When Jeff Clavier founded SoftTech VC there weren’t too many investors doing small, seed-stage investments in next generation web companies. Many traditional venture capitalists just didn’t find the new breed of capital efficient web startups very intriguing. A small group of investors, including Clavier, thought otherwise, and began to invest their own money as angels. They’ve been wildly successful in doing so, and today Clavier’s SoftTech VC firm has investments and holdings in some of the web’s most successful startups, including Bit.ly, Get Satisfaction, Ustream, Twitter, Groupon and Facebook.
Clavier just closed SoftTech VC’s mammoth third fund — a whopping $55 million, which is more than three times larger than the firm’s successful second fund. The new fund will allow Clavier and company to invest in 60 to 65 new companies with an initial investment averaging $400,000.
Watch our interview with Clavier to find out what he looks for in new investments, why VCs do whatever it takes to help their portfolio companies succeed and why there is no pride in venture capital.
This Venture Studio Classic was originally released on May 16, 2011, after the launch of SoftTech VC Fund III, but prior to it closing.
Follow Venture Studio, in association with Mashable. The show is hosted by Dave Lerner, a 3x entrepreneur and angel investor. To join Venture Studio’s Facebook page, click here.
iOS: Anyone can pick up your phone and read your text messages. It's also not that difficult for someone to install spy software. If you want to keep your messages private, Black SMS is an app that provides a very simple method for doing so. You simply type in the message, set a password, and send it over to iMessage. The recipient can then use their copy of Black SMS to decrypt the message using the password you set by simply pasting the message into the app and entering the password. (Watch the video above for a demonstration.) More »
It should come as no surprise which television event topped the charts in terms of social chatter. If you guessed The Voice, you’re fired. That’s right, the 2012 Super Bowl earned a record 111.3 million American viewers this time around. Not surprisingly, that led to 17 million social media activities, according to Trendrr’s latest social TV research.
Even though it seems as many people cared about Madonna as they did football, social media users turned out by the millions to tweet each New York Giants interception and New England Patriot blitz. And we know from watching the streams that M.I.A.’s middle finger caused quite the social stir as well.
And if you weren’t that concerned about the Super Bowl this year, not to worry. The Voice still made the cut…barely.
The data below is compliments of our friends at Trendrr, who measure specific TV show activity (mentions, likes, checkins) across Twitter, Facebook, GetGlue and Miso. To see daily rankings, check out Trendrr.TV.
Social media analytics provided to Mashable show which endorsers — and endorsees — won biggest on Super Bowl Sunday.
Getting a celebrity to shill products during the game’s valuable advertising time can do wonders to imprint a brand in consumer consciousness. But that plan can also backfire, with the celebrities themselves overshadowing the products they promote.
Overall, David Beckham dominated Super Bowl XLVI. More than 85,000 tweets mentioned him over the course of the game, according to Simply Measured. But the Beckham-in-his-undies ad helped clothing retailer H&M, too.
According to Networked Insights, the soccer player gained four times as much of the conversation on Twitter and Facebook as H&M. But his presence still pushed the brand into the eighth slot of most talked about companies on the two social networks during Super Bowl Sunday.
John Stamos also gained four times more of the conversation than the brand he endorsed, Dannon yogurt. But unlike H&M, Dannon wasn’t able to parlay that into a significant share of the online discussion, finishing outside the top 10 according to Networked Insights.
Supermodel Adriana Lima did especially well for herself when she appeared in ads for Kia and Teleflora during the game. Lima gained about 7% of the celebrity ad conversation, according to Networked Insights, and the reaction on Facebook and Twitter was overwhelmingly positive.
But her buzz did not translate into major boosts in sentiment for either of the companies she endorsed. According to NetBase, Kia’s rate of positive mentions increased by just 0.1% on Super Bowl Sunday compared to normal, and there was actually a relative dip of 1.2% in positive mentions for Teleflora.
Interestingly, the three brands that grabbed the largest share of the advertising conversation were Doritos, Coca-Cola, and Budweiser and Bud Light counted as one, according to Networked Insights. None of those companies hired major celebrities, but all did feature animals in one ad or another.
Do you think it’s worth it for brands to shell out big bucks for major celebrities in their Super Bowl ads? Or are there better ways to make a splash? Let us know in the comments.
BONUS GALLERY: Watch Every Super Bowl XLVI Ad Here
Phone Innovators: Official 2012 Best Buy Game Day Commercial
Watch as phone innovation meets phone-buying innovation, at Best Buy. Choose Phone Freedom and get any phone, any carrier, and all of their plans, with lots of unbiased advice.
Reserve a $50 gift card at http://www.bestbuy.com/phonefreedom now for your next upgrade.
There’s usually one commercial during the Super Bowl that outshines the others for its creativity and laughter-inducing antics — and gets watched over and over. Twitter’s Ad Scrimmage wants to be the website where you do that, as well as vote for your favorite. But move fast; it won’t be around forever.
The idea behind Ad Scrimmage is to get people talking about the companies and brands behind the ads (which shelled-out beaucoup bucks for these coveted spots) and extend the ad value and entertainment all week.
Here’s what Twitter says about Ad Scrimmage on its advertising blog:
“The Twitter Ad Scrimmage extends the life of a Super Bowl commercial by amplifying and moving Monday water cooler discussions to immediately after the game when momentum for conversations around those commercials is at its highest … Commercials will also have a unique hashtag to encourage conversations on Twitter.”
The commercials are organized into four quarters, depending on when each aired. There is a corresponding hashtag for each commercial to encourage discussion. If there are any commercials you missed, or just can’t get enough of, check out the site now — it’s only live for seven days.
Have you tweeted about Super Bowl commercials? Did you use one of the hastags created with the commercial? Will Scrimmage work? Let us know in the comments.
Super Bowl XLVI was not only a big hit with broadcast viewers, it also excelled in the social TV space.
Hollywood news site Deadline reports that 111.3 million Americans tuned in to watch the New York Giants defeat the New England Patriots. That puts Super Bowl XLVI just ahead of last year’s record breaking broadcast, making the 2012 Super Bowl the most-watched U.S. TV broadcast ever.
According to social TV analytics firm Bluefin Labs, Super Bowl XLVI was the biggest social TV event on record, surpassing the 2011 MTV VMAs in terms of social media comments.
Bluefin’s data shows that the Super Bowl generated 12.2 million social media comments, up 600% from 2011′s 1.8 million comments. However, we should note that Bluefin’s reporting data in 2011 was not as robust as it is now, which may account for the disparity in numbers.
According to Alex Iskold, founder and CEO of GetGlue, more than 150,000 users checked-in to the Super Bowl on GetGlue, three-times more than any previous event.
Halftime Show Soars
Although the game itself generated tons of social comments, the halftime show was also hugely social. Not only was Madonna the most searched term on Google, the halftime show generated 862,000 social comments according to Bluefin.
To put that figure in perspective, Bluefin estimates that the 2011 Academy Awards generated 966,000 comments. Additionally, if counted as its own program, the Madonna’s halftime show would rank fourth in terms of social TV entertainment events, ahead of the 2011 BET Awards.
The Ads
It was a big year for Super Bowl ads, with lots of companies choosing to preview or premiere their ads online before the big game.
Other popular spots included Volkswagen’s “The Bark Side” teaser and “The Dog Strikes Back.”
When it comes to social media commentary, Bluefin ranks H&M’s “Bodywear for H&M” featuring David Beckahm as the ad with the most social media comments.
It was followed by Chrysler’s outstanding, “Halftime in America” spot featuring Clint Eastwood. Bluefin ranked the Chrysler spot as number one among sports fans.
Did you find yourself more socially engaged while watching the Super Bowl this year? Let us know in the comments.
jfruh writes "In an email exchange with privacy blogger Dan Tynan, Columbia law professor Eben Moglen referred to Facebook as a 'man in the middle attack' — that is, a service that intercepts communication between two parties and uses it for its own nefarious purposes. He said, 'The point is that by sharing with our actual friends through a web intermediary who can store and mine everything, we harm people by destroying their privacy for them. It's not the sharing that's bad, it's the technological design of giving it all to someone in the middle. That is at once outstandingly stupid and overwhelmingly dangerous.' Tynan is a critic of Facebook, but he thinks Moglen is overstating the case."
If the names Phillip Torrone, Limor Fried and Collin Cunningham don't ring a bell then you probably need to hand over your geek badge. If, on the other hand, those names immediately make you sit up and pay attention, you maybe excited to hear the trio have just released the first Adafruit-branded app for iOS. Circuit Playground is a reference app for makers, hackers and tinkerers that helps you decipher resistor and capacitor values; calculate resistance, current or voltage; convert decimal, hexadecimal and binary values; and store PDF data sheets for ICs. The app is $2.99, but it comes with a $3 credit at the Adafruit shop, so it's kinda-sorta free. It's available for iPad and iPhone only, but an Android version is in the works. If you're an impatient Google fan, they suggest you check out ElectroDroid which performs many of the same functions and we can confirm is awesome. Check out the video after the break and hit up the source link to get Circuit Playground now.
The Super Bowl is the biggest night of the year in football, in television, and in the wings-and-nachos-delivery business. It’s also a huge night for the internet. The final three minutes of last night’s game saw over 10,000 tweets per second and the commercials make it a major night for the world’s biggest brands. But if you’ve paid up for a Super Bowl ad, your website had better be up for the traffic you’re going to get.
That’s where Yottaa, a Boston-based website performance company, comes in. As if to emphasize just how into website monitoring and optimization these guys are, the Yottaa team spent last night with one eye on the game and the other monitoring and testing the major brands’ websites. And the results of what they’re calling The 2012 Burst Bowl are in. So which sites crashed, and which were up to the traffic?
Apparently people really love those Coke polar bears. The Coke site and Acura’s call to action page both went down for significant periods during the game, while the movie Act of Valor’s video-heavy site slowed to a crawl.
Keeping a major site from crashing is a bit of a thankless job. If you fail, lots of people notice. If you succeed, your users mostly don’t even think about it. So Yottaa’s rankings let us tip our hats to the web teams at these companies for ensuring great performance.
If you’re like me, you didn’t give any thought to the challenges that web teams face on the Super Bowl, but when you think about it there are a huge number of tech issues raised by having a hundred million people watching and talking about the same thing at the same time.
Our preparation begins well before kickoff – and even before the season begins – in July or August. It culminates in more than 55 members of our Information Systems (IS) “defense” camping out at headquarters to watch and anticipate every move the system makes to ensure flawless execution
If you’re in the mood for an involved IT-as-football metaphor, go read the rest.
Tracking College Students Favorite Super Bowl Ads
It was a big night for the team at CampusLIVE as well, which shared this morning its users’ favorite ads:
For many in the northeast, Super Bowl XLVI was so exciting that many of the commercials went unnoticed. But for those who were paying attention, they noticed a continuation of a similar trend: stellar productions from Doritos and Chrysler, two of the big winners in Mullen‘s Brand Bowl, hosted on Boston.com.
“This was truly a watershed year for social media and the Super Bowl,” said Edward Boches, Chief Innovation Officer at Mullen. “With nearly 200 million people on Twitter and two-thirds of all smart-phone owners using social media while watching TV, just about every brand built interactive elements into their commercials, knowing that the true measurement of success these says is immediate consumer reaction and long-term consumer engagement.”
Boston-based Mullen has been teaming up with Radian6 for the past four years to determine which Super Bowl ads are the most effective via an analysis of Twitter buzz, and once again Chrysler made it into the top three. This year, the two brands analyzed over 400,000 tweets to see which company made the most of the $3.5 million (or more) Super Bowl commercial slot.
Surprisingly, however, Honda and Acura, two companies whose ads were generating a lot of buzz during the week before the Super Bowl, didn’t do so well, coming in 12th and 19th, respectively.
Doritos hit it big with their crowdsourced “Crash the Super Bowl” model, which encouraged fans to submit their own commercials. H+M utilized David Beckham in his underwear to get the number two spot, while Chrysler called on Clint Eastwood’s inspiring rhetoric to mark a turnaround in the American economy.
Here, according to Mullen, is what you need to know about the best and worst of Brand Bowl 2012:
Top Scoring Brands
Doritos
H+M
Chrysler
Pepsi
Chevrolet
M+Ms
Budweiser
Most Positive Tweets
M&M’s (Sentiment +41%)
Best Buy (Sentiment +30%)
Doritos (Sentiment +29%)
Most Negative Tweets
Go Daddy (Sentiment -10%)
Cars.com (Sentiment -2%)
Lexus (Sentiment -1%)
Mosttalked-about brands (those with the highest number of overall tweets)
Doritos (48,811 Tweets)
H&M (44,031 Tweets)
Pepsi (39,765 Tweets)
Least Effective Brands (those with a combination of low volume of chatter and low positive commentary)
Cadillac (Tweets 345) (Sentiment +2%)
Century 21 (Tweets 520) (Sentiment +6%)
Lexus (Tweets 922) (Sentiment -1%)
CareerBuilder (tweets 1001) (Sentiment +5%)
Hulu (Tweets 1191) (Sentiment +10%)
Highest number of negative tweets
Go Daddy (Sentiment -10%)
Cars.com (Sentiment -2%)
Lexus (Sentiment -1%)
Most Volume of Tweets (The most talked-about brands (those with the highest number of overall tweets)
Doritos (48,811 Tweets)
H&M (44,031 Tweets)
Pepsi (39,765 Tweets)
Here are some of the best of the best Super Bowl ads from 2012: