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For the past two years, Fuisz Media has been quietly developing the technology necessary to quickly and easily add interactive elements to video. Now, it’s coming out of stealth mode, with more than $2 million in funding and some interesting enterprise clients. Read More
Product Hunt, the buzzed about site for early adopters offering a mixed of new products, sites and apps as well as undiscovered older gems, is soon getting its own gorgeous and fully featured iOS application. According to founder Ryan Hoover, the app will offer the same daily list of products as on the web, as well as user comments, profiles and push notifications for when your name gets… Read More 
You’re a startup, planning to launch in September/October or November? Listen carefully. There are a few things you need to know. You need to know we have extended the deadline to submit applications for the Startup Battlefield at Disrupt Europe until Sunday, July 6th. Both Europe and non-Europe based teams are eligible to apply. You can apply for Battlefield right here, plus if you… Read More 
In a move that feels a bit like turkeys complaining to Christmas, a consortium of Internet Service Providers (ISPs), in conjunction with Privacy International, have filed a legal complaint with the UK’s Investigatory Powers Tribunal, a judicial body that claims to be independent from the British Government, over how the UK spy agency GCHQ reportedly operates. Read More 
According to bitcoin exchange Vaurum founder Avish Bhama, VC Tim Draper won all 30,000 BTC in the recent government auction. It is believed he paid above the current market rate for BTC. The price of one BTC is now up $5 to $645. Draper and Bhama intend to use the hoard to allow emerging markets to buy and use bitcoin in lieu of their own fiat currencies, thereby assisting in bitcoin liquidity. Read More 
But some will say it's still not a patch on Windows 7
When a mobile phone user clicks on one of the ads, it calls the advertiser and immediately hangs up. The advertiser returns the call with pre-recorded entertainment content and a marketing message – enabling the consumer to avoid paying data charges.
Facebook's creation of a special ad product in India, where the company has more than 100m users, is part of a broader push to develop customised solutions across emerging markets.
Read more
Claims to be the "industry's only fully open automotive platform"
Picture outs handset's 'crystal clear' aluminium casing
Nellie Bowles
Nicholas Josefowitz, wearing a slim-fitting blue suit and tie, sat down at one of the off-kilter tables just outside of a subterranean Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) station in downtown San Francisco.
He pointed out an older woman carrying shopping bags and struggling to get down a broken escalator. He pointed out the pools of urine surrounding the station’s out-of-service elevator. He pointed out how long the largely empty plaza was. He didn’t order anything, but I got a soda from a nearby coffee cart.
“It’s an escalator. It’s not rocket science,” Josefowitz said of the broken infrastructure. “There’s this incredible entrepreneurial spirit in San Francisco — everything is possible, except when it comes to the city. Here, we’ve become pessimistic.”
Technologists, who often skirt public transportation altogether by taking private company-sponsored luxury shuttles, need to just apply some of their usual can-do optimism to that same public transportation.
And Josefowitz, a 30-year-old Harvard grad and tech entrepreneur himself, thinks he might be just the one to convince them. This fall, he’ll go up for election to join one of San Francisco’s notoriously problematic political leadership organizations — the BART Board of Directors.
BART, which carries 400,000 riders across the Bay Area each day, is the nation’s oldest unrenovated subway system. It hasn’t had a significant upgrade since 1976. Last year, BART employees organized a strike over their contract, which shut down the system for four days. The solution for BART, Josefowitz said, is not that it needs more money, but that it needs to use its resources better.
“I’m running against a guy who’s been in office 24 years. He pleaded guilty to money laundering, and has the worst attendance record of any other BART director,” Josefowitz said. “You wouldn’t get away with that anywhere else. But, for most people, the BART board is the last job they’d want.”
Why, then, does Nicholas Josefowitz want it?
Because BART is more than a collection of broken escalators. BART owns land. And developing the largely empty plazas around stations, which Josefowitz wants to do, could mean more housing to accommodate the flood of workers coming to San Francisco – though, of course, at the cost of losing public gathering spaces.
“BART is the largest parking-lot owner west of the Mississippi. That’s a lot of housing you could build,” Josefowitz said. “There are 46 BART stations, and each one has the potential to be the center of a dense, vibrant neighborhood."
Currently, developers from Maximus Real Estate Partners are attempting to start building a 400,000-square-foot mixed-use development around the 16th and Mission BART station plaza. Development has been met with protests, but is proceeding. And certainly more of these would go through if one of the nine BART board of directors were radically pro-development:
“You have these plazas — if you can call them that — sitting empty in the middle of the neighborhoods where we need housing the most,” he said. “There’s a McDonald’s and some one-story buildings. BART should be a partner in development."
Josefowitz, who lives with his wife in San Francisco’s Pacific Heights neighborhood, founded solar power plant company RenGen, as well as Leadership for a Clean Economy, which invests in eco-friendly political candidates. He got interested in BART during last year’s employee strikes. He said he doesn’t want to be a career politician, though he had some good statesmanlike moments (“I just want to get San Franciscans home for dinner on time,” he said). After our interview, he sent me pictures of yellow “out of order” placards stacked up at the ready by the ticket booths.
The Bay Area tech community, under pressure from protestors who see the plush private company shuttles as another sign of the city’s growing income inequality, has started to rally behind this development-friendly public-transportation aficionado. Co-hosts of his most recent fundraiser included Lyft co-founder Logan Green, Path co-founder Dave Morin, and Founders Fund partner Brian Singerman.
“The tech community is not inherently political, but the protests made them political — it woke them up,” Josefowitz said. “There are San Franciscans suffering from poor public transportation. And the solution is right in front of us.”
Fuisz
“Shoppable TV” — the notion that it would be cool if you could sit on your couch and order clothes you saw people wearing on-screen — is one of those ideas that people have been chasing since Web 1.0. Justin Fuisz was trying to do it, too.
Then he had a better idea. Or, at least, one that is easier to fund: Instead of using the tech his startup had built to create a commerce business, he is building an ad play instead.
Fuisz Media’s new pitch is that it can make Web ads more interactive, which is supposed to make them more valuable. The basic idea is that its software can automatically identify Web video images — and instead of telling people how to buy Jennifer Aniston’s shirt, it can let advertisers add links on top of the clip.
Here’s an example from Jell-O, which is pretty self-explanatory (unless you’re looking at it on an iPhone – see below):
You’ve seen videos that let you click on images before, but those are usually bespoke efforts. Fuisz says his software lets advertisers take videos they’ve already made, and make them clickable when they’re already on publishers’ sites, using a few lines of code.
In most cases, that is: Fuisz says this stuff will work on laptops, iPads and most phones — but not iPhones, because of the specialized way the phone treats video.
That idea was enough to land a $2.1 million seed round led by Metamorphic Ventures and Lerer Hippeau Ventures; other investors include Buddy Media’s Mike Lazerow and Right Media’s Michael Walrath.
Screenshot
Tim Draper, the founding partner of venture capital firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson, was the winning bidder in a recent government auction of about $19 million worth of bitcoin, according to a son and the CEO of a startup in which he has invested.
Avish Bhama, the CEO of a bitcoin startup called Vaurum, published a blog post this morning reporting that Draper would be handing over the 30,000 or so bitcoin to the startup to help build up liquidity in overseas bitcoin markets.
“Vaurum has launched trading platforms in emerging markets, and we will be partnering with Tim to leverage the pool of ~30,000+ bitcoins as a liquidity source,” Bhama wrote. “It's still quite difficult to get access to bitcoin in these developing economies – and that's exactly where it is needed the most. Our goal is to build reliable infrastructure and increase liquidity, which are two major challenges in the ecosystem.”
Adam Draper, Tim’s son, confirmed his father’s winning bid in a text message. “Very exciting times,” he said. “I just like that he is putting the coins back to use in the market through Vaurum.”
The bitcoin was auctioned off by the U.S. Marshals Service following its seizure from an underground online marketplace called Silk Road. The now defunct marketplace is accused of being home to illegal goods purchased with bitcoin.
Adam Draper declined to reveal how much the elder Draper spent to purchase the pot of bitcoin.
The younger Draper runs a startup accelerator program for bitcoin companies called Boost. Vaurum took part in the program last summer and says that both Drapers are investors in its service.
Tim Draper didn’t immediately respond to an email seeking comment. It’s yet not clear if he is keeping any of the bitcoin for himself.
