The Startup Battlefield competition at our Disrupt events is like a mini startup school. The dozens of chosen startups that go through the Battlefield training process end up with solid presentation skills, hard-earned pitching prowess and newfound courage.

And also, lots of public visibility, which is great for getting users, hiring top employees and luring clients and investors.

The Battlefield has gone so well that our current staff has been getting overwhelmed by the record number of applications. We need help, so we’re creating a new position called the Battlefield Editor.

We’re looking for a bright, talented person to help manage the entire process, from bringing in applicants to picking the 30 finalists and getting them ready for the Disrupt stages in San Francisco, New York and, this year’s addition, Berlin. In this position, you’ll also get to give out a huge trophy and a big cardboard check for $50,000 to one lucky startup, as they debut to the media and the investor world. Battlefield winners and finalists have included huge success stories like Mint and Yammer among others.

Are you already in the Startup Whisperer role at a popular accelerator and think you can take your show on the road? Read TC every day, just finished your MBA and want a more meaningful job than McKinsey? Can you find the Next Big Thing? Send your resume and a letter explaining your interest here.

Job Description

TechCrunch is looking for someone to oversee the Startup Battlefield process in all its phases — including applicant recruitment, applicant review and final selection (working under the direction of TC’s co-editors), finalist training and rehearsals, and finally stage management at Disrupt. The role’s title is Battlefield Editor. In addition to those responsibilities, the role will focus on expanding our network of angels, incubators, VCs and accelerators to recruit a stronger pool of Battlefield applicants, strengthening our rehearsal program, and developing the Battlefield franchise, both online and offline, for applicants and alums.

The role requires a strong writer who can post on TechCrunch about Battlefield matters, as well as manage many threads of communication with the many parties who make up the Battlefield. The core of the job is a strong ability to work with relatively green, unlaunched startups and prepare them to present brilliantly on the TC Disrupt stage before a group of highly distinguished judges. That preparation process takes enormous focus and commitment. Beyond that core requirement, the role will also work to help expand the Battlefield franchise in a variety of ways, including improved ties with Battlefield alums.

Candidates should have deep experience in the Silicon Valley startup world and direct experience working with startups and investors to help shape new ideas and prepare them to pitch investors. They should possess very strong personal and written communication skills, outstanding organizational skills, a high capacity for detail work, and a very patient and winning attitude.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Like you and a lot of other people in the Valley, I read the blogs snarking on the Valley, because nothing is funnier than making fun of people just like us, technology elite who download hot apps, ringtones and backgrounds all day and all night – all on our separate phones reserved for daytime and nighttime.

It makes you feel like you’re part of a community instead of a tiny speck of dust in the vast cosmos with no reason for existing beyond randomness.

The best one lately is a Tumblr called Jesus Christ Silicon Valley (note the double meaning), and its most dazzling, scathing piece is this relatively mild one about how silly and vain people’s avatar profile pictures are. Yesterday’s piece on the Tumblr acquisition was also pretty good.

You’ve probably heard the news. No, you’ve definitely heard the news, because it’s Monday and you’ve been reading tech blogs all day, slowly burning your investors’ money. “Keeping tabs on the industry,” of course.

It’s funny because it’s true. Because I am curious and because I like the writing when it’s not too ragey, I dug around a little for the blog’s author. Not too hard obviously (this is TechCrunch after all) — just on Twitter and Quora. The Quora question, which is followed by Keith Rabois, postulates that Jesus is one of us. Just a slob like one of us.

“The secret lies within the pages of the blog itself. Someone so pathologically clever with hints of self-deprecation would hide where least expected: among the very targets referenced.”

Hmm … Perhaps he or she is one of the people lambasted in the profile picture post? That must be it! Who though? Hunter Walk? Tony Conrad? Sheryl Sandberg?

And today, I got a response to my Twitter request for an email: An email sent “To the Direction of Alexia Tsotsis” from “jesus94306@gmail.com.”

From: Jesus Christ

Subject: Greetings, To the Direction of Alexia Tsotsis.

Date: May 21, 2013 9:30:28 PM PDT

To: alexia@techcrunch.com

I am Ivan Moltobov, student in Ukraine.

I am big admiring fan of Tech Valley, and writing about love for Tech Valley on the Jesus Christ Silicon Valley tumblr blogspot by wordpress. You like? What is meaning of word “cock?” Sound funny, Americans seem to enjoy. I write much cock words, get many pageviews, exchange for Bitcoin, buy yak.

American dream to own many yaks.

(I searched and TechCrunch has yet to ‘print’ the phrase “cunty little cumdrops.” What’s with that?!)

Well, now we have “printed” that phrase, Ivan. Moltobov is unGoogleable, in case anyone was about to.

[Image via]

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Last week, representatives of many of the world’s leading cities – including London, Boston, Mexico City, Barcelona and Christchurch – came to San Francisco to learn from Silicon Valley entrepreneurs about how to make their cities smarter. One of the people behind this LLGA Cities Summit was the Silicon Valley entrepreneur Peter Hirshberg, formerly the chairman of Technorati and now one of the world’s leading pioneers of smart cities.

Citing innovative urban data startups like MotionLoft and QuickPay, Hirshberg believes there are now huge opportunities for entrepreneurs with products that can make a city smarter. We are just at the beginning of this thing, he told me, before explaining that the biggest entrepreneurial opportunities lie in the development of crime, healthcare and traffic data – particularly in terms of making this data “predictive”.

But smart cities are about more than just making money, Hirshberg believes. In the Sixties being a citizen meant we protested, he told me, while today the good citizen builds APIs that make a city more habitable. And that’s why, he insists, we have to make what he calls “smart architectural decisions” to enable the right level of anonymity in the 21st century city. Otherwise, he warns, the smart city of the future will be too smart about all of us, thereby destroying the privacy of its citizens.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, the twin Harvard graduates who famously sparred with Mark Zuckerberg over the founding of Facebook and are now working as tech investors through Winklevoss Capital, are part of the growing group of venture capitalists who have taken a keen interest in Bitcoins. Last month, it was revealed that they personally own roughly one percent of the currency, having purchased the equivalent of some $11 million. And now, the Winklevosses tell TechCrunch they have invested in Bitcoin in another meaningful way — by leading a funding round for a startup in the space.

BitInstant, a New York City based startup that operates an online platform for buying and selling Bitcoins, has raised $1.5 million in a seed funding round led by Winklevoss Capital with the participation of other strategic investors including money services veteran David Azar. The investment was closed this past fall, but the Winklevosses are just now publicly announcing it in the lead-up to the Bitcoin Foundation’s 2013 Conference being held in Silicon Valley this weekend.

BitInstant, which has a full-time staff of 16 led by CEO Charlie Shrem, has emerged as a key player in the nascent Bitcoin market: The company already processes approximately 30 percent of the money going into and out of Bitcoin, and last month alone facilitated 30,000 transactions, the Winklevosses said in a phone call this week. The funding is meant to allow the company to further scale up its staff and product as it angles to become the go-to site for Bitcoin transfers.

The Winklevosses say they were attracted to invest in BitInstant in large part because of its leadership. CEO Shrem is the vice chairman of the Bitcoin Foundation, and CIO Alex Waters previously worked with the core developers on the original Satoshi Bitcoin client. “Charlie has been in the space for a very long time, and he has an impeccable reputation among Bitcoiners. He knows everyone in the space and everyone in the space knows him,” Cameron Winklevoss said. “One of the most exciting things about people who are into Bitcoin it’s that they’re a really passionate community, and Charlie is a passionate entrepreneur. He would be in that category of someone who lives, breathes, and sleeps Bitcoin.”

Speaking of that community, the world of Bitcoiners does indeed have an interesting edge to it: There’s an underground vibe that seems like it would contrast with the more traditional East Coast prep style of the Winklevosses. In our phone call, Cameron and Tyler said that they’re intrigued by the current feel of the Bitcoin space — and its potential for becoming a bit more structured in the coming years.

“We’re definitely pretty fascinated by it. The classic issue with Bitcoin is that it’s very early days,” Tyler said. “The entrepreneurs in the space are very impressive, but it takes really two areas of expertise: One is technology, and the second is understanding money services and regulation and all those things that are important for sustainability. Most entrepreneurs and companies we see in the space have the tech down, and they’re super strong there, but in terms of being buttoned up and looking like an average bank, it’s hard to couple both of them together. We think that BitInstant and Charlie do a fantastic job of doing both.”

This marks the third big-name funding news for Bitcoin startups in just a few days. Earlier this week Adam Draper announced that half of the companies in his next Boost.vc accelerator program will be focused on bitcoin, and yesterday Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund led a $2 million investment in Bitcoin processing startup BitPay. It will be interesting to see how the Bitcoin space in general evolves as even more buttoned-up types and traditional money managers get involved.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

After more than a decade, digital media businesses are finally starting to come into their own, as advertising and subscription dollars are moving from traditional media online. With that in mind, there’s a new fund being formed to make investments in digital media companies, from legal and consulting firm Manatt, Phelps & Phillips, LLP. And that fund will be led by a digital media veteran, Sorenson Media CEO Peter Csathy.

Manatt is a global legal and consulting practice which has been around since 1965. The firm already has a number of clients in media, including big names like BMG Rights Management and DirecTV. Through its venture fund, the firm has made more than 90 investments, including a few investments in digital media startups like Pinterest and Etsy.

But it’s now interested in getting deeper into digital media investment, and brought on Csathy to lead the charge in that area. It’s also formed a fund from partners within the firm and LPs to focus on investments in digital media, entertainment, and advertising. The digital media program will be chaired by T. Hale Boggs, who founded the firm’s Silicon Valley office in 1998 and its San Francisco office in 2007.

For his part, Csathy has a background in the digital media world, after a long stint at Sorenson Media. That company provides encoding tools and a platform for video distribution for media companies and online publishers. Prior to that, he was CEO of digital video startup SightSpeed, which was acquired by Logitech. As part of the transition, he’ll remain a board member at Sorenson Media.

Csathy was hired in part due to his entrepreneurial and operations background, which will be vital as he evaluates potential investments for the firm. He’ll spend most of his time working out of the firm’s Los Angeles office, though he’ll also be spending ample time in San Francisco and New York City. The firm also looks to hook into some of the various accelerators to work with companies that participate in them.

Through the new digital media group, Csathy expects to make about 15 investments a year, writing checks anywhere between $15,000 and $600,000, depending on the opportunity. While he doesn’t expect to lead many investments, Csathy and Manatt will be looking to work with various other venture firms on their deals.

Good luck to ‘em! We need more well-funded online video and social TV startups, after all.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

If you can’t program, the future’s looking bleaker and bleaker. And if you can, learning to manage other code monkeys could get you promoted. Office-as-a-service provider RocketSpace’s new RocketU is a tech professional education program aimed to aid engineers no matter where they are in their career. RocketU offers rookies and programming veterans alike a way to get an edge in the job market.

There’s been a bit of a hubbub lately that there is actually no shortage of tech talent in America. “For every two students that U.S. colleges graduate with STEM [science, technology, engineering, and math] degrees, only one is hired into a STEM job. In computer and information science and in engineering, U.S. colleges graduate 50 percent more students than are hired into those fields each year; of the computer science graduates not entering the IT workforce, 32 percent say it is because IT jobs are unavailable.”

Yes, the United States is graduating a ton of engineers. But startups and tech giants don’t want just any engineers, they want 10X code masters and visionary innovators. That can take more than a degree from a well-known university, and a lot more than some random Codecademy tutorials. It can take hardcore training in the latest programming languages, and understanding of how to cobble code together into great products.

That’s where RocketU comes in.

The program comes from RocketSpace, a plug-and-play office space in San Francisco that houses 130 startups and the 600 employees. It handles leases, bandwidth, firewalls, and security so founders can concentrate on their companies. With room to house classes, startups to introduce graduates to, and a well-known name in Silicon Valley, Rocket U could be a smart extension of its business.

Develop Yourself

RocketU will offer a variety of courses, ranging from immersive 10-week developer bootcamps, to 3-week deep dives on advanced scripting languages and architecture, to 3-5 day professional development classes for techies. RocketU classes will be held at the RocketSpace campus with experienced teachers, and most coursework will happen there so you don’t have to worry too much about homework. The classes are on a pay-as-you-go structure, but require admission through a serious application process.

Michelle Berry, the SVP of RocketU, tells me “the main differentiators are that we’re offering programs beyond the initial developer bootcamp, to make sure we’re providing skills throughout the career life-cycle.” She explains that long-time programmers can choose between training as expert individual contributors or as managers. After graduating, RocketU students get help with placement in tech jobs, including the startups RocketSpace houses.

RocketU’s first full-length class will be a $10,000 10-week dev from July 22 to September 27th, and will focus on Python, Django, JavaScript, HTML5, CSS3, WebSocket, and jQuery. It will also teach databases, servers, team coding, and interview skills. The pre-requisite for admission beyond its application process (which closes June 9th) is a computer science or equivalent degree – or – two years of coding experience – or – completion of RocketU’s two-week Coding & Web Fundamentals crash course that runs just before the bootcamp.

RocketU will be competing with other educational programs like the well-established Dev Bootcamp, plus The Flatiron School, The Starter League, and an array of online learning tutorials. To win out, it may need name-brand professors, and an image that’s more independent than RocketSpace. Right now it’s website looks more like an off-shoot than a serious learning institution.

Still, the climate is right for RocketU. To land a job at a high-potential startup or found one of your own, you can’t be rusty. You could work a job you’re not thrilled about to slowly siphon off skills, but it might be worth paying to get them taught to you directly. You want to be a ninja? Hit the dojo.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Walmart, via its Silicon Valley innovation lab @WalmartLabs, announced today the acquisition of two startups: cloud computing newcomer OneOps and the software development shop Tasty Labs, from Delicious founder Joshua Schachter. Tasty Labs offered two services Jig.com and Human.io – both domains which are now redirecting to Walmart’s acquisition announcement, along with that of their corporate parent.

Walmart declined to disclose deal terms.

OneOps developed a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) capability that Walmart explains will enable it to “significantly accelerate” its PaaS and Private Cloud Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) strategies. The company offered developer tools built from the ground up for those who host their applications on cloud services like Amazon’s Web Services, for example, as well as Rackspace and HP Cloud. Developers could publish to any cloud, and seamlessly port their apps elsewhere as needed, eliminating lock-in.

The company offered a library of predefined building blocks to quickly bootstrap an application, which could be visually assembled in its interface. A variety of categories such as content management (ex. Drupal, WordPress), e-commerce (ex. Magento), enterprise portals (ex. Liferay), and more were available.

OneOps was named one of 12 Hot Cloud Computing Companies Worth Watching by Network World, and was a finalist at the GigaOM LaunchPad Competition.

“Walmart is looking to create a best-in-class global eCommerce platform to power ‘anytime, anywhere’ shopping for our customers. The Platform team has been working tirelessly to build the tools to help our developers deliver big site changes faster,” explains Walmart Public Relations Director Ravi Jariwala in a statement. “We are innovating on a very large scale, and OneOps brings us tools that will allow us to move even faster toward a global platform.”

Meanwhile, Tasty Labs was founded in 2010 by a team which includes ex-Mozillian Nick Nguyen, HousingMaps creator Paul Rademacher, and Joshua Schachter, who was best known for founding of of “web 2.0″‘s finest: the social bookmarking service Delicious. The company had raised $3 million in Series A funding from Union Square Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz, and other unnamed angel investors.

The startup launched its first product Jig.com in 2011, which was described as a “marketplace for needs” – meaning users would post “I need…” and others would respond to help them. The following year, it debuted Human.io, a micro-task service operating in the space general space. This application targeted businesses with small requests – like wanting to know how many people were in line at a store, for example, or getting people to take short surveys on their phone.

Schachter once described Human.io as a way to “build tiny little microapps and distribute them to a mobile client.” He said it was a combination of things the team loved: “Mobile, Mechanical Turk, MapReduce, and Twilio.”

Going forward, Tasty Labs staff will join Walmart’s Product and Mobile teams, Walmart says, in an effort to build out the company’s e-commerce platform.

Walmart Labs is known for snapping up early stage startups to test new ideas in e-commerce some of which eventually get folded into the company’s e-commerce site and other online operations. In the past, it has acquired startups like Kosmix, OneRiot, Grabble, Small Society, and others. Kosmix’s Social Genome technology was used in an earlier @WalmartLabs creation known as “Shopycat,” a social-gifting platform that debuted just before the 2011 holiday season, and Kosmix later formed the basis of a new search engine named “Polaris” which now powers Walmart.com.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Movable Ink, a New York City-based company whose technology lets clients create more relevant email marketing campaigns, has taken on $11 million in a fresh round of funding.

The funding, which serves as Movable Ink’s Series B, was led by Intel Capital with the participation of previous investors Contour Venture Partners, Metamorphic Ventures, ff Ventures, Silicon Valley Bank, and Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati. This round was significantly more sizable than the $1.3 million Series A it launched with back in 2011, bringing Movable Ink’s total VC investment to $12.3 million.

Movable Ink’s CEO Vivek Sharma said in an interview this week that the company now has 119 brands including American Eagle Outfitters, Barclays, Verizon, RadioShack and others using its technology to power targeted email marketing campaigns. Movable Ink’s platform purportedly lets companies run campaigns with more up-to-the-minute, relevant, and personalized information than typical email newsletter services. “Most email campaigns are run on a cycle of two to three months from conception to production. It’s very different from social companies like Facebook, which are pushing live code every day,” Sharma said. Movable Ink says its platform brings that same kind of speedy “agile development” process that many web developers enjoy to email marketers.

The company has grown to a full-time staff of 24 and expects to end the year with 55 or 60 employees, he said. Up until this new funding round, Movable Ink’s growth has been funded by revenue, which has grown from a paltry $200 the month of its launch in October 2011, to six figures in Q1 2012, and accelerated 100 percent in each quarter since then.

So why take on outside money when organic growth is plugging along so well? Sharma says that the new funding will be used to help scale up international operations — the company just hired former Experian executive Matthew Potter to head up growth in the UK and EMEA regions — and grow Movable Ink’s partner network with more traditional email service providers.

“It’s a new market, so one of the challenges is that we have had to convince the world why they need live content in their email,” Sharma says. “We couldn’t just be a small business service.” Now, Movable Ink has the kind of funding it needs to go big.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

This October we’re looking forward to bringing you a full-blown, all-hands-on-deck, TechCrunch Disrupt Europe in Berlin, the only Disrupt conference outside North America. This will feature the biggest stars of Silicon Valley meeting with the biggest stars of the European and emerging markets tech scenes. Meanwhile, we’ve begun working with local partners to bring you country-based events. These include TechCrunch Italy in September and TechCrunch Moscow in December. Here’s the low-down on TechCrunch Italy in Rome, 26th and 27th September (tickets here).

Co-organized with Populis, one of Europe’s leading digital media groups, TechCrunch Italy, in its second year, will gather some of the most recognised leaders and innovators of the technology and media industries in Italy, Europe and the US to give a unique insight into the big changes and trends happening in the world right now. Themes for this year include those close to the heart of Italy, such as design, fashion, tourism, automotive and will also cover Italy can re-design the way it does business to benefit startups.

This year confirmed speakers include Renaud Visage, co-founder of eventbrite, Damien Patton, founder of banjo and John Underkoffler, founder of oblong technologies and creator of the interface behind the film Minority Report.

It will be held at the Maxxi Museum, Rome. Last year featured 1,400 participants and 55 of Italy’s hottest startups, alongside 55 international speakers including Mitchell Baker (founder, Mozilla), Alec Ross (senior advisor for innovation to Hilary Clinton), ZarynDentzel (founder, tuenti), Riccardo Zacconi (founder, king.com),Corrado Passera (Italian Economic Minister), Michel Martone (Vicewelfare minister, italy), Fadi Bashira, (founder, Blackbox) and many more.

All the information you need is here.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Jeet Singh and Joe Chung have already had a nice exit, taking their enterprise software company Art Technology Group public (it was acquired by Oracle for $1 billion back in 2010). Now they’re hoping to turn the act of building successful startups into a “repeatable process,” through their new firm Redstar ventures.

Singh and Chung, along with their third co-founder Matt Beecher, said they became interested in angel investing a few years ago, but at the same time they were turned off by the randomness and risk of the traditional model. So they developed their own approach, a “venture foundry,” where the firm focuses on a few broad themes, develops companies internally, and then spins them out if they seem to be getting traction. Here’s how the model is described on the Redstar website:

We identify significant trends and growing markets, and develop potential products and services for those markets. We match very successful mentors with young and experienced entrepreneurs and co-found companies with them. Together, we staff these teams, evaluate the market, build and test the product or service, establish partnerships, identify sources of investment, and launch the enterprise. We also fund these firms through their seed-stages.

What are those themes? The firm has three so far, namely underemployment, the “grey market,” and the present/future of media.

Apparently Redstar has actually been around for a couple of years, but didn’t really publicize its existence — it’s only starting now because it has launched its first company, social shopping startup LoopIt (I’m assuming that’s one for the grey market category). The goal is to launch about three companies per year, Beecher said.

“We might spend seven, eight, nine months on the concept before we launch it,” he added.
“The core tenet of our business is knowing which [concepts to focus on] better and earlier through our network and research.”

Redstar describes this as a “top-down” approach to building companies. That makes it sound like the firm is going against much of the received wisdom in Silicon Valley, where entrepreneurs are encouraged to launch their products as soon as possible and adapt based on customer feedback, and where team and execution are valued over ideas.

Chung said he definitely expects companies to adapt and change, but he said that too many startups overvalue execution: “In the early days of ATG, there were so many company- killing decisions that we had to undo, but we were able to get away with it. … One of the great fallacies is that startups are really good at executing.”

Not that Redstar is relying entirely on its thematic approach to guide its investments. It’s also a question of building the team — the partners said they might be excited about a given idea but decline to pursue it if they can’t find the right executive to lead the company.

The firm aims to make investments of $500,000 to $1 million. Ultimately, Singh said the partners are hoping that half their companies will be successful. That would be pretty remarkable if it happened, but he noted that with a higher success rate, Redstar doesn’t need “billion dollar successes” to pay off.

“We don’t have to swing for the fences,” Singh said. “We’re trying to build good, solid companies that eventually sell at a reasonable valuation.”

REdstar itself is self-funded so far. The partners said they’re looking to raise money this year, but it might be structured less as a traditional venture fund and more as an equity investment in Redstar.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch