Cloud security startup CloudLock will launch new encryption product to make it easier for service-as-a-service and cloud platforms to protect sensitive data. Called CloudLock Selective Encryption, the product’s launch comes a few weeks after CloudLock announced that it had raised $ 16.5 million in Series C funding led by Bessemer Venture Partners, bringing its total funding to $ 28.2 million. It will make its public debut next week at the 2014 RSA Conference in San Francisco. CloudLock Selective Encryption will protect data on the two platforms, Salesforce.com and Google Apps, that CloudLock currently covers, as well as new cloud service ... → Read More

TechCrunch - Thursday, February 20, 2014

On Wednesday Facebook announced that it acquired WhatsApp for $ 19 billion. It was a deal two years in the making, according to a source close to the situation. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg first called Whatsapp CEO Jan Koum in the spring of 2012. A month after the call, the two went out for coffee in Los Altos. They went on a hike. Despite Zuckerberg’s wooing, the deal didn’t happen. But the two stayed in touch. There were dinners and a lot more hikes. There were three reasons Zuckerberg was so fascinated with Whatsapp: He’s confident it’s going to reach ... → Read More

Silicon Alley Insider - Thursday, February 20, 2014

My son turned me onto a wine app called Delectable Wine. I am waiting for the Android version so I can use it too. But I’ve used it a bit on his iPhone and its a really nice and useful application. Think of Delectable Wine as Instagram for wine. People post the wines they are drinking, their reactions, tasting notes, etc. You follow your friends and experts (likeArnold) and you see what they are drinking. You can tag where you had the wine and what you thought about it. There’s a really nice searchable archive so you can go back and ... → Read More

AVC - Thursday, February 20, 2014

Not only is WhatsApp huge, it’s been growing like crazy. Right now, it has about 450 million users. And if you look at its growth curve compared to other popular services like Gmail, you can see why Facebook is willing to pay $ 19 billion for the company. In fact, WhatsApp is growing faster than Facebook did when Facebook was the same age. Impressive. Here’s a chart from Facebook comparing WhatsApp’s growth to a few other services: Join the conversation about this story »      Tech

Silicon Alley Insider - Thursday, February 20, 2014

The sharing economy is all the rage these days. Sharing companies like Airbnb, Uber and Task Rabbit are regularly in the press and the number of sharing startups seems to grow each day. But most of the coverage focuses on the industry and relatively little has been written for people who want to start personally benefiting from sharing. Beth Buczynski's Sharing is Good: How to save money, time and resources through collaborative consumption nicely fills this void.   "Sharing is Good" explains that although we don't share as much today as in the past, sharing has long been a key ... → Read More

Small Biz Labs - Thursday, February 20, 2014

Chris gave this talk last year at startup school. It’s great. It’s about 20mins so an easy watch. AVC

AVC - Thursday, February 20, 2014

Does this happen to you? I’ll be having a very productive day working on a big project. Then I’ll go to lunch around 1pm.  I’ll be back at my desk and ready to work again by 1:30pm.   But I’ll look at my calendar and see that I have a meeting at 2pm. So I won’t re-start working on my big project, because by the time I got in the flow,  a half hour would definitely be up. I’ll do some work emails. At 2pm I’ll go to the meeting. The meeting will be exhausting and boring and throughout it I ... → Read More

Silicon Alley Insider - Thursday, February 20, 2014

I saw this on usv.com today: Popular Science has decided to turn off comments. They aren’t the first and they won’t be the last. As Adrian says in the usv comments: Let’s face it – dropping comments on PopSci isn’t going to stifle societal debate. There are more than enough places online to debate the impacts of science. There are so many places on the web to talk about stuff. There are the blog communities, like AVC and many others, and there are the link sharing communities like Reddit, Hacker News, and USV.com. The web (and increasibly mobile) is a great place to ... → Read More

AVC - Thursday, February 20, 2014

I wrote a post the other day called This For That in which I suggestred that derivative ideas are challenging to execute on and equally challenging for USV to get excited about. But there are exceptions. And Github insipired ideas are one particularly interesting area to us. I recall when Steve Martocci came to talk to us about Splice. He talked about watching musicians work and wondering why there was nothing like GitHub for them to use to store the various versions of their work. That, of course, led to Splice. And one could call Splice “GitHub for Music”. It is a lot more than ... → Read More

AVC - Thursday, February 20, 2014

Facebook just bought WhatsApp for $ 19 billion, which is its biggest competitor in social messaging. WhatsApp is used by 450 million people to send a variety of texts, photos, videos and more to friends all over the world for free. Messaging apps have become a threat to companies like Facebook since it prevents them from expanding overseas and obtaining access from coveted demographics in emerging markets. These charts from OnDevice explain why messaging apps have hurt Facebook and why Facebook spent billions buying WhatsApp. WhatsApp is the leader in social messaging apps. These stats show that WhatsApp is used ... → Read More

Silicon Alley Insider - Thursday, February 20, 2014