AngelPad, the San Francisco-based accelerator founded by former Googler Thomas Korte, held its sixth demo day yesterday. I wasn’t there (I know, it’s super-embarrassing), but I did get to meet with Korte and partner Carine Magescas today to talk about the newest batch of companies.

Magescas said that in the three years since AngelPad was founded, “the premise of what we had in the beginning has been validated.” That premise breaks down to three main ideas, she said. First, she and Korte “push [the startups] really hard.” That’s particularly important in the company’s early stages, Korte said, because it can be hard for the founders to get honest feedback from their family and friends, and because making a relatively small change can have a big effect on a startup’s ultimate trajectory.

Another reason the partners might be particularly tough on the startups is because they’re investing their own money. There’s no separate fund — at least not yet. (When I asked, Korte said, “There hasn’t been a fund to date,” followed by what may or may not have been a significant pause.)

Second, Magescas said, “We are a really small family.” Twelve startups were chosen from thousands of applicants. The first AngelPad group had eight companies, and there was one with 15, but they’ve settled on a dozen for the last few classes. That allows the AngelPad team to spend a lot of time working one-on-one with each company.

“I feel like it’s better to spend more time with less companies,” Korte said, adding that he’s realized that having a long list of well-known mentors isn’t as useful. There are outside experts who come in and give talks on a specific subject, but it really falls to Korte and Magescas to work closely with the founders. When you have too many different people offering “cookie cutter advice,” Korte said, “It hurts more than it helps.”

Third, they said AngelPad has always had a strong focus on business-to-business companies. In fact, there’s not a single consumer-focused company in the current class, according to Korte — some of them might offer consumer products as part of their business, but none of them are focused on building large-scale, free services that make money from advertising. At the same time, Magescas said they’re open to consumer startups, they just have to be “really good.”

So that’e the vision. Here are the companies, in alphabetical order:

Audience.fm uses data from existing music services to help bands and marketers reach their desired audience. For example, if a band was making a tour stop in San Francisco, Audience.fm could identify the band’s biggest fans, and they could offer free or discounted tickets.

Boxbee is a storage startup that delivers boxes to its customers. You fill the boxes with whatever you want to store, then Boxee picks up them up. It won the best new startup prize at this year’s Launch conference.

Chasm.io is a content marketing network, where influencers and brands share content that they want to see promoted. Rather than getting paid for sharing sponsored content, it’s more of a quid pro quo system, where influencers are rewarded for successful sharing with points that they can redeem to share content of their own.

DroneDeploy has built software for commercial drone operators (just to reemphasize — commercial drone operators, not military ones). The founders are former Googlers with machine
learning PhDs from Cambridge and Edinburgh. We covered the company here.

Fieldwire is a mobile task management system designed for workers who are out in the field. For example, it could be used by a team of construction workers while they’re on a construction site.

HumanAPI aims to build an API for accessing all the data that’s being gathered on various health devices, sensors, and services. So instead of figuring out how to work with dozens of different devices, a medical provider could just pull data from HumanAPI.

Iterable is an email marketing startup founded former Google and Twitter engineers. Customers can test different emails and also personalize the messages to each user without any coding.

Pogoseat integrates with existing ticketing solutions and apps, allowing them to offer seat upgrades. Partners already include Ticketmaster, the Golden State Warriors, and other NBA teams.

Roobiq aims to build a layer of voice commands and natural language processing on top of existing CRM systems, so a salesperson who’s out taking meetings could update their CRM from their phone without slowing down to type.

SensorTower has built a marketing platform for mobile app developers, allowing those developers to track and improve their rankings on different search keywords.

TheShelf is a collaboration platform where fashion brands can interact with fashion bloggers. There are already 1,500 bloggers on the platform.

TrulyWireless has built an enterprise phone system that’s cheaper than traditional systems and runs entirely on smartphones.

Interested investors can find the AngelList profile of each startup here.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Twitter today made the latest push in its bid to cozy up to Madison Avenue and the world of big-budget advertising, by tapping more into the kind of mainstream mediums where advertisers like to spend their money. In New York, during Internet Week, the company announced Twitter Amplify, a way of bringing real-time video into the site, with initial partners including the broadcasters BBC America, FOX, Fuse and The Weather Channel. It is part of the company’s bigger push that its calling Twitter4Brands, which first kicked off almost year ago exactly, also at an event in the Big Apple.

The instream broadcasting clips will be very closely tied to ads. This is something that it has already been doing with partnerships with, for example, the NBA, where a video also features a link to an ad:

Speaking at the New York event, CEO Dick Costolo talked about how the company has made advertising a more “frictionless” experience because of its emphasis of real-time updates. It’s clear that adding more broadcasting-like experiences into Twitter will further that concept.

The company threw in some fun ad-land perks: a Q&A session with Glee actress Jane Lynch and a Tweeting vending machine churning out swag.

Twitter has been making increasingly strong moves this year to get its platform to be more ad-friendly (and revenue-friendly). That kicked off in February with the launch of an advertising API so that larger advertisers can better manage their campaigns on Twitter; an improved advertising analytics dashboard; and Google AdWords-style keyword targeting (TC coverage here, here and here). Just earlier this week the company also unveiled the official launch of Lead Generation Cards, something Twitter had been testing for a while already, which lets advertisers include actions like requests for more information that users can get automatically by clicking a button in an advertising tweet. (You can see how this last one also sets the stage for Twitter making the leap into commerce, with one-click purchasing.)

While Twitter has not provided any official public guidance on how much it expects to make in advertising this year or in the future, there has been a lot of speculation about the number because many expect Twitter to go public, with a likely date in late 2013 or 2014, according to observers. A report from eMarketer in March noted that it was raising forecasts for the company to $583 million in 2013 and $950 million in ad sales in 2014, 60% coming from mobile.

The stats that Twitter’s president of global revenue, Adam Bain, provided last year shows just how much the company has grown over the last year. Bain noted at the time that Twitter had 140M+ active users; now that figure is estimated to be closer to 300 million.

Bain also had noted that 55% of users access Twitter on mobile, with 40% growth quarter over quarter, and that among Twitter’s active users, only some 60% actually tweet, but all of them “listen.” And in a sign that Twitter was always going to figure out a better way of leveraging ads on the platform, even a year ago, some 79% of people on the site were already following brands.

More to come.

Image: Jim Prosser

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Last year, Tim Sae Koo, Nikhil Aitharaju, Eunice Noh and Ryo Chiba launched HypeMarks to give people a less hectic way to consume social media. The startup aggregated tweets, articles, links and more shared by influencers and celebrities on social media accounts and, by grouping those by topic, aimed to give people a snapshot of an industry through the eyes of the people who know it best.

Although the USC grads were able to generate some interest and raise a small round of seed funding from Bill Gross and Idealab, the service never quite took off. Using the social media aggregation technology they’d developed for HypeMarks, they shifted their focus to take a B2B approach to social media aggregation. In December, they launched Tint — a simple, DIY platform that helps brands aggregate, curate and display social media feeds from multiple networks on their websites, in their mobile apps, Facebook pages and event displays.

In other words, Tint’s platform is designed to help brands create social hubs on top of their digital properties and, in turn, create a deeper level of engagement with their audiences. The idea is that, while there are a number of social media aggregators out there, the average consumer tends to gravitate towards one particular social network and, once there, tends to do their socializing and interacting on that network, rather than switching between them.

Tint allows businesses and brands to connect their social network accounts with their websites, in part to help them promote their products and services through their social feeds, but also to provide their websites with more engaging content. Businesses can link their Twitter, YouTube, Pinterest, Instagram, Facebook and RSS feeds to their Tint accounts, whereupon the service auto-populates the page from those feeds, serving the social content in a river that is Pinterest-like in design.

Or, perhaps the better analogy is Flipboard, as each piece of content is given a headline, an excerpt and a photo, served in a create-your-own social magazine sort of layout. Users can then personalize their pages by changing fonts, background colors and so on or change the headline, URL and image of each piece of content. Tint also offers a handful of starter templates (on of which is free) in case you want to get started quickly.

After that’s done, you can embed the product on your site, tweaking the code to customize it for your site or page, whether it be WordPress, Tumblr, Weebly or some other. Tint also allows you to choose the dimensions you want the embedded stream to be and the number of cascading columns you want to appear, automatically serving up the embed code. Take that to your blog, page, drop it in, and bingo, bango, bongo, you have a social feed on your website that is automatically updated every time you tweet or post cat pictures to Facebook.

Admittedly, Tint probably sounds a little bit like Rebelmouse, but Sae Koo tells us that there are a few differences: Namely, Tint enables you to display social media feeds from specific hashtags, YouTube channels and Pinterest boards to help keep your users on your website, app or event (and engaged). Plus, he says, Tint wants to be a platform tool and an aggregator, not a publishing CMS — and one that’s easy to use and takes 10 minutes to set up. The alternatives, he says, are generally expensive, custom solutions that take time to implement and integrate.

While it may not sound earth-shattering, in the four months since launch, Tint has started to build some traction. Over 10,000 brands are actively using Tint on their sites, averaging 2.5 million monthly pageviews and has been doubling revenue and user growth month-over-month. Today, Tint’s clients include Enrique Iglesias, Toni Braxton, a number of NFL and NBA teams, Honda and more, and its 10,000 clients have averaged a 10 to 15 percent increase in traffic, 20 to 30 percent increase in time spent on their site and 12 to 18 percent decrease in bounce rate, the founders tell us.

Next up, Tint will be looking to expand its partnerships with digital agencies, build out its templates and customization options and finish raising its seed round.

Find Tint at home here.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

With Disrupt NY just six weeks out, we’re excited to announce that former Facebook executive and unconventional venture capitalist Chamath Palihapitiya will be taking the stage at the Manhattan Center.

Palihapitiya started his career at the beginning of last decade at music pioneers Spinner.com and Winamp before going on to work at AOL, where he was the VP and General Manager of AIM and ICQ.

After a year as a VC at the Mayfield Fund, he went to work at Facebook in 2007, a seminal time where he made major contributions as the VP of Growth, Mobile and International. He was responsible for overseeing the Facebook Platform and played a role in launching Facebook’s online advertising products. He moved on to  found his own venture fund in 2011, The Social+Capital Partnership.

He’s made major contributions to the tech industry for over a decade — we’re excited to have him back to Disrupt NY.

Palihapitiya joins our growing list of Disrupt NY speakers that currently includes Roelof Botha, Ron Conway, and David Lee, with many more to be added in the weeks leading up to Disrupt NY. Tickets are currently available with an early bird discount.

Our sponsors help make Disrupt happen. If you are interested in learning more about sponsorship opportunities, please contact our sponsorship team here sponsors@techcrunch.com.

Chamath Palihapitiya
Founder and Managing Partner at The Social+Capital Partnership

Chamath Palihapitiya is the Founder and Managing Partner of The Social+Capital Partnership – a venture capital fund based in Palo Alto, CA that incubates and invests in breakthrough companies in healthcare, education, financial services and mobile/internet technology.

Preceding his focus as an investor, Chamath was the longest tenured member of Facebook’s senior executive team and helped drive its ascension to one of the most important companies in the world. Prior to Facebook, Chamath had leading roles at The Mayfield Fund, AIM and ICQ, and Winamp. In addition to his focus at the fund, Chamath is Owner and Director of the NBA’s Golden State Warriors. Chamath was born in Sri Lanka, grew up in Canada, and graduated with a degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Waterloo.

TechCrunch TV sat down with Shaquille O’Neal yesterday afternoon here at South By Southwest in Austin, Texas to talk about his current focus on all things tech, and it was pretty amazing.

People who are successful in the worlds of sports and entertainment aren’t usually the types that you’d associate with nerdiness. But Shaq, who was famously one of the first major celebrities to take to Twitter and had the service’s first verified account, says that he has been a big geek since way before he became a superstar in the NBA and Hollywood — and so being here in the world of technology is coming very naturally to him.

O’Neal is on the advisory board for 15-second video clip platform Tout, and during SXSW he is running a ‘Pitch Shaq‘ contest that invites startups here to send him a 15-second elevator pitch video. The winner, which will be announced this afternoon, will get the opportunity to then meet with O’Neal for a 1-on-1 meeting about an actual investment.

In the video embedded above, you can hear Shaq talk about how he’s proudly embracing his inner geek, what he’s looking for in a startup or founder, how he has bridged so many different industries over the course of his career, the futuristic app that he’s looking forward to seeing, and much more. He’s a really fantastic person to talk to and gave some great insights on business.

What’s unfortunately not in the video is what happened just after our interview wrapped, when I asked if I could get a photo with him. I still have one day left here at SXSW, but I think it’s safe to say that this is the highlight of my trip — if not my career:

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Code.org, the new non-profit aimed at encouraging computer science education launched last month by entrepreneur and investor brothers Ali and Hadi Partovi, has assembled an all-star group of the world’s most well-known and successful folks with programming skills to talk about how learning to code has changed their lives — and isn’t quite as hard as people might think.

As you can see in the five minute clip embedded above, the short film (nine minutes in its full length version) which was directed by Lesley Chilcott, known as the producer of Waiting for Superman and An Inconvenient Truth, is a who’s who featuring Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, Jack Dorsey, Drew Houston, Tony Hsieh, Miami Heat player Chris Bosh (he studied computer imaging at Georgia Tech before joining the NBA), and many more. It’s a very human look at what can certainly seem to many as a dry or intimidating subject, and it’s really a pleasure to watch.

The watchability is key, Hadi Partovi told me in a phone call this past week, because the purpose of the film is to appeal to the mainstream and particularly young people. It’s an important grassroots start on a very big problem. Partovi said that Code.org sees the first step here as simply raising awareness.

“Enrollment rates in programming classes are low, but what is worse is that schools aren’t even teaching it, even though this is the fastest growing segment of jobs in the country,” Partovi said, adding that nine out of ten U.S. schools don’t offer computer programming classes at all — and those that do often treat it as an elective that doesn’t count toward graduation, the same as, say woodworking.

Indeed, he pointed to figures (which are represented in the accompanying graphic and more on the Code.org site) that show the massive gap between the number of available programming jobs and the people graduating from American schools with the skills to actually do them — a hiring problem of which most people in the tech industry are painfully aware.

And filling in that gap of 1 million jobs could add as much as $500 billion to the U.S. economy — a fiscal cliff-sized number. Partovi put it like this: “It’s a big issue for our country. We’re trying to use immigration reform to help solve the problem, and that’s important, but the long-term fix really is that we should teach more people these skills.”

So what can you do to get involved? The first step is simple, Partovi says: Show the film to as many people as possible. Forward it to your friends and coworkers who are parents, forward it to your younger family members.

Then, there are several things you can do. If you’re a teacher, go to Code.org and sign the petition to get computer programming classes on the curriculum in your school. If you are an engineer, volunteer your time to help teach kids those skills. If you’re a parent, get your kid started with simple lessons on Code.org’s website or search for local schools nearby that teach programming.

It’s a big problem, but it looks like Code.org has made an impressive and thoughtful start in really starting to tackle it.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Chute is a Y Combinator-backed startup that helps publishers and brands incorporate photos and other media (sometimes submitted directly by users, sometimes aggregated from social networking sites) onto their own websites. Now it’s offering similar functionality for real-world locations, thanks to a new feature called Chute Live.

For example, according to co-founder Ranvir Gujral, the Cosmopolitan Hotel has launched a “Pop Up Wedding Chapel” along the Las Vegas Strip, and it’s encouraging people to post photos of themselves on Twitter or Instagram using the #PopUpChapel hashtag. (The photos can be of real or fake weddings, but c’mon, it’s Vegas — do it for real.) Chute then pulls in the photos and displays them on screens throughout the chapel, including a “massive” one facing the Strip.

Chute Live customers could also build their own applications to allow event attendees to submit their photos. Gujral said that in addition to the Cosmo, Chute Live is also being used by the House of Blues, the Palms Hotel, and the NBA for this weekend’s All-Star game.

It’s a busy few weeks for the startup. It recently announced a mobile reporting platform too, creating an app for NBC News reporters (for starters) to post photos from the presidential inauguration directly to the NBC site.

I spoke to Ryan Osborn who leads the digital media efforts at NBC, and he said the company’s partnership with Chute (which is broader than just covering the inauguration — in fact, NBC used Chute to project photos on Rockefeller Plaza on election night) is still in the experimentation phase: “I think we’re going to continue to learn from Chute and continue to figure out the solution.” Still, he had high praise for the Chute team, particularly their “drive to succeed” and the speed with which it can take an NBC idea and turn it into a product.

As Chute continues to roll out new functionality, the company is starting to give a broader sense of its ambitions. Back when it raised funding from Salesforce.com and others, we called Chute “Twilio for media content” and when I met with Gujral a few weeks ago, he outlined a similarly broad vision for the future.

“Wherever there’s image content being used I think we will be the conduit for it,” he said. “Wherever visual content exists, we will control it. Our large, audacious founder claim is that if you’re not Google, Facebook or Netflix, one day your media infrastructure will live on Chute.”

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Stanford’s student startup accelerator, StartX, had its eighth demo day tonight in Palo Alto, showing off the latest class of 11 companies* to go through the program. The accelerator, which just raised another $400,000, has already had about 100 startups go through, raising $100 million along the way between them. This next batch is hoping to follow that lead.

Here’s the next class of Stanford StartX companies, in the order they were presented:

Pixlee. This startup wants to use user-generated photos to help brands market themselves. The idea is not just to collect and curate photos that will resonate with consumers, but also to present them in a personalized fashion. The idea is that everyone will get a different experience, not just see all the same photos. The company had been chosen by the 49ers for a fan-engagement campaign around the Super Bowl, which had more than 50,000 photos submitted. It’s also being used by brands like Yamaha, Major League Soccer, and the NBA.

Distinc.tt. If you’re gay and new to an area, how do you find out where gay people hang out? And how do you find out whether or not someone hanging out in one of those places is also gay. That’s an overly simplistic description of a very complex problem that Distinc.tt hopes to solve. The mobile app shows nearby places based on the measured popularity among the gay community, and allows its users to check in and help identify other gay patrons in those locations. In just a few weeks, the app has garnered about 40,000 users, who log in twice a day on average. The company has also attracted Peter Thiel as an investor in its seed round.

VipeCloud. This startup provides a “video business in a box,” allowing independent content creators, B2B companies, and other niche video producers to quickly get up and running with video distribution. VipeCloud not only provides a platform for sales, but also customer relationship management, enabling clients to build relationships with their audiences and determine what’s working and what’s not, what’s selling and why.

Insynctive. This startup seeks to give companies a better way to do HR, providing the connective tissue between various payment and benefits systems. It’s all brought together by a single, usable, user interface that employees, as well as in-house and outsourced HR, can all use while simplifying the usual crazy HR application stack.

Spot On. Spot On provides time-based search which will give its users more actionable information. The idea is to match the right activity to the right person at the right time, therefore becoming a user’s personal concierge. The app works by pulling temporal data starting with the start and end time, matching items based on location, and then filtering by a user’s personalized preferences. The first market the team hopes to go after is families with kids to help provide activities that parents and kids will both love when they’re free.

NuMedii. This company plans to use big data to shorten the amount of time it takes to develop and test drugs, and, in the process, massively lower the costs associated with drug creation. By matching the molecular profiles of diseases and drug actions, NuMedii can reduce the amount of time for drug testing from 3-6 years down to 3-6 months, and its accuracy has been crazy good, with 6:6 probability of success in early tests. That’s successfully translating big data into effective drug creation at a fraction of the time and cost.

Meet Mikey. We all know email is a pain in the ass, and Meet Mikey wants to change that. The mobile email app, which works with Gmail, is aimed at providing quicker results to questions, with embedded yes and no buttons that can be sent and translated into instant answers. It also can show you who’s opened emails and attachments sent, making sure that everyone on your team is on the same page. It essentially aims to increase productivity and provide easier access to the information users need, in the palm of their hands.

readImagine. readImagine seeks to empower artists and storytellers to create apps for children, with a platform for creation, curation, and distribution of high-quality kids apps. For creators, the platform makes building an app easier than before, and provides distribution through its own network of apps. For parents, it provides a curated group of high-quality apps their kids will love.

MyProject.is. Crowdfunding will be a $6 billion business this year, and that’s set to accelerate, but creators need better tools for managing their campaigns. This company seeks to make building crowdsourced projects easier than ever, by taking the guilt associated with hitting up friends, family, and other members of one’s network to fund their passion projects. The tool works by involving participants early on and making them part of the project’s story well before it gets to the funding stage, making them more willing to give and also making them feel like a bigger part of the creative process.

Kidaptive. Kidaptive hopes to provide better tools for kids to learn and for parents to help them during early development. Starting with its Leo’s Pad app, the company seeks to create a suite of 25 interactive stories that will play out over the course of a year-long curriculum kids can take part in. Better yet, the product helps empower parents to help their kids learn through a continued feedback loop that keeps them informed about how their child is doing, and what they could do to improve.

* For various reasons, one of those companies didn’t want any publicity for its pitch, so we’re excluding it from our coverage.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Outspoken billionaire, Mark Cuban, is fed up with America’s patent system. “Dumbass patents are crushing small businesses. I have had multiple small companies i am an investor in have to fight or pay trolls for patents that were patently ridiculous,” he says in an email to TechCrunch.

The noted investor and Dallas Mavericks owner is perhaps best known for his unfiltered tweets against clumsy NBA officials, who he believes are endangering his star athletes. Now, he’s leveraging his penchant for attention-grabbing headlines with a newly endowed chair at digital civil rights organization, The Electronic Frontier Foundation, dubbed “The Mark Cuban Chair to Eliminate Stupid Patents.”

We interviewed Cuban and the lucky recipient of his donation, Julie Samuels, to better understand his public policy mission. As a journalist, I’m used to public figures giving bland, diplomatic answers that I have to then spice up with sense of scope and purpose. With Cuban, this was not a problem. His answers are so awesomely bold that I’ve decided to leave in their untouched, pristine form. Below each answer, Samuels and I provide more context for those who aren’t patent policy wonks.

Ferenstein: Why did you fund this chair (and where did you get the name)?

Cuban: Because dumbass patents are crushing small businesses. I have had multiple small companies i am an investor in have to fight or pay trolls for patents that were patently ridiculous. There is no place for software patents and most tech patents are not original in the first place. They are merely “remixes” of early technology.

I thought the EFF would be a great starting point to get the message to politicians that patent trolls are costing taxpayers (via trials/motions/etc.) and small businesses money that could otherwise be used for innovation and creating jobs.

I wanted a name that would get attention and not just be another announcement.

Context: Patent trolling is an opportunistic legal practice that exploits intellectual property without the intent of innovating. Acacia research, for instance, has claimed ownership of sending medical images over the Internet, threatening costly legal retribution for anyone who doesn’t pay up. Academics have found that Cuban’s experience is no exception: roughly one-third of startups have been threatened with patent violations, often from trolls.

Ferenstein: Do you have any specific policies you’d like to see implemented?

Cuban: I would like to see software patents completed eliminated, or if not eliminated have a five-year max shelf life.

I would like to see design patents eliminated. I would like to require that all patents be used in a business within five years or otherwise become public domain. The concept that patents are being held by non operating companies in hopes that someone will invent something they can sue over is Anti American, a huge tax on the economy and stymies innovation when entrepreneurs truly come up with a business only to find that the way they included tying the shoelaces on their new shoe was patented.

I would also like to see a “cold room” exception. If you can show you invented the idea using completely independent thought, you don’t violate the patent and the patent is invalidated.

Remember back in the 80s when AMD/Intel and others would clone each other and it was permissible because they came up with the features and functions completely independently? The same should apply to patents. If you didn’t copy an idea, you came up with it on your own, then the idea should not have been patented in the first place. If multiple people come up with the same idea independently, that is the definition of obvious.

You should be given the right to your idea if you come up with it independently and any patents in place for that idea should be invalidated.

Context: Right now, the patent system awards intellectual ownership in a “first to file” fashion, but great ideas are often discovered simultaneously by independent inventors. Wikipedia has an entire section on well-known instances of “multiple discovery,” including the discovery of calculus and the theory of evolution.

Ferenstein: Why don’t you think the kinds of reforms you’d like to see have been enacted yet?

Cuban: Lawyers are making too much money which means they are spending a lot of money in donations and lobbying. Why wouldn’t they? It’s easy money for law firms.

Context: Samuels explains that lobbying efforts have resulted in a one-size-fits-all system that treats multi-billion-dollar pharmaceuticals the same as time software projects. “But software operates differently. It functions uniquely as a building block technology,” she explains. “While writing code is surely not easy, it doesn’t require the kind of financial investment that pharmaceuticals do.”

Indeed, evidence that software functions differently than pharmaceuticals has led at least one influential congressman to hint that, in the near future, the government may pass laws to exempt software from strong patent protections.

Ferenstein: There was a major piece of legislation, the American Invents Act, passed recently. Do you have any thoughts on it?

Cuban: It was great for big companies. First come first serve. It did nothing to reduce the patent trolls’ impact on entrepreneurs and existing companies.

Context: Samuels explains that the American Invents Act first-to-file provision fuels trolls, since they only need to get their “hands on a crappy software patent and threaten a lawsuit.” As a result, Representative Peter Defazio is intending on passing a “loser pays” law that might scare patent trolls away from bogus lawsuits.

Ferenstein: If you could wave a magic wand and completely restructure the intellectual property system, how would you make it[?]

Cuban: No software patents. Independently derived ideas that are turned into products and can prove they are independently derived (Again, if multiple people come up with the same idea independent of each other, that should be as definite as it is obvious, and obvious cannot be patented), then it can not be patented, and all patents for those ideas are declared invalid.*

There you have it, folks. Cuban’s unfiltered thoughts on “stupid” patents. Share your thoughts with us below.

*responses edited for grammar and clarity

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Sina Weibo, the Chinese microblogging platform sometimes referred to as “China’s Twitter,” is finally offering an English-language interface, as confirmed to Tech In Asia by the company.

Though the English-language interface is still only partial, it will help turn the site into an important marketing tool for overseas brands and celebrities hoping to reach Chinese consumers, especially since there may be as few as just 18,000 active Twitter users in the country due to the fact that it has been blocked on the mainland since 2009. Having English capabilities will also help Sina Weibo ward off competition from rival Tencent Weibo, which added an English interface back in September 2011.

Earlier this month, Brad Pitt opened a Sina Weibo account, though his first message, hinting that he is coming to China, has since been deleted. Other Western celebrities and personalities already on Sina Weibo include Tom Cruise, Emma Watson, NBA player Kevin Durant, Neil Bush and Radiohead.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch