Archive for the ‘tim armstrong’ tag
The Most Amazing Internet Stock Of The Year
What do you think it is?
I’m a huge fan of Business Insider. I can’t think of any other media organizations that writes headlines as good as they do (Business Insider, if you’re reading this, pay your copywriters handsomely… they’re doing everything right). My daily email newsletter from them is always chock full of linkbaity headlines that get me clicking and clicking. This one, from yesterday, was one of them: And The Most Amazing Internet Stock In The Past Year Is… So, who do you think it was? LinkedIn? Apple? eBay? Priceline? Nope… it was AOL.
Called it.
Not really. I didn’t call it. I didn’t invest in AOL. And, if you click over to the Business Insider article, you can see the nice organic jumps and strides AOL made this year. That being said, I’ve been a massive fan of AOL since Tim Armstrong took over as CEO and Chairman in 2009. I’m not saying this because I’m a contributor to The Huffington Post (which AOL bought in 2011 for over $300 million) or because I have any kind of personal relationship with Tim Armstrong (I don’t). I’m saying this because I believe that Armstrong, Arianna Huffington and everyone else at AOL is building an interesting canopy of online properties that are diverse enough to give them a unique position in the new media landscape.
Breaking the rules.
I don’t think that AOL is necessarily breaking any new rules. I think they are, fundamentally, applying a very traditional media strategy to the Internet. They are buying and building properties, creating compelling editorial, building audiences and selling advertising on top of it all. There are sprinkles of newer thinking (like when The Huffington Post launched their GPS For The Soul app) and I’m hopeful that they can leverage everything they have with The Huffington Post coupled with their acquisition of Patch to crack the code on local (and hyper-local) content. There will be challenges in monetizing their current strategy as the world becomes increasingly more smartphone and tablet enabled. Advertising on these devices is still nascent and the formula doesn’t seem to be as effective as it is when compared to Internet advertising. So, this will be no cake walk, but – to date – I’ve been a big fan.
It’s what other media properties wished they had done.
You have to figure that The New York Times would love to have been the ones to have these types of properties that AOL now has in their portfolio. And let’s not kid ourselves, it’s not just The New York Times. Look at any kind of traditional publisher or broadcaster from newspaper, magazine, television and radio (there was a reason that Time Warner merged under the name AOL Time Warner in 2000 – even though that deal went south for a plethora of reasons). AOL now covers a lot of digital space when it comes to content. They’ve come a long way from the days of inundating your mailbox with CD Roms.
It says something.
It says something about how we see the Internet. I’m sure if you surveyed some of the smartest people in Internet land, few of them would have guessed that AOL had performed this well. We keep our preconceived notions with us. We think that businesses (especially, big businesses) can’t change. AOL isn’t perfect (I’m quite certain the comments below will be laced with commentary about AOL and their mishaps). I’m sure AOL is no golden child. AOL still has a ways to go until they have a war-chest of cash like Apple. The point is that it’s quickly becoming an interesting company (again) – especially in a world where we hold quality content in such high regard.
It’s one to watch…whether you own the stock or not.
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Earnings show AOL successfully putting the brakes on revenue decline
AOL showed signs of life in its Q2 2012 earnings report today, beating Wall Streets expectations and sending a clear signal that the company is doing well under CEO Tim Armstrong.
AOL reported revenue of $531 million for the quarter, a two percent decline compared to the same period last year. Analysts were predicting the company would report $519 million. The decline rate is the slowest for AOL in seven years, the company point’s out.
The media/web portal company’s total traffic was 112 million unique visitors for Q2, which is a four percent boost compared to last quarter and five percent ahead of Q2 2011.
“Today’s results represent a significant milestone for AOL as we returned to Adjusted OIBDA growth for the first time in four years,” Armstrong said in a statement. “The strong results and consumer performance we announced today are clear signs our strategic and operating efforts are translating into significant financial progress.”
Checkout a summary of the numbers below. We expect Armstrong to go more in-depth about his small success during the earnings call later today.
Filed under: media, VentureBeat 
Uber, Evernote, Cloudera And Nextdoor Are Sun Valley’s “Newest Breed”
Allen & Co.’s Sun Valley retreat definitely wins the prize for “Most Ironic Conference” as it is a media conference that very vehemently shuns media. Just this morning one intrepid reporter was told to stop harassing the guests as she walked down the rainy thoroughfare with her friend who also happened to be an attendee (and, no, it wasn’t me).
My boss and guest Tim Armstrong technically isn’t allowed to talk to me about anything that isn’t smalltalk (Hi Tim!). Really.
Founded by Allen & Co. in 1983, the off-the-record CEO conference takes place 6,000 feet above sea level in Idaho, at the storied Sun Valley Resort and its iconic bar Duchin, which has the best bar name ever if you pronounce it a certain way.
Every summer bigwigs like Mark Zuckerberg and Drew Houston convene at Duchin to share high-altitude drinks (or at least a drinking space) with the likes of Harvey Weinstein, Oprah, Mayor Mike Bloomberg, Bob Iger and Tim Cook. Press are also not allowed to go into the bar at a certain time, in case that wasn’t clear.
Because all these rich people are hungry for fresh blood interested in innovation, traditionally Allen & Co. wrangles a group of humble, rising star CEOs to the Gem state, inviting three or four promising startup founders to come and give a 15 minute presentation for the olds. They call it the “New Breed Program” and it’s such a pure, brilliant form of lead generation.
Last year it was Quora, Airbnb and Dropbox. The year before that it was Square, Groupon, Pandora and The Fancy (as thingD). But once you’re in the club you’re in the club. Many of the past presenters return as legit attendees.
This year’s “New Breed” includes Uber, Evernote and more modest startups (in terms of press coverage at least) like neighborhood social network Nextdoor and Hadoop shop Cloudera. The startups will each hit the stage for their close up on Saturday morning, starting at 7:30am.
All of the companies in attendance this summer had also presented earlier this year at the bank’s private company conference in Arizona. There were eight startups in total presenting, divided into “Consumer Internet” and “Enterprise.”
According to a source, photosharing darling (who was also my pick for Allen & Co’s New Breed this year) Instagram actually joined Evernote, Uber and Nextdoor on the consumer internet track in March. According to the same source they weren’t invited to the summer conference, most likely because their acquisition put the kibosh on any further dealings with Allen & Co., who has a pretty effective system going on here you have to admit …
Get ‘em while they’re young.
AOL restructures again highlighting members, brands and ads
Six months after reorganizing, AOL has done it again. This time, the Internet, advertising and content company will split into three parts: AOL Membership, Brand Group and the Advertising.com Group.
“Brands are at the center of our company and we are structuring our talent and organization around our brands,” chief executive Tim Armstrong said today.
Armstrong’s move is seen as a balancing act between his work to build a long-term revenue strategy for AOL and shareholders seeking short-term gains. The announcement follows Thursday’s $400 million share buy-back by AOL and a shareholder vote earlier this month retaining Armstrong’s current board of directors.
As part of the restructure, AOL’s premiere brands, such as the Huffington Post and Tech Crunch, will gain more autonomy, lessening the risk that visitors will jump ship amid heavy-handed corporate branding. In April, HuffPo founder Arianna Huffington took back some control from the site’s corporate owners, providing what she told the New York Times was “the innovative spirit of a start-up.”
In 2011, Tech Crunch founder Michael Arrington had a long-running feud with AOL after Arrington decided to open a venture capital firm and continue writing for the blog which comments on tech start-ups. Arrington eventually left Tech Crunch.
AOL also announced Friday its latest restructuring will include the Membership Group. The group will oversee paid and free members of the company’s properties, including AOL.com, AOL Mail and elsewhere.
The third arm of the new AOL will be the Advertising.com Group to manage the company’s advertising hopes. Advertising has been one of the firm’s areas of strongest revenue growth, AOL claims. However, the company must deal with two 800-pound gorilla — Google and Facebook — making this unit one to watch, AOL-owned Tech Crunch comments.
Finally, to oversee all through groups, Armstrong appointed the company’s chief financial officer, Art Minson, to the role of chief operating officer.
In December 2011, AOL announced it would restructure into divisions for dial-up/online, local business, media and advertising. Today’s announcement did not mention Patch, AOL’s chief local media business which has come under attack for its lack of success.
“We have a valuable portfolio of world-class content brands, and we want each of these brands to have distinct plans for innovation and profitable growth,” AOL explained.
Photo via Shutterstock
Filed under: media, VentureBeat 
AOL Reorganizes Into Membership, Brand And Ad Units [Incl Armstrong's Memo]
After yesterday’s $400 million share buyback, some more news today from our owners, AOL: it’s reorganizing into three operating units, plus a separate one for corporate support of all three: they will be called AOL Membership, Brand Group (which includes content like TechCrunch and Huffington Post), and the Advertising.com Group.
Tim Armstrong, the CEO, has also appointed Artie Minson to the role of Chief Operating Officer overseeing the three operating units. Before this, he had been the CFO, a position where he already had some control over operations, for example leading its legacy dial-up business.
This will be seen as a reward for Minson, who has been picking up increasing operations under his control in the last several months (they included the company’s mobile, search and content businesses as well), and under Minson, “our trends in these areas of our business have significantly improved,” writes Armstrong. The COO appointment is effective immediately, but Minson will continue on as CFO too until a replacement is found; the company is actively recruiting now.
Today’s is the latest shuffle at AOL, which last reorganized in December into a dial-up/online services division; a local business; media; and advertising divisions.
In some ways, today’s pared-down reorganization may speak to attempts at a more simplified approach to the business as well:
AOL Membership is all about loyal AOL users, whether paying or free. It makes sense for them to live together, as AOL thinks of more ways of upselling its most loyal users to spend a bit more time and money with them.
Content and brands, meanwhile, looks like it will be giving a bit more autonomy to individual sites to sort out their profitability as they see fit. Again, this makes great sense because no one wants to be part of a cookie-cutter, assembly line, and I suspect fewer would want to engage with such content, as well.
Advertising.com, will be an interesting one to watch. This is the space where AOL is pinning a lot of hope for revenue growth — online ads not just on its own properties but throughout the web — but it’s also hugely challenged with players like Google and Facebook commanding huge leads on overall online ad revenue share. There is a possible future in technology development and getting an edge on other companies that way.
As you can see in the memo below, Patch and other previously-categorized local businesses like MapQuest, and initiatives like mobile content, are not specifically mentioned in the new plan. We’ve written back to Tim Armstrong to ask about this, and whether there are any asset sales or closures planned as a result of this most recent reorg.
Ultimately, AOL is trying to balance Armstrong’s long-term fightback strategy, based around a strong content business and sophisticated display advertising around that, with activist shareholders who want to see more decisive and short-term actions to turn the company’s business around.
Originally AOL thrived in the early days of the internet with a robust dial-up business. More recently, and post a merger and subsequent spinoff from Time Warner, it has pivoted into a more challenged content business based around online advertising as a revenue generator (with significant dial-up revenue, remarkably, still thrown in).
Armstrong had a vote of confidence earlier this month, when shareholders elected to keep the current board. Starboard Value, the most outspoken shareholder critics of AOL’s strategy, had wanted to replace three people.
“We all agree that AOL is undervalued. We also all agree that AOL can achieve substantial revenue growth and far more profitability. The challenge is how to get that accomplished,” Starboard’s CEO Jeffrey Smith said in remarks at the shareholder meeting — echoing the basic complaints Starboard has had for months now. Some of their suggestions for how to achieve that — like selling patents — have been implemented; others — like selling off the costly content business — have not. Yet. Starboard is the fifth-largest shareholder in AOL and has a 5.3% stake in the company.
The full memo from CEO Tim Armstrong is below.
AOLers –
As we approach the halfway point for 2012, we are well positioned to reach a huge milestone in the turnaround of our company – returning to growth in 2013. AOL has faced and met a gauntlet of challenges and we will continue to take aggressive operational steps forward during the second half of 2012 against our strategy.
As we have discussed over the last several months, we are building AOL into “The Brand Company”. We will continue to unleash the power and talent within each of our brands to pursue the global consumer and business disruption by digital services. Brands are at the center of our company and we are structuring our talent and organization around our brands. Our brand strategy not only touches the brands we own, it extends to helping the world’s best content and advertising brands by sharing our technology and monetization with them.
During the many meetings we had last week in Cannes, France for the advertising festival, it was a powerful reminder that our brands have deep opportunities in all major categories of consumer and commercial usage. While AOL is a global brand, we now have the opportunity to build other global brands and to go deeper into our strategy of serving influential audiences. A highlight at Cannes was the reaction to Huff Post Live (that Arianna and Roy shared on stage at Cannes), some of the innovative follow-up from AOL Autos, TechCrunch and Engadget’s growing global footprint, the progress of the Ad.com platform, and the partner interest in Patch.
To kick-off the second half of 2012, today, the company is announcing the plan to organize into three operating groups and a corporate group that supports those three operating units. The operating units will be AOL Membership, Brand Group, and the Advertising.com Group. The goals of organizing around these operating units are the following:
1. Build and distribute the world’s best digital brands (B2C and B2B)
2. Center our measurement, resource allocation, and drive to profitability around brands
3. Focus our technology and product development on building brand platforms
4. Improve our O&O and network advertising and commerce revenue
5. Go faster, unleash talent, and have fun
Supporting the three operating units of our business will be a shared technology and sales platform, as well as AOL corporate functions. As a company and a culture, brands (including the AOL brand) will be the central focus and measurement point for us and we will continue to move the supporting resources closer to the brands. We want our brands to be driven by leaders who will achieve an even greater focus on our consumer experiences while also driving increased accountability, financial performance, and execution.
Here is a deeper look at the operating units:
- The AOL Membership Group will house the businesses that serve AOL account holders – our free and paid members. From AOL.com to AOL Mail to our consumer products that our users rely on, the AOL Membership group will be focused on delivering world-class experiences to our loyal users who rely on these AOL products and properties everyday.
- The Content Brand Group will house our portfolio of distinct and unique content and service brands. We have a valuable portfolio of world-class content brands, and we want each of these brands to have distinct plans for innovation and profitable growth. Our brand portfolio delivers unique content experiences to their audiences daily, and the leaders in this operating unit will be laser-focused on driving profitable brands that serve real consumer needs.
- The Advertising.com Group will house our B2B services and network businesses (the platforms we provide to our partners). The Advertising.com Group had our strongest revenue growth for the past couple of quarters and the product innovation and scale we are driving for our partners both on the publisher and advertiser side demonstrate that the Advertising.com Group is positioned for continued growth and acceleration of their business.
As part of our organizational structure around brands, we are announcing today that Artie Minson will be promoted to take on the role of Chief Operating Officer, a critical new leadership position at our company. In this role, Artie will oversee our three operating units and coordinate a cohesive operating model to deliver strong P&L performance across all three operating groups.
Artie’s new role as COO is designed to push continued improvements in the operation and performance of our brands. Artie is a world-class leader and proven operator who has played a key partnership role with me over the last three years at AOL. Artie has garnered an impressive list of financial and operating accomplishments. He has significantly improved our balance sheet, cost structure and tax profile, helped unlock significant value for shareholders via asset sales at great prices. Artie has also led a number of acquisitions which have been and will continue to be drivers of future growth. He has played and will continue to play a critical role in our capital allocation process as we continue to ensure that our resources are being allocated to the areas where we see the greatest opportunities for returns for our consumers and customers. In addition to his CFO responsibilities, Artie has also taken on a significant operating role in the company as he has been overseeing our subscription, search, mail, mobile and, most recently, AOL content operations and our trends in these areas of our business have significantly improved during this time period. As we move to a segmented approach to operating the business, Artie has already been working with the senior leadership on plans to further optimize our operations.
Artie will become COO effective immediately and will continue as CFO while we progress with an external search for a new CFO, reporting to me. We have engaged one of the top CFO recruiters in the country, Peter Crist, and we have a list of world-class candidates we are interviewing for the position.
We are also promoting Maureen Sullivan to the role of leading a newly created Women’s Content and Lifestyle Brands group within the Content Brands operating unit. This team will develop and launch brands that serve women – one of our most important audiences in our 80/80/80 focus – by delivering captivating experiences across the style, food, shelter, and lifestyle categories. Maureen is already engaged in building out a portfolio of women’s properties, including planning new experiences for Stylelist, Stylelist Home and KitchenDaily, with the goal of attracting new consumers to our brand offerings and enabling custom solutions for our advertisers trying to reach our valuable female audience.
Throughout her career, including her time at Google, Maureen has expertly driven brands forward – including understanding how to help partners drive their brands successfully. In her three years at AOL, Maureen has been the architect of our AOL brand reinvention, and she and her team have been widely recognized for the game-changing work they have done on our AOL brand identity and creative consumer campaigns. Almost a year ago, we asked Maureen to take on an additional responsibility in launching new brands for the company targeted at the women’s space as part of our 80/80/80 strategy. Under that charter, Maureen launched MAKERS.com for AOL during Q1, and now MAKERS is one of our most successful and profitable brands in only its first few months. Creating powerful brands that are successful businesses is something we know Maureen will lead expertly for us in this new role in the very important women’s content space.
We have engaged Spencer Stuart to backfill for Maureen’s current role and she will continue to work on the AOL Brand through Q3 as we launch a continued set of creative work around the comeback of the company and an AOL Brand campaign targeted to consumers.
As part of our effort to align the corporate areas to support our brands, we are also broadening Julie Jacobs’ role. Currently overseeing Legal, Corporate Services, and Mergers & Acquisitions, Julie’s remit will now grow to include Business Development. Drawing on her strong commercial acumen, expert partnership skills, her extensive deal experience, and some 10 years immersed in the AOL business, Julie was the primary architect of the patent transaction with Microsoft, generating more than $1 billion in value for the company. Julie’s incredible track record of leadership and execution will prove incredibly valuable in this expansion of her responsibilities. Julie will be building a full business process around our current and future investments and partnerships that will span both Business Development and M&A.
The company is already operating within “The Brand Company” structure. All AOL brands will be presenting their Q3/Q4 strategy and product roadmaps on July 2nd and we will publish the Q3/Q4 commitments next week. Earlier this week we reviewed all of the engineering allocations across the company and I will be working directly with Curtis Brown to optimize any allocation areas in technology to match the business strategy and resource needs. The sales team has had major improvements in the core operations and data process during Q2 around our brands and we will continue deep improvements to sales during Q3. Technology and sales will continue to report to me and we will continue to improve the leverage of these teams across the company.
Our brands provide the news, information, and services that improve peoples’ lives. Our brands are also are the source of sustainable long-term growth for our consumers, customers, employees, and investors. We are organized and ready for the 2nd half of 2012 and we will continue pressing forward aggressively to accelerate our growth across our businesses. Looking forward to seeing you all live shortly during our Global Company Meeting at 12pm ET today.
Go AOL! – TA
AOL Starts $400M Stock Buyback At $27-$30 Per Share
AOL (also known as the company that signs TechCrunch’s paychecks) has announced this morning it has started a “Dutch auction” tender offer to buy back shares of its common stock, up to $400 million. The Dutch auction format means that shareholders will say how many shares they want to sell at what price. AOL will then determine the lowest price per share in that range and buy the amount it wants. Shareholders will be able to tender some or all of their shares at price within a $27 to $30 per share, the company says.
The $400 million aggregate purchase price of shares includes the approximately $40 million remaining from the initial $250 million stock repurchase authorized in August of 2011 and brings the total amount AOL intends to return to shareholders in 2012 to approximately $1.1 billion.
News of this repurchase program was reported earlier this week, when sources speaking with All Things D claimed that AOL had decided a stock buyback was a better way for the company to realize its gains from the $1.1 billion sale of 800 patents. AOL sold 800 patents to Microsoft in April, following pressure from shareholders, led by Starboard Value, to realize some of the value from those patents.
AOL CEO Tim Armstrong confirmed the earlier reports that the move to initiate a stock buyback was directly related to the patent deal, saying “today’s announcement is an important first step in returning 100% of the proceeds from our patent transaction as expediently and tax efficiently as possible. AOL is focused on continued execution and operational improvement. Concurrently reducing our shares outstanding at attractive prices underscores both financial prudence and our significant belief in the opportunity in front of AOL.”
The tender offer starts today, and will expire at 5:00 PM (NYC time), on August 2, 2012. AOL shares are currently up 3.26% to $28.20, currently.
AOL closes $1B patent deal with Microsoft in effort to calm investors
In case you weren’t aware, patents are big money.
AOL and Microsoft have finally closed a deal that has Microsoft dishing out $1 billion in exchange for over 800 of AOL’s 1,100 patents. While roughly half of the patents are related to instant messaging, the rest cover areas like advertising, content generation, search, and multimedia.
When news of the sale was announced back in April, AOL’s stock price spiked 43 percent, showing that investors were very much onboard with AOL with the move.
Investor support is unsurprising: As AOL has repeatedly stressed, all of the proceeds from the transaction will go straight to shareholders, not into the AOL coffers.
That’s a big deal, seeing as how investors haven’t been all that happy with AOL as of late. Last month, Starboard Value LP, which has a five percent stake in AOL, drafted a 96-page presentation on the general missteps taken by AOL’s media business. Among these blunders, investors say, was the $668 million AOL spent on the acquisitions of properties like Huffington Post and local news site Patch, which Starboard Value wants to see shuttered.
Not exactly a vote of confidence, all told.
As a result, it’s also not a big surprise to see AOL’s laser focus on investors and not its bottom line. While shelling out $1 billion won’t erase a history of questionable decisions, it might get investors off AOL CEO Tim Armstrong’s back — at least for a moment.
The move is a big one for another reason: It shows that Microsoft would rather spend the cash on patents rather than get sued over them at some point down the line. Because, like patents, patent suits are also big money.
Photo: Big pile of money/Shutterstock
Filed under: VentureBeat 
AOL’s Armstrong on Winning Proxy Battle: Time To “Maniacally Execute”
AOL fended off activist shareholder Starboard Value today, as all of the company’s existing directors were re-elected to the board. All eight of them — Tim Armstrong, Richard Dalzell, Karen Dykstra, Alberto Ibargüen, Susan Lyne, Patricia Mitchell, Fredric Reynolds and James Stengel — are staying according to a preliminary vote count, while the three candidates Starboard suggested were not elected.
It’s a short-term victory for Armstrong, although he still faces the very formidable task of making AOL a sustainable business that can withstand the decline of subscription dial-up revenue. Shares fell 5.7 percent today to $25.55, giving the company a market capitalization of $2.4 billion.
We caught up with Armstrong after the call. “We have one of the most public company strategies in the world,” he said. “Investors knew what they were investing in. They saw us buying back a lot of shares, the patent transaction and the operational results.” AOL sold 800 patents to Microsoft for $1.1 billion in April.
How much time does this buy him? ”You know better than I do that in the Internet space, every second is a day,” he said. “We’re on a fast mission to be a growth company again.”
AOL’s dial-up revenue declined at a rate of 15 percent year-over-year to $182 million in the first quarter. Meanwhile, display advertising revenue — which is what the company is betting on — grew just 5 percent year-over-year to $330.1 million.
The timeframe for AOL’s controversial local media effort, Patch.com, remains the same. They’re looking at profitability by the end of 2013. AOL filed a fairly long slide deck defending the unit last week (excerpted below). Groupon, Google, Yelp and others are all gunning for the same local business advertising market with varying success.
As for the premium brands like The Huffington Post, Armstrong says he’s going to continue investing in them. He’s not planning any bigger acquisitions in the near-term. ”We don’t have any plans for any major acquisitions. As for the acquisitions that we’ve done over the last two years, we’re very interested in growing those and putting resources into them.”
“We went from the worst merger in history to where we are today,” he said. “We have a lot of long-term thinkers behind us and we’re going to maniacally execute for those shareholders.”
Tim Armstrong On The Future Of Aol — And TechCrunch Too [TCTV]
Aol’s chairman and CEO Tim Armstrong was in the house last week at TechCrunch’s Disrupt NYC conference, and while he got a good grilling on stage by my colleague Josh Constine, we still took advantage of the chance to pull him aside for a follow-up chat backstage for TechCrunch TV to ask a few more questions.
We at TechCrunch may like to poke fun at our parent company from time to time, but it’s always interesting to interview someone who is heading up a $2.5 billion public firm — and when that person is your boss’ boss’ boss, it’s an even cooler opportunity. So it was quite nice to sit down with Tim Armstrong.
Watch the video above to hear Armstrong’s thoughts on what “investing” further in TechCrunch and Aol’s other tech media properties really means, why Aol is doubling down on video, how he manages to balance out all the chatter about what Aol’s strategy should be, and more.
Video Highlights From Disrupt NY 2012 – Day 2 [TCTV]
Continuing our trio of daily video highlights from Disrupt NY, Day 2 of the conference featured talks with Andreesen Horowitz’s Jeff Jordan, Sequoia’s Roelof Botha, and SV Angel’s Ron Conway. We also asked our Aol CEO Tim Armstrong some tough questions. Tuesday’s Battlefield competition included a startup trying to disrupt the dry cleaning business, a new way for musicians to collaborate and a neat 3D Modeling program in your browser.
Day 2 highlights can be viewed below. You can check out Day 1 highlights here and a Day 3 highlight post is coming soon.
More information about Tuesday’s highlights can be found in this articles:
- Andreessen Horowitz’s Jeff Jordan: Are Companies Building On Top Of Facebook Really Growing Or Just “Spam?”
- Betaworks’ John Borthwick: VC Scene in NYC is “Pretty Busy” Right Now, But Not “Overheated” Like San Francisco
- With A 50% Increase In Applications, The Next Y Combinator Class Will Be 80 Strong
- Sequoia’s Roelof Botha: “Entrepreneurs Don’t Appreciate When They’re Onto A Good Thing”
- reCaptcha Founder’s Language Learning Site Duolingo To Open To The Public On June 19
- Business Insider’s Henry Blodget Defends Linkbait, Slideshows, And Aggregation
- SpotlessCity Just Brought The Dry Cleaning Industry Online
- Mirth Launches To Offer Local Deals Without The Dreaded Groupon Effect
- Forget Those Scraps Of Paper, SnipSnap Lets You Save And Share Coupons From Your iPhone
- Centzy Puts Prices Online To Power Local Business Search By True Quality, Not Reviews
- With Mobile App Cardify, The Founder Of Ad.ly Takes On His Next Challenge: Improving Customer Loyalty
- Tim Armstrong — I Love TechCrunch And It Made AOL Cool Again
- Vinylmint Is A Jammin’ New Way For Pro Musicians To Collaborate
- VisibleGains Launches Postwire At Disrupt, Aims To Be The Flipboard For Client Communication
- CAD Users Rejoice: Sunglass Brings Slick 3D Modeling To The Browser
- Talkdesk Puts Your Company Call Center In The Cloud
- Apptegic Uses Big Data Analysis To Help Companies Retain And Upsell Their Customers
- Startup Alley Day 2 — It’s A Jungle Out There, But The Startups Keep Coming
- SocialStock Wants To Turn Social Networking Into Real-World Rewards
- Ron Conway Will “Never” Run For Mayor Of San Francisco
- About Last Night Wants To Improve Your Nightlife By Making It Even More Social