The 15 Startups That La...

Disrupt NYC day two has just wrapped up. During the conference today, Michael Arrington demanded to know from Ron Conway when he was going to run for Mayor of San Francisco (he kept saying he would “never” ), our very own Josh Constine grilled Tim Armstrong with questions about AOL, layoffs, which publication he likes more: Huffington Post or TechCrunch (he said “both”), and we watched 15 more amazing startups battle it out for the ultimate Disrupt prize — the Disrupt Cup and $50,000. Starting tomorrow at 3:30pm ET we will have our Startup Battlefield Disrupt finals. Yesterday, we wrote detailed articles with pictures and pitches from all of the startups who presented . Below are the ones who were featured today. Out of these 30 companies, both from yesterday and today, five will be chosen to fight it out for the ultimate prize. We will have an all-star panel of judges tomorrow for the finals and things will probably get intense; people always get a little crazy at the finals, but as you can imagine, it’s a blast to watch. So, take your time in reviewing all of the stellar startups below. Compared to the brilliant ones yesterday , which startup do you think will make it to the finals? Going further, any guesses on who you think will win it all? Tune in tomorrow for the results! Session 4: Disrupting Local SpotlessCity SpotlessCity helps local dry cleaners connect with customers in a brand new way and lets people finally get their clothes cleaned in the same convenient way they already handle all of their other chores – online. Mirth Mirth is a principled objection to the frenzy of details. It’s a card-linked loyalty experience for the regulars of business with character. SnipSnap SnipSnap is the first mobile application to let you scan, save, and redeem printed coupons on your smartphone. It was featured by Apple on the App Store front page and rose to a top-50 ranking after going live. Centzy Compare services in your area by price, rating, hours, and more. We use paid crowdsourcing to gather comprehensive data from every local business, including the 75% of them that don’t post their information anywhere else online. Cardify Unlock VIP rewards and perks at your favorite places when you pay with a credit card that’s connected to Cardify…. throw away your punch cards and keep that phone in your pocket. Session 5: Disrupting Collaboration Vinlymint Vinlymint is a real-time creation web application that easily fits into your existing production methods, allows you to store and manage projects from a single place and collaborate with anyone, anytime and anywhere. Postwire Postwire enables you to make a private webpage for each client. You can collect videos, photos, web links, and documents and share them on each client’s private page. Sunglass Sunglass is a cloud-based platform that enables designers to collaboratively build tomorrow’s products, buildings and cities, democratizing access to 3D content across formats. Talkdesk Talkdesk allows any company to create a call center in 5 minutes – all in the browser. Apptegic Apptegic helps online businesses keep and up-sell their existing customers. Use Apptegic’s online service to understand each of your customer’s visit patterns, actions, and business metrics and to respond appropriately in real-time. Session 6: Disrupting Identity Networks Hmmm Hmmm empowers you to express and share your life without inhibitions. You can tailor your online-identity like you do in the real-world, as you interact and selectively share with people from every walk of life. Social Stock Social Stock is a stock market of places and people, where every place and person has a stock price based on their social interactions and enables trading social shares in places and people. About Last Night About Last Night is your social network for nightlife. It’s about the party last night, the concert last night, or the date last night. Do you want to know where the hot party is happening, where your friends are, or what is happening at your favorite hangout? Do you want to know who is performing at your favorite club, or learn about special deals and offers? Are you visiting from out-of-town and want to know where to go? About Last Night is for you. Hownow Hownow is a mobile app that allows users to post geo-fenced messages in order to have semi-anonymous, locally relevant conversations. Buyou (Startup Alley Audience Choice Winner) Buyou is a free online mall that aggregates various brands into one beautiful, easy to use interface. And while it’s great that the app begins learning your taste through your likes and dislikes, it’s even better that it relays that information back to its brand partners. This means that a retailer like Express will begin to learn the clothes you like and more asily target clothing you may enjoy to you. All in all, it was a very fun day. And will be even more fun tomorrow. See you then.

Huffington Post Teams w...

A couple of days ago, I said that the best way to keep traffic flowing to your website was to create solid usable and / or enjoyable content . Whether you’re selling a product, service or yourself, a static page of information won’t bring customers back over and over again. Content does that. Articles, short posts, videos, how-tos, tip sheets, photos, user submissions, games, stories, interviews — these are things customers come back for and search engine spiders, literally, eat them up. The Huffington Post knows this, so they’re expanding their content reach by reaching out to brands who want to become publishers. According to AdAge, Huffington Post is currently working with a major consumer goods advertisers to create an online lifestyle publication. The site will include articles curated from HuffPo’s extensive archive as well as new works created specifically to support the brand. And since HuffPo is an extension of AOL, it’s likely that these new sites will carry ads from their platform so it’s a big win for everyone involved. It’s also a win for consumers because good information is good information, it doesn’t matter if it’s back by a specific brand, newspaper, or a lone opinionated person. How do you get in on this? Easy. Create your own content site. It probably won’t be as big, fancy and well connected as a HuffPo / AOL / Brand collaboration, but it doesn’t have to be. Look at Craigslist.org if you don’t think simple sells. 3 Steps to Creating Your Own Content Site 1. Hire help and pay them. Writers, video makers, graphic artist, find them on Craigslist and pay them something. Seriously. People who are good at what they do get paid to do it. None of this, labor of love or work for credit nonsense. 2. Brainstorm ideas that relate to your brand but aren’t brand specific. For example, a bike store could put together a directory of bike trails, a shoe company can write about celebrity style. Your content must be generic enough to have mass appeal. 3. Post new content regularly. That means at least once a week. Posting new content once every other month or so is a waste of time. To build up readers and to connect with search engines you need to post on a schedule. Once or twice a week is plenty for a branded website. Believe me, unless you have a dedicated content person, even that will be hard to keep up. Creating content is easy at the start. You have lots of ideas and enthusiasm. But creating a content-rich site is a long term project. What you post a year from now has to be as fresh and intriguing as what you post next week. So don’t burn yourself out with a big push at the start. Try a few things and let the audience response be your guide. What are your thoughts on content creation? Fun? Easy? Or last on your list of things to do?

Tim Armstrong — I Love ...

A panel run by TechCrunch’s Josh Constine with with Tim Armstrong, CEO of AOL and Melissa Brenner of the NBA was billed as being about how social advertising is working for those content brands. In the end, we heard a lot more about the future path of AOL and TechCrunch perhaps. But let’s review. Armstrong admitted that AOL was originally built as a portal and on a subscription model but that it needed to head in a content direction. He said the overall premise is that “content is going to be what differentiates platforms” from search and social. AOL “invested early in the curve and deep into content” in order to tie in business models and eventually move into paid content. A social strategy offers the possibility of huge distribution for this content play. But, asked Constine, was there a do-or-die moment regarding portals? Armstrong’s view is that “humans need curated information daily” and that may even mean the old notion of a portal coming back into vogue – something that helps people go about their daily lives. That requires content brands. He admitted that despite having some dissident shareholders that “don’t believe”, in the content strategy, most of AOL’s shareholders do believe in it. But should portals be powered by engineers or one where the brands and the people behind them “leave if they’re not treated right,” asked Constine in a barely veiled reference to Michael Arrington’s controversial departure last year. Armstrong took the diplomatic path. It’s important to “let strong strong brands thrive” he said, and AOL was “becoming a house of strong brands”. But, pushed Constine, why did people leave TechCrunch and Engadget? It was at this point that Armstrong was on the spot to address the issue directly. AOL has focused on letting its “brands have their own voices.” We will check the audio again, but I believe has also added “I don’t think you’ll see AOL play a super heavy role again in those.” So perhaps confirmation that AOL effectively plans to dial down its own brand in favour of pushing its portfolio of individual content brands. He went on. AOL invested in CrunchFund for instance… (yes I believe we’ve heard of that). Armstrong had a chat with Arrington backstage in fact (we’d love to have been a fly on the wall for that one). But AOL is now figuring out the branded content business for the next few decades. But by now Constine was on a roll. What did Tim think about looking “like a dark overlord”? “Did it drive people away?”. Ok… Armstrong came back. It’s about entrepreneurs, he said. Some sell up (to AOL) and leave and some don’t and stay put. His job as CEO is about making those brands thrive, and trying to keep the entrepreneurs involved and engaged. A lot of entrepreneurs have taken on bigger roles inside AOL he said, we presume referring to Arianna Huffington, rather than Michael Arrington. Constine kept on. Did TechCrunch make AOL cool again? Tim: “I think it did, and I hope to keep that atmosphere.” Ok folks, then we were back to talking about the actual topic for the panel… “How is AOL’s ad business going?” “It’s doing well”, said Armstrong. The ad space is getting more data-driven, and he’s placing his bets on Project Devil for instance. He said AOL’s ad network recovered from a double digit decline to double digit growth. AOL is building a CMS into the ad business to let brands be social. Melissa Brenner of the NBA said the NBA is “in the content business” and it’s up to her group to determine the best platforms for that. Social “has a place” said Armstrong, and Facebook has done a great job, but the content business is about allowing users to share. As a Boston Celtics fan, he said because of its online and social strategy the NBA now feels like it’s about a great deal more than just the TV broadcasts and programming. Constine then asked, “Don’t publishers wish they had Facebook’s data?” Brenner pointed out that without social they would not have realised how big NBA was in places like the Philippines, for instance. One thing AOL is doing that’s different to social is tracking offline behaviour. Social networks have a lot of data, but the content business has a lot of data on the migration between channels. So for instance, AOL knows the highest consumption of fashion information is on Saturday morning and Sunday night. That affects how AOL programs content around social. Brenner said that one big thing with social is that when it first appeared it was about real-time updates. As the NBA got deeper into it, they realised fans would be planning what they were watching that evening and used that to suggest NBA programming. Constine asked what what Facebook could do better, such as launch an off-site ad network. Armstrong said he’d seen 40-50 major AOL ad customers recently and social is a “big topic” for advertisers. So there seems like an opportunity to have a second-generation version of Facebook, which might involve an external ad network. Constine asked about blunders in AOL and the NBA’s strategies to date and the answers ranged from the wrong tweet into the wrong channel, and that perhaps some AOL sites were “over-monetized” (read: too many ads). And “sticking social buttons everywhere” is not the way to go, said Armstrong. Finally, Constine went into curve-ball mode and asked Armstrong which he loved more, TechCrunch or the Huffington Post? “I love them both. They are both my children. But they serve different markets. TechCrunch as a brand has a global opportunity to reconnect the future of where technology is going. Technology touches every person, every household and business. I would hope TechCrunch becomes a global tech property with much bigger scale,” said Armstong. He pointed out that former TechCrunch CEO Heather Harde was consulting with the company after some “scuba diving and yoga”. “I think TC is just starting.”

Machinima Gets $35M In ...

After weeks of speculation , online video creator Machinima announced Monday that it has closed a $35 million funding round led by Google, which also included existing investors Redpoint Ventures and MK Capital. The new financing comes as Google’s YouTube has been investing heavily in bringing in all sorts of new original programming. The Machinima network is the largest single page view generator for YouTube, with more than 1.6 billion video views in the month of April. And YouTube is an invaluable partner for Machinima, as it is the company’s primary distribution and monetization platform. With the funding, Machinima says it will invest in content and global sales, as well as international expansion and distribution. For Google, though, it signals another move toward betting on teams that have proven their ability to grow and scale in what used to be the Wild West of online video. Last year, Google acquired Next New Networks and leveraged it to create YouTube Next, a program for helping independent content creators to improve their video production skills, as well as better leveraging social and other channels for grabbing viewers attention. It’s also betting more than $100 million in an effort to fund a whole new group of independent video channels on its platform. As I wrote this morning , the race to add interesting independent content is on for a number of streaming providers, including Netflix, Hulu, AOL, and Yahoo, all of which see an opportunity to grow an audience of young new video viewers without having to go through traditional broadcast or cable TV distribution channels.

Major Steal: King.com P...

King.com , the European-casual-gaming-company-that-could, is cementing its ascendance on the Facebook platform by poaching one of the key producers responsible for EA’s Sims Social and opening a new game development studio in London. The company just hired Catharina Mallet away from EA to lead the new studio, which should have 40 people by year-end (with her departure first being noted by Business Insider last week). King.com, which started in Sweden and hasn’t taken outside funding since raising $43 million seven years ago , is one of two European gaming companies that have made a serious run on the Facebook platform in the last year. While Zynga has seen its revenue growth slow and other longtime Facebook developers like Crowdstar and Funzio have mostly moved onto mobile games, both King.com and Germany’s Wooga have both climbed up the developer leaderboards. King.com has beat out EA and more recently, Wooga, for the #2 spot among game developers in terms of daily active users on Facebook , according to AppData. The number of game sessions has also blown up by tenfold to 3 billion per month, from 300 million a year ago. The company has a long, long history. It’s almost a decade old and started out building casual games for a destination site at King.com (naturally). That made for a decent business that’s been profitable for seven years. But King.com got turbo-charged when it started building Facebook games too. The company’s long history of building for an independent destination site has given it a few competitive advantages. Launching games outside of Facebook ensures that only the very best and most viral games make it onto the platform. “Because we see which games fail outside of Facebook, what we have managed to do is have a hit-proof business on Facebook,” said chief executive officer Riccardo Zacconi . It’s worth noting that Zynga and many other developers like Kixeye are ironically going in the opposite direction by pouring resources into standalone destination sites. The business now has several legs to stand on. It has a destination site for casual games, Facebook games and then mobile titles. Like Zynga, it makes money through virtual currency sales and advertising. But it also has a third revenue model. The company also recently signed a deal with AOL to provide skilled tournament games. Those are games where players have to pay a very small entry cost (like less than $1) and compete with others. This deal is financially material to King.com, although the company won’t say how much the partnership will bring in. All this said, King.com is starting to feel the competitive heat on Facebook. Zynga recently launched Bubble Safari , which looks a lot like Bubble Witch Saga, King.com’s top game on Facebook. “We have the leading bubble shooter on Facebook. While there are a fair number of copycats popping up, we’re pleased with the continued audience engagement that we get with Bubble Witch Saga,” said chief marketing officer Alex Dale . “We think that will improve further when we launch the game on mobile.” Zacconi adds that King.com’s model is more capital efficient than Zynga’s. “For one of their games, they might need 80 people,” he said. “But Bubble Witch Saga had a team of eight. To launch a new game on the web, we need two people.” He also says that the company hasn’t been feeling the effects that other game developers have as Facebook clamped down on viral channels, notifications and requests for games. He says King.com’s K-factor or viral coefficient is roughly 0.8. “For every user we get, we get almost another one for free,” Zacconi said. Keep in mind though, that number is still way down from the heights of 2008 and 2009, when apps ran wild on the Facebook platform. Other social gaming companies, which still have the institutional memory of that era, have had a harder time coping with the Facebook platform’s new realities. When Mallet comes on-board, she’ll be spearheading the development of casual games. Zacconi stresses that King.com is not going into resource management or sim games. Mallet was of the top producers behind Sims Social and she came to EA through the up to $400 million acquisition of social gaming company Playfish. Over the last year, EA’s social gaming push has faced several management changes. After Zynga poached John Schappert to be chief operating officer, Barry Cottle followed him over to spearhead mergers and acquisitions . That made room for Playfish co-founder Kristian Segerstrale to move up in the ranks and become EA’s executive vice president of digital. Another key Playfish executive, John Earner, recently left to be an entrepreneur in residence at Accel Partners .