I’ll lose some sales and my boss won’t be happy,
but I can’t stop listening to the sound
of two soft voices
blended in perfection
from the reels of this record that I’ve found.

Every day there’s a boy in the mirror asking me…
What are you doing here?
Finding all my previous motives
growing increasingly unclear.

I’ve traveled far and I’ve burned all the bridges
I believed as soon as I hit land
all the other options held before me,
would wither in the light of my plan.

So I’ll lose some sales and my boss won’t be happy,
but there’s only one thing on my mind
searching boxes underneath the counter,
on a chance that on a tape I’d find…
a song for someone who needs somewhere to long for.

Homesick.
Because I no longer know where home is.

I can’t wait to see what this produces.

The saucy and often controversial Milo Yiannopoulos, who I’ve heard some call Europe’s one-man Gawker media, just penned an a post declaring its time to fix European tech journalism, and also noted he will retire from writing the fluffy stuff he’s been producing lately in favor of more substantive pieces in the future.

This echoes the sentiment of conversations ever since Michael Arrington left TechCrunch, and I think this emerging trend is about more than European media.  The conversation is about what changes need to happen when it comes to startups storytelling as a whole, particularly in places like London where the trend for company creation is currently up and to the right.  I think Milo puts it quite well when he says:

Start-ups have become conditioned to this cult of the mediocre, but it’s time to snap them out of it. Entrepreneurs who aspire to refashion the world around them deserve writing just as audacious and thought-provoking as their own ambitions. Unfortunately, as the technology sector in Europe has expanded, the quality of commentary around it has failed to keep up.

While Milo can’t save startups from their own PR, I hope we will see more compelling untold stories unearthed with this new project.  Maybe I’ll even contribute, and help startups discover how to make meaningful connections with the press.  What will you contribute?

More discussion of this topic from:

• Max Neiderhoffer “Tech News in Europe”

What Europe really needs is startup reviews. And good startup reviews, not rehashed press releases. Frequent ones: three or more per day. Tell me about the team, the tech, the traction. Make me understand market size, competitive landscape, go-to-market strategy, unit economics, capital intensity, and the strategic importance of this widget in a likely future stack.

Crunchbase is probably the most undervalued of Techcrunch’s assets. It’s the go-to database for startup financing information in the entire industry. It’s more complete and fresher than VentureSource or Capital IQ. I am glad it has been getting some love lately.

• Philip Wilkinson “Why Techcrunch Europe (and others) Just Aren’t Cutting the Mustard these Days

I’d like to see a blog really getting into the soul of the space and people behind it, with real insights into how things work. “teardowns”, case studies, documenting specific points in a startup’s life, summarising where vc’s and entrepreneurs think the opportunities are, successes, failures, learnings.. What’s going on with MyDeco, Keynoir, MoshiMonsters, Kopi, Unbound, BookingBug, Moo, Skimlinks, huddle etc.. where are the real interesting pieces?

Oh, and can we PLEASE stop going on about Silicon Roundabout – it’s NOT going to be the mecca where everyone wants to go and work. If I wanted to work by a tacky roundabout full of rubbish and kebab vans then I would have looked for an office in Basingstoke!

This will be a conversation piece for the rest of my life!  I’m also already thinking of how to mod it with a SIM card and Arduino so that it can be completely wireless and working.

Disrupt is a strange event, because you can see the future of mobile search in one moment, and then walk into the room as an entrepreneur talks about getting kids to “do butt art”.  But I digress…

UPDATE: What IS Do@?

Do@ is an iPhone application that lets you search across publishers for content you care about in a mobile context. You enter something like “French” and it autocompletes with things like “French Food @ internet” or “French @ books”. When you select a result, you can horizontally scroll through pages of content to pick what you want. It’s like clicking through the top 10 Google results, except minus the clicking and plus the beautiful touch interface of the iPhone.

What’s with the name “Do@”?

I didn’t ask this, but I should have.  It’s impressive that the company landed a four letter domain name, so I wonder if they did that first and then tried to rationalize it with the branding.  My best guess is that the concept around the brand/name is that mobile search isn’t about consuming a lot of information, its about approaching “perfect information” or the right information for my context.  Something cool about mobile app usage is that it always happens in a place, and on smartphones the app can get this location data without even syncing something like Foursquare or Facebook Places.

One other note on the name – it kind of reminds me of the SEO problems with “Ke$ha” (the music artist), but I’m an early adopter type and the general public might not care, or might actually dig it.  We’ll see.  It will certainly make it easy to completely own the search for “Do@”.

Media Consumption Power Tools for Regular People

What strikes me about Do@ is how easy it is to use.  Download, connect Facebook, do a search, done.  However, what done looks like is a dashboard as sophisticated as any home grown social media listening platform I’ve ever seen.  I immediately searched for Twilio and found tons of conversations, articles, and relevant tweets and Quora threads.  I can also “heart” searches that I want to do over and over again.  Setting up this kind of listening in my brand would be incredibly time consuming with a tool like Google Reader, but do@ does it in seconds.  I’m not sure this is the intended purpose, but I already know I’ll be using it as a media consumption and listening tool.  I really really hope they release an iPad app soon too – it could compete with my love for Flipboard!

This is More Than Search, Its a Browser

There’s no Firefox or Google Chrome for the iPhone, but Do@ made it into the AppStore.  I almost wonder if this is because Apple doesn’t even totally understand what it is yet.  This is an entirely new user experience model for a mobile browser, driven by intention, implied preferences through sharing, and location (I think?).

When you use the app, it isn’t just displaying images of screens and then having you click through Safari.  You can load the content and interact with it inside the app.  This means Do@ is already building a huge data asset in engagement data which this can use to further refine results and improve the experience.

No Cold Start Problem in Sight

Ultimately, I fell in love with Do@ because I didn’t need to invite anyone to it to gets tons and tons of value in minutes.  By simply connecting Facebook, it learned enough about me to give me relevant results.  It has excellent search-as-you-type, so it tries to take a best guess at what I’m looking for based on both my explicitly stated interests and implicit interests it gleans from the content I share on Facebook.

Robert Scoble covered Do@ yesterday on his blog, and I’m dieing to read the post and watch this video.  For now, I’ll post it here for your enjoyment:

In less than an hour, teams from the TechCrunch Disrupt hackathon will begin presenting their apps and they will have just 60 seconds each to make the judges (and audience) fall in love with what they’ve built.  There are several outcomes to optimize for during your presentation, but the two that stand out to me are:

1. Win the hackathon by impressing the judges
2. Win public interest and get the crowd excited about your app (a la GroupMe last year)

You can try going for both, but my personal opinion is that public interest trumps the opinion of a few judges who’ve only had 60 seconds to evaluate.  With a little hustle, you can set yourself up to optimize success.  If you’re product sucks, no amount of hustling will save you, but if you’re looking to tip the scales favorably in your direction this could be the key.

Know the Judges

I haven’t found them listed on the Disrupt hackathon website, but a few have already tweeted that they’re on the way to judge.  Look up their profile, follow them, read their bio page (if they have one, most VCs do)

Pre-Seed the Audience with Your Product

Start giving away beta access to people now, create a Twitter account for your app, and jump into conversations and get feedback.  If you have a small but vocal group of fans cheering for you after you demo that’s a little more social proof, and the judges will notice.

Use Technical Difficulties as Free Time to Vamp

It’s likely some of the demos will be plagued with technical difficulties: a Mac that finally decides to give up after having its CPU pushed to the limit all night, a broken cable, a missing dongle, a screen with some screwed up resolution.  You can protect against some of this by asking to quickly connect your computer to the monitor you’ll be using to present ahead of time, just to be sure, but the odds are something unexpected will go wrong when you’re not expecting it.  Instead of getting pissed or flustered, use that time to crack a joke, show some of your personality, and show that you can be calm under pressure.

Don’t Waste Precious Seconds on How You Built It

The judges and audience (unless they ask explicitly) probably don’t care about what you used to make this happen, so don’t waste precious seconds taking about your technology stack.  Unless of course its Twilio, in which case I’d like to know so I can write about you!

Use the Last 5 Seconds to Create Warm Fuzzies

As you’re about to be kicked of the stage remember to be gregarious:

• thank your team
• thank the organizer
• shoutout to any special people who helped you
• let us all know where/how we can connect with you (your Twitter name, app URL etc.)

Draw the Fucking Owl

Hopefully you’ve been doing this for the past 24 hours, good luck teams!

Sweet Disposition – The Temper Trap

sweet disposition
never too soon
oh reckless abandon
like no one’s
watching you

a moment, a love
a dream, a laugh
a kiss, a cry
our rights, our wrongs
a moment, a love
a dream, a laugh
a moment, a love
a dream, a laugh

just stay there
cause i’ll be comin over
and while our bloods still young
it’s so young
it runs
and we won’t stop til it’s over
won’t stop to surrender

songs of desperation
I played them for you
a moment, a love
a dream, a laugh
a kiss, a cry
our rights, our wrongs
a moment, a love
a dream, a laugh
a moment, a love
a dream, a laugh

just stay there
cause i’ll be comin over
and while our bloods still young
it’s so young
it runs
and we won’t stop til it’s over
won’t stop to surrender

a moment, a love
a dream, a laugh
a kiss, a cry
our rights, our wrongs (won’t stop til it’s over)
a moment, a love
a dream, a laugh
a kiss, a cry
our rights, our wrongs(won’t stop til it’s over)
a moment, a love
a dream, a laugh
a kiss, a cry
our rights, our wrongs (won’t stop til it’s over)
a moment, a love
a dream, a laugh
a moment, a love
a moment, a love (won’t stop to surrender)

955 Dreams

The team wasn’t here, but we enjoyed a video from them of their History of Jazz iPad app

AwayFind

“A lot of you are checking your email on your phones, so I imagine its gonna be big someday”

Push notifications to my phone allow me to quickly reply to messages that need my immediate attention.  Keeping the high signal to noise ratio in his inbox.  Jared and the team have lots of enterprise experience, and their solution is different — it isn’t in just gmail, but also in Exchange, because that’s where business customers are living in their email.

The goal is to have 2 or 3 messages remain in your inbox each day.  You can’t expect people to change their behavoir, you have to make it easier.  There are a lot of add-ons like Xobni that give you more data about the people sending you messages, but they don’t help with the issue of processing your messages.  We’ve added intelligence that wasn’t available even 6 months ago… semantics, sentiment analysis, machine learning, user history, calendar integration.

Lot’s of users are using it at $100/month, they are making $1000s/month.  Google “outlook vs. gmail” – the article they wrote is the first result.  They’ve raised $400K and would like to raise another $350K.

Baydin

“For the record, that was not water” says the cofounder, as he throws back a drink and starts his pitch.

Let’s call this “The Tale of Two VCs” – comparing the email styles of Brad Feld and Fred Wilson.  Baydin built The Email Game and the service is live, it gamifies working through your messages to make it fun to focus on cranking through your email.  If you’ve received an email from me this week it is highly likely you noticed their little “Excuse the brevity, I’m trying to win the Email Game” in the footer.

While everyone is telling you email is dead, 180 Million hours will be spent in email inboxes in America this year.

The company recently closed their seed round in an Uber car, as seen on TechCrunch

Crowdrally

Disclaimer from the presenter: The info on their website is out of date, they’re now doing something different.  They had a network of 10,000 Facebook pages and a user footprint of around 40 Million.  Things were looking good, and then they got a cease and desist from Facebook Newsfeed team… about 6 weeks ago. “If Facebook can’t monetize the newsfeed yet, neither can we”.

They have a new service where you can automatically follow your friends, get a ranked feed of videos your friends have watched, and you can queue or hide videos to watch.  You can also pair with your TV from your computer!  So you can search for the next thing you want to watch on your laptop, before pushing it to your TV.  You can also take control of other screens.  Its much better to use your laptop as smart remote, rather than turning your TV into a computer with a wireless mouse and keyboard.

This completely describes the pain point I have with my current setup at home by the way, and I WANT THIS.

They’d like to raise $1 Million to build out their consumer product.

Evoz

Data driven parenting services.  They believe that connected devices and tailored online content can help parents.  Modern Moms want to be connected to their families, but technology can sometimes make people feel disconnected when it comes to using that technology with babies.

There is a ton of content out there, but it is really generic.  Is my baby crying more than normal?  We but a device in the babies room running Evoz software, it could be an iPhone.  This is an infinite range baby monitor… so you can listen in from wherever.  You can also set to get notifications.  Mom’s also can get a dashboard, and see how your baby compares to babies of the same age or the same region.  Quantify the problem, and then offer really targeted services like sleep consultants to parents and caregivers, or tailor other markets.

They launched their closed beta yesterday – they had 1300 signups but only took 20 people.  They already have purchase orders from companies in US and Canada.  Check out the Evoz write up on TechCrunch

Raising $600K seed round, about 50% committed from 500 Startups, David Shen Ventures and Charles Forman

InternMatch – Andrew Macguire, Founder & CEO

They’re passionate about helping college students find their first internship, and helping companies showcase why they’re a great place to work, with a simple digital marketplace.

Employers spend over $7 Billion on interns each year, they’re not just free/cheap labor, which is a common misconception.  Since 1992, the % of college students entering the workforce with internship experience has increased 800%.  Finding an internship is a painful process for students, it is slow.

They showed some classic “hockey stick” graphs, and in March application submissions doubled over the previous month (from 800 to 1600).  The company just launched an enterprise product called the “Community Page” which allows companies to publish what its like to really work for them, to break down.

They’re currently raising $400k and have about half committed.  You can find them on Angel List.

Motion Math

Not yet presented…

myGengo – presented by a 1-take video (based in Japan)

Global online translation market with an API that allows you to plug in human translation into any platform.  They’ve built open source plugins for popular CMS services like WordPress, and are partnered with high volume ecommerce and content production sites.

10,000,000 units translated, and revenue generating from the start.  Their team is SUPER international.

They’ve raised $1.5 Million so far, from 12 angels representing 9 nationalities.

Ninua – Waleed Abdulla, Founder

On the publisher side, their product Networked Blogs has 1.7 Million users and 700,000 blogs – and they are helping bloggers get their content onto Twitter and Facebook.  But what about the user?  What are the important factors for a good reading experience?  Three pillars: mainstream, blogs, friends.

“Ninua Newsreader is a beautiful, social newsreader, in your pants.”  They are competing with Flipboard and Pulse, but those services don’t let me filter content via my friends.  Ninua shows you your friends, and you can follow the ones who share your interests for news.  You can also see which publications friends are following, and follow those publications directly.

They are a team of 4 engineers and one designer.  They are raising $500K.  While he was talking 25 new users signed up.

Punchd

“So in the spirit of full disclosure, I’m imagining you all naked right now.  And I’m dedicating this to Alexia (from TechCrunch), who has deemed us the least interesting startup she’s ever seen.”

iPhone and Android app to make loyalty punch cards digital.  They started out by going to the marketing manager at Cal Poly, and they tested the product out at Peet’s Coffee and Jamba Juice in their local stores.  It turns out college students are a perfect demographic, everyone has a smartphone, they spend their parent’s money to eat out, and no one can cook.

They then had 7 universities approach them – representing 200,000 who can get free stuff through the app.  This was all done with word of mouth, they have 35 stores and 3 colleges are using the service. 7,000 punches have been pushed through the system in the past 4 months – “this is our obligatory  up and to the right graph”

Punchd App Promo from Punchd on Vimeo.

ReadyForZero

Not yet presented…

Rewardli – George Favvas, Cofounder & CEO

Smaller businesses don’t have the same buying power to get discounts that larger companies get.  However, SMB owners are networked and could band together to buy things and collectively join forces to drive down prices.  When you sign up, you get connected with other people in your network to create a buying group and your buying power is determined by your personal and group buying power.

Rewardlii can save the average SMB $10,000 a year, and they have more than 50 participating vendors including major brands like Staples, Dell, and Expedia.

“We’ve already made $100 in revenue using the product ourselves… and we’re looking to make… more.” {{chuckles}}

“Buying power in your pants”

They’re currently funded by 500 Startups and Real Ventures, and they are looking to raise $500k – half of which is already committed.

Saygent

The worlds smartest voice response and analysis platform.  ”The use cases are vast, but our price model is simple.  Our gross margin is about 85%”.  Last year they supported $250,000 in sales.

Simple one hour (actually, 2 minutes) setup – you tell the system who you want to talk to, and the people you want to talk to, as well as the criteria you want to have analyzed.

They already have Comcast as a paying trial customer, and they want to raise money to help them service pilot customers… roughly $250-$750K.  Currently has Jeff Lawson (CEO of Twilio), Sid Wiswanathan (founder of Cardmunch), and Andrew Tang (VP Operations at Comcast) are advisors.

Social Stork – Joel Auge, Founder & CEO

Ummm… he just sang his pitch – apparently this guy was a finalist on Canadian Idol.

“100% of Facebook users ARE or HAVE a Mom, so that’s huge”

Before he was a Dad, he was making social games at HitGrab and basically invented consumable social goods on Facebook.  They distribute content into the Chinese market, and the Facebook Fund gave them a $250K grant.  That business is monetized in 186 countries (“Stop Slacking!” says a heckler).

And then… his daughter was born.  Mom’s are super proud of their babies, but there is literally no tool to capture what moms are doing — they’re producing tons of capacity.  I don’t have boobs (“small ones” says another heckler, “they’re bigger than mine” – go Hermione!).

Scrapbooking takes too long and a lot of moms aren’t crafty.  Social Stork lets you share the events that happen in the babies life, and sharing is gamified.  They are going to take the moms they already have on their other game platform, and they will

They are raising $250K (even though the founder is millionaire) and he wants smart money who can provide resources and mentorship.

SpeakerGram – Sam Rosen @Sir

Sam is from New York – East Coast!

Think of the service a bit like OpenTable for event speakers.  Speakers have WAY too much email, but they hardly can get to all of it so they miss opportunities.  The U.S. conference industry is $150 Million – and 8% of that is spent on speakers.

Sam went to Foursquare, who primarily use a PR agency to manage Dennis Crowley’s speaking gigs, and convinced them to use the service.  They cut down their email engagement for speaking gigs by 50%, and have closed 99 engagements in the past 90 days.  What they’ve realized in the past few months building this product, is that there are still so many inefficiencies in the marketplace.  Just as speakers have challenges with speaker opps, organizers are also getting bombarded with requests from PR agents and speakers.  A lovely two sided market, ripe for a marketplace (see a trend here?)

The team is a great combination of hackers and hustlers.  They are raising $500K and have 50% of that money committed from investors like Dave Tisch, Alexis O’Hanian, Jason Finger (Seamless Web), and Jay Weintraub (organizer of Leadscon and an awesome guy!).  You can SpeakerGram on Angel List.

Spoondate – Raissa B. Nebie, Cofounder & CEO

“Next up is actually not a bro, it’s a wo!” – Dave McClure

Meet and eat with people you should know – food dates!  They realized this goes far beyond dating.  The founder was an investment banker until 2008, when she left to follow her passion for food, she even went to culinary school.  People love to gather around food, and 78% of adults consider restaurant dining a valuable use of their social time.

Spoondate was built with women in mind, think if it as a pre-emptive checkin, people can say what they want to do and invite you to join them.  Group dinner bookings have a 25% margin!

They are currently fundraising to round out their team, so if you are a food loving investor please talk to us.

Visual.ly

Volta

“Nothing converts better than live phone calls”

A/B testing framework for live outbound phone calls.  Shows the business owner what is and isn’t working, so they can improve their call scripts and move on.  There are hundreds of plugins that can be created to combine with existing workflow.  Revenue model is very simple, per minute per agent pricing.

Won “Best Business Model” Award at the Launch conference

They are are looking to raise $300 – $500K to round out the team and reach profitability with their first 100 customers.

Wednesdays – Cofounders Andy Chen & Hugh Olliphant (PayPal mafia)

They are a platform for connecting people over lunch, and helping them coordinate membership.  Anyone can build their own lunch club, and they can coordinate connecting people.  Imagine a case where a manager wants 300 employees in a large company to connect for a meal – but she wants to break the meals into various small groups to make sure people are meeting new people and that there are employees at various levels.  AND she wants to make sure these lunches take place on a regular basis.

There is also a way for groups to make money using the platform… not totally clear how that worked, will have to find it later.

They are looking for pilot groups and are raising a small amount of funding now, and you can find Wednesdays on Angel List.  Follow them on Twitter @wednesdayslunch

WorkersNow

YongoPal – Darien Brown, CEO & Cofounder

Probably the bravest guy in the room, he got up and told us about he cried in the presentation earlier today at the end of his pitch and that we might have that to look forward to.  Or, he might pee.  Okay… so onwards to the company!

The service is designed to help people learn language from one another by sharing their day-to-day lives.  People in Asia want to be able to use their English language skills with native English speakers.  When they first arrived, they built a product that they thought worked using live video.  They made the assumption that video was the next best thing to talking in person, but as it turned out it was high friction.  However, American users were signing up because they were curious and genuinely wanted to connect with their foreign peers.

They decided to pivot the product and reduce the friction while increasing engagement – via mobile.  They set up a test to take these existing behavoirs, and use them in a new and interesting way.  They set up daily guided prompts between people they paired up to learn from each other, creating a private window into another person’s life through daily photo missions.  The opportunity to use mobile photo sharing for English language learning is huge – and they’re going after the entire continent.

They are raising a small seed round right now, and looking to raise a larger round in 4-6 months.

—-

Most of the companies here are listed on Angel List, so if you’re and investor and interested check them out there.  I’ll try to link to every resource I can find about them for you, and many of their presentations will be online.

Official Atlas Shrugged Movie Trailer

Dagny Taggart Confronts the (Railroad) Union

Francisco D’Anconia Voicemail

Dagny seems younger than I had pictured in my mind, and I definitely feel in the first trailer like the actress has a lot of attitude but doesn’t convey the deep confidence Dagny Taggart has from her experience running and working on the railroad from a young age.

Not a fan of the music.

Teens ages 13 to 19 are encouraged to participate in what I think of as summer camp for learning entrepreneurship and building products.  You must be local to the San Francisco Bay Area to apply (for now) and teams must have at least one developer who can code the project at hand.  Finding kids to participate in the program might sound daunting, but Teens in Tech has existed for 3 years now and has the ability to draw young entrepreneurs.

The application deadline for the program is March 18th, so if you know a young aspiring entrepreneur make sure to pass it on so they can register in time.  The program runs June 20th through August 10th, and culminates with a demo day.

Are Quora Answers the New Twitter Followers?

With Quora taking off (yes I’m addict), I’ve been getting a huge influx of followers and I’ve been trying to figure out how to follow people back. On each peson’s profile you get a little bit of data about how they’re using Quora – including three things that are really useful:

1. # of Answers
2. # of Mentions
3. # of Questions

I listed those in the order of which are most important to me.  The way I think about it, answering a question is the most time consuming thing you can do on Quora and suggests real engagement.  Mentions aren’t much work on the part of the user, but are harder to come by (mostly famous people seem to have these right now). Number of questions is least important to me, afterall it is easy to ask a question.  You also don’t get much “credit” for asking good questions in Quora (yet).

I wonder how long until Klout is using this metric to help evaluate how influential various people are in social media.

Oh and btw, check out my ANSWERS on Quora, some of them could easily be a blog post.