Over the last twelve weeks, 24 startups have been working out of Facebook’s old headquarters in downtown Palo Alto as part of fbFund REV, Facebook’s startup incubator program that’s jointly run with Accel Partners and Founders Fund. During that time the startups have receieved mentorship from some of Silicon Valley’s elite, as well as help from Facebook engineers. Tomorrow, they’ll be presenting at the program’s Demo Day (we’ll have full coverage beginning tomorrow afternoon). In light of the close of this session, we’ve compiled a number of the mentor presentations given thoughout the summer, and sat down with fbFund team member Dave McClure, who outlined what made the program unique.
McClure says that REV is a “social incubator” — an idea that is helped by the fact that all of the startups enrolled somehow take advantage of Facebook, the world’s largest social network. But McClure also says that the structure of the incubator, from the way classes are held to the actual layout of the building, is designed to ensure that the startups involved maintain interaction with each other. Startups have been working in wide, open rooms with white boards and no cubicles, and the program invited mentors to speak to all of the startups around three times per week. The fact that the startups get office hours and help from Facebook employees can also help give them a leg up on the competition.
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In July we said we would be giving away substantial amounts of advertising to promote the new startups and products launching at TechCrunch50 on September 14-15.
Today I’m pleased to announce that four of our key partners will be giving an aggregate of $1 million in advertising to TechCrunch50 companies. Facebook, Google (Youtube), Microsoft (Bing) and MySpace are all participating with substantial donations. We expect more partners to join shortly.
One of the cooler additional ideas was proposed by the Bing team. They’ll make tshirts that say “Bing Loves [company/logo]” and Bing staff will wear these tshirts, each one promoting a different TechCrunch50 startup, to various events and conferences they’ll attend throughout the year. They promise that the team will be familiar with the startup/product they’re promoting on their tshirts and be ready to talk about it when people ask. Crazy idea right? I love it.
YouTube is offering in-video advertising, and MySpace and Facebook will give substantial advertising credits on their ad platforms. So there are lots of ways TechCrunch50 companies will get exposure even after the event is over.
Right on schedule, PlayStation 3 firmware 3.0 is now out and being fed directly into your console (should you opt to download it, at least), offering a number of changes to the user interface and Trophies section and animated themes with avatars. Be sure to come back and let us know what you think!
Update: We’re running the update now and the changelog that shows up the PS3 has two new features we hadn’t heard about: simultaneous audio output across connectors and control of video playback (slow motion, fast forward and rewind) using the right stick. Nice!
Filed under: Gaming
Today we are trusting the web with our most personal and important data, from private photos and social graphs to finances and key work documents. Our hesitation to share such information has dropped over the years as our trust in our favorite services grows. Yet all the while, the web is actually growing less secure, as sites are left open to new attacks that can spread easily and leave users totally unaware when they’ve been compromised.
Looking back on the history of the web, classic security protection involved patching servers to assure latest versions were running, monitoring advisories from vendors, and maintaining some level of filtering and firewall to keep basic attacks out. Simple moves on the part of an admin or developer could protect sites from 99% of automated scripts. But a few years ago, a new security can-of-worms was opened, as new exploits that took advantage of simple oversights within web applications were being used to steal large amounts of user data.
The best place on the planet for looking into space has been computed from satellite data. The only problem is that it’s 600 miles from the closest human settlement. And those humans are living at the American research station at the South Pole.
Director Jared Hess offers a few tips on getting the most from your camera when you’re shooting in VHS. We find him on the set of his new film Gentlemen Broncos for this exclusive video.
There’s nothing wrong with the earbuds you’re listening to. Except for the fact that they completely suck. For $1,100 (yes that much) JH audio has ‘buds that blow all other in-ear audio devices completely away.
Not anytime soon, bub. But when you eventually get your iPhone 4G, they should be included in your rate plan.
Which is weird, because it's probably been a long time since you nervously eyed the clock while on the phone with your granny in Smallville. Long distance has been all-you-can-eat since cell phones and voice-over-IP conquered the universe. But international telephony—whether landline, cellular, or Internet-based—is still a piggybank-rattling affair: Providers just can't offer dirt-cheap calls across borders.
The problem is that there’s no such thing as an international telephone network. As your voice travels the lines from, say, Venice, California, to Venice, Italy, it encounters a lot of tollbooths. You pay your local provider to let you hop on the wire, and you pay a termination fee to whoever owns the network at the other end. If you cross another country’s wires along the way, you have to pay them, too.
The Web, on the other hand, is, well, worldwide—and that should mean no more checkpoint charlies. Unfortunately, even if you're using VoIP, you're often calling someone who's using a traditional line. So the termination fees remain. That's why Skype calls to cellular and landline numbers can still be as expensive as $1.40 a minute. (Sucks to be you, East Timor expats.)
Google Voice is great, but it isn’t an entirely free voice-over-internet service if you have to pay a phone bill to use it. With a few tweaks, though, you can talk to anyone on-the-cheap through Skype, or entirely for free with Gizmo.
Since we’re extremely cheap, we’ll start out with the Gizmo/Google Voice 1/2 combo, since you can use it to place and receive calls without spending a dime. If you’re particularly partial to Skype, we’ll demonstrate how you can integrate Gizmo, Voice, and Skype for cheaper Skype calls after we demonstrate how to get everything up and running with Gizmo.
As most Mac users have undoubtedly read over the past few days, there are some pieces of software that are a bit buggy with the latest version of OS X, Snow Leopard, which was released on Friday. Applications that have been having issues include the developer builds of Chrome and Chromium for OS X. While these versions are obviously still not complete yet, there are more and more people using them as they had been becoming increasingly stable and usable under OS X Leopard. And today, Google rolled out a bunch of bug fixed to keep it purring along in Snow Leopard as well.
Specifically, version 4.0.203.4 of the Dev channel build of Chrome fixes a host of problems, ranging from text being garbled to favicons no longer working. Find the full list of changes here.
