AllThingsD » Chris Dixon

Commercial Drone Platform Company Gets $10.7 Million From Andreessen Horowitz and Google Ventures

Kara Swisher — Wed, 15 May 2013 11:30:39 +0000

Airware, a startup that is creating a software platform for commercial drones, said it had raised $10.7 million in a Series A funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz. Google Ventures also participated. As part of the deal, Andreessen Horowitz partner Chris Dixon will join Airware’s board.

The Newport Beach, Calif., company said it would use the money to expand staff for its universal development platform as the market for non-military drones expands.

Airware founder and CEO Jonathan Downey said that uses of drones will be increasing for a wide range of purposes, from checking infrastructure to monitoring mining operations to preventing poaching.

In an interview, Downey said that he expects to compete with a range of ex-military efforts, but that the most successful companies will be those that provide a platform to allow for the widest range of innovations.

“This is going to be about a lot more than we know or can guess,” he said. “The industry is at its very beginnings.”

Dixon agrees. “Hardware is the new software,” he said about the investment in Airware, which he said he discovered after attending conferences about the fast-moving drones business, noting that the overall field of robotics has “overpromised and underdelivered.”

Airware came out of both the Lemnos Labs and Y Combinator incubators and had raised seed financing from First Round Capital, Firelake Capital, RRE Ventures, Shasta Ventures, Promus Ventures and several Y Combinator partners.

Shapeways Raises $30M for 3-D Printing Led by Andreessen Horowitz's Chris Dixon

Liz Gannes — Tue, 23 Apr 2013 13:00:45 +0000

The idea of dreaming up a physical object and having a computer help you bring it to life — a.k.a. 3-D printing — is very cool today, but there’s a long way to go. Some of the challenges include faster creation times, more accessible software, a greater variety of materials with which to print, better 3-D scanning, and better ways to help people dream up what’s possible.

Now 3-D printing marketplace Shapeways has some more money to try to solve at least some of those issues. It has raised $30 million in a Series C round that’s the first venture investment for new Andreessen Horowitz partner Chris Dixon, alongside previous investors Union Square Ventures, Index Ventures and Lux Capital.

The New York City-headquartered site allows product designers to upload 3-D designs and sell them to online customers, who can choose a plastic, ceramic or metal material and sometimes also customize or personalize the product. Then Shapeways prints the object in one of its factories in Long Island City, N.Y., or Eindhoven, Netherlands, and mails it to the customer.

Shapeways isn’t the only company that does this, but it’s the largest and most well-known. Some 10,000 people are selling 1,000,000 designs to 150,000 customers so far. Shapeways tells designers how much it will cost to make their products, and then they can mark them up as much as they want.

Dixon said he thought Shapeways was particularly interesting because it combines three traditionally separate businesses — manufacturing, e-commerce and community.

Dixon — who previously was an angel investor, founded SiteAdvisor and Hunch, and became well-known for his blogging — said he expected to make further investments in what he called “fringe technologies” that help bring the physical world online, including 3-D printing, robots, hardware and “the Internet of things.”

Go West, Young Geek: Chris Dixon on Why He Became a Silicon Valley VC at Andreessen Horowitz, and More! (Video)

Kara Swisher — Fri, 25 Jan 2013 18:32:05 +0000

In mid-November, longtime entrepreneur, active angel investor, iconoclastic blogger and hardcore New Yorker Chris Dixon told the tech world something it least expected — that he had taken a job as a venture capitalist at one of Silicon Valley’s most powerful firms, Andreessen Horowitz.

Well, he’s arrived finally, and moved himself to San Francisco and his office to Sand Hill Road for real — even though he is still keeping his apartment back East.

It’s been a long and winding road to here for Dixon, who was CEO and co-founder of SiteAdvisor, which was acquired by McAfee, as well as recommendations engine Hunch, which was bought by eBay a year ago.

He is one of the founding members of Founder Collective, an East Coast-based seed-stage venture firm run by entrepreneurs, making a lot of investments in companies such as Skype, Invite Media and OMGPOP. Previously, he programmed financial algorithms at a high-speed options trading firm, and has also worked at Bessemer Venture Partners.

And, perhaps most intriguingly, Dixon has also blogged a lot about what needs fixing in the VC industry (a lot, according to him).

Yesterday, I motored the Mazda 5 down to Andreessen Horowitz’s office to talk about the move with the always clever Dixon, who is hoping to focus on a range of consumer-focused investments, and perhaps cast his freshly monied net more widely.

Here’s the video of the interview:

[ See post to watch video ]

Confirmed: Chris Dixon Becomes Seventh Investing GP at Andreessen Horowitz

Kara Swisher — Mon, 19 Nov 2012 23:00:03 +0000

Chris Dixon will indeed be the latest VC to join Andreessen Horowitz, as I had reported earlier was likely, starting in January.

Dixon is a lively and interesting choice for the high-profile Silicon Valley venture capital firm, having been a successful serial entrepreneur, a savvy angel investor and also a voluble tech scene commenter in blogs and on Twitter.

Perhaps most interesting is that Dixon, who is largely based in New York, will move to California to join what Marc Andreessen describes as a “single-office” firm.

In other words, Chris, get ready to be force-fed at Hobee’s!

In all seriousness, Andreessen said in an interview today that his big criteria for picking Dixon was because, “when the next Mark Zuckerberg walks into the room, we want them to say, ‘I want that person.’”

In addition, he noted that Andreessen Horowitz has a “bias for entrepreneurs … and Chris is the real deal when it comes to being an entrepreneur.”

Indeed, Dixon was CEO and co-founder of SiteAdvisor, which was acquired by McAfee, as well as recommendations engine Hunch, which was bought by eBay a year ago.

He is one of the founding members of Founder Collective, an East Coast-based seed-stage venture firm run by entrepreneurs, and is also an active angel investor, including in Skype, Invite Media and OMGPOP. Previously, he programmed financial algorithms at a high-speed options trading firm and has also worked at Bessemer Venture Partners.

Dixon, whose job at Bessemer was junior, said that he became interested in Andreessen Horowitz once he learned more about them after helping the start-ups he had invested in with fundings. He was especially struck by all the added help the firm provided in areas such as recruiting.

While he said his investing as a partner there would be “non-thematic,” he noted that it was likely he would “tilt more toward consumer” investments.

“I am going to try to pick the special bird,” he said, paraphrasing a quote by famed Sequoia Capital VC Mike Moritz. “And not the flock.”

Here is a blog post on the move by Dixon and one by Andreessen, in which he apparently thinks I leak for a living.

New York Techie Chris Dixon in Talks to Be Next Partner at Andreessen Horowitz

Kara Swisher — Sun, 18 Nov 2012 00:54:06 +0000

According to sources, well-known New York techie Chris Dixon is in the final stages of discussions to become a partner at the high-profile Silicon Valley venture firm Andreessen Horowitz.

While the deal is not yet complete, Dixon seems likely to become the firm’s latest addition. It’s not clear what his area of specialty will be, but it is likely to center on start-ups, given his experience.

Dixon is one the more voluble and energetic tech players on the New York scene, as well as a serial entrepreneur with several prominent exits. He was CEO and co-founder of SiteAdvisor, which was acquired by McAfee, as well as recommendations engine Hunch, which was bought by eBay a year ago.

He is one of the founding members of Founder Collective, an East Coast-based seed-stage venture firm run by entrepreneurs and is also an active angel investor, including in Skype, Invite Media and OMGPOP. Previous to this, he also programmed financial algorithms at a high-speed options trading firm and has also worked at Bessemer Venture Partners.

In his bio on the Founder Collective site, Dixon said: “I think one of the reasons I can be helpful to entrepreneurs is I’ve worked in the trenches on both the startup side and the investor side.”

His selection by Andreessen Horowitz is an interesting one, since it is the first by the firm of a solidly New York-area techie, although it is not clear if Dixon will move to California or not.

He’s also not been afraid to tangle with VCs in his frequent blogging. In one post in July, titled “Shoehorning Startups into the VC Model,” he noted:

“A startup should raise venture capital (or ‘venture-style’ angel/seed funding) only if: 1) the goal is to build a billion-dollar (valuation) company, and 2) raising millions of dollars is absolutely necessary or will significantly accelerate growth. … Unfortunately, many of these startups graft VC-friendly narratives onto their plans and raise too much money. Short term it might seem like a good idea but long term it won’t.”

Quote-Saving App Banters to Shut Down; Founders Jump to Betaworks

Mike Isaac — Tue, 15 May 2012 23:42:16 +0000

After struggling to attract a significant user base over the past year, conversation-saving app Banters is closing up shop, co-founder Lauren Leto announced via company blog on Tuesday. Leto and partner Patrick Moberg had raised an undisclosed amount of seed funding from the likes of Chris Dixon, Khosla Ventures and SV Angel. The two will join Betaworks — Leto as general manager of the firm’s Findings product and Moberg as a “hacker-in-residence.”

Pinterest CEO Ben Silbermann's Lesson for Start-Ups: Go Your Own Way

Liz Gannes — Tue, 13 Mar 2012 18:42:39 +0000

Telling people how to create and run their own Internet start-up is a booming mini-industry. But here’s Pinterest co-founder and CEO Ben Silbermann’s advice: “Don’t take too much advice.”

“Most people generalize whatever they did, and say that was the strategy that made it work,” Silbermann said. In reality, there’s very little way of knowing how various factors contributed to success or failure.

In an interview with Hunch co-founder and investor Chris Dixon at SXSW today, it was remarkable how often the conversation hit upon ways that Pinterest bucked Silicon Valley’s conventional wisdom. And yet, these days the visual social curation service is one of the fastest-growing and most influential of start-ups.

Silbermann is in some ways a stereotypical start-up founder. He moved to Silicon Valley because he wanted to be a part of the excitement (in fact, he says one of his inspirations was reading about Kevin Rose and Digg on TechCrunch). He worked at Google before starting a company. He’s a soft-spoken young guy who’d obviously be more comfortable working on his product than speaking to a large audience.

Still, on many important decisions, Silbermann and Pinterest zigged where others zagged.

Timeless Beauty (not a skin-care product, promise)

Pinterest was hard for investors to understand at first (these days, they’d cut off a limb for equity) because it deviated from the trends of the moment. “When we first started, people were obsessed with this idea of real time, and everything was real-time text feeds,” Silbermann said.

Pinterest, on the other hand, isn’t about speed or dense information. “To me, [Pinterest's image-dominated] boards are a very human way of looking at the world,” Silbermann said. By contrast, “You never see a tweet older than 48 hours, unless it’s ironic. I wanted to create a service that’s a bit timeless.”

Pinterest’s big idea is “helping people discover things that they didn’t know they wanted,” Silbermann said, so beauty and simplicity are its highest product goals.

Cult of the Engineer

Or here’s a more personal example. Engineering is the hallowed skill and occupation of Silicon Valley. Silbermann is not an engineer, so at Google he worked in online sales and operations.

“I left, not because I didn’t love the company, but because of my particular background, it would have been really hard to built products,” he said. When he and his co-founders got together, they first worked on iPhone apps with expensive contract developers.

And today, Pinterest’s small team of 20 people is not driven by engineering. The company is split into three divisions: Engineering, design and social — with “social” a combination of quantitative people and community people, who try to understand how and why people use Pinterest, how social groups form and how social norms propagate.

“I kind of think of engineering like the chefs at a restaurant,” Silbermann said. “Nobody’s going to deny chefs are integrally important, but there’s also so many other people who contribute to a great meal.”

Not Knowing When to Quit

Here’s another one. “Fail fast” is a common mantra in Silicon Valley. “If you’re not embarrassed by your first product release, you’ve released too late,” says start-up guru Reid Hoffman.

But Pinterest had “literally dozens” of versions of its signature grid layout “that were fully coded and fully styled with production data” before they were released.

Silbermann said, “The hard part about that idea of ‘minimum viable product,’ for me, is you don’t know what ‘minimum’ is, and you don’t know what ‘viable’ is.”

In the early days, Pinterest had “catastrophically small numbers,” Silbermann said. Nine months after launch, the site counted 10,000 users, with few of them active on a daily basis.

Silbermann said he recently picked up Eric Ries’s “The Lean Startup,” and was grateful he didn’t read it at the time, because it might have convinced him to give up at that point.

In fact, he’s not sure why he didn’t quit — probably because he was afraid of embarrassment, and doubted Google would hire him back, Silbermann said.

Myth of the Early Adopter

If there’s one thing people know about Pinterest being different from other Internet start-ups, it’s the site’s success with women and homemakers.

But Silbermann has a more nuanced view of so-called “early adopters.” A decade ago, an early adopter was likely someone with a fast, expensive home Internet connection and a smartphone. But those luxuries are not just reserved for the techie elite anymore.

“Now, everyone that I grew up with in Iowa has Facebook; they often have an iPhone or Android phone; so, to me, it makes sense that people would find these services,” Silbermann said.

Once Pinterest did start growing — it had 16.1 million U.S. uniques in January, having doubled since November — it wasn’t because of celebrity users who brought in growth spurts, as with some other services like Twitter, but rather through networks of people like design bloggers, Silbermann said.

I don’t want to get too cheesy, but one last way Silbermann differs from many other founders? He comes off as incredibly humble, thoughtful and nice.

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NewsFailure

Voices — Wed, 29 Feb 2012 07:59:09 +0000

The way I see it, If I can spend 20 minutes in the morning and have a 90 percent chance of knowing anything important that someone might mention that day, I’m informed. A person mentioning news that I didn’t know about, that is relevant to me, is a failure in my newsreading methods.

– Chris Dixon, talking to News.me about how he gets his news

Sarah Lacy Debuts New Tech Site, PandoDaily -- $2M+ in Funding and Guess Who's Working for Her? (Video)

Kara Swisher — Mon, 16 Jan 2012 17:00:28 +0000

As has been widely reported, well-known TechCrunch columnist and Silicon Valley journalist Sarah Lacy has a new gig: Running her own new tech news site, which debuts today.

(She’s pictured here with another recent adorable start-up of hers, named Eli.)

Not so widely reported? The site, called PandoDaily.com, will feature three of TechCrunch’s most high-profile former bloggers: Michael Arrington, M.G. Siegler and Paul Carr.

That’s right, Lacy is Arrington’s boss this time around — even though his CrunchFund venture firm will also be an investor, in a funding round of more than $2 million for PandoDaily.

Other investors — whom Lacy described as “people I like and respect” — include a panoply of tech movers and shakers, including personal investments from Marc Andreessen, Peter Thiel, Matt Cohler, Jeff Jordan, Josh Kopelman, Zach Nelson, Andrew Anker, Saul Klein, Tony Hsieh and Chris Dixon, as well as seed investments from Greylock Partners, SV Angel, Lerer Ventures, Accel Partners and Menlo Ventures.

There will certainly be questions about all these funders who are also topics of PandoDaily’s posts, which Lacy acknowledged. She said the large number of funders was calculated so that none had undue influence.

Of course, many in Silicon Valley will be watching her carefully for any conflicts of interest or punches pulled. Lacy insisted that there will not be a problem and joked that she will definitely not become a VC, referring to the controversy around Arrington becoming one while at TechCrunch.

That issue blew up like a Roman candle, of course, leaving everyone with powder burns — I called the incident a “giant, greedy, Silicon Valley pig pile.”

Interestingly, Lacy did manage to stay out of the spotlight (she was, in fact, having her baby during the worst of the controversy, which was likely more painful).

Ignoring the delicious epic revenge part of this on AOL — which bought TechCrunch and then promptly presided over a tech version of the War of the Roses (and is, ironically, an investor via CrunchFund) — PandoDaily will focus on start-ups in Silicon Valley and everywhere else that homegrown spirit of innovations reaches.

Here’s a screenshot of the cleanly designed and handsome site:

In an inaugural post, titled ““Why I Started PandoDaily,” Lacy compared the site to a colony of trees in Utah, saying, “We have one goal here at PandoDaily: To be the site-of-record for that startup root-system and everything that springs up from it, cycle-after-cycle.”

Which is kind of like TechCrunch, which she left earlier this year.

“This is not TechCrunch 2.0,” Lacy said to me in an interview last week. “But, of course, we will be compared to TechCrunch.”

Of course, especially because of the presence of its star lineup on PandoDaily — who will write regularly, along with an initially small staff of other writers — and also its plans for conferences and other gatherings.

(An AOL source, by the way, said there were no contractual noncompete issues for PandoDaily to worry about.)

Here’s a longish interview I did about PandoDaily with Lacy, who has written two books focused on entrepreneurs, worked at Businessweek and was founding co-host of Yahoo Finance’s daily show “TechTicker.”

She talks about the site’s unusual name, her wrangling over leaving TechCrunch, and the prospect of now running her own show.

Welcome back, Sarah (and call me if you need help with those dudes, as we have wrangled before).

Here’s the video:

[ See post to watch video ]

eBay Buys Hunch

Peter Kafka — Mon, 21 Nov 2011 14:57:51 +0000

EBay has purchased Hunch, a recommendations engine that’s supposed to figure out what users like, based on their tastes and affinities.

Michael Arrington, who broke the news this morning, pegs the purchase price at “somewhere around $80 million.”

Hunch, led by high-profile CEO Chris Dixon and, for a time, Flickr co-founder Caterina Fake, had raised around $20 million from investors including Khosla Ventures and Bessemer Venture Partners; last year, the company had reportedly mulled a Google deal for around $60 million. The purchase is one in a string of start-up acquisitions for eBay.

Here’s a 2010 interview with Dixon and Fake, conducted by Kara Swisher:

[ See post to watch video ]

Like the Blog? Buy the E-Book! Chris Dixon For Sale, Via Kindle

Peter Kafka — Tue, 19 Apr 2011 13:31:32 +0000

Here’s a clever idea from Chris Dixon: The investor and entrepreneur has turned his well-read blog into an e-book. Dixon, who runs Hunch and helps steer Founder Collective‘s bets when he’s not blogging, has taken a couple years’ worth of posts and compiled them into “Startups;” Dixon’s proceeds from the $2.99 mini-book will go to non-profit hackNY.

With Canvas, Can "Moot" Bottle 4chan and Sell It?

Liz Gannes — Mon, 31 Jan 2011 23:20:18 +0000

Christopher “Moot” Poole, the creator of 4chan, today opened his new image-sharing community, called Canvas, to 4,000 of the people who signed up to test it.

The service seems remarkably similar to 4chan, the rowdy image-sharing message board, but rather than anonymity, Canvas requires that users have accounts (would-be users currently sign up through Facebook Connect), and unlike 4chan, Canvas keeps an archive of posted graphics (and will reportedly later support other media).

Poole has described his goal with Canvas as trying “to reimagine what an image board should be today using the current technologies available.” Canvas and 4chan are run separately.

Unlike the many personal and professional image-sharing sites that already exist, Canvas seems oriented toward PhotoShop jobs, cartoons and memes (more like Cheezburger, which often riffs off 4chan-originated concepts, and just raised $30 million for an Internet comedy empire). Canvas is backed by Ron Conway, Marc Andreessen, Chris Dixon, Kenneth Lerer and Joshua Schachter.

Image via TechCrunch.

Twitter List Service TLists Becomes Sulia, Raises $3.5 Million

Peter Kafka — Mon, 20 Dec 2010 20:42:27 +0000

Ah! You can still raise money for a start-up whose fate is tied directly to Twitter.

Here’s Sulia, which is dedicated to finding and sorting the most relevant Twitter users into related groups, so you can follow them.

The New York-based company has raised $3.5 million in a round led by FirstMark Capital. Other investors, who had previously put in $1 million, include Bo Peabody’s Village Ventures, Roger Ehrenberg’s IA Ventures, Chris Dixon’s Founder Collective and Ron Conway’s SV Angels.

If Sulia sounds vaguely like TLists, which did something similar, there’s a good reason for that. It’s the same company, rebranded and tilted slightly–can’t call this one a pivot.

The main difference is that while TLists was primarily supposed to be a tool for Web publishers and Twitter clients–it already works with TweetDeck, Flipboard and Mashable–Sulia is supposed to do that and provide a destination Web site. That is, it is becoming a publisher itself.

How will Sulia make money? The same way Twitter wants to: Act like a media company, and sell ads against the eyeballs it collects.

CEO and founder Jonathan Glick knows that world pretty well, given a work history that includes stints at iVillage and the New York Times. Prior to the start-up, he was director of research at Gerson Lehrman Group, which is both the subject of legal scrutiny and the world’s largest “expert network.”

At one point this summer, when the company was still called TLists, the start-up had a working relationship with Twitter, where it powered a grouping feature on the service’s profile pages.

From what I can tell, that feature disappeared with Twitter’s redesign, but I’m told the companies are still working together and may have something to show off within a few weeks.

BoomTown as Judge Judy, Um, Judge BigApps

Kara Swisher — Wed, 13 Oct 2010 09:37:04 +0000

With All Things Digital Global HQ located in the heart of the Castro in San Francisco, BoomTown tries hard not to judge–even that dude who likes to come into the Starbucks (SBUX) naked.

But I made an exception to be a judge for an innovative civic geek contest that New York City is doing for the second year called BigApps 2.0.

Get it? Big Apple…BigApps!

In any case, Mayor Michael Bloomberg is opening up a whole mess of government information–350 data sets from more than 40 agencies–and letting software developers have at it.

According to NYC:

“The City continues to open more data on the www.NYC.gov Data Mine as part of transparency initiative. The Data Mine was established for last year’s competition and, as part of the City’s efforts to promote transparency across agencies, all data will remain available for public use after the conclusion of the competition. Additional datasets will be made available throughout the year.”

Some of the new juicy data includes: CompStat data, buildings complaints and real-time traffic numbers.

The winners for the best apps created to help New York City citizens will get cash prizes totaling $20,000.

Last year, there were 84 apps, including a winner from Big Apple Ed, a guide to schools there.

The new winners will be announced in March of 2011, after fellow judges of mine–including Union Square Ventures’ Fred Wilson, Hunch CEO Chris Dixon and Betaworks CEO John Borthwick–decide who is the best.

And how much do you want to bet there will be a bed-bug app submitted this year?

Here’s the official press release from NYC:

MAYOR BLOOMBERG Launches NYC BIGAPPS 2.0 COMPETITION

More than 350 Datasets Provided by More than 40 City Agencies and Commissions, Doubling Last Year’s Availability

Competition Builds on Citywide Efforts to Increase Government Transparency and Provide Greater Public Access to City Data

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, Deputy Mayor for Economic Development Robert K. Steel and Deputy Mayor for Operations Stephen Goldsmith today launched NYC BigApps 2.0, the second annual contest for software developers and members of the public to create web or mobile applications using City data. Building upon the success of the inaugural NYC BigApps Competition launched in October 2009, the City has roughly doubled the number of datasets available, bringing the total to more than 350. These datasets provide developers and programmers with additional material, including public safety data, buildings complaints, and real-time traffic numbers from which to create new digital applications. Last year’s winning applications are today helping New Yorkers find mass transit routes, review public school information and gather an array of information based on their current location. This year’s winning applications will receive cash prizes totaling $20,000. Deputy Mayor Steel will detail the program this evening at NY Tech Meetup, a monthly meeting of tech entrepreneurs where companies and developers demonstrate new technologies. Deputy Mayor Steel will be joined at the announcement by New York City Economic Development Corporation President Seth W. Pinsky, Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications Commissioner Carole Post and Mayor’s Office of Media and Entertainment Commissioner Katherine Oliver.

“NYC BigApps combines two of our Administration’s important priorities: making civic information more readily available to New Yorkers and promoting innovation and entrepreneurship in New York City,” said Mayor Bloomberg. “The inaugural NYC BigApps competition yielded an array of creative uses for City data, and–with nearly twice as much data formatted for application use this year–there are even more possibilities with version 2.0.”

“The most important thing that the public sector can do to help create jobs through technology innovation is to provide our talented entrepreneurs with the tools to create new products,” said Deputy Mayor Steel. “The BigApps competition does this by providing open access to City Data. Through the competition, we encourage the development of applications that can then be commercialized, spurring job growth and economic development in New York City.”

“NYC BigApps is redefining the relationship between City agencies and enterprising citizens, all while delivering value to the public,” said Deputy Mayor Goldsmith. “Last year, NYC BigApps contestants came up with innovative applications that would have never been created in the normal course of business. There is more data available for use in this year’s competition, so the potential for new and innovative tools that can benefit New Yorkers is even greater.”

“Last year’s Big Apps competition was an enormously successful way to achieve multiple goals: supporting the City’s important technology sector, giving entrepreneurs opportunities to create new products, and increasing the accessibility and transparency of City government,” said New York City Economic Development Corporation President Pinsky. “This year’s expanded contest promises to promote even more innovation and creative thinking among the vibrant and growing tech community in New York. We look forward to seeing the results of their efforts.”

“NYC BigApps, and the DataMine site that supports it, sits at the heart of the City’s open data efforts,” said Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications Commissioner Post. “This effort complements the many other ways we’ve worked to bring technology to life for New Yorkers, including 311 Online and the 311 iPhone app. Beyond today’s competition, we’ll continue enhancing the functionality of DataMine and expanding the amount of data available there for use across the City and around the globe.”

“At the Mayor’s Office of Media and Entertainment, we’re exploring new ways to share information about City resources and services across multiple platforms,” said Commissioner Oliver. “Already we’ve reached new audiences through QR codes on the Staten Island Ferry and on the sides of sanitation trucks, and we’re making the content of our online Video On Demand player available on various mobile devices. The NYC BigApps Competition is the perfect opportunity to further communication between the government and the public.”

The NYC BigApps Competition is open to individuals, and companies and non-profit organizations with fewer than 50 employees. More than 160 datasets have been added to the 190 compiled for the inaugural competition. New York City Economic Development Corporation and the Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications coordinated with over 40 City agencies and commissions to provide the datasets, with 15 new City agencies, including the Department of Environmental Protection, the School Construction Authority and the Campaign Finance Board, participating in Data Mine for the first time. New data on public safety, the City budget, complaints to the Department of Buildings, and real-time traffic information will all be available for download today at www.nyc.gov/data .

The Data Mine was established for last year’s competition and, as part of the City’s efforts to promote transparency across agencies, all data will remain available for public use after the conclusion of the competition. Additional datasets will be made available throughout the year. Information and updates on the NYC BigApps competition, as well as official rules, can be accessed at the competition website: www.NYCBigApps.com .

Fourteen winners will be chosen in total, including two new prizes–best application created by a high school, college or full-time graduate school student; and a Large Organization Recognition Award for organizations with 50 or more employees, which will not eligible for a cash prize. A panel of judges from the technology and venture capital community will select winners for Best Overall Application (Grand Prize, Second Prize, Third Prize and five honorable mentions), Investor’s Choice Application, City Talent Award, Student Award, and the Large Organization Recognition Award. Two Popular Choice Application awards will be determined by public voting. Judging criteria will include the benefit to residents, visitors and City government; the quality and implementation of the idea; and potential commercial value.

All submissions are due on January 12, 2011. The Popular Choice Application winners will be selected by public vote through www.NYCBigApps.com between January 26 and February 26. Winners will be selected and announced at an awards ceremony to be held in March.

Last year’s winners included: WayFinder NYC–an application that allows users to find the nearest and best directions to New York City subway and New Jersey PATH stations; Taxihack–an application that allows users to post live comments on New York City taxis and their drivers via email (alert@taxihack.com) or Twitter (@taxihack); Big Apple Ed–an education application that provide residents with an easy-to-use guide to schools in the City, including school searches, top ten lists , analyses , comparison charts , and detailed school profiles ; and NYC Way–an iPhone application that bundles more than 30 New York City resources and provides information sorted by the user’s current location. The developer of NYC Way, MyCityWay, received the first investment by the NYC Entrepreneurial Fund, a $22 million seed and early-stage investment fund established by the City and managed by FirstMark Capital.

The judging panel is comprised of: Dawn Barber, Founder, Tech Meetup; John Borthwick, CEO, Betaworks; Chris Dixon, CEO & Co-founder, Hunch; Esther Dyson, Chairman, Edventure; Stuart Ellman, Co-Founder & General Partner, RRE Ventures; Lawrence Lenihan, Founder, CEO and Managing Director, FirstMark Capital; Danny Schultz, Co-founder & Managing Director, Draper Fisher Jurvetson Gotham Ventures; Naveen Selvadurai, Co-founder, Foursquare; Kara Swisher, Co-Executive Editor, AllThingsD.com; and Union Square Ventures Partner Fred Wilson.

“We are thrilled to be powering the second NYC BigApps competition, with significantly more data made available for software developers and the general public,” said ChallengePost Founder and CEO Brandon Kessler. “We were wowed by the creativity of the apps in the first competition, and we look forward to giving new entrants the great exposure they deserve.”

“New York is home to some of the world’s best developers,” said Foursquare Co-founder Naveen Selvadurai. “It is great to see the City rewarding this talent and taking advantage of it to increase transparency and make the wealth of information on NYC.gov more easily accessible.”

Goodbye (Crummy) CAPTCHAs. Hello Ad Dollars?

Peter Kafka — Mon, 20 Sep 2010 12:00:16 +0000

Hate dealing with captchas–the squiggly, indecipherable text strings Web sites often force you to read and regurgitate for security reasons? Join the club. And pay attention to what Solve Media is trying to do.

The New York start-up isn’t getting rid of captchas, but it does promise to make them more tolerable: It says it can swap out the random, hard-to-read text with clear, concise English. And while it’s at it, it says it can turn captchas into revenue generators for publishers, by transforming them into ad units.

It’s a super-simple pitch, and if you see the ad units Solve Media is selling, it gets even easier to understand. So click the image to enlarge:

How can Solve’s easy-to-read English text defeat the bots and other evildoers that captchas are supposed to foil with their jabberwocky? Got me. I’ve got no way of verifying its claims, either.

But assuming it does work, CEO Ari Jacoby has an interesting product on his hands. He’s pitching it specifically to display advertisers and big brands that put a lot of money into TV spots but have a hard time doing much with click-per-action schemes offered by Google’s (GOOG) AdWords and others.

The idea is that Jacoby’s ads require users to engage with them, by typing in the names of brands and products. But they don’t do anything beyond that–they don’t trigger a video, or take you to another Web site or anything else. It’s sort of like sitting on your couch and uttering “Outback” every time a Subaru spot comes on.

Jacoby claims his “type-in” ads will increase Web surfers’ recall of the ads, for the same reason that writing anything down makes it easier to remember.

That’s much more valuable than taking users to a branded minisite, he argues. “If we can deliver the cognitive payload up front, then we don’t need to deliver the users to a site that they don’t really want to go to anyway.”

And Jacoby thinks advertisers will pay up for the privilege, in the range of 25 cents to 50 cents each time a surfer types in a brand or product. He’ll split revenue 50/50 with publishers.

Playing along so far: Advertisers including Microsoft (MSFT), GE’s (GE) Universal Pictures and Toyota (TM), and publishers including Meredith (MDP), Tribune and AOL (AOL).

AOL is also an investor in the company (previously named AdCopy), via its AOL Ventures arm. Other investors, who have collectively put something like $6 million into the company, include First Round Capital, New Atlantic Ventures and angels like Chris Dixon, Roger Ehrenberg, Aydin Senkut and Shervin Pishevar.

Solve Media from Solve Media on Vimeo.

Hunch Gets It Right, Adds a $10 Million Series B Round Led by Khosla Ventures

Peter Kafka — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 21:40:15 +0000

Hunch, a buzzy start-up that answers questions using crowdsourced recommendations, has resolved one query of its own: Who’s going to fund our B round?

Sources tell me that Khosla Ventures is leading a new round that will add another $10 million to $12 million to the start-up’s bank account. General Catalyst Partners, Bessemer Venture Partners, and Ron Conway, who put $2 million into the company a year ago, are reinvesting.

I’m told that Gideon Yu, the former CFO of both Facebook and YouTube, is steering the investment for Khosla.

Hunch was co-founded by Caterina Fake, who founded Flickr and sold it to Yahoo (YHOO) in 2005, and Chris Dixon, who built SiteAdvisor and sold it to McAfee (MFE) in 2006.

Hunch is still a modest-sized site–its internal numbers put it at 1.2 million unique visitors–but Fake and Dixon are well-regarded entrepreneurs. And while they don’t like to be compared with Aardvark, which has a vaguely similar concept, the linkage does have some upside: Last month, Google (GOOG) bought that site for $50 million.

I asked Fake, Dixon and Yu for comment. Until I hear from them, you can read up on Hunch in Kara Swisher’s story from last month. Or you can watch this interview.

[ See post to watch video ]

Hunch's Fake and Dixon Speak (And They've Got a Hunch, You Might Not Get Exactly What It Is Yet)

Kara Swisher — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 18:42:18 +0000

When Aardvark was sold to Google (GOOG) for $50 million last week, a lot of folks wondered about the fate of Hunch, another hot start-up in the space.

Except, as correctly noted by two of its four co-founders, Caterina Fake and Chris Dixon, in a chat BoomTown had yesterday, Hunch is quite different–more of an algorithmically hopped up recommendation service that makes use of a mass of data from user-generated questions and answers than a simpler social search site.

That doesn’t make Hunch into either a Yahoo Answers or a Wikipedia with more charm or allow for annoyingly querying your friends on Facebook or the masses on Twitter.

Personally, Hunch reminds me of a crowd-sourced decision-making mosh pit without the sharp elbows, making all kinds of cool, if odd, connections.

This mass of varied data is what Dixon and Fake think is key to making better decisions.

Got it?

The New York-based Hunch launched about last June to a lot of hype–somewhat due to Fake’s success with her last start-up, Flickr, the popular photo-sharing site Yahoo (YHOO) bought in 2005.

And so far, Hunch has been growing decently, with 1.2 million unique monthly visitors now and tens of millions of questions asked and answered.

(Its other founders are Tom Pinckney and Matt Gattis.)

With $6 million in funding, where Hunch goes from here will be interesting to watch, as it adds perhaps more profiling features, both fun and helpful.

The business goal said Fake: Basic lead generation, for which Hunch will presumably be paid by all kinds of vendors.

Listen in on all this and more in my video interview with Fake, who works on product design at Hunch, and CEO Dixon, who has had his own serial entrepreneurial success selling security start-up SiteAdvisor to McAfee (MFE) in 2006:

[ See post to watch video ]

A Father and Son Team That Founds Web Start-Ups Wants to Finance Them, Too: Ken and Ben Lerer Get Their Own Fund

Peter Kafka — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 11:30:25 +0000

Are you cobbling together a start-up in New York City and looking for cash? Good news: A lot of wealthy and wired people want to write you a check.

Meet the newest batch: Lerer Media Ventures, a new fund run by Huffington Post co-founder Ken Lerer and his son, Thrillist co-founder Ben Lerer.

The two men say they’re closing the fund’s first round in the next few days. When they’re done, they will have around $7 million to put into angel/early-stage investments–primarily in New York tech/media companies, though they intend to play on the West Coast too.

If you want a sense of what the Lerers are looking for, check out deals they’ve already done, like Hot Potato, Paperless Post, and GDGT.

Their investors include a number of bold-faced names, at least by tech/media standards. Among them: Pilot Group’s Bob Pittman, ZelnickMedia’s Strauss Zelnick, SoftBank Capital partner Mike Perlis, Hunch co-founder (and prolific blogger) Chris Dixon, uber-angel investor Ron Conway and Lerer’s Huffington Post co-founder, Arianna Huffington.

The Lerers join the ranks of other investors interested in New York start-ups, including early-stage venture capital shops Union Square Ventures, Spark Capital and First Round Capital, and a set of smaller funds like IA Capital Partners, Betaworks and Founder Collective.

The fact that the last two funds are directly connected to the Lerers–Ken is an investor in Betaworks (and shares office space with it), and Chris Dixon is an investor in Founder Collective–shows just how interlinked the New York start-up scene is. The same players seem to invest in the same deals, and now they’re investing in one another.

For instance: Check out the investor list for Brooklyn-based Hot Potato, which looks a lot like the Lerers’ group.

Or consider the fact that Pittman once worked with Ken Lerer at AOL (AOL) and now funds Ben Lerer’s newsletter company. Or the fact that Perlis, via SoftBank, is a Huffington Post investor and that former SoftBank partner and current Huffpo CEO Eric Hippeau will be an adviser to the new fund. Etc.

If you’re a cynic, you might call such familiarity overly cozy. And you might worry about the chances for a start-up that doesn’t find favor with the collective. If you’re an optimist, you’d say there’s nothing wrong with like-minded investors who like to collaborate.

No surprise what side Ken Lerer is on. And what about the growing number of people who want to invest in Web start-ups again? Not a problem, either.

“In angel investing, you don’t really have competitors. You go ahead and do your thing,” Lerer insists. “I don’t look at Internet or Internet investing as competitive, generally.”

Fair enough. If anyone feels otherwise, sound off in the comments below.

And in the spirit of full disclosure, I’ll note that even I have the faintest of links to this group, though it’s mainly aspirational. Ken Lerer was an early backer of my former employer, Silicon Alley Insider, and I have the tiniest of investments in that company, too.

[Image credit: Tony the Misfit]

Hot Potato Is Ready to Eat: Do Twitter, Facebook Users Want Another Real-Time Chatter Service?

Peter Kafka — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 15:25:03 +0000

Last month I told you about Hot Potato, one of the buzziest start-ups in the very buzzy “real time” sector. Now you can check out the service yourself. But not really.

The New York-based service opened its doors last week, but it won’t really kick into gear until Apple (AAPL) signs off on its iPhone app, and that’s taking a bit longer than the company expected. Founder Justin Shaffer still thinks he’ll be up and running on Apple’s platform in a few days, but until then, you can check out this video interview I shot with him yesterday, where you can get a sense of how the app will work.

[ See post to watch video ]

Or if you’re impatient, here it is in a nutshell: The service is supposed to let users converse in real-time about “events”–whether a football game, business conference or maybe even a really good house party.

You can already do that on Twitter and Facebook, but the pitch is that Hot Potato will help “curate” the chatter, so you will end up talking to both your friends and interesting people you don’t know–and that’s something Twitter and Facebook don’t do well right now.

If it works, there are some obvious advertising/sponsorship opportunities available for the service: The NFL could sponsor chatter about its games, for instance. Or someone who isn’t related to the football league could sponsor chatter about the games–since this is user-generated content in its purest form, Hot Potato isn’t required to get the go-ahead from anyone before it creates a conversational stream.

In any case, Hot Potato now has a pile of money to help it figure this stuff out. Last week, the company closed its first funding round of $1.4 million (I had originally reported that it was raising “about $1 million”), and in addition to VC backers First Round Capital and RRE Ventures, the start-up has an array of high-profile angel investors who have pitched in.

Here’s the roster: Super-angel investor Ron Conway; real-time start-up incubator Betaworks; Huffington Post co-founder Ken Lerer and his son Ben Lerer, who runs Thrillist; New York Observer owner Jared Kushner and his brother, Josh Kushner; ZelnickMedia’s Strauss Zelnick; Hunch and Founder Collective co-founder Chris Dixon; About.com co-founder Scott Kurnit; Facebook executive (and Apple vet) Dave Morin; Boxee’s Zach Klein; angel investor Allen Morgan; and entrepreneurs and investors Scott and Cyan Banister.