Friday 18 October 2013

Mode Lands A $550K Seed Round Led By David Sacks To Bring Online Collaboration To Data Science

Mode Lands A $550K Seed Round Led By David Sacks To Bring Online Collaboration To Data Science


Mode, a company that is building an online repository for data science work, announced today that it has secured a $550,000 seed round of funding led by Yammer founder David Sacks. Mode CEO Derek Steer previously worked at Yammer, including after its acquisition by Microsoft.
Mode calls itself the “GitHub for Data Analysis.” While I tend to scorn “We’re the X for Y” comparisons by startups, Mode has a point: It supports storing work online, publicly, in a way that helps data scientists avoid reinventing the wheel. Quite similar to what GitHub provides developers. Also, Mode intends to charge users to keep their stored data work private. Public storage will be free. Again, this mimics GitHub. I don’t say that pejoratively; GitHub is a success story.
In short, if you work in data science, Mode will sport a number of models and other work that you can apply to your own data sets. Mode isn’t alone in building a product to support data analysis. Companies such as Kaggle are pushing the larger data science effort forward. Both are betting that data science as a market niche is growing now, and will continue to do so for years.
I hate to sound too positive, but they are correct. The declining price of storage, the increasing power of computing, and a technological shift towards tracking more and storing more are generating what PR folks love to call “big data.” Once you have all that information, of course, you want to make it talk. And that’s the loose way to define data science.
Mode has all its work still ahead of it, of course. It has to generate a critical mass of data scientists to make its product worth using: Data models can be very targeted, meaning that it may require a very large upload base to become useful to the average data scientist.
I spoke with Mode’s Steer, and he indicated that integration with AWS, a service that the company itself uses, is something that will be added in the future.
$550,000 isn’t much money by current technology norms. But it should be sufficient capital for Mode to prove its market size if it has measured correctly. And when it needs more money, it has a few friends already in the tank that have deep enough pockets.

E-Loan Specialist Wonga Buys BillPay, The PayPal Of Germany, To Move Deeper Into Payments

E-Loan Specialist Wonga Buys BillPay, The PayPal Of Germany, To Move Deeper Into Payments
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Wonga is a UK-based startup best known for its online payday loan services, but today the company made a move that could see it not only extending across to other markets in Europe but also into other services like payments: the company today is announcing the acquisition of BillPay, known as the “PayPal of Germany”. Terms of the deal have not been disclosed, but there is a call with Wonga and BillPay execs in a little while, where we might find out more.
“The acquisition significantly accelerates our development into a broad-based, digital finance group and will also speed the development of our PayLater online retail product, together with the company’s international expansion,” the company noted in astatement today.
If the ambitions of Wonga — which has raised some $145 milion in funding from VCs like Balderton, Accel, Greylock, Meritech, Dawn Capital and Oak Investment Partners — were not clear before, they should be now: they would like to compete against the likes of PayPal and other e-payment services across Europe. That’s in addition to more global ambitions: the company last year also eyed up expanding to Canada and South Africa.
“The combined Wonga and BillPay business will consolidate our position as a pioneer in the financial revolution, offering customers a range of bold new payment and credit solutions for the modern world,” Errol Damelin, founder and chief executive, said in a statement. “As well as giving Wonga Group a presence in Europe’s second largest online retail market, this deal continues our on-going transformation into a fully international, digital finance business with operations across three continents and more than three million customers.”
To date, BillPay, which has 2 million users and agreements with 3,500 sites/online storefronts, has largely been operating in German-speaking countries — Germany, Austria and Switzerland — but it is expanding, most recently to Holland. The deal could see the UK become BillPay’s next market, as well as provide a lever for Wonga to extend into countries where BillPay is already active. In all, Wonga says that the combined effort will cover seven markets — because in addition to its mainstay UK market, it is also active in Poland and Spain, markets it has entered in the last year.
It also gives Wonga some openings for how it can use its e-loan and financing services to work directly to buy big-ticket items from merchants. This is something that Wonga has already been pursuing with its PayLater option to pay for items in installments. Current customers of BillPay include the CBR Group (CECIL and Street One), Runnerspoint, Fahrrad.de, DriveNow and Home24.
Wonga says Nelson Holzner, the founder and CEO of BillPay, as well as other senior colleagues, “will remain within their current roles as part of the enlarged group.”All of us at BillPay are delighted we are joining forces with such a large and innovative group as Wonga,” Holzner said in a statement. “We feel our services and ethos are entirely complementary and we look forward to working with them.”
More to come.

Come And Build With Us At The Disrupt Europe Hackathon — We’re Nearly Out Of Tickets!

Come And Build With Us At The Disrupt Europe Hackathon — We’re Nearly Out Of Tickets!


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It’s almost time.
In just over a week, we’re bringing the TechCrunch Disrupt conference to Europe for the very first time.
And you know what comes before every Disrupt? One of our crazy, intense, exhaustingly wonderful hackathons, where you’ve got just shy of 24 hours to build the very best thing you can hammer together from the ground up. To show the world you’re one of the best coders in all of Berlin. To blow minds.
We’re pretty much out of tickets. This will be one of the very last batches we release.

What Is It?

Never been to one of our hackathons? Here’s how it works: You enter. You check in. You find a team, or bring one with you (or, hell, hack alone!). We start the clock, you open your code editor, and you let loose every bit of skill you’ve got at your disposal.
At the end of 24 hours, you and your team have 60 seconds to wow the crowd —from your fellow hackers, to local VCs, to our panel of awesome judges (which we’ll announce early next week.)
The top team walks away with $5,000, no strings attached. The top three teams get to present their projects again just a few days later — but this time, it’s in front of the massive audience at the main Disrupt conference. And because we like to sneak as many clever people into our conferences as possible: the top 50teams each get 2 tickets to the main Disrupt Europe event (generally valued at nearly $1,000 each)
Oh! And there’s a bunch of awesome API sponsor prizes up for grabs, as well —stay tuned for those next week.
Sound like something you’d be into? Great. Check out our newly polished set of rules, so you can start figuring out what you’re gonna build.
Then grab a ticket below. Quick. Because really — after this batch is gone, there aren’t many tickets left.


NEWS/ Did Erin Andrews Accidentally Confuse Justin Bieber With Justin Verlander on Air? Listen Now!

NEWS/ 

Did Erin Andrews Accidentally Confuse Justin Bieber With Justin Verlander on Air? Listen Now!


Erin Andrews, Mike Napoli
Did Erin Andrews really have Justin Bieber on the brain?
During Tuesday night's broadcast of Game 3 of the ALCS on Fox, the 35-year-old sports reporter conducted an on-field postgame interview with Boston Red Sox's Mike Napoliabout his homerun off Detroit Tigers ace Justin Verlander.
Only problem was when she was asking the bearded slugger about his previous homer against the pitcher, she stumbled over Verlander's name and appeared to refer to the 19-year-old teen heartthrob.
If you ask Andrews however, she adamantly denies it.
"My lord…people are unreal," she tweeted afterward in response to a follower's question about it which she retweeted.
"If you really think I have Bieber on my mind, then u are soooooo right #sarcasm," sheadded.
Okay, so Erin doesn't exactly sound like a Belieber, though a lot of folks online certainlythought so.
But to be fair, upon closer inspection, a case can be made that Andrews may have said "Vee" as in "Vee-lander," as opposed to "Bee" as in "Bieber."
Whatever she was thinking, the verbal goof proved to be the least sticky situation the journalist found herself in following last night's 1-0 playoff victory by the Sox.
That's because Andrews also ended up getting drenched in Gatorade while talking with Sox catcher Jarrod Saltalamacchia after Red Sox right fielder Shane Victorino missed his target for the most part and got her by mistake.

A Standalone Messaging App Is The Last Thing Twitter Needs

A Standalone Messaging App Is The Last Thing Twitter Needs



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Despite being one of the most popular and powerful social networks on the planet, Twitter is far from perfect. With only a quarter of the 1 billion registered accounts actively using the service, the platform clearly lacks mainstream appeal. So what’s missing?
According toAllThingsD today, Twitter may be launching a standalone messaging app to compete with the likes of Line, KakaoTalk and Snapchat. It has even reportedly been meeting with employees at MessageMe. To poach? To aqui-hire? it’s unclear for now.
If all of this is true, this points to a big question: Is a me-too approach to messaging the best strategy for Twitter right now?
No. And also no.
Mainstream users don’t love Twitter for its privacy or for its messaging system. With so many messaging offerings already lined up on our smartphones, the only reason to use Twitter direct messaging is if you absolutely have no connection to that person anywhere but on Twitter.
Part of this could be because Twitter’s DM product isn’t a good one — the company has harshly neglected the service since inception. It’s often buggy (such as the URL glitch from yesterday), and it has been hidden away for a while now, with several clicks required behind the profile page to get to it.
However, this week Twitter started to turn on the ability for people to privately message you even if you don’t follow them — with a blanked permission box in your settings. (Which seems slightly counter-intuitive, given that messages are meant to be private.)
Still, even if Twitter beautified its messaging product, is there a clear benefit to DMing someone over texting them, or Snapchatting them, or sending a Viber message, or using MessageMe? Is that benefit enough to get users to switch from one of the other myriad products already available?
For Twitter, the company obviously wants to take advantage of the huge opportunity in the U.S., where the messaging space is highly fragmented. But that’s not what Twitter was built for, it’s not what Twitter is good at, and it’s not what Twitter will be used for in the future.
The original idea for Twitter, status updates like “lunch,” didn’t pan out so well. Dorsey was wrong (kind of). It’s not about a close group of friends knowing what you’re doing at any given moment, which is closer to messaging than the Twitter of today.
Instead, Twitter is used to discuss what’s happening right now in a global forum. It connects people interested in a certain television show, or people at the same venue, or folks who are living through the same tragic or joyous current event, and it does so in real-time. It lets users consume conversations with the option to participate. This, along with a handful of celebrities, is what made Twitter into what it is today. It’s the opposite of privacy and intimate messaging (unless you’re askingAnthony Weiner).
To grab (and keep) the mainstream audience Twitter is so hungry for, the platform needs to play up its strengths and remove its weaknesses. This doesn’t really include messaging, and following the lead of other popular social apps like Snapchat and MessageMe risks diluting what Twitter actually is.
Consider what we seem to like about Twitter.
The first thing is the follow structure. Twitter was one of the first social networks to adopt a follow-based structure instead of a mutual friendship structure for connections. This means that everyday users can be appreciated, and followed, by anyone in the world regardless of the relationship between those people.
Suddenly, anyone can become a celebrity. A guy who’s annoyed by his ditzy upstairs neighbors gets a book deal. A BuzzFeed writer ends up with a job at Fox writing for sitcoms.
Instagram and countless other social networks used the same structure, changing social networking from a tool to connect with friends into a tool to broadcast to the world.
There’s something equally vain and comforting that comes with a following, a quantifiable group of people who subscribe to your stream of consciousness. It’s part of Twitter’s magic, and that ever-present hunger for more followers is part of what drives engagement among active users.
But beyond the following, Twitter users also love the conversation. It’s one of the only digital tools that focuses on time with such acuity. The best moments I’ve ever experienced on Twitter all centered around what was happening right now.
When the lights went out during the Super Bowl, Twitter was the best place to be. When the Bachelorette finale aired, Twitter made me feel less like a loser for watching that ridiculous show.
Screenshot 2013-10-17 13.24.56
This real-time discussion spans the entirety of Twitter, from serious breaking news in Syria to things as silly as my Bachelorette finale. And what’s more, users have the option to participate or merely sit back and consume.
This is what makes Twitter Twitter, and messaging is kind of a distraction from it. Instead of worrying about yet another standalone app that competes with niche social apps, like Twitter Camera and Twitter #music (two major fails for the company), Twitter should be working on making the main Twitter experience easier to navigate for new users.
Baby steps have been taken, including the new conversation view feature that pulls responses to tweets into a single thread, connected by a blue line and shown in chronological order. This adds context to what can be a confusing, and sometimes one-word response to older tweets, tweets that may not even have been seen due to the fact that you may not follow the same folks as I do.
But even Twitter’s strengths have their own weaknesses. Take the follow structure, for example, which offers up just as much benefit as it does quandary. As exciting as it is to gain new followers, parsing through Twitter users that you should follow is a different matter. I assume most new Twitter users run into the same problem I did when I joined, which is following too many people and publications and organizations, only to have an overwhelming Twitter feed.
Of course, this predicament calls for extra organization, which becomes difficult on Twitter. There’s a lack of automation on the social network. That means you have complete control over your feed, but it also means that you have to manually decide on every little detail, from who to follow to your lists and back again.
A little automagic would go a long way here, as would automated filtering of the stream to surface content the user actually cares about.
ATD also reports that Twitter is working on the third major revamp since the company’s launch seven years ago, with a focus on simplicity and integration with television to onboard new users into an instantly comfortable conversation. These are steps in the right direction, as is a move toward more media-centric feeds. Twitter is historically text heavy, and likely took a heavy blow when Instagram turned off cards integration. More media in-feed means the easier and more comfortable Twitter is to a new crop of users.
And to be perfectly honest, a little spring cleaning on the internal messaging system in Twitter wouldn’t hurt. It’s not that it’s a bad feature for Twitter, but it can’t be the hero when hunting down new users. A standalone messaging app, however, is yet another fragmentation of what Twitter is without any clear benefit to users, not to mention being a distraction to engineers who could be fixing other (real) issues on the social network.
Of course, this is all speculation until Twitter makes its move in the coming weeks and/or months, but hopefully this 1,300-word plea doesn’t fall on deaf ears. I know it’s TL;DR, Twitter, but make an exception or I’ll DM the whole thing to you, bit by bit.

US Tech Companies Raised $8.1B In 806 VC Deals In Q3, Capital Raised, M&A Activity And IPOs All Up From Previous Quarter

US Tech Companies Raised $8.1B In 806 VC Deals In Q3, Capital Raised, M&A Activity And IPOs All Up From Previous Quarter


Dow Jones Venture Source released its quarterly report on the state of venture capital, including data on number of VC deals, funds raised, M&As and IPOs in the technology sector. According to the report U.S.-based companies raised $8.1 billion from 806 venture capital deals in 3Q 2013, a 2% increase in capital and a 4% decrease in number of deals from the previous quarter.
Compared to the same period in 2012, there was a 10% decrease in number of deals, while amount raised went up by 4%. The sectors to increase in amount raised were Business and Financial Services (46%) and Consumer Services (1%). By industry group, IT led the pack with 246 deals raising $2.3 billion and
accounting for 28% of total equity investment. Business and Financial Services saw $2.2 billion through 195 deals. Healthcare placed third with $1.8 billion in 164 deals. And $1.3 billion were raised by Consumer Services in 148 deals, a decrease of 10% in deal flow, while capital invested went up by 1%.
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The largest deals in the quarter included Beat’s $500 million raise, Uber’s $258 million funding round, Palantir’s $200 million raise, and MongoDB’s $150 million round. The most active investors by amount of deals were in order, Google Ventures (25), Sequoia Capital (17), Andreessen Horowitz (17), Kleiner Perkins (16) and NEA (15).
M%A increased by 11% from 2Q 2013, with 111 deals garnering $9.7 billion. The number of deals also increased by 25 percent from the previous quarter. These included IBM’s $1 billion acquisition of Trusteer, and AOL’s $405 million purchase of Adap.TV.
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IPOs seem to be seeing an uptick, with 25 companies raising $2.2 billion through public offerings in 3Q 2013. Both number of deals and capital raised increased from the previous quarter, with 25% and 24% increases, respectively. The largest IPOs of the quarter were FireEye and Violin Memory.
Median pre-money valuations decreased slightly by 7% from 2Q 2013. In terms of VCs themselves, firms raised 11% more funds than the previous quarter and saw the highest number of funds since 4Q’08. The data shows that 62 funds raised $4.1 billion in 3Q 2013, an 11% increase in number of funds, but a 47% decrease in the amount raised from the prior quarter. Greylock raised the largest fund in the quarter at $1 billion, accounting for 25% of the total amount raised in 3Q 2013. The median U.S. fund size was $123 million in the three quarters of 2013.
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