A new free Android and iPhone app called Sidecar brings a few tweaks to the mobile dial pad, such as helping people share live video, photos, locations, contacts and texts during phone calls.

What’s nice about Sidecar is that it allows all those items to be shared after a normal phone call is already happening.

This is the kind of functionality that would probably seem more natural within the native dialing experience than within an application, but a start-up has to start somewhere.

So instead of being in the middle of a phone conversation, and then switching tasks to the address book to look up someone’s phone number and reading it out loud, a Sidecar user can tap on the big “contact” button, scroll to the right number, and send it directly to the person on the line.

As for its video feature — which helps users stream live video into an existing call — Sidecar has actually filed for a trademark on the phrase “See What I See.” As you might guess, the focus is to show what’s in front of the caller, unlike something like Apple’s FaceTime, which defaults to iOS devices’ front-facing camera.

The Sidecar app has a simple — you might even say rudimentary — interface. It works best when one Sidecar user calls another. Sidecar users can dial out to nonusers over Wi-Fi, and for free within the U.S. and Canada.

Founded by former RealNetworks execs Rob Glaser and Rob Williams, Sidecar was previously a social video service called SocialEyes. Funnily enough, when it launched last year, I faulted the company for its lack of mobile support.

Airtime is to be a live video platform built around meeting new people. The site is currently accepting signups via Facebook Connect.

Parker and Fanning had previously tried to work with and even buy Chatroulette — the anonymous webcam pairing site built by a Russian teenager that sparked a zeitgeisty desire for online serendipity in 2010, and then was overrun by naked dudes — but that deal fell apart.

One thing to watch for with Airtime is how the service negotiates between anonymity and real identity sharing. Here’s a hint from the site’s privacy policy:

Your name is not shared when you are paired with a stranger. However, your Airtime and Facebook friends will be able to directly call you and see when you are online. You may edit or delete your interest information on Airtime and modify your profile information to increase anonymity.

Airtime’s investors include Founders Fund, Accel Partners, Andreessen Horowitz, Google Ventures, SV Angel, Yuri Milner, Ashton Kutcher, will.i.am, Scott Braun and Michael Arrington.

WePay CEO Bill Clerico

Among many competing payments providers, one thing that stands out about WePay is how it’s driven by social sharing. Almost half of WePay’s traffic is referred by Facebook, CEO Bill Clerico said yesterday on a panel we were both on at the Startup Conference in Mountain View, Calif.

A rep for the company said the exact Facebook referral stat is 43 percent — and much higher for campaigns like this one to support a family that lost seven members in a car crash.

Palo Alto, Calif.-based WePay, which initially launched as a groups payments tool, has raised a total of $20 million from Ignition, Highland Capital Partners, August Capital, Y Combinator, SVAngel, Dave McClure, Mark Goines, Steve Chen, and Max Levchin.

Unlike many other companies of this era, Evernote has known exactly what it was since the beginning — it just took some time for users and investors to catch on.

A while back I interviewed Evernote CEO Phil Libin about Evernote’s steadfast strategy for both its product and business model. On the occasion of Evernote’s sky-high valuation, Libin’s experience seems particularly compelling — and unusual.

“It’s almost like if you don’t pivot three or four times you’re doing it wrong,” he joked about today’s tech start-ups.

But in fact, Evernote had the tagline “remember everything” on the first day the company was formed in 2007, and it planned a freemium payment model from the beginning, Libin said.

“We said we wanted to make an external brain for everyone,” Libin said — as he has said many times in the past five years. “The driving force was no one is really happy with biological memory.”

But a good idea and a business model weren’t enough. Libin tried to raise money in the summer of 2008, a few months after Evernote launched and before it had much traction. He had a funding deal set up, set to close the day Merrill Lynch went bust. The investors told him they’d just lost 60 percent of their value so were pulling out.

At that point Evernote had four weeks of money in the bank.

Libin looked around for other investors for a week. Some potential investors told him they would fund Evernote if the start-up switched its business model from users paying for premium features to selling advertising about users’ interests.

“They said if you’re successful, you will have the holy grail of targeted adverting because people are telling you what’s important to them,” Libin said. “We considered that very briefly but I was never comfortable with that model. I always thought it would undermine the trust. We turned that down. We’d said we’d rather shut the company down.”

Other investors suggested an enterprise product, but Libin thought that would be odd because Evernote is, by design, made for both professional and personal use. Splitting the product into two versions felt false.

With three weeks left before forced shutdown, Libin was awake at 3 am. He said he told himself, “I’m going to go into the office and act like an adult for the first time in my life” and tell the staff it’s over so the company could close down on its own terms.

Sitting at his computer thinking his company was done, Libin noticed a new email from someone he didn’t know. Turns out it was an Evernote customer from Sweden saying how much he loved the product and wondering if the company was looking for any outside investment.

“Twenty minutes later we were on a Skype call,” Libin recalls. “He wired us half a million dollars within two weeks.”

The Swedish investor has asked to remain unnamed, Libin said, describing him as a computer nerd who started and sold a company. The two men have never met face to face.

The emergency funding from the mysterious benefactor paid off. A few months of keeping the company alive delivered the data to show that Evernote’s product and freemium model were working. It was able to raise its first institutional funding from Troika Ventures (which earlier this year sold its stake to Sequoia Capital for what’s estimated to be more than $45 million).

“I think if that email had come 10 minutes later I probably wouldn’t have seen it, and I probably wouldn’t have opened an email from a name I didn’t recognize in the morning,” Libin said.

Libin believes the fact that Evernote was saved by a happy customer was a proof point, in and of itself. “The guy from Sweden might not have fallen in love if it was an advertising company,” he said.

Why was Evernote, at the brink of being shut down after barely getting started, able to brush off potential investors who wanted to change its core premise? Libin said he could think of two reasons.

First, Evernote put a ton of work into building its own analytics tools and figuring out what to measure.

“I think the most important thing for us was really having a set of metrics and measurements so we didn’t have to make any blind, panicked major turns,” Libin said. “If you can’t see where you’re flying, it’s easier to start panicking and turn the flightstick around.”

And second, Evernote is not Libin’s first company — he’d previously sold two others — so he had confidence in himself and his convictions, and he didn’t necessarily need the job.

“It was easier to say ‘no one is forcing me to do this,’” Libin said. “We don’t want to get into targeted advertising? That’s fine.”

“I think if this was my first time around I’d be a lot more eager to please the market and the investors,” he added. “Maybe that’s a luxury.”

Photo credit: @jibees for LeWeb11 Conference

Cinemagrams are created by taking a video, isolating a particular section within the shot, and looping movement while keeping the rest as a still photograph. On a touchscreen, you can do this editing with your finger within the Cinemagram app. The rest of the interface is basically just like Instagram — with overlay filters, social features, a popular page, etc.

Cinemagram uses the age-old Internet format of animated GIFs, so these creations play automatically on many Web pages and within the app.

There’s also an artistic aspect to the format, originating from two New York photographers named Jamie Beck and Kevin Burg, who started creating and posting beautiful “cinemagraphs” on Tumblr a couple years ago.

Cinemagram doesn’t have a relationship with Beck and Burg. It’s also not the first app to try to offer “an Instagram for cinemagraphs” — but it’s one of the better ones I’ve played with so far.

Cinemagram comes from the small Montreal team that built the social news reader Smartr, which they’ve now shut down. I chatted with co-founder Temo Chalasani this morning, who’s out in California fundraising.

“People shake their heads as soon as they hear animated GIF, but we think they’re pretty cool,” Chalasani said. “Personally my favorite kind of Cinemagram is one in which the animation is subtle and surprising. But people are creating ones where it’s not subtle but still great.”

The standard starter Cinemagram, Chalasani said, tends to be new users winking their eyes or sticking their tongues out. But from there they can get pretty creative. See below:

At Y Combinator’s Demo Day, a short Ark pitch delivered in the midst of 64 other start-up presentations got the company commitments for $2 million in funding in a single day. And more than 250,000 people have signed up for Ark beta invites.

Less than a month after Demo Day, Ark now tells me that it has raised a $4.2 million seed round from investors including Andreessen Horowitz, Charles River Ventures, Greylock Partners, Intel Capital, SV Angel, Atlas Ventures, Crosslink Capital, Expansion Venture Capital, Felicis Ventures, Lightbank, Salesforce, Tencent, Transmedia Capital, and a bunch of individual angel investors.

That’s the largest seed round ever raised by a Y Combinator company. Update: Paul Graham of Y Combinator says the program does not track such statistics, so he cannot confirm that Ark’s is the largest seed round to date. Thus, I’ve updated the headline to “biggest seed round in memory” from “biggest seed round ever.”

The round benchmarks Ark as a clear front-runner in the most recent batch of the program’s closely watched start-ups. (Though to be fair, I’ve heard other top companies in the winter class are also cleaning up.)

Ark is almost too good to be true — a search engine that combines public and personalized search for people. It promises to transcend the current stalemate in social search between Google, Twitter and Facebook.

And it actually is too good to be true — right now, Ark is basically a simple interface to sort Facebook profiles by current city, gender, school, work, interests and other categories. Only 15,000 people have gotten beta access, as Ark has already fully maxed out its Amazon Web Services account by searching their networks and public data.

Ark co-founder and CEO Patrick Riley

But Ark CEO Patrick Riley, who was previously working on his Ph.D. at UC Berkeley’s School of Information, is clear about his ambition. “Google seems so out of touch without the rest of us,” he told me last week. “They’ve lost their neutrality.”

The rift between Google and Facebook leaves social search dramatically underdeveloped, Riley said (and it’s a point I’ve argued, as well).

“Politics have left open this enormous opportunity,” is how Riley put it.

Part of what’s hard about social search is that Facebook prohibits outside crawlers. But Riley said he’s confident that he can get Facebook data, because he has gotten advice from Facebook CTO Bret Taylor, and has worked with Facebook’s legal team to make sure everything’s kosher.

So why should anyone care about “people search”? Beyond the age-old attraction of researching and stalking people, Riley described Ark as an automated “About.me of everyone,” that collates various social profiles.

Riley also said Ark is planning to beef up its social-discovery tools, so users can find new activity and interest partners inside and outside their networks. There will also eventually be an Ark equivalent of Google AdWords, where users can pay to promote themselves, he said.

Riley wants to develop a reputation and validation tool that fingerprints a person by comparing their social graphs on different networks. Because many sites and apps improve with a better sense of who is using them, he plans to provide social-data plug-ins to other companies.

After being founded just last summer and coming into focus during the three-month YC program, Ark already has a team of 16 employees, including co-founder Yiming Liu, also from Berkeley’s iSchool. And now it has a bunch of money to hire more.

Please see the disclosure about Facebook in my ethics statement.

Transmitting personal data between applications doesn’t have to be for nefarious purposes. In fact, it’s often something that we users like and encourage — when we sign up for new services, we often volunteer our credentials from Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram and elsewhere.

Connecting these accounts means we don’t have to type in our personal information yet again in order to try some new thing; we can see which of our friends already use it, and we can cross-post our activities so we’re not constantly manually updating all these different networks.

You don’t have to try very hard to imagine why companies like this.

Singly offers this whole account-connection process as a service to developers, so they can get “merged, normalized and de-duplicated social data” aggregated together from at least 10 different APIs. This is similar to how developers might connect to Factual to get access to public datasets about places.

Singly is still in its very early stages; CEO Jason Cavnar told me that today just three applications are being built using Singly, and they are too young to name. But examples of apps that he thinks would benefit from Singly include any service that is built as an interface on top of existing information about users — like Mint, Flipboard, Showyou, Highlight, Sonar, Greplin, CloudMagic, Tungle, Nimble and Timehop.

Beyond social data, Singly is entertaining visions of connecting to credit card companies, utilities and other sources, all in the name of helping users dole out access to their personal data.

Singly started life as “The Locker Project” and attracted particular interest because co-founder Jeremie Miller founded the open source instant-messaging protocol Jabber. The company continues to open source its data-connection work, while offering it as a service to customers.

Early on, Singly had focused on hosting applications as well, but now it plans to be primarily an API provider, Cavnar said.

New Singly angel investors, along with Foundry Group, include Robert Stephens, the former CTO of Best Buy; Federated Media’s John Battelle; Esther Dyson; and Roger McNamee. Previous seed investors included Venrock, True Ventures, PivotNorth Capital (Tim Connors) and Freestyle Capital.

Now it has 25 million registered users, with 40 percent of new members joining from mobile and 50 percent of new users outside of the U.S.

If there’s one thing investors like, it’s hockey sticks. So Mayfield Fund, along with previous backers Accel, Norwest Venture Partners and Redpoint Ventures, has put $25 million into a Series C round for BranchOut, about a year after its last round of $18 million.

To be clear, San Francisco-based BranchOut doesn’t offer its own mobile apps — this is all on top of Facebook’s apps.

BranchOut has 13.1 million monthly active users, according to Facebook app-measurement source AppData.

BranchOut, which currently has 45 employees, said it plans to focus the new funding on expanding its team.

The deadline to respond to that request — sent by ranking members of the Energy and Commerce Committee — was April 12.

The location app Banjo got in touch with us to share its response. Basically, Banjo is willing to draw attention to itself on this issue because it says it didn’t do anything wrong — it never transmitted or stored users’ contacts, and it is designed around adherence to users’ location data privacy settings on various networks.

Banjo CEO Damien Patton says his app was included in the inquiry only because it had been on the list of social networking apps in Apple’s iPhone Essentials category during the week the congresspeople got interested. Banjo is a location aggregation app with one million users.

I’ll forgive a little privacy grandstanding on Banjo’s part, because I think it’s interesting to see the reply. If others of the 34 apps want to share their responses, I would probably publish them as well.

120412 Banjo Response to Waxman_Butterfield

But there’s already a new site called CircleUp that falls somewhere in between Kickstarter and SecondMarket. CircleUp vets consumer product and retail start-ups with $1 million to $5 million in revenue that are looking to raise up to $1 million. It posts them on a portal that’s accessible only to accredited investors, using standardized forms and online verification so that equity investments can be completed quickly.

(After the JOBS Act crowdfunding protocol gets figured out, the site may open to unaccredited investors, its co-founders said. For now, it is operating as a broker dealer through a relationship with WR Hambrecht.)

CircleUp has raised $1.5 million of its own funding from investors including Maveron, Triple Point Ventures, Twitter’s Elad Gil and David Topper, the former head of Capital Markets at J.P. Morgan.

But CircleUp didn’t use its own platform to raise that money, because it doesn’t meet the criteria for investment, the founders told me. Why? First, it doesn’t have an established financial track record; and second, technology businesses are hard for consumer investors to evaluate. Talk about brutal honesty!

So, starting today, Read It Later will be called Pocket. All the San Francisco-based company’s apps will be made free, with a fresh coat of paint today and a freemium model to be introduced later.

Pocket has 4.5 million users who save 400,000 items per day. It’s integrated into apps like Zite, Flipboard and Twitter, and it’s available for iOS, Kindle Fire, Android, Google Chrome and Firefox.

Usage stats from Pocket/Read It Later

Redpoint Ventures led the $40 million round, which values Path at $250 million.

Path CEO Dave Morin

That Path was fundraising was not a secret, and Business Insider had already reported that Redpoint would lead the round.

Path CEO Dave Morin said in February that the app had two million registered users. It was rejuvenated after a successful redesign late last year to become a personal journaling app, with ways to share travel, sleep, photos, locations and workouts through a Nike partnership.

Path is often mentioned as a buyout target, but Instagram is the app Facebook scooped up for $1 billion last week. Instagram, which is all about sharing photos, closed a $50 million round of funding just before it got bought that valued it at $500 million.

Path’s last funding was $8.65 million from $8.65 million from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Index Ventures and Digital Garage Japan at the beginning of 2011.

Morin did not reply to requests for comment.

What happened in the interim? Voxer CEO Tom Katis says building a good walkie-talkie app is harder than you think. To work well, Voxer integrates live calls and messaging — two very different models of communication. On one hand, live voice calls are a natural way to talk to someone, but they are plagued by crappy connectivity. On the other hand, written and spoken messages are composed and finished before they are sent as a whole package. They’re not interruptive, but they’re not real conversations.

“You can be light or you can be strong, and we wanted to be both,” Katis said.

Earlier in its development, Voxer spent two years and $7 million building a communication app that focused on live chat, Katis said. But the app failed as soon as 200 people were on the system. After lots of effort spent debugging and rebuilding, it was ultimately scrapped completely.

Then, about a year ago, Voxer released a fully functioning iPhone app with both live calls and messaging. The addition of an Android version in November — and the functionality for users of both mobile operating systems to talk to each other — is what really drove organic growth, Katis said.

Along the way, Katis and his personal friends spent $20 million in total funding Voxer development. (Most of that money came from Katis, who had previous success with his security company, Triple Canopy.)

So what was so hard about building Voxer? Part of it is the app’s patented system design, and another part is the nuts and bolts (the Voxer team uses the trendy Node.js), Katis said.

There’s also some nice subtlety to the Voxer interface that helps conversations flow. For instance, Voxer users can click to listen to a voice recording even before the other person stops talking. And the app automatically speeds up voice memo playback. When the phone’s proximity sensor tells the app a user is moving the phone closer or further from her ear, the volume goes down or up, respectively. It’s neat stuff.

Here’s Katis explaining where he came from and where he’s going:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120412/20-million-later-voxer-raises-its-first-30m-in-venture-capital-video/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120412/meet-9gag-the-community-comedy-site-thats-growing-like-crazy/ http://allthingsd.com/20120412/meet-9gag-the-community-comedy-site-thats-growing-like-crazy/#comments Thu, 12 Apr 2012 14:00:57 +0000 Liz Gannes http://allthingsd.com/?p=195466 Message board communities, with their endless creativity and mob mentalities, are kind of a mysterious phenomenon within the business of technology.

For instance, how did Reddit emerge and thrive over time? How could Digg have grown without alienating its community? Should the world be scared of 4chan? Can I Can Has Cheezburger turn into viable venture-backed businesses? What’s the next big hit?

We might have just the answer to that last question. 9GAG is a fast-growing user-submitted meme site that Silicon Valley investors have recently been humming about — in part because they might actually get a piece of this one early on.

9GAG had 67 million unique visitors in the past month, and more than two billion page views, according to co-founder Ray Chan. That compares favorably with Reddit’s most recent self-reported traffic.

To try to get more of a fair comparison, I asked comScore to pull a chart of global traffic to this group of sites. By unique visitor count, 9GAG surged in the past year to reach the top spot in February. (And, wow, just look at Digg.)

9GAG posts are generally in the style of comic strips, with lots of cute animals and big captions and teen humor, followed by long comment threads of people riffing on the joke. It’s not often clear where the original material was found or created.

Chan and his four co-founders, who are based in Hong Kong, created 9GAG in 2008. It had been doing just fine as a side project, with about 500,000 page views per month — and was a sort of resume-builder for part of the team to be accepted to work on start-up ideas last summer as part of the 500 Startups accelerator.

During the summer program in Mountain View, Calif., the 9GAG team worked on a group photo-sharing app, and then a karaoke site called Singboard, which I somewhat randomly wrote about at the time.

But then, after 500 Startups wrapped up, 9GAG started to grow like crazy. By October, the team decided to kill its other projects and go all-in on 9GAG.

Chan was tight-lipped about 9GAG’s seed funding, saying it wasn’t finalized, but some investors I’ve heard are involved include Freestyle Capital, True Ventures, First Round Capital and Greycroft Partners (that same investor list has been mentioned elsewhere). Chan did say that 9GAG gave 500 Startups equity as thanks for their help with the other discontinued projects last summer.

Chan — who previously worked at a Hong Kong TV station and on a book community start-up called aNobii — said 9GAG is currently profitable using Google AdSense, which is a pretty impressive feat, considering it is paying Amazon Web Services to support its crazy growth.

The U.S. is 9GAG’s largest audience, but it accounts for only 12 percent of total traffic, according to Chan.

Chan thinks 9GAG’s growth reflects its team’s focus on user experience — the site is simple and visual, without lots of annoying ads. 9GAG is also tightly integrated with Facebook; it uses Facebook’s commenting system, it allows users to embed content directly on Facebook, and its actively updated fan page has 2.8 million “Likes.”

9GAG (the name sounds like “making fun” in Cantonese) is much more than a meme site, Chan said. That’s sort of a touchy distinction, because the folks at Reddit and 4chan have criticized 9GAG for stealing their memes.

“We want to become a place where people will go to whenever they want to kill some time and have a laugh,” Chan said. “We want to make the world a happier place.”

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120412/meet-9gag-the-community-comedy-site-thats-growing-like-crazy/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120411/springpad-bookmarking-app-goes-social/ http://allthingsd.com/20120411/springpad-bookmarking-app-goes-social/#comments Wed, 11 Apr 2012 14:00:21 +0000 Liz Gannes http://allthingsd.com/?p=195207 The private organization tool Springpad has redesigned as a collaborative service, where users can share “notebooks” — kind of similar to Pinterest boards — with each other, both privately and publicly. Springpad, which is available on the Web and on iPhone and Android phones and tablets, adds value by enhancing the content its users bookmark; for example, after a movie is saved, the app can automatically alert users when it’s available for streaming on Netflix.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120411/springpad-bookmarking-app-goes-social/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120410/wavii-distills-information-overload-into-plot-points/ http://allthingsd.com/20120410/wavii-distills-information-overload-into-plot-points/#comments Wed, 11 Apr 2012 04:00:58 +0000 Liz Gannes http://allthingsd.com/?p=195169 Wavii tonight opens to the public an ambitious Web site and iPhone app with personalized news feeds of what’s going on in the world.

After users specify what topics and sources they are interested in, Wavii crawls the Web for stories, tweets and other fresh information about those topics. It condenses those into headlines and topic sentences that users can scan through and click to learn more.

So, rather than a site like Twitter or an RSS reader, where users receive information from a designated list of people and sources and scan through it in chronological order, Wavii does the algorithmic editorial work on each user’s behalf.

The site identifies newsworthy items by looking at the authority of the source, how widely and quickly stories are spreading, the strength of the language used (if there is hedging, Wavii can flag an item as a rumor) and other factors.

CEO Adrian Aoun compares Wavii’s story summaries to Facebook’s structured status updates — for instance, when a user checks into a specific location or announces they are in a relationship with someone. When information is brought down to those key plot points, it’s easy to consume a lot of it. And like Facebook’s new Timeline apps, Wavii wants to compile graphical summaries of these similar news stories.

So, a Wavii item about a tech acquisition might automatically feature a chart of other recent deals; a story about a starlet arrested for drunk driving would have a list of all the other celebs with DUIs, Aoun said. But not all of that is built yet.

Wavii is the latest hopeful addition to a long line of semantic Web start-ups like Powerset and Twine that didn’t meet the high expectations set for them. But Wavii is different and better than the rest, according to Aoun, because it’s a big-data company rather than a natural-language processing company.

Beyond that distinction — which I think some might quibble with — I think the biggest hurdle facing Wavii is that it’s setting itself up as a destination site with its own social network. Wavii users share their interests publicly, they can see which other people have clicked on an article, and they can start Wavii-specific comment threads.

I’ve checked out lots of smart and well-designed personalized news sites and apps, but I can think of very few that I’ve visited on a regular basis.

Wavii was started in 2009, but this is the first time it has opened up to the public. The Seattle-based company has 25 employees and is backed by SV Angel, Felicis Ventures, Kapor Capital, CrunchFund, Dave Morin, Shawn Fanning, Keith Rabois, Joshua Schachter, Paul Buchheit, Rick Marini and Max Levchin.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120410/wavii-distills-information-overload-into-plot-points/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120406/sequoia-set-to-lead-500m-valuation-round-for-instagram/ http://allthingsd.com/20120406/sequoia-set-to-lead-500m-valuation-round-for-instagram/#comments Fri, 06 Apr 2012 14:00:55 +0000 Liz Gannes http://allthingsd.com/?p=193798 The fact is, if you make a consumer Internet app that people actually use, you’re probably raising venture capital right now. So we try not to write about every funding round that’s in the works.

But some deserve the attention: It looks like Instagram is close to wrapping up a Series B round led by Sequoia Capital, according to several sources close to the situation.

Instagram co-founder and CEO Kevin Systrom

The maker of the fast-growing photo-sharing app, which just made its way to Android, is set to receive $50 million at a $500 million valuation, the sources said. Others joining the round could include DST Global.

The Wall Street Journal had reported that some were skeptical that Instagram deserved a half-billion-dollar valuation without revenue to speak of, but there does not seem to be a lack of people wanting to get into the deal.

Instagram received Series A funding of $7 million led by Benchmark Capital just over a year ago. At the time, it had 1.75 million registered users.

The company had 30 million iPhone users before it came to Android this week, at which point it got more than a million new users in 12 hours.

Instagram, which just got its own office on San Francisco’s South Park, had 13 employees at last count. CEO Kevin Systrom declined to comment on fundraising.

(Image courtesy of JD Lasica on Flickr)

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120406/sequoia-set-to-lead-500m-valuation-round-for-instagram/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120405/two-years-and-33-million-later-startup-investor-lerer-ventures-starts-building-its-own-companies/ http://allthingsd.com/20120405/two-years-and-33-million-later-startup-investor-lerer-ventures-starts-building-its-own-companies/#comments Thu, 05 Apr 2012 14:02:49 +0000 Peter Kafka http://allthingsd.com/?p=193517 A couple of years ago, Ken Lerer and his son Ben put together an investment fund that concentrates on early-stage start-ups. Which means they were doing the same thing that lots of other well-off, well-connected guys have been doing for the last couple years.

At the time, the Lerers’ pitch was that they were different because they were primarily focused on New York-area companies, and that’s still true.

But now they’re starting to carve out a new niche for themselves by actually building some homegrown companies, too.

These come in two flavors. Some are full-blown start-ups where they are taking on a hands-on role, like YouTube channel programmer Bedrocket Media, or the new video news start-up they aren’t saying much about yet.

The other ones are “service” companies they are helping launch, with the notion that they’ll help their other portfolio companies with functions like PR and marketing.

One thread connecting a lot of these ventures: People who have spent time at the Huffington Post.

The PR company, for instance, is run by Mario Ruiz, who until recently was HuffPo’s head flack. Former Huffington Post social media editor Rob Fishman is running Kingfish Labs with the Lerers’s backing. Former Huffington Post CTO Paul Berry is running both Soho Tech Labs, a sandbox for super-early-stage start-ups, and Rebel Mouse, his own mysterious social media thingamabob that will launch in the next month or so. Etc.

All of which makes perfect sense, since Ken Lerer was a Huffington Post co-founder, and his partner, Eric Hippeau, was HuffPo’s CEO until AOL acquired the site a year ago.

Still, you wonder if AOL CEO Tim Armstrong considered the fact that some of the $315 million he spent on HuffPo last year would end up reinvested in start-ups populated by HuffPo employees — in the building that used that used to house HuffPo itself.

In any case, now that Lerer Ventures is a couple of years into this — they’ve raised $33 million so far, and have invested in 100 start-ups — it seems like a good time to check in on them.

Here’s a video interview with Hippeau and Ben Lerer, where they talk about their philosophy, portfolio and the possibility of raising yet another fund. (Extra features, free of charge: Something off-camera that seemed to occupy Lerer’s attention, as well as some bona fide New York City audio interference at the end.)

(Image courtesy of Shutterstock/irin-k)

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120405/two-years-and-33-million-later-startup-investor-lerer-ventures-starts-building-its-own-companies/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120403/could-the-next-elite-university-be-online-and-venture-backed/ http://allthingsd.com/20120403/could-the-next-elite-university-be-online-and-venture-backed/#comments Tue, 03 Apr 2012 20:17:37 +0000 Liz Gannes http://allthingsd.com/?p=192683 The Minerva Project says it’s planning to launch the first elite American university in a century. Sounds wacky, right?

But the project is starting to gather some heavyweight support: Former Harvard President and U.S. Secretary of the Treasury Larry Summers will chair its advisory board, and Benchmark Capital has committed $25 million, the VC firm’s largest seed investment ever.

Elite higher education is a stagnant market, argues Minerva CEO Ben Nelson. Far more people are qualified to get into top colleges than are admitted. Meanwhile, college education is too expensive and good teaching is undervalued. How can you address all that? By going online.

Unlike former Stanford professor and Google exec Sebastian Thrun’s Udacity, which started by offering a small selection of university-level classes online, Minerva plans to birth itself as a full alternative to college.

Minerva will be a virtual school, though it will encourage students to live together in dorm clusters around the world. It doesn’t plan to offer introductory-level classes — students will be expected to go to community colleges or take online courses to get up to speed.

To attract the best professors to contribute Minerva courses, the school will be paying them well and running an international “Minerva Prize” for the best college-level teaching, with a substantial cash reward.

As for admission, Minerva promises it will give “no weight to lineage, athletic ability, state or country of origin, or capacity to donate.”

Oh, and here’s the most ridiculously audacious bit of all of this: Minerva plans to admit its first class in 2014.

Here’s Nelson giving his pitch about “Taking on the Ivy League” last year at TEDxSF. Nelson was formerly CEO of SnapFish and chairman of RedBeacon.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120403/could-the-next-elite-university-be-online-and-venture-backed/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120403/instagram-by-the-numbers-1-billion-photos-uploaded/ http://allthingsd.com/20120403/instagram-by-the-numbers-1-billion-photos-uploaded/#comments Tue, 03 Apr 2012 16:12:06 +0000 Liz Gannes http://allthingsd.com/?p=192611 Instagram, the social photo app that has grown to 30 million registered users in the 18 months since it launched, despite only being available for the iPhone, debuts its much-awaited Android version today.

Android users (on phones version 2.2 and higher) get almost the same features as iPhone users, with the exception of a few things like tilt-shift and blur.

On the occasion of the launch, Instagram released a bunch of stats:

• 430K+ on its Android waiting list
• 30 million+ registered users
• 1 billion+ photos uploaded
• 5 million+ photos per day
• 575 likes per second
• 81 comments per second

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120403/instagram-by-the-numbers-1-billion-photos-uploaded/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120402/get-off-of-my-cloud-found-makes-personal-files-searchable-on-the-desktop/ http://allthingsd.com/20120402/get-off-of-my-cloud-found-makes-personal-files-searchable-on-the-desktop/#comments Mon, 02 Apr 2012 20:00:03 +0000 Liz Gannes http://allthingsd.com/?p=192198 We users give our personal data and files to cloud services like Dropbox and Google Docs so they can reliably store them and help us access them from anywhere.

But maybe some of us want the inverse, too: Found is a new Mac desktop application that pulls down users’ cloud files to store them locally. The point is to be able to search all your personal files, no matter the service or folder they live in.

For now, Found only connects to Dropbox, Google Docs and Gmail, and local files on a single machine. When a computer with Found installed is online, the app is constantly retrieving and backing up the latest emails and docs. As compared to alternatives like Greplin, Found doesn’t index users’ files on its own servers.

Though Found is an unfashionable desktop app, it’s been built to be conveniently accessed either via an icon in the Mac’s top bar or by tapping the “control” button twice. Unlike Apple’s built-in Spotlight search, Found displays nice full text and big image previews.

Obviously, the big play for Found would be if it worked on every device, connected between a user’s multiple devices, and connected to every cloud service. All those are daunting tasks — just consider trying to back up all your files to your tiny phone storage. There’s a reason people use the cloud.

San Francisco-based Found was started by two former Microsoft corporate strategy guys who have a team of five people total and $1 million in seed funding from NEA and Rembrandt Ventures. They plan to make Found available to the public in May, but said people who sign up now should get early access.

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