Just before the weekend, Google dropped word to developers that paid Android apps support was on its way to more countries than the 14 currently supported. In the email, the company did not specify a timing other than “over the next few weeks” and stopped short of saying which markets would be gaining support for paid apps.

Now app store analytics company Distimo tells us they’ve noticed paid apps targeting previously unsupported countries have effectively starting to make their way to Android Market.

So far, the startup has identified 12 ‘new’ countries: Argentina, Belgium, Brazil, Finland, Hong Kong, Israel, Mexico, Poland, Romania, Russia, Slovakia and South Africa. Other reports suggests Sweden and Hungary are two other countries that are starting to see paid apps support.

If all this checks out, Google will be at least (and at last) doubling the amount of countries where users can purchase Android apps, which is nothing short of great news for many a developer. This greatly expands their reach – even if this is only a start – and will most definitely reduce the gigantic proportion of free-only apps currently in the application store.

Here’s the email sent out before the weekend:

Hello,

We're writing to inform you about some changes to Android Market that require your attention.

Over the next few weeks, we'll be adding paid apps support for additional countries. If you have selected to publish your paid apps to all locations and intend to support all new locations as we expand the number of supported countries for paid apps, you don't have to do anything. If you have selected to publish your paid apps to all locations but intend to only target the currently supported 14 countries, please update your location selections to target these specific countries.

Please look for follow-up emails when we introduce paid apps support for specific additional countries in the coming weeks. At that time, you'll have the option to target these specific countries.

Thanks, and we look forward to continue working with you on Android
Market.

Sincerely,
The Android Market Team

Google, Inc.
1600 Amphitheatre Parkway
Mountain View, CA 94043

We’ve contacted Google to see what’s up and hope to provide more details soon.

For now, if you’re an Android user based in any of the countries put in bold above, let us know if you can find paid applications in Android Market, and if you’re effectively able to purchase them already.

Standby in 3 – 2 – 1: We are now live from San Francisco with TechCrunch Disrupt. If you can’t make the conference in person, you can still watch all the great panels, fireside chats, product launches, and the Startup Battlefield, plus a few surprises on TechCrunch TV.

We’ll be webcasting the entire 3-day event and showing you all the action on the main stage. The guest list reads like a who’s who in Silicon Valley and the world of entrepreneurs. Plus, during the breaks we’ll have special backstage interviews and take you on a walking tour of Startup Alley.

TechCrunch Disrupt will not get taken over by AngelGate according to Michael Arrington. But we do have 2 key players lined up this morning – Ron Conway and Dave McClure. Certainly not to be missed.

The show kicks off with John Doerr (KPC&B), Mark Pincus (Zynga), Bing Gordon (KPC&B) on building internet treasures. Here’s a look at the complete star-studded agenda.

Tech specs: We’ll have 7 cameras feeding into 2 Tricasters, live webcasting via Ustream, on demand video archives via Ooyala and tweet-able transcripts from SpeakerText. Use Twitter hashtag #TCdisrupt.

And here’s the venue on Foursquare.

If you’d like to help build up the mountain of coverage we’re making here, be sure to tag all your tweets, posts, photos, and so on with #tcdisrupt. That tag’s stream tends to show up onstage a lot. We’ll update this post with links to deeper coverage of the panels, startups, and other developments at the show, so refresh often. If you’re here, then enjoy the show. If you’re not here — enjoy the show.

Location-based media company Where has acquired LocalGinger, which operates a daily deal / group buying service with the same name. LocalGinger focuses on secondary markets for its social commerce activities, which it says has allowed it to build a strong following in select cities.

So why is Where buying the privately-held flash commerce startup? In a nutshell, to ramp up its advertising products.

The company says its WHERE Ads platform enables it to reach 50 million people, and by integrating LocalGinger local businesses will be able to use tools to create offers and drive real-time commerce at a hyper-local level.

Said Walt Doyle, CEO of Where:

"With the LocalGinger platform, WHERE Ads bridges a gap between services like Groupon and AdSense. Combining these services supports our mission of delivering relevant and valuable content to the WHERE audience as well as the audience of our publisher partners. On WHERE Ads, merchants interested in just-in-time group buying deals will have a platform to use and audience to reach through WHERE."

Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.

Where, which competes with the likes of Loopt and Foursquare, has raised $18.5 million in funding to date, from investors such as Venrock and Kodiak Venture Partners.

It has attracted 3 million active users so far, according to its About page.

This is Grig (actually Greg looking like a total doofus at a wedding). He will appear hidden in posts and inside images for the next week. Your mission is to find all of the Grigs and then email us on Friday with a list of the posts in which he appeared. But what can you win? Oh, my friend, this is your lucky day.

Read more…

IBM today announced it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire BLADE Network Technologies, a privately held data center switching company based in Santa Clara, California. Financial terms were not disclosed. BLADE, founded in 2006, specializes in software and devices that route data and transactions to and from servers; the company provides blade server and top-of-rack switches as well as software to virtualize and manage cloud computing and other workloads.

We are only a few hours away from kicking off the second TechCrunch Disrupt conference here in San Francisco and we are thrilled to announce the 25 startups that were chosen out of nearly 1,000 applicants to pitch ideas and applications over the next few days. We will also hear pitches from the two StartupAlley companies that receive the most votes over the next two days.

These startups will battle it out over three intense days, with one of these companies eventually taking home $50,000 and the official Disrupt trophy.

Badgeville: Badgeville uses game mechanics to increase engagement on publisher and new sites.

Checkpoints: Checkpoints is a mobile shopping tool that allows users to check-in to retail locations and accrue points to buy real world products.

CloudFlare: CloudFlare develops performance and security tools previously reserved only for the Internet giants, and makes them available for any site on the web.

Credit Sesame: Credit Sesame is a personal finance tool that allows users to save money on their mortgage and loans by unlocking their credit potential.

DataSift: Datasift allows developers and companies to aggregate and filter content from Twitter on a per project basis.

GameCrush:GameCrush is social gaming site that allows users to meet, match and pay to play online games with other users to enhance their gaming experience.

Gifi: Developed by social payments platform Venmo, Gifi integrates with Foursquare allows users to let friends to unlock gifts of money when they check-in to venues.

Gild: Gild provides unique tools to job seekers to certify your technology skills, find jobs, and track employment progress.

Gripe: Gripe is a free location-aware mobile app that uses people's online clout to help them get complaints about any of the 100 million+ local businesses or service providers worldwide.

Gunzoo: Gunzoo changes the way you search videos, images and more.

Lark: LARK is a silent waking system that uses an iPhone app and vibration technology to wake you silently and naturally.

Namesake: Namesake is a social community that aims to connect people around professional opportunities and jobs.

OneTrueFan: OneTrueFan is a browser addon and service that enables users to see who else has viewed and shared the pages they read on publisher sites.

Opzi: Opzi has created a Quora-like Q&A site for the enterprise to make corporate knowledge more accessible.

Pinger: Pinger develops TextFree, a massively popular free texting application.

Qwiki: Qwiki produces an "information experience" in response to user queries, by combining on-the-fly infographics, video, narration, and interactive elements to describe people, places and things.

SeqCentral: SeqCentral aims to help human genome scientists collaborate and put data in the cloud.

Shwowp: Shwowp is a tool to help you take control of your shopping history: organize it, share it and track how you influence others.

Snapdragon: Snapdragon uses smartphone barcode readers to turn interactions with products into entertainment.

Storify: Storify allows you to collect photos, video, Tweets and more and then publish them as simple stories that can be embedded anywhere.

Sumazi: Sumazi is an intelligent connection engine and network for professionals that introduces you to the people you don’t know but should.

Superfly: Superfly is like Mint for travel, and collects and analyzes your travel patterns, offer ways to save, and more.

Tello: Tello provides a way for consumers to quickly provide businesses with direct feedback on their customer service experiences via their mobile phone.

ToVieFor: ToVieFor is discount shopping site for handbags and accessories that allows a member to choose the price he or she wants to pay for a particular product.

Voxy: Voxy is a mobile language-learning game that converts relevant real-world content into fun, addictive and customizable language lessons

The Range Rover is an icon, perched above its peers as the sexiest offroad/onroad SUV on the market. But does performance match its looks? We were handed a 2010 Range Rover Supercharged and put it to the test for an entire week, enjoying off-road trails and river fording, rallying around old farm paths and traversing an autocross course. We already covered the gadgetry earlier and this is what we have to say about the rest. Spoiler: It is a true sport utility vehicle.

Microsoft has released an updated Bing for Mobile iPhone and iPod Touch app.

The updated app brings with it new features for the mobile versions of Bing Travel and Maps.

For the former service, you can now go to the ‘Travel’ tab from your iPhone or iPod touch’s browser and find deals from your home airport and special promotions. Using the interactive Deals calendar, you can see when good prices are available.

Also new is flight search, which lets you look up fares and flight times and utilize the Price Predictor Bing provides to desktop users to know when users would be best of to buy their airfares. The app also comes with a Bing Travel flight status feature to enable users to check if their flight is on time when on the go.

In addition, Microsoft says it has completely redesigned the mapping experience from the ground up for the upgraded mobile app. That means a bigger font size corresponding to larger roads, added neighborhood labels so one can easily identify and convey locations in cities and easy switching between map and list view.

The backdrop was also enhanced, which means information on the map such as traffic details, business listings, pushpins, labels, etc. could “pop”.

Also new in Maps for Bing for Mobile iPhone and iPod touch: ‘What's Nearby’ with enhanced map and labels so you can "fly" through a neighborhood and quickly find a local listing.

Last time Bing for Mobile had gotten an update was last June, when the app got social search and visual scanning features.

OneHourTranslation.com was born when its founders were trying to translate Hebrew blog posts into English. Discovering no one could do it for less than a few dollars per “page” – a page being anything under 500 words or so – they were stuck paying big bucks for translation. Why? Because the system wasn’t centralized.

Fast forward to today. The service costs $ 0.07 per word and there are a number of languages available. The service works by contacting a network of thousands of freelance translators who are vetted by a community process and then allowed to pick and choose the jobs they want to take. It is, in fact, like having your own translator on staff.

We last talked about the company’s TwitTrans service but now they’ve created a number of CMS plugins including services for Drupal (WordPress is coming soon) as well as an API so you can build your own apps. Essentially this injects a translation project into the service and returns the translation once its done. This allows you to quickly and easily translate blog posts on the fly or even translate an entire website as it is updated, all in an amazingly short time.

Translation can get expensive, but it is a sight better than hiring a single person to do all the translation an suffer from the vagaries of their schedule and willingness to work.

The service is also hiring translators so if you speak Beothuk or Crimean Gothic you may be in demand. Sadly, at least for this audience, there is no current need for Klingon or Tolkeinien Elvish translators.

UPDATE – The guys at OneHourTranslation are offering 50 words for free. Use coupon code ‘TC50′

Permuto, a startup that develops an intent-based ad-serving technology, has raised $10 million in funding from Onset Ventures, Rembrandt Venture Partners, Reid Hoffman, Jeff Clavier and others. This brings Permuto’s total funding to $16 million. As part of the announcement, Permuto is rebranding itself as Buysight.

Buysight’s ad-serving technology captures the intent of what shoppers are looking for on search engines, shopping engines and more and then serves them highly targeted advertisements while they are browsing the web. And Buysight promises to deliver these intent-based ads in realtime.

For example, if you are searching for a particular type of shoe on a search engine, you could be served with an ad for the brand of shoes or a similar shoe on a publisher site that has partnered with Buysight.

Buysight purchases the index of consumer intent search data from search engines and partners with retailers to serve intent-driven ads on publisher sites. The startup says that its network reaches 65 million people monthly and includes hundreds of advertisers, and thousands of publishers.

As co-founder Shaukat Shamim tells me, Buysight is about turning data into insight for retailers. For publishers, Buysight will serve highly targeted ads to visitors, promising a better experience for any website visitor.

Yandex, operator of Russia’s largest search engine, has invested in Tel-Aviv based facial recognition technology startup Face.com, marking its first investment in an Israeli company. In total, Face.com has raised $4.3 million in Series B funding in a round led by previous investor Rhodium.

The news was first reported by TheMarker (in Hebrew) but we’ve confirmed the news with a Yandex representative, who declined to say how much it is investing in the startup.

Yandex did say they and Face.com are working on a “large joint project”, but failed to specify what that initiative entails exactly. Finally, Yandex CEO Arkady Volozh has joined the startup’s board of directors.

Face.com, founded in 2007, has developed a number of face recognition apps for Facebook (PhotoTagger and Photo Finder; the latter is currently in private alpha mode).

Last May, the company said its technology had helped users scan over 7 billion photos, and moved to launch a developer community and open API, providing third-party devs access to their core facial recognition technology.

One of the startup’s closest competitors, Polar Rose, was reportedly acquired by Apple for about $29 million.

Update: statement from Face.com founder and CEO Gil Hirsh:

Face.com has indeed accepted a round of funding. The total amount is $4.3M USD, and the participants included Rhodium, Yandex, and current private investors. We’re going to use the money to boost our development team, hire some new and talented people, and build out additional infrastructure to support our facial recognition platform.

We’ve had thousands of developers sign up to join our platform and get access to our facial recognition API’s, and we want to support those developers and provide great technology. We’re excited and very proud to have the support from our investors.

XING, the European social network for business professionals, has recently passed the ten million registered user mark (even if it still advertises 9 million members on its main website). The publicly-listed company says the second quarter of this year proved to be XING's most successful period of member growth in the last 15 months.

Online training software startup Mindflash.com is debuting its software to the public today after being in private beta over the past few months. We have a 20 percent discount on the software for TechCrunch readers here.

Mindflash.com is a portal small businesses can use to train employees. Geared towards non-technical users, Mindflash allows participants to upload and share training documents or videos on the web. They can even include quizzes and games to test employees' comprehension of the content.

The platform then manages the entire training management process – from sending training invitations to tracking employees' progress to producing real-time progress reports. Mindflash aims to replace tools like PowerPoint to train employees remotely, and adds analytics to the mix so employers can ensure that employees are completing online training seminars.

Over 2,000 small businesses requested early access to Mindflash during the six-month private beta period. For example, College Hunks Hauling Junk launched a training program for 50 franchises run by college kids across the country in just two weeks. Mindflash CEO Donna Wells (who was Mint’s former CMO) says that the software is particularly helpful for companies who have mobile employees.

Pricing plans start at just $79 per month for up to 20 trainees.

As we all know, early adopters hate pulling out their phones. They would, quite honestly, prefer to leave their phones safely ensconced in little leather holsters on their belts, glancing at them only once or twice during the day and spending the rest of the time riding tandem bicycles with loved ones and eating delicate smoked cheeses. This is, it seems, the message Microsoft is trying to impart with these new <A HREF="http://crunchgear.com/tag/WindowsWindows Phone 7 ads (after the jump) which tout the phone's simple interface by suggesting that you'll get more done with less. True? Possibly. A valuable marketing message? Probably not.

Windows Phone 7 is obviously the most exciting thing to come out of Redmond in a while and to suggest it is so simple that you barely have to use your phone is to misunderestimate the user base for these things. The first users will use these phones until their fingers bleed and only after a bit of coaxing will people who don't want to use phones start using WinPho. I'd suspect those users already have Android phones or, barring that, some mix of Blackberry/iPhone usage in their lives, so it will be an even tougher slog for WinPho. Generally, Microsoft would be better off suggesting that you can launch nuclear missiles with your phone than suggest that Blackberry users are inconsiderate shilly–shalliers.

Read more…

iStreamer by AllOfMe is an iPad app that offers a realtime, timeline-based stream of data from social and RSS feeds as well as images and search keywords. Designed to make it actually kind of fun to browse your friends’ feeds, the app is fully touch-controlled and lets you get a birds’-eye – or worms’-eye – view of your streams.

The app costs $4 and is available today on the iTunes store. A lite version will follow that allows you to open only one feed at a time.

Read more…

Last week I sat down with Sequoia Capital partner Roelof Botha to prepare for tomorrow’s Super Angels To Super VCs — The Changing Face Of Venture Capital panel at TechCrunch Disrupt.

As part of that conversation I asked about some of the big exits that Sequoia-backed startups have enjoyed over the last couple of years. After naming a few I became more curious and asked for more data.

Sequoia supplied it, and the dollar amounts are…really large. I looked at the current value of Sequioa-backed companies that IPO’d in the last two years, and the acquisition value of the companies that were acquired. The total? Over $12 billion:

Of course this isn’t the total amount of money Sequoia made from these deals since they only owned a percentage of each one. And when I told Sequoia I wanted to write about this they quite rightly pointed out that it’s the entrepreneurs, not Sequoia, that should get the credit.

But at least some credit goes to Sequoia for at least picking the right entrepreneurs and helping them along the way.

What Sequoia and other venture capital investors are doing to create huge value is clear. We’ll discuss this more on stage tomorrow.

Note: Some of these companies are based in Asia and I had to do some heavy estimating on their market caps, but I went with the lower estimates in each case. If you note any errors please point them out.

It took them a while, but now it seems Sharp is serious about entering the e-book and tablet business. The company announced "Galapagos"in Tokyo today [press release in English], with Galapagos being the (terrible) name both for Sharp's cloud-based e-book service and two new Android devices supporting that service. Read the rest on CrunchGear.

Textbook rental juggernaut Chegg raised another $75 million from a Hong Kong investment firm called Ace Limited. This new round, which is a series E, brings the total capital put into Chegg so far to $219 million. The company raised its last round of $57 million just last November.

Chegg rents textbooks to college students, which is a capital-intensive business, requiring warehouses, keeping massive inventory, logistics, and shipping. As Chegg grows, so does its need for capital. But the more it scales, the harder it becomes for others to compete. Chegg CEO Dan Rosensweig will be speaking at Disrupt tomorrow, where I will ask him what he plans to do with so much capital.

Chegg’s main competitive advantage comes from buying textbooks at wholesale, managing its warehouses, and its customer service. All of that takes a lot of money. But Chegg has found a sweet spot in that it is disrupting the quasi-monopolistic pricing for both used and new textbooks at college bookstores. Here is a detailed analysis of Chegg’s business model that we ran earlier this summer.

This guest post is by Dave McClure, founder of 500 Startups and GeeksOnaPlane.

As we wrap up our GeeksOnaPlane video series for TechCrunch TV, I thought I’d offer a perspective on Asia from the eyes of a Silicon Valley geek and investor (not to mention the father of two Japanese-American kids).

For those aren’t familiar with what GeeksOnaPlane (aka “GoaP”) is all about, we bring geeks and investors from Silicon Valley and elsewhere to geeky locations all around the globe. We talk/ meet/ socialize to understand more about technology, entrepreneurship, and new markets through travel and cultural exchange.  To learn more, visit our website and blog and meet the 100+ folks who have traveled with us to Asia in 2009 and 2010, and Europe in 2009, or see any of the thousands of photos, tweets, and other social media created while we visited 10+ countries in the last 2 years.

I am extremely optimistic about tech entrepreneurship around the world, and in particular in the emerging powerhouse economies of Asia.  My new fund 500 Startups is only a few months old, and yet we have already made 8 investments outside the US (4 in Europe, 4 in Asia). Earlier this year, on a trip to Japan I made an investment in MyGengo.com, which provides a crowdsourcing platform and API for language translation.  Over the spring & summer, we made several other investments in Europe after meeting companies last year in London at SeedCamp.  And our most recent deal happened just this past Thursday, and is our first portfolio company in China — ChinaNetCloud out of Shanghai.

ChinaNetCloud is a unique company — although most of our investments are in software or internet companies, this our first investment in a China cloud computing & managed services provider.  Run by Silicon Valley veteran co-founders James Eron and Steve Mushero, CNC was founded in 2008 in Shanghai China. The company solves two key problems in China: the severe lack of trained system administrators and the lack of flexible cloud computing. CNC customers are mostly Chinese Internet companies across all industry verticals, and also include global companies coming into China, as well as Chinese Internet/game companies going out to the US via Facebook, Japan via Mixi, and other sites in Asia.

I’ve known Steve for over 10 years, and he’s been in China since 2007. We caught up last year during our GeeksOnaPlane trip in 2009, and I heard him speak about the tremendous growth CNC is seeing from internet startups across China and East Asia.  This year when we met again, we (500 Startups) decided we couldn’t pass up the opportunity to learn more about the exploding Chinese internet market, and by investing in CNC we are also investing in that growth.  And we’re looking forward to CNC as a stepping stone to do more in Asia and China in coming years.

In the 4th and final episode of our 2010 GeeksOnaPlane East Asia trip from earlier this summer, we wrap up our trip in Singapore for the Echelon startup conference. There I spoke about the Lean Startup movement coming out of Silicon Valley, changes in venture capital and angel investing, and with other emerging internet entrepreneurship communities around the world.  In our trips this year to China, Korea, Singapore, and Japan we realize more and more how closely we are connected to the billions of people online around the world, both in our social lives and our business lives, we are inextricably connected to the World Wide Web.

In closing, along with our video is also a photo essay of our trip to Asia by our fellow GoaP member Kris Krug.  Kris tells his story in both words and pictures and you won’t want to miss a thing:

While in Asia the geeks got a chance to attend many conferences and
specially organized conferences. Their itinerary included ReThink
Shanghai, the Shanghai World Expo, Ignite Shanghai, CHINICT Conference, Startup Weekend Seoul and Echelon 2010 Conference. Between all the
business of being geeks, the GOAP group attended themed dinners,
awesome parties and even the Great Wall of China.

This is Kris Krüg’s third time attending a GOAP event, having
joined the crew for their 2009 Asia trip and their 2009 ReThink Hawaii
journey. Kris provides the perfect amount of geek and artist into the
GOAP crew.

Here is a photographic recap of Geeks on a Plane Asia 2010:

The GOAP crew was invited to a special tour of the US pavilion at the
Shanghai World Expo by US Secretary of State Hillary Rodham
Clinton.

Micro-documentary filmmaker Ben Henretig catches some
footage of the DMZ in South Korea.

The final leg of the GOAP journey took the geeks all the way to Tokyo!
Here geek girl Rachel Lara Horton roams the streets of Japan.

GOAP Portraits: the geeks enjoy the country pavilions at the Shanghai
World Expo.

Geeks from GOAP being interviewed during the CHINICT conference in
Beijing, China.

At every dinner table during the GOAP Asia 2010 tour, there was always
an iPad around. :)

GOAP portraits: Geeks on planes, eating dinner and in the kitchen.

GOAP Geek Ken Brady poses outside a building at the
Shanghai World Expo in China.

A round-table dinner of sharing entrees was often the setting for most
of the GOAP dinners during the Asia tour.

The Tokyo neighborhood of Harajuku is a world of fashion that is colorful and
creative.

GOAP portraits: geeks sleeping on a plane, geek kung-fu master on the
Great Wall of China and GOAP founder Dave McClure going through
airport security in China.

GOAP geek Paul Papadimitriou gave a talk during the
Ignite Shanghai event. This event was one of many planned during the
tightly scheduled Shanghai portion of the tour.

Geeks love good food! The diversity of food presentation was often a
highlight of the different cities in this GOAP tour.

During the Beijing leg of the trip, the geeks got a true lesson from a
kung fu/zen master. Aside from Tai Chi lessons, the whole group got to
see his superhuman feat of needle throwing.

GOAP portraits: geeks, geeks, geeks everywhere!

Not a geek from the GOAP tour but a definitely tired vistor takes a
rest during their visit to the Shanghai World Expo.

GOAP founder Dave McClure plus other GOAP geeks talk on a panel during
the Global Mobile Internet
Conference in Beijing, China.

Road signs directing us to South korea!

GOAP portraits: Dave McClure fast pitching US Secretary of State
Hillary Rodham Clinton on Startup Visa, geek kung-fu on
the Great Wall of China in Beijing, GOAP geek Jill Buck presenting during Ignite Shanghai.

Dave McClure and Christine Lu share a geeky
GOAP moment at the dinner table.

CEO of Creative Commons Joi Ito takes a minute for a GOAP
portrait.

GOAP Geek Paul Papadimitriou poses between two large statues in South Korea.

GOAP Portraits: Dave McClure; the entire GOAP crew in Beijing; and Laurie Deneschuk

The GOAP crew had a chance to take a tour of the Demilitarized Zone while in
South Korea.

Dave McClure throw some fingers up with the guys from Foound while at the Echelon 2010 Conference in
Singapore.

GOAP Geek Jing Zhou outside in the hillside
of Beijing. The geeks took a tour of ecological homes built from the
artistic visions of various architects from around the world.

GOAP Portraits: GOAP Geek – Francine Hardaway; the
GOAP crew at the Shanghai 2010 World Expo; Geek on a Plane – Daniel Gruneberg

This neat little device, called the SOULR PRO WOWee ONE, is a amplifying device that can turn
any flat surface into a large audio speaker. Successfully it was used
during the GOAP tour of the Great Wall of China. :)

GOAP organizer Christine Lu takes a minute with her iPhone.

Static Photography photographer Kris Krüg speaks at the Ignite
Shanghai event in Shanghai, China.

GOAP Portraits: Ben Henretig, Kaiser Kuo and Mikkel Thagaard.

The whole GOAP crew in Shanghai, China.

Kris Krüg and his resident teacher take a minute to have some fun on
the Great Wall of China in Beijing.

Geeks on a Plane definitely accomplished bringing geeks from all over
the world together, with the intention of sharing knowledge,
experience and stories. With the success of the last three trips, the
Geeks on a Plane crew have announced the 2010 ReThiink Hawaii in mid-October.

Many geeks, many planes, one trip and lots of fun!

For more information:

Geeks on a Plane website

Geeks on a Plane Twitter

Twitter Search for GOAP

GOAP Gossip Twitter

GOAP News Twitter

Photography Trip to Shanghai, Beijing, Seoul & Singapore
with Geeks on a Plane

Photo Geeks
Take Over Oahu for ReThink Hawaii, Geeks on a Plane & TEDx
Honolulu

ReThink: Hawaii Entrepreneurship, Technology &
Sustainability Conference

Many of you may know Blippy’s Philip Kaplan, but many of you may not know that Blippy’s Philip Kaplan (Drums) is in a boy band with Mayfield Fund VC Raj Kapoor (Vocals/Gold pants), Investor Tim Chang (Bass), Facebook’s Ethan Beard (Guitar) and Prashant Fuloria (Guitar).

If you are just learning this now now, don’t fret. There’s still opportunity to familiarize yourselves with the smooth stylings of entrepreneur side-project Cover Flow (there’s nothing dorkier than being named after an iTunes interface). The nerd fivesome met each other through “business” according to Kaplan, and mostly play songs from the ’80s and ’90s, with some Lady Gaga mixed in. Really.

Kaplan tells TechCrunch that band’s pretty nervous about playing the Media Temple Disrupt Party tomorrow night at Manor West, especially when going up against the star power of MC Hammer at the Google Ventures/SV Angel party on Tuesday, in a battle to win over the ears, hearts and minds of Silicon Valley.

“The investors in the group keep trying to collude every time we get together to rehearse, but we’ve managed to run through the set a few times uninterrupted and it sounds great.”

Perhaps the only band whose members correspond to Crunchbase profiles, here they are playing Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” below.

The topic of Google’s birthday is always a little tricky. The company was incorporated on September 4, 1998, the first technical spec is from September 20, 1998, and the first employee was hired on September 21, 1998 (Craig Silverstein — a fellow grad student with Sergey and Larry at Stanford). And yet, the search giant seems to prefer to celebrate their birthday today, on September 27 (which it is on the East coast of the U.S. right now).

Well, it’s their birthday, and they can celebrate when they want to — and that’s apparently exactly what they started doing in 2005. And they are today with a new doodle logo by Wayne Thiebaud, an American painter often associated with the “Pop Art” movement. For Google’s 12th birthday today, he painted them a nice cake.

For more history of Google (at least up to their tenth birthday) check out this page. As they approach their teenage years, the giant shows no signs of slowing down — quite literally. This year saw the launch of both “Caffeine” (their fresher, faster search results) and Google Instant.

For much of their life, Google has basically dominated search, and their market share speaks to that. But Microsoft Bing has been proving to be a worthy competitor in recent years, so let’s hope puberty doesn’t make things awkward for Google.

Happy birthday, Google.

For years, offline merchants have been acquiring data about you in attempts to personalize your experience through loyalty and rewards cards, credit card data, and surveys. But the problem is these interactions occur after it’s too late: at the point of sale. You've already checked out and are leaving the store, or have ordered dinner. For a merchant to convince you to add an extra item to your shopping cart, or buy an appetizer with your meal, the interaction must happen sooner.

Online check-ins, as a trend and use-case, have created a remarkably compelling opportunity for offline merchants to interact with consumers who are in the store before the sale happens. When you announce you're at a store or restaurant by checking into Foursquare or Facebook Places, for example, your experience can be shaped and molded in compelling ways.

This is precisely why check-ins are incredibly powerful—they give the offline merchants an opportunity to shape your behavior before you buy or consume. Unfortunately, check-ins alone provide little value to merchants in the absence of contextual data about you. And checking into a place definitely does not equate to liking it. Imagine how many restaurants you visit, then consciously decide to never return to. Without a feedback loop this context will be used erroneously for future offers and recommendations.

The real power in converged online/offline interactions will come from a hybrid of realtime contextual offers, deals, and advertisements which can change a consumer's behavior long before any transaction occurs. Recommendations and offers that take into account nearly everything about you as an individual.

This is a why Steve Jobs strategically entered mobile advertising with iAd. Contrary to what Carol Bartz thinks, Apple is thinking way beyond serving brand advertisements within mobile apps. The real potential is about blending offline and online data about you as a person, data that can be transferred across services and devices. iAd is absolutely a secret weapon for Apple to ultimately leverage its micro-payments franchise to influence you at the point of sale. But they could work not just while you're mobile, but at home as well. Imagine watching rich immersive ads on your Apple TV, which are tailored based on your offline behavior while your iPhone simultaneously knows what channel you're watching and gives you a click-to-act offer or saves a deal which you can unlock later.

And though Google bought Admob for a simpler reason (to own mobile/online display), it's clear that their success with Android and momentum with Google TV is driving them toward similar ambitions.

There's simply no doubt that the offline and online worlds are melding in a way where "ads" will incorporate your presence and behavior across the entire web. Obviously the use of apps and web services on your mobile phone will be the source of a lot of this data. But because apps don't use cookies like traditional websites do, proprietary layers of data are becoming silo'd inside these individual services and applications.

This is one fundamental reason why you see so many mash-ups and "data threesomes" happening between services these days – there is incredible power in blending silo’d data across web services. For example, say Foursquare reaches beyond check-ins with a recommendation service, while also providing curated offers by tapping into the API of a group buying service. Then imagine this combined data mash-up accessing the API of a mobile payments service like Square to provide not only a discount, but also an integrated loyalty or reward at the point of sale. You get a recommended list of restaurants, check-in with your friends, trigger a context-aware offer, then immediately get a discount and reward when you pay.

This is the future. And ultimately, this creates massive opportunities for companies to enter the fray with great ideas and leverage APIs from other services. Many will end up as commodity layers, but it’s likely that those which play the greatest role in shaping purchasing intent will benefit tremendously from this massive online/offline convergence and acceleration of mobile commerce.

And these trends likely form the underlying strategy for why Facebook is building a mobile phone. They want to become a participant, not just a layer or service, in how this offline/online commerce plays out. This week’s announcement that Target will sell Facebook credit gift cards is another telling sign of Facebook’s ambitions.

That’s why it’s funny when people see Facebook’s push into phones as a basic play to make phones more social. Dan Lyons wrote a silly Newsweek article this week about Facebook not innovating. I believe innovation is alive and well right now, and is likely accelerating. And Facebook's push into mobile is much more profound than making phones more social – Facebook believes owning elements of the mobile stack will help it leverage its vast social graph to influence offline/online commerce.

And though companies like Facebook and Apple are salivating at the opportunities in this offline/online convergence, so are many startups. TechCrunch Disrupt will undoubtedly mark the arrival of some amazing new startups which are poised to take advantage of these trends as well.  We’re on a new frontier of mobile commerce and life after check-ins looks pretty good from where I’m standing.

_________________________

Contributor Steve Cheney is an entrepreneur and formerly an engineer & programmer specializing in web and mobile technologies.

[photo: flickr/Darshy]

Quick summary of “AngelGate” to date:

• A Blogger Walks Into A Bar
• Dave McClure Gets Mad
• Dave McClure Gets Really Mad
• Ron Conway Goes Nuclear
• Ron Conway Clarifies

As I said the other day, there would be more private emails getting published. This one is from Chris Sacca, a prominent “super angel” who was not at the meeting I stumbled into but was at a previous meeting. He wrote a response to the Ron Conway email. It’s worth pointing out that this email is time stamped a good half hour before our story broke, meaning he wrote it thinking it would all still stay private.

This is also the first leaked email we’ve received that actually includes names in the header of some of the people who are involved in this mess. Presumably these were the people Ron Conway emailed, but the header was stripped out of that email when we received it. Like the Ron Conway email, we have separately confirmed this email is authentic, although Sacca will not comment on it.

I’ve removed one sentence from the email that was highly sensitive. Nothing that material to the overall message, but it was very personal and not appropriate to print publicly.

The email:

From: Christopher Sacca
Date: Thu, Sep 23, 2010 at 7:05 PM
Subject: Re: Super Angels Gathering
To: Ron Conway
Cc: Josh Kopelman, Steve Anderson, Jeff Clavier, Mike Maples, Dave McClure, David Lee

Ron,

I agree with you that we all owe it to each other to be candid.

In that spirit, I will say that I will always be grateful for the opportunities you have given me in this business. You have shared deals with me, introduced me to colleagues, and invited me to events for years. Your philanthropy knows no bounds and has definitely inspired my work with charity:water and Livestrong. In fact, I have great respect for how you took my introducing you to will.i.am as an opportunity to become the single most important benefactor to his foundation. As I wrote last year before the Crunchies when I endorsed you for Angel of the Year:

I mention Ron last only because this one gets a little emotional for me. It goes without saying, his prolific reach is legendary. He is the Zelig of the startup world in that there isn’t a liquidity event in our industry in which he isn’t involved and a closing dinner to which he isn’t invited. Of course, he isn’t just invited as an investor, but usually as the guy who made the introduction, helped negotiate the terms, and saved it from the brink of disaster along the way. It gets emotional for me because no one in this business has been more generous, more selfless, or more caring with me. We all learn from Ron, and none of us could be here without him. I will never understand how he covers so much ground and how he manages to be so responsive and perform so much service for others. When you are with Ron, you know he will go to any length to help you. When guys with his success might otherwise take time to rest, Ron then redoubles his efforts for his charitable causes, not just giving money, but raising funds and awareness and doing hard work on non-profit boards. I feel lucky to know Ron and to have the chance to work with him virtually every day as I am sure many of you do too.

That said, I am having a hard time resolving the person I quite literally grew up with in this business, with the person who sent the email to which I am replying. Your anger and personal accusations hurt, and it is clear they are intended to.

I wasn’t in town for the second meeting, but I went to the first dinner. I wish you would’ve been there. Not only would your input have been valuable, but if you had attended, you would have seen firsthand these topics of discussion:

1) Standard docs to make financings cheaper for startups. The group talked about who would be willing to pitch in our own money and time to help draft a set of financing documents that would allow for priced rounds to cost the same as convertible notes. As you know, it usually costs 10-15 thousand dollars more to sell stock than issue a note. Entrepreneurs would directly benefit from that work by lower costs and less bullshit legal process to get a financing done. In fact, it is exactly what YCombinator did in building a model convertible note. I am sure you agree that would be a good thing for founders everywhere if we were able to publish docs like this to the public to be used as open source.

2) Pro-rata rights. At the first dinner, we heard, from guys who have been doing this for a long time, about the importance of securing pro-rata rights for future rounds. This would allow them to continue to invest alongside other investors at the new, higher, market price in future rounds. I have no doubt you would agree that entrepreneurs also benefit from having their early investors continue to stay involved and demonstrate their renewed commitment to the company. I know you would also love to be able to continue to invest in companies beyond their seed round, and you also know this is only ever helpful to your founders.

3) The futility of VCs blocking company sales. We also discussed how pointless it was for VCs to put clauses in deals that would prevent companies from selling and how the guys in the room had never invoked such a clause because doing so would create misalignment with their founders. We identified that as one way in which many traditional VCs were just missing the boat as to how to work with founders as peers and collaborators and not put them on the opposite side of the table. Each of us felt better knowing we weren’t alone in pushing back on this term that very directly harms founders.

4) Earliest stage founder cash-outs. Among efforts from others, we talked about my recent projects to get very early stage founders some liquidity. Traditional VCs have rarely been inclined to give founders any ability to cash out claiming it makes them less “hungry”. As someone who, just five years ago, had net worth of exactly zero dollars, I remember the difference between being “panicked” and “hungry”. As I have invested in more and more companies, I have learned that many founders would benefit dramatically from even the smallest amounts of cash (compared to the overall deal size). I have worked hard to get my founders as little as $25,000 to pay off credit cards and student loans. Or, in a small deal that closed this week, I was able to get a founder the money so he can pay for his wedding and not have to worry about taking on debt. I, and the other investors in this group who do the same thing, feel good about helping our founders in this way.

I hope you can really pause to consider who is on this list you mailed, as well as the others in the room you didn’t, and the way they do business. All of us have considered you a mentor along the way, and you have recognized that by collaboration with each of us. Inspired by your service, we have seen each of our firms evolve to continually try to always put founders first. Guys like Kopelman are so painfully pro-entrepreneur, and so service-oriented to the community of founders, one topic of discussion at our dinner was understanding all of the different founder perks on which he has spent his fund’s money. From the venture concierge and his hiring services, to his CRM software and CEO summits, I haven’t seen anyone add as much value to founders as First Round. I wish you could have been there to experience firsthand the discussion about how the rest of us could emulate more and more of that model. And, like typical Josh, he was certainly willing to teach us his best practices. I was so blown away, that I actually asked FR to lead a deal I sourced recently because I knew they could serve the company better than I could.

I know that each of the guys on this list coaches entrepreneurs they aren’t even invested with and continue to take time to help the entire startup ecosystem. They work to get founders access to early betas that they know will help. They call in favors to get costs down. They spend political capital to bring in the best hires and they lose sleep brainstorming how to solve problems. Each of the guys here takes phone calls and sends emails at all hours of the day and night. Everyone here hustles. Frankly, I find it hard to keep up with them, just like I can’t keep up with you.

I told you last night that I think some of this issue is worth discussing, even on stage. But, this message, and the ferocity and ad hominem attacks that you include, hurt. Both what you wrote to me before (calling this group “dirtbags”) and in this message above. I am not sure why it needed to get personal. In sharp contrast to your stereotyping about what you say is obsession with talking about cars, I actually drive a piece of shit truck with 115k miles, despite having been frequently encouraged to visit Franz to buy a Mercedes. I fly coach and I stay on friends’ couches in NYC and LA, not out of Signature Aviation and at the Peninsula. That said, though I haven’t yet made a buck, I sincerely hope I will. As I post clearly on my website:

“We don't think of ourselves as money managers. That isn't to say we aren't tireless and competitive. In fact, we are ruthless negotiators, aggressive businesspeople, and have no allergy to disproportionately large returns. However, frankly, capital just isn't that important to the early triumph of a company anymore.”

My founders will tell you, as will the founders of everyone listed here, that I/we sweat with these guys just like you do, bleed with them just like you do, and try as hard as we can to put their interests first. My founders stay at my house for team retreats. In fact, I just bought an entirely new place for them to be able to come to the woods, exercise, relax, focus, unwind, and bond with each other. That came out of my pocket. They get overweight? I buy them a mountain bike. They look skinny? I pick up groceries. Just talk to them and I am sure you will see that, though each of us investors adds value to our founders’ lives in different ways, everyone on this thread adds value, Ron. Everyone. To claim that SV Angel has a monopoly on adding value is disingenuous.

When I started angel investing, my first deal was paid for with a credit card check. It was a dumb idea, but I was so drawn to the notion that I could be helpful to the team and I relished the chance to be building something again. You and I were in that deal together and we both made out pretty well. As you know, at Google, I didn’t get rich by Silicon Valley standards. I left there worth less than a million dollars. I started doing angel investing in part because you and others like Coach Campbell encouraged me to and you knew I would be good at it. I wrote checks to companies when it was financially irresponsible for me to do so, then I went in there and busted my ass to make those things succeed. My days have been driven by a passion that makes it impossible for me to avoid the opportunity to help. Right now, 94% of my net worth is tied up in startups and I [REMOVED BY TECHCRUNCH]. I have every shred of my money alongside my founders, often buying their same common stock. No one but an obsessive idiot would ever allocate their money that way. But, I love what I do. And I know that goes for everyone on this list.

Kopelman bids his kids farewell every few weeks to fly the redeye here and back to be with his companies. I have watched Maples, Clavier, and Steve all drop what they are doing to be supremely helpful to their founders and to their peers. Each of them shares opportunities and leverages their network to try to offer the best possible service to their companies’ teams. Sure, McClure is loud and swears like a drunken sailor, but he takes bullets for his guys, and his service to entrepreneurs through Geeks on a Plane and his Startup 2 Startup dinners series is unparalleled. His followings among founders make that clear. They love and respect him, no matter how you may judge his writing style. They know they have an ally in Dave.

I have seen guys on this list, and in the larger group of all dinner attendees, repeatedly back off terms or convince other investors to take haircuts alongside them so deals can get done. Ask any single one of the companies who has met with me and they’ll tell you that I always negotiate against myself. To a fault. I have given back shares to make room for hiring and I have talked other angels into waiving any fiduciary arguments so our teams could stretch a small deal farther. Everyone here has done that knowing we will get to work with those entrepreneurs again in better times.

This group of guys could all take a much easier path if they were just out to make a buck. Everyone here could raise megafunds, bilk them for fees, jam too much money into deals and repeat that process all over again just mooching off the system. Instead, the folks you listed are all your fellow pioneers in a new way of doing business, a way that admits the structural change the industry has undergone. This is a different era, and each of these guys knows that means greater accountability than ever before.

I described on my Lowercase site characteristics that I think apply to everyone on this thread, and especially you, Ron:

We dive in to work with teams that obsess over user experiences, customer happiness, and that, to quote Paul Graham, "make something people want." Along with relatively small amounts of money, we give them the time, attention, and the empathy that catalyze winning outcomes for all involved. Rolling up our sleeves, we help design front pages, invent new services, prioritize product features, negotiate partnerships, and deal with the everyday professional and personal challenges of startup life. We are grateful for the companies who have chosen us, and feel lucky for the chance to collaborate with such brilliant minds. The dealflow that comes to us is flattering, and we are beyond thankful for the other individuals and firms with whom we partner and learn from along the way.

It makes me sad to hear you don’t think that is actually the case, because I actually don’t doubt for a second that the guys on this list all exceed the standard above. You know they do. You have worked alongside them for years. You have broken bread with them. You know who these people are and you know what their values are. You have referred deals to all of them because you know the positive impact they have on this industry. Now you are willing to throw that away over second-hand accounts of what transpired at a dinner you didn’t attend. I think you owe this group more than that. I also think you owe the press and the founders who are reading the accounts you have prompted more than that.

Ron, we live in the age of Twitter. If we ever fucked an entrepreneur, or if an entrepreneur even hinted we had fucked them, it would be broadcast immediately and the resulting blog posts would be permanently attached to a search on our names. Founders have never been better educated or more empowered than they are today. We aren’t giving them money; they are giving us the right to invest in their companies. Our founders hire us and they do so after consulting a rich network of datapoints confirming whether we are or are not helpful. Slackers don’t get deal flow. Jerks don’t get deal flow. Poseurs get left aside. Abuse the system once and you are tattooed with shame.

Entrepreneurs outnumber us and they talk more than we do. The good opportunities are more than any of us can handle. There are legions of investors at the gates hucking checks at today’s founders. The only possible way any of us can stay in business is by serving. If we are not demonstrably and materially helpful to entrepreneurs, we are dead.

Pausing now to look back and re-read what you wrote, it just makes me sad and your rush to judgment of people you called your friends is disappointing. All of this goodwill burned with guys you have loved. All of this time spent on an issue when we should be helping our companies. (I am writing to you when I should be calling a founder to help him weigh the demands of his VCs and a potential acquirer.) All of this anger directed at people with whom you didn’t even have a discussion to understand what was or wasn’t going on. I wish you had been at those dinners. First, I am sure you would have had helpful input. But, more importantly,you would have instead seen your peers working, as they have always done, to cut through the bullshit in this industry and continue to restore the purity and honor a decade of misaligned interests has left here.

I hope you will find some time over the next couple of days to chew on all this, some time to reflect on who we all are and what we all do. I hope you will spend a little time with our founders and ask them how they feel about working with all of us. I hope you will work to clear the air about what did or didn’t happen. You have such an important voice. But, with that voice comes the responsibility to investigate, know, and share the whole truth.

All told, I know that the gratitude that this group has for your work in this business can’t be undone with one vitriolic email. So, I am optimistic that after you have a chance to chat with each of us, you will remember the passion and selflessness that underpin the work all of us do. While I deeply believe none of us could have gotten here without you, I also ask that you respect that we have all worked our asses off to be here. We all care, we all help, and we all serve. We all learned much of that from you.

I hope in time that will be clear once again and we can all get back to helping our founders and each other.

Thank you,

Chris

Born from the cradle of Disrupt’s NY Hackathon, GroupMe is turning the codefest into something of a company tradition. The startup, which officially launched in August and recently raised $850,000 from a few prominent investors, took the stage on Sunday at the San Francisco Design Center to pitch their latest hack in 60 seconds or less.

GroupMe is a service for private groups based around SMS. To sign up, you go to their website, punch in your cell phone number and your name. Once GroupMe assigns a unique mobile number (a pretty instantaneous process), you can invite anyone with a mobile to join your group. From there you can chat via SMS as a group, organize a conference call, and discuss certain topics. According to co-founder, Scott Martocci (formerly of Gilt Groupe), demand has been  healthy, with GroupMe hitting its 1 millionth text message on Friday.

Unlike Flymodo, another notable Hackathon alum, the founders of GroupMe didn’t launch an entirely new product on Sunday, instead they created a feature for GroupMe: suggested reminders and sponsored groups. Through “sponsored groups,” corporations and organizations can sign-up to create/sponsor event or theme centric groups, like music festivals, sporting events or even television shows. Once a user sign up for a sponsored group, he will be able to access suggested reminders (created by the organization/company).

TechCrunch’s Disrupt will be GroupMe’s first first guinea pig. If you sign up for the Disrupt group, you can sign up to get reminders on events like the Super Angel/VC debate, Google CEO Eric Schmidt’s session or Barry Diller’s fireside chat. Martocci says the team (now a crew of five plus one intern) will be closely monitoring how Disrupt attendees are using the service and making tweaks along the way. You can access the Disrupt’s sponsored group here.

While it may not seem like an earth shattering feature for GroupMe, such a B2C friendly app certainly presents a critical monetization opportunity for the young startup.

This weekend, 450 or so developers descended upon the San Francisco Design Center to hack. The result? Some really cool/interesting/crazy stuff being made at our TechCrunch Disrupt Hackathon. On Sunday, it was time to present before our selection of judges: Cyan Bannister, Brett Bullington, Rebekah Cox, Chris Dixon, Bradley Horowitz, Dean Hovey, Michael Marquez, Christopher Poole, Joshua Schachter, and Mike Schroepfer.

After 86 60-second presentations on stage, the judges went backstage to pick the ones they felt put their time to best use last night (and/or gave the best presentation on little or no sleep).

The overall winner was WiseDame, an app that allows you to easily let people you care about know where you are. For example, perhaps you told your parents that you would be home at a certain time, but you’re going to be late for some reason, you’ll get a notification to let them know why. Perhaps your phone battery is dying and you’ll be forced off the grid — you can also send out a message to let someone know this so they don’t freak out when they can’t reach you.

This app was developed with women in mind — specifically, J’aime Ohm, the sole developer, viewed it as a “black box” recorder like they have in planes, but for real life. But you can easily see this idea being applicable in a lot of ways. (See our video with J’aime above.)

Congrats to WiseDame — they’ll get some time to present during TechCrunch Disrupt, which begins tomorrow.

Below, the full list of Hackathon awards winners:

Honorable mentions — ezetop, PitchHero, Potweet, Ostrich, Display ^ N, Pinnokio, Netflix Theater

Best Demo – Active Hackers

Best Business Model — GreenZone

Funniest — Drinkerator

Creepiest – D8Coach

Top Prize — WiseDame

Thanks to everyone who participated in this year’s Hackathon. We’ll have full videos of each winning presentation up later tonight.