By Kelly Faircloth 5/06 1:26pm

Blog Lords

Mr. Siegler. (Photo: LinkedIn)

MG Siegler Joins Up With Google Ventures

A year and a half after bailing on the blog life during the Great TechCrunch Conflagration of ’11, MG Siegler is wading deeper into the world of venture capital. He announced today that he’s heading to Google Ventures as a general partner. He’ll join Kevin Rose and Wesley Chan, focused on seed and early-stage investments.

Mr. Siegler said he’d “continue to work closely with CrunchFund” on investments they’ve already made as well as writing the occasional column for TechCrunch, because apparently that place is actually the Hotel California. But perish the thought of his revealing confidential info from inside the notoriously secretive GOOG: Read More

By Nitasha Tiku 3/19 9:30am

Facebook Faceoff

Screen shot 2013-03-19 at 8.26.54 AM

MessageMe, the Addictive App Facebook Tried to Buy Before Cutting It Off, Already Picked Up More Than 1M. Users

There have been a rash of reports recently about Facebook’s mercurial approach to third-party developers. The social network may not want to be “in the business of king-making,” by boosting–or suppressing–traffic to popular apps, as Douglas Purdy, director of developer products, told Reuters. But Facebook is increasingly willing to shut the castle gate on competitors.

While Facebook claims it’s an effort to stop spam and promote apps that add value to the network, “Developers say the crackdown is an attempt to stifle applications that compete with Facebook-owned services,” or pay for ads on Facebook, the Wall Street Journal reported last night.   Read More

By Kelly Faircloth 10/10/12 7:30am

Linkages

Time for school! (Photo: flickr.com/slambert)

Booting Up: Hacking Press Coverage for Fun and Profit

First Round Capital has built a brand-new platform for startups seeking press coverage: HackPR, designed to connect them with journalists. The firm is hoping to replicate the same kind of buzz that made Warby Parker an e-commerce darling after an early profile in GQ. [TechCrunch]

Kids from Cornell got a tour of the New York startup scene yesterday. [New York Daily News]

Kleiner Perkins, Andreessen Horowitz and Google Ventures are all backing a startup called LendUp, which’ll make small loans (think $300) to people with poor credit. Basically, it’s an alternative to the traditional payday loan, with friendlier customer service. Good luck and God bless. [AllThingsD]

No, you’re not just imagining it: There are Meetups everywhere, all the time, for everything. You’re going to need to be strategic in your selection. [WYNC]

Please enjoy this cri de coeur against Instagram filters, which are basically photography training wheels. [Wired]

By Jessica Roy 9/06/12 8:08am

Linkages

(Photo: Hyperbole and a Half)

Booting Up: Oh Good, An Amazon Phone Edition

The Amazon phone nobody wanted is coming. [The Verge]

Different ads looping simultaneously on the MTV website is just one version of hell. [Wall Street Journal]

“Our company is at the intersection of X and X” is the new “It’s like X for X!” [Bloomberg]

Paul Graham is talking shit on Google Ventures. [Business Insider]

Reddit nabbed 3.4 BILLION pageviews in August, thanks in large part to Obama’s AMA. [Daily Dot]

By Kelly Faircloth 6/12/12 6:00pm

Fresh Capital

Disrupted. (Photo: flickr.com/toasty

Death to Muzak: Roqbot Raises $1.2M from Google Ventures and Others for Better Background Music

Good news if poorly selected background music makes you miserable: Music tech startup Roqbot has raised a $1.2 million seed round, led by Google Ventures and Detroit Venture Partners and including Penny Black, T5 Capital, and Accelerator Ventures, as well as angel investors.

Roqbot aims to offer a more interactive alternative to the background music services that produce the anodyne mixes you’ll hear in the grocery store, without requiring the level of participation of a jukebox. Customers in a bar or bowling alley request whatever they’d like to hear via a smartphone app. So the business gets final approval, but doesn’t have to painstakingly build a playlist or default to a standard background music service. The idea is to create ”a streaming music solution that’s customized for each location, that lets the customers engage with the music and discover what’s playing,” explained cofounder and CEO Garnett Dodge. Read More

By Nitasha Tiku 5/01/12 3:05pm

Venture Capitalism

Stu_Wall_IIII

Signpost, the Startup That Promises to Drive Customers to Small Businesses, Raises $3.75 M. From Spark Capital

Say you’re a small business trying to figure out whether a deal with Groupon or ad on Yelp will bring customers to your door. That already-tricky marketing decision gets more complicated when you factor in fragmentation among daily deals sites and all the other publishers that could potentially host your ad. If you wanted, however, Read More

By Nitasha Tiku 1/05/12 3:39pm

Legal Eagles

Kinda like a superhero hero. . . special power: raising $$$!

Good News for NYC’s Legal Startups: DIY Advice Site Rocket Lawyer Picks Up ANOTHER $10.8 M.

A few weeks ago, Betabeat jumped down the rabbit hole of legal starts that were trying to bid farewell to the billable hour by making it cheaper and easier to get legal advice and legal documents.

At the time, we had a heaping handful of signs that the venture capital market thought the time was ripe for legal disruption. Just last year, Nolo.com was acquired for $21 million, LegalZoom picked up $66 million (and rumors of an IPO), local TechCrunch Disrupt winners Docracy raised $650,000. Google Ventures led a $1 million round in LawPivot and an $18.5 million round in Rocket Lawyer.

But apparently that was just the beginning. Read More

By Nitasha Tiku 10/06/11 4:49pm

Starship Enterprise

We really wanted to use the headline Enterp the Void, but it made no sense.

Enterproid, a Startup that Separates the Personal and Professional on Android Devices, Raises $11 M.

Enterproid isn’t exactly a name that rolls off the tongue, which is why Betabeat recognized it immediately when we saw TechCrunch post that the New York-based company had raised $11 million in a Series A round from Google Ventures, Comcast, and Qualcomm. The startup uses a platform called Divide to let corporations offer their employees the ability to make distinct professional and personal profiles on the same Android device.

We recognized the name from an interview Betabeat did last week with Kirill Sheynkman, the VC running RTP, a $750 million fund backed by Leonid Boguslavsky, aka Russia’s number two tech investor after Yuri Milner.

At the time, Mr. Sheynkman, who invests in IT, SaaS and cloud computing companies pointed to Enterproid as an outlier in the New York’s mainly consumer-facing tech scene. Read More