Who did Groupon try to distance itself from today?
How many people tuned into the royal wedding online?
What happens, money-wise, if hackers steal your customers’ credit card numbers?
Also, what might Congress do?
What do you have to do if you’re caught spamming Reddit?
MEGARUMOR: It’s gorgeous outside!
This week’s Friday rumorfest is keeping in step with spring. Investors are sprouting up like tulips! It’s an investor invasion! On with the visiting dignitaries, angels, early-stage and growth VCs:
WE NEED A VERY OPEN OFFICE. We perked up when we saw this email on the New York Tech Meetup list, titled “Early-Stage Venture Capital Fund seeking large office near Times Square/Penn Station.” Near Betabeat, you mean?! “Size: Approximately 5,000 square feet. Location: Must be walking distance from Times Square/Penn Station. Setup: we need a very open office, with glass walls and the ability to host numerous outside events for entrepreneurs and investors. We also need fridge, microwave, bathrooms, etc. in our vicinity. Strongly prefer to share a building with other companies in the NY startup community.” Yeah, you must be new here. Are there any early-stage start-ups in the middle of Midtown? The VCs also want to pay $30/square foot–cheap for the area, which averages around $40 asking, but doable according to The New York Observer’s ace real estate desk. Read More
The Harvard Business School Angels of New York, an early-stage fund founded in 2011, seeks Harvard and non-Harvard investors to join its ranks. HBS Angels started over three years ago in Northern California but recently opened a New York chapter. The group does invest in companies that have no Harvard affiliation, and a fair amount of them. “We generally see at least 40 to 50 deals per quarter,” the group’s website says. Read More
The power of a social news site comes principally from its community, so when users feel like their service is being manipulated, they take it very personally.
Two weeks ago a rag tag team of anonymous Redditors discovered a group of SEO consultants and viral marketers submitting content on behalf of Village Voice Media. Read More
Along the road to raising a seed round, most entrepreneurs are going to hear the word “no” more often than they would care to remember.
In a fascinating little breakdown, Anatomy of a Seed Round, Brendan Baker of Angel List charted the rejections and connections that start-up AppMakr went through to raise $1 million. Read More
Remember the cloud outage last week that interrupted Thrillist emails, knocked Aviary’s site down for more than a day and lost some of Chartbeat’s data? Amazon posted a lengthy post-mortem explaining what happened (passive voice: “a network change was performed,” “the traffic shift was executed incorrectly”) and offering customers in the region Read More
Douglas Crockford, master JavaScript programmer, author of JavaScript: The Good Parts and the popular JSlint, spoke this morning at Columbia University on Why JavaScript Matters. Apparently he spoke at Etsy earlier this week; watch it on Livestream.
Stop maximizing that Excel worksheet whenever a coworker walks by your cubicle. Everyone already knows that you are looking at the J-Crew sale page while playing angry birds on the iPad in your lap.
Or if they somehow didn’t know, they will soon. Once you download School of Visual Art Interaction Design MFA candidate Eric St. Onge’s thesis project, trying to hide your shocking lack of productivity on sunny spring Fridays (but also, be honest, on rainy Mondays too) will be even more impossible. Read More
Facebook prefers to keep things discreet, thank you very much. The social network is arguably the hottest tech company to work for right now, so it can probably demand whatever nondisclosure clauses it wants, whether it’s preliminary talks with a potential recruit with a clever Tumblr or post-hire details from Daytum’s Nicholas Felton and Ryan Case, now part of Facebook’s design team. The Daytum founders sent over this officious “FAQ” on the move. Read More
Chatter in the underground forums frequented by hackers and security researchers is that gamers sensitive financial data is now for sale.
The recent attack on Sony’s Playstation network compromised a record 70 million user accounts, leaking names, emails and addresses.
Nick Bilton over at Bits checked in with a security specialist who had seen offers of 2.2 million credit card numbers for $100,000, along with a claim that the criminals had offered to sell the data back to Sony first. Read More
