This week, we hosted Accel Partners’ Rich Wong in the studio for our Ask A VC show.

Wong, who has invested in Angry Birds (Rovio), Lookout, Atlassian, MoPub, talked about where he sees the next wave of disruption in mobile technologies. He believes mobile security is a huge opportunity mobile, especially at the enterprise level.

We also chatted about whether entrepreneurs can build a great tech company outside of Silicon Valley. Wong has some interesting perspective on this considering that Atlassian’s headquarters are in Sydney, Australia and Rovio is based in Finland.

Tune in above to hear what Wong’s favorite Rovio game is and more.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Back in November last year image giant Corbis acquired Demotix, the crowd-sourced breaking news picture and video agency which had launched in 2008. We present for you a lighting fast ‘exit Q&A’ with founder and former CEO Turi Munthe, who has since left to pursue new projects.

Demotix sold to Bill Gates’ Corbis, the second biggest picture library in the world, in November 2012. On the way, since their launch in January 2009, they built a community of about 40,000 people in every corner of the globe, providing them with a platform to tell stories that nobody else could – or often would – cover. They broke over 1 million news images, reported 100,000+ news stories, published scoops from Iran to Oslo and sold their community’s work all over the world, shipping hundreds of thousands of dollars per year to a network of freelancers from Haiti to Zimbabwe. Not bad for a start-up in news industry which is haemorrhageing money daily.

I caught up with Turi Munthe the week after he finally stepped down as CEO to ask what advise he would give to other entrepreneurs.

MB: What did you get right?

TM: Our advisors: we (Jonathan Tepper and I) built a team of exceptional people who, despite our thick-skulledness, helped us avoid some of the biggest potholes. The ones we hit were ALL because we didn’t know how to listen to them.

In terms of office culture neither Jonathan nor I have ever had as much fun professionally as starting Demotix. Everyone we hired and kept had the same vision of, commitment to and passion for what we wanted to achieve, and everyone had options (including many of the early interns). We had problems, but we also had a ball and made some great friends in the process.

We were cheap because we never raised the squillions of our competitors in the US, so we had to be. Short, cheap leases; no marketing spend (as Founder, you are the marketing); no headhunters, no consultants, and as few hires as possible. Don’t try to outsource your risk: do it yourself. Oh, and conferences? Only go to the ones you’re speaking at…

We also set out to win prizes. Before you make sales, raise big bucks, and become insufferable, start by winning prizes. When there’s nothing else out there, they validate your story. Plus they dazzle investors and boost the team.

MB: What did you get wrong?

We weren’t geeks, and didn’t bring one in as co-founder. I still can’t quite believe some of the crap we wasted time and money on as a result. Here’s a rule to follow.

Hiring: I’m sentimental, and Jonathan is even worse. When everyone fits, the team fizzes. It takes just one person to skew the dynamic, and I let that happen too often.

Spending equity. When you start, equity is your only currency. You will regret how you spent it whatever happens. So try to spend it measurably (ie. options not shares).

MB: What have you learnt?

The defining feature of a company’s success is the market it’s entering: a rising tide raises all ships and all that… A free-speech news platform? Are you kidding?

Understand your market, even if you’re planning on inventing a new one. Do everything you can to speak to future clients, and then when you’re up and running, to talk to existing clients. If you don’t believe they’re your number one mentor, you’re in trouble.

Moats matter: the news photo business is really an oligopoly (AP, Getty, and Reuters). Oligopolies exist because there are high barriers to entry: your business is figuring out quite how much it’s going to take you to breach those.

Have fun: start-ups are risky as hell and, in almost all certainty, a terrible investment of your time. So really care about what you’re doing and really enjoy doing it: the experience, most likely, will be what’s of most value.

Photo by Anton Nosik

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Two Italian VC firms and an institutional player, Fondo Italiano di Investimento, have combined to form United Ventures, closing a first round of funding at €30 million ($39M). The new firm has set a fund-raising target of €50 million, with a term of ten years and brings together Annapurna Ventures, a firm founded by Massimiliano Magrini which has specialized in seed investing, and Jupiter Venture Capital, which specialized in early-stage and late-stage investments, a firm founded by Paolo Gesess.

Together, with institutional and private investors, the new entity aims to take advantage of a recent explosion in tech activity in Italy, which was evidenced by the enormous reception we had a TechCrunch Rome last year. In part, Italy’s terrible economy is channeling talent towards one of the few growth areas: tech.

In addition to Fondo Italiano di Investimento, the first closing of the fund was participated in by institutions Fondazione Banco di Sardegna, Fondazione Cassa di Risparmio di Lucca, Banca Sella and Banca Patrimoni. Among individual investor there is serial entrepreneur Matteo Fago founder of Venere.com, Marco Corradino co-founder of BravoFly group and Davide Serra managing partner of the edge Fund Algebris.

Massimiliano Magrini, founder and managing partner, says: “There is an entire generation of young Italians with entrepreneurial talent who would prefer to have the opportunity to create their own jobs rather than look for one. To do so, they will need to found their own companies, and this is why the system needs venture capital.”

For his part, Paolo Gesess, founder and managing partner, added: “This first closing, completed with important support from both institutional investors and successful digital economy entrepreneurs, is only the first stage in a process that… we believe needs to be completed as swiftly as possible.”

Paolo Gesess and Massimiliano Magrini’s associates include operating partners Mario Mariani, founder of the incubator The Net Value and former partner of Annapurna Ventures, and Sergio Zocchi, former partner of Jupiter Ventures.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

We’re live in Berlin at a major announcement due to be made shortly by German Chancellor Dr. Angela Merkel. I’ll be covering the event which has been rumoured to be a major policy shift by the German government towards technology startups. (We should add that TechCrunch will be coming to Berlin in October). TechCrunch is exclusively live streaming the event below.

In her speech Merkel called technology startups “The yeast so that Germany grows.”

She also recognised that for a long time the government hadn’t realised the impact tech companies were making on the economy, but that today would be the beginning of a new conversation with the tech industry.

Although she made no major policy announcements, the feedback from the entrepreneurs and investors present was extremely positive. As one told me: “We’ve been waiting for this to happen a while, but over the last two years the government has started noticing the tech economy. To have the Chancellor recognise it in such personal terms is a great boost. We very optimistic this will translate into significant support for the startup industry.”

That said, the new government ovation to the tech community comes at a time when Germany is poised to enact a new ‘snippets’ law design to push search engines like Google to pay content owners, but which is at the same time likely to affect startups.

It also emerged during the event that Dr. Merkel was, during her time as a physics researcher, used Fortran to program, after she was asked directly by Stefan Richter, an adviser to the HackFWD accelerator. What do you know – a Chancellor who’s a former hacker…

The event was put together by some of Germany’s key entrepreneurs and investors: Lars Hinrichs, Klaus Hommels, Frank Thelen, Christophe Maire, Heiko Hubertz and Marco Boerries. In addition, major corporate players eBay, Google, Bertelsmann and Axel Springer are joining the event.

It includes 200 of Germany’s top 200 tech entrepreneurs, and main organiser Lars Hinrichs says a survey of the group found it represents around €21 billion in value, over 127,000 employees, and 95 percent of the companies said they would experience growth this year.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

CloudVelocity, a new startup emerging from stealth that develops hybrid cloud automation platform, has raised $5 million in Series A funding from Mayfield Fund.

CloudVelocity (which was formerly Denali Systems) allows companies to automate private data centers to the public cloud. CloudVelocity’s software, based on the startup’s patent-pending One Hybrid Cloud platform, aims to extend the enterprise data center to the public cloud, by enabling multi-tier applications to run without modification in the cloud and access services that reside in the enterprise data center. In a nutshell, the startup allows enterprises to get the benefits of private clouds in the public cloud.

Users can discover, blueprint, clone, and migrate applications between data centers and public clouds. Currently, CloudVelocity supports full server, networking, security and storage integration with AWS but plans to integrate other public clouds, such as RackSpace in 2013. The beta trial of the Developer Edition cloud cloning software allows users to clone multi- tier app clusters and services, without modification into the Amazon Web Services (AWS) EC2 cloud. The Enterprise Edition enables users to clone, migrate and failover multi-tier apps and services into the AWS EC2 cloud.

The new funding will be used to continue developing the startup’s hybrid cloud automation software suite (including cloud cloning, migration and cloud failover solutions).

Navin Chaddha, Mayfield Fund’s Managing Director explains that the firm incubated the idea, and made a bet not only on the technology but also the entrepreneurs. The co-founders founded virtualization company NeoPath Networks, which was acquired by Cisco.

“We believe that CloudVelocity will have the same impact on public cloud adoption as VMware did on the adoption of server virtualization by making public clouds look like internal data centers,” Chaddha explains.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

While us Brits wait for San Francisco, U.S.-based TaskRabbit to launch this side of the pond, at least two local competitors have emerged.

The opportunistically named TaskPandas, founded by Farrukh Khan, describes itself as an ‘eBay for small jobs’. Meanwhile, Sorted, which is part of the Oxygen Accelerator programme and recently won the Entrepreneurs Week seed investment competition, is talking up its ability to be a better TaskRabbit by tweaking the model by which task providers are quality controlled.

With TaskRabbit thought to be eyeing up a UK launch, both sites are clearly gunning for first-mover advantage locally, with a strikingly similar model to the U.S. company, which enables people to outsource their errands and to-dos.

Running since July, TaskPandas says that £50,000 worth of work has been posted on its site and more than 1,500 people have signed up to become ‘pandas’ (silly name) in London, Birmingham, Glasgow, Manchester and Leeds, of which half are women. The types of task posted so far have ranged from assembling IKEA furniture, dog sitting, local deliveries or even sorting the household laundry, apparently — with a typical job paying anywhere between £5 and £250, minus TaskPandas’ 15% commission.

For Sorted, it’s even earlier days. Launched as an iOS app-only, the startup has signed up just over 600 ‘sorters’ (task do-ers) in the last 3-4 weeks, although it says that this is without spending anything on marketing. It’s also only available in one city (Birmingham), but plans to expand to “every major city” in the UK in due course.

Interestingly, Sorted thinks that the key to scaling quickly is a more efficient way to verify service providers — the people actually carrying out the tasks — but in a way that also gives reassurance to those doing the commissioning.

“TaskRabbit makes their supply side jump through a lot of hoops to even be able to make offers on the platform, and after that they still need to get off the ground and are put in a bracket in terms of what tasks they can complete. This is great for the person paying for the task but not ideal for the supplier”, says Sorted co-founder James Pursey.

One of the ‘hoops’ that Pursey is referring to is a background check. In the opposite direction is a completely open marketplace, although he doesn’t think this is the answer either because it creates too many trust issues.

Sorted’s solution, says Pursey, is a “gamified review system” where anybody is free to put themselves forward to do any task in any category, “but after doing 5 tasks in 1 category with an average star rating of above 3.5, we ‘certify’ them – essentially saying ‘Hey, use this guy, we recommend him’”.

In contrast, TaskPandas’ Kahn is pushing the site’s reliance on background checks. “A lot of our tasks involve domestic help and so it is of the upmost importance to us that our pandas are verified, CRB checked and that users continually provide feedback as to the service they receive”, he says in a statement.

Whichever system will win out remains to be seen, of course. But I suspect that both startups will have a whole different set of problems if or when TaskRabbit does cross the pond. It dwarfs TaskPandas and Sorted in terms of funding: Just shy of $38m compared to £70k (~$112k) or less each for its UK counterparts.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

A year is a long, long time ago, especially in the technology world. I can’t even remember what I was doing at this particular time last year without looking at my foursquare check-in history…sad, I know. I do know where I was in January, though — at The Crunchies. I wasn’t a part of TechCrunch yet. I attended as a guest while working for The Next Web. I wasn’t sure what it was all about, so I definitely wanted to have a look. And I’m glad I did, because it was an experience that I’ll cherish forever. If you want to come, which you most definitely should, tickets are available right now HERE. Act fast though, they go quickly.

The Crunchies are a mix of the MTV Music Awards and the Oscars…but for tech innovation. Basically, a dream for those who really care about pushing the needle. Now that I’m a part of the best team on Earth, I get to help out a little bit in making the next Crunchies even awesomer than the last (you can buy tickets now), which will be difficult. It keeps getting better, I’m told.

I took some time to speak with three companies that won huge at last year’s Crunchies – Evernote, Grindr and Peixe Urbano. Basically, three companies that couldn’t be more different if they tried. I asked them a series of questions about how The Crunchies impacted them personally, professionally and from a product perspective. I think you’ll enjoy their answers and thoughts, because I sure did.

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On the overall “Crunchies Experience,” Evernote’s CEO Phil Libin told us this:

My entire management philosophy was shaped by the Crunchies, or at least by the Crunchies Trophy: climb over old obstacles, smash things, eschew pants. I don’t always live up to every part of this credo, but I try.

All business, we love it. Grindr’s Founder and CEO, Joel Simkhai, gave us more of an idea of how the whole spectacle felt:

We’ve always been big fans of TechCrunch – here at the office, it’s our go-to destination for what’s going on in the tech world. It was an honor to simply have been nominated by a source that we respect and read daily. Then, to actually have won the Crunchie – especially in TechCrunch’s brand-new location-based apps awards category – was amazing. And as for the awards show itself, it was truly amazing to be in a room with all the legends and people whom I admire in the tech industry. And obviously we had a lot of fun at the show and the party.

Legends, indeed. But these folks are from the Silicon Valley area. What about an international company that travelled a long way, like Peixe Urbano’s founders Alex Tabor, Julio Vasconcellos and Emerson Andrade:

Being the first Latin American company to win the Crunchies Award for “Best International Startup” was an incredible recognition for all of the hard work up until that point as well as a source of motivation for us to do even more. It helped to put Peixe Urbano and the Brazilian startup scene on the map, and I hope it served as an incentive not only for our team but also for other entrepreneurs in Brazil and the rest of the region.

Three different companies with three very different, yet strikingly similar in some ways, experiences. Sweet. So that’s the “experience,” but how about what winning at The Crunchies did for them as a company and what it felt like when winning?

Libin went a little numb, perhaps, during wins and losses:

I don’t really remember the times we won, just blurry clapping and bright lights. I remember the moment I lost for “CEO of the Year” to Jeff Weiner and felt a big wave of relief that there was some sanity left in the world after all.

Oh, and he has a suggestion for those who are nominated: “For godsakes, wear something nice to the ceremony. Yes, yes, you’re s Silicon Valley hipster CEO, but you can still throw on a jacket.”

Fair enough. Grindr’s CEO told us what it felt like to win and “bring it home” to the office:

I was proud to bring the award back to the office, and I put it on prominent display near the front door so that people would see it right when they walk in. Also, after Grindr won the Crunchie, I received a lot of messages on Grindr from our users congratulating me on the win. It’s funny, though – they’re the ones who deserve to be congratulated. Our Grindr community, which now numbers 4.5 million users worldwide, was a huge factor in winning. They believed in our product, they spread the word about the Crunchies and voted – it’s because of them that we received the award. So their messages meant a lot to me, and I’m very grateful to them.

The Peixe Urbano situation was a bit different. Not better, but quite inspiring:

We received plenty of calls and emails. The news was covered by most major publications in Brazil as we were the first company in the country to win such an important international recognition. The governor of Rio de Janeiro, where Peixe Urbano is based, even set up an event in our honor to congratulate Peixe Urbano for this achievement in order to inspire other entrepreneurs in the state.

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So there you have it, there’s a bit of background on what it feels like to be nominated, and win, a Crunchie. It sounds good to me, and being in the audience cheering everyone on felt good too. If you’re in the area, or feel like travelling, there’s really no excuse not to be here. I’ve heard from sources that this could be the best one yet.

Get your tickets now. Also, nominations end on December 6th, so get those in for your favorite companies and people right this very instant!

The 6th Annual Crunchies Awards

Thursday, January 31, 2013

Louise M. Davies Symphony Hall
201 Van Ness Ave.
San Francisco, CA

7:30pm – midnight – Awards Ceremony and After Party
A night of celebration with festive attire.

Tickets are on sale here. Be sure to act fast!

Nominations are open now.
Nominations close: Thursday, December 6th at 11:59 p.m. PST
Finalists announced: early January

Our sponsors help make the Crunchies happen. If you are interested in learning more about sponsorship opportunities during the ceremony or after party, please contact sponsors@techcrunch.com.

For press credentials, please fill out this request form and confirmations will be sent separately via email.

Check out additional coverage from our partners: GigaOM and VentureBeat.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Downtown Detroit has sadly not been known in recent years for having a bustling business vibe, but the people at the M@dison Building are working overtime to turn that around.

Housed in a nearly 100 year old building that used to house Detroit’s first major movie theater, the M@dison is a 5-story, 50,000 square foot space dedicated to all things that go along with technology and digital startups: Entrepreneurs, developers, business people, and investors are all in the mix. Dan Gilbert (the billionaire businessman behind Quicken Loans) has led the charge in building out the M@dison, buying the building in early 2011 and spearheading a $12 million renovation of the space. After opening its doors in January of this year, the M@dison is now at 100 percent occupancy.

We were in Detroit earlier this month for the TechCrunch Northern Meetups and took an afternoon to check out the M@dison and talk to some of the folks there. In the video embedded above, you can get a bit of a look around and hear from the founders of M@dison-based startups including interior decorator app maker Doodle Home, web CAPTCHA alternative Are You A Human, social plans sharing platform UpTo, and green energy freelance engineering network Greenlancer.

In the video embedded below, you can see our sit-down with Josh Linkner, the CEO and managing partner of Detroit Venture Partners, which is also based in the M@dison building. Linkner is a huge champion of all things Detroit tech, so it was a pleasure to talk with him in person about the city.

We also met with Ross Sanders, who heads up Bizdom, a Detroit- and Cleveland-focused non-profit startup accelerator that also calls the M@dison home. You can watch that conversation in this video:

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Editor’s note: Derek Andersen is the founder of Startup Grind, a 30-city event series hosted in 15-countries that educates, inspires, and connects entrepreneurs. He’s ex-Electronic Arts and the founder of Commonred.

A few years ago I asked a successful entrepreneur for advice on what I should do with my latest product idea. His reply was simple. “Trust your gut. What does your gut tell you?” I confidently replied, “That this is a $100MM business.” To which he added, “Then go for it.”

So that’s exactly what we did. We went for it and a year later we didn’t have a $100MM business or even a $10MM business. We didn’t even have a….ok I’ll stop there. But how did I get it so wrong? Is my gut untrustable? Was I wrong to follow it? Or was my stomach just acting up after a recent trip overseas? I recently sat down with Charles River Ventures Partner George Zachary who has had his fair share of big successes.

In his 17-year venture capital career, he has had over $1B in returns on $150MM in investments. He is an investor in companies like Twitter, Yammer, Playdom, Jambool, and a lot more you’ve heard of. This subject is one George has preached for a long time.

“Listening to my gut is the right thing to do for me. It doesn’t mean it’s going to work out.  But it does mean that’s what I should follow,” he told me a few weeks ago at Startup Grind in San Francisco. “That’s my passion. When I’ve done that it has worked well. When I’ve followed my brain and not my heart it’s resulted in disaster and failure every time. I’ve had no success operating from making a rational decision or a decision based on fear. It’s all come from listening to my gut and intuition.”

George isn’t the only person with this creed. Steve Jobs famously said at the Stanford Commencement Address in 2005, “You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.”

But that’s Steve Jobs. For the rest of us normals some times it does let us down or so it appears. Like when your gut tells you that you’re building the next great product of this generation, and after 3-months you have 1,000 users, most of which were college friends, extended family, and creepy ex-girlfriends who still can’t let it go. You know who you are.

For someone with his level of success, George is surprisingly honest and frank about his failures. Despite their friendship, George didn’t invest in one of Elon Musk’s early companies X.com which he says was a mistake. He had an opportunity to lead Twitter’s Series A at a $25MM valuation (eventually taken by Fred Wilson at USV), but he did invest a smaller amount.

“A lot of the mistakes I’ve made at acting out of my gut, led to important things that I’ve needed to learn to get better. I’m not so sure there’s any divine purpose or anything behind it, but what I do know is that by learning through my mistakes I’ve tended to get better,” George says. “There’s no science to it, there’s no 64,000 variable algorithm to investing. If there was then I’d be doing it and so would everyone else. My investing algorithm is: Do I feel more energized at the end of the meeting than at the beginning of the meeting? That is all it is. There is nothing more.”

In 17-years of investing, his gut is a solid bet. George was a founder of Shutterfly which eventually went public. He was one of the few Odeo investors that managed to also invest in Twitter. He backed David Sacks at Yammer and Geni. He’s an investor in Millennial Media. Early in his career he even nearly managed to convince his firm to invest early in Google but was outvoted by the other partners. His gut approach is working just fine.

So back to my original experience. Yes I followed my gut, and yes I failed at building a massive company with it. But I learned all sorts of things. I worked with a dozen engineers refining my product management skills. We had lots of small wins which taught us we have what it takes but this was the wrong mixture. I solidified my relationship with my co-founder and we’re battle scarred taking on the next thing. I earned my startup education through blood, sweat and tears, and we were able to eventually sell the product at a small financial but massive moral victory. Not a $100MM, but it was the right decision for me at that time and my gut was still right. So next time you’re in doubt about the right decision, remember George’s advice on the cause of his success, “It’s all come from listening to my gut and intuition.”

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

CANDDi, developers of analytics software that lets websites create profiles of individual visitors, which can then be used to customize the site and improve conversion, has announced that it has picked up a £370,000 round of funding led by repeat investor Northstar Ventures (£250k in mixed debt and equity from its Accelerator fund), with participation also from a number of strategic angels including a Google executive, and the entrepreneurs behind e-commerce sites TravelSupermarket and DiscountVouchers. The total raised to date by Newcastle-based CANDDi — short for Campaign and Digital Intelligence — is £539,000 ($870,000).

The company will be using the funding to expand its product and business development: to date the company has been focusing on “high value, low volume” sites that may see less traffic but sell higher-value goods — for example, existing CANDDi customers include companies in the insurance and banking/financial sectors. Going forward, CMO Tom Cheesewright tells me, CANDDi wants to extend that product to cover more high-volume, lower-value sites — for example in the retail sector.

In both cases, the need for better customer analytics, and better personalization to improve visitor conversions is a big area at the moment, with sites like Twitter and Facebook also focusing on how to create and better measure engagement — not just unique visitor numbers. As users become more de-sensitized to online marketing, it seems like the metric that will get the most focus from advertisers and online businesses will be the one that proves their marketing is actually working.

CANDDi’s funding today follows other news from the company: earlier this month it appointed ex-sales Googler Fred Abrard as its new sales manager.

Among the angel investors in today’s round, are Chris Nixon, the former MD of Travelsupermarket.com and Kelkoo Travel; Clement Schvartz, EMEA Large Customer Sales, Director, Google; Doug Scott, the founder of CarRentals.co.uk and DiscountVouchers.co.uk; and Tim O’Shea, the founder, Blurtit & Mindcom Investments. Nixon, Scott and Schvartz are also coming on board as advisors.

The company has been around since 2009 but it seems like it is just finally finding its niche in terms of meeting a need in the current market for more intelligence and web analytics, something noted by CANDDi chief executive Tim Langley as the company turns to bigger volume prospects: “The last twelve months have been spent proving the value of CANDDi Prospect Analytics with customers in the finance, B2B marketing and automotive sectors. Now we plan to take our product to market much more aggressively,” he noted in a statement.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch