Good news, everyone! Well, everyone who’s trying to raise capital in New York, at least.

SoftBank Capital, the investment arm of Japanese mega-carrier Softbank Corp., has just announced that they’ve raised $50 million that they plan to invest entirely into early-stage New York startups.

This new New York fund will be headed by SoftBank Capital General Partner Jordy Levy, with the funds coming from the State Of New York itself, in hopes that it’ll boost the startup ecosystem there. The one main rule of this new fund is that any company that gets investment from this fund has to call New York home — in fact, it sounds like they’ll mostly be focusing right on the core, New York City.

This is actually the third super-focused chunk of funding that SoftBank has raised this year alone. Back in February, they raised a $250M fund focused on helping established tech startups break into Asia. In April, Yahoo! Japan gave them another $20M to do the same specifically for Japan.

We spoke to Levy a bit about the investment, who tells us that this is “drop down” fund — which, in less fancy speak, mostly means that it’s a subsidiary of their bigger funding effort, and that they’re able to both back investments from the other SoftBank funds as well as invest on their own.

For those keeping track, Softbank has actually already had a few big wins come out of New York. Of the New York companies in their portfolio, Buddy Media sold to Salesforce for around $800M, OMGPOP was acquired by Zynga for $180M, Huffington Post went to AOL for $315 million, and Hyperpublic got snatched up by Groupon.

To date, Softbank Capital tells us that they have 32 active investments in New York.

[NYC Photo Credit: Randy Lemoine on Flickr]

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

It’s no secret that the amount of time that tech companies are spending in Washington, D.C., is at a high. And money spent on lobbying has also been reaching peaks for a number of well-known technology giants, including Facebook. In the first quarter of 2013, Facebook spent $2.45 million on lobbying efforts, a 277 percent increase from $650,000 a year earlier. In the fourth quarter of 2012, Facebook spent $1.4 million on lobbying, so this is a big jump both on a quarterly and yearly basis.

So what did Facebook spend on this quarter? International regulation of the Internet and freedom of expression; privacy and security policies and the education of these policies; education of online advertising; immigration reform; cyber security and data security; and discussions on tax issues and stock options.

It’s also worth noting that Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and a number of other tech all-stars recently co-founded a political advocacy and lobbying group designed to promote policies that will keep the American workforce competitive. The first item on the agenda for the group is pushing comprehensive immigration reform, but it will also be focusing its efforts on education reform and scientific research.

After hitting highs in lobbying spending in 2012, Google cut its first-quarter lobbying spending by 33 percent to $3.35 million year-over-year (Google spent $5.03 million on lobbying in the first quarter of 2012). The search giant’s spending was flat from quarter to quarter, with Google spending the exact same amount on lobbying in Q4 of 2012. Google scored a huge victory in February when the Federal Trade Commission closed its antitrust investigation, and many say that Google escaped lightly because of its increased presence and lobbying in D.C.

This quarter, Google spent money lobbying on issues of regulation of online advertising, patent reform and intellectual property enforcement; privacy and data security issues; renewable energy policy; online freedom of expression; health information technology and privacy; cyber security; immigration and job creation; openness and competition in online services, math, science and technology education; international tax reform; the benefits of cloud computing for small businesses; broadband adoption and open Internet access; and freedom of expression and intellectual property in international trade agreements.

And it looks like Facebook’s not the only company taking a page out of the Google lobbying playbook. According to Consumer Watchdog.org, a number of other tech giants also increased spending on lobbying efforts. Microsoft spent $2.53 million in the quarter, which is a 41 percent increase from $1.79 million in 2012. Amazon spent $859,831, a 32 percent increase from $650,000 in 2012. Apple spent $720,000, a 44 percent increase from $500,000 in 2012. Oracle spent $1.37 million, a 25 percent increase from 1.1 million in 2012.

Photo Credit: Flickr/Cliff1066.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

So, you’ve built yourself a nice little product. Maybe you’ve raised a small friends-and-family round; maybe you’re still bootstrappin’ on your own. Either way, now you’re looking to raise at least a million dollars to help with the next steps.

While there’s no perfect formula for stuff like this, these stats from AngelList’s Ash Fontana are a pretty good indication of the metrics you should be aiming for.

As part of a presentation at a startup gathering in Santiago, Chile this evening, Ash presented a slide outlining some ballpark metrics that startups should aim for before swoopin’ in for a big first round:

[Photo Credit: César Salazar of 500Startups]

As a Venture Hacker at AngelList, Ash’s job involves poring over tons of deals to try and work out exactly what makes a good deal go down. In a conversation I had with Ash earlier, he asked me to note that these numbers are just his rough estimates based on this insight; they’re not crunched directly from AngelList’s database.

The bulk of the slide is pretty self-explanatory — just consider each bullet point a sort of theoretical entry bar for companies looking to raise a $1M+ round in a given category.

If you’re a social company, you’d do well to have at least 100,000 downloads and/or signups before going after your million dollar round. If you’re running a marketplace or e-commerce company, you should be aiming for around $50k in revenue each month. If you’re going after the enterprise, you’ll want at least 1,000 paid seats at $10 per seat per month (or the equivalent for your pricing model); if you’re focused on big enterprise, you should lock down at least two huge (pilot) contracts.

You may note that “Product” and “Team” are crossed off at the top of the slide. This is from earlier in the presentation, when Ash reaffirmed just how important traction seems to be. Assuming that we’re talking about an average team with an average product (that is, unless your team has a very well-proven entrepreneur or two on its roster, or you’ve built some truly hardcore, one-of-a-kind tech,) traction is everything.

These numbers, of course, aren’t concrete. In fact, they’re very much ballpark figures. You shouldn’t expect to hit your 100,000th download and suddenly have every VC in the valley bangin’ on your door. If you’re able to get your stats up in these ranges and can score yourself some meetings, however, you probably won’t have too much trouble sealin’ the deal.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Botnets. To security researchers, they’re like digital Hydra. For each vicious head they lop off, another two explode from the stump.

Just a month ago, Microsoft and Symantec announced that they’d manage to take down the massive Bamital botnet, which is said to have been fakin’ clicks to the tune of around a million bucks a year. This new guy that just popped up? Six million. Per month.

Spider.io, a security research/traffic analysis firm out of London, says they’ve been on this botnet’s trail since December of 2012. Dubbing it “Chameleon” (because of the many ways it hides), they’ve shared a whole stack of stats regarding this nasty thing’s behavior:

• “Chameleon” appears to have around 120,000 computers under its control
• It seems to only target Windows PCs
• Unlike many (most) botnets before it, Chameleon is faking clicks to graphic/Flash ads — not just text ads.
• The botnet appears to fake around 9 billion ad impressions per month, clicking through these ads with an easy-to-overlook rate of about 0.02%
• About 95% of the infected PCs are residential systems (Read: Your grandma’s old Dell.)
• The botnet is pulling down about 9 billion ad views per month. At an estimated rate of $0.69 per thousand views, that’s just over $6 million paid out for views without any actual eyeballs behind them.

As if the insanely high numbers weren’t enough, Chameleon also packs quite a few tricks up its sleeve to make it hard to detect/fight. It’s constantly moving the mouse around the page whenever the bot is surfing sans driver, which helps it sneak by any fraud-detection system that’s on the lookout for suspiciously robotic movements. It’s constantly running multiple concurrent sessions per visitor, and it’ll automatically reboot itself anytime once its slave sessions crash. Guh.

According to Spider.io, Chameleon seems to be primarily focusing its trickery on 202 different websites. Which 202 websites? They don’t say — presumably because it implies that any one or all of those websites might be in on it, when that’s really just not the case. Any one who’s set to profit from this (or, hell, anyone who just wanted to flex their tech muscles and write a sophisticated botnet) could have put it together.

On the upside, Spider.io has managed to pin down a list of what they say is 5,000 of the most active infected computers. On the downside, that’s.. you know, 5,000 out of 120,000 and counting. SAVE US, SYMANTEC.

[Photo Credit: D. Richard Hipp on Flickr under creative commons]

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

When you’re using Google+ Hangouts to broadcast, say, a live concert, there hasn’t been a way to make it full-screen for your wonderful viewers. Basically, it would show a big window with you in it, along with a smaller window under it. A full-screen option has been a long-requested feature, and the Hangouts team announced today that this has been added due to popular demand, much like the recent pan and zoom feature for photos.

Hangouts On Air take your live streaming Hangout and push it to an embeddable YouTube player, which records for later viewing as well. If you’re a band, a teacher or any type of performer, you’ll be happy to know that your one-camera show will now have a gorgeous viewing option.

Here’s the before and after, as shared by Google’s Dori Storbeck:

This feature is now the default. It’s a pretty important one to have for professional musicians or news organizations, as the original display was kind of, well, amateur. Attracting these types of users helps Google build out a social platform that integrates with all of its products, as Hangouts On Air demonstrates by working quite nicely with YouTube. When you think about it, the service takes a lot of the hard work out of shooting live video, recording it and then sharing it to places like YouTube. It’s done seamlessly.

Hangouts have been the breakout feature of Google’s social suite, Google+, since its launch. As we noted before, it uses extremely complex technology to stitch participants together into one chat, with seamless camera switching. It’s still easy to use, though, which is the magic.

If you have more than one participant, you can still go full screen by using Google’s Cameraman app to put the main speaker in the background.

Incremental changes, small tweaks, and improvements: This is the Google way.

[Photo Credit: Flickr]

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

We’re seeing chatter on Twitter that Instagram photos are not showing up in Twitter streams anymore. This is obviously interesting considering Instagram’s recent moves to remove support for Twitter cards last week. We’ve reached out to both Facebook and Twitter for confirmation.

Basically, when users push an Instagram photo to Twitter, instead of a cropped photo, there is just a white space in the Tweet, and a link to the web-version of the photo on Instagram. Here’s another example.

Last week, Facebook-owned Instagram decided to turn off support for Twitter Card functionality for its photos. Basically, you would no longer see the full images; rather, you’d see a cropped version.

Instagram co-founder Kevin Systrom said at LeWeb that this was done to drive more traffic to the web experience for Instagram. Instagram recently revamped its entire web presence and wants to create more engagement on its web platform.

Of course, this latest issue could be some sort of temporary glitch, or an issue with Twitter Cards. On Friday, we started seeing full Instagram photos back in Twitter streams, but this was a regression. And some users are reporting the ability to see Instagram photos in Twitter streams.

As our own Michael Arrington wrote last week, the move itself is not good for users in the long run.

Adding more fuel to this fire, Twitter is reportedly planning to build Instagram-like photo filters into a new version of its mobile app.

We’ll update the post when we hear back from Facebook and Twitter.

Photo Credit/Mike Isaac

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

I’ve been using Twitter for just about six years now, someone on Twitter informed me. Naturally. There are quite a few things that I’ve enjoyed about the service over the years, including the ability to connect with people all over the world in real-time.

But do you know what I appreciate about Twitter the most? Ushering in the notion of “brevity” for the entire Internets. Not sure what it means? Check it:

I tend to talk a lot, yes I’m a rambler. When I’m super passionate about something I immediately want to talk to whomever is around me about it. It doesn’t mean that they’re interested, it just means that I’m excited. When I use Twitter, I can say random stuff, poignant things or anything in between and sometimes I get a response. It’s like…magic.

The real reason why I get responses to things I say on Twitter is that the service forced me to introduce brevity into my arsenal. Yes, the fantastic world of keeping things short and compact, allowing people to let it run through their brain quickly and fire out a response if they like. Some people haven’t gotten the knack of the whole Twitter thing yet, linking to longer blog posts all of the time or simply using it to spit out links or images. That’s cool, but I feel like it’s missing the true spirit of Twitter.

I tend to get upset when people build things to take you off of networks, be it cross-posting from Facebook or linking for the sake of linking. I like Twitter the best when everything is contained right in my little stream, ready for me to interact with. I can favorite something, reply, retweet, view an image or a video and interact rapidly.

Brevity makes all of that happen.

One Hundred-Forty

The 140 character “restriction” was originally introduced because that’s how long a text message generally is. Well, 160 characters, but 140 after all of the extra username junk. I remember way back when six years ago, people complained that 140 characters was simply not enough to make their thoughts heard. This was of course folks just fighting back to save what they’re used to and comfortable with.

Email made people gabby. The fact that you could write an email as long as a book, people go ahead and ramble and ramble, just like I do in real life. It’s horrible. But what I’ve noticed since the launch of services like Twitter and Facebook status updates, people are starting to communicate in a more compact and efficient way. All of the wasted crap is dropped to the side.

Brevity is winning.

That doesn’t mean that there isn’t a place for long conversations, because that’s when creativity and love comes out in us. I love sitting down at a bar or coffee shop with a startup founder and listening to their story. However, when someone randomly pitches me via email, I can’t stand thirty paragraphs. Twitter has taught me to be concise and to value the very few characters I have at my disposal. My own emails have definitely gotten shorter.

Remember, on Twitter, you don’t have to tweet to get a lot out of using it.

Offline

Twitter has actually affected how I communicate offline as well. For example, I’ll tell someone about something I’m interested in, but I’ll preface it with “If you’re not into it, just let me know. It won’t hurt my feelings.” By being more thoughtful with their time in this way, I save both of us from an awkward long yap-session that I’m known for.

The moment that I truly understood Twitter was when my friend in Philadelphia Alex Hillman sent out the fact that he had an extra ticket to see Foo Fighters on Twitter. I saw it as I was about to get on a train and hopped right off. We enjoyed the show together.

That efficient communication gave us a bunch of time to talk about technology, music and life. I thank Twitter for that, and for Alex’s brevity. And yes, this post was ironic.

(TL:DR Twitter makes me talk less, listen more and it works.)

[Photo Credit: Flickr]

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

We know that Facebook is in full gear when it comes to monetization. It was obvious the second that the company announced its “Gifts” offering, which lets you send a physical or virtual item to your buddies. It’s kind of cool, and the first gift I’ve ordered is in the mail.

One of the things that I enjoy doing the most on Facebook is saying “Happy Birthday!” to someone on their wall. Facebook had made this a super simple process by adding a quick link on your Newsfeed that said “Write on their Timeline.” Well, that easy shortcut is gone now, and “Give them a gift” has replaced it.

I don’t like it:

Of course I want to get my close friends a gift, but not before I actually say “Happy Birthday” to them. For me, communication is at the core of Facebook’s offerings, and dropping a middle step to communication by way of selling things kind of ruins that spirit.

The “Write on Timeline” option isn’t completely gone, mind you, but it certainly has been degraded from the Newsfeed experience:

Our own Josh Constine reached out to Facebook about this, and got in touch with Lee Linden, CEO of Karma and head of Facebook Gifts. Here’s what he was told:

If you hover over you can always choose to write on someone’s timeline with a little link.

Josh dug deeper and asked Linden if he thought this new change would reduce the number of birthday wall posts people get and Linden replied “I don’t think so.”

I’m not sure that I agree with that, and this shift certainly isn’t the end of the world. It just shows that Facebook is charting a new path to monetization, and is willing to creation friction for the communication flow that we’re used to.

This isn’t the first time that Facebook has tinkered with birthdays, as Josh reminds me. The site used to show upcoming birthdays, then only today’s, which hasn’t really impacted Birthdayness as far as number of interactions. At one point they were even hidden.

Celebrating Birthdays is a Facebook tradition. As Josh points out:

Birthday wall posts are possibly the longest-standing and most iconic emergent behavior on Facebook. Since the early days, Facebook showed whose birthday it was on the home page, and people spontaneously started leaving wall posts ranging from a standard “Happy Birthday” to more personalized messages. It’s become something of a social contract, where it’s rude to not post to a close friend’s wall on their birthday. It’s also a gauge of influence, with beloved people getting more wall posts than jerks.

I just want to say Happy Birthday, man.

[Photo Credit: Flickr]

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Ok, folks, dust off your old web browsers, because Myspace is teasing a brand new design! Yes, the Justin Timberlake-backed whatever-it-is-now has slapped a new coat of paint on something that has already been sold and pushed to the side of the road.

Here’s a video demo of what to expect, since you clearly log in daily just to see what’s new:

It looks like Pinterest. Ugh.

It’s not that I’m not supportive of iteration, a great comeback story or people in general, it’s that this ship has sailed. More than once. And far, far away.

Getting people to try new things is super difficult, but getting people to circle back to a dead wagon is nearly impossible. For reasons.

My good friend Harrison Weber from The Next Web calls it “beautiful”, but Harrison is about 14 years old, so he has forgotten everything that we’ve been through with good old Tom and Myspace. (UPDATE: I was told by Harrison that he designed pages for Myspace back in the day. I’m sorry to hear that, but this brand/idea/whatever is crapola. Also, he’s still probably 14.)

“Pretty things” don’t win. Facebook is ugly, has 950M users. Twitter? 140M and boring, design wise, for the most part. It’s content that wins.

As a journalist, I see tons of beautiful things. Beautiful isn’t what makes a product, it’s the team, the focus and the potential for something great. This thing? Ugh. I don’t care if a rainbow Unicorn giving out free money starts using the site heavily, I have zero interest.

[Photo Credit: Flickr]

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

I’m not a fan of pitting two or more companies against one another and calling “war”, but the reality is that there’s such a thing as competition and advantage in any marketplace. One of the hottest verticals of interest as of late is transportation. I’m ready to buy a Lit Motors car that we saw at Disrupt, and I’ve used Uber since it launched.

One of the things that I experienced this past week was a ride in one of those pink-mustached Lyft cars. In case you haven’t heard, Lyft has a platform and service that allows regular vetted folks with a car become your personal driver. It sounds like Uber, but up until now, Uber has focused on sending you a professional driver in a fancy town car. It’s awesome, but hear me out on some things.

If we’ve learned anything on the Internet, we know that the companies who can nail customer service and experience win the day. Take a look at Amazon and Zappos, now one in the same, those companies focus on creating a warm environment with their customer service staff and sites, which makes you ready to spend money. It’s not by accident, this is a focus for these brands.

I’ve only had one or two bad experiences with Uber, but for the most part, the drivers have been nothing but professional and courteous. I thought that would win the day until I rode in a Lyft yesterday.

Here’s the difference between the two companies:

Uber has to make drivers be nice folks, and Lyft has nice folks that they empower to become drivers.

Advantage? Lyft.

During our ride, we talked to the fellow who gave us a customary Lyft-esque fist-pound when we got into his car. I asked him how Lyft was treating him and he told me that he quit a job as a miner because this income and opportunity was something he enjoyed more.

Yup, nobody made him a driver. It’s not a “job” for him, it’s a way to make money doing something he likes. He liked talking to us, and not just because we write for TechCrunch. The man truly enjoyed interacting with people. Sadly, most of the conversations that I have with Uber drivers consist of where I’m going and how the weather has been.

But that’s ok, it’s not Uber’s thing to give me someone to chat with, that would be asking too much.

This is a true advantage for Lyft, though, and with Uber saying that it will get into the “ride-sharing” business, I wonder if it’s too late. And yes, Lyft is way cheaper, too.

For the same reason that Airbnb is better than staying in a hotel, in my opinion, Lyft creates a familiar experience with a regular nice person. I don’t like having my bed cleaned up and my towels changed. I like staying in a home, or a friend’s house, when I’m out on the road.

I like the idea of a “friend” coming to pick me up at the airport, too. That friend, for the time being, will be pinged via the Lyft app for me in the near-future.

PS: Notice that I didn’t even mention a taxi cab…they’re so ten years ago.

[Photo Credit: Flickr]

Article courtesy of TechCrunch