LAUNCH Education & Kids, June 12th & 13th

[ Image via creative commons license from flickingerbrad .]

Here at LAUNCH we follow innovation like hawks, and we've seen a lot of activity from founders working on education and 'edutainment,' both for kids and adults. So, we're going to have an intimate 250-person event for folks trying to disrupt the space on June 12th and 13th in Silicon Valley (Mountain View to be exact). More details at our official site: http://www.launchedu.co
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LAUNCH Festival Wrap-up: Winners, Investments and More



The 5th annual LAUNCH Festival March 7 & 8 in San Francisco exceeded our expectations:  42 amazing startups launched or launched new products and competed for investment money that topped $1.4M by the time we announced the winners.

We had 195 companies in the Demo Pit -- 11 of which got to present on stage -- and 1,700+ people (including top entrepreneurs and investors)  attended the show over the two days. Our Office Hours stage attracted standing-room-only crowds as folks like Tony Hsieh of Zappos, David Cohen of TechStars and Dave McClure of 500 Startups answered entrepreneurs' questions.

The Grand Jury gave out 12 awards in all, naming Dropbox rival Space Monkey Best Overall in the 1.0 competition, TurboTax for financial aid Alltuition Best Overall in the 2.0 competition and Scoot Networks Best Demo Pit. Space Monkey and Alltuition snapped up $376k in investments, while Best Design 1.0 winner Minbox secured the TechStars slot plus $200k in investments.

Check out the list of winners, who got which investments, the awards ceremony, all LAUNCH Festival '12 demos (on our YouTube channel) and all official LAUNCH Festival '12 photos.
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Watch TWiST with Jawbone Founder and CEO Hosain Rahman Today at 1pm PT


Today on This Week in Startups, Jason Calacanis sat down with Jawbone founder and CEO Hosain Rahman. 

Jawbone manufactures premium Bluetooth headsets, wireless portable speakers, like the popular JAMBOX that launched in August 2011, and other products that support the mobile lifestyle. Back in December, Jawbone raised $40M, bringing the company's total to $210M raised. Investors seem to be most excited about...
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Watch TWiST News Roundtable with Adeo Ressi and Ryan Block Live at 1pm PT

[ Adeo Ressi and Ryan Block. ]

Today on This Week in Startups, tune in for a special News Roundtable live from CNET in San Francisco with Adeo Ressi of the Founder Institute, gdgt co-founder Ryan Block and Erik Lanigan, journalist and former This Week in Tech host, who will read the news. 

Adeo is the founding member of TheFunded, an online community of 17K CEOs, and runs the Founder Institute mentoring program that helps entrepreneurs in 30 cities worldwide. 

Ryan helped start consumer electronics and personal technology Q&A site gdgt in 2008 shortly after...
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Watch TWiST with Di-Ann Eisnor of Waze at 1pm PT Today


Today on This Week in Startups, Host Jason Calacanis sat down with Waze's VP Community Geographer Di-Ann Eisnor at the company's headquarters in Palo Alto at 1pm PT.

Di-Ann is a neogeography pioneer and serial entrepreneur. Before joining real-time traffic navigating app Waze in 2010, Di-Ann co-founded...
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Watch TWiST News Roundtable with Cyan Banister and Erik Lanigan Live at 1pm


Today on This Week in Startups, tune in for a special News Roundtable live from CNET in San Francisco with Cyan Banister of Zivity, and Erik Lanigan, journalist and former This Week in Tech host.

Cyan is the founder and CEO of Zivity, a subscription and voting based artist-fan interaction platform for models, photographers and artists. She is also a confirmed judge at the upcoming LAUNCH Festival in March.

Erik, formerly of TWiT, left the company in December after "wrongful termination...and subsequent...
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Chill Gets More Social but Ditches Live Rooms Feature

Chill just launched a new version to make watching videos more social and provide an easier way to find the content you want. Even though the live rooms -- the feature that let you watch videos with friends -- is gone, Chill now offers more discovery options and sharing capabilities like comments, reposts and thoughts. 

The new homepage is now a grid of videos shared by friends and the new popular section shows you what's "cool" at the moment in the Chill community. 

"More and more, the things that are important to us -- music, images, interests -- are being networked," Chill Director of Growth Andrew Skotzko tells LAUNCH. "Why hasn't video been? It's the richest medium of expression we have, but for whatever reason the social tools in video are still pretty weak. Sure, the vast majority of video sharing happens on Facebook & Twitter, but neither of those sites are optimized for consuming video—they're pretty noisy platforms."

While Chill's focus is no longer on watching videos with friends, Andrew says they will still...

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Watch TWiST #224 with Box Co-founder Aaron Levie at 1pm PT

[ Box Co-founder Aaron Levie. ]

Today on This Week in Startups at 1pm PT, Jason sat down at Waze headquarters in Palo Alto to speak with Box's co-founder Aaron Levie.

Levie, at just 27 years old, has seen his company grow from startup to major player in the cloud storage space, raising a series D round of venture funding for $81M in 2011. Levie created Box.net as a project while studying at the Marshall School of Business at the University of Southern California.

Listen in as Jason and Aaron talk scaling...
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Watch TWiST News Roundtable with Sean Percival and James Altucher Live at 1pm PT



Today on This Week in Startups, Sean Percival, Entrepreneur in Residence at the incubator Science, and writer and entrepreneur James Altucher will join Host Jason Calacanis for the News Roundtable live at 1pm PT.

Before joining Science in Nov. 2011, Sean served as vice president of online marketing at Myspace for nearly two years and previously worked at Mahalo as a content manager.

James Altucher is a contributing writer for The Wall Street Journal, Managing Partner at Formula Capital and author of seven books. His most recent book, How to Be The Luckiest Person Alive, describes...
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LAUNCH Festival Judges and Grand Jury Members: Robert Scoble, Tony Hsieh, Tony Conrad and More

[ Row 1: Robert Scoble, Tony Hsieh, Tony Conrad, Jennifer Lum. Row 2: Don Dodge, Greg Tseng, Chamath Palihapitiya, Thomas Korte. Row 3: Jay Levy, Cyan Banister, Bill Warner, Adeo Ressi. ]

By Jason Calacanis

Man, I'm the luckiest guy on the planet!

Over the past two weeks almost everyone I've asked to join me as a judge or Grand Jury member at the LAUNCH event has said yes!

This is my fifth year hosting the LAUNCH Festival (the first three we called it TechCrunch50), and I'm thrilled to announce the following judges/speakers are on now on board...
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The Only Two Questions Founders Need to Answer


By Jason Calacanis

Every day a couple of dozen folks email me asking me to tell them what I think of their products.

When I have the time, or interest, to respond I generally ask myself a battery of questions:

a. Is the logo iconic?
b. Could you tell me the domain name over the phone once and have me type it in correctly?
c. Is it clear within 10 seconds what the purpose of this product or service is? Does it matter if it is clear?
d. Is the design world-class?

Those are tactical questions that let me know the person has skills. Everyone can pass those tests with a couple of months of hard work.

My two brutal questions, which you can't simply pass with a couple of months of hard work, are how recommendable and unforgettable your product is.

Here is how I ask them:

1. Would I recommend this product?
2. Will I remember this product next month and next year?

If you run an amazing product like...
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Comcast Brings Live TV Streaming to Tablets but Requires New AnyPlay Device


Comcast is starting to roll out AnyPlay, a device that makes it possible to watch live television on Internet-connected devices like the iPad and eventually, the Motorola Xoom.

For now, AnyPlay is only available to Xfinity HD Triple Play customers in Denver and Nashville but will eventually be available in other markets. In order to live stream all of the channels you subscribe to, with the exception of On Demand programming, you must download the existing Xfinity TV app.

"Here's how it works...the AnyPlay device works the same as any other set top box in the home, but instead of delivering the incoming channel lineup to a television, AnyPlay delivers the lineup to the Wi-Fi router on the home network," Comcast SVP of Video Product Development Mark Hess writes in a press release. "The router then...
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Watch TWiST #222 with Gil Elbaz and Nova Spivack of Common Crawl Live at 1pm PT

[ From left to right: Gil Elbaz and Nova Spivack. ]

Today on This Week in Startups, Gil Elbaz and Nova Spivack of non-profit web indexing service Common Crawl will join Host Jason Calacanis to discuss the democratization of web data live at 1pm PT.

Common Crawl is a free, open 5B page search index of the web that Gil created on the belief that it is crucial for web crawl data to be open and accessible to all. 

Before founding the Common Crawl Foundation in early 2008, Gil...
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Watch TWiST News Roundtable with Marshall Kirkpatrick and Peter Pham Live at 1pm PT


[ Peter Pham and Marshall Kirkpatrick via creative commons licenses. ]

Today on This Week in Startups, Peter Pham, co-founder of Color, and Marshall Kirkpatrick, formerly of Read Write Web, will join Host Jason Calacanis for the first News Roundtable of 2012 live at 1pm PT.

Peter left Color back in June, less than three months after the social startup launched publicly. Now, he is a partner at the incubator Science, which former Myspace CEO Mike Jones launched in November.

Marshall stepped down from his full-time position at RWW in November to...
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Airbnb for Parking Spots ParkatmyHouse Launches in U.S.



U.K. based ParkatmyHouse, an Airbnb-like marketplace for renting parking spaces in crowded areas, just launched in New York, Boston and Washington, D.C.

Considering that homeowners and business owners tend to have parking spots that go unused throughout the day, ParkatmyHouse connects property owners with drivers in an attempt to turn those unused parking spots into cash and help drivers save money.

Since launching in the U.K. six years ago, 150K+ property owners have earned $5M+ through renting parking spots, the press release states.
 
"We're not talking about a few bucks," Anthony Eskinazi, CEO and founder of ParkatmyHouse, said in the press release. "Property owners with...
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Tumblr Rolling Out Fan Mail for Private Messaging



Tumblr is starting to roll out a new private messaging option for users, Fan Mail, the blogging platform company announced today.

“I’m very pleased to introduce Fan Mail, a beautiful new way to share those sweet, inspiring, or otherwise thoughtful notes with your favorite bloggers,” Tumblr founder and CEO David Karp wrote in a Fan Mail-themed note.

You'll soon be able to send unlimited messages to your favorite bloggers via...
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Forget Lean Forward and Lean Back -- It's Curl Up


By Jason Calacanis

For the better part of the last two decades we've compared the lean-forward experience of computers with the lean-back experience of television.

At Mahalo today, as we were brainstorming new apps, we discussed an idea I had for a new app. Our president Jason Rapp asked, "Well, do you see it as a lean forward or a lean back experience?"

I thought for a minute and said, "Neither, it's more of a tablet experience. What would you call that? We need a name for that."

Then it hit me. Duh?

"It's the curl-up experience!" I blurted out.

Everyone nodded in complete understanding.

In fact, the most important experience in media is no longer...
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Survey Says 92% of Political Ad Buyers Choose Facebook Over Twitter



When it comes to advertising political campaigns on social services, Facebook is the tool of choice for political ad buyers, according to software company Strata. So if you start to realize there are more political ads on Facebook compared to other networks, you can't say we didn't warn you.

Strata recently conducted a survey that found 92% of political ad buyer respondents choose to spend money on Facebook ahead of Twitter (46%), YouTube (31%), LinkedIn (31%) and Google+ (23%). Overall, digital ad spending has doubled since the 2010 election.

When we recently logged into Facebook, we immediately noticed an anti-Mitt Romney ad by...
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