Many here in Silicon Valley are eagerly trying to get funding for their startups. Out of those few who are able to get funding from Venture Capitalists, I wonder how many actually hear what’s in the above video. Following in line with the “Sh*t” memes that are the flavor of the month on YouTube, August Capital’s David Hornik posted this hilarious one about “Sh*t VCs Say”.  There are some really great gems in this video like poking fun at the negotiating process (e.g. “$10 million pre”) and much more…here are a few of my favorites:

• Is an 11 good on Klout?
• Is that the biggest plane they got?
• I got one word for you: participating preferred
• That’s what you’re doing? Are you kidding? I had that idea 3 years ago.
• S-1, baby!
• What if we put it in the Cloud?
• Mary, can you come here for a second? I need you to tweet something for me!
• I just got back from Paris.
• You’d be better off with Snooki on your board.
• What? You only have 7 million users.
• Why in the world are people skiing on the weekends when the lines are shorter during the week?
• You gotta check it out, it’s like the AirBnB for cosmetics

Thanks David Hornik for the laughs this Saturday morning. You can watch the whole video here.

SoundCloud, the Berlin-based open platform for audio sharing on the web and mobile devices keeps making noise. During the past six months it’s grown from 1 Million to 2 Million users, having attracted both Snoop Dog and Justin Bieber as customers. To keep up with its fast growth in order to become the leader in audio hosting and sharing, as to establish its US presence and the San Francisco office, it needs more fuel to execute. The rumors of raising new funding ($10 Million) were confirmed today, and we can congratulate Union Square Ventures with Fred Wilson and Index Ventures with Mike Volpi for joining the SoundCloud journey together with its prior investor Doughty Hanson Ventures.

I’ve been a fangirl of Soundcloud since its private beta, and long before Spotify Social came along, SoundCloud had been my home for music discovery. Citysounds.fm is still one of my favourite apps, perfect to discover new music from different cities. And now, with the new updated iPhone app, I finally get access to my SoundCloud favourite tracks list streaming nicely on the background. What. A. Relief.

Something tells me that my perfect world scenario, where I can check-in and discover the best food, music and places recommendations all in one isn’t that far away in the future…

Record Your Tunes, Sounds, Talks And Thoughts On The Fly

While doubling its user base, SoundCloud has also been busy developing its latest feature, The Record Button. With the new updated iPhone app with recording and instant upload and sharing features, SoundCloud makes sure you can easily capture and share any audio where ever you are. Like YouTube is for video. Alexander Ljung, Founder and CEO of SoundCloud, cleverly demoed the app in action at LeWeb’10. (Reminder: Just make sure you always have the latest update not to lose any precious sounds coming your way.)

Not an Apple fangirl or boy? There’s an Android app for you. When the new Mac App Store launched for two day ago, so did the SoundCloud Desktop app for Mac, placing itself as steady number 8 on the top 12 list.

With the Record button on both the desktop and mobile devices, SoundCloud now takes the leap into the space of audio sharing platforms such as Audioboo and Cinch, a service frequently used by Robert Scoble when interviewing people.

API Is The New Marketing and Product Development Model

Besides from being one of my favourite startup entrepreneurs, Eric Wahlforss, Co-founder and CTO of SoundCloud, is also a person I enjoy to listen on stage. I had the pleasure of moderating Eric’s session “SoundCloud’s API Learnings“ at Disruptive Code developer conference back in September. With over 100 third party developer apps, Eric and his team have a deep understanding on how to empower, as the value of being empowered by, third party developers. It’s no co-incidence that Music Hack Day unconferences were started by SoundCloud. If you’re running or building service online, this is the presentation you can NOT afford to pass in order to understand why open API is the future model of marketing, product development and should be part of your core business.

Paula is online strategist and startup evangelist. She is also a mentor for startups at Seedcamp. She blogs at paulamarttila.com and here at Bub.blicio.us.
Connect with her on Twitter, LinkedIn,
Drop her email at paula.marttila[at]gmail[dot]com

By Julie Blaustein

A company’s failure is something that people don’t usually speak of, as if it were a bad omen or a skeleton in the closet. But, as FailCon ’10 made clear, failure happens to everyone, including those used to always being on top. The conference, held Monday in San Francisco, made failure appear to be a badge of honor. In the world of start-ups, failure is a way for one to learn lessons and to succeed as a result of failing in the past. FailCon ’10, now in its second year, was launched by event planner Cassie Phillipps of WebWallfower Events and took place in the Hotel Kabuki in San Francisco.

Steve Blank of Four Steps to the Epiphany

The opening speaker was serial entrepreneur and business school professor Steve Blank who was also available to sign his book, The Four Steps to the Epiphany. It’s about early stage start-ups and the four stages of growth any start-up goes through in order to become a real company. Right on target with the theme of the conference. His talk was based on the key task of any start-up; creating a working business model. He also provided some practical advice such as, “Don’t expect the VC’s to be lined up waiting for you to hand you money when you get off the plane in Silicon Valley.”

Jay Adelson of Revision3

Blank was soon followed by a number of speakers from very successful companies who spoke about what they learned from their mistakes. The line-up included Chad Dickerson of Etsy, Chrysanthe Tenentes of FourSquare and Cathy Brooks of OtherThanThat, who asked her usual probing questions when interviewing former Digg CEO, Jay Adelson. Adelson did not share too much with the audience that wasn’t already news, such as his departure from Digg as CEO, but he did share his thirst for being a part of the start-up process, whether it is successful or not.

Hotel Kabuki is a convenient venue, not only for its great restaurants in Japantown but ideal for a conference thanks to its numerous rooms that provided both speaker presentations and workshops. How Not to Fail at SEO presented by Vanessa Fox, formerly of Google and now of Nine By Blue, provided a great presentation of do’s and don’ts for SEO that one can find in her book, Marketing in the Age of Google.

The Audience of FailCon '10

A number of start-ups provided demos of their products and services in the “Demo Room” including: Footfeed, Near2There, FoodSprout, Wordchuck, SurfMark, Doochoo, CardMunch, Soup.me, MogoTix, hiyakoo, MyNextCustomer, R/A Profit$, and Bee.TV. Throughout the day they offered demos of their product or service for those that wandered into the demo room during sessions and breaks. The audience texted their favorite using Poll Everywhere and the three favorites of FailCon were MyNextCustomer, CardMunch and MogoTix. MogoTix, the winner of the popular vote, provides scannable tickets on your mobile phone and for the event organizer, instantaneous viewing of who has arrived. Perhaps they will have some small failures in order to ensure that they will be successful in the end.

We recently had a chance to sit down with recently funded CEO Brian Wong, to find out more about what he’s working on with Kiip.me

Brian was recently funded by True Ventures and has had an amazing couple of weeks. Being the youngest to be funded by True Ventures, Brian said that he is looking forward to what is to come, and excited to to be launching at the end of the year.

Thanks to @KickLabsSF for sharing the space, and @Brian_Wong for the interview! We look forward to many more to come!

*Photo by www.RyanChuaPhotography.com

At the time of year when the airports are busiest, FlightCaster has announced $1.3 million in funding. FlightCaster launched a service that predicts the probability of a flight leaving on time, reporting up to 6 hours before the airline will announce a delay. Combining data from air traffic control, airport information, airline information and countless other parameters, FlightCaster emerged earlier this year as a nifty but questionable tool.

FlightCaster’s applied use cases were in question, as calculating the probability of a flight delay does not always give a flier the guarantee of making their flight should they change their plans accordingly. A lack of integration with other major travel-planning tools also isolated FlightCaster in its service provisions.

However, The funding of FlightCaster shows interest in its product, though details regarding plans for FlightCaster growth have not been released. Increased features for usability will improve the FlightCaster service based upon its existing functionality. Furthered integration with other services, especially those that are related to travel planning and alerts. Additionally, trending personal concierge services with well-integrated mobile features are targets for FlightCaster integration as well.

According to TechCrunch, FlightCaster has already begun discussions with companies for future inclusion of its predictions services. From airlines and airport information hubs such as RSS feeds and mobile apps to travel planning tools that already offer similar alerts, FlightCaster may have found itself in a nice position.

Whether this is indicative of a future acquisition for Flightcaster or not is too early to determine. The funding of Flightcaster, however, shows the potential behind niche services such as this. Many others that were too far advanced for their time have missed opportunities in not being able to integrate with the services and methods already employed by the average consumer.

As mobile phones make concierge services even more prevalent in our lives, the necessity for personalized updates grows accordingly. With larger companies creating robust mobile apps to connect more directly with consumers, startups such as Flightcaster have more opportunities to become integrated features promoted through these apps, accessing consumers on a broad level.

By Julie Blaustein

Kosmix‘s doubles Ping Pong Tournament held at its head quarters in Mountain View last week was quite the event. Seven of their closest neighbors and potential partners were invited along with a team of bloggers that included myself, Julie “Julie B” Blaustein of Bub.blicio.us and Jennifer “Mediaphyter” Leggio of ZDNet. Kosmix takes not only their work seriously but their Ping Pong even more so. Scattered throughout their office are ping pong balls, rackets and previous trophies – a true testament to their ping pong culture. For this special tournament a two foot high, gold topped trophy with ping pongs was awarded to the winners. Each player’s game name such as “The Octopus” and “The Smasher” made it clear how intent they were in their quest to win. In the end, it was the Kosmix team made up of Nikesh “The Wall” Garera and Ankur “Neo” Jain that were the winners! Check out the hilarious Video of the Kosmix Startup Smackdown shot by Carl Brown of Corduroy Media.

The Contenders included the following companies:

Talenthouse: A platform that provides opportunities to the world’s creative community.

Skyfire: Provides a downloadable, free mobile browser that gives you Web browsing like your PC.

TheFind: Finds every product from every store, every coupon, and every review.

Rythm NewMedia: Mobilizes and Monetizes TV Shows.

Polyvore: Mixes & matches products from your favorite stores. You can then shop looks created by the web’s largest fashion community.

Evernote: Saves your ideas, things you see, and things you like. Then it allows you to find them all on any computer or device for free!

Meebo: Instant messages everywhere.

And Kosmix: It is a universal guide to the Web that organizes the Internet through a categorization engine into fun magazine-style topic pages to navigate the web using a countless number of sources including YouTube and Wikipedia. Unlike Mahalo that depends on Human Editors, Kosmix relies on Search Algorithms. Recently launched MeeHive creates customized news pages through very fine tuned aggregation. You can customize your own or a specialized version such as found with FailCon’s version.

Photo Credit: Karl Mueller

The Kosmix Ping Pong Tournament and its Team Players Photo Credit: Karl Mueller

Kosmix Founder Anand Rajaraman Guards the Ping Pong Trophy

By Julie Blaustein

Jay Adelson of Digg and Mike Vorhaus of Magid Advisors

Digital Media Conference West, a one day conference held at the Kabuki Hotel in San Francisco, focused on a wide range of topics  including online video, social media, investments, online advertising, mobile entertainment, mobile apps, the future of news media and the relationship between Hollywood and Silicon Valley. There were also a number of well known digital media  leaders there to speak including Jay Adelson of Digg and Craig Newmark of Craig’s List along with other great speakers from the industry.

Bill Trancer of Hitwise and Nick Veronis of Veronis Suhler Stevenson kicked off the conference with their view of the trends of the Internet. Bill’s trends can be found in his book Click: What Millions of People are Doing and Why it Matters along with his blog I Love Data which he gave a few shout-outs about. His post about the competition of Twitter vs Facebook provides a clear analysis of the trends, spelling out his observation that Facebook, with its 6% of all U.S. Internet visits, is not threatened by Twitter.  Nick Veronis spoke of ad spending trends where $210 billion is allocated to digital advertising, search is huge and growing with over $11 billion while classified spending has been reduced by 50% most likely due to competition with free services such as Craig’s List. The main problem according to Nick Veronis is, “Distribution used to be the issue, now its gaining the attention of users”

It was like hanging out in a cafe during Jay Adelson of Digg’s talk with Mike Vorhaus of Magid Advisors, a research-based strategic consulting firm (founded in 1957!). Jay shared amusing incidents such as when he was hailed back west from NYC to return to the Digg helm and his biggest concern was the transportation of his daughter’s Gecko. He “twittered” for information inquiring how does one transport a Gecko and was blown away by the amount of knowledge his followers shared with him about Geckos – a testament to the power of Twitter. His first hire was a coder from eLance who turned into a full timer. Digg would have been Dig if Disney didn’t already own it. He isn’t thrilled with the depiction of him as despising VC’s as detailed in an entire chapter on him called Fuck the Sweater Vests by Sarah Lacy in Once Your Lucky, Twice Your Good. He does prefer Angel funding. Digg is hiring and allows dogs, even parakeets in the office. And he shared “secrets” including that Digg is releasing new features in a week and focusing on verticals, content types and also on multiple levels of promotions.

Chuck Fishman of Cisco and Craig Newmark of Craig's List

The agenda was packed with great content yet it seemed to always come back to Facebook, Twitter and MySpace in each and every conversation. Lunch was served along with a chat from Craig Newmark who still goes by his title of Customer and Service Rep from 12 years ago when he first started the site. He was candid, honest and a delight to listen to even though folks were having lunch while he spoke. His main concern is about information not being shared. He is so concerned that he gave out his Twitter, Facebook and even his email address to all, suggesting they contact him in the afternoons when he isn’t dealing with spam. Great information was shared during the conference by the speakers and through the Twitter hashtag #DMCW that was displayed front and center on the big screen on stage with the speakers. Attendees at the conference and off-site kept the live stream fresh. What were they sharing? They shared when they  arrived for the “party.” They promoted their speaking engagements coming up. They shared who they were looking forward to hearing speak. They provided links to information such as the Pew Study on Twitter Users tweeted by @nedsherman. They gave a play-by-play of who is speaking and about what. And they promoted themselves.

Check out more about the Digital Media Conference West and Buzz on its Twitter Feed at #DMCW

In September, we covered the latest investment in FourSquare, a popular mobile app that fuses geo-location, micro updates, outside social networks such as Twitter, and social gaming into one, very social and addictive platform for the iPhone and Google Android phones.

Initially O’Reilly AlphaTech and UnionSquare Ventures were identified as investors. However, behind the veil, FourSquare also aligned an all-star list of investors and advisors. Yesterday, the company finally revealed the names behind the mystery…(descriptions amended)

Let’s play…

Jack Dorsey, creator of Twitter.
Twitter has changed the way a lot of us think about things – presence, status, search.  Jack’s advice and feedback have already proven to be invaluable as the team hustles to improve and grow foursquare.

Kevin Rose, founder of Digg.
A day after FourSquare launched at SXSW, Kevin tracked us down and bullied them into making a badge for Digg’s party.  Since then he’s been one of their biggest supporters and a great source of advice and product ideas.

Joshua Schachter, founder of Delicious.
Since FourSquare launched, people have been describing parts of it as “Delicious for places”.  Obviously, they love this comparison and have been thrilled to have Joshua’s feedback and insight into their product goals.

Alex Rainert, co-founder of Dodgeball.
Very few people understand the mobile/social space as well as Alex.  Since their very first iPhone build, he’s been throwing feedback and product suggestions at us. Karen Bonna-Rainert, Alex’s wife and a good friend from Dennis’ grad school days at ITP @ NYU is also actively involved.

SV Angels LLC
The angel group founded and backed by Ron Conway is a major player in seed-stage tech investments since the early days of Google.

Chad Stoller, NYC branding/advertising/interactive superstar.
You can thank Chad for the “mayor” idea – which he demanded that the tream build so he could flaunt his loyalty to Think Coffee.  FourSquare sold out and wrote the code in exchange for two beers.  :)

Sergio Salvatore, long-time music / technology entrepreneur.
A long-time friend of Naveen’s, Sergio’s been advising the team on scaling and technical architecture issues since the early days of foursquare.

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