Modu, an Israeli startup founded in 2007, is going to be adding $100 million to the $20 million in venture capital they’ve already raised, says Israeli newspaper The Globes. The company will create tiny modular phones that can be slipped into different device “jackets”— like an MP3 player, GPS, bigger cell phone, car stereo, or digital camera (see here for a demo video).
The round hasn’t closed yet, but clearly the details are leaking. The Globes isn’t naming the new investors but says that the company is being valued at $150 million pre-money, meaning they’re giving away a whopping 40% of the equity in this round. They must really need the money to get the product to market to take that kind of dilution.
Founder Dov Moran’s previous company, M-Systems, pioneered the concept of the USB flash drive and sold to SanDisk for $1.6 billion in 2006. See an interview with Moran here.
LongJump, a hosted applications environment that competes with the likes of Salesforce and Coghead, is introducing a new visual workflow system meant to streamline business processes.
Companies will be able to set up this workflow system in conjunction with existing LongJump applications, such as those that track businesses’ assets or contracts. Before the introduction of this workflow system, these applications could be used to manage databases of relevant objects. Now they can also be used to program and execute on procedures that regularly occur around them.
Do expense requests usually go through your company’s hierarchy before getting approved? You can now chart this process in LongJump with “states” and “actions”, respectively represented as circles and vectors in the visual workflow creation tool. Each circle represents a type of person within the company (supervisor, manager, CEO, etc) that must make a decision on the expense request (approve, deny, issue check, etc). These decisions cause the request to travel along the vectors until a final conclusion to the process (request fulfilled).
This process would ordinarily be accomplished over email or even physical slips of paper that make their way through various “in” and “out” boxes around the office. Now it can all be handle in one central online location with variously designated user accounts for employees.
LongJump says that its workflow solution is the first to come integrated with a full-featured database application suite. Competitors include Appian (a hosted solution) and Tipco Business Studio (non-hosted), but these must be used with something like Oracle or SAP. Since many large corporations are happy with their existing database solutions, this new workflow product will appeal mostly to small and medium-sized businesses.
Champs just put up an interesting black and white colorway of the Air Classic BW with a patterned leather panel just above the mudguard. Black and white is used pretty proportionally through out this classic but reguardless of the niceness of them, they are still lacking a mesh toebox favored by most Air Max purists. They should be available at your local champs and at champssports.com
A new service called Quotably may be the best third party Twitter-related service so far. That’s because it reformats Twitter messages into threaded conversations, making it significantly easier to follow actual discussions that are occurring on Twitter.
Until now, it’s been hard to follow conversations, even if you are in the middle of them. Sometimes responses come back tagged with your user name (@username), but often they don’t. And if you are just observing the conversation it is nearly impossible to see all of the responses.
The service is easy enough to use - just tell it a Twitter ID and it will show you threaded conversations that involve that person. You can also view a RSS feed for any Twitter user by simply adding “.rss” to the end of the Quotably URL, such as quotably.com/techcrunch.rss.
Google started offering secondary search boxes for major sites March 4, and TechCrunch readers split 55% for, 45% against the feature. Now the New York Times reports that some companies oppose Google offering secondary search.
According to the article, objections are focused on Google selling adds against the secondary search results and potential customers being led astray, by both competitors ads and because they are not immediately searching via the particular site.
Google users have long been able to search within a site with a site:abc.com search term query or via an advanced search. Google’s secondary search box simply makes an existing function easier to use.
The argument ultimately seems to come down to control. Consultant Alan Rimm-Kaufman told the NY Times:
Mr. Rimm-Kaufman said the new Google service also diminishes a Web publisher’s role in helping users find potentially useful content. “You may want to editorialize differently when someone searches, and maybe put a premium on certain reporters or content,” he said. “This moves you further out of the loop.”….
Retailers, Mr. Rimm-Kaufman added, should be even more leery of this feature, and not because they will lose sales to competitors whose ads appear in Google’s refined search results. More sophisticated retail sites have search functions that take into account a customer’s past behavior to suggest certain items, as well as more accurate data on which items are in stock.
There was some sense though at the end of the article:
Pam Horan, president of the Online Publishers Association, an industry trade group, said online executives were growing accustomed to the idea that users often did not find their company’s content through the site’s own search box or its front page. More often than not, she said, users would find links to specific articles or products on blogs, search engines or other sites, and navigate to that page.
“So publishers are building their sites,” Ms. Horan said, “to make sure the experience is the same, whether users are coming in through the front door or the side.”
Crunch Network: CrunchBoardbecause it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
When we first showed you the White/Black/Varsity Red pair of Jordan Force Fusion V’s we didn’t anticipate a “23″ on the heel but we did see the OG colorway as an main source of inspiration for the particular makeup. Now thanks to Air-Randy we have a closer look at the updated version of this shoe that is set to release in the middle of June. The colorway stayed the same but as noted there is now a “23″ stitched on the heel, but perhaps the best part of the shoe is the partially clear sole. via Niketalk // Air-Randy
Release Date:6/14/2008 Name: Air Jordan 5 Fusion Style: 318608-161 Color: White/Black-Varsity Red Price:$150.00
Consider this response that I just received (identifying information removed) from a venture capitalist I emailed to discuss a new investment:
Thank you for your message. I apologize in advance if I do not reply.
I admit it. My email response rates are lame. I have tried many different approaches and techniques, yet I fail. I read everything that comes in, and I swear I have the most sincere intentions of replying to all of you. But, alas, I suck.
I am spending more time than ever on the road these days. Working on private equity stuff, coaching startups, giving speeches, training for an Ironman this summer, and luckily, taking some vacation. The result has me logging in to Gmail much less frequently, which may, in fact, be a healthy development.
Thankfully, what used to be well over a thousand inbound messages a day is slowing now that I am an increasingly irrelevant unemployed vagabond and no longer holding any [XXXXXX] pursestrings. Hopefully, these trends will continue until my mom and dad are the only folks left sending me notes, and even then mostly to give me updates on the weather back in [XXXXXX].
If you are curious about what I am up to, or looking for clues as to where you can physically stalk me, try my Twitter stream at:
twitter.com/[XXXXXX]. If we are actually buddies, friend me on Facebook. Though, be warned I log in over there even less frequently than here. If you are just looking for some cheap laughs, check out my brother [XXXXXX] ’s YouTube videos: http://youtube.com/[XXXXXX].
In any event, I do look forward to being in touch with all of you. For now, thanks for your patience.
I remember the days before email. For those of you who don’t, you probably won’t understand how important the phone was as a communication device. If the phone rang, you answered it. Today, answering the phone when you are around other people is considered insulting.
The wonderful thing about email is that it’s asynchronous, meaning you don’t need to deal with it when it is first received. For me and many others, instant messaging is basically the same - I may respond to an IM instantly, or 24 hours later. The recipient generally understands that a response might be delayed, and doesn’t take offense. Facebook messages, Twitter and cell phone text messages all have similar benefits.
But the benefits of the new ways we communicate also mean there’s a lot more of it. The volume of communication requests for most people today are far, far beyond what they can handle. Few people today respond to every communication they receive. And an increasing number don’t even claim to be able to read every communication they receive, let alone respond.
I routinely declare email bankruptcy and simply delete my entire inbox. But even so, I currently have 2,433 unread emails in my inbox. Plus another 721 in my Facebook inbox. and about thirty skype message windows open with unanswered messages. It goes without saying, of course, that my cell phone voicemail box is also full (I like the fact that new messages can’t be left there, so I have little incentive to clear it out).
How do I deal with email now? I scan the from and subject fields for high payoff messages. People I know who don’t waste my time, or who I have a genuine friendship with. Or descriptive subject lines that help me understand that I should allot a minute or more of my life to opening it and reading it.
A journalist recently complained in a comment on another blog that he sent me multiple emails asking me for an interview, which went unanswered. But an email that he sent later suggesting some drama between AOL and Yahoo was instantly addressed. He was a little angry about that, which I understand. But what he doesn’t understand is that when I see an email asking for an interview, my brain says “this is not urgent, deal with it this evening,” whereas the possible breaking news has to be dealt with right away. Of course, when evening comes new fires have to be put out, which explains the 2,437 email messages in my inbox (it increased from two paragraphs ago in the time I took to write those words) that have to be responded to eventually.
The long term answer to all of this isn’t that people need to try harder to respond to communication requests. The long term answer is that someone needs to create a new technology that allows us to enjoy our life but not miss important messages. If I knew what that solution was, I’d quit this blog and go do it. Someone out there, though, has the beginning of an idea on how we can better manage our electronic communications. And he or she may someday turn that into a product and save us.
If you are the person with the idea to save us all, send me an email and tell me all about it. Actually, strike that. Drop by my house and tell me all about it. I don’t want your message to get lost in my inbox.
Crunch Network: MobileCrunchMobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
Note that Bragg neatly sidesteps the fact that music was uploaded to the site by artists (or their labels) themselves, with full knowledge that they would not receive payments of any kind (except free marketing, of course, and access to Bebo’s tens of millions of music loving users).
His argument is based on the notion that Bebo’s success was based on the availability of streaming music on the site: “The musicians who posted their work on Bebo.com are no different from investors in a start-up enterprise…Now that the business has reaped huge benefits, surely they deserve a dividend.”
Bragg also tries to take direct credit for Bebo’s success:
Mr. Birch has cited me as an influence in Bebo’s attitude toward artists. He got in touch two years ago after I took MySpace to task over its proprietary rights clause. I was concerned that the site was harvesting residual rights from original songs posted there by unsigned musicians. As a result of my complaints, MySpace changed its terms and conditions to state clearly that all rights to material appearing on the site remain with the originator.
A few weeks later, Mr. Birch came to see me at my home. He was hoping to expand his business by hosting music and wanted my advice on how to construct an artist-centered environment where musicians could post original songs without fear of losing control over their work. Following our talks, Mr. Birch told the press that he wanted Bebo to be a site that worked for artists and held their interests first and foremost.
Bragg does attempt to argue his case, primarily by (1) saying that social networks are as much to blame for declining music sales as the people who are downloading songs in violation of copyrights, and (2) saying that arguments that social networks are doing musicians a favor by marketing their music are “disingenuous.”
Both arguments have holes in them so large you could drive a BitTorrent stream through them.
Social networks have absolutely nothing to do with the decline in music sales. The fact that recorded music can be reproduced at a zero marginal cost is why music sales are declining. You can hate that or love that, but it’s simple economics that drives it.
And in fact the argument that social networks actually provide free marketing to artists is not disingenuous. In fact, it’s quite correct. Bragg notes that radio stations pay royalties for playing songs, even though they also obviously provide free marketing for artists.
His argument isn’t quite factually correct - In the U.S. royalties are paid by radio stations to song writers but not artists (it comes to about $450 million per year). In most of the rest of the world, though, artists are paid royalties. But a much more interesting analysis of the radio industry is the very strong desire for labels and musicians to pay them to play songs. Payola is now illegal, but the practice almost certainly continues. As recently as 2005, former New York State Attorney General Eliot Spitzer prosecuted payola-related crimes in his jurisdiction.
Recorded music is nothing but marketing material to drive awareness of an artist. Websites that bring that music to listeners are doing artists a favor. In fact, they’re doing them a favor that they should (and will) be paid for. Young artists and songwriters in particular benefit from these services - Until a few years ago they had almost no way to break into the mainstream without getting a label to promote them. Now those walls are being torn down, and Bragg has the audacity to complain about it.
I think the main reason Bragg wrote this article is jealousy over the massive success of someone he once met - Bebo cofounder Michael Birch. The paragraphs quoted above where he takes credit for their business model reveal his angst in that regard. Bragg had absolutely nothing to do with Bebo’s $850 million payday. And everything else he wrote in that article is dead wrong, too.
Crunch Network: MobileCrunchMobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
New platforms like Adobe Air and Mozilla Prism are evolving that combine the benefits of Internet flow with the flexibility and power of desktop applications. They are part browser, part desktop app and are extremely efficient for certain types of applications.
Flash, Silverlight and Ajax get most web applications over the hump in terms of usability and are the technologies behind the fast transition of desktop applications to the web. But it’s not clear that they’ll ever kill off all desktop applications entirely. The bridge between them may very well be Air and/or Prism.
Matthew Gertner, who was a co-founder and CTO of startup AllPeers before it shut down earlier this year, is now working with Mozilla on their Prism project. I asked him to write a guest post discussing Prism and how it fits into the ecosystem v. Air as well as a number of emerging technologies for using web applications offline (Firefox 3, Google Gears).
Thanks to innovations like Ajax and Flash video, web apps are quickly gaining ground on their desktop counterparts. With a few notable exceptions like Firefox and Skype, the big software hits of recent years have been websites such as Flickr, YouTube and Facebook. And yet web-based software cannot yet equal the high-quality user experience of the best native apps. This is the reason why Apple was forced to reverse its original decision to make Safari the official SDK for the iPhone. It also explains why online productivity suites like Google Docs are still struggling to compete with stalwarts like Microsoft Office. Web apps simply don’t provide the responsiveness, performance, whizzy graphics and access to local data that users crave, and they only work when you’re connected to the internet.
Modu, an Israeli startup founded in 2007, is going to be adding $100 million to the $20 million in venture capital they’ve already raised, says Israeli newspaper The Globes. The company will create tiny modular phones that can be slipped into different device “jackets”— like an MP3 player, GPS, bigger cell phone, car stereo, or digital camera (see here for a demo video).
Consider this response that I just received (identifying information removed) from a venture capitalist I emailed to discuss a new investment:
Why is it the Brits have all the 
