Shashi Seth, whose résumé includes management and executive roles at Yahoo, Aol, and Google, is joining the Tribune Company as the president of a new unit called Tribune Digital Ventures.

Seth’s role was first reported yesterday at AllThingsD, and the company is now confirming the news. It says Tribune Digital Ventures will operate as an independent unit based in Silicon Valley.

Seth told me that his job will be to develop new products around Tribune content, making sure that it “gets used appropriately on the Internet and mobile side.” A big part of that is finding new ways to circulate traffic between Tribune’s different properties, whether they’re in print (it publishes newspapers including the Chicago Tribune and the Los Angeles Times), broadcast or digital. The goal, he said, is to create “a network effect across these disparate mediums and build a bridge between them.”

It sounds like partnering with startups is going to be a part of that mission. As for whether that will involve making startup investments, Seth said, “It is within the realm of possibility, but I think first and foremost we have to come up with a strategy.”

Seth left Yahoo in January, where he was most recently the senior vice president of its Connections business unit, which included products like Yahoo Search and Mail. He has also been the senior vice president of global ad products at Aol (which owns TechCrunch), head of monetization at YouTube, and search product lead at Google. He has startup experience as well, founding and serving as CEO of a wireless startup called Conexo and chief revenue officer at Cooliris.

“I’m fascinated and disappointed at the same time with what the traditional media world is going through,” Seth said when asked why he joined the Tribune Company. “I know and feel it in my heart that the content itself is amazingly valuable. … I think newspapers and broadcasters have given up the ownership of that space to the new Internet world. What I’d love to do is find a way to actually reclaim it.”

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Peer-to-peer ride sharing is one of the hottest — and most controversial — markets in the current tech startup world. And one leading player in the space, SideCar, is looking to hit the gas pedal on its growth amidst all the hubbub.

The San Francisco-based SideCar announced today it has hired two key tech executives to join the company and focus on product development and revenue generation: Gregory Boutte, most recently VP of eBay’s electronics and motors divisions, is joining SideCar as Chief Revenue Officer, and Robert Wong, most recently VP of product at Hulu, will serve as SideCar’s EVP of product.

In a post on SideCar’s company blog, CEO Sunil Paul said the two new execs “will help us build our brand visibility and prepare for global expansion.” In a separate press statement, Paul had a couple more comments about what each new hire brings to the table:

“Gregory has a reputation for leadership and execution. His depth of experience in two-sided marketplaces and international operations will be key to Sidecar’s global acceleration. Robert is known in the industry as a product executive with the strategic and tactical expertise to take a breakthrough idea mainstream. Both these hires will play an essential role as we grow our business and rideshare community.”

The company launched its service nearly one year ago in June 2012. At the moment, SideCar has active operations in eight markets — San Francisco, Seattle, Los Angeles, Austin, Philadelphia, Chicago, Boston, Brooklyn, and Washington, D.C. — and, like other transportation apps, has battled its fair share of regulators along the way.

There are certainly a lot of question marks about how ride-sharing will evolve in the months and years ahead, as local governments work out their responses to the new transportation landscape. But the fact that companies like SideCar continue to attract talent from other established areas of the tech industry is a big vote of confidence that it’s a market that is here to stay.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

YCharts, a Chicago and New York-based startup that calls itself a financial terminal for the web, today announced that it has raised $3.875 million in its third funding round. The round was led by Morningstar and Reed Elsevier Ventures, with participation from all of the company’s earlier investors, including Hyde Park Angels, I2A and Amicus. This round brings YCharts’ total funding to $8.625 million.

Last year, our own Rip Empson called the service “a better Yahoo finance,” but the company’s goal is now quite a bit broader than that. YCharts says it computes more than 2,000 metrics for every listed stock in its database and also tracks over 350,000 economic indicators from around the world. The service gets these data points from public sources, as well as through deals with other firms, including data from its investor Morningstar. YCharts also offers an Excel plugin that allows users to easily pull YCharts data into spreadsheets and financial models.

As the company’s CEO and co-founder Shawn Carpenter told me, the company’s pro product is performing well ahead of expectations. Given that the company is seeing larger deals than it expected, the team decided to raise this new funding round to be able to “scale things up more aggressively.” The new funding will be invested in engineering, but also in expanding the company’s sales force.

In a statement today, Carpenter says YCharts currently has over one million monthly users “and we’re increasingly the choice of professionals seeking sophisticated financial information. This latest funding round – led by two globally prominent information companies, each with great strategic relevance to YCharts – will enable us to be even more aggressive in growing our institutional business.”

YCharts currently offers two paid plans for financial pros: one for $49/month and, for users who need data export, the Excel plugin and data verification, a $199/month option. You can also sign up for a limited free plan.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Swifto, a startup that wants to be the Uber for dog walking, has raised $2.5 million from Benchmark Capital. We’re told that the funding round previously closed but the startup didn’t want to announce to the public for fear of attracting competitors.

The marketplace connects dog owners with vetted and screened walkers. But beyond just serving as a way to find someone to walk your dog, the service also lets clients view walkers’ routes. The Swifto tracking app sends clients a text at the beginning and at the end of a walk, as well as a photo along the way, and it allows owners to track a walker’s progress on a live map of Manhattan through a mobile app as the walker progresses through the route. A 30-minute dog walk costs $20.

Dog walkers use the app to track their responsibilities for each dog and to schedule walks.

The startup says that each walker is fully vetted and undergoes a background check. After meeting the standard, they then go through three interviews and a training session, and they must pass an exam. A client gets a free meet and greet with a selected walker. Only after that meeting, and once a client deems a walker to be a perfect fit, do walks commence via Swifto. Payment is taken care of automatically online via Stripe. Swifto also offers insurance to cover walkers in case of any accidents.

The startup says that after a year in business, Swifto is cash-flow positive with a 20 percent month-to-month growth rate in revenue. Sales are expected to reach $1 million this year. Swifto plans to expand to Boston by the end of the year, and both Chicago and San Francisco in 2014.

While the Uber model doesn’t apply to every vertical (i.e. Cherry) it seems to solve a problem for dog owners who want to easily find walkers, and track the walks when they are away from their pets. And so far, the Yelp reviews on Swifto are fairly positive.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Want to book a private jet but are away from your keyboard? No worries! BlackJet‘s got you covered! The startup, which hopes to make non-commercial flights more efficient and less expensive for the high-powered jet set, launched an iPhone app for instantly booking private jets.

BlackJet, which was first announced last fall, publicly launched in February. At launch it connected five cities: San Francisco, New York, Los Angeles, South Florida and Las Vegas.

But it was only available on the web. Now it’s expanding the ways in which its busy, on-the-go clientele can book private jets to include its own native mobile app. The BlackJet app, which was released recently, provides an ultra-simple and fast way to buy seats on non-commercial aircraft, directly from their phones.

BlackJet is also growing the roster of supported cities — and trips between them — adding Chicago, Boston, Dallas, Seattle and Washington, D.C. That means the service will soon have 10 major markets total, and is connecting a lot of the big business corridors. While users perusing the site can see the new cities already, they’re really just placeholders until markets officially launch.

BlackJet’s investors include a whole lot of big-name angels and celebrities, such as founder Garrett Camp, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, First Round Capital, Shervin Pishevar, SV Angel, Ashton Kutcher, Guy Oseary, Michael Birch, Naval Ravikant, Rick Marini, Noah Goodhart, Thomas Ryan, Josh Spear, Jay Levy, Science Inc.’s Peter Pham and Mike Jones, Dan Rosensweig, Stephen Russell, Tim Ferriss, Matt Mullenweg, Ryan Sarver, Steve Jang, Shakil Khan, and David Ulevitch, among others. Another one of those investors is CrunchFund, which was started by TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Eighty-seven percent of the nation’s top economists think that the digital currency, Bitcoin, has “limited usefulness.” Given the growing popularity of the enigmatic currency, the University of Chicago conducted its famous Initiative on Global Markets (IGM) poll of 38 of the world’s top economists, to see how experts felt about its longterm future. By far the best response came from the former Chairman of the President’s Council of Economic Advisers, Austan Goolsbee, who simply wrote, “Hahahaha. ROTFL.”

Bitcoin is a digital currency designed by an anonymous programmer that is produced by “miners” who contribute expensive computing power to solving the mathematical puzzles necessary to bring more of the scarce currency into existence. Early speculators and anarchy-friendly buyers gave the crypto-currency an early boost, eventually earning it mainstream acceptance at popular websites, including the home of lonely netizens, OkCupid. Even after months of wild swings in value (from $205 to $105 during one day), more and more shops are starting to accept bitcoins alongside dollars. (for an awesome explanation, see the Colbert Report video below):

It appears that the nation’s top economists don’t have the same faith in Bitcoin as the proprietors of the online dating service. The overwhelming majority surveyed felt that Bitcoin’s crazy fluctuations will inherently “limit its usefulness.” Former editor of the prestigious American Economic Review, Judith Chevalier, wrote: “Unlike government issued fiat money, there is no guarantee it can be used to pay taxes or settle other obligations.”

Of course, the expert crowd wasn’t unanimous. Stanford’s Caroline Hoxby wrote: “First part is right: value derives from belief others want to use it for trade. Second part is not obvious: beliefs could stabilize or not.”

While this isn’t a glowing endorsement of the nascent currency, it’s worth noting that economists occasionally have difficulty predicting events, such as the massive recession that almost tanked the global economy. Still, people are investing their own money in Bitcoin. Question is, do you want to bet against 87 percent of top economists?

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Aereo has just announced its first expansion beyond New York City, and the city it’s moving to next is Boston. Bostonians will gain access to the startup’s free, over-the-air TV services and usage-based cloud DVR subscription options beginning May 15, indicating it’s full-speed ahead for the media startup despite its ongoing legal battles with networks and broadcasters.

Expansion to Boston opens up access to Aereo to over 4.5 million new customers, and the first in line will be those who pre-registered their interest an Aereo.com. General availability will open up about two weeks after that on May 30. Aereo tech is currently available to stream content on iPad, iPhone, Chrome, IE9, Firefox, Safari, Roku and more. The company has offices in Boston’s Innovation District, and already employs over 60 people in the region, according to a press release from Aereo.

Aereo’s Boston coverage will include 28 broadcast channels, including CBS, NBC, Fox, and ABC, and will be offered to residents living in the 16 counties in Massachusetts. The company plans to show off the product in action tonight at a startup event in Boston proper. Boston is the first in a series of planned expansions for this year, which the company announced back in January alongside news of its $38 million series B funding round.

The rollout was said to be getting started in Spring of this year, so it looks like the lawsuits against it haven’t put a dent in its expansion plans thus far. Also on the list for Aereo’s 2013 growth are Atlanta, Austin, Baltimore, Birmingham (AL), Chicago, Cleveland, Dallas, Denver, Detroit, Houston, Kansas City, Madison (WI), Miami, Minneapolis, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Providence (RI), Raleigh-Durham (NC), Salt Lake City, Tampa, and Washington D.C.

Developing…

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

BodeTree, an online service that helps small business owners better understand their finances, has raised $1.4 million in seed funding, led by Denver-based Greenline Ventures. Though a company working to address the money management needs of business owners would seem, at first blush, to be a competitor with Intuit, BodeTree has actually grown by partnering with them – ties it expects to soon deepen in the weeks ahead.

The startup’s product is currently featured in Intuit’s App Center, a site undergoing a refresh this June after which it will relaunch as Apps.com. The new approach will see the service as less of a add-on marketplace, instead resembling an almost Apple-like app store featuring software and solutions designed for small business owners.

Following the new investment, BodeTree no longer plans to be just an Intuit partner going forward. The goal, explains co-founder Matthew Ankrum, is to go “platform neutral.”

“Anybody who has an accounting software system will be able to get the benefits of BodeTree,” he says. For now, that focus is on the SMB customer, but longer-term the company may expand to address either the high end or low end of the market.

Those benefits, for those unfamiliar, is an online dashboard-like interface that helps business owners better understand where their business stands today. It uses colorful widgets, charts and graphs to draw the eye, and playfully includes a red, yellow, or green “BodeTree guy” sitting under a window entitled “Business Enlightenment.” (The color, of course, indicates your current progress.)

The mascot – and the startup’s brand – is something of a play on the concept of Zen-like enlightenment. The message being that you can find peace with your business finances.

But this lightheartedness serves another purpose, too – it makes something that’s decidedly boring and unsexy kind of fun, as CEO Christopher Myers told us when the service launched last spring. This quarter, BodeTree will release an all-new version of its service which aims to make its user interface even more visually appealing, notes Ankrum.

“We’re going to move it from being a powerful, connected, holistic reporting tool to something that’s much more of a management tool, so [users] can see what’s happening in their business and make better decisions,” he explains.

In addition to the expanded partnerships, BodeTree’s funding will also be used to beef up its online university product which offers financial and business management classes to SMBs, led by experts. The new university will adopt the SkillShare model, where 70 to 80 percent of the revenue earned goes directly to the teacher. Business owners will pay $20 to $50 for each week-long class they sign up for, the founders say.

Today, BodeTree has more than 5,000 paying customers who either paid a $49.95 monthly fee for the service, or pay $495 per year. This is an increase from its launch prices, but it is still less expensive than the business consulting services the startup aims to compete with and the high-end financial software programs on the market today.

BodeTree’s now 15-person team will also grow, with plans to hire more developers, plus sales and marketing.

Also participating in the round that closed just this week were an eclectic group of other angel investors, which the company couldn’t disclose by name. But Ankrum referred to them in broad strokes as: “a founder of a large accounting and advisory firm out of Chicago; a CEO of a Fortune 500 company; a managing director of a private equity fund that also co-heads their small business fund; and a former White House Cabinet member.”

More on BodeTree, including sign-up, is here.

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

In the annals of criticism it is often the case that a writer is cursed in life and forgotten in death. For Roger Ebert, voluminous historian of the cinema and its most astute critic, neither of these was the case.

Ebert, along with his counterpoint, Gene Siskel, defined the modern movie review and brought the figurative Cahiers du Cinéma down from their lofty perch and into our living rooms. He was affable, honest, and as a longtime columnist for the Chicago Sun-Times, so prolific – 306 reviews in the last year alone and over 200 a year prior to that – as to make many journalists look like withering failures.

His kindness and blunt judgements made his writing a treat and I can only imagine how it felt to be the recipient of his attention. A person’s work is their child and he was a strong scold and virtuous champion.

Ebert, who suffered from thyroid and salivary gland cancer, died today at age 70. He recently announced a sort of retirement after finding that his cancer had returned. He is survived by his wife, Chaz Hammel-Smith Ebert.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch