Y Combinator’s Paul Graham revealed a bunch of personnel news in a just-published blog post.

Let’s see if I’ve got everything: The incubator has added one full-time partner (Wufoo’s Kevin Hale) and four part-time partners (Socialcam’s Michel Seibel, Hipmunk’s Steve Huffman, imeem and App.net’s Dalton Caldwell and Groupon’s Andrew Mason). Current partner Harj Taggar, meanwhile, is leaving “to start a new startup (in the long term) and travel the world (in the short),” but Graham writes that Taggar will stay on as a part-time partner.

YC first began bringing on part-time partners two years ago — it now has 10 partners, plus eight part-time partners. As with the other, previously announced part-timers, these additions are mostly YC alums — the exceptions are Caldwell (who I’ve seen speak at numerous YC events) and Mason, who was recently fired from the CEO job at Groupon.

The obvious significance here is that YC has basically doubled the team of part-time partners. Graham also notes that with the addition of Hale, two of the incubator’s partners are designers, “which partly reflects the increasing importance of design in startups, but frankly mostly reflects the fact that they’re really good.”

Update: Mason also has his own blog post announcing that he’s joining YC, but also stating that he’s starting a new company, moving to San Francisco, and releasing an album of “motivational business music.” On the company front, he doesn’t say much:

I feel very lucky to be alive at a time when someone like me can have a simple idea like Groupon that ends up impacting millions of people. If there’s a silver lining to leaving Groupon, it’s the opportunity to start something new. I’ve accumulated a backlog of ideas over the last several years, my favorite of which I’ll be turning into a new company this fall.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

BitPay, the startup with ambitions to become the PayPal of the bitcoin world, is today announcing that it has raised another $2 million. And in a kind of poetic justice, the round is led by none other than the Founders Fund, the VC started by what’s commonly called the PayPayl Mafia.

The Atlanta-based startup says that it was not planning to raise any money at the moment — it announced an initial raise of $510,000 only in January. That was its first outside funding after being bootstrapped internally. However, the company also says that it couldn’t say no, considering who was asking:

“We were not looking to raise any capital until later this year, but we could not ignore the opportunity to have Founders Fund involved with BitPay,” Tony Gallippi, co-founder and CEO of BitPay, notes in a news release on the deal. “There’s no single investment firm we would rather have on our team right now than Founders Fund.”

Nevertheless, it looks like the extra money will be used for hiring: there are currently two jobs open for node.js developers “who are excited about bitcoin.” BitPay is also looking for a UX designer. There will also be more investment in its platform and further product development.

Founders Fund partners know a thing or two about payment platforms — given their past experience as founders and senior execs at PayPal and other companies. Their interest in BitPay comes from the fact that it, and bitcoin, in general, appear to be growing like wildfire.

“BitPay’s ambitions have been global from the outset, and at Founders Fund we have been impressed with the company’s tremendous growth as they sign up hundreds of new customers a day, turning the potential for opportunity into a reality,” said Brian Singerman, a Partner at Founders Fund, in a statement.

When we covered the company’s first raise in January, we noted it had already signed up 2,100 businesses that were using its platform to process bitcoin payments. In April, it added nearly that many again: 1,900 merchants, and they are now processing $5 million per month in bitcoin transactions covering areas like electronics, precious metals, “and other low-margin products.” The promise of using bitcoin over dollars is lower fees, and companies are seeing “a large increase in profitability by accepting bitcoin payments,” the company notes.

In addition to Founders Fund, Max Keiser’s fund Heisenberg Capital, a London-based fund focused on bitcoin companies, is also involved in this seed round. It comes as a number of other VCs are also jumping into the bitcoin landgrab.

The terms of this most recent round were not disclosed, the company notes, “although 100% of the existing seed shareholders exercised their pro rata rights to maintain their ownership percentage in BitPay.” Previous investors in BitPay included Shakil Khan (the Path and Spotify former head of special projects, who has also launched his own bitcoin information resource, Coindesk), Barry Silbert, Jimmy Furland and Roger Ver.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

TechCrunch favorite MC Frontalot and filmmaker Caly Monardo have created a video for “I’ll Form The Head,” a rap song about a Voltron-esque group of heroes fighting a worm monster in their rhino robotic vehicles. Each one wants to form the head, and they explain their reasoning in surprisingly eloquent terms.

Why are they rhinos and not, say, giant robotic cats? Mr. Frontalot explains why in the first part of the song:

The song comes from Senor Frontalot’s album Solved and is hilarious. He is backed up Dr. Awkward and ZeaLouS1 and while it’s clear that the gold rhino deserves to be the head, the other rhinos to seem to be solid pilots who deserve a little screen time. Hopefully M. Frontalot visits us again at Disrupt in SF, ensuring me another opportunity to state my case in re: me being the head.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Congress is on track to passing a nationwide Internet retail sales tax, but it has serious flaws that could majorly muck up the e-commerce industry. We think citizens are often smarter than the government, and we want to give you a chance to make the bill better before it becomes law. So, we’ve teamed up with Congressman Darrell Issa’s Open Government Foundation, which designed a platform for making line-by-line suggestions to proposed laws. In TechCrunch’s version of the “Project Madison” crowdsourcing legislative platform, our readers can add, delete, and amend specific passages in the upcoming tax law.

Suggestions that are voted up by our community will get the most attention of Congressional staffers (which we know are watching our platform). It’s been claimed that the Internet is “democratizing” the world; well, here’s our chance to prove it.

Senate Bill S.743, the “Marketplace Fairness Act of 2013,” passed the Senate with overwhelming support and is on to the House of Representatives. But, it won’t be passed for at least a month, so we have some time to bubble up the best ideas from our community of readers.

As we promised when we first launched our new civics channel, Crunchgov, TechCrunch would source and promote the most insightful ideas from the technology community. A proactive approach to improving law is just the next logical step for how we can support the amazing work you all do.

Go to http://madison.techcrunch.com/ and get your citizen on. Encourage your friends, ping your local expert, and share  this opportunity loudly. If we make an impact on the bill, it’ll a watershed moment in American democracy. Go forth!

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Today in interesting moves comes the news that serial entrepreneur-turned-investor Russell Buckley – who co-founded AdMob (which sold to Google) is joining the UK government to accelerate its policies around startups, mainly funding. Specifically, he’s joining the UK Government’s Venture Capital Unit. The Unit, launched last year, is designed to help UK companies attract funding from abroad and thus help resolve the funding gap which often exists at early and mid-stages. The Unit is headed by veteran entrepreneur Chris Wade and embraces Clean Tech, Life Sciences and Hardware. Here’s Russell’s blog post on the matter:

My New Job

Exciting times!

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Dell shareholders Carl Icahn and Southeastern Asset Management have teamed up to propose an alternative offer to founder Michael Dell’s $24.4 billion leveraged buyout deal.

According to correspondence obtained by the Wall Street Journal, Icahn and Southeastern say they would give Dell shareholders the option to continue holding stock in the company and take an additional $12 a share in cash or stock.

Southeastern is Dell’s largest shareholder with a 8.5 percent stake. Icahn and Southeastern currently hold a combined 13 percent of Dell’s stock, while Michael Dell and his partners hold about 16 percent.

Carl Icahn has sought to overturn Michael Dell’s bid to take the company private since March. The activist investor, who owns a $1 billion stake in Dell, originally said he was open to a partnership with Blackstone Group after the private equity firm made its own separate bid for the PC maker. Blackstone Group backed away from its offers last month, however, citing Dell’s “deteriorating” business. Dell’s operating margins and sales have been hurt as demand for PCs drop.

Michael Dell and Silver Lake agreed in February to buy out shareholders at $13.65 a share. Icahn and Southeastern are among several major investors who say that Michael Dell and Silver Lake’s offer undervalues the company.

In the letter seen by WSJ, Icahn and Southeastern also brought up the possibility of replacing Michael Dell and other members of Dell’s board and management.

“You now have the opportunity to ameliorate the damage we believe you have caused to Dell and its shareholders by following the fair and reasonable path set forth in this letter,” wrote Icahn and Southeastern president G. Staley Cates.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Most people may not yet be using smartphones to pay for goods when they are out shopping, but that doesn’t mean that they are not glued to their handsets anyway. Some research out today from Google indicates that among smartphone owners, some 79% can be classified as “mobile shoppers,” using their devices for some aspect of the shopping experience, from finding store locations through to finding goods. On top of that, among those who use smartphones for any kind of shopping or browsing, some 84% do so in physical stores. And when it comes to investing in experiences that consumers like, retailers should stick to mobile web sites: 65% of consumers prefer these to apps.

This means that while we are still slowly inching towards for one of the holy grails of mobile commerce — using devices for actual transactions at the point of sale — there are still plenty of retail opportunities to snag people along the way.

“Some stores promote their expanded inventory online or implement a price match guarantee to retain savings-hungry shoppers. Others are putting smartphones to use with QR codes that share more information about products, or apps with store maps and real-time inventory,” writes Adam Grunewald, Mobile Marketing Manager for Google, in a blog post. “Whatever tactics marketers choose, it’s clear that smartphones are changing the in-store experience, and that winning the key decision moments at the physical shelves mean owning the digital shelves too.”

And while Google didn’t spell this out, this research also speaks to how Google appears to be spending less time these days pushing its own mobile wallet solutions, and more time presenting itself as an enabler of more holistic mobile shopping experiences.

Working with retail research group M.A.R.C. Research, the Google Shopper Council surveyed some 1,500 consumers who indicated that they use their smartphones for some form of shopping activity. Apart from finding that the vast majority of them use the devices in stores, they found the average time spent on shopping-related activities devices was around 15 minutes. Within that, the most popular service was not so much shopping, as it was shopping around: some 53% of respondents said that they used their devices for price comparison searches. The second-most popular service was closely related: it was looking for offers and promotions (39%). After that it was store practicalities — finding store locations (36%) and opening hours (35%).

Google and M.A.R.C. also looked into how users were using handsets in the lead up to going to stores. As you would expect, some of those practicalities around store logistics are more popular at that time. (These results also closely mirror some of the predictions that Google made about how mobile shopping was likely to play out in the months ahead.)

In reality, retailers potentially are caught between a rock and a hard place when it comes to mobile commerce. Short of them gaining the expertise and making the investment to capitalize on this themselves, there are a number of third parties tackling the opportunity of targeting shoppers who use mobile devices, and capitalizing on it. Startups like Shopkick, which in January of this year told me it was already profitable, has built a business partnering with major retailers like Best Buy and Target to offer users deals on goods while they are in store, with the offers pushed to them just as they are in the vicinity of the products. Shopkick says that usage of its app contributed to some $200 million in sales in 2012.

On the other hand, there are others that are actually seizing the opportunity afforded by smartphone usage to offer users cheaper alternatives that can be found via e-commerce channels. When Amazon launched its price check app in 2011 — a way for shoppers to quickly look up items just before buying them in store to see if they can find cheaper alternatives online (and on Amazon) — Forbes noted that it “may be evil, but it’s the future.”

The Google research seems to indicate that there is a clear opportunity to target avid smartphone users, as well as to encourage people to use their smartphones more: in general people using their mobile devices for shopping turn out to be bigger shoppers in general, with those buying health and beauty products increasing their median “basket size” the most, by some 50%. (Incidentally, Google doesn’t give any breakdowns between how males and females fare in these categories.)

In the wider world, apps have come to dominate how many interface with their mobile devices, but interestingly when it comes to retailers, mobile web experiences appear to be preferable to consumers. This may be because it is far more likely that a user will just want to look up information about something quickly rather than take the time to download an app in order to obtain information. Unlike Instagram, e-mail or your favorite game, it may be less likely that you will be returning to a retailer’s app on a regular basis enough to merit parking it on your handset.

Some of the research seems too directly self-serving to Google’s own interests — for example the stat that some 82% of mobile shoppers use mobile search to help make purchase decisions. But on the whole some interesting insights into the ever-growing connection between our smartphones and our wallets. The full research report can be found here.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

A funny thing has happened in tech in recent years. It used to be that you could expect a venture-backed company to file for an IPO soon after a few rounds of funding — after, say, its Series C or Series D raise. But now we’re seeing companies’ venture capital investments go well into the hundreds of millions, and valuations cross over into the 10-figure range, with no S-1 filing in sight. Sequoia Capital, for instance, is said to have a dozen portfolio companies with valuations of more than $1 billion who are still private entities.

So when we had the opportunity to sit down with Sequoia’s Roelof Botha backstage at Disrupt NY this week, we asked him what his perspective is on this trend and why Sequoia is so patient regarding the IPO route.

We also talked about where the PayPal Mafia for the current generation of techies might be forming, how “brain drains” can lead to the next wave of innovation, and more. Check it all out in the video above.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

While Foursquare has been the most hyped location startup out of New York, there is actually another startup that is growing a real business from serving merchants with about 150,000 locations globally.

Yext has quietly grown to 200 employees through a platform that makes it easy for brands and small businesses to manage their location data across more than 50 search engines, mapping companies and on Facebook. They’ve raised more than $65 million to date after spinning out and selling an older pay-per-call business to IAC, in favor of going after this opportunity.

CEO Howard Lerman thinks of his company as the “quiet location giant,” which could eventually become one of the New York tech scene’s serious IPO candidates.

They’re making their connection to the Facebook platform even more seamless today with the launch of Yext Sync. Through a mobile app, businesses can manage their Facebook Pages, whether they have one or one thousand of them. It’s designed so that a local employee at one of a franchise’s hundreds or thousands of locations can update the page with real-time content like photos or status updates.

“If a Starbucks barista is interacting with customers every day, why can’t they manage the local Facebook Page?” said Yext CEO Howard Lerman. He said that Facebook is now a growing source of local search; according to a study from Neustar, Facebook has about 13 percent of local searches now.

The app they’ve built, called Yext Sync, kind of feels like any other social networking app where you can just add photos or updates to a stream (which ends up being the Facebook page). Facebook actually has its own Pages Manager App, but it isn’t multi-platform, Lerman says.

“When a business or brand posts into Yext, it appears not just in Facebook, but also, optionally on our network of 50 sites,” he explained. “So, post once, and it updates more than 50 platforms with one touch. This is better than updating each platform individually.”

Yext is looking to have 300,000 locations on its platform by next year. They have a subscription model with tiers that range from $149 a year to $499, depending on the number of sites a business wants to manage.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

I’m pretty much out of superlatives when writing about Dylan Collins’ latest venture.

Box of Awesome, which we previously described as a “free Birchbox for kids“, has acquired Swapit, the site that lets kids and teens trade unwanted items for stuff they do want and operates an accompanying ad network with a reach of 7.3 million. And with it comes a change of name. The newly formed company, which Collins says is now the leading kids and teens discovery platform in the UK, is to be called SuperAwesome.

That’s right, just when you think it can’t get any more ____________ [INSERT SUPERLATIVE].

The terms of the deal remains undisclosed, though I understand it was for stock not cash and that Swapit’s 9 person team will be joining the newly-formed company, including Tom Impallomeni as COO and Lee Veitch as VP Sales.

Box of Awesome launched back in February as a way to solve the discovery problem faced by physical and digital products targeting the 8-14 year-old kids market. It consists of a bi-monthly box delivered in the post to subscribers, stuffed full of games, music, books and other kid-friendly stuff. The draw for brands who pay for space in each Box of Awesome is the opportunity to be discovered by influencers in that hard to reach demographic — and to get valuable feedback from the mandatory surveys the kids take if they want to receive the next box.

The following month, the UK startup launched a version targeting girls, cleverly named OMG!, and there’s also a digital-only version to keep kids happy while they sit it out on the waiting list.

Meanwhile, Swapit has been around for a lot longer. Founded in 2001, it has three legs to its business. First is the online swapping and trading community for kids and teenagers. On the site, members earn virtual currency called “swapits” for every item they trade in, which they then use to bid on items they do want. But here’s the clincher: They can also earn “swapits” from leading brands and organisations for various activities. This includes mini-games, competitions and taking surveys. Swapits can also be used to bid on brand-promoted items. All of which makes sense from a SuperAwesome point of view.

In addition, Swapit operates an extensive ad network targeting kids, and has a research arm, too. Both also of value to the “kids discovery” proposition offered by the new company.

“Our vision is to create the next generation discovery platform for the kids and teens market,” says Collins in an email. “This generation of kids is enormously disruptive: they exist on multiple platforms and locations. And this maps exactly to how we’re building our company. As well as being experts in understanding kids and teens, Swapit has always shared this hybrid view which is why we realised there was a genuine match here.”

Collins also reckons that by combining forces, SuperAwesome has a reach of about 65% of the UK kids/teens market.

In a statement, Tom Impallomeni, CEO of Swapit, adds: “With SuperAwesome we’ve created the biggest kids and teens discovery platform in the UK which is safe, compliant and effective. I think our awesome customers, who include the likes of Warner Bros, Topps, Activision and Random House (amongst many others) are testament to this. For many brands, we are already a required part of their marketing mix.”

Article courtesy of TechCrunch