The democratizing of 3-D printing just saw its first big deal, with the sale of MakerBot to Stratasys for $403 million in stock, with an additional $201 million in performance-based earn-outs.

Stratasys is a larger industrial 3-D printing company, which has been around since 1989, while MakerBot has pioneered the desktop 3-D printing. But it has sold more than 22,000 3-D printers since it was founded in 2009, especially the most recent MakerBot Replicator 2 unit.

With it, a consumer can print out small objects, such as a plastic figurine. But the entire 3-D industry is innovating rapidly and things such as replacement body parts are also being printed on some machines.

MakerBot will continue to operate independently, out of its new factory in Brooklyn, Minneapolis- and Israel-based Stratasys said. MakerBot also has one retail store in Manhattan, where it shows off its printers and the thousands of objects that can be made from it.

Stratasys is a publicly-traded company, which merged with another company in the space called Objet, last year.

In 2011, MakerBot raised $10 million from a number of investors, including Foundry Group, RRE, True Ventures, Facebook exec Sam Lessin and Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos’ personal investment group Bezos Expeditions. Thus, it’s obviously a big win for them all.

“We have an aggressive model for growth, and partnering with Stratasys will allow us to supercharge our mission to empower individuals to make things using a MakerBot, and allow us to bring 3-D technology to more people,” MakerBot CEO and co-founder Bre Pettis said in a press release. He will continue to lead the company.

Said Stratasys, about its move into the “prosumer” or “maker” arena: “The merger enhances Stratasys’ leadership position in the rapidly growing 3-D printer market, by enabling Stratasys to offer affordable desktop 3-D printers together with a seamless user experience.”

Indeed, sources close to the MakerBot said it was on track to reach revenue of more the $75 million in 2013, a huge leap over last year’s $10 million in sales. It could be more if its new scanner product is released on time and sells well. It will allow a user to scan an object and then render a digital file that can be used to print it, all without requiring drawing skills.

In addition, MakerBot also had many offers for additional funding, said sources, at similar valuation to the sale.

Stratasys said the transaction is expected to be completed during the third quarter of 2013, subject to regulatory approvals. There will be a press conference tomorrow morning about the deal at MakerBot’s New York HQ.

The company connects riders and drivers through its smartphone apps, with payment in “gifts” rather than fares.

It is launching weekend service in Boston, Brooklyn and Chicago. Previously, the company started operations in San Francisco, then expanded to Seattle, Los Angeles, Philadelphia and Austin.

But those last two cities didn’t go too smoothly. In Philadelphia, local authorities conducted a sting and impounded the cars of SideCar drivers.

In Austin, the transportation authority declared ride-sharing was illegal, so SideCar filed a lawsuit against the city a week ago, and made all rides free for now.

Free rides were an easy non-sell during SXSW, with more than 20,000 requested during the Interactive (a.k.a. technology) portion of the festival. (Obviously, not all of those were fulfilled. But such is the nature of the system.)

SideCar spokeswoman Margaret Ryan said of the Austin situation via email, “We’ve since had productive meetings with city officials, many of which are pro-rideshare. We’re hoping to have resolution so we can go back to operating as usual soon.”

Meanwhile, San Francisco-based SideCar is still in discussions with regulators in its home market, where competitors Uber and Lyft have already settled with the California Public Utilities Commission, but SideCar had resisted terms that limited an open interpretation of ride-sharing.

In Boston, Brooklyn and Chicago, SideCar will be available from 5 pm to 3 am on weekend nights until it reaches critical mass.

The company had also said last month that it was recruiting drivers in Washington, D.C., for launch this year.

SideCar raised $10 million in Series A funding last year from investors including Lightspeed Venture Partners and Google Ventures.

That said, being in your twenties in Brooklyn as a hipster seems even scarier.

Mixel launched in November 2011 as a hyped collage creation app for the iPad, and later pivoted to be more of a simple photo manipulation tool for the iPhone.

The four-person Mixel team, which had talked to a number of potential buyers after its pivot, gets to stay in New York, making the easy move to Etsy’s Brooklyn office from the Union Square area.

Mixel co-founder and CEO Khoi Vinh — who was formerly design director for the New York Times’ Web site and is now Etsy product design director for mobile — said he and his co-founders are stripping out Mixel’s social networking features but leaving the core collage-making tools. They plan to maintain the product by working nights and weekends.

Meanwhile, Etsy’s Mike Brittain, who is director of engineering for mobile, said the company has projected that mobile traffic will top desktop traffic by the end of 2014.

Today, at least 25 percent of Etsy’s traffic comes from mobile. The company added iPad and Android apps to its iPhone and mobile web offerings in December. During the 2012 holiday season, mobile shoppers accounted for a third of visits.

But Brittain said the majority of mobile traffic comes via the mobile Web, and the company feels it can offer a better experience with native apps.

Asked whether the Mixel deal was actually an acquisition or simply a talent hire, Brittain said the company was fully acquired, but would not disclose further details.

Vinh and Brittain attested that Mixel and Etsy aligned on a few different axes — not just location — as both companies are built by “makers” and provide highly visual products.

Mixel had raised $1.1 million from Betaworks, Polaris, Allen & Company and CrunchFund.

The staff of AllThingsD is taking the day off today to test postprandial somnolence with the turkey-and-tryptophan thing, but we leave you with this very funny video from Funny Or Die by the grumptastic Larry David, about his Thanksgiving in Brooklyn.

Enjoy, and see you Friday:

Hurricane Sandy’s impact was widespread and damaging all over the East Coast, much of it devastating.

But on a late-night comedy level, of course, it provided fodder. While Jimmy Kimmel — who usually does his “Live” out of Los Angeles — had to cancel a week’s worth of shows planned for Brooklyn, other hosts used the storm as a prop.

Here’s both Jimmy Fallon of “Late Night” and David Letterman of “Late Show,” doing their monologues in front of no one, because it was not safe to bring in audiences (although as a joke, Fallon had one dude named “Bucket Hat Guy”).

Here are the videos:

Jesse Jo, Facebook

In the age of Photoshop, expect Internet chatter around every national event to come complete with fake pictures. With Hurricane Sandy fast approaching the Eastern seaboard, we’ve already spotted quite a few hoax shots circulating on the Web.

Instacane.com — a single-serving site that has collected all images with hashtags related to the hurricane — is riddled with fakes and repeats. And now that the site has reached critical mass, irrelevant photos with the #sandy hashtag are beginning to populate the feed.

Amid the fakes, however, there are some amazing real photos.

Take this picture of a construction crane at 57th Street and 6th Avenue in midtown Manhattan. It’s nearly snapped in half, dangling in front of the city’s eyes.

How do we know this is the real thing? Unlike previous photos spreading fast over Twitter, we’re seeing the same situation shot from multiple angles across the city, tweeted and reported on by everyone from CNN anchor Piers Morgan to Reuters social media editor Anthony DeRosa. And regular Joes on the street are tweeting it, too, not just the major news orgs.

Twitter consensus right now: Stay away from that intersection.

Keep in mind, however, that just because a photo isn’t as spectacular as a dangling crane doesn’t mean it isn’t real.

Like this photo on the left, taken by Vanity Fair contributing editor Andrew Hearst. It’s a picture of the Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn, nearly a foot away from overflow.

While it may not win a Pulitzer, it’s providing Brooklynites with actual important information.

Same thing for the Red Hook area, which is seeing waters rapidly sweep in over the streets.

by @greenpainting, Twitter

The fact that we must question these shots at all, however, raises an interesting point. In our “tweet first, ask questions later” world, the photos that spread faster aren’t necessarily the real ones, but those most sensational or poignant (see also the three-month-old “Tomb of the Unknown Soldier” shot here). False information spreads wider, faster, which in turn could potentially heighten alarm among an already freaked-out public.

So, a public service announcement: Next shot you see of a tidal wave about to engulf Lady Liberty, think before you tweet.

Unless, of course, you see Godzilla emerging from the water behind her. Then you need to tweet immediately.

George Takei, Facebook

Surely Etsy, of all places, should be an attractive place to work for engineers who are women, Hedlund thought.

As an online marketplace for handmade goods, more than 75 percent of Etsy’s buyers and sellers are women. And further, the company’s engineering team works on interesting problems around product discovery, has a quick-moving culture (it releases, on average, 27 live updates to its site per day, according to a live display when I visited), and is part of a company recently certified as a B Corporation — recognizing its social purpose beyond profit.

Marc Hedlund

Plus, Hedlund has a three-year-old daughter, and he wants her to eventually feel like she has the opportunity to share his career, if she wants to.

So he made hiring women to his team a sort of personal mission.

Hedlund had some early success — increasing Etsy’s number of female engineers to 12, by doing things like cold-calling recruits himself and finding promising candidates straight out of college — but in the past couple months, he’s gotten more creative.

In April, Hedlund — who previously founded the failed personal finance start-up Wesabe – advertised $5,000 in grants for women to attend a three-month program to turn people with a passion for programming into professional engineers. It’s called Hacker School, and it takes place in New York this summer. He also volunteered to host the session at Etsy’s Brooklyn office.

After having one female student in all of its past three classes, the current batch at Hacker School now has 23 women out of 53 students, said co-founder Nicholas Bergson-Shilcock. That’s still under half of enrollment, but some 661 women applied for the summer program, with an enormous bump following Hedlund’s announcement. “If anything, the admissions standards went up,” Bergson-Shilcock said.

Etsy ended up raising its grant amount to $7,000 for 10 students, to allow for taxes, and signed on Yammer and 37signals to provide four more grants each, for a total of $126,000 offered for female students who asked for financial assistance.

Hacker School's first day in session at Etsy

Hedlund said he’s ready and waiting to recruit some of those women when they finish the program, which was kicking off its very first day when I visited Etsy’s office last week.

That’s actually part of the premise of Hacker School, a year-old unstructured program based around independent learning and contributing to free and open source projects. There’s no cost to students, but Hacker School tries to place graduates at programming jobs in exchange for a $20,000 fee paid by the hiring company.

(Hacker School evolved out of a Y Combinator start-up called Hackruiter, and has raised $200,000 from Founder Collective and SV Angel.)

After dropping in on the gender-balanced Hacker School classes, Hedlund said, “It almost feels like time travel, more futuristic than any technology project I’ve seen: A trip to the future of what our industry should and will look like.”

(Image courtesy of James Duncan Davidson for Web 2.0 Expo NY 2010 presented by O’Reilly Media and UBM TechWeb)

This version: “The Hipster Games,” with ironic young people from five districts — Portland, Austin, Brooklyn, Oakland and Silverlake in Los Angeles — fighting to the death for that old Talking Heads vinyl record album.

Enjoy:

Here is one of the more fantastic appearances by the talented Samantha Bee of “The Daily Show,” on the controversy about Brooklyn’s Park Slope Food Coop’s proposal to ban Israeli products because of its persecution of Palestinians.

Yes, a hummus war.

Oh, just watch:

It is always nice when an intern makes good, and that is entirely the case with Drake Martinet (pictured here), who joins All Things Digital–as of yesterday, in fact.

We could not be happier. Plus, we knew he was our kind of geek after he agreed to spend the night in a tent next to Robert Scoble, to cover last year’s Apple iPad release.

That was when Drake was an ATD intern, until he headed to the New York Times this past summer to work on social media efforts in the newsroom.

And that’s one of the many things he will be working on here, making ATD more Facebook-worthy, Twittified and YouTubed within an inch of our lives.

Drake will also be working on upgrading our multimedia efforts–which is to say, figuring out a more sophisticated strategy for us than BoomTown’s Flip video camera assaults, helping mesh up business development efforts with our editorial integrity, analyzing our analytics and even making sure our new interns are up to snuff.

And, for his next trick, he will also be doing posts on interesting early start-ups and emerging ideas, much in the same way he did a bang-up job with a feature called “Almost Famous” when he was an intern.

Whew! Then again, he is young!

Still, Drake has done a lot so far.

After receiving his masters degree from Stanford University’s graduate program in journalism this year, and spending time in the school’s design program (the d.school), Drake moved to Brooklyn to work for the Times.

In addition to his weekly start-up column for ATD, his written, photographic and video work has appeared in the New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, the San Francisco Chronicle and numerous Web sites and blogs.

A native of San Diego, Drake first moved to Northern California to attend the University of California at Davis. He has lived in the greater Bay Area for the last eight years, excepting short stays in Louisiana, Washington D.C., New York and Chile.

When not working on a story or doing a little Web development, Drake can be found at his workbench building all manner of things physical and electronic, like the solar-powered Timbuk2 backpack that accompanies him almost everywhere.

He also loves to twist through the Peninsula hills on his classic Triumph motorcycle. (And, now that he is our employee again, perhaps we’ll make him do it with Scoble in tow.)

Drake joins a spate of recent hires at ATD, including: Liz Gannes on social (now appearing here in her new blog, NetworkEffect); Tricia Duryee on e-commerce; Ina Fried on mobile; and, last but not least, Arik Hesseldahl on enterprise.

And, as usual, much more to come….

The difference here? Apparently, Mark Zuckerberg really, really wanted to work with Drop.io founder Sam Lessin. That’s why Facebook not only gave Lessin’s investors a return on their money, but paid for the deal with Facebook stock instead of cash.

People familiar with the transaction tell me that Drop.io’s investors–primarily DFJ Gotham and RRE Ventures–ended up with something close to double the $10 million they put into the company over the past two years, and that they were paid out in common stock.

At one point in Facebook’s history, that wouldn’t have been remarkable. But as Facebook has shot up in usage, employee size and valuation, its managers have become loath to hand out shares in advance of an IPO.

For instance, after the company bought Hot Potato and founder Justin Shaffer this summer, there was some sotto voce grumbling from investors that only Shaffer received Facebook equity, while his backers got cash.

With the exception of the payment, the Drop.io deal looks very similar. Like Shaffer, Lessin will move from Brooklyn to Palo Alto to work at Facebook headquarters. And like Hot Potato, Drop.io will be shut down.

So what makes Lessin worth precious Facebook shares?

We know that Lessin and Zuckerberg have been tight since they met at Harvard ( Caroline McCarthy has more on that here). Perhaps as important: I’m told that prior to the deal Drop.io had begun work on a new product that was meant to supplant its consumer-facing storage service. (UPDATE: Samuel Clay, via Twitter, suggests that Drop.io was working on a “a wrapper for [content delivery networks]. Auction-style bidding for lowest cost delivery of content.”. That synchs up with what I’ve heard. But if true, not sure it explains Zuckerberg’s interest.)

Love to know more, but Facebook and Lessin are staying mum for now.

…recently begat this much more popular viral video, which eventually turned into a hit song at Apple’s (APPL) iTunes:

But here’s the full backstory, via the “Auto-Tune the News” guys behind the whole thing. They told their tale at Google’s (GOOG) Zeitgeist conference this week, impressing at least one high-profile attendee.

And if you’re a little uneasy about the notion of hipster Brooklyn kids turning someone else’s real-life crime story into a novelty song, I hear you. But the Auto-Tune dudes say they split their iTunes sales with unintentional star Antoine Dodson. So we’re all good. Right?

Former Google international exec Adam Freed (pictured here) has taken a job as COO of Etsy, the crafts e-commerce site, which just raised another $20 million in venture funding.

Index Ventures is part of the new round, which also includes previous investor Accel Partners.

Union Square Partners and Hubert Burda Media are also investors, as well as Flickr co-founder Caterina Fake.

Etsy has raised almost $52 million overall since its 2005 founding, which gives it a valuation of more than $300 million.

Etsy’s CEO is founder Rob Kalin, who took over again as CEO at the start-up last year.

But Freed brings more solid management with a global flavor to Etsy, having been a director of international product management at Google (GOOG). He left the company two years ago.

In that job, he focused on the localization and development of the search giant’s international products and had also worked in international online sales and operations, including setting up Google’s online advertising operations in London, Paris, Hamburg, Tokyo and Sydney.

He also established Google’s multilingual online operations center in Dublin.

Oh, yes, Freed speaks nine languages, which will come in handy at Etsy, since it helps craftspeople globally sell handmade items online.

The appeal for me: Checking back in with former Excite CEO George Bell, whom I used to cover in Web 1.0–an exec who never failed to correct my grammar, even though I was chronicling the quick rise and slo-mo fall of the doomed portal.

Bell is now a venture capitalist at GCP.

Here’s the video of my interview with him, as well as reps from four start-ups I met with before the event, all of which are not based in Silicon Valley, a relief in and of itself.

The interviews, in order:

* Justin Shaffer, founder and CEO of Hot Potato, a “presence data” service, based in Brooklyn, NY.

* Paul English, co-founder and CTO of Kayak, the travel aggregator, based in Norwalk, Conn.

* Stephen Chao, co-founder and CEO of WonderHowTo, a how-to video content destination, based in Santa Monica, Calif.

* Dan Olschwang, president and CEO of Jumptap, a mobile advertising company, based in Cambridge, Mass.

Check it out:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100510/video-boomtown-meets-five-non-sv-techie-dudes-in-10-minutes-in-boston/feed/ 1 http://allthingsd.com/20100408/google-at-the-gallery-turning-search-results-into-works-of-art/ http://allthingsd.com/20100408/google-at-the-gallery-turning-search-results-into-works-of-art/#comments Thu, 08 Apr 2010 11:30:44 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=18317 Most people see Google’s image search as a quick way to find a picture. Ken Solomon sees art.

Literally.

Solomon is a Brooklyn-based artist who has spent the past couple years working on stuff with a digital bent. One recent strain: Recreating the contents of a Web browser, such as Google results pages and Facebook profiles, using watercolor on paper.

This sounds odd but looks cool, at least to my eye. And I definitely enjoy the practical joke at work here: Solomon creates an image by appropriating Google’s (GOOG) appropriation of other people’s images.

Is that art? Well, Solomon has a show opening at a Chelsea gallery tonight, so some people think so. You can see some examples of his work at the bottom of this page, but they may make a bit more sense when you hear him explain what he’s up to in this video:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100408/google-at-the-gallery-turning-search-results-into-works-of-art/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20100212/how-google-made-me-feel-better-about-my-cable-guys/ http://allthingsd.com/20100212/how-google-made-me-feel-better-about-my-cable-guys/#comments Fri, 12 Feb 2010 14:09:58 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=16266 Here’s a move I didn’t expect from Google: A chart designed to make me feel better about my broadband service.

Okay. So perhaps Google (GOOG) didn’t intend to make me feel better about Time Warner Cable (TWC) when it rolled out it a “YouTube Speed History” feature yesterday. But that’s the practical effect of the doohickey, which shows me how fast YouTube clips get to me and compares that with the speed of my neighbors and the world at large.

Check out the black lines on the two graphs below. That’s me (click to enlarge):

Not bad, right? I mean, I don’t really know exactly what it means, but it sure appears as if my broadband guys are getting me my Numa Numa guy clips faster than they get them to most people.

Then again, it’s not as if I could do anything about it if I was unhappy. Until Verizon (VZ) rolls out its high-speed FiOS network to my little patch of Brooklyn, Time Warner Cable is my only broadband choice, which is no choice at all. And it’s a good bet that you’ve got a similar scenario where you live.

Which is maybe what Google is getting at here. Or perhaps this thing only exists so that when Google rolls out its own hyper-fast broadband service and adds that to the chart, I’ll feel less smug about my speed.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100212/how-google-made-me-feel-better-about-my-cable-guys/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20091218/almost-famous-auto-tune-the-news-michael-gregory/ http://allthingsd.com/20091218/almost-famous-auto-tune-the-news-michael-gregory/#comments Sat, 19 Dec 2009 07:25:19 +0000 Drake Martinet http://voices.allthingsd.com/?p=19242 A feature wherein All Things Digital looks at up-and-coming and innovative start-ups you should know about.

This week: We went all the way to Brooklyn to visit with, ask some questions of and gather a few pertinent stats about Michael Gregory and Auto-Tune the News, the viral video series featuring mainstream news personalities and hip-hop style singing.

Who: Michael Gregory

What: VP of Counter Melodies, Gregory Residence Productions

Why: In April 2009, the Gregory brothers began producing Auto-Tune the News, a musical satire of news programming using the ubiquitous Auto-Tune production software that enables spoken words to sound like singing (among other things). Every Auto-tune the News episode (nine so far) has gone viral, logging nearly 12 million views overall.

Where: thegregorybrothers.com (Web site); Brooklyn, NY (analog place).

Who else: Anyone with a Flip cam, a family of musical production wonks and 100 man-hours per episode.

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Five Stats You Won’t Find in His Facebook Profile

Worst Job: I moved furniture for a while. I got a little too excited and strained my back.

Has a Geek Crush on: Charlie Chaplin. He was an actor, he was technically proficient–he could do everything. And Groucho Marx. He was the Picasso of 20th-century comedy.

Gadget of the Moment: I think we may need to get ourselves a new camera this year. [But] we don’t want to improve production value too much, you know, and get people’s hopes up.

Wishes There Was an App For: One that turns your phone into a Taser. Not that I’ve ever been physically harmed or anything. I just think it would be cool.

Spoiler Alert: The next Auto-Tune the News will be more rock-oriented and has something to do with turtles. We can’t say more.

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A Taste of Auto-Tune the News

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Bio in 140 Characters

Born & raised in Appalachia. Moved w/brothers to Brooklyn. Worked days in a recording studio, nights playing w/Auto-Tune. Went viral.

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The Five Questions

Give me the step-by-step. How do you Auto-Tune the News?

Sometimes, it just kinda comes together. Normally, we start with the audio track that comes first. We kinda start with the hook and then lay down some kinda creepy arpeggio-sounding things, then lay down a sweet baseline.

It’s usually three or four stories news. Sometimes we’ll just see stories that we know are it. This last one, number 10, I probably watched the most news. Sometimes it’s because the story is boring, but sometimes it’s interesting, but the speaker is boring. It gets easier once you find your heavy hitters [news people who sound good auto-tuned].

What is your secret to making videos that are reliably viral?

I think it’s half crapshoot, half, uh…not crapshoot. No one is an island on the Internet; I’ve heard that said somewhere, maybe by Confucius. The perfect keywords for a viral hit these days are probably something like New Moon-Lady Gaga-Parody-Kanye. Something like that. Put those in all caps in your title and you’ll have a viral hit. Oh, and I forgot, cute cats.

Seriously, if you have things that are already popular in your video, it helps for sure. That’s why our “Charlie Bit Me” video [referring to the viral video of cute British kids] is probably our most viral to date. It took two already popular memes, the “Kanye interruption” [from this year's MTV Video Music Awards] and the “Charlie Bit Me” and remixed them in a style that is currently a meme. It created this, like, infinite feedback loop.

Early on, the strategy was releasing stuff parodying the [presidential] debates on the debate YouTube channel. I hate to admit it, but we used that really stupid but necessary formula of releasing something right after an event ended and titling it, “Kanye-Tiger Woods-Lady Gaga-Kittens.” I didn’t title it in all caps if that makes you feel better about me.

How has YouTube changed the world?

Well, in comedy at least, back in the vaudeville days, it was easy to steal from everyone and just use the material and not get in trouble. Back in those days, people weren’t taping your every move and saying, like, “Oh, you stole that from Sammy the ventriloquist.” Now, YouTube is sort of the new vaudeville. People can watch and say, “Oh, you’re stealing that from Steve Carell, and that’s from Andy Samberg, and that’s from Tina Fey.”

How has this turned into a viable business?

So right now, the brothers and me have left other jobs to do this full time. We’re trying to be smart businesswise, which has always been hard for me. I’ve been doing other [production] stuff…freelancing. But I was also doing stuff like tutoring SATs. We get lots of inquiries that we can’t realistically do, like: “Auto-Tune our business conference.” People don’t really understand how much effort it is. We did a video for the Webbies, and we did something for Sony (SNE). Those bring in the bread.

Internet fame is a fickle temptress. What will you do if and when Auto-Tune the News loses popularity?

I think I would just to succumb to my heroin addiction. You know, curl up in a ball and cry–just get it over with. Memes certainly have a beginning and an end. I think the fad will certainly end, but I think what has been created is a new category of what some people call art and some people call a joke. I think it’s possible that, in 20 years, people will still be doing the Auto-Tune joke. It will just be, like, “Meghan McCain sings the debate with Malia Obama.”

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The In Living Color Interview

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20091218/almost-famous-auto-tune-the-news-michael-gregory/feed/ 2 http://allthingsd.com/20091023/investors-bet-on-another-real-time-startup-next-up-for-hotpotato-product-users/ http://allthingsd.com/20091023/investors-bet-on-another-real-time-startup-next-up-for-hotpotato-product-users/#comments Fri, 23 Oct 2009 19:16:34 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=12350 Here’s a good way to get your hands on scarce venture capital money: Create a start-up geared around “real-time” sharing and conversations.

That’s the core of Twitter’s pitch, of course, and it has helped the microblogging service raise $155 million, a $1 billion valuation, and forge partnerships with Google (GOOG) and Microsoft (MSFT). Not surprisingly, investors are looking to place money on related bets, from search engines that parse real-time data to location-based social networks with real-time updates, and even real-time photo-sharing sites.

The newest entrant: Hot Potato, a buzzy start-up that’s supposed to let users converse about a particular event, whether they’re attending it in person or watching from afar. When it’s up and running, that is. The five-man crew doesn’t have users or a product just yet.

But that hasn’t prevented the Brooklyn, N.Y-based company from raising about $1 million, sources say, in a round led by First Round Capital and RRE Ventures. A group of smaller investors, including Betaworks, the incubator that specializes in real-time companies, and Ron Conway, the angel investor best known for his Google bet, are also backing the company.

Hot Potato is led by Justin Shaffer, an eight-year veteran of Major League Baseball Advanced Media, pro baseball’s well-regarded Web unit. Shaffer has recruited three other MLB.com employees (one of whom subsequently left to get an MBA at MIT) to join him.

Shaffer wouldn’t comment about his funding round, but was willing to discuss his start-up’s general plans. They are finishing an iPhone app and plan to submit it to Apple (AAPL) in the next few weeks, he said, and will open their doors once that’s approved.

The big idea is an interesting one. People are already using Facebook and Twitter to converse about events in real time–think about Barack Obama’s inauguration, or Balloon Boy, or last night’s Yankees-Angels game.

Shaffer’s critique of those platforms, though is that “they break at scale–there’s no good way to filter the chatter so that  you, your friends, and a group of strangers with something relevant to say can all connect. Hot Potato, he says, will offer a “curated stream” in real time of all the data coming out of the event in real time. What we’re really focused on doing is bringing together the entire audience of an event, whether they’re at the event or watching at home.”

Business model? TBD, of course. But there are a couple of obvious ways to go. For instance, Shaffer thinks people who opt-in to a particular conversation–say, about an NFL game or a U2 concert–would be okay with seeing “in-stream” ads, as long as they were relevant.

But that’s a problem that’s best tackled once the service is up and running. We’ll check back then.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20091023/investors-bet-on-another-real-time-startup-next-up-for-hotpotato-product-users/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20090828/coming-soon-to-your-iphone-major-league-baseball-for-a-dollar-a-game/ http://allthingsd.com/20090828/coming-soon-to-your-iphone-major-league-baseball-for-a-dollar-a-game/#comments Fri, 28 Aug 2009 21:10:41 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=10469 If you’re out of town and on the move and still want to watch your favorite baseball team, Major League Baseball is about to make you a very interesting offer: The ability to watch a game streamed live to your iPhone, for 99 cents a pop.

Bob Bowman, CEO of Major League Baseball Advanced Media–pro baseball’s standalone digital media company–tells me iPhone and iPod touch users will soon be able to buy individual games. The feature will be added to the company’s existing MLB.com app and will roll out as soon as Apple (AAPL) finishes approving the update, which Bowman expects to happen within the next few days.

As far as I know, that will make baseball the first pro sports league to sell mobile access to live games on an on-demand, a la carte basis.

The current version of the MLB.com app, which sells for $9.99, gives users the ability to watch a couple of live games each day, but MLB.com selects the games. And those who own both the app and subscribe to baseball’s MLB.TV–an all-you-can eat subscription service–can stream any live game they want to their phones. iPhone and iPod touch users have bought about 250,000 downloads of the app.

Bowman, not surprisingly, says he’d prefer to sell the app-plus-Web subscription together, but says he’s offering the games a la carte as an experiment to gauge demand. The test will run through the rest of the regular season, which ends Oct. 4.

News Corp.’s (NWS) Fox and Time Warner’s (TWX) Turner, the two networks that own the rights to the baseball playoffs and World Series, have a Web blackout for the TV broadcasts of those games. (Bowman says he is working with both networks to offer a compromise to iPhone app users–a “four screen” version with live, stationary feeds of the game–so that, for instance, you may be able to see the dugout, etc. Pricing, if any, still undetermined.)

There is one other restriction to the offer, and it’s the same one that exists with the Web subscription service: You can’t watch games that are broadcast in your home market. That is, I can watch the Minnesota Twins play on an iPhone if I’m in Brooklyn, but not in Minneapolis.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090828/coming-soon-to-your-iphone-major-league-baseball-for-a-dollar-a-game/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20090820/hottest-smartphone-ever/ http://allthingsd.com/20090820/hottest-smartphone-ever/#comments Thu, 20 Aug 2009 12:05:24 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=10093 Sure, your iPhone may be cool (except when it’s exploding). But can it turn your oven on, against your will? That feature, apparently, is only available on certain Sony Ericsson models.

As Brooklyn resident Andrei Melnikov points outs, this is great for remote pie-making, but problematic in most circumstances. Meanwhile, I am still holding out for a smartphone that turns the air conditioning on. Can someone please get to work on that, right away?

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090820/hottest-smartphone-ever/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20090811/mossberg-does-moby/ http://allthingsd.com/20090811/mossberg-does-moby/#comments Tue, 11 Aug 2009 08:43:58 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=17393

Last night, onstage at Lincoln Center in Manhattan, my most excellent partner, Walt Mossberg, interviewed well-known techno musician Moby about music and entertainment in the digital age.

The wide-ranging talk was part of an ongoing cultural festival series organized by The Wall Street Journal, called Summer Scoops Live.

Here are three video clips from the event:

If you prefer to read, here is a live blog that Michelle Kung did of the event to enjoy:

7:30 p.m.–Out of the steaming heat and into the cool, air-conditioned confines of Lincoln Center’s Stanley H. Kaplan Penthouse.

7:39 p.m.–The lights dim and Moby and Mossberg make their entrances. Moby slinks down in his chair (“Am I greasy, or is it the chair?”) just before WSJ culture editor Christopher John Farley introduces the pair.

7:43 p.m.–Mossberg plugs his son, who’s in a band, before asking Moby–whose real name is Richard Melville Hall–if he is really related to “Moby Dick” author Herman Melville. Moby replies that that is what his parents have always told him and explains the origins of his moniker: “When I was 11 minutes old, my parents looked at me and I was this little grub of a baby and my mother said, Richard Melville Hall is a very grown up name, and my father said jokingly, let’s call him ‘Moby.’ All these years later, I still have this name I’ve have from infancy.”

7:46 p.m.–Mossberg asks Moby, in between jokes about being both being bald-ish, about the difference between “Play” and his new album, “Wait for Me.” Moby begins by talking about how the success of “Play” completely surprised him, because he was considered a “has been” by the time the album was originally released in the early 1990s and that Rolling Stone refused to review the album. His success with the album also confused him, because he was unsure of his next step–was he supposed to listen to the label now? To the fans? To himself?

“Wait for Me,” his ninth studio album, was designed as a return to simplicity, and created with old instruments–many of which were purchased on eBay–in his bedroom in Manhattan. When Mossberg asks Moby to clarity what he means by “his bedroom,” the musicians lays out out his floorplan–he lives in a two-bedroom apartment on Mott Street and with a small space (“two people starts to feel claustrophobic”) set aside for his music work.

7:52 p.m.–Moby uses a Mossberg question as an excuse to slam Jay Leno, whom he calls the “least prepared interviewer.” He fakes a Leno voice, and mock interviews: “So Moby, you have a new record. Tell me about it.” Mossberg interjects, “So I have a low bar?” to the delight of the crowd.

7:53 p.m.–Mossberg asks Moby how he used technology in “Wait for Me.” Moby begins by explaining that while he loves technology, he don’t fetishize it like some of his friends. “I have an 18″ flat screen TV. A bigger screen doesn’t make TV any better. ‘Family Guy’ is still funny on a little TV. If it works and doesn’t cause me undue stress, I love it.’

7:55 p.m.–Moby launches into an explanation of what Pro Tools and plugins are, and how thanks to this nifty recording/mixing operating system, he can take prerecorded “notes” that have been recorded abroad, say, in places like Vienna, and then recreate a 60-piece orchestra on his keyboard.

7:59 p.m.–On to issues of intellectual property. Moby says: “I don’t mind when people pirate my music–if you want to steal my music, more power to you.” Mossberg immediately asks, “Why?” And he deadpans, “Deep-seated emotional issues.” He then goes on to explain that personally, he’s so honored that people want to listen to his music, he doesn’t want to restrict access to it. “I don’t have alimony, I don’t need insulin…I don’t have crystal meth problems.” Thus, he personally doesn’t mind, but he can only speak for himself. But to clarify, he does want you to buy his album so his friends at the label are happy.

8:04 p.m.–Mossberg and Moby discuss the RIAA’s decision to sue customers. Moby says that it’s never been cheaper to make music, videos, and promote albums. EMI, he thinks, broke even. So why are they alienating their customers?

8:06 p.m.–Blind item alert! Moby says that a few years ago, he was talking to a record label head, and when he asked the top honcho about their iTunes plan for their biggest star’s newest album, he was told, oh, we’re going to wait a couple months.

Moby then launches into philosophy mode and brings up the is/ought fallacy to illustrate his point, noting that the current music model “underpins the failure of major labels–they think, it used to be this way, so it ought to be this way.” Their ethos is, “Please go away. Make the future die.” Mossberg suggests he write a song/album with that title. Moby quips back with “Young People Suck” as a potential label-inspired tune.

8:12 p.m.–Moby adds a qualifier to his comments, touting Mute, his own record label. “Mute is wonderful, and they care about music–it’s the big major labels who have been egregiously bad stewards of music. It’s hard to feel bad for them when they’ve brought us some of the worst music ever created.” He then gets in a dig at Lars Ulrich of Metallica, saying that if he needs a “fur-lined walking humidor,” that’s him.

8:15 p.m.–Moby asks the audience if he can get pedantic for a moment. They cheer their assent. He then launches into a story about the early days of the Beatles, a band that got “lucky” because everything they did was in mono. “The first ‘Meet the Beatles’ was recorded in four hours. They played the songs and it was done.” He explains how this is not possible anymore.

8:18 p.m.–Yay! Moving on to a discussion about Auto-Tune, which “enables anyone to fake perfect pitch.” Moby declines to name names in his anecdotes, because he has enough feuds already, but singles out Cher’s “I Believe” as the first of the supremely auto-tuned songs, and mourns how kids can’t recognize real singing anymore. Next, a discussion of playback, aka the technology that failed Ashlee Simpson when she was reduced to her now infamous hoedown on “Saturday Night Live.”

8:23 p.m.–Memory lane for Mossberg. He recalls seeing the Supremes, and Simon & Garfunkel in the ’60s for $3/ticket in a gym, and how the concerts back then used to sound just like the album. But everything is much more complicated now.

8:25 p.m.–Moby talks about how he plays to bigger crowds in Europe, and how he can enjoy the concert experience. Playing in front of a big crowd, he says, with big production values, is the musician’s equivalent of playing the big penis card.

8:28 p.m.–Mossberg asks: When you make music, do you have to consider the fact that it’s going to be listened to on [Apple] iPods and [Microsoft] Zunes? Moby says sadly yes, and tells a story about how super-processed music works on the subway, because the noise of the L train doesn’t interfere with, say, a song by Rihanna, but the subtleties of Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue” will get lost.

8:32 p.m.–Mossberg moves on to playing a snippet of the song “Pale Horses” from “Wait for Me” because we’re running late, and Moby says he has to pee–”Syphilis is a demanding mistress.” Mossberg: “Bill Gates doesn’t say that to me…I can’t believe I’m defending Microsoft.” Moby: “I’m just saying the Zune is clumsy as hell.” [For those lacking the implied sarcasm, Moby clarifies later on that he does not, in fact, have syphilis.]

Moby on “Pale Horses” and many of his other songs: 80% of the work is done in a couple days, but it’s the finishing stuff that is what really takes a really long time. To get the job done, he holes himself with the music–”Hopefully, a more benign version of Ted Kaczynski during the creative process.”

8:40 p.m.–Audience Q&A time. Moby is asked about his licensing deals, and says he doesn’t license music anymore, because he’s sick of being the whipping boy for the process. Which is ironic, because everyone’s selling out now. He adds that he initially licensed the music for “Play,” because it allowed more people to hear the album.

8:46 p.m.–Moby interrupts a question-asker to comment on how he wishes the stage were against the left window like a previous panel he was on, so everyone could get a glimpse of the view. The questioner then proceeds to take out a Chilean flag and hold it up before asking Moby if there’s relationship between his music and the cosmos. The short answer? Yes.

8:51 p.m.–Mossberg sums up the evening and offers kudos to Moby for sharing his time and process.

8:52 p.m.–Moby plugs a new tour date in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. And good night everybody!

And, here is a rather unusual cartoon video of Moby being interviewed by a dog that the Journal did:

And, here is a video of Moby last week, talking about the digital impact of the music, in an interview on the Leonard Lopate radio show on WNYC:

Finally, here is a Q&A that Walt did with Flavorpill’s Caroline Stanley about a range of tech trends, as a preview to the event.

[Moby photo credit: AFP/Getty]

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090811/mossberg-does-moby/feed/ 1 http://allthingsd.com/20090711/brooklyn-loses-sarah-jessica-parker-gains-a-super-rich-googler/ http://allthingsd.com/20090711/brooklyn-loses-sarah-jessica-parker-gains-a-super-rich-googler/#comments Sat, 11 Jul 2009 22:29:18 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=9191 If you’re offended by a little weekend celebrity real estate porn, don’t read on.

OK. For the rest of you: The New York Times has unmasked the buyer of one of Brooklyn’s most expensive homes.

It’s not, as an astonishing number of people have speculated, actress Sarah Jessica Parker. Instead, it’s an unnamed Google (GOOG) engineer, who bought the place on Prospect Park West last year for $8.45 million.

At the Googler’s request, the Times isn’t naming the buyer, citing “office culture at Google” (more on the Times’s policy on unnamed sources here). But it’s going to be hard to keep this one quiet for long.

For starters, the buyers have already told the paper that “Harken Pretty,” the name of the limited-liability company they used to buy the nine-bedroom, 5,000-square-foot townhouse, is an anagram of their names. They also note that the Googler started working at the company prior to its 2004 IPO.

Assuming that the Googler is based in New York (he and his family are moving from Soho), that’s a reasonably small pool of folks to pick from. Maybe a couple hundred, tops. So this one’s getting out sooner than later.

Meanwhile, Curbed has a full set of pictures of the place, if you’re interested in that sort of thing (not that there’s anything wrong with that). Note that these snapshots were taken prior to planned overhauls. The exterior will have to remain the same, per New York City’s Landmarks Preservation Commission. But while the interior was good enough for its previous owners, actors Jennifer Connelly and Paul Bettany, the new owners say the kitchen “had an inconsistent 1980s renovation.”

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090711/brooklyn-loses-sarah-jessica-parker-gains-a-super-rich-googler/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20090629/big-music-label-foe-lime-wires-newest-executive-a-big-music-label-veteran/ http://allthingsd.com/20090629/big-music-label-foe-lime-wires-newest-executive-a-big-music-label-veteran/#comments Mon, 29 Jun 2009 18:40:27 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=8746 What do you do when your job working for a big music label disappears? You go to work for a pirate-friendly file-sharing service that’s being sued by the big music labels.

That’s the path that Jason Herskowitz has chosen. Old job: VP of product management at Total Music, Universal Music and Sony’s (SNE) attempt to create a service that offered either free downloads or free streaming music as a way to combat file-sharing. It collapsed earlier this year and Project Playlist bought some of its parts.

New job: VP of product management at LimeWire, one of the last (one of the only?) high-profile peer-to-peer file-sharing companies based in the U.S. Not surprisingly, the service was embroiled with industry lawsuits for three years running.

Here’s Herskowitz’s blog post announcing his new job and his pending move to Brooklyn (Welcome, Jason! Pretty sure we’re neighbors.) from Washington D.C. It’s not a crazy career move: A job is a job and there aren’t that many in digital music these days. Besides, I hear that LimeWire has nice offices.

Which reminds me: How is it, exactly, that LimeWire stays afloat when the labels have been able to force so many of its peers to shut down? Good question. I’ve asked around and heard murmurings that the labels and the file-sharing service may be able to work out some kind of agreement, but I’ve heard that every 12 months or so. So I’ll believe it in when I see it.

In the meantime, LimeWire continues to allow you to download just about any song (and many other things) you can imagine over the Web for free, without paying anyone a cent. Though if you do try to download a copyrighted song, you do get this stern warning from the service. I take it in the same spirit as the warnings head shops give you when they say the bong they’re selling is for tobacco use only (click to enlarge):

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