Published on: 2012-05-23 21:20:35

I found this post I found for this blog. Read it here – Meg Whitman Details Layoffs To HP Employees In Internal Video, Thinks HP Is “Rebuilding Credibility”

Confirming rumors from last week, HP just publicly announced a layoff plan that will result in a reduction of 8% of its workforce. Shortly after releasing the memo to Wall Street, HP CEO Meg Whitman sent a company-wide video message explaining the future of Bill Hewlett and David Packard’s company. She acknowledges throughout that HP is in trouble, stating in the beginning, “HP’s performance is still not where it needs to be” and “We have a lot of work ahead of us to get HP back on track.” She also explains, a bit comically and perhaps erroneously, that “[HP] is currently rebuilding credibility one quarter at time, and to do that, we need to consistently deliver on what we say.” Whitman also reaffirmed HP’s commitment to infrastructure, PCs and printing, servers, storage and networking. “This is a differentiating strength for HP and one we can be proud of,” she said in the video. However, the axe is about to fall throughout HP. Before Whitman attempts to justify the cuts, she explains that HP’s employee count has grown at a pace unsustainable by its low revenue as of late. “We’re struggling under our own weight,” said Whitman in today’s internal video memo. “And we’ve got to restore a healthy balance in order to return HP to its position as a growing… thriving… innovating… industry leader. That’s what this is all about. And the workforce reduction is only one piece of a comprehensive effort. We see a lot of opportunity to remove complexity, streamline and reduce costs in a number of areas across HP.” Like previous rumors speculated, HP plans on reinvesting the savings into the company. “We’ll be investing to drive leadership in the three strategic pillars – cloud, security and information optimization. And in each of our businesses, we’ll make investments to stay ahead of customer expectations and market trends.” This is a fresh move for HP who under previous leadership simply used the savings of a smaller company to help the ledger. In the consumer-focused PC and Printing Group, “we’ll be focused on design, engineering, quality, and generating demand and desire with our customers,” she said. In Enterprise Servers, Storage and Networking (ESSN) “we’ll invest to drive R&D and innovation in our core businesses of servers, storage and networking. In Software, we’ll be investing to speed development across Security, Information and Management Infrastructure for both on-premise IT and in the cloud – with a key focus on software-as-a-service offerings. This will include the extension of Vertica and Autonomy across our entire portfolio. And in Services, we’ll improve processes and build-out capabilities in cloud, security and information. We’ll also be strengthening our industry practices, as well as our service quality and innovation.” Whitman also detailed that HP is looking to better train their employees while providing a “career development and better tools and support.” Like most leaders, Whitman ends the video with a reminder to her underlings that “In times of change, it’s easy to lose focus, waiting to see what happens next. We can’t let that happen. This a great organization, full of incredible people who are resilient, committed and who care about our customers and our company. I’m asking all of you to please keep driving forward. Close every deal. Leave nothing on the table. We need that now more than ever.” Below is a transcript of the video. We are currently working on obtaining the video itself. Hi. Today HP announced second quarter results, and once again, we delivered on what we said we would do. Our publicly-stated guidance for non-GAAP diluted earnings per share was 88 to 91 cents. And we delivered 98 cents, beating our outlook by 7 cents a share on revenues of $30.7 billion. I thank all of you for your hard work and dedication. This is a journey. We’re rebuilding credibility one quarter at time, and to do that, we need to consistently deliver on what we say. You are at the heart of our results. Without your efforts, HP cannot thrive. But HP’s performance is still not where it needs to be. Our business is still declining. Year-over-year, non-GAAP EPS was down 21 percent and revenues were down 3 percent. We have a lot of work ahead of us to get HP back on track and that begins with executing against the strategy we’ve talked about in recent months. Our foundation is infrastructure, PCs and printing, servers, storage and networking. This is a differentiating strength for HP and one we can be proud of. HP Software extends and strengthens that foundation, solving customer challenges like managing, securing and automating the information flow across the data center. Services makes it all work together for the customer, ensuring their technology is meeting their needs. And finally, we combine our infrastructure, software and services into comprehensive solutions that deliver enormous customer value. Moving forward we’re aligning our powerful collection of assets to capture leadership in three strategic areas: Cloud, security, and information optimization. But to do this we must invest and we cannot afford to wait. As we discussed in Q1, our costs are expanding while our revenues decline, and this has been happening for too long. The strategic realignment we announced last quarter was a good first step in addressing this problem by beginning the process of removing complexity, simplifying our operations, and reducing costs. And today we’re taking the next step in this journey with the announcement of a multi-year restructuring that will touch every part of HP and create a more streamlined company. We’re taking a pre-tax charge of approximately $1.7 billion to be included in our FY12 GAAP results, as well as a further multi-year pre-tax charge of $1.8 billion. By the end of 2014, we expect to reduce the workforce by 27,000 positions through a combination of layoffs and early retirement. And we expect to generate run-rate cost savings of approximately $3 to 3.5 billion. These are difficult actions. Workforce reductions aren’t easy and we don’t take them lightly. They adversely impact people’s lives and are tough on the company, our culture and you. We’re trying our best to mitigate the impact as much as we can. We’ve limited hiring to try and reduce the number of people affected. For those positions we have open, we’re giving top consideration to internal candidates. We’re offering an upgraded early retirement package in the US, and expanding our career transition and planning services to better support employees. I know HP has been through a lot in recent years and this is another dose of change. But in this case, it’s absolutely essential for the long-term health of our company. Let me share a little perspective. At the end of 2009, we reported a workforce of about 304,000. At the end of 2010, we had almost 325,000 employees and at the end 2011, that number had ballooned to nearly 350,000. Over that same period, we saw year-over-year revenue growth of 10 percent in 2010, of 1 percent in 2011… and so far in 2012, revenues have been declining. We’re struggling under our own weight. And we’ve got to restore a healthy balance in order to return HP to its position as a growing… thriving… innovating… industry leader. That’s what this is all about. And the workforce reduction is only one piece of a comprehensive effort. We see a lot of opportunity to remove complexity, streamline and reduce costs in a number of areas across HP. I know that many of you remember the cost reduction of years past, like data center consolidation and centralizing functions such as HR, Legal, Finance and IT. What we’re doing now is different. We’re going after the big cost buckets and fundamental business process reengineering. This includes optimizing the supply chain, reducing the number of SKUs and platforms, continuing to hone our real estate strategy, simplifying our go-to-market, improving business processes, and implementing consistent pricing and promotions to drive end-user demand profitably. It’s harder work with greater potential payoff. Another difference from years past is what we plan to do with the savings. The majority of savings this time around will be invested in the business. We’ll be investing to drive leadership in the three strategic pillars – cloud, security and information optimization. And in each of our businesses, we’ll make investments to stay ahead of customer expectations and market trends. In our PC and Printing businesses, we’ll be focused on design, engineering, quality, and generating demand and desire with our customers. In ESSN, we’ll invest to drive R&D and innovation in our core businesses of servers, storage and networking. Together they create a converged infrastructure that is the foundation for top customer initiatives such as cloud, big data analytics and social media. In Software, we’ll be investing to speed development across Security, Information and Management Infrastructure for both on-premise IT and in the cloud – with a key focus on software-as-a-service offerings. This will include the extension of Vertica and Autonomy across our entire portfolio. And in Services, we’ll improve processes and build-out capabilities in cloud, security and information. We’ll also be strengthening our industry practices, as well as our service quality and innovation. Additionally, we’ll invest in our people – in better training, better career development and better tools and support. In times of change, it’s easy to lose focus, waiting to see what happens next. We can’t let that happen. This a great organization, full of incredible people who are resilient, committed and who care about our customers and our company. I’m asking all of you to please keep driving forward. Close every deal. Leave nothing on the table. We need that now more than ever. I’m confident in the decisions we’ve made and the direction we’re going. Together, we will define the future of HP and of our industry. We’ll be holding our next all employee broadcast on June 18th and I look forward to speaking with you then and answering your questions. Thank you.

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Meg Whitman Details Layoffs To HP Employees In Internal Video, Thinks HP Is “Rebuilding Credibility”

This is an interesting article called U.S. Launches Digital Roadmap To Open Up Government Data And Court Developers:

Published on: 2012-05-23 15:07:58

There’s all sorts of data that the government has, but very little of it is actually accessible by developers. But the U.S. Government is trying to change that: Wednesday at TechCrunch Disrupt, U.S. Chief Technology Officer Todd Park and Chief Information Officer Steven VanRoekel announced a new initiative within the government to open up data that was previously locked up in government documents and arcane backend systems. That will allow developers to create new applications and services based on that data. The digital road map is based on the following five ideas: Open Data as the new default Anywhere, anytime on any device Everything should be an API Make government data social Change the meaning of social participation With the launch of the new digital roadmap, the U.S. government is hoping to increase the way that users can access data in many different ways. It’s also designed to decrease inefficiency in government and to allow developers to build applications that the government would never have dreamed up. It’s also built around the idea that government data has to become less sprawling. As a result, it is going to stop building new .gov websites, and ensure that all agencies which already have a website need to have a /DEVELOPERS page. The government has also been pushing innovation by sponsoring meetups, hackathons, and “datapaloozas” through which developers can show off new apps that they’ve built. And here are the first five projects that Park and VanRoekel announced as part of the initiative: The launch of a portal called MyGov, aimed to be a user-friendly website for government services. The launch of the 20% Campaign, a way to move from cash payments to mobile payments overseas. Introduction of a program called RFP-EZ, which will let startups that don’t usually compete for government projects have access to them. The launch of Blue Button for America, which will let developers create apps to allow U.S. citizens to have access to their own health data. Open data for access from new industries, including energy, education, non-profits, and safety.

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U.S. Launches Digital Roadmap To Open Up Government Data And Court Developers

This is a new article called Juniper Networks Invests In Video Conferencing Startup Vidyo, Bringing Total Funding To $97M:

Published on: 2012-05-22 07:01:42

Video conferencing startup Vidyo announced Tuesday that it has received a strategic investment from Juniper Networks as part of the network equipment vendor’s Junos Innovation Fund. The funding comes alongside existing Vidyo investors such as QuestMark Partners, Menlo Ventures, Rho Ventures, Star Ventures, and Four Rivers Group. Vidyo makes video conferencing software that allows organizations to very efficiently and effectively make and receive video calls across any number of connected devices. Its video compression technology is based on H.264 Scalable Video Coding (SVC), which can be used to deploy high-quality video conferencing, even on constrained mobile networks. The company sells some video conferencing equipment directly to enterprises, but it also has a large and growing OEM business, with partners such as HP, Google, Ricoh, Hitachi and others licensing the technology to put in their own products. The Juniper investment could signal either a possible acquisition at some point in the future — or at the very least a much closer partnership, which could mean integrating Vidyo’s video conferencing technology directly into its networking equipment. Juniper partnerships and strategic investments that have turned into acquisitions include Ankeena, which was also part of the Junos portfolio before the network equipment manufacturer acquired it outright in 2010. Juniper also integrated the technology of Packet Design , another company in its portfolio, into its networking equipment. And Juniper was rumored to be looking to buy portfolio company Cotendo before it was acquired by CDN competitor Akamai. Vidyo is headquartered in Hackensack, NJ, but has 12 other offices and 225 employees worldwide. While terms of the Juniper funding weren’t disclosed, they bringing total money raised to $97 million since being founded in 2005.

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This is a new article called CallApp Uses Social Data To Build A Smarter Smartphone Contact Book:

Published on: 2012-05-21 20:23:35

One of my least favorite moments of the day comes when my iPhone rings and the number isn’t in my contact book. Is it an important call from an entrepreneur? A random PR person pitching me? Or just a telemarketer? I won’t know until I pick up. CallApp , a startup launching today at Disrupt, wants to eliminate those awkward moments, for starters. It’s creating what CEO and co-founder Oded Volovitz calls a “universal social contact book.” It’s drawing data from social networks and other data sources to give users more context about phone calls and other communication. The data also comes from CallApp users — users can edit CallApp listings, and if they choose, they can add their contact book into the company’s general database. So when you get a phone call, even if it’s from someone who isn’t in your contact list, you should be able to see information about them — say a photo, their most recent update on Facebook, and your most recent email exchange if you’ve corresponded with them. Of course, if your phone is already ringing, you’ve only got a few seconds before you need to pick up, but at least you can glance at your screen and go into the call with some basic context. CallApp should be even more useful when you’re about to make a call. Then, the social network updates can give you a way to start off the conversation, or tell you when someone has traveled out of the country, so maybe now isn’t the best time to reach them. You can also attach personal reminders to CallApp contacts, share your location with them, or set up a meeting. In some ways, the concept is pretty similar to an email plugin like Rapportive ( recently acquired by LinkedIn ) or Xobni. However, Volovitz says that bringing this information to the smartphone puts it in a different context. After all, when he gets a phone call, “I cannot wait until I can go to the Internet to see who is calling me. This is about giving you real-time, immediate, the most relevant information you can get, and the tools to execute on that information.” Volovitz also says CallApp, despite the name, isn’t just about phone calls — he estimates that he only uses it for phone calls 50 percent of the time. The app also lists and connects to other ways for reaching people, like WhatsApp Messenger and Viber. The core of the experience isn’t the phone call but the contact itself, Volovitz says. Nor is CallApp limited to personal contact listings. It includes businesses too, showing you things like Yelp reviews, Google Street View, or a menu for a restaurant where you’re thinking about making reservations. Moving forward, Volovitz says the company will be adding features that are more about encouraging “serendipity.” The app is available on Android phones (you can download it from Google Play here ). CallApp is developing a version for iPhones too, though Volovitz estimates that it will have 80 percent of the functionality of the Android version, due to “some technical issues.” Volovitz says the company isn’t monetizing the app (which is free) yet, but there are a number of possible business models, including affiliate fees. The company has raised $1 million in funding from undisclosed venture capital firms and angel investors. Disrupt Q&A Q : How does the iOS app differ? A: There are more limitations than in Android, like you have to use the built-in dialer rather than any dialer you want. Q : What are the viral hooks? A: If you use CallApp to share information with someone, they get an SMS message linking to the content and asking them to download the app. Q: Tell us about the technology. A: What we do is artificial intelligence, big data. The system knows how to link the right person to the right number, for example using location to narrow the search. Q: Why do other improved contact books fail, and why will you succeed? A: It’s all about the execution and the ambition. If you build an app on the client side, you only get a limited amount of information about contacts on your phone, versus CallApp’s crowdsourced, cloud-based approach.

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CallApp Uses Social Data To Build A Smarter Smartphone Contact Book

Published on: 2012-05-21 20:09:30

How is data moved between systems? In the enterprise environment, point-to-point application interfaces are either handled with expensive and cumbersome utilities or, more likely, with custom code…and frankly, a lot of manual labor. BroadPeak Partners has a better idea. The company is today introducing its application known as K3 Server , a system that aims to disrupt the traditional enterprise interface market by making it easier for I.T. to build, and for end users to tweak, the way code is handled, transformed, reconciled, mapped and enriched as it moves in between systems. BroadPeak is a software consultancy formed in 2006, whose founders have backgrounds in energy trading and capital markets. The idea for K3 Server came to them last year, when they saw the difficulties in how trades were being brought off an exchange and managed for one of their clients. “It really wasn’t about retrieving trades from that exchange,” explains co-founder Vivek Pathak, “it was about moving data from one system to another system effectively, in a way that was transparent for the business users, and that had fail safe mechanisms to alert when things went wrong (as always does in big tech enterprises), and to give a way for a simple business user to manage the logic of that integration thereafter.” And so K3 was born. But the product isn’t just meant for moving data off an exchange – the technology BroadPeak designed can be used for anything. Containing 140 open source components which are initially put to work by in-house I.T., the system can be purposed for moving and managing data between just about anything, from data stores in price repositories to electronic health records. The system offers three main functions: transparency (allowing you to see what data goes through and what fails, so you can act upon that), mapping (field x in System A maps to field y in System B) and rules (if data meets this criteria, then take this action). For IT, K3 Server means they no longer have to re-invent the wheel every time they need to translate data between two systems or develop a failover routine, for example. The framework allows them to call up the component instead of coding these pieces from scratch every time they’re used. But while the main data highway, so to speak, is set up by IT, the interesting thing about K3 Server is how the data is handled afterwards. In a traditional environment every little tweak or adjustment would have users scrambling back to developers with a change request. But K3′s “Rules Manager” offers a GUI interface that lets end-users customize their own “if/then” statements for how the data needs to be enriched afterwards (add this reference, set this field, e.g.) Pathak says that in early beta testing, the GUI was simple enough for an end-user to handle, even though this was someone for whom using an Excel spreadsheet was considered a technical feat. Plus, the company claims that using the K3 Server system instead of traditional processes results in a 50% reduction in deployment, operation and maintenance of enterprise integrations. And who doesn’t love less work, right? Given BroadPeak’s wide client connections from their consultancy practice, they’re not worried about signing up their first users. However, others interested can sign up to beta test here . For those waiting for the public launch, it’s very close, we’re told, and the system will then be licensed on a per-server basis, renewed annually. BroadPeak bootstrapped their efforts, spending around $500,000 on K3 Server’s development, and is not looking to immediately raise funding. Disrupt Q&A Judges: Adrian Aoun, Fritz Lanman, Dave Samuel & Michelle Zatlyn MZ: What are the benefits of this? A: Fast to deploy, really after replacing custom code. Market is around trading, primarily. Can move 30K trades per second through K3. Benefit to business: gets data to right place at right time. AA: You know it’s not just about wrapping data, it’s about taking actions on data. How much extensibility is in the UI? And what happens when you pass the limits of that? A: Have 65 integration patterns, plus open source components. We know that in the future we need to create UI transparency into those integration patterns. FL: Which verticals are being targeted? A: Trading is a great place to start, because there’s a low tolerance for losing data. Also looking at healthcare and CRM. FL: Risks in sales process? A: Developers are used to developing their own stuff. Wish I could say it’s been easy. Sales cycles are about 6 months. DS: More about the team? A: Trading biz and tech for long time. (See above) AA: Is it easy to pitch CIOs? A: Most boring part – mapping – is the bane of CIOs, they’re backed up all the time.

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K3 Server Is Making Enterprise Application Integrations More Efficient, Reduces Work By Half

Published on: 2012-05-21 19:25:35

I thought you would like this article I found for this blog. Read it here – Incident Launches The gTar at Disrupt, An iPhone-Powered Electronic Teaching Guitar

The gTar by Incident is disruption defined. It takes the guitar, an instrument with a steep learning curve, and adds a bit of digital wizardry in the form of an embedded iPhone to make learning dramatically easier. The company brags that their modern take on the guitar allows for three levels of difficulty, rather than the traditional single really difficult one. But thanks to the iPhone and a clever app, this $450 electronic guitar essentially teaches users the ins and outs of the instrument. The startup recently turned to Kickstarter to raise $100,000. However today they gave the crowd at Disrupt a musical treat — a demonstration at Startup Alley. And the device seemed to work as advertised. After docking an iPhone in the guitar’s body and loading the app, the neck comes alive with a series of interactive LEDs along the fretboard. In Easy Mode, these lights illuminate in sequence with the teaching app, showing the user which string to play. Medium takes it up a level by forcing the player to use the frets and the strings. However, the gTar’s Smart Play function only plays the correct string. Thanks to sensors rather than traditional pickups, the guitar will only play the appropriate string. But, as the user improves, the guitar does away with some of the nanny features, allowing the user to have, for better or worse, full access to the guitar’s musical capabilities. The Free Play mode allows for even more options, letting the player turn the guitar into a wide-range of instruments thanks to its iPhone core. The gTar seems to have all the right goods to disrupt a space as old as string instruments. This could be the high of Disrupt NYC talking, but it feels as if this could be, or perhaps lead to, the guitars for the Guitar Hero generation. Disrupt Q&A q: From a user perspective, will gTar players be competent at playing the guitar or is this a way for people to fulfill a guitar fantasy? Or is this an actual learning tool so they can pick up a guitar and jam solo? a: On one hand, yes this teaches people the fundamentals on how to play the guitar. These are real strings. They take the same amount of pressure. On the other hand — and I get this all the time — does this actually teach people to play the guitar? That usually comes from people who don’t know how to play. But yes, this teaches people how to play the guitar. q: How do you handle pace and rhythm? a: The app does move with the tempo of the song accurately. We were playing with some display techniques to show people. We are going with an MVP solution. The capabilities of the technology is a lot larger than we can demo. q: From a song library perspective, can you create a song from my iPhone or is it limited to your library? a: Our content platform is developed on a platform we built and we deliver songs directly from our crowd — kind of seamlessly so that the user doesn’t really see it. The platform doesn’t take the songs from iTunes; that’s definitely not a trivial problem. We have first parties to help get songs onto the platform. It takes about 30 minutes per song. q: Is there a speaker built-in? a: So you can either use the iPhone’s speaker and thanks to a cavity in the body under the pickup, it amplifies the sound a bit. we are going to be providing a headphone adapter. But you can pop it into a Marshall amp. q: Can you say how much it costs wholesale? a: We’re going to be releasing through Kickstarter. We’re going to release at $450. The way we’ve structured our cost of goods, we’re working with a manufacturing partner in China, who are a really great group of people. Out of the last six months, I’ve been there three. We’ve spent the last 3 months with them. We are building it clean and lean. What Kickstarter really helps us do is to ascertain how many people want to buy it. And for a hardware business that’s very important for us to know.

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Incident Launches The gTar at Disrupt, An iPhone-Powered Electronic Teaching Guitar

Published on: 2012-05-21 19:14:29

Lord knows there is a lot of online video out there these days, but only a tiny proportion of it has been transcribed (less than 1% according to some estimates). Searching the mountains of video generated by businesses, governments and educational institutions for the valuable information within is almost impossible because the words hidden in the audio are invisible to search. Waiting for it is not just the world, but the many people who can’t access that video because of their disabilities. Transcription unlocks the gold-dust buried in them there video hills. This would involve transcription on a vast scale, but this is exactly the problem Koemei aims to tackle. It’s a SAAS platform for speech recognition in video. Today at TechCrunch Disrupt it announced it has completed an integration with YouTube’s API in preparation for a potential launch. It also announced the successful completion of its first pilot with the University of Geneva and IMD Business School. Simple video lectures can be uploaded, translated, linked to and visible on other platforms like YouTube. Users get to see an interface where they can go through the lecture and check the transcription. Based out of Martigny, Switzerland and with offices in San Francisco, Koemei is a startup leveraging years of academic research. It was spun out of the Swiss Institute of Technology (Idiap institute), which worked with Sheffield University and Edinburgh University on a seven year EU-funded project (which has about $30 million spent on it already). Koemei acquired all the IP under a transfer agreement, has a patent pending and now plans to use its platform to transcribe video content on a super-scale. The problem they are out to solve is obvious. Manual transcription is expensive (as much as $5 per minute). They claim to reduce the cost down to $0.09 a minute. The startup estimates the market for video transcription is around $16 billion annually, given that there are around 120,000 people doing this work in the U.S. alone. It anticipates there will be a 21% year on year growth in the business. The market for corporate and educational video is clearly the most lucrative here. Koemei claims its automated transcription program works better than current systems from the likes of Nuance , because it not only transcribes the video’s soundtrack into words, but also produces an interface for humans to check the transcription. This can be open to the public or closed off for designated users. In other words, it ends up being like a crowdsourced effort to check an AI’s transcription, making it far more accurate than AI alone. An hour audio takes an hour to transcribe, claims the startup. The transcriptions can be pushed to YouTube, Vimeo etc and you get the first 10 hours of transcription free, just in case you need convincing that it works. Of course the technology needn’t just work for the likes of YouTube. There is also videoconferencing, telepresence, web collaboration, group meetings, classroom lectures, webcast; the list goes on. So far they’ve done a pilot rollout with some university partners which has brought in some revenues and proved the model. Next up will be more partners, plus an enterprise solution they want to offer to the likes of Vimeo, Brightcove, and Kaltura among others. On the horizon, their potential competition is Nuance, Google (Google Voice) and solutions like Amazon Mechanical Turk. This is not exactly a weak opposition, but they reckon they can beat all comers. They claim Nuance has issues with long conversations; Google Voice is low quality and closed for other platforms; and mechanical turk solutions involving people are pricey – and may even be customers for Koemei in the end. The startup predicts it could have $44.9 million in sales by 2014, with a potential exit to any number of players including, not unexpectedly, most of their opposition. Backed with Angel funding, they’re now raising a $1.5 million Series A round, following a commitment from a European early-stage VC. The team is led by Temitope Ola, formerly of Silicon Graphics, and comprises three others, most of whom worked on the platform during its academic development.

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Koemei Is Out To Transcribe All Video And Make It Searchable

This is a good article called Venture Capitalist Michael Moritz Says He’s Stepping Back From Sequoia Because Of Illness:

Published on: 2012-05-21 15:14:37

In very sad news, Michael Moritz, who has helped lead top-tier venture firm Sequoia Capital through the very beginnings of the web until now, is stepping back because of an incurable disease. His firm has backed many of the home runs of the last two decades including Google, Yahoo and PayPal. He’ll still be involved in Sequoia, but less so in the day-to-day workings of the firm. Moritz is a journalist-turned-investor who chronicled the beginnings of Apple for Time Magazine and in his book, “The Little Kingdom: the Private Story of Apple Computer.” Not long after, he crossed over into investing and shepherded Sequoia through some of the biggest seismic shifts in the technology industry over the last two decades. He got the firm into the initial $25 million venture investment into Google back in 1999 . He has also seen its expansion overseas into Israel and China. This is a huge shift for one of the Valley’s most storied firms. Sequoia will be looking to its next generation of venture investors including Doug Leone, PayPal mafia member Roelof Botha, former Zappos chief operating officer Alfred Lin, Bryan Schreier, who sits on Dropbox’s board, and Neil Shen, who represents Sequoia in China to lead it forward. Attached is a letter he sent to limited partners this morning: Dear …, We have always tried to be straightforward with you and, in that spirt, I need to share something. Unfortunately, I have been diagnosed with a rare medical condition which can be managed but is incurable.  I’ve been told that in the next five to ten years the quality of my life is quite likely to decline.  Right now I feel fitter than ever and I hope that I’ll be one of the lucky ones who can live a full life and defy the statisticians.  But there is no way of predicting this with certainty and thus for me, life has assumed a different meaning and I am making some adjustments. I am going to extract myself from the daily management of Sequoia Capital, a task that has consumed a large part of my time for the past sixteen years.  I will become Chairman of Sequoia Capital and will be deeply involved with nurturing the fresh investments, ideas and relationships that can be of significant long-term benefit for all of us.  I will also work very closely with some of our younger and newer members, will continue my role as Managing Member of existing funds and maintain all my current company responsibilities.  I will use twelve to fourteen weeks – sprinkled throughout the course of each year – for various pursuits, diversions and trivial indulgences. Nothing about this should cause much of a change because everything that has been achieved at Sequoia Capital has resulted from the teamwork and contribution of many people.   Our overall business is in the best shape it has ever been and we are better positioned than at any time in our forty year history.  Doug Leone will assume full responsibility for coordinating the business we have gradually developed over the past couple of decades and almost everything else remains entirely the same. Thanks for your support, Michael Moritz

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Venture Capitalist Michael Moritz Says He’s Stepping Back From Sequoia Because Of Illness

Published on: 2012-05-21 12:20:03

Apple’s Siri has been transforming how people interact with their phones. It taught us that it’s not just OK to talk to our phones, but that, in many cases, it’s actually a more useful way to get things done. Along those same lines, a company called Saygent is launching a mobile feedback solution which developers can insert into their application to collect feedback from the app’s users. Available as an SDK for easy integration, the toolkit can be used within any type of application. But Saygent is specifically targeting the emerging mobile wallet space to start. The idea with mSay, as it’s being called, is that mobile wallet providers (think, companies like Visa, MasterCard, Google Wallet, Intuit, etc.) could use Saygent’s solution to collect instant feedback about the merchant immediately following a mobile payment/mobile wallet transaction. The app’s developers – that is, the mobile wallet providers – can integrate the mSay in-app voice feedback solution into their app and then configure the types of questions the app would prompt users to answer, as well as when and where they would appear (e.g., pre- or post-checkout, on a product page, etc.). Some app makers may also want to make it so that consumers can launch the feedback option at any time. In a real-world scenario, you can imagine how a consumer might launch the app to give feedback about the service at a restaurant, or tell a clothing retailer that they were unable to find a dress in the right size or color. Or maybe they just had trouble using the app itself, and had run into bugs. “All they have to do is push a button and talk to the app, like they’re using Siri, and say whatever’s on their mind,” says Saygent creator Guy Hirsch. “And then our technology collects that feedback and analyzes it.” The interesting thing about Saygent’s solution, explains Hirsch, is that on the backend, the system can process the feedback, including what was said as well as the sentiment behind the words (angry, happy, etc.) and then route that response to the correct department for handling. That means a bug report or feature request about the mobile wallet may be directed to the app’s dev team or product manger, but a customer’s response would be sent over to the merchant instead. In addition to routing the voice messages appropriately, the system also provides metrics surrounding what customers are saying. Hirsch says mobile wallets are the perfect venue for the mSay technology. “We know you just purchased something,” he says, “so you might have something to say. And it’s critical for merchants and retailers to know that in near real-time, so if you had an issue they could take care of it right away.” (You know, before you post how pissed off you are on Twitter and Facebook.) The company is currently in talks with several mobile wallet makers now and plans to announce partnerships soon. Although Hirsch couldn’t disclose more details, it would make sense that one potential client could be Intuit. Given that Intuit is already a customer of Saygent’s other solutions in its online products, and is a notable player in the mobile payments space, it makes for a good fit. As for the revenue model, it will be on a per-response basis. An app maker gets 50 responses upon signing up in order to try it out, then pays 99 cents per response afterwards. There’s also a money-back guarantee on each response – if it’s not useful (spam, someone talking nonsense, or whatever else), the app publisher can flag it and not have to pay. San Mateo-based Saygent raised $1 million in seed funding from  500 Startups ,  Innovation Endeavors ,  Juvo Capital ,  Kapor Capital ,  Kima Ventures , Orefa Investment, PG Ventures,  Ty Danco  and  Matthew Grodin , in May 2011.

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Saygent Launches In-App Voice Feedback System: Lets Customers Vent To Apps, Not On Twitter

This is an interesting post called The Story Behind Payment Disruptor Stripe.com And Its Founder Patrick Collison:

Published on: 2012-05-21 00:00:36

Editor’s note:  This guest post is written by  Derek Andersen , who is the founder of  StartupGrind and  Vaporware Labs , and is a former entertainment development manager at Electronic Arts. Paypal created a cost effective way to safely accept payments 10 years ago, but the web has changed dramatically and accepting payments has not. Enter Stripe, a company that in my opinion is going to get very influential over the next few years. At  a recent Startup Grind event  I interviewed 24-year old Irish co-founder Patrick Collison who has raised $18MM from Sequoia Capital and others. Patrick is leading a company poised to completely disrupt the online payment industry starting with your website. Background Patrick has the most valuable of  Valley technology  skillsets. He’s a technical prodigy having won numerous prestigious awards including Ireland’s  41st Young Scientist and Technology Exhibition in 2005 , a national science competition which boasts hundreds of submissions each year from the country’s brightest young scientists. But he also has the personality and presence to be a leader and CEO.  His two brothers are equally impressive.  John  is one of Stripe’s co-founders not to mention a Harvard dropout and one of the first engineers at Auctomatic. His youngest brother,  Tommy , is a teenage blogger and writer that probably has more Twitter followers than most of us. Y Combinator and Paul Graham Patrick holds the distinction of literally being the face of Y Combinator. He’s the skinny red headed guy you see on the front of their website. While attending MIT at age 18, he and his brother decided to build a better version of eBay. After applying to YC they merged with Kulveer and Harjeet Taggar to build Auctomatic. They moved to an apartment in San Francisco, raised angel funding, and went to work. After launching and getting initial user traction,  the company was acquired  by Live Current Media and the founders moved to Vancouver to build the product. From start to finish the company’s pre-acquisition life span was just 10-months. Stripe was also eventually funded by YC. Patrick said that YC’s founder network is one of its most valuable assets. “Having all these other people building startups and having them want to help us because we were a fellow YC company, that was super valuable for us.” He added that perhaps the greatest advantage to YC is that,  “Paul and the (other) partners are just really smart. There is no question that they are very top tier.” Because of the sheer quantity of deals and companies that they interact with combined with those smarts, they’re able to offer both specific and strategic feedback that is second to none. What makes Paul special? According to Patrick, Paul Graham is able to make surprising ideas and connections that other investors and advisors simply aren’t able to make. What isn’t Paul Graham so good at? Patrick says, “He’s not good at feigning interest.” Solving Hard Problems  “The most striking example I know of schlep blindness is  Stripe , or rather Stripe’s idea. For over a decade, every hacker who’d ever had to process payments online knew how painful the experience was. Thousands of people must have known about this problem. And yet when they started startups, they decided to build recipe sites, or aggregators for local events. Why? Why work on problems few care much about and no one will pay for, when you could fix one of the most important components of the world’s infrastructure? Because schlep blindness prevented people from even considering the idea of fixing payments. 
 Probably no one who applied to Y Combinator to work on a recipe site began by asking “should we fix payments, or build a recipe site?” and chose the recipe site. Though the idea of fixing payments was right there in plain sight, they never saw it, because their unconscious mind shrank from the complications involved.” – Paul Graham,  SchlepBlindness . John and Patrick first started working on Stripe in early 2010.  The inspiration came when Patrick, who was working on a few side projects, kept complaining about how difficult it was to accept payments on the web.  The two quickly developed a simple solution and within 2-weeks they had processed their first transaction.  Over the next 6-months they showed it to friends, watched people interact with it, and iterated as fast as they could. In the beginning they weren’t sure how big the market was or whether they could accomplish their goal of addressing issues like fraud and non-US payments in a user-friendly way.  They originally partnered with a payments company, but quickly realized that the only way to control the entire experience was to control all aspects of the process. That’s when they brought everything in house. By the fall of 2010, Stripe had become their full-time jobs.  They thought about bootstrapping it, as they had to that point, but soon realized that as a payment startup they would need the kind of institutional credibility that only a top-notch investor could provide. “Even Turkeys Can Fly In A High Wind” Stripe’s most  requested feature  is to expand beyond the United States, which is something he assured me they’re working on. The team also recently moved from Palo Alto to San Francisco to accommodate their rapid expansion. To date the company’s growth has been completely organic. Before they publicly launched last fall they had more than 1,000 developers on a waiting list and have grown almost exclusively by positive word of mouth. For those wondering why they haven’t heard of Stripe, it’s because true to Steve Blank’s Customer Development process, they have planned to turn on the marketing as soon as they were sure the product was right. Quoting from a Kleiner Perkins founder Eugene Kleiner saying, “Even turkeys can fly in a high wind.”  Watch the full interview here .

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Original post: The Story Behind Payment Disruptor Stripe.com And Its Founder Patrick Collison