Honestly.com Becomes A ...

Honestly.com, a startup that allowed professionals to submit anonymous reviews of their coworkers, has been pretty quiet for the past couple of years. Turns out that’s because the company has been busy reinventing itself. Today it’s unveiling a new product and a new name — TalentBin . Co-founder Peter Kazanjy says TalentBin addresses one of the big problems with Honestly, namely the lack of content. Rather than relying on users to create all the reviews, TalentBin looks at the content that already exists on the Web — specifically, people’s activity on a variety of social networking sites. Kazanjy calls that activity your “professional exhaust,” and argues that it contains lots of relevant information about your professional interests and accomplishments. So TalentBin aggregates a person’s activity across sites like Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus, Meetup, Quora, Github, Sourceforge, and Bitbucket, then uses that data to create a searchable profile for recruiters. Comparing the product to LinkedIn’s recruiting tools, Kazanjy says, “we’re kind of like that for the rest of the Web.” In other words, recruiters can use TalentBin to take their search beyond LinkedIn, finding new candidates and new information about existing candidates. For example, Kazanjy says he conducted a search for Ruby on Rails in the San Francisco Bay Area, and he found 4,500 matching profiles on LinkedIn, 156 profiles on BranchOut, and 22,000 profiles on TalentBin. He also argues a TalentBin profile can be much richer than what you’d find on LinkedIn or a traditional resume. A profile might just say that someone was an engineer at Company X and then at Company Y, with no additional detail, but TalentBin might show that they’re constantly tweeting and posting on Quora about Ruby and therefore rank them highly in a search for Ruby engineers. And since recruiters theoretically get a better sense of your real interests and passions, that may mean you’re more likely to get approached about jobs that you actually find exciting. For now, TalentBin is focused on technical talent, but Kazanjy says it could expand into other fields where this data is relevant, which he predicts is “any knowledge worker.”  It’s also entirely recruiter-facing for now, meaning that only recruiters see the profiles, but Kazanjy says it might add features that allow people to see and correct their profiles in the future. ( Coderwall is also trying to create an aggregated profile and reputation system for programmers , but rather its model is inverted, starting out as a site for coders then maybe eventually moving into recruiting, and the name, at least, implies that it’s pretty focused on programmers.) Recruiters can access TalentBin via the website, or as a plugin to Human Resources Information Systems, Recruiting CRM programs, or Applicant Tracking Systems. This is actually the company’s second rebranding, because back in 2010 it  changed its name from Unvarnished (at the same time it announced $1.2 million in funding from First Round Capital, Ron Conway’s SV Angel, Charles River Ventures, and others). Hopefully this will be the last. Kazanjy says early signs are positive — even though today is the official relaunch, TalentBin has been in private beta testing for months, and already has 60-plus corporate customers including Intuit, Groupon, and Yahoo.

Enterprise, Video Led T...

Instagram, Schminstagram. While flashy consumer deals keep getting all the headlines, it was actually cloud computing, enterprise and video that fueled the biggest deals of last quarter’s $25.1 billion in mergers and acquisitions, according to top-tier accounting firm Ernst & Young. The total value of all deals fell by 12 percent from the year before while the number of deals was about the same, according to a report the firm published today. While that’s not too huge a drop, the firm attributes it to “ongoing economic uncertainty.” (Thanks Greece.) Quarterly deal volume has apparently reached a plateau after two years of growth and is being restrained by concerns about the macroeconomic climate. If you’re curious what the biggest deals of last quarter were, here are they below. The leaderboard is topped by enterprise deals like  Cisco’s $5 billion agreement to buy NDS Group and Oracle’s $2 billion deal to buy Taleo , which helps companies manage recruiting.  There is also a consumer-facing deal in there with Youku , China’s version of YouTube, merging with its rival Tudou Holdings Ltd. for $1.1 billion in a pending acquisition. Instagram’s $1 billion deal doesn’t count because it happened after the quarter ended. If it was here, it would show up in seventh place. Ernst & Young says there are five megatrends driving deal-making. Basically, they include smart mobility, cloud computing, social networking and “big data” analytics. Shocker. Then there is one extra one, which Ernst calls “blur” or ”convergence, as technology sectors come together and the technology industry enters other industries as enabling innovation.” (Yes, “blur” is a big trend these days. Haven’t you heard?) Cloud computing and software-as-a-service deals had both the biggest number of deals and the biggest transaction sizes. The biggest deal of the quarter looped in both trends. Cisco’s $5 billion deal to get NDS will give the Silicon Valley networking giant a video software and content security solutions provider that’s a backbone of pay TV industry . The Tudou-Youku deal also skews the size of video and online gaming transactions. The Americas led most of the acquisitions, with 75 percent of global deal volume and 87 percent of global deal value. Buyers in Asia also tended to buy targets in other parts of the world. M&A activity dropped off dramatically in Europe thanks to continuing economic malaise there. Joe Steger, who leads global technology industry transaction advisory services, says the overall economic climate will keep M&A activity flat or slow this year. So here are a few more charts from the report: Again, here’s another way to look at how software-as-a-service is leading deals, representing $11.5 billion of all the target companies. Overall, there were were a few really large deals in the $1 billion-plus range that drove overall transactions up. There were also many more deals that didn’t have disclosed prices this quarter. Something that should keep things exciting for the rest of the year is the huge pile of cash the world’s biggest technology companies are accumulating. Ernst & Young estimates that the top 25 tech companies in the world have $668 billion in cash between them, up from $571 billion the year before. (Thanks Apple.) That should give bigger companies room to write checks for interesting targets. Europe actually was a net seller as many U.S. buyers picked up companies from across the pond. NDS, for example, originally was founded in Israel.

Gumroad Gets $7 Million...

Gumroad , the startup that lets individuals receive e-payments through a simple URL link, has received $7 million in new funding led by Silicon Valley venture capital stalwart Kleiner Perkins Caulfield & Byers . The round, which serves as Gumroad’s Series A, brings the startup’s total outside investment to just over $8 million — Gumroad closed on $1.1 million in seed funding back in February , and all those investors also pitched into this round. Kleiner Perkins partner and former Twitter VP of engineering Mike Abbott headed up the funding and will join Gumroad’s board of directors. Gumroad founder and CEO Sahil Lavingia tells me the new funding will be put toward hiring more people to bulk up its current staff of three. “I just really want to build a sustainable company that scales, and I think Kleiner Perkins and Mike [Abbott] just want to help me do that. He really believes in the larger vision.” Small Beginnings, Big Idea That vision is to let people sell anything online as easily as they can share a link to it — independently made music, crafts, writing, whatever — without having to set up an online store. It all began a year ago as a proof-of-concept hack by Lavingia, a 19-year-old college dropout who was a designer on the founding team of Pinterest and has also worked as a designer for Turntable.fm . He showed it off in a post on Hacker News , writing: “Over this past weekend I had the idea to build a sort of link shortener but with a payment system built-in. There have been many times in the past where I wanted to share a link – on Twitter or just through IM with a few friends – but did not want to go through the overhead of setting up a whole store. So I built Gumroad.” Today, Gumroad works worldwide with all major credit cards, and can be used for digital content as well as for physical content, since it lets users collect shipping information if needed. Gumroad takes a 5 percent fee for every payment processed, along with a 25 cent credit card fee. So if an item costs $1, Gumroad takes 30 cents; if an item costs $10, Gumroad takes 75 cents. Lavingia declined to provide specific user numbers, but said that so far, “people from nearly every creative industry has started using the platform. Music, film writing, photography, illustration; all of these industries have started using Gumroad significantly.” Disruption Brings Challenges The idea is that largely because of social networking platforms such as Facebook and Twitter and online media platforms such as YouTube and Flickr , nowadays people can attract followers and fans on their own — they don’t necessarily need to get exposure through old distribution channels (or pay the big commissions those channels typically take.) Gumroad wants to make it just as easy for these people to sell things to their followers as it is to get their attention, and potentially make a living doing so. It’s potentially a hugely disruptive concept, so it’s not too surprising that a big-idea VC like Kleiner Perkins is getting on board. Lavingia tells me that a few copycat apps have emerged in the past year since Gumroad debuted, and he welcomes the competition as being “good for consumers” — but surely this new funding could help the company keep its edge for a while. Of course, anything dealing with payments is also hugely complicated from security and regulatory standpoints, so Gumroad certainly has its work cut out for it in making sure its platform is truly robust enough to go up against the powers-that-be. It’ll be interesting to watch how it puts its funding and new staff to use in the months ahead. Our own Alexia Tsotsis interviewed Lavingia a few months ago on TechCrunch TV, and you can watch that video below:

comScore: Google Sites ...

Online and mobile research company comScore just released its newly rebooted and retooled Mobile Metrix report this morning, which examines mobile media usage across both apps and mobile web browsing. According to the new data, Google sites led as the top property on iOS, Android and RIM devices, reaching 96.9% of the U.S. mobile audience, followed by Facebook, Yahoo sites and Amazon sites. But apps dominated in terms of usage, says comScore, with 4 out of every 5 mobile media minutes spent in apps. As far as which apps led the way, not surprisingly, built-in system apps came out on top, as did Facebook. But Facebook isn’t #1 – depending on the platform, the App Store or the Android Market holds the top spot, followed by either Google Search or Maps. On the iPhone, iTunes was the top app, with 99.9% reach (what, did someone figure out how to delete iTunes off of their iPhone?), and was followed by Google Maps, at 91.2% reach. Facebook, meanwhile, was in the #3 spot, with an 80% reach. On Android, the rankings were a bit different – the Android Market…excuse me, Google Play store…was #1 (93.2% reach), followed by the Google Search app (84.1%), Maps (74.5%), Gmail (71.4%), and then Facebook (68.9%). Clearly, the numbers show that Android users gravitate towards Google’s own branded apps. ComScore also looked at social networking properties by audience size, a measurement determined by both app usage and mobile site visitors. In this case, Facebook was an easy winner, with the average Facebook mobile user engaging for over 7 hours via browser or app in March. Twitter saw 25.6 million mobile users, engaging for nearly 2 hours during the month, but this statistic didn’t include usage by third-party apps (of which there are many), so may not be as accurate. People visiting Twitter on their computers spent only 20.4 minutes on Twitter.com, which comScore says highlights the importance of mobile engagement for brands. However, again, Twitter.com metrics are not the only way to account for Twitter users who engage on a Mac or PC – there are dozens of client applications, available both as desktop applications and those which run in the browser, neither of which were counted here. The newly hot image pinboarding site Pinterest reached 7.5 million smartphone visitors who engaged with the brand for nearly an hour. (And this despite a number of anecdotal and app store review complaints of app bugginess, some of which were only recently addressed by the company through a mobile app update – Imagine what Pinterest could do with a killer app!). Foursquare trailed Pinterest, with 5.5 million mobile visitors engaging at an average of nearly 2.5 hours. And Tumblr reached an audience of nearly 4.5 million who engaged for 68 minutes during the same time. As with anything, methodology is an important consideration here. With the new comScore Mobile Metrix 2.0 reports, the company is bringing its Unified Digital Measurement to smartphone devices, which combines both sever-side and panel data to provide a snapshot of mobile web and app usage on smartphone devices. This is combined with census data to determine that the above metrics apply only to U.S. adults, age 18 and up.

Hachi Combines LinkedIn...

OK, this is cool. A new networking utility called Hachi is taking some of the best functionality offered by LinkedIn (searching by name, company, title, etc. and seeing how you’re connected to other users), and is merging that with your social graphs from other services like Facebook, and soon Google contacts, Twitter and even your Outlook address book. That way, you can see who you know where – meaning, the actual path of connections between you and another person – even if you’re not connected on LinkedIn. Um, totally bookmarking this. Also cool: unlike LinkedIn, the service isn’t limited to 2nd or 3rd degree connections – it can go deeper than that. And it can offer cross-network paths to get you from point A to point B. For example, it can show you how you’re connected to PersonA via LinkedIn, who knows PersonB on Facebook, who’s connected to PersonC via Twitter (Twitter integration goes live next week). And, in the case of multiple paths, it can compute the smartest path to get there via something called the “Path Score.” Hachi founder Rachna Singh says the Path Score is calculated on the basis of how well one person in the path knows the other one he or she is connected to. In the initial version, Hachi looks at factors like similar company, school and common friends. Later this month, more real-world and behavioral factors will be added to the algorithm, she says. Using Hachi is pretty easy. You create an account, connect your networks, then kick off a search. The search box defaults to searching by name, but links below let you search by company, title, industry, location, or school/education. When there are multiple results, such as for company searches, they’re ranked in order by smartest/quickest path on down. While networking is an obvious must in startup world, especially for entrepreneurs hoping for intros to investors, the need to know who you know and how you know them is something everyone who works for a living wants. In fact, LinkedIn’s primary value today still comes in a large part from its ability to build out your graph of professional connections and then arrange for introductions via friends and colleagues. But not everyone is on LinkedIn, of course. ( Just ask BranchOut about that ). These days, many of us are building our network or networks elsewhere, like on Facebook and Twitter, for example. Plus, the line between our “professional” lives and “personal” lives has blurred to where it no longer makes sense to only think about maximizing our business-only connections to reach out to people we want to meet. Although still in private alpha, Singh tells us that the private beta will launch in mid-May, but she’s opening up access to the first 200 TechCrunch readers who email hello@gohachi.com today with the subject line “techcrunch.”  Singh also says that following Twitter integration, support for Google contacts will roll out later this month, and the mobile version will arrive next week. The service is currently being bootstrapped, but Singh has already completed the first pilot with an enterprise customer. “We didn’t intend to go enterprise – but there was a lot of interest,” she says. “We’re in talks with a couple of other enterprises as well, who’ve approached us.” She has also been turning down investors and seed funds while building up Hachi to something she felt was “demonstrably kickass” (and yep, it is), but now she’s talking about raising a seed round. Something else to note – Singh is a non-technical co-founder who has somehow managed to build this thing with a small team (“myself and a few interns,” she says), which she admits has been incredibly challenging. So how does that work? “Understand (invest that time) into how the problem is to be solved technically, rope in 1-2 people in your team, break the problem into small chunks, and focus” says Singh, “things are much solvable then.”