TechCrunch is headed down south this summer and we’re starting our trip in Savannah, Atlanta, Charlotte, and Raleigh-Durham. We already have some great spots lined up but we definitely need your help finding a few more locations.

We begin by riding down to Savannah where we’ll see what the Coast is up to then on to Atlanta, Charlotte, and ending in Raleigh-Durham where we’ll have a great night planned of networking, chit-chats, and boozing.

The goal here is networking and connecting with the exciting projects happening in your cities. These mini-meetups are a great way to get noticed and to chat about what you’re working on and, in addition, get some advice on next steps. That said, we’ll have very limited time in each city so please drop jordan @ techcrunch.com a line if you’d like to meet with us. We’ll probably be holding office hours at a central location. Because of the vagaries of city travel, we won’t be able to come to your office, even if you ask nice.

If you’d like to help nailing down Atlanta and Charlotte, drop me a line as soon as possible at john @ techcrunch.com. Also note that we’ve changed the dates for the meetups to better work around vacation schedules.

Here, then are the dates and locations so far:

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Savannah is happening on July 6th at the offices of The Creative Coast, 15 West York Street. It’s going to be a smaller crowd, I suspect, but considering we found Vinylmint at the Norfolk mini-meetup, I’m excited to see what Savannah has to offer. You can RSVP here.

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Atlanta is happening on July 9. Location is still TBD so if you have any ideas, please drop us a line as soon as possible. You can RSVP here.

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Raleigh-Durham is happening on July 10th at the Tyler’s Taproom in the American Tobacco Historic District. We will be taking over most of the restaurant and garden so roll on over. You can RSVP here.

Special thanks to the fellows at GBW Strategies who helped us organize the event. GBW Strategies is a new era, Triangle-based public relations and marketing firm serving clients such as Facebook and the Cherokee Challenge.

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Charlotte is happening on July 11th. We are still looking for a location although we’ll finalize it by Monday. You can RSVP here.

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.”

Reporting and analytics firm Umbel wants to provide new metrics for measuring content online, to help publishers better monetize their content. And it’s getting some validation from the Knight Foundation, which was just announced as a strategic investor in the startup.

Umbel uses big data analysis of publisher data to better measure audiences that view their content. By using public data provided by social logins, it can provide real-time data about those audiences and help publishers engage with them. It has data from 2.5 million registered users today, which it correlates against 30 different data sources to provide composite audience information.

Umbel therefore provides publishers with more granular data about who’s viewing their content, going beyond just the usual demographics and geography data provided by most third-party measurement systems. That will help publishers to better pitch their audience’s value and interests to brands and agencies.

To help with this, the Knight Foundation has made a strategic investment in Umbel, as part of the $3.7 million Series A Round it announced in April. That round was led by Austin Ventures and also included investment from angels such as Herbert Simon, Chairman and Director of the Simon Property group, and Gordon Paddison, CEO Stradella Road and former EVP of New Media Marketing at Newline Cinema.

The investment was made as part of the Knight Enterprise Fund, an early-stage venture fund focused on innovation in the media industry. In addition to money, Umbel and other Knight Enterprise Fund investments will gain access to advisers that include Joi Itoh, John Palfrey, and Chris Hughes. It will also give Umbel an inside track into the Knight Foundation’s journalism network — the idea is to position Umbel’s measurement services as a value-add to other services provided by the foundation.

As more and more publishers have fewer resources to boost monetization, Umbel’s technology — and this strategic partnership — could give them the tools to engage with audiences and pitch them to advertisers.

The European “Directive on Privacy and Electronic Communications” that regulates the ways websites can track users, is coming to sites which serve European users, which covers plenty out there. The Directive requires that sites disclose the use of cookies on their site and allows visitors to opt-in to their use. It could be an immediate turn-off for users, but it’s here to stay. On Saturday, May 26, the UK implements the first phase of the law, so website owners are scrambling to ensure they are in compliance (assuming they even know about it). As we’ve said before, we think it’s dumb and will make it much harder on European startups.

The first requirement of the UK law is that sites do an audit to determine what cookies are used on their site. The Directive asks them to identify two types of cookies: those it deems “strictly necessary” and those that are not. The problem is that most sites have no idea what cookies it might be serving to users. However, US-startup CloudFlare is about to launch a service which will tell site what cookies they are serving and a way to control them: CloudFlare Audit + Control.

CloudFlare launches its Audit service first, possibly later today. This will interrogate a site and deliver a report on what cookies are being served.

Once that is in operation and people are using it, the data collected will form a sort of collective intelligence about what cookies are actually doing. This is useful because cookies can get dropped by multiple sources including the Facebook Like button, widgets, ad networks and analytics services. CloudFlare’s Audit will identify all the cookies floating around and will let a website owner see how other site owners have classified those cookies. Then they can work out which are the “strictly necessary” cookies.

After building a database of all the web’s cookies and the widgets that drop them, CloudFlare then plans to enable the second portion of the Audit + Control app. This will allow site owners to selectively enable/disable cookies and third party scripts on an individual basis via CloudFlare’s interface. Site owners won’t need to change any of their underlying code.

The idea is that sites will then be able to comply with the opt-in requirement of the EU law, which comes into effect later this year, without harming the core functionality of their sites.

The service is available for free to any CloudFlare users (CloudFlare’s basic plan is also free) but non CloudFlare customers will get the Audit portion in three weeks. The Control part of the service will only be fore CloudFlare users.

CloudFlare knows its onions on this score. It already powers nearly half a million websites and sees over 45 billion monthly page views across its network for more than 450 million unique visitors.

Clearly the Directive will put sites run out of Europe at a disadvantage to their US competitors, and slap bang in the middle of a recession. Not only that but the law applies to any website that has European visitors, so it’s not just an issue EU webmasters need to worry about. However, I’d love to see the European Union try to bring an action against multiple Stateside sites.

Spring has sprung and like Persephone loosed from Hades’ bonds, our iPad app is now available to all and sundry. This app is literally years in the making and we have been back and forth and up and down regarding functionality, design, and look and feel for most of this month. I’m pleased to report, however, that it is ready to go, free, and fabulous.

The app connects our blog content with live Internet reactions as well as some amazing functionality centered around CrunchBase data. You can also just view Gadgets and Mobile content with one click and an offline mode will cache content for the road. It is retina-ready and looks pretty darn good.

An Android version is forthcoming and should be available this summer.

This is, obviously, version 1.0 and we’re planning updates over the next few months that will smooth out the interface and potentially reflect a new design direction for the site in general. Until then, sit back, relax, and start slip-sliding through the new TechCrunch iPad app.

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Click to view slideshow.

Special thanks to the whole team at AOL and thanks to you for reading.

Star Wars music homage by Will Gannon.

If SpaceX founder Elon Musk felt like winning the Super Bowl when the Dragon (perched atop a Falcon 9 rocket) finally launched on Tuesday, he must be absolutely over the moon now.

At 9:56 AM Eastern this morning, astronaut Donald Pettit coaxed the International Space Station's gangly robotic arm into grabbing the unmanned Dragon capsule, marking the first time a private spacecraft has docked with the station.

"Looks like we've got a Dragon by the tail," Pettit said.

The move elicited plenty of hugs and handshakes both at NASA's mission control facility as well as SpaceX's operations center in Hawthorne, California. That initial burst of elation has passed though, and for the past hour the astronauts aboard the space station and their ground crews have buckled down to get some more work done.

That historical grapple maneuver was only the first part of the process. Over the next few hours, the Dragon capsule will be manipulated and berthed along the station’s Harmony module. From there, power and data cables will be connected up to the capsule, and the crew will begin the process of unloading nearly 1,000 pounds of consumables and clothing.

Once they're finished unpacking, the Dragon will be loaded up with nearly 1,300 pounds of cargo — think spacewalk hardware and crew preference items that no longer serve a purpose aboard the station — which will touch down in the Pacific Ocean when the Dragon returns to earth later next Thursday.

UPDATE: The Dragon capsule is now firmly attached to the International Space Station at its berthing port on the Harmony module. Quoth astronaut Pettit, “To all you folks working on the ground, we’re all part of a big team, but thanks a lot for making this happen.”

A big win for healthcare expense-tracking platform Simplee, fresh off its $6 million Series A from earlier this month: the company is now announcing a partnership with top HSA provider in the U.S. ACS (a Xerox company). This is the first major HSA partner for Simpleee, which now introduces its service to ACS|BNY Mellon’s The HSA Solution’s 800,000 members.

While perhaps not as exciting as a brand-new, Instagram-like Facebook Photos app (I’m so downloading that), Simplee is one of those companies solving a real-world challenge that has a big impact on our lives: health care expense management. The company takes a consumer-friendly angle to the problem with its service, which helps patients track their bills and payments, while also visualizing, in something of a Mint.com-like style, what their current situation looks like.

The dashboard shows things like total costs, how much you've paid out-of-pocket, your deductible, how many doctor visits you've had, and more.

For doctors and insurance companies, the service also helps them get paid faster, because it integrates bill payment on the site itself. A forthcoming feature will automatically spot billing errors, too, which will further reduce issues surrounding the bill payment process.

As for ACS’ The HSA Solution, it’s the most frequently selected HSA product in the U.S. by employers and individuals, and is now the largest administrator of HSAs in the country, based on the number of consumer accounts. Members on The HSA Solution will be able to review, track and pay their medical claims and bills from all insurance providers, including health, PBMs (pharmacy benefit management), dental, and vision insurance carriers, through a co-branded single sign-on portal. As with Simplee’s direct solution, things are simplified (get it? Simplee?) for end users, allowing them to read plain language benefits and claims explanations, get notifications about their deductible usage, track their historical spending and very soon, be alerted to billing errors, as noted above.

This partnership is going to allow Simplee to scale its service significantly, and is the first of many still in the pipeline. Stay tuned.

SittingAround, the new service that allows parents to quickly and easily find and schedule a babysitter online, is now getting their sitters clients equipped with Square credit card readers. CEO Erica Zidel tells us that, starting now, all sitters are being offered a free Square dongle as a part of the signup process on the website, and can then indicate whether or not they accept credit cards in their online profile. Parents, meanwhile, can now search and hire sitters based on the payment method they accept.

Granted, this may not be huge news, but it’s a perfect example of Square’s momentum and potential for disruption in the industry. In this case, Square isn’t the one that’s marketing directly to the babysitters – it’s the babysitting service that is. (And frankly, as a parent myself who never carries cash, it would be great if all sitters carried a Square. Having to make an ATM stop part of date night is kind of a bummer.)

Zidel also says that SittingAround is working to add other payment options in the future and plans on integrating these into the company’s forthcoming mobile app, due out soon.

Boston-based SittingAround has doubled its user base and now has over 7,000+ families on the site and 1,500 registered sitters since its launch at the beginning of this year. The site has coordinated over 3,000 bookings to dates since then as well.

While newer than more well-established players in the online child care space (like UrbanSitter, Care.com, etc.), SittingAround isn’t about leveraging Facebook to find social recommendations, but is rather about helping you bring your current “trust network” online – including both parents and sitters alike. It also offers unique features like support for babysitting co-ops, free background checks for parents and sitters, and a “date night deals” section so parents can fully plan their night out.

The site is free to use, as it’s currently ad-supported, unlike the paywalled Care.com. “We want sitters to look at their SitterProfile as their online babysitting resume,” says Zidel. “Because we have an open platform, this profile can be used wherever sitters respond to parents – on Facebook, through a local newspaper, from Craigslist, etc.”

You no doubt are familiar with the Xetum brand, based out of California.  If not, just have a look over at to the side of the page. In the past, we’ve reviewed their Tyndall model; today, we’ll be taking a look at the Stinson.

The Stinson presents as a very minimalistic three-hander, and it does it with style.  I say that for two reasons – first, it’s an extremely clean dial.  Second, the lugless design (well, to be honest, they’re hidden in the case) helps for a cleaner appearance.

But let’s get back to the dial.  The numerals and indicators are varied and easy to ready, especially with the slightly longer-than-usual hands (maybe they’re not, but it seemed that way to me) and super-luminova usage.

While some might prefer the white dial as summer approaches,  I think the black dial works great as a year-round option.  I’d be remiss if I didn’t complement them on having the date wheel color match the dial – such a small detail, but just great when they complement.

As you can see from the pictures, our review model was on a steel bracelet, which is a $100 option.  I can’t say how it compares to the leather strap, but as a bracelet itself, it’s a nice one.  I especially like how the latching mechanism kind of tucked away, giving a clean, smooth surface under your wrist.

What’s ticking away inside that 40mm case (11mm thick)?  Glad you asked!  It’s an ETA 2824-2 automatic movement, which is a well known quantity.  You’ve also got a sapphire crystal up front (mineral glass for the exhibition caseback), and a screw-down crown, all resulting in a package that’s water tight to 100 meters.

Should you want to pick one up for yourself be ready to bring $995 for the model on the leather strap, or $1095 for the steel bracelet.

Product Page

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.’”

Editor’s Note: Peter Fenton has been a General Partner at Benchmark Capital since 2006 and serves on the boards of DotCloud, EngineYard, HortonWorks, Lithium, Minted, New Relic, Pentaho, Polyvore, Twitter, Yelp (IPO: YELP), Zendesk and Zuora.

Today Benchmark Capital announced with Mayor Ed Lee our long-term commitment to the City of San Francisco, opening a new office on the top floor of the Warfield Theater, in the heart of the Tenderloin district.

It's our intention to create a counterpart to our existing office on Sand Hill Road in Menlo Park, in keeping with the new spirit of entrepreneurship in the city.

Follow the Customer

Our move to the city speaks to this change in the entrepreneurial landscape. Two out of every three new investments we have made since 2009 have been in San Francisco. Our partners currently sit on more than 20 boards in San Francisco including Twitter, Yelp, Instagram, Uber, NewRelic, Zendesk, Dotcloud, Asana, OpenTable, DemandForce, NextDoor, ServiceSource, Lithium, Marin Software, 1Life, Second Life, Coverity, EngineYard, Couchsurfing, Grockit and Pipewise.

Benchmark's model of working shoulder-to-shoulder with entrepreneurs who aspire to change the world requires we be close to our customer, the entrepreneur. Our approach requires us to be available 24/7 to our entrepreneurs. In the past decade, this commitment increasingly means being in the city. Our center of gravity is no longer limited to the 5-mile radius around Stanford, and now includes fundamentally the 3-mile radius around Yerba Buena Gardens.

What Changed?

So, what changed in the last decade? We see several major factors driving the rise of San Francisco.

1. The primacy of Interaction Design

The new digital landscape in which entrepreneurs operate is no longer dominated by sales-driven cultures, or by the need to deploy and maintain infrastructure. Instead, amazing products, products that are often bought rather than sold, dominate this new landscape. Designers of these products are increasingly in direct touch with their users. We have spoken of this product-driven versus sales-driven change, and it impacts every sector we invest in. Design moves to the center. We believe designers are choosing urban life in the city over suburban life elsewhere.

2. A deeper talent pool

Google pioneered the bus service, and by 2007 25% of its company was being ferried to work. Other companies followed suit. Young engineering graduates could now live in an urban environment, get work done on the commute, and enjoy the pleasures of city life at night and on the weekends. This has expanded the pool of exceptional engineers in San Francisco and many of these people have either started their own companies or joined growing startups. The new wave of companies based in San Francisco is producing a generation of engineering leaders who have real ties to urban life.

3. A new model of production

With the advent of the cloud and the proliferation of tools for distributed work, engineers can innovate anywhere in the world. Coding has become more social, more urban; it's no surprise that the two leading companies in that initiative are both based in San Francisco (Atlassian and Github). This mode of production removes the need for the "bay of cubes", the norm for many south bay engineering teams.

4. Re-urbanization movement in the United States

The New Yorker had a fantastic piece on the re-urbanization of our country a few years ago. After decades of flight to the suburbs, American workers are waking up to the benefits of urban living, trading long commutes and larger houses for the dynamism and diversity of raising families in the city.

5. San Francisco government policy

For all the positive forces, there is obviously a long list of things that need to improve in San Francisco. Transportation, crime, blight, tax codes, and education, to name a few. Enter Ron Conway. Ron moved to the city in the mid-2000's, and took an interest in re-making San Francisco as the Startup Capital. He helped identify and catalyze massive support for Ed Lee as Mayor, attracting a number of firms including Benchmark in that support. Ed brings pragmatic, forward-looking views — in a city notorious for self-interest and cronyism, he operates in an endearing, selfless manner. Ron's leadership took organizational form with the launch of sfCITI (@sfciti on Twitter) at the beginning of the year, creating a sustained effort to seize the opportunity in front of the city to become the innovation capital of the world.

The Challenge & The Opportunity

Despite the positive momentum, San Francisco's rise could easily fall back and fragment if major changes don't occur. One of the biggest challenges city-based startups face is the potential for distractions in city life. We've found open, contiguous floor space materially helps achieve the collective sense of mission and deeper commitment that avoids such distractions. Unfortunately, many of the offices in SoMa are chunked-up, and work against these cultural goals of young companies. But if you go west along Market Street, to the tenderloin and the civic center area, wonderful open floor space abounds. Yet this is ground zero for urban blight.

The Warfield

Our inspiration for the Warfield location comes from restaurateur and OpenTable board member Danny Meyer. Danny taught us in the context of opening new restaurants to seek locations before there is a "there there" and to play a civic duty in transforming abandoned or disfavored urban areas:

"One of the things we love to do is come to a neighborhood before the rest of the world does. We did that with Union Square. We did that with Gramercy Tavern in the Flatiron district. We come down here to Battery Park City, there’s a real dearth of restaurants down here."

So, like Twitter last year, we saw an opportunity to go into a tough neighborhood, and to be part of the transformation. Twitter's new headquarters are at 10th/Market (80kft+ floor plates), and the Warfield is at 6th/Market.

We look forward to seeing you at the Warfield. Just don’t go to the door on the left or the one on the right….

[Warfield photo via AGI Capital.]

It looks like the webOS contingent at HP isn’t done losing people. HP laid off 275 webOS employees back in February shortly after they announced their plans for the Open webOS project, and now their Enyo team is being picked apart.

The Verge reported late last night that key members of the Enyo team have left their posts at HP, and will migrate over to Google.

Enyo, in case you're not steeped in webOS lore, is a JavaScript framework that allows devs to “build and maintain HTML5 applications of any size and complexity” that debuted alongside the ill-fated TouchPad. Considering that the platform is meant to help devs create platform-agnostic apps that can be tailored either for the web or for a mobile device, the team behind it apparently made for an enticing target for Google.

Though initial rumblings made it seem like the entire team up and left, it's since been revealed that only a handful of HP employees will be making the transition. AllThingsD reported last night that Google has been working out these talent acquisitions on a person-by-person basis rather than swooping in and taking the whole lot of them. Unfortunately, Enyo Senior Director Matt McNulty is one of the people making the transition to Google, and they’re expected to regroup in Mountain View some time next month.

Despite how things sound, it's not completely over for the project — it’s damned near impossible to kill an open source project once its out in the open, and HP has said that business will continue as usual:

We’re pleased with the traction Enyo has gained to date and plan to continue its development along with the open source community. The Open webOS project is on schedule and we remain committed to the roadmap announced in January.

And what will Matt McNulty and the rest of the ex-HP crew be doing at Google? Surely some of them will end up working on Android, especially given that Android User Experience Director Matias Duarte led up Palm's design efforts on the little mobile OS that couldn't until he left just after HP's acquisition. With Enyo focused on allowing developers to create cross-platform applications that play nice with web browsers, some of that new blood could trickle into Google’s Chrome and ChromeOS divisions.

Of course, this isn't the only notable departure that HP is dealing with at the moment. The news comes just two days after HP revealed that they would be axing 27,000 jobs in an attempt to save $3.5 billion by 2014.

Well, that’s one way to get some attention for your product launch.

Manpacks is announcing a new Startup Perks program, and to promote it, the company mailed boxes of free condoms to more than 100 startups, including Path, Udemy, Scribd, and GetAround. Supposedly, the boxes started arriving today — includes a custom URL where workers at that specific company can sign up for the program.

Co-founder and CEO Ken Jonson says Manpacks has been working to build a corporate perks program aimed at larger organizations, but then he decided it felt “a little weird” to leave out startups. So it’s launching with startup perks, then expanding to more corporate targets in a couple of months.

Basically, the program allows entrepreneurs and their employees to sign up for discounted Manpacks shipments, which include things like underwear, socks, razors, and, yes, condoms — things that guys may not want to spend time shopping for.

Startups may be the ideal customer base for Manpacks, since people at a startup often put their lives on hold and work ridiculously long hours, so anything that reduces the time spent on the responsibilities of everyday life will probably be welcomed.

So why the condoms? (It probably won’t help with the complaint that startups are increasingly dominated by a “brogrammer” culture that’s hostile to women.) Johnson says he wanted to do “fun and a little irreverent.” I’d say he succeeded.

Launched in 2009, Yahoo’s Connected TV was one of the first platforms to introduce an open app development kit (ADK) for Internet-capable TVs. Now it’s making those apps even more powerful, by allowing developers to build apps that integrate TV and mobile capabilities.

At a meeting with developers Thursday evening, the Yahoo Connected TV team is rolling out the newest version of its ADK, in addition to open source availability of its device communication library for Android devices on GitHub.

The new ADK let developers connect their mobile and connected TV apps, supported by two-way messaging between the devices through Yahoo’s device communication protocol. That way, developers can build apps for smart phones and tablets that recognize what users are watching or games that are being played on the TV.

Useful apps could include those that add smart TV controls and navigation to the mobile device, or allow viewers to share content from the small screen to the big screen. And there’s a huge opportunity for multi-user games that take advantage of both screens: Think Scrabble or poker, in which the playing field is on the TV, but tiles and cards are controlled by the devices in users’ hands.

To speed app development, Yahoo has open sourced a library of communications tools, which developers can use to build up and customize their own apps. For now, the library is only available for Android developers, although the company is looking to soon release a comparable offering for iOS devices, according to Ron Jacoby, chief architect and VP of Yahoo Connected TV.

The ADK aims to take advantage of new features that will be available in the most recent group of TVs with the Yahoo platform installed, Jacoby told me by phone. Those TVs, which were demoed at CES 2012, come from Sony. There’s also the chance that older TVs with the Yahoo software in them could get the features, but firmware upgrades are rolled out at the manufacturer’s discretion.

Yahoo’s Connected TV platform isn’t the only one that’s looking to connect TVs with mobile and tablet devices. The most recent version of Samsung’s Connected TV platform includes similar functionality, as does version 2 of the Google TV operating system.

Yahoo currently has more than 1.5 million active monthly users on its connected TV platform. It’s attracted more than 10,000 registered developers for the platform, who have made nearly 200 apps available on Yahoo Connected TVs. Enabling more interactive second screen apps could make the platform more compelling for developers, and more fun for users.

BetterWorks, the employee perks startup led by Los Angeles entrepreneur and investor Paige Craig, has told its customers that it will be shutting down May 31.

The company offered tools to help businesses manage discounts and rewards programs for employees. In the past few months, BetterWorks still seemed to be rolling out a steady stream of new features like catering and groups and permissions. In fact, Director of Product Varun Krishna told me that BetterWorks was seeing growing interest from larger enterprises (though in retrospect that may have been a polite way of saying that it wasn’t making enough money from small- and medium-sized businesses).

However, last week the company laid off all of its sales and marketing staff and half of its operations team. It looks like today’s note to customers (which was first reported by socalTech) is the final nail in the coffin. Here’s the copy that one of our readers sent in:

Thanks for being a supporter, and a user a of the BetterWorks platform.

We're proud to have helped make work rewarding for your team and company. I'm writing to let you know that for business reasons, as of May 31st 2012 the BetterWorks perk platform will no longer be in service to customers. We've been unable to sustain a large enough market and have decided to close our doors. It's been a privilege having you as a customer and I deeply apologize for any inconvenience this creates.

Because the site will be retired, please take the following actions to make sure you are able to retain key information:

• Please print out your vouchers by May 31st: Because these vouchers have been pre-paid, vendors will continue to honor services until August 31st 2012.
• Spend May Allowance and Bonus Bucks by May 31st: As of midnight May 31st, you will no longer be able to spend budget on the platform and they will be returned to your employer. Please use any remaining funds in your account by this date.
• Memberships will cancel on May 31st: If you have gym memberships – they will be cancelled automatically at the end of this month. While it is not an obligation, many vendors will continue to offer corporate rates and we encourage you to discuss this directly with them.
• Food Ordering Closed on Monday May 28th for Memorial Day: Note that food ordering will be closed in observance of Memorial Day. During this time, all other perks are available for purchase.

Please email support@betterworks.com or call us at 1-888-601-9675 extension #2 if any issues arise and we will be happy to assist you. Thanks for believing in our vision and for using BetterWorks at your company.

Paige Craig
CEO – BetterWorks

BetterWorks raised a total of $10.5 million from investors including Redpoint Ventures. Craig co-founded the company with Geni co-founder George Ishii and Farmville co-creator Sizhao Yang.

Two big customer review platforms are teaming up: Bazaarvoice just announced that it has agreed to acquire PowerReviews.

The agreement is for up to $31 million in cash, plus stock, bringing the total estimated value to be $151 million. Bazaarvoice says the acquisition should close before the end of July.

The companies plan to combine their technology, content, and data. Both offer social commerce products that allow retailers and brands to collect and syndicate customer reviews, as well as other content. The release says PowerReviews’ self-service product will allow Bazaarvoice, which has been focused on larger companies, to expand into the small- and medium-sized market.

The combined company supposedly serves nearly 1,800 clients globally, including half of the Internet Retailer 500.

PowerReviews has raised a total of $37 million in funding from Menlo Ventures, Draper Richards, Lehman Brothers, Tenaya Capital, Four Rivers Group, and others. Bazaarvoice, meanwhile, went public earlier this year.

Entrepreneurs, please start paying more attention to healthtech. Rather than trying to build the next billion-dollar mobile photo app, go lean and deep into bigger problems. As ZocDoc CEO Cyrus Massoumi said recently, healthtech is underrepresented among startups, with many (and founders are not alone) failing to recognize the size of the market (and the corresponding opportunity): Healthcare alone is a $2.7 trillion industry in the U.S., for example.

Yet, healthtech is just as desperate in its need for brain power, entrepreneurial enthusiasm, and a little elbow grease as it was five years ago. Speaking to a crowd at TechCrunch Disrupt yesterday, the ZocDoc CEO essentially issued a call-to-action, declaring that access to healthcare “is one of the greatest challenges to face our generation.”

Today, thanks to the increasing number of health-focused startup accelerators, like San Francisco-based Rock Health and New York City-based BluePrint Health, to name a few, lacking intimate familiarity with HIPAA or med school experience is no longer a categorical disqualifier. What’s more, there are plenty of problems to tackle, some of them low-hanging, and there is in fact growth capital to be found for healthtech.

To that point: One of the first graduates of BluePrint’s healthtech accelerator is a startup called Meddik, which wants to give consumers a better way to search for health information and find targeted and personalized support. The startup is still in the early stages, so the fine points are still gelling, but the idea is to build a platform that aggregates user-submitted content, identifying the best advice, articles, and solutions based on the specific conditions and topics of interest of the individual.

Thought it’s still early in the cycle, Meddik is already finding validation from investors, as the startup is today announcing that its has raised $750K in seed funding from a flock of notable angels and early-stage VCs, including Chris Dixon, Nat Turner, Zach Weinberg, Bob Stern, Vivek Garipalli, as well as Collaborative Fund, Founder Collective, Great Oaks, and Silicon Badia.

Co-founder Tim Soo, who’s currently on leave from the University of Pennsylvania as he and co-founder Ben Shyong work towards to launch Meddik later this summer, told us that they had originally set out to build a kind of Google Search for health. Much in the same way that Noodle is currently doing for education.

But the co-founders eventually came to the realization that their scope was too wide, as crawling the entire web resulted in an unfavorable ratio of spam and junk to quality health content. Of course, this touches on a problem that’s fundamental to online health portals. Unless your leg is falling off, thanks to the high cost of health care and doctor/hospital visits, when it comes to basic health questions, our first move is to ask Google. Just as true now as it was then.

Naturally, that Google search then leads to general answers, confusing encyclopedia entries, or long-winded forums. But, what if you find someone just like you (a clone?!), who had experienced the same medical issue, ailment, or had already asked the same question and could tell you what worked — and what didn’t.

Of course, while this is a great start, that information is still anecdotal. Thus, the key, Shoo said, is to scale that experience, adding personalized, aggregated public and academic information, traditional and alternative remedies, in an effort to not just find a good answer to your health questions, but find the right answer. Which is so much easier said than done.

We still haven’t applied Web 2.0 answers where they matter most, the co-founder continued, so a health networking play “doesn’t just mean a better news feed, or a good restaurant recommendation, it means making the right health-related connection can save lives.”

Of course, even though Massoumi reminded us of the fact that health startups are underrepresented in the ecosystem, Meddik has plenty of competition — at least nominally. WebMD and PatientsLikeMe, and Healthline each offer extensive resources for patients, yet the majority of existing health solutions tend to focus on specific conditions (like chronic illnesses), which makes them inherently boxed-in. And in the case of the above examples, the barriers to entry can also be high, requiring users to fill out involved online profiles.

While solutions like Fitbit and Fitocracy are finding adoption among mainstream audiences, there’s a lot of focus on Considering most health attributes are intrinsically interrelated, the co-founders began building out a large ontology table that connects all common health language (via a Wiki and internet scraping) to actual medical code.

Companies such as WebMD, PatientsLikeMe, Healthline and Alliance Health also provide an online heath resource for patients, but Soo said those sites either have higher barriers to entry (in that users have to complete more involved profiles) or target patients with more chronic illnesses. Fitbit, Fitocracy, Nike's Fuel band and others appeal to a mainstream audience, but they only focus on general fitness, not the larger category of personal health. Meddik wants to play across that spectrum, Soo said.

Based on those codes, Meddik calculates a clinical similarity index between the searcher and every other user connected to the site, with the goal being to create a health network, in which users remain anonymous while being able to connect with those who will be best suited to help you.

At this point, as you may already be able to tell, Meddik is still in the early stages of building its MVP. The service is in closed beta with a limited number of beta testers beginning the process of seeding its content. When the site is up and fully functional, Soo says, it will likely monetize by leveraging its unique data set to serve targeted health advertising — not unlike Facebook’s social data/advertising model.

To give readers a taste of the site, Meddik will be peeling the doors back the foor a opening its doors over the next few days to a few hundred early participants. Check them out at home here, and let us know what you think.

Knowing how users react to Facebook’s product changes is crucial to the site making the right moves, so today it closed an acq-hire of part of design research firm Bolt | Peters — specifically its leading man CEO Nate Bolt and several other employees from the six person consultancy. Those coming over will be joining Facebook’s design team that’s headed by Kate Aronowitz.

Bolt | Peters started 10 years ago and specialized in recruiting actual visitors to a website through its tool Ethnio and then observing their usage remotely so it could deliver insights on what to improve to their clients, which numbered over 90. Bolt | Peters will shut down on June 22nd, and has already spun out its Ethnio real-time research service.

Facebook tests product changes more frequently than nearly any service. Bringing in Nate Bolt and some of his teammates will help it understand exactly how users feel about changes and avoid blunders like Beacon.

Right now, Facebook typically pushes design changes to a tiny fraction of its user base through its Gatekeeper system. It then watches the usage data to see if users engage with new features or changes, and how engagement, sharing, and time-on-site change. Changes that improve these metrics often get pushed to the whole user base. Innovating and iterating in a way that pushes people’s boundaries is good, but Facebook needs to be careful not to roll out new features too far before its users are ready for the future.

Bolt | Peters will give Facebook talent with experience deducing both the sentimental reactions and actual impact on usage of its changes. That’s important because sometimes users hate things at first, like the news feed, but use them a ton and end up loving them. It had previously assisted Sony, HP, Electronic Arts, Volkswagen, Autodesk, AAA, Genentech, Esurance, the Washington Post, and more with its services including live remote research, mobile research, training, live recruiting, game research, and “UX blitz”.

Here’s the full announcement of the acq-hire from Bolt | Peters’ blog:

It turns out the Facebook design team is a great place for smart researchers. For more than ten years, Bolt | Peters has worked with our clients (plus a robot and clay dinosaurs) to improve the design of their sites, apps, devices, video games, and cars. We did that with 238 projects, 24 talks, 18 articles, 11 events, 1 book, 19 weird videos, and 1 app. But the time has come for our next adventure — at Facebook. Bolt | Peters will be closing operations on June 22nd, 2012. While we'll miss working with our amazing clients, we're stoked about Facebook's commitment to user experience, and the design team is a critical part of this.

What about ethnio? Last week we announced that after five years of growth, ethnio deserved to be its own company. That has not changed. Ethnio remains committed to supporting its customers with real-time research recruiting and more. We know Ethnio is in good hands with some of the people who have worked on it for years at the helm. I will no longer be working there, but will retain ownership. You can find out more about the new team at ethnio and who will be running it by following @ethnio or watching their blog.

User Research Friday and 1197 I'm thrilled to say that our friends at User Interface Engineering will be taking over User Research Friday. They pretty much rule at events. URF lives on. And the fine folks at the New York Soho Gallery for Digital Art will be taking over our mobile photography conference, 1197. Basically, both our product and the events that we've enjoyed putting on will live on after Bolt | Peters closes up shop. Feel free to get in touch with us with any questions, and you can keep up with all of us individually here. Our VP, Cyd Harrell, deserves 100% of the credit for running the consulting side of the business for the past six years. She rules. Thank you, Cyd. And a huge thanks to my co-founder Craig Peters, who has been a friend and advisor for years. But especially, all the team at Bolt | Peters past and present that I've had the pleasure of working with – you've made our success possible. Thank you guys. Well. It's been our privilege to be a part of the the interaction design and UX community as a consulting firm since January, 2002, and we plan to continue to work in that community as part of Facebook. I want to mention that this decision did not come lightly. Our clients, colleagues, team, and advisors are simply the best. They are our partners. They are our friends. And we sincerely thank you. – Nate Bolt

This is guest post by Julia Szopa , program director at the blackbox.vc incubator in Silicon Valley which specialises in moving European startups into the US.

It is not uncommon for European entrepreneurs to come to the Silicon Valley to learn how to launch globally. However, they often play "the startup game" by the wrong rules. With scarce venture resources in Europe, founders learn to compromise way too much and accept what's typically unacceptable by those who build great, successful companies with global potential.

Having talked to dozens of entrepreneurs from outside of the U.S. shortly after they arrive to take their first steps in Silicon Valley, I have observed a set of common false beliefs that most of them share. Even if they have great products, great teams, and endless motivation for working hard in their startups, the crucial first step for them should be to get rid of some misconceptions about the startup game… ASAP.

Co-owning the company with your team is crucial to its success

As Tim Draper noticed during his recent visit at Blackbox Connect, the concept of co-ownership is often misunderstood and underestimated outside of the Silicon Valley. Giving stock options to employees with a vesting schedule, which is one of the most natural ways to establish a real sense of ownership and motivate, often takes the last place on their lists of priorities (if at all).

There are countries, like Denmark, that explicitly discourage entrepreneurs from giving shares to employees, as their tax laws impose an additional 25% tax on any shareholder in possession of less than 10% of a company. In case of an exit, a stock-owning employee would owe the Danish government around 67% of what he'd made by investing his blood, sweat, and tears into building a successful startup.

Many entrepreneurs from Europe often point out that potential employees they talk to usually don't even recognize the value of owning shares in a startup. In the culture of scarcity the short-term tangible benefits matter much more, and too few success stories among their peers make them believe that having shares in a startup could not really bring any profit.

Giving away too much for seed money limits your agility

Standards of equity amounts given away to investors, angels or advisors in Europe are incomparable with those in the Silicon Valley. While the well-established YCombinator asks for somewhere between 6%-8% for $11K-$20K, there are multiple local acceleration programs in Europe that take as much as 10% for as little as $10K of seed funding. I've also met entrepreneurs who have given away 35% of their company during the seed round and they weren't just rare foolish exceptions.

While sometimes it's crucial for startup founders to raise whatever seed money they can, they need to understand that giving away that big of a share of the company to investors will make it harder for them to raise future rounds of financing.

Furthermore, it also minimizes the incentives to reap meaningful rewards, as it sets the frame for inequitable partnership between the entrepreneur and the investor.

There are a couple of totally legitimate reasons for small markets VCs to demand more equity for less. First, they count on small exits, as the markets are smaller. Second, they have few competitors, so they simply can ask for more and still get a good deal-flow. But that doesn't mean that the entrepreneurs have to accept these rules of the game, just because they have to prove the concept on the home market. Of course, having achieved decent traction in home country definitely makes entrepreneurs look more legitimate in front of the VCs from the Valley, but it doesn't prove anything about their capabilities to scale to the global market.

Thus the very common assumption that "first we need to prove ourselves locally, and then go global" is not always true. Sometimes it just makes more sense to start globally, and then localize (as most of the Silicon Valley startups do).

Making quick decisions doesn't always mean you are desperate

Whenever a VC invited to give a talk at Blackbox Connect mentioned that it takes her or him around 4 weeks to close a deal with a start up, the audience reacted with huge disbelief. How come it can take such a short time? while back in their home countries they would talk to VCs or angels for months before they get funded.

Apparently SV is much faster with making decisions, and the entrepreneurs are expected to act quickly too. Being able to make a decision fast is not a sign of desperation.

Thinking small doesn't protect you from failure

Almost all of the companies that come to the Valley from a different startup ecosystem bring here the fear of failing with their startup. They pitch their tiny little projects — an app for this, an app for that — believing that maybe they will not change the world, but at least they'll build something in order to start playing the startup game and move forward. And if they fail, that will be just a tiny little failure — much easier to digest.

Non-US startups must learn that failing is always an option. While small failure is less painful, no big win comes from playing it too safe. To succeed in the world of global business, they must adopt the Silicon Valley mindset. That means making fast decisions, taking bigger risks, giving shares to everyone in the company, and being smart about financing their company growth.

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.]