So, of course, there’s a Birchbox — the subscription service that delivers a monthly package of makeup samples — for people who like dogs, too.

It’s called BarkBox, obviously. It’s a bit more than a year old and has 35,000 customers paying at least $19 a month. And now it has $5 million in venture money, via a round led by RRE Ventures.

The new money comes on top of $1.7 million the startup raised last year, from all of the same investors in the new round, including Lerer Ventures, Polaris Ventures, 500 Startups and Bertelsmann.

The New York-based company is using the money to build out other canine-related businesses, including BarkPost, which CEO Matt Meeker describes as a dog-specific version of BuzzFeed’s “animals” site, and BarkCare, a $199-a-year service that gives dog owners 24/7 access to vets for consultations online and over the phone. The company is also rebranding as Bark & Co.

In the old days, it was easy to dismiss this kind of narrow, this-version-of-that-thing concept as a symptom of a bubble. But we’re (seemingly) past that now — if it works in one vertical, there’s no reason it can’t in another. And some dog-owners really, really like their dogs.

“One thing that surprised us was that there’s just a ton of room for innovation in the space,” says Meeker, who created the company while he was running the New York location of startup incubator Dogpatch Labs for Polaris, and also co-founded community organizing site Meetup.

One difference between BarkBox and Birchbox,  Meeker says, is that BarkBox doesn’t give subscribers samples, but full-sized deliveries of stuff they’d like their dogs to have, like toys and treats.

Okay. So why not at least broaden the business out to attract cat-lovers, too? Not happening, says Meeker. “We’re all-in on dogs, and dogs only.”

“We believe being a single founder is one factor that makes it more difficult to succeed … [because] there is just so much to do at a startup,” said Y Combinator partner Jessica Livingston, who estimates that fewer than 10 percent of companies accepted and funded by the accelerator are led by solo founders. “Also, the moral weight of starting a company can be very hard to bear alone.”

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

The company is backed by $3 million in funding from GRP Partners’ Mark Suster, 500 Startups’ Dave McClure and other angels, including Brian Lee, David Tisch and Jason Calacanis, and was founded by Ethan Anderson, who sold his first startup, Redbeacon, to The Home Depot last year.

Anderson calls the service “the world’s first online open appointment superstore” because it aggregates local merchant calendars in one place online. So far, the company has launched in Los Angeles, where it is working with a few thousand merchants, who have more than half a million appointments available for the next month.

Categories include automotive, health and beauty, home and garden, medical and dental, sports and fitness and pets, but not restaurants or other food services.

On the consumer-facing side, customers come to the site to find open appointments, then book and pay for the services in advance, whether for that day or later.

For the merchant, the service is all about finding new customers and getting new people in the door, much like Groupon.

MyTime will help local service providers fill unused inventory by advertising on Google, Facebook and Twitter. The site will also dynamically price the services, so if there is free time coming up immediately – or in generally slow times or hours — MyTime will encourage customers to book by offering a discount.

The service is free for merchants to get started, but if they elect to use some of MyTime’s premium services, like dynamic pricing or its advertising services, then MyTime will take a 40 percent cut of the revenue it generates from bookings that occur because of the advertisements.

“It’s a generous business model,” Anderson said. “If we are promoting them, only then do we keep the commission. If someone just finds them through the browse or search features, then we don’t charge them. It’s a freemium service.”

However, a majority of businesses do elect for MyTime to advertise on their behalf, he said.

It takes about a day for a company to get up and running and to connect its calendar to MyTime’s system. Merchants then get paid within one to seven days of a customer’s appointment.

The San Francisco-based company has 15 employees and plans to use the cash raised for salaries and sales and marketing. Anderson said they’ll expand to new markets slowly because the service requires a large number of merchants to be on board for it to work. He said if they don’t have a lot of appointments available for customers to choose from, it’s like a retailer being out of stock (in other words, it just doesn’t work).

Interestingly, MyTime didn’t pick San Francisco as its first market because “there are so many startups calling merchants here. Five years into the Groupon craze, and I really feel like they are jaded.”

The online reservations company said it paid about $10 million in cash for the company, making it a pretty good deal for the startup, which raised $3.75 million over its three-year existence.

Matt Roberts, OpenTable’s CEO, said it originally partnered with Foodspotting a year ago to add some of its photos to its mobile application, but “we had a such a shared passion for restaurants, we wanted an opportunity to work closely together as one team.”

As the name of the app suggests, Foodspotting allows people to look for restaurant recommendations by sifting through photos of dishes shot by other customers. Today, the app has three million photos in its catalog of dishes from crepes to cupcakes.

Roberts said that the Foodspotting app will continue to exist, and that users can make OpenTable reservations from within the app, but “the more deeper integration will happen in the other direction,” he said.

In October, OpenTable started getting more serious about mobile by giving restaurants the tools to optimize their sites for the smaller screen to support making reservations over mobile. The images and photography will be used by OpenTable’s restaurants to illustrate their menus. There are 15,000 OpenTable restaurants on the Foodspotting app.

Ten of Foodspotting’s employees will join OpenTable, including CEO and co-founder Alexa Andrzejewski, who will become OpenTable’s lead user interface designer.

Investors in Foodspotting include BlueRun Ventures, Felicis Ventures, High Line Ventures, 500 Startups and Zelkova Ventures, plus angel investor Dave Morin.

Joe Lin Daily Muse co-founders Alex Cavoulacos, Kathryn Minshew and Melissa McCreery

The Muse — formerly known as The Daily Muse — is a hybrid career advice and job search service focused on roles in marketing, sales and engineering. “It’s not just a job hunt, it’s a career hunt,” is how co-founder and CEO Kathryn Minshew puts it.

The site now has 700,000 monthly active users. And it’s making money. A wide range of companies, many of them from the tech industry, pay as much as $60,000 per year to be included on the platform.

The Muse was founded by a trio of young women, none of them technical, making them an extremely rare fit for the Y Combinator startup program in California, which has become a mecca for ambitious coders, who often tend to be dudes.

After finishing Y Combinator, Minshew and her co-founders, Alex Cavoulacos and Melissa McCreery, moved most of the nine-person company back to New York — another play that ran counter to Silicon Valley startup culture.

(Also, it’s not like being a “non-technical” person is a genetic decree; Cavoulacos and McCreery now code for the site.)

The Muse’s seed funding comes from investors including 500 Startups, Great Oaks Ventures, Eric Ries, Gordon Crawford, Cathie Black and Thomas Lehrman.

As Europe attempts to cope with its financial crisis and Asia braces for the looming slowdown of China’s economy, Latin America — in America’s backyard — is witnessing an unprecedented expansion of its indigenous technology economy. Long considered a relative backwater, rich in minerals, natural resources, and tin-pot dictatorships, Latin America in 2012 is quietly cultivating a culture of technology entrepreneurship virtually unheard of in other emerging economies.

From Chile to Mexico, pockets of local start-up enthusiasts who have long labored in obscurity are coming to the attention of a small but growing group of investors and other entrepreneurs from the United States and beyond. And interest in start-up companies, never particularly high on the radar of graduates of the best universities in Latin America, is on the rise. Business schools across the region now regularly host pitch contests and hackathons, encouraging the next generation of business leaders to embrace the concept of the knowledge economy.

A few data points:

• Startup Weekend, a U.S.-based start-up boostership organization funded by the Kauffman Foundation, now has 13 chapters in Mexico, more than anywhere else but the United States; additional chapters are planned in the near future.
• Startup Chile, a government-sponsored program designed to draw start-up technology companies to the country, recently launched its fifth running, drawing over 1500 applicants from 37 countries — for 101 spots.
• Investor Dave McClure’s venture capital firm, 500 Startups, a major force in Silicon Valley, recently acquired Mexican.vc, a small firm with a portfolio of Mexican companies. McClure has indicated he expects to make additional investments in the region.
• For the first time ever, companies from Argentina, Brazil, Chile and Mexico will have strong representation at TechCrunch Disrupt San Francisco, the annual tech conference of start-up companies and investors.
• Last week, two Latin American tech start-up accelerators, NXTP Labs (Argentina) and 21212.com (Brazil) “invaded” Silicon Valley with nearly two dozen start-up companies in tow. They have organized a pitch contest and audiences with U.S. investors, a major coup for companies from the region.
• Twice in the last few months, tech companies in Latin America have acquired competitors in order to broaden their market penetration. While this is de rigueur in the U.S., it is far from the norm in Latin America, and illustrates how the market is maturing. Moreover, in both instances, all companies involved were products of local accelerator programs and investors.
• A U.S./Mexican venture capital fund based in Monterrey, Alta Ventures, recently closed a $70 million venture fund, possibly the largest such VC fund in Mexico’s history; the fund will invest mainly in Mexican start-up companies. Another virtually unprecedented aspect of this deal is that a majority of the funds came from Mexican investors.

The region is not without its troubles, of course. Mexico continues to grapple with narco-criminals, albeit mainly in the North. Brazil needs to develop its support infrastructure for small businesses; the current bureaucracy can be stifling for entrepreneurs (e.g., it can take more than 100 days to set up a business in Brazil, compared to nine in Mexico). Argentina’s President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner is becoming increasingly erratic as her country’s economy slows. And certain leaders in Latin America, not least among them Hugo Chavez of Venezuela, Rafael Correa of Ecuador, and Evo Morales of Bolivia, continue to stoke anti-capitalist, anti-U.S. feelings in the rest of the region. These factors can not help but inhibit the interest of U.S. investors.

But Latin America also has strong and improving market conditions that suggest it will be an increasingly fertile ground for technology commerce. For instance, inhabitants of the region are incredibly “social.” Half of the Top 10 markets worldwide, ranked by time spent on social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter, are in Latin America. E-commerce sales in Latin America will be an estimated $69 billion in 2013, more than 50 times what they were a decade ago. Mobile phone penetration in Mexico is expected to exceed 100 percent by 2013; already, more than 20,000,000 Mexicans — roughly one in five — have smartphones. And online ad spending in Latin America is expected to double from 2010 levels, to more than $4 billion in 2014.

There is a sense among the programmers and designers in Condesa and Roma that they are technological pioneers for Latin America. They and their colleagues in other parts of the region have embraced the Silicon Valley ethos, but have adapted it to their own communities. Rather than asking for help from their Northern neighbors, they are more interested in collaborating with coders in The Valley to produce world-changing technologies. They feel that Latin America’s time has come, and they are eager to seize this day.

M. Christopher Johnson is an experienced strategy consultant, entrepreneur, investor and writer. He is editor of the Latin America Startup Blog. He speaks Spanish and is based in Mexico City.

In the past four months of big-ticket tech exits, Wildfire, co-founded and led by the engaged couple Victoria Ransom (CEO) and Alain Chuard (head of product management), was bought by Google for at least $250 million; Michael (CEO) and Kass (COO) Lazerow’s Buddy Media sold to Salesforce for $745 million-plus; and LinkedIn purchased married couple Rashmi Sinha (CEO) and Jon Boutelle (CTO)’s SlideShare for $119 million.

Asked about the trio of hits, Michael Lazerow told me: “I guess this proves that successful companies are built by teams who love and respect each other, versus teams who hate each other. If you can’t work with people you love, who do you work with, people you hate? Hopefully, this puts an end to any talk that backing couples is risky.”

500 Startups investor Dave McClure, who backed both SlideShare and Wildfire, told me his portfolio includes probably a dozen companies founded by couples. “A year or a year and a half ago, we realized there were a huge number of couples in our portfolio, and they were actually some of our best companies,” McClure said.

McClure added to the list two other recent acquisitions from his portfolio by companies led by couples: Kush sold to Smule, and Yell bought Moonfruit.

500 Startups doesn’t invest in companies because they are run by couples, McClure said, but it benefits from other venture capitalists seeing that as a risk factor.

“Because they don’t want to invest in couples, we probably get a better deal,” he said.

Why don’t VCs like backing married couples? Wouldn’t a tightly aligned duo that’s willing to mix their work lives and home lives normally be an asset? In fact, this is actually such a commonly cited concern that people are quite willing to go on the record about it.

“All partnerships have the potential for conflict, but married business partners have a superset of the problems of traditional business partners,” wrote Josh Hannah of Matrix Partners, on Quora. As examples, he cited the possibility for lack of tough feedback when one member is underperforming, the potential for couples to team up against a dissenting view, and the possibility of a messy divorce.

Meanwhile, Jonathan Tower of Citron Capital wrote in a Fortune op-ed that “the bias in traditional venture circles against investing in such startups is long-standing and rooted in some uncomfortable realities.”

His big concerns? Overly emotional relationships, recruiting difficulties and lack of defined roles.

Of course, every firm rule comes with significant counter-examples, and the companies of married couples backed by VCs past and present have included Cisco, VMware, Eventbrite and ModCloth.

“Investors doubted us always,” said Buddy Media’s Lazerow. “But married couples don’t have a monopoly on investor doubt. We were more than happy to prove them wrong. We’ll see if they doubt us next time around.”

Plus, the intersection of family and tech company is less verboten than it once might have been.

Remember the pregnant CEO trend I wrote about a few months ago, which has now been elevated to the public-company level by new Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer?

Well, SlideShare’s Sinha was not only a pregnant CEO with her married co-founder, but she delivered twin boys and then sold her company four months later.

“It’s been a very exciting six months,” she said.

(Image courtesy of mudcards on Etsy)

Considering that the new JOBS Act makes crowdfunding even easier, what sorts of things do you see coming out of the grass roots?

“May the VCs be ever in your favor” is the motto for the goofy video, which includes Nerf and water-gun fights as well as mock killings. It’s almost too true to life, given the carnival nature of starting a Silicon Valley company these days.

Here’s the “Funding Games”:

500 Startups attracts an international crowd as compared to the many other incubators and accelerators. More than half of the summer batch comes from outside Silicon Valley, with representation from Slovenia, Mexico, Brazil and Italy.

The start-ups include a bunch of companies working on projects around kids and families, as well as a “Flipboard for fashion” and a “Netflix for ties.”

500 Startups previously made a “Thriller” dance video for its fall batch.

Rather than focusing on extreme discounts, the San Francisco company has decided to offer extreme adventures.

Today, it is launching Zozi Guru, which sells high-end adventures taught and organized by professional athletes.

For example, you can go skiing with Olympic gold-medal skier Jonny Moseley, or go running with barefoot runner Eric Orton, or learn to kayak with Tao Berman, a three-time world-record holder for extreme whitewater kayaking.

Unlike typical daily deals, these offers are full price, and the merchants and celebrities involved will surely make money, which is in steep contrast to lots of sites that blast emails out to a list of subscribers on a daily basis.

“We don’t want to be a deals site. You won’t hear us use the word ‘deal.’ It’s all about experiences. We try to offer the best prices, but it’s about the adventure and exploration component,” said TJ Sassani, Zozi’s CEO and founder.

That hasn’t always been the case for Zozi.

It started off as a daily deals site, selling international trips in 2008. But Sassani said the opportunity wasn’t as big as the company had hoped, and Zozi shifted to local adventures. Intially, it used the Groupon model to grow membership, but now that it has some scale, it is shifting to full price.

Typical offers on the site range from bungee-jumping sessions to kiteboarding lessons, but Sassani said the business won’t ever reach Groupon’s scale. He said he definitely doesn’t aspire to have an initial public offering; however, he does believe that it could be a $1 billion to $2 billion opportunity.

So far, Zozi has signed up close to one million subscribers and is in 20 cities, up from only one market in 2010. It has just started moving into Canada, and other locations are coming soon.

“Groupon is much more like Wal-Mart, where they offer low-cost, low-quality items to discount seekers,” Sassani said. “But our average purchase price ($60) is more than double Groupon’s, and we target someone who would shop at REI. It’s a sophisticated customer, who is less price-sensitive.”

To help with the rollout of Zozi Guru, the company raised a small undisclosed inside round with investors last week. Previously, it had raised $10 million from Dave McClure’s 500 Startups, Launch Capital, ZIG Capital and others.

This week, Zozi is launching the new service with six celebrity athletes, but Sassani said the company has signed deals with 20 to 30 people, who will do a combination of 100 programs over the next year.

Sticking with its goal of offering premium experiences, the programs start at $1,000, and can go as high as $10,000, depending on the celebrity’s status and the event, which could include luxurious accommodations — one example might be a five-night visit to Hawaii, where you would learn how to surf from a professional, and stay at the Four Seasons.

A new iPhone app called MovieGoer aims to help people find movies through their friends, go to movies together and submit quick video reviews from their phone.

MovieGoer is the first product from Nettle, a La Jolla, Calif.-based start-up funded by Google Ventures, 500 Startups and Advancit Capital (Shari Redstone’s new early-stage investment firm).

“The theatrical business of movies is booming internationally, and flat in the U.S., but crying out for innovation,” said Nettle CEO Brian Dear in an interview today. He said MovieGoer’s mission is to help people enjoy more movies.

MovieGoer is trying to be both a public and private social network, said Dear, who previously founded Eventful. So users might make plans with their close friends but publish their 15-second mobile video reviews to a larger audience.

Users can also follow movies, cast and crew and other users to get updates about upcoming films. Dear said MovieGoer may make money through analyzing demand and also through offers from studios and theaters.

Another start-up working on similar ideas is called Can’t Wait and was in the last Y Combinator class.

OwnLocal is also one of the first for-profit investments by the Knight Enterprise Fund for media innovation; additional funding comes from 500 Startups and investors found through AngelList.

The total amount of funding OwnLocal has raised is still pretty small: Just $2 million. That’s because the company is already supporting its 20 employees based on revenue, said OwnLocal founder and CEO Lloyd Armbrust.

OwnLocal serves local media outlets in 35 states, with white-label tools for directories, search engine optimization, daily deals and other services to help local businesses.

Automattic CEO Toni Schneider said he expects to make more investments in the WordPress ecosystem. “Their approach is highly complementary to our own goals of making it easy for anyone in the world to have a beautiful Web site,” added Automattic founder Matt Mullenweg.

Imagine lifting the silver lid on a carefully prepared, elegantly plated and perfectly seasoned culinary masterpiece, only to realize … your dog is pawing at your leg, begging for a bite.

That experience, or something like it, is precisely what the new start-up Kitchit is trying to bring to its users’ homes.

Launching today, in invite-only beta, the Web service allows anyone with a credit card to book a top-tier chef to prepare the meal at their next dinner party.

The company, which was part of Stanford’s StartX incubator program, just finished raising a seed round of funding. The value of the round is undisclosed, but it counts super-angel Dave McClure among the early investors.

The three founders — CEO Brendan Marshall, CTO George Tang and Chief of Product Ian Ferguson — came together months ago to build a business around the idea of “democratizing fine dining,” said Marshall.

Buzzwords aside, Kitchit is opening up what was a previously gray market of transactions made by foodie insiders — or people who happened to have the connections necessary to find chefs who were looking to make extra money cooking outside the confines of their primary jobs at high-end restaurants.

With Kitchit, even a fish-stick aficionado can arrange for such a meal.

It’s the exact same kind of hidden economy that companies like Airbnb have built a business on disrupting.

But what does this new opportunity mean for the user/eater?

Potential diners visit Kitchit.com and pick from a stable of preapproved chefs — about 40 at last count — who will prepare their haute cuisine in the client’s home for any number of guests.

Kitchit takes care of billing, scheduling and making the connection with the chef, taking a cut of the payment.

The end result, said Ferguson, is “a five-star meal cooked for you and your guests in your home, for less than you would pay in a restaurant.”

And while the prices fluctuate with the cost of ingredients and demands of individual chefs, Ferguson’s math does seem to hold, even if it doesn’t promise an enormous bargain.

He explained that the average per-plate cost of a Kitchit dinner party is somewhere between $50 and $100.

Still, being able to eat at home and drink wine without a restaurant’s precious liquor markup must mean some savings, right?

While it’s tempting to draw an immediate correlation between Kitchit and a company such as Airbnb, CEO Marshall insisted the two were after different markets.

“We’re really more like NetJets for now,” he said.

Beyond the initial focus on high-end dining, Kitchit faces some sobering costs of scaling that Airbnb doesn’t.

For one, the cost of onboarding new chefs is high.

Ferguson noted that many chefs “don’t do a great job of writing their own bios, and few have enough high-quality photos of dishes they’ve prepared — but that’s also exactly why Kitchit can succeed.”

Kitchit, in a sense, has to serve two masters, at least according to Ferguson.

“Our chefs need to see value in using Kitchit, as well,” he said. “It has to make their lives easier, and make it possible for them to make extra money more reliably than other methods.”

And while the eating public never sees it, Kitchit provides a management interface and a host of other services to chefs who book events using the platform.

Kitchit has also started negotiating bulk deals on certain expensive ingredients, such as caviar, so that it can drive the cost of dinner parties down further.

As for what’s next, its founders said the company will spend its time and money growing the stable of chefs and expanding to other markets.

That’s in addition to plenty of “delicious business development meetings,” said Ferguson.

The trio of well-fed founders recently sat down for a fairly lengthy video chat about the launch of Kitchit and the difficulties of building a tech business that sells such an analog service:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110930/want-to-lunch-like-larry-or-snack-like-sergey-kitchit-launches-the-netjets-for-personal-chefs/feed/ 3 http://allthingsd.com/20110921/angel-investors-agree-to-kiss-make-up-fund-communications-start-ups-together/ http://allthingsd.com/20110921/angel-investors-agree-to-kiss-make-up-fund-communications-start-ups-together/#comments Thu, 22 Sep 2011 00:16:34 +0000 Liz Gannes http://allthingsd.com/?p=123327 Dave McClure and Ron Conway, the two investors most publicly associated with last year’s “AngelGate” scandal over power struggles between seed-stage investors, have set aside their differences to invest in the second round of the Twilio Fund, dedicated to start-ups built on top of the Twilio communications platform.

The new Twilio Fund consists of $125,000 from McClure’s 500 Startups and another $125,000 from Conway’s SV Angel. Chosen start-ups get at least $10,000 each, according to McClure.

Highlights from the last batch included WorkersNow, Proven and FastCall411, McClure said.

McClure said he and Conway — who has been called “the godfather of Silicon Valley” — have worked on a few investments together lately, and joked, “It’s OK to kiss the ring every now and again.”

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110921/angel-investors-agree-to-kiss-make-up-fund-communications-start-ups-together/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110830/linkedin-vp-adam-nash-to-depart/ http://allthingsd.com/20110830/linkedin-vp-adam-nash-to-depart/#comments Tue, 30 Aug 2011 22:50:22 +0000 Liz Gannes http://allthingsd.com/?p=115363 LinkedIn VP of Product Management Adam Nash is leaving the company. Sources said it seems likely he will join LinkedIn investor Greylock Partners.

Nash is clearly loyal to LinkedIn, having recently built a four-foot-by-four-foot sculpture of the company’s logo using more than 10,000 Lego bricks. He has been with the recently IPOed professional network since 2007, when he joined from eBay.

LinkedIn spokesman Hani Durzy offered the following statement:

In his more than four years at LinkedIn, Adam helped build and lead great teams that developed some of our most important products. He also played an important role in helping shape our internal culture, and his championing of LinkedIn’s Hackdays inspired some of our coolest innovations. We wish him the best as he embarks on the next stage of his career.

Nash, whose last day at LinkedIn is tomorrow, is expected to join LinkedIn co-founder and executive chairman Reid Hoffman, a Greylock partner, and former LinkedIn Chief Scientist DJ Patil, who is now Greylock’s “Data Scientist in Residence.”

Nash is also an advisor at Marin Software and a mentor at 500 Startups.

Earlier this month, LinkedIn beat expectations with a profit in its first quarter as a public company.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110830/linkedin-vp-adam-nash-to-depart/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110816/500-startups-next-class-leaves-the-nest-plus-a-full-list-of-the-companies/ http://allthingsd.com/20110816/500-startups-next-class-leaves-the-nest-plus-a-full-list-of-the-companies/#comments Tue, 16 Aug 2011 23:24:23 +0000 Drake Martinet http://allthingsd.com/?p=110789 Dave McClure’s seed fund, start-up accelerator and incubator — 500 Startups — hatched another class of companies into the world on Tuesday.

Some from the seed funding program and others from the accelerator, 27 companies presented to a packed house at 500 Startups’ HQ in downtown Mountain View, Calif.

This class was heavy on consumer services products, focusing on things like shopping and product discovery. A surprisingly large number of food- and restaurant-related services also demoed. And, of course, it wouldn’t be an incubator demo day without at least a few companies building services for tech companies.

McClure emceed the whole session, noting that 500 Startups had invested in 175 companies to date and plans to continue a focus on adding international start-ups to its ranks.

Below is the list of companies and products announced. The list is complete, thanks to a lack of “off the record” conditions such those imposed at Y Combinator Demo Days.

Tout
http://www.toutapp.com
Email response templates and tracking.

VidCaster
http://www.vidcaster.com
Make a video site on your own domain.

Daily Aisle
http://www.dailyaisle.com
Expedia for wedding vendors.

AppGrooves
http://www.appgrooves.com
iOS app discovery platform.

Loku
http://www.loku.com
Big data for local.

Kibin
http://www.kibin.com
“The easiest way to get feedback and editing on your writing.”

OVIA
http://www.oviahr.com
Video interviewing service for recruiting.

BugHerd
http://www.bugherd.com
Visual bug tracker for the Web.

Skipola
http://www.skipola.com
Easy mobile apps for restaurants.

LaunchBit
http://www.launchbit.com
Ad network for email.

Tinfoil Security
http://www.tinfoilsecurity.com
Protecting Web sites from outside hackers.

Culture Kitchen SF
http://www.culturekitchensf.com
“Ethnic cooking classes taught by the grandmas you wish you had.”

Storytree
http://www.storytree.com
Capture and share family stories.

DailyGobble
http://www.dailygobble.com
One-to-one marketing for restaurants through receipt digitization.

Vayable
http://www.vayable.com
Social marketplace for experiences.

Singboard
http://www.singboard.com
YouTube meets karaoke. AllThingsD‘s Liz Gannes wrote about them here.

Chirpme
http://www.chirpme.com
Connecting people through single dates.

From.us
http://www.from.us
Crowdsourced gift selection and purchasing.

Welcu
http://www.welcu.com
Managing unique high-end events.

Console
http://www.console.fm
“Awesome music with no hassle.”

Zerply
http://www.zerply.com
“Professional networking done right.”

WillCall
http://www.getwillcall.com
HotelTonight for live music and theater.

Manpacks
http://www.manpacks.com
Purchasing help for men’s accessories.

Snapette
http://www.snapette.com
Location-based fashion discovery and sharing.

CardinalBlue
http://www.cardinalblue.com
Makers of Pic Collage, a Top 10 photo app.

CoderBuddy
http://www.coderbuddy.com
Next-generation ODesk meets Heroku.

CraftCoffee
http://www.craftcoffee.com
Mobile apps for small business.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110816/500-startups-next-class-leaves-the-nest-plus-a-full-list-of-the-companies/feed/ 1 http://allthingsd.com/20110812/singboard-karaoke-without-the-cheesy-videos/ http://allthingsd.com/20110812/singboard-karaoke-without-the-cheesy-videos/#comments Fri, 12 Aug 2011 23:00:29 +0000 Liz Gannes http://allthingsd.com/?p=109451 Singboard is a soon-to-launch start-up that dynamically creates mashups to create an online karaoke experience.

According to Singboard co-founder Ray Chan, karaoke on the Web is usually not ideal because it involves cheesy made-for-karaoke videos featuring nameless nobodies instead of real singers. Plus, as much as it’s fun to gather friends around a computer or in a Google+ Hangout, there’s a lot more to be done to make online karaoke social, Chan said in a recent interview at 500 Startups in Mountain View, Calif., where his team is about to finish the Accelerator program.

Singboard mashes up official music videos, karaoke tracks and song lyrics. It doesn’t license any of the parts, because it keeps the streams intact as it layers them together to form a whole, Chan said.

Chan said he and his co-founders are building tools to help users to record themselves singing karaoke and then overlay their own voices onto official music videos — which he thinks is way cooler and more likely to be shared than amateur Webcam karaoke video. Singboard will also emphasize singing and sharing videos with friends.

Online karaoke has been done many time before — even Myspace had a karaoke product — but Chan argued that the combination of official music videos and a more social experience can set Singboard apart.

In the video embedded above, Chan gave us a demo using Justin Bieber’s “Baby” but said his own favorite song to sing is Eminem’s “Love the Way You Lie.” The first version of Singboard should be released before the end of August, he said.

Prior to Singboard, the same team had started work on a group photo-sharing app called vvall.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110812/singboard-karaoke-without-the-cheesy-videos/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110811/stealthy-app-maker-nettle-has-raised-funding/ http://allthingsd.com/20110811/stealthy-app-maker-nettle-has-raised-funding/#comments Thu, 11 Aug 2011 16:24:31 +0000 Liz Gannes http://allthingsd.com/?p=108712 Nettle, a start-up from two MP3.com guys, including Eventful founder Brian Dear, has raised $500,000 from investors including Google Ventures, Advancit Capital and 500 Startups.

What does Nettle do? That’s not clear yet. The company plans to launch “a next-generation social/local/mobile application and website for the global entertainment market” next month, starting with an iPhone app.

Dear, who is CEO of La Jolla, Calif.-based Nettle, elaborated that it is focused on “a very specific consumer vertical.”

Dear founded Eventful, an event aggregation site, in 2004, but resigned as chairman last year after being inspired to do something on the mobile Internet, he said. His co-founder, Dan O’Neill, who is CTO of Nettle, previously co-founded music company Trusonic.

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