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Thursday, February 20, 2014
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As crowdfunding is all the rage today, there are entrepreneurs like Brian Caldbeck of CircleUP who approach opportunities a bit differently. A former private equity analyst focused on consumer retail, Caldbeck noticed consumer retail businesses were often rebuffed for venture capital but yet good businesses run by many smart people. He spotted a gap in the financing market, and hence CircleUP was born, a marketplace connecting accredited investors to a curated list of private consumer retail companies.


In this discussion, Caldbeck shares with us why CircleUP leverages the benefits of a marketplace model to connect capital with companies, how they select and accept companies into the platform (only 2% make it), and how he and his co-founder started the business, which included rounds and rounds of regulatory and legal work with their partners. For founders innovating around the edges of finance and/or those building marketplace businesses, this talk with Caldbeck could prove useful.


Editor’s Note: Michael Abbott is a general partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, previously Twitter’s VP of Engineering, and a founder himself. Mike also writes a blog called uncapitalized. You can follow him on Twitter @mabb0tt.





12:54 PM

As crowdfunding is all the rage today, there are entrepreneurs like Brian Caldbeck of CircleUP who approach opportunities a bit differently...

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I generally enjoy writing about startups, but I love writing about startups that are working on something undeniably good for the world. This is one of those.


SoundFocus is trying to improve the experience of listening to music for people who are hard of hearing, or unable to hear certain frequencies. They’ve just raised $1.7M to get it done.


The investors in this round were Kapor Capital (Lotus and EFF Co-Founder Mitch Kapor’s fund), Y-Combinator, Greg Badros, Ovo Fund, RTA Capital, Vegas Tech Fund, Garry Tan, Alexis Ohanian, and Harj Taggar.


We first wrote about SoundFocus back at the tail end of 2013, just after they’d first launched their iOS application.


The app, compatible with both your iPhone’s built-in music library and tracks streamed down from Spotify, automatically adjusts music based on a person’s unique abilities to hear different frequencies.

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When you first launch the app, a quick one-minute test helps you determine which frequencies you can and can’t hear. When you later play a track through the app, it’ll adjust the music accordingly. Can’t hear highs very well? The app will take those higher frequencies and attempt to drop them down into a range you can hear. Even if you hear frequencies better in one ear than you do in the other, it’ll be able to compensate.


How does one find themselves in this space? One of the company’s co-founders, Alex Selig, grew up with hearing loss, requiring hearing aids in both ears. He and his co-founder, Varun Srinivasan, met during a gig at Microsoft, and the two set out to, as they put it to me, “change the way the world hears”


The app is, and always has been, free. So how does the team make money?


As we’ve written before, they’re working on a hardware equivalent of this app that’ll bring similar functionality to any music source — not just your iPhone. Their still not saying much about what exactly this hardware solution will be, but they’re hoping the free app will help raise awareness (both of the problem and of their efforts) in the long run.


You can find SoundFocus (currently iOS only) in the App Store right over here.





11:39 AM

I generally enjoy writing about startups, but I love writing about startups that are working on something undeniably good for the world. Th...

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Google Ventures and Jafco Ventures have co-led a $25.5 million investment in Ionic Security, which is developing a distributed data security platform based on encryption technologies.


Security is once again moving to the forefront of business concerns thanks to the billions that companies are spending on new resource planning, customer relationship management, and accounting tools that are offered as a service by technology companies. Couple those hosted software services with the increasingly mobile modern workforce, and chief technology officers are looking at potential breaches in security coming from everywhere.


Ionic Security’s backers, including previous investors Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, ffVenture Capital, Tech Operators, and additional new investor Webb Investment Network, believe Ionic’s distributed approach to addressing security issues can ease businesses’ concerns.


“The whole flow of data is the wrong place to try and control everything,” said Ionic’s CTO Adam Ghetti. “We have a distributed architecture that processes, analyzes and controls information without a single step-change to the user experience.”


Ionic’s executives are cagey about exactly how the company works its security magic, but Ghetti said it wouldn’t be wrong to think of the tech as working in a way similar to Bitcoin. “It’s a distributed protocol very similar to the Bitcoin philosophy. Bitcoin exists because there is a distributed set of processing resources that have to agree.”


The Atlanta-based TechCrunch Disrupt SF Battlefield company will use the money to build out its go-to-market strategy. Ghetti said the company will significantly increase its headcount, doubling the number of employees from roughly 50 to over 100 by the end of the year.


Ionic already has over half a dozen customers using the technology in what Ghetti called the “early access stage.”


Ionic initially launched in 2011 as Social Fortress and began as a way for consumers and enterprise customers to simplify and secure data, including email, messages, photos, tweets and status updates. Over the course of 2012, the company shifted its focus to the enterprise.


Photo via Flickr user Perspec_Photo88





10:54 AM

Google Ventures and Jafco Ventures have co-led a $25.5 million investment in Ionic Security, which is developing a distributed data security...

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Microsoft has a new virtual assistant, and it’s a hybrid of Siri and Google Now, with some artificial affect thrown in for good measure. The Verge’s Tom Warren dishes on the upcoming feature of Windows 8.1, describing Cortana, the digital aide in question named after an AI character from the Halo series of games.


Cortana will be a circular icon in terms of how it’s visually represented in the OS, with animations that trigger when it’s speaking in response to queries, or “thinking” while processing them. It’ll display emotions through these animations, Warren reports, with bounces for happiness and frowning for displeasure depending on what it’s doing. Bing, Foursquare and other data sources will provide Cortana with its digital intelligence, according to the report, and make it so that it can offer some of the contextual smarts of Google Now, the Android-based anticipatory helper.


The most interesting feature of Cortana might be its transparency in terms of what data it does and doesn’t use – Warren says it’ll offer a “Notebook” feature that lists exactly what kind of information a user is granting Cortana access to, including stuff like location information, biographical points, reminders and contact info. Cortana is designed to learn more about a user through use, but that information won’t necessarily be stored in the Notebook without a user’s okay to do so. Finally, Cortana is said to be replacing Bing as the overarching search feature for the Windows Phone mobile OS.


It’s interesting that digital personal assistants are essentially becoming table stakes as a built-in feature of mobile platforms. Microsoft’s entrant might gain some advantages from the work the company has done on Kinect wizardry for the Xbox One, but that device still leaves a lot to be desired in terms of natural language processing, so it’ll be interesting to see how much, if at all, it improves upon the tech used in the console peripheral.





10:24 AM

Microsoft has a new virtual assistant, and it’s a hybrid of Siri and Google Now, with some artificial affect thrown in for good measure. The...

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Om Malik, founder of venture blog Gigaom, is stepping down as contributing writer and will become a partner with True Ventures.


Malik founded Gigaom in 2006 during a time of great upheaval in business journalism. Blogs were rising in prominence – including TechCrunch – and business journalism was quickly moving from print to online. His site began focusing on events and paid research in 2008 and it currently employs 70 writers. Tom Krazit is executive editor.


He has been a long time “venture partner” at True and will remain on Gigaom’s board. He will also headline Gigaom events and write the occasional column.


Malik writes:


Living a 24-hour news life has come at a personal cost. I still wake in middle of the night to check the stream to see if something is breaking, worrying whether I missed some news.It is a unique type of addiction that only a few can understand, and it is time for me to opt out of this non-stop news life. After five years as a “venture partner,” I am joining True Ventures as a partner, and thus bringing an end to my life as a professional journalist.

Om has long been a personal inspiration and his impact on blogging has been immense. I’m glad to count him as a friend. I look forward to seeing where he’s headed. Thankfully, he leaves us with a bit of advice:


Give respect: the respect we want

Take less, give more

Others don’t have to lose for us to win.

Better, not more.

Keep it simple, keep it honest.

You can read a bit more about his transition on his personal site.


Photo by Flickr user Joi under a CC by 2.0 license





10:24 AM

Om Malik, founder of venture blog Gigaom , is stepping down as contributing writer and will become a partner with True Ventures . Malik foun...

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Facebook's $19 billion purchase of mobile-messaging service WhatsApp appears to have buoyed the value of BlackBerry Messenger -- and by extension, BlackBerry. BlackBerry shares went up nearly 10 percent in after-hours trading because, in the words of Reuters, Facebook's purchase "put a rough valuation metric around the smartphone maker's own BlackBerry Messaging service," also known as "BBM." WhatsApp came to the party after BBM but flew past its predecessor, which had long refused to open itself up on other platforms.


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Facebook's $19 billion purchase of mobile-messaging service WhatsApp appears to have buoyed the value of BlackBerry Messenger -- and b...

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Technologist and serial entrepreneur Steve Perlman on Wednesday announced his new company, Artemis, and demoed its pCell technology. pCell technology "consistently delivers full-speed mobile data to every mobile device concurrently, regardless of how many users are sharing the same spectrum at once," he claimed. The theory is legitimate, but "you certainly do not have the whole network's capacity available to an unlimited number of users," said Philip Solis, a research director at ABI Research.


10:24 AM

Technologist and serial entrepreneur Steve Perlman on Wednesday announced his new company, Artemis, and demoed its pCell technology. pCell...

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