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Marc Andreessen is normally enthusiastic about the startups he’s invested in. Still, when I spoke to him last week about Kno, he surprised me by saying it will be “the most powerful tablet anyone has ever made.” And he’s backing up that claim with a new investment – Andreessen Horowitz has put even more capital into the company as part of a new $46 million debt and equity round. Silicon Valley Bank and TriplePoint Capital also invested in the round. Kno has now raised over $55 million.

The company is still planning on getting its first dual-screen tablet computer to market by the end of the year, says CEO Osman Rashid, although he won’t get specific on the price. It will be less than $1,000, but that’s as close as they’ll get.

Why is the device compelling? Andreessen and Rashid talk about how Kno is offering a total product – software, hardware and services – that will be compelling to the college user. They can purchase textbooks and view them just as they look in printed format. Users will be able to take notes, draw on the pages, etc., just like the print versions. And they’ll be able to access those books on a variety of devices – even eventually their desktop and laptops – because Kno’s software is built on webkit and designed to run on a variety of hardware setups. And there’s a normal web browser too for the Internet in general.

As for textbook pricing, Rashid says the model will work. Imagine an iTunes for college textbooks, he says, and users who purchase the tablet and all their books will be paying about the same amount v. just buying print books over the first 13 months. That means individual books on the Kno will be priced lower than the average of $100 for the print versions.

Will it all work? It’s probably best not to bet against this founding team. Rashid also cofounded Chegg, which rents textbooks to students. No one thought the idea would work, but the company is absolutely killing it right now. The best evidence so far that Kno may work is this – Early student testers are telling the company that they’ve stopped bringing their laptops to class and just use the Kno now.

CrunchBase InformationKnoInformation provided by CrunchBase

How businesses and brands deal with social media has become one of the defining issues of the recent web era. Today a pretty big leap is taking place which may define the next phase. Two of the biggest players have come together to create certainly one of the slickest and most seamless integrations I’ve yet seen of the realtime social web and enterprise worlds. Seesmic is to integrate Salesforce’s internal Twitter-like app, Chatter, into their platform. That makes Seesmic the first realtime social consumer app to go directly into the enterprise space. Seesmic will also suddenly have the potential to access to over 20,000 Salesforce customers who have used Chatter so far.

The news was unveiled at a 3,000-strong Salesforce conference in London today. Below we have an exclusive interview with Loic Le Meur of Seesmic and Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce.

Once you see Seesmic working with Salesforce’s Chatter it make perfect sense. Suddenly you can be having internal and external conversations at once.

It’s clear this is part of a long term strategic partnership between the two companies, and the rapport between the two CEOs is evident. While Seesmic has made a virtue of its ability to develop strong social clients on Adobe Air, Android, BlackBerry, Windows and (via Silverlight) Mac, Salesforce is clearly gunning for the space opened up by ‘enterprise social’ services like Yammer. We’re seeing the first integration of the realtime web and the enterprise, and there is plenty more to come.

At an interview in London, Seesmic’s Loic Le Meur told me “It’s not enough to have these two worlds silo’d any more… What we bring is the connection to the outside world without making it scary. With chatter you can directly send someone on the social web [via Seesmic] directly into the enterprise.”

For Marc Benioff, Salesforce CEO, it’s all about the movement to what he calls Cloud 2: mobile, social, realtime.

Indeed, he wrote a TechCrunch guest post this year, “The Facebook Imperative”, where he said “New realtime cloud applications, platforms, and infrastructure offer the path to redefine the future of collaboration.”

So how will the integration work?

Here’s an example: A Salesforce user on Seesmic will be able to push, for instance, a Tweet onto the Chatter wall of someone inside a company. That could mean pushing it to a sales rep or a social media response team. You name it. The upshot is a great ability to respond, in realtime, to social conversations around brands or products.

That could mean much better customer service – or more some interesting sales pitches, depending on which side of the fence you are on. But suddenly, instead of needing to physically cut and paste a reference to a Tweet or a Facebook Group or whatever, people who monitor social media can bring that data directly into the enterprise and work out a response. It’s going to make a lot of social media community managers pretty happy – at least the ones who use Salesforce (for now).

When companies need to respond to customer complaints on social media, they need to see context in terms of the prior conversation, internal company feedback etc – this Salesforce Chatter/Seesmic integration effectively makes the whole process a lot easier. It’s like the Missing Link between the enterprise and the realtime social web just got invented.

And by moving first on this plane, Seesmic is in a prime position to open up a completely new front against its competitors, like Tweetdeck, which remain locked in the social web and not at all integrated into enterpise systems.

Seesmic’s integration with Chatter has been made possible by its switch to the Miscrosoft Silverlight platform which allows for plugins. Adobe Air does not afford this, so, on the face of it, competitors could well struggle to create the same kind of ecosystem around their core product.

Much of this is discussed in our exclusive video interview with Benioff and Le Meur below.

CrunchBase InformationSeesmicSalesforceInformation provided by CrunchBase

As Salesforce's foray into social collaboration, Salesforce Chatter, gains traction amongst enterprise users, it makes sense for the company to launch complimentary mobile apps to the platform. And as the enterprise increasingly relies upon mobile devices for connectivity; there is a strong demand for native mobile use of Chatter. Today, Salesforce is taking Chatter to mobile phones; unveiling Chatter Mobile apps for the iPad, iPhone, Google Android and BlackBerry devices. Salesforce Chatter, which was originally announced last November, was launched into public beta in June after four months in private beta. In the realtime collaboration platform's firts three months open to the public, Chatter has been adopted by 25,000 companies; with 25 percent of Salesforce's client base using the platform. .

It has been roughly one year since Yahoo! made waves in the Middle East, by buying Maktoob, the region’s largest web portal for $164 million.

From Silicon Valley’s observation deck that may seem like small peanuts— these days we barely bat an eye when HP and Dell get into a multi-billion dollar tug-of-war game. However, for the Middle East and in particular Jordan, the Maktoob takeover was a flash point for the fledgling tech scene.

That’s not to say that Jordan has become a premiere tech hub overnight. Indeed, the region still suffers from a dearth of angel investors. But there is a palpable rise in confidence among the region’s entrepreneurs, like Ammar Ibrahim founder of Asuaq.com. The young site, which touts itself as the Craigslist of the Middle East (minus the “censored” controversy), has only garnered about 300,000 unique visitors since its launch earlier this year, but it’s growing at a healthy clip. Traffic has doubled in the last five months.

On this week’s episode of Entrepreneur to Entrepreneur, SGN Founder Shervin Pishevar talks to Ibrahim about his new site, Jordan’s startup community, the Maktoob deal’s effect and the challenges of funding. See video above. Many thanks to Shoo Fee TV, a content provider and aggregator of Arab satellite channel listings based in Jordan, for shooting this video.

For all the progress in Jordan, it was interesting to hear Ibrahim discuss the ongoing challenges of raising capital in the region. Although he says the investment environment has improved significantly in the last 2-3 years, a site rich in traffic is still tough sell in this traditional market: “The thing that is still happening today is that people are still evaluating internet businesses on the balance sheet. So it’s pretty much like a grocery store, like gasoline station… So this is one of the biggest problems, if you’re a website and you do have significant traffic…it’s a bit difficult to monetize traffic…[so] internet businesses are undervalued because of the internet business model.”

To see episode one of Entrepreneur To Entrepreneur, featuring Yahoo’s former Chief Data Officer, Dr. Usama Fayyad, click here. On next week’s episode, we’ll meet the man Pishevar calls the “Ron Conway of the Middle East.”

CrunchBase InformationAsuaqMaktoobShervin PishevarInformation provided by CrunchBase

The most interesting thing about Campus Dibs, a recently launched GroupOn clone, is its choice of vertical i.e. college campuses. If you don’t think this is notable enough to merit another (albeit brief) GroupOn clone post then just remember how Facebook got a heads start towards world domination, by strategically targeting social networks in the Ivy League and slowly expanding outward.

Facebook has proven that colleges are hotbeds of virality in more ways than one, and thus are extremely interesting when thought of  in terms of a market for GroupOn clones. If you doubt Campus Dibs’ chances for setting itself apart from the 800 or so daily deals sites out there, just imagine the power of the 50k plus populations of college campuses and alumni coupled with the mob mentality of group buying sites.

Picture briefly what a deal tie-in might mean for the student store, especially at campuses with pretty fanatical populations and hopping college towns. I’m looking at you USC, Penn State, Arizona State, Michigan State, OSU, and UT Austin who are among the campuses covered by Campusdibs.

Right now the USC deal (my alma mater) is “50% off Timbuk2 messenger bags and backpacks.” Perfect for back to school! But no joke, college campuses are serious business, no matter how niche they might seem. And as history has proven, no niche is too niche; Just ask GroupOn CEO Andrew Mason, who once sold slippers with flashlights. Enough said.

Former head of Google China, Kai-fu Lee, insists—insists—that he is not happy that Google imploded its business in China. “Seeing the work that I put in, how could I be happy to see that?” he says. In fact, in a press release all about his incubator’s companies being built on top of Android he doesn’t use the G-word once. “Given the pull out, we’ll accept the situation and do our best,” he says humbly. Yeah, accept the situation like a fox.

As Lee begins to open up more about the types of companies being created at his incubator, Innovation Works, there’s a consistent theme—Android. Whether it’s address books, music programs, video games, maps, eCommerce marketplaces or e-readers, many of Lee’s companies are hoping to take advantage of the good things about Android—namely that it’s a free, robust operating system—but customize the core smartphone applications in a way that Google won’t or can’t.

It’s interesting that I had a conversation with Lee about this topic right about the time Google CEO Eric Schmidt was delivering a keynote touting that more than 200,000 Android-powered smartphones are activated daily, going beyond just the smartphone wielding “elite.” Lee would agree with everything his former boss said. It’s just that Google isn’t well positioned to make money off the apps and services in the world’s largest market. Oops.

Lee philosophically may have issues with the lack of openness in the Chinese Web, but it’s also giving him an advantage: The most popular applications for the Android phone like YouTube, Facebook, Twitter or Pandora aren’t available in China, and Google’s native apps may not be the top choice of manufacturers given the search engine’s stance on doing business in the country. So Innovation Works is collectively trying to build a new Web on top of the platform that’s customized for Chinese tastes.

For example, music services that show song lyrics as they play—an essential feature for China’s karaoke loving audience. Another example is a program that automatically enters different dialing prefixes that save money on calls to certain regions. Because 3G is so expensive in China, a video program called Wonderpod downloads videos onto your phone from your laptop at work, so you can watch them without having to stream them on the commute home. An eReader software company lets you read 60% of the book for free then asks for a payment to read the rest. Because of rampant piracy, there’s no chance of selling eBooks without giving anything away for free, but once people are hooked, if they enjoy it, they’ll pay for the rest of the book out of convenience, Lee argues. The incubator is making a few, broad platform plays with an Android-based operating system called Tapas, an analytics tool for developers called Umeng and Ascending Cloud, a publisher of social games.

At most, Lee’s mobile companies are getting a couple dollars per user for these apps so these ideas only become huge companies with massive scale. This can’t be just a game played for the top of the pyramid. And there’s no question in Lee’s mind that Android will be bigger in China than the iPhone, because the cost differential is much more pronounced. Because there aren’t many Android models in the US, hardware makers can price the phones close to the iPhone, but in manufacturing-heavy China prices will almost certainly be driven down much faster.

Lee says the Android devices coming out next year—including manufacturers his companies are working with—cost $200 to $300 per phone. He expects that to fall to around $100 the next year, and possible fall below $100 the year after that. The iPhone will never experience that kind of competitive pressure because only Apple makes it. (Although I could show you plenty of cheaper versions with the an Apple-like logo in the dodgy markets of Shenzhen…)

And there are no carrier subsidies in China, because 80% of phones are bought independently from airtime. So an iPhone will cost around $600. Already Android will enter the market at half the price. For a big swath of the Chinese population that will make a difference, especially if those prices can get under $100 per phone in just a few years with features more tailored for the market.

In a lot of ways, this is a strategy that would only work in China—it’s all about volume and counts on a market with hyper-aggressively competitive gadget manufacturing. But with billions of dollars in venture capital sloshing around China, the market to build the best mobile apps could be as cutthroat as the competition to win the hardware wars. Lee has recently inked some strategic partnerships with Foxconn, Chunghwa Telecom, MediaTek Inc and a raft of global investors to help his chances of being the one to profit from the opportunity.

He’s also moved Innovation Works from Google China’s building to a new location that features what any incubator needs—a hologram that greets you at the front door. I’m not kidding. He told his designer he needed it to look different than any other office and from the look of the pictures, he succeeded. His mobile bets are less certain. But if he wins he’ll have at least one guy to thank: Sergey Brin. A big juicy market opportunity is a lot better parting gift than a watch.
CrunchBase InformationInnovation Works (China)Information provided by CrunchBase

The ongoing saga of Google’s logo continues. The search giant has just changed the doodle on google.com once again this evening, leading up to their search event tomorrow. And once again, it looks as if the logo points to what they’ll be announcing tomorrow.

Whereas yesterday, the doodle was more kinetic, which Google called “fast, fun and interactive,” today’s logo updates as you type in the search box. This points to Google rolling out the live-updating results-as-you-type feature they’ve been testing.

When you load Google.com right now, you’ll see the logo grayed-out. When you start typing, the colors come to life one character at a time. If you backspace, the logo goes back as well.

Join us bright and early at 9:30 AM PT for coverage of the event tomorrow. Just in case you can’t see the new logo yet (last night it seemed to roll out slowly), I’ll include a video below.

Meanwhile, if you’d like to see how yesterday’s doodle worked, check out the recreation Rob Hawkes made using only HTML5.

Update: And here’s Google tweeting about it:

CrunchBase InformationGoogleInformation provided by CrunchBase

VillageVines, a New York based startup, that offers users discounts at high end restaurants is set to expand its reach.

The company, which had been focused solely on New York, is opening its deals offers to Washington D.C. starting this morning. In the weeks to come it will be operating in Los Angeles, Chicago, and San Francisco, as well.

VillageVines is the product of two Wall Street drop-outs, Ben McKean and Dan Leahy. They quit their jobs in September 2009, and launched VillageVines the spring of 2010. 

Here's how it works. You sign into VillageVines, and look at restaurants that have open tables for the night. VillageVines always has more than 10 offers up on the site at a time, says McKean. If you want to eat at a restaurant, you pay $10 for a reservation. For $10, you get a 30% on your meal.

Because VillageVines only works with top notch restaurants, you could save a lot of money. One user got $400 taken off a bill thanks to Village Vines, says McKean.

Diners aren't the only people benefiting. McKean says KittiChai, a Thai spot in SoHo, will see close to half a million dollars in sales driven by VillageVines users.

VillageVines has 400,000 registered users, and will do $250,000 in revenue through the end of the year, according to McKean. The startup is only months old and until now offered New York restaurants.

In addition to expanding nationally, VillageVines is partnering with MenuPages. VillageVines offers will show up on MenuPages. VillageVines and MenuPages will be doing a revenue share on reservations made from MenuPages.

See Also: The 20 Hot New York City Startups You Need To Watch

Join the conversation about this story »

See Also:

• Meet Two Young Wall Street Analysts Turned Beard-Growing Tech Scenesters
• If Your Startup Can't Get Money In New York Right Now, There's Something Wrong With It
• The 20 Hot New York City Startups You Need To Watch

Oracle has responded to HP's lawsuit against new hire Mark Hurd.

In short, Larry Ellison is ready to fight!

Here's the statement:

“Oracle has long viewed HP as an important partner,” said Oracle CEO Larry Ellison. “By filing this vindictive lawsuit against Oracle and Mark Hurd, the HP board is acting with utter disregard for that partnership, our joint customers, and their own shareholders and employees.   The HP Board is making it virtually impossible for Oracle and HP to continue to cooperate and work together in the IT marketplace."

Join the conversation about this story »

See Also:

• HP Sues Mark Hurd For Violating Severance Agreement (By Joining Oracle)
• Oracle Hires Mark Hurd As Co-President
• The HP Truth Comes Out: The Board Fired Hurd And Then Paid Him To Go Away

Well, power to the people, I guess. Yesterday we announced quite innocently that we’d be changing our logo every day for 50 days to salute a different startup. We thought it would be fun based on doing it last week with an old Twitter logo.

Fun it was not. Reddit, it seems, has been doing exactly the same thing for the last eight days. Within moments of our post going up we were slammed for copying them. And then demands were made that we stop, and/or give them credit for inventing the silly idea. I scoffed, and then things went crazy. We get more than our fair share of crazies in our comments, but this was over the top even in our experience. We banned dozens of hateful comments, but they’re coming faster than we can stop them. And I certainly have no intention of doing this day after day as each new logo goes up.

So, Reddit, you win. Making fake logos is your territory from here on out. Some things just aren’t worth fighting about. And believe me, if we actually ever visited Reddit and saw that they had begun doing this we never would have done this, too.

Hope everyone enjoyed our 1 day of logos.

Update: Interesting – After mildly mocking us earlier, Reddit Cofounder Alexis Ohanian says “Seriously, @reddit? Not cool. We stole the idea from google anyway – the world needs more customized logos”

Firefox just launched its fifth Firefox 4 beta, which includes a more streamlined interface, faster graphics and a new audio API that exposes raw audio data (see video above).

What’s new in this latest iteration of Firefox?

* The introduction of an audio API which uses HTML5, allowing developers to visualize the sound data in a browser and creating novel ways to experience sound while web surfing.

* Emphasis on faster graphics with default graphics support from Direct2D, a 2-D graphics API for Windows 7, on machines that support Windows 7.

* Implementation of the HTTP Strict Transport Security (HSTS), a security protocol that increases the chances for a secure connections.

A stable version is set to be released by Mozilla in November. You can try out the latest beta here.

Gather up a group of people who make their living through web design, and they’ll probably all agree on at least two things: A) touchscreens aren’t going anywhere, and B) designing web stuff for touchscreens sort of sucks. Native apps have, in a sense, spoiled users; with things like drag-and-drop and basic touch gesture recognition almost laughably simple to implement in native apps, web app developers are left to hack in such features themselves or risk having their app seem dated from the get-go.

Today Yahoo! is looking to make things a bit less painful with the latest release of their open-source User Interface library, YUI.

Read the rest at MobileCrunch >>

Brendan“I made an iTunes icon for you” Alan Clarke

Iain “I am better than Steve Jobs because my icons have even more photoshop effects” Henderson

Kanwa “iTunes10 icon from JAPAN” Nagafuji

Mike “Steve Jobs is colorblind” Potra

Daniel “Steve Jobs has more money than me, but only because I refuse to wear mock turtlenecks” Reneer

EyeTunes (get it?) logo by reader who wanted to remain anonymous.

Dario” iRaptor” Fisher

Claes “vinylTunes 2.0” Kallarsson

Alessio  “I am better than Steve Jobs — Not really” Zito Rossi

Chris“The Replacement” Carlossi

Is it just me or has there been a lot of logo hate going around lately? Apparently hell hath no fury like an armchair graphic designer scorned, if you go by some of the comments on the “Hate The iTunes 10 Logo? Think You Can Do Better?” post. Along with haters doing what they do best (hint: it’s hating) we also got a ton of alternative submissions. Here are ten of the most noteworthy above. And in case you want to switch the current iTunes 10 logo out, here’s how to do it on a Mac and on a PC.

I remember my first iPod very well. Shockingly, I was a little late to the party, waiting until the fourth generation iPod (now called the “iPod classic”) in 2004 to join the revolution. And I only bought one because I was planning to drive out to California (from Ohio) and I wanted enough music storage to last me the entire trip. I remember unboxing it and thinking: “wow, I can store all my music on this tiny device?”

Today, six years later, I still have that old iPod. But I no longer consider it “tiny.” In fact, it’s more of a “brick” both in size and weight. It held 40 gigabytes of my music on its miniature hard drive platters. Today, the latest high-end iPod touch holds 24 more gigabytes and is a sliver of the size and a fraction of the weight. And it plays music for 28 more consecutive hours. Oh, and it has a color screen. One you can touch. One you can multi-touch.

With the unveiling of its new iPod line last week, Apple has made it very clear what the future is: touch. The iPod classic, while still around, wasn’t updated at all for the first time in nine years. At the other end of the spectrum, the iPod shuffle underwent a return to form — literally — as in, its form factor is now the same as it was two generations ago.

These are now the last two remaining iPods without touch screen integration. And both are clearly moving out to the pasture.

That’s not to say the shuffle is dying yet. It still fills an important niche for Apple — the cheap niche. At $49, it is by far the cheapest iPod available — by $100. But it’s clear that if it was feasible, Apple would put a touch-screen in this device too. Amazingly, it’s now almost the exact same size as the iPod nano (more on that in a bit), the major difference is the lack of a screen. Instead, the shuffle focuses on its VoiceOver capabilities (the carry-over from the last generation, which fully relied on them).

But again, this iPod refresh, which Apple CEO Steve Jobs called their biggest one yet, clearly points to the future of the line — and really, the future of Apple in general: touch.

The two big updates in the iPod lines this time around are the iPod nano and the iPod touch. First, let’s talk about the nano.

The iPod nano

The previous version of the nano was nice with its elongated form factor. That said, every time I used one, I had to fight the urge to touch its screen to navigate through it. Finally, I can do that. And just as the way Apple killed off the need for a physical keyboard with the iPhone’s touchscreen, here, they’ve killed off the need for the old standard click wheel. As such, they’ve been able to make the nano much, much smaller.

As I noted above, it’s crazy but the nano is now almost the same size as the shuffle. It’s now the same square form factor, just a bit bigger. And it’s a good thing it’s a little bigger because Apple needs the room to squeeze four different apps on the various nano pages.

Yes, like the iPhone and iPod touch, the nano now has apps — sort of. Don’t get too excited, Apple says there will be no third-party apps for the nano (at least not yet), instead, they have some standard apps they created to use on the device. These include “Now Playing,” “Playlists,” “Radio,” “Clock,” “Photos,” “Fitness,” and a few others mainly to give you quick access to your content.

So how do you control a touch screen device with such a small screen? It’s quite simple, actually. Most of the time you’ll be traveling through music which is done with the on-screen controls. But when you need to return to the main menu, you simply hold one finger down for a few seconds on the screen and the main screen fades in. Just as with the iPhone/iPod touch, you flick left and right to get to other pages of “apps.”

Album artwork is nicely displayed when music is playing, and touching the screen once will bring up controls. Swiping to the right here gives you more options (such as Genius and Shuffle).

But the most interesting little feature of this nano is that you can use multi-touch to rotate the album artwork. Why would you want to do this? Because like the shuffle, the nano now comes with a clip on the back to easily attach it to a piece of clothing you have on. By putting two fingers on the screen and rotating, you’ll ensure your controls and/or album artwork are just the way you want them. This is one of the little things that makes Apple, Apple.

The sound quality on the device is solid — in line with previous generations of nanos. And the 24 hour audio playback that Apple lists in the specs seems about right. I have been unable to wear the battery down all the way over several days.

One unfortunate side effect of this new tiny size is that Apple had to remove video support. This means the iPod nano can no longer play videos, nor can it record them (there is no longer a camera). I suspect people may be disappointed by this until they see the actual device. Can you imagine watching a video on this screen? Because I sure can’t.

The removal of the camera itself will disappoint some people, but it was always a bit odd anyway as it only recorded video and not still images. I think the new size and touch screen in exchange for the video capabilities is a good tradeoff. Especially when you consider the new iPod touch.

The iPod touch

What the new nano lost in video capabilities, the iPod touch gained — and then some. The latest version of this device is not only the first with a camera — it has two cameras, one in the front and one in the back. And the one in the back shoots 720p HD video.

For some people, that alone will be reason enough to part with at least $229 for the 8 gigabyte version. But when you add in the fact that it has the same “Retina” display that Apple made for the iPhone 4, and the A4 chip which Apple included in both the iPhone 4 and the iPad, and of course, FaceTime support, there’s no question that this thing is going to be a massive hit for Apple.

Obviously, everything I said in my review of the iPhone 4’s 960-by-640 resolution Retina display is the same here. Simply put: it looks amazing. What’s great is that despite the same basic specs, the iPod touch is tiny when compared to the iPhone 4. Putting them side-by-side, the iPod touch is significantly thinner and also a little shorter.

It also trades the all-glass back and controversial antenna siding for a more conventional silver metal backing. While obviously the iPod touch doesn’t need the cellular components of the iPhone, it still is interesting that Apple has done away with the outside antenna (which also handled the WiFi, which the iPod touch does have).

The metal back is also slightly curved around the edges on the iPod touch, this makes it feel even slimmer. As with previous generations of the device, the headphone jack is at the bottom, while the top only contains the screen on/off button (which is actually a little easier to hit thanks to the curved sides).

People are now likely to use the iPod touch for three main reasons: music, gaming, and video.

For music, the song remains the same. This iPod touch seems inline with previous iPod touches. Apple says it has upped the battery life a bit (about 10 hours more of audio playback and 1 hour more for video playback), which is likely a result of the power saving techniques of the A4 chip. I wasn’t able to run the battery into the ground; it seemed solid — not iPad-good, but better than the iPhone.

For gaming, the combination of the A4 chip and the Retina display makes this an awesome machine. Jobs noted during the keynote that when you consider iOS devices as portable gaming devices, they’re outselling the entries by rivals Nintendo and Sony — combined. That’s likely to continue, if not accelerate from here. Every game I tried ran smoothly and looks brilliant with this screen.

Video is the big new addition here though, obviously. When taken outside (or in good light), the 720p videos look excellent. Inside, in low light, at things things can be a bit murky, but that’s probably to be expected (and there is no flash on the iPod touch). Just as with the iPhone, you can use the iMovie application (sold separately) to edit videos right on the device. All in all, it’s a great little HD movie machine — one that’s insanely small.

Photos, however, are a different story. Sadly, the lens in the iPod touch is not the same 5 megapixel variety found in the iPhone 4. Because of that, Apple limits still-image resolution of 960 by 720 pixels — very low. I found still pictures taken with the iPod touch to be grainy — again, especially in low light. The iPhone 4 performs much, much better as a camera.

When I asked Apple why they were limiting the camera to such a low resolution, they noted that the focus here was primarily video. The picture-taking capability was simply a bonus feature they tacked on for people who wanted the ability to take some quick shots, they said.

With that in mind, it may have been wise for Apple to make video capture the default mode for the camera on the iPod touch (it is still picture capture).

(Above: An image taken with the new iPod touch in medium light.)

Having a full 5 megapixel camera that is as good as the iPhone 4’s would have also undoubtedly required Apple to make the iPod touch a bit bulkier (and added a little bit to the manufacturing costs, undoubtedly). To me, it would have been worth it, but they clearly felt it wasn’t.

The other big component of the camera is FaceTime. On the iPod touch, things work a little differently because there is no cellular service to latch on to (that’s how it works on the iPhone 4 — you first place a call to the person you wish to FaceTime with). To work around this, Apple has made email addresses the new way of doing this with the iOS 4.1 update (due this week). Sadly, I wasn’t able to test this new link-up ability on my demo unit, but I did try it in the demo area right after the Apple event last week, and everything seemed to work fine. Once you establish the initial FaceTime connection (in this case, via email address), the device remembers connections so it’s one-click from then on.

This addition of a second device that does FaceTime is important for Apple. Clearly, they feel this is a major feature their portable devices will have going forward (they sure are promoting it enough). And by making it an open standard, they hope others will adopt it. With FaceTime on the iPod touch, millions more people will have access to the feature. In my opinion, Apple still needs a better management system for FaceTime calls (something like FacePlant), but when you connect, it’s very, very impressive.

Touching

The transition is taking place before our eyes. The click wheel, once the signature of the iPod line, is all but extinct now. Instead, Apple is continuing their march forward into touch.

This shouldn’t be surprising give that last week, Jobs revealed on stage that the iPod touch is now the most popular iPod Apple makes. As sales of other iPod models have been in decline for some time, the iPod touch was going the other direction. With its new touch capabilities, Apple undoubtedly hopes the same will be true for the new nano as well.

And with the iPod touch, the iPod nano, the iPhone, the iPad, and Macs (with the Magic Mouse or Magic Trackpad or MacBook trackpads) all now using multi-touch in one way or another, Apple is slowly but surely aligning itself to be the leader in touch computing going forward. The writing is on the wall — it’s hand-written.

CrunchBase InformationAppleInformation provided by CrunchBase

According to recent SEC filings, it appears that Chris Sacca’s newly launched fund, Lowercase Capital, has raised over $20 million in funding. Under the name Lowercase Industry Fund, Sacca has quietly raised over $11 million in a filing from early August and $10 million in a filing from June. It’s unclear who the investors are from the SEC filings.

This funding adds to Lowercase Capital’s $8.5 million raised earlier this year at the launch of the angel fund. Some of the fund’s previous investments include SimpleGeo, Fanbridge, DailyBooth, Posterous and Stickybits. And Lowercase has been on an investment roll lately, participating in a number of recent rounds in hot startups, including Embed.ly, Chartbeat, and Backupify.

As we wrote in our initial coverage of Lowercase, Sacca’s investment philosophy is fairly simple – It’s cheap to create new companies relative to ten years ago, and there are lots of investors to choose from. He promises to invest more than money, though and will take on a larger role than simply an investor. From the fund’s mission statement, “Rolling up our sleeves, we help design front pages, invent new services, prioritize product features, negotiate partnerships, and deal with the everyday professional and personal challenges of startup life.”

Besides the early-stage fund, Sacca also operates a four other funds, so the $20 million could be used in his other investment vehicles.

For more entertainment from Lowercase, check out this witty call for an intern.

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Apparently some of Digg’s employees aren’t super happy that their main source of news about Digg is TechCrunch – probably referring to the news that VP of Engineering John Quinn is out.

Digg Designer Danny Trinh Twitters “I love finding out about @digg company news via @techcrunch. Wonder if they’ll post our lunch menu too..”

Yes, we will.

Digg engineer Mark Lewandowski posted it as a response to Trinh’s Twitter (via Ben Standefer’s Facebook). Tomorrow is Greek for lunch and Sushi for dinner, Danny. Thursday though is more complicated. There’s a three hour lunch and people are told when to come out based on a wristband to avoid overcrowding.

Given Digg’s trouble’s with scaling in general we’re not surprised they have to stagger “traffic” to the lunch line too. Ok, bad joke.

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The dramatic battle between Mark Hurd, HP, and Oracle continues. Yesterday Oracle announced that it was hiring recently-ousted HP CEO Mark Hurd as Co-President and a member of its Board. HP responded this morning by suing Hurd, alleging that he would potentially leak trade secrets to Oracle. Oracle has just responded to the suit, and it isn’t pulling any punches:

“Oracle has long viewed HP as an important partner,” said Oracle CEO Larry Ellison. “By filing this vindictive lawsuit against Oracle and Mark Hurd, the HP board is acting with utter disregard for that partnership, our joint customers, and their own shareholders and employees. The HP Board is making it virtually impossible for Oracle and HP to continue to cooperate and work together in the IT marketplace.”

Hurd was forced to leave HP after allegations that he harassed former HP contractor Jodie Fisher (he was cleared of those charges, but was found to have fudged some expense reports). At the time Ellison, who is a friend of Hurd’s, called the firing “the worst personnel decision since the idiots on the Apple board fired Steve Jobs many years ago.” Also worth noting: Hurd’s severance package is worth more than $35 million, though HP is alleging he’s breaching some of his contractual agreements (which could impact the severance).

CrunchBase InformationMark HurdLarry EllisonOracle CorporationHewlett-PackardInformation provided by CrunchBase

I was on a panel last year titled “The Future of Venture Capital” with four other panelists who had way more experience in venture capital.

In fact, I'm not sure what my credentials were to be on the panel, given my six months’ experience in the industry. My credibility with the audience fell further based on what I think most people perceived as my naive and wacky comments.

All of my co-panelists agreed that venture capital was broken and that we'd likely see half the number of funds in five years. All agreed that this would be a bad thing for entrepreneurs.
 
When it was my turn to speak on the subject, I predicted that we'd see double the number of funds in five years. No doubt this further diminished my credibility, but I tried to explain my view that the venture industry was rationalizing and that it made no sense to have hundreds of funds managing hundreds of millions of dollars each. Instead, we think what we were doing at Founder Collective and what our peers are doing at First Round, Floodgate, Harrison Metal, Baseline, IA Capital, Betaworks etc. fills a big gap in the venture industry and that there is room for many sub $100MM funds.

I view this as a very good thing for entrepreneurs, but I also see this as a very good thing for larger venture funds. In the last year, with the advent of what some are questionably calling the super-angel bubble, I believe the industry has shifted as I hoped with a much more active super-angel community and a more than tripling of the number of micro-cap funds raised. In my view, this is a big win for everyone in the ecosystem.
 
There have been many blog posts lately commenting on the criticism of mainstream venture capitalists and the tension with angel/micro-VCs. This has hit the ultimate peak with Sarah Lacy's Super Angel/VC Smackdown with David Hornik and Dave McClure screaming at each other. Some of this tension is only natural as we all get comfortable working together and competitive juices start to flow. Brad Feld wrote a thought-provoking post on the topic last week. My personal view is that this tension needs to die quickly.  Let's all agree that most VCs don’t “suck” and nearly all seeded startups will need VC funding to become important companies.  It’s hard for me to think of a single company in our portfolio at Founder Collective that doesn’t intend to raise money at some point from a larger VC. The tension needs to die quickly because we all are creating value for each other and are largely non-competitive.  I’m going to try to articulate the role seed investors play in the VC industry, but first I’d like put seed investment in the context of the last decade of venture capital.
 
Looking back, as venture funds got bigger during the dotcom bubble, they became and marketed themselves as “life cycle investment partners.” VCs were sized to invest in every round of a startup, though not always lead, and maintain 20% or greater ownership in every portfolio company. In theory VCs told their Limited Partners that they would “lean into their winners,” but in practice they knew it was very hard to stop investing in the underperforming companies for a variety of reasons — Rob Go wrote a great blog post on this.

The biggest challenge is that VC backed startups are rarely good or bad companies for future investment. The world isn’t so black and white. Lots of companies have merit at inflection points, but hold tremendous risk. Given the intention of being a life cycle funder, a VC walking away from a follow-on round of a portfolio company is typically catastrophic to that company. If the initial investor wasn’t willing to write a check and that investor had the best information, why should anyone else be willing to do so? In other words, any deal that a VC didn’t want to continue supporting would find no other venture capital support and die.  VCs didn’t really want to be in the business of killing companies and turn out to be much better at company creation and support than company termination.
 
The implication of large funds doing life cycle investing is an implicit huge commitment to any portfolio company regardless of the size of the initial investment. There are recent exceptions to this rule as some larger funds are making lower commitment seed investments to many startups, which can be highly problematic for founders, but historically any investment was a long term commitment unless it was performing very badly. This was generally a good thing for entrepreneurs, because through good and bad times VCs kept writing checks (not always at desirable terms), but it created a huge burden to clear the hurdle of getting an initial check. VCs had to be very careful in their diligence and their conviction needed to be extremely deep, as even a Series A $2MM check could be an implicit $10-$20MM commitment to a company. 

Unfortunately, deep diligence and high conviction is not fully correlated to investment success, as it only analyzes a snapshot, not a movie, about the merit of a startup. These companies need time to show their worth and truly justify the large commitment. Historically angels have provided some capital for this purpose, but the angel community was greatly damaged in the dotcom bust and further injured by the great recession.

This life cycle investment approach also lent itself to investing in repeat entrepreneurs and avoiding first time entrepreneurs, as VCs really had to decide out of the gate if an investment was worthy of “taking a slot” among a handful of deals in a fund and an implicit commitment to a big chunk of capital long term.  In essence, this market structure led to very few at bats, but lots of swinging for the fences right out of the gate.  If considered as a funnel, the structure of venture, post the dotcom bubble, looked like a thin and minor taper round after round. Few entrepreneurs were getting at bats, but the ones who got to the plate had the benefit of an over commitment from funds that needed to put lots of capital to work in a limited number of deals and were really bad at killing the companies that did not deserve so much capital.  To be fair, this had some pretty big pitfalls for the entrepreneurs too, but that’s not the focus of this post.
 
The common refrain of VC funds is that too much capital is chasing too few deals.  For me, this hits a major philosophical question as to whether great companies are born or are made. If you believe they are born, i.e. they can be identified from day one and it isn’t the execution that matters, probably the increased birth rate has little benefit for creating more great companies. If, like me, you believe great companies are made, i.e., by getting more at bats, more entrepreneurs will get a chance to prove they can build great businesses and more great businesses will be created, then the increased birth rate is a really good answer to the issue of too much money chasing too few deals.
 
My belief is that the shape of the investment funnel is changing for the better. Angels and micro-vcs should be focused on the seed round, creating opportunities for entrepreneurs to build validation that justifies larger commitments from larger funds. Seed investors must also avoid signaling by keeping funds small and showing restraint when it comes to follow on financings. That way many more founders will get at bats and less capital will be overcommitted to experiments that don’t merit the investment.
 
The failure rate will be much higher, but I’m not sure that’s a bad thing. Fred Wilson wrote a great post on “The Expanding Birthrate of Web Startups” in which he fears that angels and small funds won’t be positioned to support the growing population of funded companies.  Fred asks “who is going to house, feed, school and send all these kids to college?” I agree with Fred that this is an issue, but I also think this is the creative destruction of a major improvement in the startup industry. The market should be in a position to decide the merit of a startup without the challenges of sunk costs of a large venture fund or the signaling of a single fund determining the future of a company. This is particularly true if the implication is that many more founders get a chance to create something of value. 

Most founders would rather be funded to try and fail, than never to try at all.  After all, an implicit commitment of $10MM being allocated to a very early stage startup going sideways can be used to fund 10 similarly staged startups at $1MM and perhaps create a few companies that become rocket ships. Nearly all of them will require more capital from larger funds at some point to be successful. Larger funds get the benefit of seeing more validation early of a greater number of startups without the obligation to over invest round after round, which should yield higher investment returns for everyone.
 
Not only will this broader funnel create more companies with capital to prove value, but it will also attract more people to entrepreneurship, as founders won’t be deterred by the notion that getting funding is impossible unless they’ve run a company before.  I believe we're already seeing this benefit.  This is a positive spiral that will further create more interesting opportunities for the venture capital industry.
 
On a macro industry level, venture capital might have the same amount or even less capital infused into startups in the coming years, but I believe that capital will be more productive as it is redirected from overfunding underperforming companies to funding the creation of more companies that have a shot of proving their worth.  I believe this is a big improvement for founders, seed investors and large funds.   

This post originally appeared at Anything's Possible and is republished here with permission.

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See Also:

• The Idea That Entrepreneurs Only Need Super Angels Doesn’t Make Sense
• My Life As A CEO (And VC): Chief Psychologist
• Sorry Kids, First Time Entrepreneurs Don't Usually Get Funding

We’ve seen a lot of TVs announced before and during IFA this year. That makes sense — it’s a consumer electronics show, after all. And I guarantee that most if not all of those sets will have their 3D capability touted. It’s a dangerous move, since so many consumers are wary of 3D — not enough content, bulky glasses, headaches, and so on. So there’s been some grumbling: why are they including 3D on TVs when nobody wants it?

It’s really pretty simple: adding 3D capability to a TV is trivial. It’s a freebie feature they get to charge for.

Continue reading…

Earlier today Mozilla Labs — the R&D arm of the company behind Firefox — announced that it was launching a new Gaming section focused on fostering games built on modern Open Web technologies. And to kick things off, it’s inviting developers to take part in a contest to develop the best games for the Open Web. At least, it’s inviting them to look forward to a competition that will begin later this month (the logistics haven’t been announced).

The contest itself isn’t out of the norm — Mozilla Labs runs challenges every two months for its various projects. But the long-term vision for this new Games project is extremely vague at this point. The main site for the Gaming section states that Mozilla is looking to “help establish the Open Web as the platform for gaming across all your Internet connected devices”, but it doesn’t really get into how it will do that. A Mozilla spokesperson said that the company isn’t sharing more details at this time and that this is announcement primarily about getting developers excited — we’ll learn more later.

From the Mozilla Labs Gaming Page:

We are excited to present to you the latest initiative from Mozilla Labs: Gaming. Mozilla Labs Gaming is all about games built, delivered and played on the Open Web and the browser. We want to explore the wider set of technologies which make immersive gaming on the Open Web possible. We invite the wider community to play with cool, new tech and aim to help establish the Open Web as the platform for gaming across all your Internet connected devices.

Modern Open Web technologies introduced a complete stack of technologies such as Open Video, audio, WebGL, touch events, device orientation, geo location, and fast JavaScript engines which make it possible to build complex (and not so complex) games on the Web. With these technologies being delivered through modern browsers today, the time is ripe for pushing the platform. And what better way than through games? Traditionally games and game developers have been at the forefront of technology, often pushing the boundaries of what was thought possible.

So what could this mean? It’s possible this is related to Google’s Chrome Web Store, which is slated to launch this fall and will provide developers with a relatively seamless way to distribute and charge for web apps (and games). Mozilla has previously discussed the possibility of creating an Open Web App Store (in other words, one that isn’t controlled by Google) and gaming would almost certainly play a part in it.

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