CrowdOptic, a startup with technology for identifying where people are pointing their smartphone cameras, has raised another $1 million in funding.

When I’ve spoken to the team in the past, they’ve emphasized the ways this could be used to create new types of social interactions — if people are attending a live event and pointing their cameras at the same thing, they can start chatting and sharing content. However, the company’s website highlights a number of use cases, including “focus-aware” advertising, analytics, news reporting, social TV (live attendees can provide content to people watching at home), and security.

CEO and co-founder Jon Fisher said that customers include Australia- and New Zealand-based ticketing company Ticketek (CrowdOptic built the company’s Friend Spotter app for finding your Facebook friends in a stadium, which you can see in the screenshot above) and Fora.tv (which used CrowdOptic to share authenticated, eyewitness content from the presidential debates).

The new funding comes from CrowdOptic’s existing investors, including Silicon Valley Bank, tech legend Ray Lane, and Fisher himself. Fisher also said that CrowdOptic recently celebrated its second quarter of profitability. The company has now raised a total of $3.5 million.

By the way, Fisher was previously CEO of Bharosa, NetClerk, and AutoReach, but he isn’t the only team member with an impressive résumé — COO Jim Kovach has worked at other startups, he has a medical degree and a law degree, and he was a linebacker for the New Orleans Saints and San Francisco 49ers.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

G2 Crowd wants to disrupt Gartner’s Magic Quadrant through a real-time, crowdsourced platform of peer reviews and social analytics targeting the CRM and marketing automation markets.  The new “Grids” service launches June 1.

The platform, free to explore, analyzes and correlates about 15,000 peer reviews that it has aggregated since its launch in February.

CEO Abel Goddard says G2 Crowd will sell access to its crowdsourced data and provide comparison tools that customers can use. The value is in the data and how it is segmented. Customers now pay a one-time fee of $199 to get the CRM data. Abel envisions it becoming a subscription model.

Grids feeds peer reviews, web traffic, Twitter, LinkedIn,  and other social media data into an algorithm to determine how companies are perceived. The peer reviews are weighted more heavily than other data.

Reviews so far put Salesforce.com and Microsoft Dynamics in the lead for the CRM market. Leading marketing automation companies include Marketo, Pardot and Hubspot. G2 Crowd will eventually add more market segments to its Grids platform.

Gartner’s Magic Quadrant has helped it reach $1.6 billion in revenues. The methods it uses for Magic Quadrant rely on analysts, each of whom are specialists in their fields. These analysts talk with customers, conduct market research through Gartner and then define the leaders.

Due to the amount of research required, Gartner often has to limit the number of companies in the market that it reviews, Abel said. Startups and smaller companies, while they may be innovative, don’t get an analyst’s attention. By contrast, G2 Crowd’s reviewers determine what companies get reviewed, helping customers get a picture of the market, as well as large and small companies.

Prior to starting G2 Crowd, Abel founded Big Machines, a sales configuration vendor that grew to $50 million in revenues before being sold to private-equity partners. In the 11 years he ran the business, Abel said they would pay $75,000 per year to Gartner, whose customers often are the companies it researches and ranks. The payment gave them access to the analysts and their presence at events, including user conferences. Abel believes, and so do many in the tech market, that this kind of relationship affects how Garner does its reviews. Abel says it’s similar to Wall Street analysts that get paid by the customers it researches.

The sales model has changed as the Internet has emerged as the main marketplace for enterprise applications. New companies now leverage fast development cycles, APIs and subscription models to sell their services. Data is mixed into algorithms and packaged as services. The CIO is no longer the sole gatekeeper for what applications a company buys and sells. That reflects a shift in the market. The buyer is not one person but dozens, maybe hundreds or thousands of people in an organization. It’s these people who need guidance from their peers. Much as consumer services use peer reviews to help people choose products so also is the need for enterprise technologies.

Gartner has provided valuable services to organizations over the years. But it’s a model that comes from the IT age. Its way of doing business aligns with the giants of a former time, now challenged to find their way in a faster, more agile world. To its benefit, Gartner has a high degree of visibility. Its data is used daily by journalists like myself. But it does not provide the insights that a customer can get from real-time data. That’s the difference for G2 Crowd. If it can leverage this advantage, its crowdsourced platform will certainly grow in scope and pose a challenge to Gartner.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

With the growing demand for video-based online education, Curious.com is joining the crowd today with a marketplace that aims help students and teachers connect around a range of subjects, from pipe soldering and salsa dancing to jewelry making and knife sharpening.

With 10K learners logging 150K sessions during its five month private beta, Curious launches today with hundreds of short, video-based lessons for people who want to learn a new skill or rekindle a favorite hobby. Founded by former Homestead founder and CEO Justin Kitch, who sold his company to Intuit for $170 million, Curious is taking a page out of Udemy’s book by not only offering learning content to students but by allowing teachers to market, share and monetize their lessons and engage with new students.

To support its launch, the company has raised $7.5 million in Series A financing from Redpoint Ventures, former Apple Chairman Bill Campbell and Jesse Rogers, including a personal investment of $500K from Kitch.

Kitch tells us that there are millions of teachers out there who are itching to share their expertise with the world but don’t have access to the tools or marketing skills to bring their knowledge online. The Web today, he says, is littered with low-quality learning content delivered in static ways that fail to keep students engaged.

With Curious, Kitch wants to make online learning more digestible and accessible to the average Web surfer, while helping wanna-be teachers make a buck or two on the side by helping them, say, learn how to brew a tasty pilsener. The platform allows teachers to sign up for free and use the site’s “lesson Builder” to design, publish and market their own lessons in under an hour.

Teachers can link their related lessons and track how many views their lessons collect, while enabling learners to submit projects they drum up during class and create “Curious Cards” to share their achievements with the world. Through its comment and messaging system, Curious allows teachers to work with students individually, while answering their questions, reviewing projects and providing speedy feedback.

While there are a ton of online lesson platforms out there, from Khan Academy and Skillshare to Udemy, CreativeLive and Lynda.com, Curious is looking to set itself apart by keeping videos short and serving content in bite-sized, episodic chunks. Students can engage with the content on their own time, as Curious eschews the traditional scheduling approach, opting for convenience and immediacy.

Learners can stop lessons whenever they want, share projects during the process or at the end of the lesson and post questions to the community or directly to teachers. At launch, the site offers more than 500 lessons from over 100 professional teachers, curated by Curious’ staff of educators and video experts.

The startup wants to help its teachers monetize their content, but it’s also looking to keep things inexpensive at the outset, so the most lessons will cost is a few dollars. Teachers can offer their lessons for free, or for a few bucks a pop.

In another twist for video-based education, Curious offers its own micropayment system and currency, called “Curious Coins,” which allow learners to securely purchase premium lessons without having to swipe their credit card 15 times.

Another nifty feature which helps it stand out from the crowd is Curious internally-developed media player, which breaks each video up into short 30 or 60 second intervals. Each section is watermarked, which allow attachments to surface at the appropriate interval and makes it easy to flip back and forth between sections. Comments pile up below the videos in a river, while students enrolled in Curious have the ability to view comments by section.

Curious isn’t yet ready to provide its own studios for teachers, so educators have to provide their own video, but the platform takes care of everything else. The Lesson Builder helps teachers split their lessons into sections, add attachments and text and publish. Curious’ team is actively perusing the Web to find the best teachers in any given subject, wherever they live, inviting them to the platform if they pass muster.

Curious takes the standard 30 percent for all lesson sales in its marketplace, although that could be subject to change going forward.

To celebrate its public launch, the startup is offering new learners $20 of free Curious Coins. For more, find Curious at home here.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Y Combinator-backed startup CrowdMed hopes to use the wisdom of the crowds to speed up and lower the cost of diagnosing rare medical conditions. By crowdsourcing medical data and applying some patented predictive technology, the company believes it can help users identify illnesses that had otherwise baffled medical professionals.

CrowdMed is designed to help users who have been unable to get help within the current health system. Because doctors can’t always track the thousands of rare diseases that are out there, patients may find themselves going to dozens of physicians and specialists and still not know what is wrong with them. Rather than continue to spend thousands or tens of thousands of dollars on tests and hospital visits, CrowdMed provides an alternative path to uncovering rare illnesses.

Users anonymously submit information about undiagnosed conditions on CrowdMed, providing details such as their symptoms, health history, family background and any tests they’ve already taken. The platform then allows a team of “medical detectives” to collaborate on the case, using their own personal history and knowledge, as well as online research to diagnose the illness. By aggregating their answers and using a patented, prediction technology, CrowdMed provides its own suggestions. In its private beta phase, 20 difficult real-life cases were solved using the platform, with some of those patients having already spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to no avail.

While the platform isn’t designed to serve as a replacement for highly trained medical professionals, CrowdMed is there to provide help in the case of rare illnesses that are easily missed or to provide a “second opinion” for patients who aren’t sure of a doctor’s diagnosis. Mostly it’s there to help narrow down the realm of possibilities and provide suggestions for their physicians to consider.

The company was founded by Jared Heyman, who had previously built the Internet survey company Infosurv. After his sister spent three years with a rare, undiagnosed illness, he realized that the same kind of predictive survey technology could be used to help those who are sick figure out what they are suffering from. Heyman was joined by lead developer Axel Setyanto, who had previously worked at Loku, and lead designer Jessica Greenwalt, who had previously founded graphic design firm Pixelkeet. The startup is being advised by former WebMd exec Clare Martorana, who had been general manager at the company.

CrowdMed was one of the 46 companies to participate in the Y Combinator Winter 2013 class, and is announcing its public beta launch at TEDMED 2013 in Washington, D.C., today. The company has raised $1.1 million in seed funding from investors that include NEA, Andreessen Horowitz, Greylock Partners, Y Combinator, and SV Angel.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Editor’s note: This is the second part of a two-part guest column by Zach Noorani. Part one examined whether equity crowdfunding is a threat to VCs. Zach is a former VC and current second-year MBA student at MIT Sloan. Follow him on Twitter @znoorani.

Is angel capital an attractive asset class? Is the crowd capable of being good investors, willing to spend 20-40 hours doing due diligence per investment? These are critical questions to help determine just how big equity crowdfunding will become, right? I say no.

Successful startup investing is way too hard, and the wisdom of the crowd is way too useless if not destructive (in this case at least). For equity crowdfunding to become a mainstream activity, these questions don’t need to be answered, they need to be removed from the equation.

That’s why the crowdfunding platforms themselves prospect the deals, decide whether they’re attractive, and negotiate the terms. The crowd only sees investment in committee-approved, neatly packaged and pre-negotiated deals.

• FundersClub advertises that fewer than 5 percent of applicant companies get listed on its site.
• CircleUp’s acceptance rate is less than 2 percent.
• AngelList’s approval rate barely registers given that just 15 companies can be invested in online out of the 15K or so they have access to.

You can call that simple curation, but it’s the same process with largely the same ratios that institutional VCs undertake. In essence, crowdfunding platforms are the general partner venture capitalist and have made the crowd their limited partner investors. Their economic models might differ from normal VCs, but their path to success is the same: Build an investment portfolio that makes their LPs an attractive return.

In terms of what constitutes an attractive return, crowdfunding has some advantages over traditional VCs.

In many cases, investors aren’t charged management fees or carried interest, and the “2 and 20” fee structure of most VC funds is expensive as hell. Rather than trust my math, Fred Wilson calculated the difference between gross (what the crowd gets) and net (what regular VC LPs get) returns on a fund that nominally did a 4x: 39.2 percent (gross) vs. 28.6 percent (net). Big difference.

Another advantage is that crowd investors get to pick and choose when to participate. While hard to quantify, there should be some economic value associated with this option.

Taken together, returns as low as break-even (per annual vintage) could be enough to entice the masses. Either by luck or successful cherry-picking, a large portion of the crowd would then be able to make money. But how feasible are break-even returns and at what level of scale? To answer, let’s examine the three models of equity crowdfunding: VC pledge funds; online private placement; and loss leaders.

Venture Capital Pledge Funds

Think FundersClub and OurCrowd. Much like traditional asset managers, the model requires a combination of management fee on capital invested and carried interest on profits. But rather than having committed capital, investors come in on a deal-by-deal basis.

fee structures matter but not nearly as much as deal quality.

FundersClub, for example, charges a one-time fee ($300 for a $2.5K investment) to cover transaction costs and will eventually institute a carried interest fee – meaning they make money when investors do, aligning them well with investors generally.

One disconnect, however, is that crowdfunding carry on good investments won’t be affected by the bad, which implies little direct incentive to avoid them. Depending on the return profile, this can also make VC pledge funds quite expensive. Take a very simple example (ignoring management fees):

• A $50 million VC fund (with 20 percent carry) makes 10 $5 million investments in year one
• In year five: Five deals return nothing, three return principal, and two return 3.5x principal
• Fund return: 1.0x gross, $0 in carry, 1.0x net
• Identical performance from a crowdfunding business (with 20 percent carry) nets 0.86x to the crowd
• For the crowd to get 1.0x principal, the portfolio must gross 1.18x (4 percent IRR over the five years)

Certainly fee structures matter but not nearly as much as deal quality. While some might view crowd capital with a stigma, to entrepreneurs VC pledge funds are just very public angel groups with perhaps fewer voting rights – overall, not a huge handicap in deal sourcing. And to find deals they use exactly the same tactics as every other professional investor. Therefore success here requires the same caliber of deal sourcing ingenuity and investment acumen as it does for all VCs.

As a result, the sector should develop in some predictable ways:

1.  To raise a devoted VC fund, you actually have to convince relatively sophisticated investors to bet on you based on your experience and capabilities. Since the crowd largely thinks they’re the general partner, crowdfunding managers face no such scrutiny. Resulting performance should therefore be markedly worse.  Expect most VC pledge fund managers – hundreds maybe – to fall far short of returning investor capital.

2.  Some portion will do well by accident.

3.  A few will actually prove to be exceptional fund managers.

4.  It’ll be hard to tell which is which at least for the first couple of years and there’ll be many bad companies funded and money lost in the process.

5.  Given all this uncertainty, the crowd will favor the few that successfully build brands.  But if those players are also good investment managers, their deal volume won’t expand much to meet investor demand.  So the more enthusiasm the Crowd has for the asset class, the more they’ll be pushed to less credible platforms.

6.  Speaking of, anyone want to start a Morningstar-like evaluation and performance measurement service for equity crowdfunding platforms? The industry will desperately need one.

7.  All this will happen no matter how stringent the SEC’s crowdfunding guidelines end up being. It’s just a tricky asset class.

How This Affects Venture Capitalists

We’re basically just talking about a bunch of new angel groups. The more the merrier as far as VCs are concerned. Their money would help more startups get further along before needing a $5 million – $10 million round. To VCs that means more and less risky investment opportunities to choose from. Maybe Sequoia should send FundersClub some flowers?

But what will happen to the few successful VC pledge fund managers? Undoubtedly they’ll be tempted to move beyond seed rounds and invest larger amounts in later-stage companies, take board seats and invest in stealth companies and follow-on rounds. Perhaps they’ll find a way to do all that through crowdfunding.

And if they do, you can be sure that established VCs would follow suit (500 Startups is already trying). They won’t actually renounce their existing limited partners so this would mean billions of incremental dollars from the crowd gushing into the market. Could this over-capitalize the industry and hurt everyone’s return?  Sure, but so long as the VCs get to manage that capital, they’re happy to take that risk.

More likely, however, is that successful crowdfunding managers raise capital from traditional limited partners themselves or get poached by established VC funds with their famous brands, rich fee structures, and steady streams of committed capital.

Online Private Placement

Private placement agents, deal brokers, bankers, etc. have always played a large offline role in the startup ecosystem. They help companies raise money in exchange for some combination of retainer, percentage of the capital raised, and equity.

With online platforms, deal brokers are extending their services down market, now able to represent many more businesses to many more investors. But at some point “more” investors means the crowd and then their model has to change. To compensate for the crowd’s naiveté and laziness, the placement agent himself has to assume responsibility for maintaining high-deal selection standards. Some dynamics unique to brokers make this problematic:

1. Success Fee-Based Compensation – Your real estate agent doesn’t care what house you buy, just that you buy one and that it’s expensive so that he gets a fee and it’s big. If a broker’s thinking is too short-term, what keeps him from offering whatever deals he thinks he can get the crowd to invest in (regardless of objective quality) so as to earn a fee?

2. Adverse Selection – In a market filled with active and competitive investors, why is it necessary for companies to hire bankers and pay them ~5 percent to 10 percent of the amount raised? Sometimes the decision bears no reflection on the quality of the company for reasons like transaction complexity, geographic remoteness, or esoteric industry focus.  But sometimes it means something is amiss and you’d do well to pass on the opportunity.

Given these distorting incentives, it’ll be even harder for private placement platforms to build break-even portfolios than VC pledge funds. But not impossible.

CircleUp provides an interesting example. They focus on consumer businesses, which CEO Ryan Caldbeck explains are “20 percent of the economy but just 4 percent of angel capital.” Further, consumer startups with annual sales <$20 million are subscale for private equity and not technology-driven enough for most VCs.  That focus perhaps alleviates the negative selection risk.

But are their long-term incentives compelling enough to enforce maniacal deal screening? Here’s my back of the envelope for CircleUp’s model:

most startups will fail no matter how much capital they raise.

There are 1.4 million consumer businesses in the U.S. with <$20 million in annual sales. If you buy that the sector’s truly underserved, then it’s not crazy to assume 2 percent are attractive investments. If 10 percent of those companies raise $300K annually through CircleUp, that yields the company $70 million in revenue (assuming 5 percent broker fee). And there are lots of acquirers who’d pay attractive multiples for a value-add transaction processing business (just wait and see what Eventbrite trades at once it goes public). Interesting, right?

VCs are reluctant to admit it, but they regularly work with private placement agents. There’s no reason they wouldn’t patronize the online version for the right deal. In fact, the more effective deal screening and packaging that brokers provide the more of VC analysts’ jobs they’re doing. Not much threat here.

Loss Leaders

By this I mean AngelList.

AngelList’s primary goal is to connect startups with investors. Think of them as a private placement platform without the fees – CEO Naval Ravikant has repeatedly said that AngelList will never attempt to monetize fundraising-related activities. Any company can make a listing, most can get introductions, some get recommended to investors, and now a choice few are made available to invest in online.

AngelList wants to help make building companies easier. It’s also a social network, and fulfilling that mission expands the user base and increases engagement, which they’ll eventually monetize through premium services. But most startups will fail no matter how much capital they raise. AngelList’s essential value, therefore, is not as an indiscriminate fundraising service for private companies, but as a platform that helps discern which companies might actually succeed and make investors money. And to build the type of long-term usage they need, they must be good at this discernment.

Consequently, AngelList is in a unique position to dominate equity crowdfunding. Investors receive full gross returns and are unaffected by perverse deal quality incentives facing pledge funds and brokers. Furthermore, AngelList doesn’t need to deal source; they see the vast majority of early-stage deals automatically – tens of thousands at any given time. If they can just crack the formula of deal selection and demonstrate consistent break-even returns, the volume of online investments they facilitate could become enormous.

The first few billion dollars of crowd capital will do nothing but de-risk the deals VCs were going to do anyway.

Who needs VCs then, right?  Some of AngelList’s most predictive data has to be which investors have committed to participating in a particular round. Said differently, a VC’s vetting process is likely a critical input to AngelList’s approval engine so the crowd could never actually replace professional investors in this model. Not to mention that someone still needs to structure and lead the transactions as well as represent the security’s voting rights.

In that sense, the crowd’s money would only complement professional investor dollars, producing many more and less risky Series A investment opportunities. Perhaps a whole lot of them. Maybe the NVCA should throw a banquet in AngelList’s honor?

In an end-state where AngelList’s crowdfunding service has proven viable, perhaps they’ll find ways to broaden the Crowd’s investment capabilities to handle larger amounts, follow-on commitments, etc. But the need for VCs to both vet the deal and facilitate the transaction remains unchanged.

One thought, however: The VC’s value in AngelList crowdfunding is likely not correlated with investment amount, meaning that $2 million from the right $50 million fund can mean the same as $20 million from a $500 million fund. Perhaps the crowd would be interested in making up the $18 million difference.

So What’s The Damn Answer?

VCs are the Br’er Rabbit of the startup ecosystem. They can appear vulnerable and don’t mind playing the woeful underdog. But they invented the rules for the game that I’ve discussed. Any sort of change is rarely more than an opportunity to outcompete one another.

The first few billion dollars of crowd capital will do nothing but de-risk the deals VCs were going to do anyway. In the meantime, all that crowd activity will fund development of deal-screening services that VCs will use to improve their coverage and slim down their teams.

If the crowd is ever going to approach a 40 bps allocation to startups (as discussed in part one), it’ll be because the VCs engineered it and profited handsomely in the process. Their revenue models and fund structures might shift, but they’ll continue to control where the capital goes.

[Images: Willy and shadow crowd]

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

It can be such a headache trying to figure out what internal collaboration tools a company should use. Even at TechCrunch, where we have a few dozen writers, product and sales people, we’ve switched tools many times and have gripes with all of them.

Imagine how it must be for a company with more than 1,000 people, or even 10,000. G2 Crowd is aiming to solve that with a site of user reviews on everything from CRM (customer relationship management) software to productivity tools.

Behind the company is an experienced team of founders that previously sold BigMachines, a company that specializes cloud-based product configuration, pricing, quoting, and proposal generation, to Vista Equity Partners and JMI Equity at a valuation of more than $100 million.

After some time off, co-founder Godard Abel started thinking about new problems to work on.

“We then founded G2 Crowd based on our frustration in selling business software,” he said. “We thought there had to be a better way.”

On G2 Crowd, people can submit reviews of services like Salesforce, Oracle’s PeopleSoft or Sugar CRM and so on. The community is managed with contests and free iPad mini giveaways, and G2 Crowd also uses LinkedIn profiles to authenticate people and help encourage reviewers who actually have expertise in using these products.

Interestingly enough, G2 Crowd is not going down Yelp’s path of getting reviewed businesses to buy ads or premium placement in search results. Abel thinks that could distort the reviews or incentivize the company in the wrong way.

“We don’t want to do vendor advertising. We don’t want to sell leads. We think it makes you biased,” he said.

Instead, they’re going after Gartner. IT managers can spend thousands of dollars on reports from companies like Gartner that help them decide what vendor to us.

G2 Crowd will start its research in a lower price range of $99 and up. In those reports will be deeper data dives that will help you understand vendors that comparable companies use. Healthcare companies, for example, might want to know what software other healthcare organizations use.

“We believe the data we can get is better than what you would get from Gartner,” Abel said. “Plus, we can gather the content at a lower cost. We’d want to pass on that benefit to the buyer.”

Eventually, that one-off research report business could transition into a subscription model.

While research businesses sometimes can have issues scaling depending on the size of their target market, Abel thinks the market for enterprise software reviews could be huge .

“We’re looking at $2.7 trillion being spent on enterprise IT and we think we can make that process 10 percent more efficient,” he said.

The 10-person company is being bootstrapped out of Chicago with $2 million in funding from the founders.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Mark your calendars, Android fans — HTC has just started sending out invitations to press events in New York and London on February 19. Granted, those invitations are very vague (no teasing any big features a la Motorola, I’m afraid), but the Taiwanese company is widely expected to officially reveal its latest flagship Android smartphone, codenamed “M7.”

Considering the sheer number of leaks floating around recently, that shouldn’t really come as a surprise, but there’s something to be said about how HTC is handling this whole thing. After all, the beleaguered Taiwanese smartphone maker officially unveiled its original One series handsets at a huge press conference at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona last year — those devices and the design choices inherent to them would go on to influence much of HTC’s 2012 device portfolio.

Taking an announcement like that out of a grand event and splitting into two seems more than a little peculiar to me, but it certainly makes some sense. By pushing out its big news ahead of the scrum, HTC seems eager to avoid the crush of news and mobile minutia that comes out of shows like MWC — arguably, the best way to stand out from the crowd is to avoid the crowd entirely. Factor in some early reports that HTC would reveal the M7 well ahead of MWC and this whole thing is starting to feel like a lock.

Of course, all this raises yet another compelling question — if HTC does officially out the M7 in New York and London not even a week before MWC is slated to kick off, what else does it plan to show off in Spain? With less than a month to go before the big event, I wouldn’t be surprised at all if the company’s full agenda is leaked sooner rather than later.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

It’s the dawn of a new day here at CES 2013 in Las Vegas, and just like clockwork there’s yet another keynote address that’s set to kick off in just a few minutes. Today’s headliner is none other than Samsung president Stephen Woo, and rumor has it that there’s quite a bit of star power lined up for today’s event. Panasonic may have had Lisa Ling, but Samsung is expected to bring former President Bill Clinton onstage in short order.

Anyway, myself and Canadian wunderkind Darrell Etherington are here in the crowd to liveblog it all — it won’t be long before things officially kick off, so stay tuned!

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

When Foap first launched its iPhone app and markeplace to let users upload and sell their photos, it relied on a manual approval process designed to keep the quality high in a bid to give the traditional stock photography market a run for its money. But, should the app really take off, it was an approach that was never likely to scale. And so it is that 1.4 million photo uploads and 150k app downloads later, Foap is turning to the crowd to approve photos submitted for sale.

Meanwhile, to further help it scale, the Swedish company is announcing a new round of funding: $500k from Asia’s Jade Global Investments. This brings the total capital raised so far to approximately $900k.

Launched just shy of 5 months ago in the U.S. and UK, Foap lets users upload their photos to the startup’s marketplace where they can be purchased for $10 each, with revenue split 50/50 between the photographer and Foap. However, until now, each submission had to be approved for sale by the company itself, an arduous and expensive process. By turning that process over to the crowd, it sets up Foap nicely to scale, while its user-base is now at a size to make community policing possible. Users get to rate each submission and after five submissions, any photo that gets 2.5 stars or more is automatically approved.

In addition to tweaking its model, Foap has rolled out a sort of friends affiliate scheme in which users are being enticed to invite their friends to download the app and sign up to Foap in return for earning 10% of any future sales from the photos those friends upload.

As for where Foap is heading next, I’m told that in January the company will be launching a “photo missions” feature in which brands can put a call out for specific photo submissions on Foap and on their Facebook page (strikingly similar to that of EyeEm, although here users will actually get paid). The aim is to enable brands to build their own exclusive image libraries to be used in their marketing, whilst at the same time increasing engagement by rewarding users. Companies who take advantage of this feature will be charged a monthly fee for using the platform.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

A few months back, I was pitched over Skype by the CEO and co-founder of a startup building a platform that was going to realise the “true potential” of science.

“Okay,” I said, “but have you got anything you can actually show me?”

“Not yet but I still think TechCrunch readers will want to hear about us,” he replied, before proceeding to tell me how to do my job.

“Look, it’s late here,” I countered, “but I’m happy to meet when you have something to show. I have a feeling you’ll be slightly less annoying in person.”

“Don’t count on it,” said the overly confident CEO.

That startup was Marblar, which today sees its public launch with a platform that — with the help of the crowd — aims to find commercial uses for the thousands of scientific discoveries otherwise laying dormant in universities around the globe. And in doing so, may actually have the potential to not just change science but (indirectly) change the world.

Specifically, the problem that Marblar is trying to solve is that all too often, the authors of scientific discoveries and inventions simply don’t know what practical uses, if any, their breakthroughs might have. As a result, universities have a pretty poor track record of commercialising their research (research that is largely funded by the taxpayer). But by setting more eyes on the problem, in a way that encourages lateral thinking, greater creativity, and a coming together of people with different disciplines, Marblar thinks it can change that.

“Talk to any scientist and they’ll tell you they really only read papers in their own field, do keyword searches, but to actually stumble upon a novel piece of research in a completely different field that solves your problem, that just rarely ever happens”, explains Marblar’s CEO, Dan Perez, when we finally meet over coffee in London’s West End.

And he and his other co-founders — Mehmet Fidanboylu, Gabriel Mecklenburg and Tom von Erlach — should know. In their mid-to-late-20s, each are PhD science students at Oxford University, King’s College, and Imperial College, respectively. Their disciplines span biochemistry, neuroscience, materials science, and regenerative medicine.

The overriding ambition of Marblar is to create a platform that will “make lightning strike more often.” The kind of lightning that has historically seen inventions, such as a new temporal glue give rise to the Post-it Note. Or something as revolutionary as the printed press, which combined lessons from the coin press and the controlled pressure used in making wine. These are just two examples that Perez likes to tell with infectious — bordering on slightly irritating — enthusiasm.

Nonetheless, the pitch is compelling.

The way Marblar hopes to engineer this type of serendipity is deceptively simple: The authors of un-commercialised discoveries work with the Marblar team to post a listing of their invention — distilled in an accessible, yet comprehensive form — from which the crowd are tasked with drilling further into its capabilities and, in contest form, enter ideas for possible commercial uses. Each ‘entry’ is then voted upon by the Marblar community, while there’s a wiki-like Q&A section so that users can interact with and bounce ideas off of the invention’s author. There’s also a heavy dose of gamification, users earn points — marbles — and trophies for their participation.

The eventual winner, as decided by the IP holder, receives a small cash prize, too, though Perez doesn’t think this is the most important incentive. Instead, it’s the intellectual curiosity itself and the chance to be recognised by the wider scientific and academic community that, in Marblar’s closed beta test, proved to be the biggest draw. And it’s certainly true that kudos and recognition is the main currency in academia.

Perez also says that for the ‘winner,’ there’s the potential to stay involved in the subsequent commercial exploration of said invention and maybe even land a job. “They can show prospective employers they’re thinking creatively around science and innovation,” he says.

To that end, the types of inventions being put in front of the crowd at launch include a new method of sending huge amounts of data over DC cables, an Energy Harvester that can arbitrage the motion from a human body or other devices and store that energy, and a new foam material with “incredible properties.”

Perhaps controversially, however, Marblar, and its contract with the university ‘tech transfer’ departments that it’s partnering with, doesn’t offer anything in the way of royalties to the winning entrant if a product does make it to market. That probably won’t pose a problem at launch, but I can see it potentially causing some bad PR further down the road should the platform really take off. On the other hand, for the time being at least, Marblar doesn’t take a cut, either, and instead makes its money by charging a fee for the listings themselves. In the future, however, it’s not hard to see how that could change, and Perez hints as much.

All of which hasn’t gone unnoticed by the wider R&D industry. One of the participants in Marblar’s trial run, IP Group PLC, has since gone on to become a strategic investor, putting £373K (appox. US$600K) into the young startup.

In addition, the law firm, Bird and Bird, and the Royal Society of Chemistry, have agreed to sponsor 6 Marblar competitions each, providing another early revenue stream for the young company.

And Marblar boasts an impressive advisory board, too, spanning heavyweights from the scientific world, along with an executive from the ad agency Saatchi & Saatchi, whose London office is just around the corner from the coffee shop we’re in.

Finally, after taking in an hour-and-a-half long pitch, scrutinising every slide in Marblar’s deck, which Perez insists I see, we draw our coffee to a close, to the relief of myself and, I suspect, Perez’s co-founders. Before I make motion to leave, however, I ask if there can possibly be anything that I’ve missed.

“Well, there is one thing, says Perez. “I think you should mention that I’m single.”

And at the risk of letting the Marblar CEO tell me how to do my job again, I think I just did.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch