Though Snapchat has been picked on, picked apart, and blown up in the media, the technical aspects of the service are still somewhat mysterious to the average user. A new research report from a company called Decipher Forensics is looking to shed a little light on how the service “deletes” photos you send through Snapchat.

According to Decipher, Snapchat photos are renamed with a .jpgnomedia extension to hide that photo from your phone, under /data/data/com.snapchat.android. The computer forensics company claims that they can retrieve these photos both before and after they’ve expired within the app.

The only catch is that you need to use their $9,000 forensic software, and you’re in luck! They’re only charging $300 to $600 to do so.

This is what we, in the media industry, like to call FUD. Or worse, FUD to drive sales.

We did our own digging, with the help of AndroidCentral’s Phil Nickinson and Jerry Hildebrand, and discovered that Snapchat is actually doing exactly what it promises it’s doing.

Here’s the scoop.

Decipher’s findings only relate to rooted Android smartphones, and require the use of this special, expensive forensic software. When Phil and Jerry tried to break into a rooted HTC One to see all the dirty snaps hiding under the surface, they actually found that you can only retrieve Snapchat photos before they’ve expired.

In fact, Snapchat does rename the file when its sent to your phone. First, the sender takes the picture, which is sent to Snapchat servers, and then delivered to the phone. Once the photo is delivered to the recipient, Snapchat deletes that photo off of its servers, so the only alternative is that it’s stored locally on the phone.

To keep it from showing up in your gallery or elsewhere, Snapchat hides the photo with the .jpgnomedia extension that Decipher mentioned. As Phil explained, “Snapchat has to see the photo to serve up to you, right?”

Jerry and Phil confirmed that, on a rooted phone, while the photo is delivered but still unopened, users can absolutely delve into the file system and retrieve, rename, and view these photos. This app helps. That’s what happens when you root your phone and open it up.

However, once the photo is opened, and the timer goes off, Snapchat does in fact delete the photo. Phil and Jerry confirmed that they could no longer retrieve photos once they were expired.

Decipher argues that those photos aren’t deleted, and remain renamed with the .jpgnomedia extension even after they expire. But, our own digging proved otherwise. Phil and Jerry said that once the photo expired on Snapchat, the “original file in the protected data folder was no longer available, and was deleted.”

Of course, a company like Decipher can still retrieve photos once they’ve expired because they have the software to do so. The same software that retrieves deleted child porn from pedophiles computers, and the same software that digs through digital trash cans for incriminating bank statements, emails, etc.

But your average Joe, or even AndroidCentral tinkering wizards, can’t actually dig into the phone and find all the embarrassing snaps you’ve sent them.

This comes down to the nature of deletion. When you delete something from your computer, it’s not actually gone. No, not even if you empty the trash can. Instead, the file is re-designated (much like Snapchat renames photos that haven’t been opened) to make it so that photo is non-viewable, and doesn’t surface in the Finder.

It’s not until the bits that comprise the file, a series of 1′s and 0′s, are written over that the file is actually gone, and replaced with something new.

So, if you delete a picture on your computer, and empty the trash can, I would have a tough time finding that picture. Decipher Forensics? It would take them no time at all.

Here’s what Snapchat co-founder Evan Spiegel had to say in a snarky response to Decipher’s findings:

There are many ways to save snaps that you receive. The easiest way is to take a screenshot or take a photo with another camera. Snaps are deleted from our servers after they have been viewed by the recipient.

Long story short, don’t panic. And chew on this: Snapchat wasn’t built to be a super secure messaging platform. The whole reason for the self-destructing pictures isn’t to keep your titty shots safe; it’s to create a new type of sharing wherein you live in the moment, not in the digital footprint you leave behind.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

This is the ground floor of one of the electronics malls in Shenzhen’s famed Huaqiangbei district. Huaqiangbei is a stretch of large malls and shops in the Southern Chinese province, and due to its proximity to some of the manufacturing superfactories in the city, it has a cluster of malls that specializes in carrying tech goods.

These electronics malls generally start out with booths on the ground floor and individual store units as you go up the floors. They’re typically buzzing with activity from consumers to wholesalers keen to check out the quality of new devices coming out of the factories.

But when I visited some of the malls last month, only a handful of the open booths downstairs were tenanted, and the shutters were down on almost every floor of one of the seven-storey malls. when I asked one of the shopowners what was going on, he said his former neighbors packed up progressively over the past months, forced out by the tight competition of hawking nearly identical products as one another.

Ling Liling, who runs a local phone reseller business called Weibintongxin, was at one of the booths downstairs. Her shop window carried an array of Chinese phones as well as Nokia and Samsung knock-offs. She said local phones were starting to sell a lot better these days, compared with several years ago when people were averse to buying local brands.

Furthermore, as Nokia’s brand name slips, there is no draw for the average Chinese consumer to pick up a Nokia, knock-off or otherwise, when a dual-core Huawei goes for just as much and works better, she said. Samsung Galaxy S3 knock-offs are still selling well, however.

She pointed out that as technology gets cheaper, with most makers running Android, resellers have to either rely on selling shiny knock-offs or hope for volume sales on white label phones.

Meanwhile, across the corridor from her, some homegrown brands like Yoobao and Meizu were enjoying comparatively better reception. Rather than imitate foreign brands, these companies have been building up their brand reputations over the past few years.

According to analyst IDC, the top five smartphone makers in China in Q3 last year were Samsung, followed by Chinese makers, Lenovo, Coolpad, ZTE, and Huawei, in descending order. Apple was knocked to sixth place.

^{The display area for some of the local brands was noticeably more dressed up than the section carrying knock-offs}

The closing down of a lot of resellers in Huaqiangbei is also due in part to the government’s ongoing efforts over the past few years to clean up the district’s image as a gritty place to find knock-offs. The growing affluence of Chinese consumers also means that knock-offs aren’t the defacto choice as they used to be, as well.

Benjamin Dolgin-Gardner, who owns Shenzhen CE and IT (SZCEIT), said the average quality level of commodity phones has risen to very decent levels, which explains why so many phone resellers are being squeezed out.

And where the electronics market in Huaqiangbei used to cover a fuller range of IT products like PC parts and peripherals, consumer tastes shifting over to mobile products saw most shops move their product lines to mobile accessories or phones. Jian, a reseller with Xiaozhang Accessories, said she used to carry PC parts, but they moved over to mobile accessories like power banks and micro USB cables. The strategy paid off in early days, but she’s starting to feel the pressure of the growing competition from other resellers coming in with similar commodity products.

“Tablets are the next thing that’s coming in a big way,” Dolgin-Gardner said. The average Chinese user, having been exposed to the Internet via the mobile phone, is craving a larger screen that will still take a 3G SIM card, and is accustomed to the Android interface. “It’s just an evolution,” he said.

This trend isn’t limited to Asia, he added. SZCEIT recently won two big contracts to manufacture tablets for a white label maker in the US, and another in the UK, which are expecting big demand for non-Apple tablets in Western markets.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

While I’m not a big fan of ostentatious watches that cost too much and are aimed at buyers with more money than sense (in short, most of the Hublot line) I will give this odd-looking watch a moment of reflection. It is the MP-05 LaFerrari, a tourbillon watch with a 50-day power reserve, a number almost unheard of in the watch world, and a unique styling that is reminiscent of a certain Arashikage ninja.

The watch itself has a custom HUB9005.H1.6 movement and displays the time in a series of vertical registers. There is a visible tourbillon (essentially a rotating balance wheel AKA the little wheel that “spins” in your average mechanical watch) on the bottom of the watch as well as a winding port on the top. To wind it you use this little power drill. Seriously.

A power reserve indicator tells you how long you have to go before you whip out your little drill gun and the entire thing is designed to look like the cowling on the $1.3 million LaFerrari or, more precisely, Cobra Commander’s codpiece. The watch is completely handmade and you can see more photos here. It comes in a limited edition of 50 and you can expect to pay $300,000 for the privilege of strapping it to your wrist.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Amazon doesn’t share details on how well its Amazon Appstore apps sell, but according to mobile app analytics firm App Annie, the app marketplace is seeing growing traction among developers. The company surveyed over 1,500 developers, and found that 22.5 percent of them were now publishing to the Amazon Appstore, and half of that group (50 percent) cited the game category on the Amazon Appstore as their leading revenue driver.

Previous reports have confirm roughly the same thing: that Android developers are turning to Amazon’s Appstore in greater numbers, and are seeing the benefits. Amazon Appstore’s revenue per user tops that of Google Play, or even iOS, in some cases. Last summer, for example, mobile gaming startup TinyCo, was saying that its revenue per user was higher on Amazon than on iTunes or Google Play. However, another report from Flurry said that iTunes was number one, and Amazon was in second place in terms of its revenue generation capabilities. Flurry had found that for every $1 spent on the iOS store, Amazon’s store generated $0.89, and Google Play $0.23.

But this was over a year ago; App Annie itself said this month that Apple’s was still the store to beat, in terms of revenue.

Today’s report also found that top paid iOS and Google Play applications have higher average price points than those on Amazon. Comparing the average price of the top 400 paid apps, the company noted that Amazon’s average was $1.73 compared with $2.21 on iPhone, $3.39 on iPad, and $3.55 on Google Play.

However, it might be a little early to paint such a rosy picture, depending on whose data you believe more. For instance, App Annie competitor Distimo also released a report this month, examining similar trends among the two leading Android app marketplaces. Its findings were a bit different.

Although it too saw Amazon’s influence growing, it found that overall, Google Play was still beating on revenue. Distimo said that the number of paid downloads in Google Play is twice the size of paid downloads on Amazon, but the revenue gap was smaller. According to its analysis, the top 200 paid applications in Google Play in the U.S. made $5.2 million in March 2013, making Google Play 1.7 times bigger than the Amazon Appstore by revenue.

However, that report noted that there were some examples of applications that did better on Amazon, which essentially backs up the broad strokes of what App Annie is saying here. Simply put, for some developers, Amazon is proving more successful than Google Play, and its potential is growing as Amazon’s store scales.

Also in the new report, 56 percent of the developers App Annie surveyed were said to focus on gaming, and over half (51 percent) said they decided to publish on Amazon because of how easy it was to port apps. Other top reasons included a belief that Amazon’s Appstore marketshare would grow, and that the Kindle Fire would become a leading device.

That second reason – marketshare growth – is already happening, of course. Amazon announced on the 17th that it was expanding its Appstore to cover nearly 200 countries, including notable additions like Australia, Brazil, Mexico, Canada, South Africa and South Korea. Before, the store was only available in the U.S., U.K., Germany, France, Italy, Spain and Japan.

But Amazon’s potential isn’t only tied to its growing reach, but also to its deep experience with e-commerce and related infrastructure. Amazon customers have their account information on file, and can use 1-click purchasing to buy apps. The store lets users test drive apps, and promotes free apps daily, which drives traffic. Amazon also curates apps, so unlike Google Play, those that fill its charts have been scanned for malware and for other bad behavior.

For developers looking to have their app found, and more importantly, purchased, these strengths can add up to drive sales.

Correction: an earlier version of this cited Amazon’s Appstore as a leading revenue driver. This should have said the games category on Amazon was. This has been updated.  

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

New research released by the U.K.’s telecoms regulator, Ofcom, has flagged up significant growth in social networking among older Internet users — which is helping to offset lower rates of growth across younger age groups.  Ofcom’s latest Adult media uses and attitudes report, which examines 2012 U.K. data, indicates that more than a third (35%) of 55 to 64 year-old Internet users created a social networking profile last year — up by half in just one year (24% in 2011).

Ofcom notes that it’s the only age-group with a “significant increase” in social networking growth but the research also found that a quarter (25%) of Internet users aged 65+ also set up a social network profile last year.

As you might expect, younger  age-groups saw much more marginal growth (see chart below) — doubtless because the majority of those users would be likely to have a social networking profile already. There have also been some suggestions that younger age groups may be becoming less interested in social networking, also fuelled by the rise in usage of alternative messaging and communications apps, such as Snapchat. Lots more older users flocking to mainstream social network sites could further encourage younger users to take more of their chatter elsewhere.

Overall Ofcom said that about two-thirds (64%) of all the U.K.’s adult Internet users had a social networking presence in 2012, up from 59% in 2011.

According to Ofcom’s findings, older social networkers are following in the footsteps of their younger counterparts, with much the same types of usage — predominantly using social networking as a way of keeping in touch with friends and family, with six in 10 (64%) of those aged over 55 who have a social network profile using it to contact friends and family they rarely see.

The research also found that younger social networkers are generally likely to have more friends on their main social network profile than older users. Ofcom found the average U.K. adult with a social networking account has 237 friends on their main profile, such as Facebook, but younger adults have more online connections — with the average 16-24 year-old social networker claiming 352 friends, which it said was almost three times as many as those aged over 45 (126 friends).

Far from Brits getting tired of social networking, Ofcom found that half of U.K. adults with a social network profile visit it more than once a day, up from a third (35%) who said they did so in 2011. Almost one in ten (9%) is an especially avid user, checking their profile more than ten times a day. Those aged 16-24 are the most likely to fall into the ‘avid’ category — suggesting those younger users who still think Facebook is cool remain heavily engaged with it —  while almost a fifth (17%) said they check for updates more than ten times daily.

It seems likely, though is not specifically noted by Ofcom, that the rise in smartphone usage and mobile social networking is likely to be helping to power frequent daily visits to social networking sites such as Facebook. Research by Flurry earlier this month showed Facebook in particular taking up a big chunk of mobile users’ day. Ofcom’s data found that 16-24s remain the most likely to use a smartphone (86%).

Looking at specific social networking site users, Ofcom’s data shows a clear skew towards messaging & communication — which underlines why Facebook is increasing its focus on messaging, adding new comms features to its Messenger app and launching Facebook Home: a smartphone skin which includes a dedicated messaging layer called Chat Heads:

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Mobile browsing got significantly faster over the last 12 months, according to a new report from Google, and the average page load times on mobile are now comparable to desktop page load times. On mobile, web pages now load about 30 percent faster than a year ago, but when it comes to desktops, Google only found some very minor speed-ups. That, however, is actually quite impressive, given that the size of the average web page increased by over 56 percent in the last 12 months.

The report is based on aggregate data from Google Analytics’ Site Speed reports, which users can opt-in to transmit to Google. Given how many sites use Analytics, this data is likely representative of the web as a whole.

The company argues that mobile speeds increased thanks to improved browsers, more powerful mobile devices and the fast rise of LTE/4G networks. A year ago, Google’s data still showed that mobile browsing was typically 1.5x slower than desktop browsing.

The study found that users in Japan tend to see the fastest page load times, followed by Sweden, Poland and the United States. With regard to desktop browsing, Japan and Sweden are also in the lead, followed by Canada and the U.S.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Over 25 million Americans participate in frequent-flier programs that allow them to earn airline miles through flights and credit cards. Today, Chicago-based Rocketmiles is launching a service that will allow those travelers to earn miles just by booking rooms from select hotels, which Rocketmiles serves up directly on its website, and soon, on mobile, too.

Rocketmiles was founded in November 2012 by former Groupon exec, Jay Hoffman, who also previously ran the Mileage Plus program at United Airlines. Co-founders Bjorn Larsen and Kris Helenek also have a background in the travel industry.

Hoffman says he knows first-hand what it’s like to be a frequent traveler, having spent four to five days per week on the road earlier in his career when he worked with The Boston Consulting Group. He learned a lot about frequent-flier programs and the needs of businesses travelers in general through this experience, which he now brings to Rocketmiles.

Like the partnership programs with credit-card companies, Rocketmiles also buys miles from the airlines which it then ties to stays with its partner hotels. Prior to today, these deals were only available to a couple of hundred private beta testers who could search across eight cities in the U.S.

As of the public debut, however, Rocketmiles now supports 15 cities in the U.S. and plans to expand to even more markets over the next few months, adding about one to two cities per week.

What’s different about Rocketmiles, besides the fact that it’s a new way to accumulate miles, is that it’s also focusing on delivering a hand-picked selection of premium hotels that appeal to business travelers, as opposed to the hundreds of search results which aggregators offer, while also offering the same prices. The company gets its hotel rooms at a lower rate and resells them higher, leaving behind enough revenue to purchase more miles and generate revenue.

“You’re getting the same rate that you would have paid any place else,” explains Hoffman, “and you’re getting a gigantic incentive for booking through Rocketmiles.” The service appeals to the hotels, too, he adds. “If you think of this as an alternative to booking through Priceline or Hotwire, the hotels love this because they’re not publicly discounting their price,” Hoffman says. “Sometimes the hotels look down on the Priceline or Hotwire customers as being ‘deal seekers.’ We deliver to them a business traveler who’s a lot more likely to buy Wi-Fi or order room service…it’s going to be the kinds of people the hotel wants to work with.”

While the company isn’t disclosing transaction numbers during its pre-launch period, Hoffman did say that the average transaction is about 3,100 miles per night, and the service is focused only on stays where at least 1,000 miles can be earned. The per-booking average was 7,000 miles. Hoffman notes that the average business traveler taking a dozen or so trips per year could end up with an extra 80,000 miles per year using the service.

Though the company is targeting the travelers themselves, it’s also beginning to work directly with companies who want to offer Rocketmiles as an option to benefit their employees. A few consulting and tech firms have already begun to pilot this program at their own companies, we’re told.

Going forward, the plan is to continue to expand across the U.S. and prepare the launch of the Rocketboom mobile application, which has already been through a beta of its own. Rocketmiles has been self-funded until recently, but is now closing a round of seed funding north of a million, expected to be finalized in a few weeks’ time.

Interested travelers can sign up to try Rocketmiles today for hotel stays in the following 15 cites: Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Denver, Honolulu, Houston, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Miami, New York City, Philadelphia, San Diego, San Francisco and Washington D.C., with more to come.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Zozi launched in 2010 to become the go-to destination for those looking for an (affordable) excuse to take break from the daily grind by offering daily deals on a wide range of local adventures — everything from cocktail classes in Atlanta to kayaking in San Francisco Bay. However, after fighting it out in the crowded daily deals space for two years, Zozi shifted its focus to offering high-end, exclusive adventures and get-aways.

Instead of offering deep discounts and being the middle man for activities and multi-day tours, the platform began offering once-in-a-lifetime experiences that are hosted by experts and celebrities. With the launch of Gurus, Zozi allows users to not only go on a kayaking adventure, but paddle down the river with a world-record holder — or ski the Alps with Jonny Moseley.

Although these kind of elite experiences (and celebrities) are tougher to supply and by moving away from daily deals it loses some of its appeal to the Average Joe, investors seem to be buying into Zozi’s new approach, likely because there’s more money to be made in celebrity-backed tours.

Today, the startup announced that it has raised $10 million in growth capital and debt as part of a Series B1 round. Investors include Launch Capital, 500 Startups, Forerunner Ventures, Par Capital Ventures, Silicon Valley Bank, Dolby Labs Chairman Dave Dolby and Seamless Founder Jason Finger, among others. The additional capital brings the company’s total financing to $17.5 million.

Zozi is currently available in more than 20 cities across the U.S. and Canada, providing trips to a host of international destinations, while offering customers the chance to buy products from outdoor brands like Timbuk2 and Marmot, for example. The startup now employs a staff of 40+, with teams dedicated to curating its elite experiences, which now include activities like backcountry snowboarding with Travis Rice (a three-time X-Games Gold Medalist), gourmet cooking lessons with Michael Mina, vineyard bike tours and hardcore training with Ironman champion Chris Lieto.

Going forward, Zozi wants to expand its roster of celebrity experts and increase its options across local experiences and gear. It was also look to improve its technology around booking and customer relations, while expanding deeper into eCommerce.

Zozi co-founder and CEO TJ Sassani said that the key to the startup’s success, especially given increasing competition from other venture-backed adventure startups like Peek, is to give its customers “a trusted source to help them with discovery and curation of the most authentic experiences and the latest gear, while giving merchants an on-brand channel to connect with targeted new customers, who will become repeat buyers and refer their friends.”

Whatever the case, high-margin, high-value experiences seem to be working for Zozi, but until it offers full-contact, backcountry blogging lessons with select TechCrunch writers, there’s still a long way to go.

Find Zozi at home here.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Yelp is announcing a new feature intended to highlight and quantify the value that the listing and review site provides for small businesses.

A company spokesperson told me the feature is important for two reasons. First, it helps business owners understand the impact that Yelp is already having on their revenue. Second, it gives them a baseline from which to judge the success of their advertising campaigns — it’s one thing to see an increase in page views or reservations after a campaign, and another to put a dollar value on the new business generated by those ads.

To make its estimate, Yelp separates customer leads from page views — those leads can include things like bookmarking a Yelp business listing, mapping directions to the business, placing a phone call from the Yelp app, purchasing a Yelp deal, making an OpenTable reservation, and more. (That’s information Yelp already provided in monthly reports.) Then, using a recent study from the Boston Consulting Group, it estimates the average spend per customer in a given business category. (Businesses can also enter their own estimate for the value of a lead.) Finally, it takes the total leads and multiples it by the average value of each lead, giving businesses a sense of the total revenue generated by Yelp.

Explained this way, it seems pretty simple, but a Yelp spokesperson said it’s pulling from a lot of data to determine what a lead is, and it would be hard to pull off without all the user data that the company has collected. (They added that the company had 100 million unique visitors in January.) This feature will be available for free to all Yelp businesses, though it’s available initially for those in the United States.

The spokesperson added that this is just the first of a number of simple tools that Yelp plans to offer small businesses for calculating return on investment on ad spending.

In its most recent earnings report, Yelp said there are now 39,800 active local business accounts, a year-over-year increase of 68 percent.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

While the number of seed financing deals has ballooned over the last few years as the cost of starting a company has fallen, the pace of Series A venture deals hasn’t kept up.

Now it looks like the bottleneck between the seed stage and the Series A level has gotten even tighter, according to a survey from Fenwick & West, one of the best-known law firms for startups in Silicon Valley. In their annual survey of companies they work with, they tracked 61 transactions from last year, 56 the year before and 52 in 2010.

What they found was that even fewer companies had raised Series A rounds by the end of the year after their seed deals closed. Only 27 percent of companies that raised in 2011 were able to pull a Series A round by the end of 2012. In contrast, 45 percent of companies funded in 2010 were able to secure a Series A round by the end of 2011.

What’s interesting is that follow-on financings are picking up some of the slack here. More companies are relying on follow-on seed financings if they can’t get to a full A round. Twenty-three percent of companies funded in 2011 did follow-on seed rounds, compared to 12 percent of companies in 2010. Basically, the path from seed to proving you’re worth a Series A round is just getting longer.

At the same time, traditional VC firms are getting more active at the seed level, and led about 34 percent of seed deals in 2012, compared to 27 percent in 2011. You can see that the average size of investment for VC funds in these seed deals rose slightly, while the average investment size from professional angels declined.

Not only that, the deals themselves are starting to look more conventional. The use of preferred stock structures rose to 67 percent last year, from 59 percent in 2011.

“It says two things. The leverage is changing a bit,” said Barry Kramer, a Fenwick partner in the corporate group. “Last year, the entrepreneur had a bit more leverage than they have right now to get the terms they want. But it’s also a reflection of how more sophisticated investors like venture capital groups are getting involved with seed financing and they’re saying — ‘This is how we do it.’”

That said, it’s not all black and white. He pointed out that the average pre-money valuation on those more traditional preferred stock deals rose to $4.6 million last year, from $3.8 million the year before.

Meanwhile, the average valuation cap on convertible note financings (which have been used in the past as a bridge to a priced Series A round) fell $6 million last year from $7.5 million in 2011. Convertible notes became a popular choice, in part, because they postpone pricing a company until a Series A round when a startup presumably has more traction and the numbers to prove their worth.

So is this good? Is this bad? What?

The “Series A Crunch” often feels like it’s written about in apocalyptic terms.

But the thing is, if the cost of creating companies has fallen, we should be trying a greater number of experiments. If a proportional amount of them are simply not that good or don’t get traction to graduate onto the next level, that’s okay.

The other criticism of the easy seed financing environment is that it splits talent between too many companies. People who otherwise would be great mid-level hires or leaders at growth-stage companies are eschewing those jobs for starting their own companies. It is a legitimate concern. Great companies like PayPal and Google emerged in part because they had a serious concentration of talent relative to other companies in the Valley.

Yet it’s hard to argue that a world in which more people get a chance to build something themselves and take ownership of it is a bad thing. Even if they fail, they filter back into the system either as more seasoned entrepreneurs on their second or third startups or as leaders in big companies who are more fearless about making change.

“Truthfully, there should be a Series A financing crunch,” Kramer said. “You put a small amount of money into a large amount of companies and some of them won’t work out. It’s not horrible. It’s part of a healthy ecosystem in general.”

Article courtesy of TechCrunch