We knew CrunchBase was big. We knew because there are 2 million people using the startup database each month. We knew because more than 120k people have contributed 1.6MM data points on companies, entrepreneurs, fundings, exits and more. What we didn’t know, however, was what the investment community thinks about CrunchBase.

To answer that question, we spent many weeks visiting venture and angel firms and talking about data and CrunchBase. We learned that most are investing a lot in data and analytics in order to find good companies, ideas, and people. Everyone agreed that CrunchBase is an important source of that information, but we also heard something else: CrunchBase needs to evolve fast to keep pace with these new demands. In particular, Crunchbase needs to be more timely, accurate, and detailed.

That’s a big challenge, and today at TechCrunch Disrupt NYC, we are annoucing one key initiative to get us there: the CrunchBase Venture Program. We designed the venture program to appeal to venture firms that want to improve CrunchBase’s data set, and we’ve found just about universal willngness to participate.

Under the program, members agree to work with the CrunchBase team to get public information on their portfolio companies — including funding updates, staffing changes, product launches, and acquisitions — into CrunchBase in an accurate and timely way. What our partners get in return is better access to the CrunchBase team and API. But more importantly, what our partners and everyone in the startup world will see is steadily improving data in CrunchBase. That’s a big deal to investors researching new companies and founders, entrepreneurs looking for investors and talent, business development folks looking for partners, and virtually anyone trying to understand the constant change in the technology world.

Today we are also announcing 11 firms that helped shape the CrunchBase Venture Program and are our launch partners. There will be many more to come, but today we are very pleased to announce these partners who will work with us to make CrunchBase’s data nothing less than awesome.

The venture program is one of many major initiatives we have underway to improve CrunchBase. It’s a big responsibility. To learn more and join the program, visit the CrunchBase website.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Boundary‘s application performance monitoring technology is now integrated into Splunk‘s enterprise platform, providing a window into apps that increasingly are distributed across cloud and on-premise virtualized environments.

Boundary provides a snapshot every second of the app’s topology. That data now appears in Splunk Enterprise, which collects and indexes machine data such as logs, events and performance metrics from all tiers of the technology stack.

By combining the two apps, IT personnel can determine the health of the app and how it is behaving across a distributed environment, which increasingly common in today’s market. The app can be viewed in a virtualized or cloud environment, reflecting the need to monitor apps as data flows on and off premise. The new integration is available through Splunk’s community website Splunkbase.

Here’s how it works. Splunk real-time alerts are tagged as annotations in Boundary’s time-series graphs. Customers can then correlate alerts against application flow and performance data.

Gary Read, CEO at Boundary, said in an interview that it is becoming increasingly complex to determine the root cause for why an app is not performing well. “Brownouts” are increasingly becoming an issue. Apps are so distributed that they never actually go down. But they can get sluggish. The challenge is finding out why they are not performing well. To do that IT has to get a holistic view of the app. That means knowing how the app is doing on a contextual basis.

It’s this problem that is leading to a new breed of performance stacks that is managed virtually through providers such as Splunk, Boundary or New Relic, which looks at an app’s code. These are different from the stacks that IT would once build on-premise to manage client/server applications with software from companies such as CA or HP.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

MkII Ventures’ Ron Palmeri joined us in the TechCrunch TV studio for our Ask A VC series.

We chatted about the rise of rise of company builders, or “studios,” in the technology and VC world. Palmeri was one of the first participants in this movement while he was a managing director at Minor Ventures (GrandCentral (now Google Voice), OpenDNS and Scout Labs (acquired by Lithium). And now Palmeri is continuing this with MkII Ventures. The firm has incubated Prism Skylabs, and is in the process of launching a new stealth startup, which Palmeri reveals in the video above.

Tune in for more!

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Yahoo! has acquired Jybe, the company announced today via a post to its corporate blog. Jybe is a startup founded in 2011 by three ex-Yahoo! employees, including Arnab Bhattacharjee, who was VP of Yahoo! Search Technology when he departed the company. The startup’s mission was to help connect people to the physical world around them, a mission for which it released an iPhone app late last year to help connect people with recommendations about things to do, stuff to eat, books to read and movies to watch.

I spoke with Jybe co-founder Arnab Bhattacharjee about the move, and he said that it basically stemmed from a desire on the part of Yahoo! to get into personalized recommendations in a big way.

“Basically we’ve learned a lot about how to use search scale techniques, both on the data science side but also large-scale engineering, and apply it to signals to really do personalization well,” he said. “We really want to take those technologies and apply that across most of the Yahoo! properties.”

The standalone Jybe app will be closed down as part of the acquisition, which seems mostly to be about getting the five member team (all ex-Yahoo!) back in the Yahoo! fold, but Bhattacharjee said that “the technology will live on inside Yahoo! as one of the core pieces that is used to do personalization for various things.”

Finally, he said that personalized delivery of various sorts of media will be “very important” to Yahoo! in the future, which is in part why the Jybe team got so excited about the chance to rejoin the company. Bhattacharjee couldn’t share any information about deal size with TechCrunch, and a request for that information from Yahoo! was met with a statement that the company is “not disclosing the purchase price or other terms of the deal.”

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

After a brief hiatus for SXSW, Ask A VC is back this week with MkII Ventures’ Ron Palmeri. As you may remember, you can submit questions for our guest either in the comments or here and we’ll ask them during the show.

Over the past few years there’s been a rise of company builders, or “studios,” in the technology and VC world. Palmeri was one of the first participants in this movement while he was a managing director at Minor Ventures. He was responsible for hits like GrandCentral (now Google Voice), OpenDNS and Scout Labs (acquired by Lithium).

Last year, Palmeri debuted his new firm, MkII Ventures, which has developed Prism Skylabs, a cloud service that takes unused images from surveillance videos and turns them into actionable information for store owners. Prism Skylabs is also backed by Andreessen Horowitz, SV Angel, and CrunchFund.

We’ll be talking about why parallel entrepreneurship works, what Palmeri is incubating next and more.

Please send us your questions for Palmeri here or put them in the comments below!

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

MYO, the gesture control armband from Y Combinator-backed Waterloo startup Thalmic Labs, has managed to rack up over 10,000 pre-orders over the course of its first two days of pre-order availability. At $149 a pop, that means the young company has already managed to secure around $1.5 million in gross revenue, so long as they actually ship hardware.

The MYO, as Ryan pointed out on Monday, is a wearable control device for smartphones, PCs and other electronics that uses lower-power Bluetooth 4.0 to connect, which also has a boatload of sensors on board to help it detect electrical activity in arm and hand muscles to detect movements at the earliest possible stage. It’s the latest in a series of devices trying to make sci-fi type interfaces a reality, and could be among the most accurate yet.

Thalmic Labs co-founder and CEO Stephen Lake explained in an interview that while the team expected some kind of response to its launch, there was no way they could have anticipated quite this level of interest.

“I think we knew that there was going to be a lot of people interested in the technology, since it’s such a cool technology, and there are so many good potential applications for it,” he said. “We’re not completely surprised, but the amount of attention it’s got is more than anyone could’ve expected.”

Lake had some ideas about why people are so interested in traditional modes of interaction for computers. He said he believes people are looking around for something different, and that MYO is a case of the “right technology at the right time.”

“There’s a lot happening right now with the form factor and how we’re connected to technology,” he said. “A lot of the technology that’s coming out, and Google Glass is a perfect example in the realm of wearable technology, is really going to change not just how we input information into the computer, but just how we interact with technology, and make our devices an extension of ourselves instead of an outside thing you’re interacting with.”

The interest from consumers eager to try out the MYO has likewise attracted a lot of interest from distributors and retail partners, Lake said. His inbox has been flooded with “thousands” of emails from companies wanting to be a distribution partner for MYO all over the world. He wasn’t at liberty to share any details on early stage discussions at this point, but it seems reasonable to expect the MYO will get a splashy launch when it’s ready to come to market.

Developer interest has also grown by leaps and bounds thanks to the initial response from buyers and media, Lake said. Building out that community is key, just as it is for other innovative input and interaction hardware like the Leap Motion Controller, and Lake says Thalmic will have a dedicated developer website with support forums and more information up and running as soon as possible to help deal with the influx of attention.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Analytics company KISSMetrics has acquired SourceNinja, a startup offering to help companies manage security flaws in their open source libraries.

KISSmetrics co-founder and head of product Hiten Shah made it sound like a pretty standard talent acquisition. Shah’s company won’t be using the Source Ninja technology, but it’s bringing on the startup’s two founders (and only team members) on-board — Brett Hardin will become a senior web application engineer and Matt Stump will become an infrastructure engineer.

The SourceNinja team was incubated at AngelPad, and that’s where Shah said he and his co-founder Neil Patel met them.

“The SourceNinja team contacted us for a potential partnership and were exciting about utilizing their technology within the KISSmetrics product,” Shah said (via email). “After a few conversations we decided it would make more sense to acquire them instead of just licensing the technology. … That technology can’t directly plugin to KISSmetrics, but, the experience Matt and Brett have gained from building the technology directly helps our use cases.”

The financial terms of the deal aren’t being disclosed. Shah said this is the company’s first acquisition.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Austin Meyer, creator of the popular and ultra-realistic flight sim, X-Plane, is facing a potentially destructive lawsuit by an East Texas patent troll, Uniloc. Meyer, who has worked on the simulator since 1995, isn’t dealing with a claim against his simulator or the game mechanics within. Instead, he’s being sued for using a simple copy-protection system found in almost all Android programs.

You can read the whole story here but last September Meyer received word that he was being sued for failing to license a patent for “code for verifying the license data stored on the licensing medium by communicating with a registration authority having verification data.” Writes Meyer:

Speaking for Laminar Research, we used only the technology that was provided to us by Google for copy protection in our Android App ‘X-Plane’… we used exactly the copy protection Google gave us! And, of course, this is what Google provides to everyone else that is making a game for Android!

Mojang received a similar complaint from Uniloc for using a central licensing server in Minecraft. Meyer claims that Google, for their part, will not assist in the lawsuit.

Thus far Meyer has created a petition on Whitehouse.gov and is working on fighting the suit. He said he will not settle. He is also looking for donations to cover court costs.

The creator of the original patent, Ric Richardson, wrote regarding the Minecraft lawsuit:

And yet, the technology in question is a system that stops people from pirating their software and helps them make money. Well if you think it’s so unfair, don’t use the tech. Do something else. No one is forcing you to use the technology.

It amazes me that people complain about paying a royalty for a technology that stops up to a third of a software companies sales from being lost to piracy. What are you saying? “Its all right to steal from Uniloc as long as it helps stop pirates stealing from me?”

Richardson claims to no longer be a principal at the company and is only a non-majority shareholder.

It’s painfully obvious that anyone using even the most basic of certificate-based copy protection may deal with Uniloc in the future. Whatever you think about patent trolls and their manifold evils, it will be a hard road for Meyer and his fellow litigants in fighting down this claim.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Finding parking is always a chore, but new tools and companies are making it easier than ever to find a place to leave your vehicle. One startup focused on this problem, Streetline, is getting a big boost for its real-time parking data through a partnership with Cisco that could help get its parking sensors deployed in more cities around the country.

Streetline’s system for parking info works by combining sensors that are installed next to parking spaces with a mobile app to provide true, real-time availability of parking throughout a city. The sensors are installed in the sidewalk next to parking spaces throughout a city and can determine whether a car is present based on magnetometers and light sensitivity. They operate on a mobile mesh network that then relays signals back to the cloud, and then make that information available through the Streetline Parker app.

That’s where Cisco comes in: The censors are tied into local municipal Wi-Fi networks provided through Cisco network equipment. The equipment provider is working with cities and universities on deploying networks that solve a range of problems. Deploying citywide Wi-Fi is one piece, but those networks are also increasingly being used for applications like Streetline’s parking use case.

Once the sensors have been installed and connected to the network, users will be able to find parking spots in real-time, thanks to Streetline’s Parker app. The app helps users find street parking and garage parking nearby, when applicable.

The first two cities to benefit from the partnership are San Mateo and San Carlos, Calif., but there are likely more cities to come. Streetline has deployments in 25 to 30 different municipalities and universities around the country, charging a monthly fee for use of its technology. But since Cisco has existing relationships with a number of different cities, we could see the technology integration being introduced in other places where its equipment has been deployed.

Last year Streetline raised $15 million from Fontinalis Partners, RockPort Capital Partners, and Sutter Hill Ventures.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

The Electronic Frontier Foundation is looking forward to a future when 3D printing, thanks to “creative” patents, could no longer be free. Because the technology is so nascent, patenting parts of the process or renewing expiring patents could prevent incremental improvement of the technology out of fear or patent infringement. The EFF wants to head this off at the pass.

Their proposal is fairly simple but will take a lot of work. In short, they want people to supply prior art when it comes to 3D printing design and manufacture. They will troll the patent records for potential problems and then, once they’ve gathered things up, they’ll need your help figuring out what can’t be patented.

You can help the EFF by heading over here and emailing them if you’ve found particular applications that must be challenged.

Nascent technology often suffers because of early and egregious patenting. The Internet, in many ways, has been hampered by people creating obvious patents (and the USPTO not being able to check them) in the course of building out infrastructure and applications. Let’s not let that happen here. With your help, we can all be like 3D-printed Success Kid.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch