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Tuesday, January 21, 2014
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Y Combinator, a major Silicon Valley accelerator, announced that they are holding a Female Founders Conference that aims to bring women together to discuss their entrepreneurial journey in tech. The event, to be held on March 1 at YC’s Mountain View campus, is a one-day event hosted by YC’s female leaders — Kat Manalac, Kirsty Nathoo, Carolynn Levy and Jessica Livingston. Female founders will share their experiences and offer startup guidance.


“Back in December, Paul sent me an email pointing out that there are now a lot of successful female YC alumni and suggested we put on an event where they could share their experiences to encourage other female founders,” said YC co-founder Jessica Livingston. “I’d been thinking about similar ideas, so we said, ‘Let’s do it!’”


“If I were considering starting a startup, I know I’d be very encouraged by hearing how other women did it,” she said.


Female entrepreneurs versed in startup life will appear, including Eventbrite founder Julia Hartz, Homejoy founder Adora Chung, VMawre founder Diane Greene, and YC’s own Jessica Livingston.


The application deadline to attend is February 3.


Outside of Startup School, Y Combinator holds conferences every year or so. Most of them focus on educating and equipping the young startup founder. In 2011, the startup accelerator had an Ad Innovation Conference, and in 2012 YC held a couple of events, “Let’s Talk Startup” in Canada and “Work At A Startup” in Mountain View.


The conversation around “Women In Tech” has been going on for what seems like ages, with no real end in sight.


One school of thought believes that bringing more attention to female founders separates them even more from male founders, as it gives off the sense that a successful female is news whereas a successful male is expected. Still others believe that the only way to inspire more women to get involved in tech entrepreneurship is to show the success of the few who have come before them.


Whether there’s a right or a wrong isn’t clear, but it is obvious that the conversation isn’t ending any time soon.


Here’s the full speaker list for the Y-Combinator Female Founders Conference:



Adora Cheung, Founder, Homejoy

Diane Greene, Founder, VMware

Julia Hartz, Founder, Eventbrite

Elizabeth Iorns, Founder, Science Exchange

Ann Johnson, Founder, Interana

Jessica Livingston, Founder, Y Combinator

Jessica Mah, Founder, inDinero

Kathryn Minshew, Founder, The Muse

Danielle Morrill, Founder, Mattermark

Elli Sharef, Founder, HireArt

Jamie Wong, Founder, Vayable








11:24 AM

Y Combinator , a major Silicon Valley accelerator, announced that they are holding a Female Founders Conference that aims to bring women to...

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github-execs

So now is the time for top execs at middle stage technology companies to trade titles with each other, apparently: GitHub has just announced that co-founder Tom Preston-Werner will be taking over the role of President from fellow co-founder Chris Wanstrath, who is moving into the CEO position made vacant by Preston-Werner. It sounds familiar because WordPress creator Matt Mullenweg just did essentially the same thing with Toni Schneider at Automattic.


For GitHub, the switch seems designed to shake things up a bit in terms of giving Preston-Werner time to take a more hands-on approach to R&D and “growth opportunities within the company,” according to a blog post he ran announcing the news. Preston-Werner will also remain the primary face of the company, he says. Wanstrath, for his part, will be handling more top-level strategy and overarching company vision.


As did Mullenweg and Schneider, Preston-Werner downplays the significance of this shift, nothing that there’s a lot of fluidity when it comes to roles and duties within GitHub’s corporate structure. He even goes so far as to say that they’ve already made the switch in practice, and are only now catching up to doing so in name.


We heard from Preston-Warner back in September at TechCrunch Disrupt, when he discussed the company’s 4 million user milestone, and the shifting nature of the traditionally code-focused platform as a more broadly targeted collaboration platform. At the time, Preston-Warner also denied that the company’s recent $100 million raise wan an immediate precursor to IPO plans.



It’s possible that Wansrath is stepping in to help prepare the company for that transition, but it looks more like companies that deal in highly collaborative tech like GitHub and WordPress with young executives are getting more comfortable with a shifting definition of executive roles. Less rigidity at the top could allow for greater adaptability throughout an organization, so it’ll be interesting to see how companies embracing these moves continue to perform in 2014.







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So now is the time for top execs at middle stage technology companies to trade titles with each other, apparently: GitHub has just announced...

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Is the Android OS morphing into a new form of embedded Linux? Android is a Linux OS derivative perched to make inroads beyond its growing user base in smartphones and tablets. Some auto makers are considering the potential for Android-connected communications systems in their vehicles. The Android OS is already available as an all-in-one desktop computer powered by System on a Chip circuitry. So how much potential is there for Android-powered gadgets to sprout in devices as the Internet of Things gathers steam?


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Is the Android OS morphing into a new form of embedded Linux? Android is a Linux OS derivative perched to make inroads beyond its growing ...

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zirtual

Zirtual, which operates a marketplace to match up busy professionals with virtual executive assistants, is ready to go big. After three years of operating in invite-only mode, the company is opening up the floodgates to enable anyone to hire a virtual assistant for as little as $99 a month.


Zirtual was founded on the idea that even the busiest of professionals probably don’t need a dedicated assistant sitting at a desk for eight hours a day. Furthermore, that those assistants could better spend their time helping multiple clients.


By email, phone, or through Zirtual’s own dashboard, clients can assign tasks to assistants who help make their lives more efficient. Zirtual plans start at $99 a month for non-dedicated support and just 15, 15-minutes tasks a month. For double that amount, clients get eight hours of dedicated support, as well as next-day turnaround on tasks.


The next two plans, at $399 and $749 a month, offer 16- and 32-hours of dedicated support each month with same-day turnaround on tasks and dedicated email, phone, and SMS support. In all cases, though, Zirtual believes that it can significantly reduce the cost of hiring a dedicated executive assistant, which costs an average of $54,000 a year.


And for those who just need something done really fast? The company is launching Zirtual Now, which allows any client to get help from a pool of virtual assistants with spare time on their hands, for about $75 per task.


The decision to become more open didn’t come lightly. According to founder Maren Kate Donovan, Zirtual benefitted early on from being invite-only — which helped seed the site with some “amazing early adopters” while the company figured out how the marketplace best works.


For instance, it needed to figure out how much time was actually needed for each client, and how they could best prioritize the needs of multiple clients. Now, after several years and more than half a million tasks performed by its “Zirtual assistants”, the company feels confident that it’s worked out the kinks and will be able to appeal to a much wider audience.


Zirtual had raised $2 million in funding $2 million from Tony Hsieh, VegasTechFund, and Mayfield Fund. The company has offices in Las Vegas and San Francisco.







9:54 AM

Zirtual , which operates a marketplace to match up busy professionals with virtual executive assistants, is ready to go big. After three yea...

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TechCrunch Conference - San Francisco, CA

Facebook has just announced a slight tweak to the Newsfeed algorithm. The newest version of the Newsfeed will show fewer text-based status updates from Pages, but will serve more text-based status updates from users.


The good news for Pages administrators is that Facebook will probably be distributing more status updates from Pages that are media- or link-based, as opposed to text-based.


According to a blog post, Facebook leanred through testing that, the more simple, text-only status updates people see, the more they share. In fact, the initial test resulted in an average of 9 million more status updates written every day.


However, a text-only status update from Pages didn’t yield the same result as text status updates from regular users. Knowing this, Facebook has decided to pull back on text updates from Pages.


So what should Page administrators do to make up for the traffic?


Aside from the obvious switch to more media- and link-based content sharing, Facebook recommends using the link share tool rather than embedding a link in the text of the update, as it provides a more rich media experience for the consumer.


Last month, Facebook made changes to the feed that showed more links, likely an attempt to battle other news discovery tools. Of course, rumors suggest that tweaking the newsfeed is just a battle in the war on news discovery apps, as the social network is planning to launch a Flipboard-like newspaper competitor in the near future.


Here’s a copy of the announcement:



The goal of every update to News Feed is to show people the most interesting stories at the top of their feed and display them in the best way possible. We regularly run tests to work out how to make the experience better. Through testing, we have found that when people see more text status updates on Facebook they write more status updates themselves. In fact, in our initial test when we showed more status updates from friends it led to on average 9 million more status updates written each day. Because of this, we showed people more text status updates in their News Feed.


Over time, we noticed that this effect wasn’t true for text status updates from Pages. As a result, the latest update to News Feed ranking treats text status updates from Pages as a different category to text status updates from friends. We are learning that posts from Pages behave differently to posts from friends and we are working to improve our ranking algorithms so that we do a better job of differentiating between the two types. This will help us show people more content they want to see. Page admins can expect a decrease in the distribution of their text status updates, but they may see some increases in engagement and distribution for other story types.


Many Page owners often ask what kind of content they should post. This is difficult to answer, as it depends on who your audience is and what they want to see.


Still, one thing we’ve observed is that when some Pages share links on Facebook, they do so by embedding the link in the status update, like the one below:


The best way to share a link after this update will be to use a link-share, so it looks like the one below. We’ve found that, as compared to sharing links by embedding in status updates, these posts get more engagement (more likes, comments, shares and clicks) and they provide a more visual and compelling experience for people seeing them in their feeds.



Developing







9:39 AM

Facebook has just announced a slight tweak to the Newsfeed algorithm. The newest version of the Newsfeed will show fewer text-based status u...

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AngelList has soft launched a new feature this week that should make investors very happy. Basically, AngelList will accredit any investor, for free, and let them use that accreditation, anywhere, via an API or just by sharing a document. You can access Accreditation here.


The network is debuting Accreditation Reports, which are web pages hosted by AngelList that investors can use to confirm their accreditation status. Once created, it can be reused for any investment that requires proof of accredited status. According to AngelList, Accreditation Reports meet the SEC’s new 506(c) accreditation standard for investing in publicly fundraising companies. It also meets the standard for investing in privately fundraising companies (the biggest difference between the standard for public and private fundraising is the requirement to provide proof of your finances for public financings.)


As Fred Wilson has written, when you make a private investment in a company, VC fund, or private equity or hedge fund, lawyers require you to fill out a form to ensure that you are a qualified or accredited investor, according to SEC regulations. form is created by lawyers to make sure that we are qualified and/or accredited investors. Investors have to keep filling out these forms across every investment/closing, which is tedious.


Previously on AngelList, investors only had to fill out the form once per valid time period (3-12 months depending on which method was used), but it was always in the context of a specific closing. So an investor couldn’t use the form on AngelList unless they were closing a transaction online on AngelList. And the investor couldn’t re-use it outside of AngelList.


Via the new AngelList feature, they can just do it once for an AngelList closing and/or share the resulting certification with a click with the lawyer or platform in a different closing, up to a year later. Additionally, a platform like Secondmarket or Equityzen can pull it via AngelList’s API (with the investor’s authorization) if they making a secondary trade on their platform.


Filling out the forms around fundraising, whether it be on the startup or investor side, can be an extremely time-consuming and tedious task, especially if a startup has a dozen or more investors. If AngelList’s new Accreditation feature saves time for investors, and lawyers, then founders win too.







9:09 AM

AngelList has soft launched a new feature this week that should make investors very happy. Basically, AngelList will accredit any investor, ...

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popsugar shopstyle

Content and commerce company PopSugar has acquired PICT, a startup which makes technology that enables users to make photos “shoppable.” With the acquisition, PopSugar hopes to make it easier for bloggers to participate in its ShopSense program and grow affiliate marketing revenues.


PopSugar might best be known as a destination site that targets women between the ages of 18 and 40, providing all sorts of information and entertainment across verticals that include celebrity, fashion, beauty, fitness, food, and parenting. But in addition to its own content and ad business, PopSugar also offers search and commerce tools.


That includes ShopStyle, with is a search engine for fashion, and its PopSugar Must Have subscription commerce box. It also has ShopSense, which is an affiliate marketing program that third-party publishers (i.e. bloggers) can use to monetize their own sites.


And that’s where the acquisition of PICT comes in. The company, which launched last Spring after participating in the AngelPad seed-stage startup accelerator, called itself a “B2B publishing and analytics platform” that enabled brands create “shoppable” photos. Those photos could be shared across social networks and embedded in publisher websites, all while bringing the end customer back to where they could actually make a purchase.


With that technology, PopSugar wants to bolster its ShopSense offering. By integrating PICT into it, publishers will be able to earn revenue by creating shoppable images with product details and links to ShopStyle retail partners. Viewers would get info like the retailer selling it, product name, price, and even have a “shop” button to purchase the product.


That would enable consumers to shop directly from the image, whether it was embedded on the publisher’s site or shared to social networks like Facebook.


PICT had raised $1.4 million in funding from investors that include Chris Sacca’s Lowercase Capital, Kirsten Green’s Forerunner Ventures, New York fashion designer and businessman Steven Alan, Opus Capital, AngelPad, 500 Startups, Gary Vaynerchuk, Scott Belsky, and Seth Berman.


While details of the transaction were not disclosed, the entire PICT team will be joining PopSugar in its San Francisco headquarters to work on the integration and add new features to make images more shoppable.







9:09 AM

Content and commerce company PopSugar has acquired PICT , a startup which makes technology that enables users to make photos “shoppable.” W...

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