Uber Launches Its First...

Uber , the private car share service that allows you to summon town cars via an iPhone, has opened up shop in Paris in time for international Internet conference LeWeb . Adding context to the jumpy video of the very first Parisian Uber ride above, Uber CEO Travis Kalanick , who was on my flight from SFO, tells me that there are a few Uber-enabled cars in the city of Light currently, and tomorrow that number will start steadily increasing. I’m still waiting for confirmation of pricing and other details (I’ll update this post as soon as I know). Sure there are already many options for those seeking taxi service within Paris, but Uber, with its appeal to the tech-savvy and fashionable, has a good chance of gaining a foothold in the class-conscious city. “This is going to end the monopoly of the taxis in Paris,” said LeWeb founder Loic LeMeur ,”You will have models here, not like Geeks in San Francisco.” In an effort to preserve today’s Uber supply for customers, Kalanick took a regular taxi from Charles De Gaulle airport. You can find Uber in the App Store here.

CapLinked Partners With...

CapLinked, the LinkedIn-meets-SalesForce for private investing, has landed a significant deal today, helping Microsoft BizSpark startups raise cash via a new capital raising tool. As we’ve written in the past , CapLinked launched to allow entrepreneurs to raise capital and sell or buy assets, manage and contact investor prospects, centralize document flow on a secure platform and connect with new investors, advisors and companies. Investors can use CapLinked to manage deals, build public profiles, leverage LinkedIn contacts and connect with promising startups. Startups enrolled in the Microsoft BizSpark program will have exclusive access to new feature Deal Rocket, which allows them to submit their ‘deal room’ to dozens of angel groups and early stage venture capital funds around the country. Here’s how Deal Rocket works. Companies can create secure, viral deal rooms on CapLinked to manage their capital raise or asset sale. The deals can then be shared with prospective investors and advisors, who can then invite others to view the deal. And companies can submit their deal to over 100 angel groups and venture capitalists pre-aggregated into Deal Rocket for review. As you may know, BizSpark is a Microsoft startup accelerator program that provides fledgling companies with resources such as access to Microsoft software development tools, free or discounted software or cloud services, as well as access to the software giant’s broad partner network and as much marketing visibility as they can give them. For background, CapLinked was founded by former PayPal marketing exec Eric Jackson and funded by a number of well known members of the PayPal mafia. Jackson says over 55,000 individuals and 6,000 companies are currently using the site to manage the private investing process and share $5 billion worth of deals. For now, Deal Rocket is only available only to BizSpark startups, and will soon be available to other CapLinked users in the future. It’s a actually a pretty significant deal for CapLinked considering that there are over 45,000 startups in the CapLinked program. And having Microsoft as a partner isn’t to shabby either. Crunchbase CAPLINKED Company: CAPLINKED Website: http://www.caplinked.com/ Launch Date: 2009 Funding: $1.25M CapLinked is a free online platform for private companies, investors, and their advisors to network, manage a capital raise or asset sale, and exchange updates. CapLinked makes private investment... Learn more Crunchbase MICROSOFT Company: MICROSOFT Website: http://www.microsoft.com Launch Date: 4/4/1974 IPO: 13/3/1986, NASDAQ:MSFT Microsoft, founded in 1975 by Bill Gates and Paul Allen, is a veteran software company, best known for its Microsoft Windows operating system and the Microsoft Office suite of... Learn more

Cloud Solutions Company...

Appistry , a St. Louis, MO-based developer of cloud solutions, has raised $12 million in funding in a Series D round led by private equity firm eXome Capital. Stuart Mill Capital and other private and existing investors also participated. The round, which includes term debt, pushes the total of capital raised by Appistry to over $34 million. Appistry’s flagship CloudIQ Platform applies cloud architectures to ‘big data’ challenges. The solution, which is designed to support data-intensive and analytical applications used by enterprises, basically enables Appistry’s clients to rapidly turn raw data into actionable intelligence. Appistry customers include FedEx, GeoEye, State Street Bank, Lockheed Martin and multiple US government agencies.

With No IPO In Sight, T...

Twitter is once again raising money, this time at a $7 billion valuation, according to Spencer Ante of the Wall Street Journal . That valuation would be almost double the $3.7 billion valuation Twitter got last December when it raised $200 million from Kleiner Perkins and other private investors. But that valuation would put it below the $8 billion to $10 billion takeover talks rumored last February, which Twitter denied . Those takeover rumors were also reported by Spencer Ante. Twitter certainly could raise more money. Many investors would like to own shares, despite the fact that it hasn’t yet found a revenue model to match its technological and cultural impact. Perhaps DST, which was muscled out of the last round by Kleiner, would be interested to take another look. Despite all the IPO activity among Web companies these days, Twitter is not believed to be preparing for an IPO anytime soon. It simply doesn’t have the financials to make that kind of run for the public markets. But with 200 million tweets per day and growing, there’s got to be a business in there somewhere. Right? CrunchBase Information Twitter Information provided by CrunchBase

Third-Party Twitter App...

Any third-party Twitter app developer can currently ask you to authorize software using OAuth under the pretense that they will not be able to access any of your private – both sent and received – messages, while in fact they easily can. TechCrunch was contacted by developer Simon Colijn , who hopes to make as many people aware of this privacy issue – or disaster, if you will – as possible. Colijn created this test application to prove that the anomaly with the authorization process actually exists. You can use a dummy account if you’re not comfortable clicking anything on that page, but I just ran a test with my personal Twitter account. Sure enough, I was shown an authorization screen that explicitly told me that the app would not be able to access my private messages … after which it swiftly did in mere seconds. To be clear, the developer had selected the option ‘Read-only’, which means he wasn’t supposed to be able to fetch (and thus download and store) my direct Twitter messages at all. This obviously gives the term ‘private messages’ a whole new meaning. One Twitter app developer I’ve since spoken to about the privacy issue, Topify.com founder Arik Fraimovich , suspected that what is going on is this: Twitter recently updated its OAuth screens, which are supposed to give users greater transparency about the level of access third-party applications have to their accounts. Fraimovich thinks what happened is that Twitter planned to release the new authentication model (which will limit DM access) on June 1st, and then postponed it to the end of June without fully realizing that the new UI for the OAuth permission screens would already be live. In other words: what you see is not quite what you get. The reason why I think this is in fact a serious privacy fail that shouldn’t be simply swept under the rug: there are currently hundreds of thousands of third-party applications on Twitter, as Twitter itself repeatedly says, and at this point they can all trick you into authorizing their software while you think they will not be able to see your private messages (or do all other sorts of things with them than just view them, like publishing them elsewhere). One developer I know, Mike Robinson , was kind enough to verify the bug a third time just to make sure it exists, creating a test Twitter application that exploited the privacy hole in just a couple of minutes. Think about that. Whether this is indeed a UI screw-up, or a more serious system bug of some sorts, it’s an issue that can affect a lot of people’s privacy. We’ve contacted Twitter about Colijn’s discovery a few hours ago, but haven’t heard back yet (note that it’s early morning in San Francisco). Either way, think twice before you authorize third-party apps on Twitter, check your settings to see which applications can currently access your account, and in general be careful not to share too much private or sensitive information via direct Twitter messages. Related reading: Twitter Revokes Automatic 3rd Party DM Access, Gives Users More Details On App Permissions (May 2011) Latest Twitter Bug: “Misdelivery of Direct Messages” (April 2009) DMFail: Another Reason To Just Not Send Private Messages On Twitter (December 2008) Privacy Disaster At Twitter: Direct Messages Exposed (April 2008) (Image from Flickr user Dan McKay , used with permission) CrunchBase Information Twitter Information provided by CrunchBase