AOL Asks AOLers To ‘Disrupt AOL'

Over the last few years, TechCrunch has done a pretty good job of Disrupting things. We've Disrupted San Francisco, we've Disrupted New York City, and most recently we've Disrupted Europe. But now, our parent company wants TechCrunch employees, and all the rest of the company, to “Disrupt AOL.” In an internal memo today, AOL Global CTO Curtis Brown announced an “exciting event” that will be taking place next month in AOL campuses “around the world.” In an “exciting twist” on the TechCrunch-branded Disrupt events, the company will be running an internal “Hackathon” and “Idea Battlefield” in which participants will be able to “pitch their ideas” in front of “judges.” Winning ideas will be “considered for actual development.” Oh yeah, and there is a “pretty sweet prize package,” “including CASH.” Then there's a whole part about the “AOL Open philosophy,” which I've never heard of but apparently “challenges and rewards AOL brands to be more open,” which I have never actually seen happen. (One could argue that having the Disrupt branding “borrowed” without our knowledge for this “exciting event” is an example of such “openness.”) The memo touts the company's “long history of innovation,” which is qualified by the number of patents AOL has been awarded. Because patents = innovation. Putting aside the fact that an internal hackathon is actually a cool idea, and that encouraging cross-promotion of various internal APIs is a good thing, and that yeah, we could come up with some new ideas for this “Idea Battlefield,” I began to worry that maybe AOL could become too Disrupted. For instance, what if someone Disrupted our broadband business, the most profitable part of the company, and our grandmothers ended their 15 year-old AOL subscriptions? What if someone Disrupted our horrible internal employee portal, which is only accessible through the most arcane and impossible VPN you might never hope to use? What if someone found a way to Disrupt our massive - and growing - layer of middle management at AOL, thereby crippling our bureaucracy and spiraling the company out of control? Would barnyard animals sprout wings? Would dogs and cats live peacefully together? Would AOL as we know it cease to exist? Almost forgot: If you're an AOL employee, not only can you submit your ideas to “Disrupt AOL,” but you can also help choose the logo you'll be forced to look at while doing so. (I'm voting for D.) Full text of the memo: Hey AOLers – About a month ago, we held Beat The Internet Breakfasts in multiple AOL offices. We asked you to share thoughts and ideas about the AOL community, our products, and how we work. We read through each and every submission, and we started to take action. See the different logos below/attached? We need you to pick one. For a t-shirt, for an invitation to the Event we are announcing today and for the design on the $2,500 check you and your co-workers might win as one of the prizes…. But more on that in a second. We are pleased to announce an exciting event coming next month. Disrupt AOL will take place on our campuses around the world on December 3rd, with a Judging Event broadcast globally on December 5th. Putting a twist on TechCrunch Disrupt, this event will be comprised of a Hackathon and an Idea Battlefield, and will culminate in your projects being pitched before judges and considered for actual development. Oh yeah, winners also will get a pretty sweet prize package, including CASH. This event is designed to drive the AOL Open philosophy and to challenge and reward AOL brands to be more open. AOL has a long history of innovation, with more than 1000 patents awarded since the inception of the company. By being open and letting the AOL community- all of you bright and creative people- loose on some of our APIs, I'm convinced we will generate some awesome ideas that will help move the company forward in significant ways. You Want Open? How's this for Open. Ryan Sagawa, our talented AOL Events intern, has come up with 4 logos for Disrupt AOL. Now we want you to choose the winner. Go to Inside RIGHT NOW to vote for the logo you think should represent Disrupt AOL on all our branding- including the t-shirts all participants will be receiving. For the Hackathon, teams of up to five people will compete to come up with and code an original, open, viable, and innovative idea within a 12-hour time period. If you are interested in participating in the Hackathon and are in search of a team, send an email to DisruptAOLTeam@teamaol.com and we will connect you to other team members. Teams are encouraged to have a mix of both engineers and product managers. The Idea Battlefield will allow individuals and teams across the company to submit their potential products for review by a judging panel, with the best submissions going on to a finalist round to pitch their ideas. Rules, registration, and prizes can all be found now Inside, and we'll announce the API's you can choose from in the near future. Please check in often for updates. I realize that we have a lot going on and many, many, competing priorities, but this event is hugely important to the future of the company so I encourage you to take the time to participate. My hope is that the next great AOL product will be born from this event and we will all win. Think big, take chances, have fun, show your love for what you do, and go out there and root for your colleagues. Look for more information on the Inside later this week for how to register as well as the great prizes up for grabs.

Obama’s Interview: Most Important Quotes On Healthcare.gov And NSA

President Obama sat down for an extended interview with NBC’s Chuck Todd about the epic failure of the healthcare website and National Security Agency spying. The video is embedded below. I’ll get right to the quotes and add context: – “I am sorry that they are finding themselves in this situation based on assurances they got from me.” Obama was referring to the hundreds of thousands of people who are receiving health insurance cancellations from plans that do not conform to rules under the Affordable Care Act (a.k.a “Obamacare”). This embed is invalid –“Kathleen Sebelius doesn’t write code, she wasn’t our IT person”, on the Secretary of Health and Human Services, related to ongoing issues with Healthcare.gov, the new federal healthcare insurance e-commerce website. –“In some ways, the technology and the budget and the capacity have outstripped the constraints, and we’ve got to rebuild those,” on the reach of National Security Agency spying. –“This idea, that somehow every president is looking at the raw intelligence and figuring out what sources those are, is just not the case,” on whether he knew that the National Security Agency was monitoring the phone calls of German Chancellor Angela Merkel. He would not give a straight answer on whether he knew the NSA was monitoring her calls. –“When it comes to my campaign, I’m not constrained to a bunch of federal procurement rules,” on how federal contracting rules makes the government far less efficient than his tech-savvy campaign. Notably he says he wants to review federal procurement for all of the federal government. There you have it, folks. Convinced?

Newsle Lands $1.8M From Media Giant Advance Publications, Bloomberg Beta & More To Be The News Reader For People You Care About

The Web fundamentally changed how people consume the news. On the one hand, it's now easier than ever before to create and distribute content to millions of readers; on the other, the Web has become an ocean of content and information, and it almost goes without saying that it's now more difficult than ever before to locate the signal amidst the noise. Given the dizzying amount of content and news sources out there, most people now just fall back on their social networks to act as the filtration system that helps them find what they want - Facebook for friend-sourced news, LinkedIn for business-related content, an so on. Going one step further, thanks to Flipboard, Feedly, Circa, Techmeme, Prismatic, Nuzzel and more, there are now a million ways to access filtered news on our phones or based on our relationships, interests and so on. Axel Hansen and Jonah Varon began building Newsle as undergraduates at Harvard to fill a nagging gap among today's news aggregators. The idea being that, as popular as Google Alerts may be, people want to read news based on who their friends and colleagues are and who they want to know more about. But, from Varon and Hansen's vantage point, the existing options didn't go far enough, so they decided to build one that would. Today, Newsle's network (and person)-oriented news alert service tracks more than 100 million people and processes more than one million articles each day from over 100,000 sources, serving users filtered, personalized alerts based on their preferences. While that scale is impressive, building a great news aggregator isn't just solving the problem of scale, it requires both scale and awesome filtering mechanisms that work well enough that they can hold a user's attention when there are a million other tools that can be used. That's why Newsle prides itself on not only processing enough news so that it can bring you stories from sources you actually care about, but the person identification, natural language processing and disambiguation algorithms that help it serve better alerts. Since launching in 2011 and moving operations from Harvard to San Francisco, Varon and Hansen have managed to keep Newsle afloat with a team of five and $650K in seed financing they raised in early 2012 from SV Angel and Lerer Ventures. Newsle has even had its tires kicked by a few recognizable names in the news business, although the startup declined the offers, and naturally Varon also declined to specify which players those offers came from. Nonetheless, having build what they believe is a solid foundation on which to create the next big news aggregator, the co-founders are eager to stay independent and are looking to expand their natural language processing and data mining efforts with new talent. With its user base now growing 20 percent month-over-month, Varon says, Newsle is adding some coin to its coffers to help it take the next step. This week the startup finally closed a $1.85 million Series A financing round led by Advance Publications, the veteran media company, which owns a sizable fleet of newspapers and magazines, including Conde Nast and a 31 percent stake in Discovery Communications. Participating alongside the strategic investor were Maveron, DFJ, Transmedia Capital, Launny Steffens and previous investor Rockwell Schnabel. The news of the startup's Series A raise first appeared in May, but the company has brought in additional capital and investors since, including Bloomberg Beta. The investor, as its name would imply, is the new early-stage investment fund and venture capital arm of Bloomberg, which launched this summer and is headed by OUYA chairman and former head of IGN, Roy Bahat. Newsle also happens to be the fund's first investment, Varon says. In the end, strategic investment from two enormous media companies - or at least their VC affiliate - could be a huge leg up for Newsle, especially with Advance Publication's giant network of news content. This could make tackling seemingly huge problems on the technical side of personalized news discovery, like better disambiguation - in other words, being able to determine which “John Smith” a user wants to hear about - a lot more manageable.

BitNami Launches MongoDB Stack To Develop Apps As Demand Scales For AWS-Based Services

BitNami has added a MongoDB stack for developers to build web apps on the popular NoSQL database. The stack, available next week, allows developers to deploy and manage either on-premise, through Amazon Web Services (AWS) or Windows Azure. The Y Combinator alum's new stack will come integrated with Node.js and be available for free from the BitNami app store as a native installer or virtual machine for local development, or as a cloud template for the Amazon and Windows Azure cloud computing platforms. The complete package will contain the following, which are sometimes referred to as the "MEAN" stack: • MongoDB • Node.JS • Apache Web server • Git • PHP (optional) • RockMongo (optional) • AngularJS • Express • Mongo drivers for PHP and Node.js BitNami will add other programming languages in combination with the MongoDB stack. For now, a customer that uses Ruby on Rails would install the BitNami Rails stack and the MongoDB stack, said COO Erica Brescia in an interview today over Skype. The company offers its own cloud hosting service to run on Amazon. That service provides automatic backups, built-in monitoring and other features to manage apps in the cloud. BitNami also announced it will launch a new library with DreamFactory next week. DreamFactory is an open source, mobile backend platform. In 2012, BitNami emerged as a key partner with AWS for the launch of its new marketplace. BitNami, with its 80 stacks, helps app developers bundle what's needed to operate as a service in the marketplace. On AWS Marketplace, BitNami offers WordPress, Drupal and dozens of other apps that can be used on a pay-as-you-go basis. Brescia said that the number of BitNami applications deployed to Amazon Web Services increased by 98 percent in 2012 and is expected to increase 160 percent in 2013. She said they also estimate that this year the applications will generate over 100 million hours of usage on AWS. BitNami also recently completed a survey of 3,600 people who represent some aspect of the application development and management process. The results are not too surprising. More people are using the public cloud, and small companies are more likely to use cloud apps than their larger counterparts. The survey's most surprising results showed in the respondents' next most common cloud deployments after AWS. Private clouds received 27 percent followed by Google Compute Engine with 16 percent. Microsoft Azure and VMware Cloud came in at 11 percent each. Rackspace had 8 percent of the vote. Google is doing better than Azure? That should make any cloud watcher pause about Google's growth and Azure's overall strength as a cloud service. BitNami is one of a number of providers in the apps marketplace arena that is thriving with the advent of web and mobile apps. AppDirect, for example, provides developers with a way to connect with channel reseller partners that are using the platform. In its model, a developer can point an API to the partner selling the technology. Identity, provisioning and billing are the key endpoints that serve as the foundation for the service. The company recently raised $9 million, formed a partnership with Cloud Foundry and acquired Standing Cloud, which packages apps for use with cloud services to ease the complexity of deploying and managing apps. That's a service similar to BitNami and a pointed example for how app marketplaces are becoming platforms for developing and selling services to a growing market base.

HTC Channels Crazy With $8,000 Gramohorn Smartphone Trumpet

Smartphone maker HTC is going through a tough time - and having something of an identity crisis that's playing out as a rebranding exercise. That's why it's spent millions hiring Robert Downey Jr to spice things up with its Here's To Change campaign. It's also, apparently, got a few other attention-grabbing tricks up its sleeve. Such as the gizmo pictured above. Part vapourware, part steampunk fantasy, pure marketing madness. No it's not a leftover prop from the latest Tim Burton flick. The Gramohorn II - for that is its ludicrous name - is HTC UK's contribution to the struggling mobile maker's internal cultural revolution. What actually is it? It's audio kit for the outré HTC One user: a passive speaker smartphone dock designed to grab the tiny timbres issuing from the phone's front-facing speakers and flick them through its twin horns like a Pamplona bull dispatching a pair of overweight tourists. Or actually that's its secondary function, after the primary one of grabbing consumers' eyeballs and rattling them in their sockets. If it's eyes on its logo HTC needs - actually it's dollars in its coffers but the former tends to lead to the latter - then this mystical hardware unicorn is surely going to deliver. Not so much HTC as WTF?! But in the smartphone popularity contest where Samsung is the ruling Gladiator then anything is better than being invisible. So it's out with ‘quietly brilliant' and in with ‘WTF' blared through a pair of oversized ear trumpets. Bravo HTC, bravo. Say what you like about the Gramohorn II but one thing is for sure: it's not quietly brilliant. It's not quiet, period. HTC hasn't come up with this chunk of craziness on its own. It engaged a young UK designer called Justin Wolter to do that for it - maker of the Gramohorn II's uni-trumpeted predecessor (which was, er, for iPhones). Wolter came up with the dual-trumpet remix of his earlier design, sketched it out and then with a little judicious use of 3D printing, the Gramohorn II was born. These days crazy is that easy. Print on demand means there's never going to be a warehouse full of unloved Gramohorn IIs. These bad boys are individually made to order. And at £999/$1,600 each (for a plaster-based resin Gramohorn II) - or a frankly insane £4,999/$8,000 for the milled steel version - buyers are being deliberately discouraged from actually getting their hands on the Gramohorn. In all likelihood because it's going to murder your music by trampling tinnily all over it. Audiophiles avert your ears. Even hipsters would balk at a price tag with that many bells on it. Here's what HTC has to say about its curious lovechild: To kick-start our Here's To Creativity campaign Justin has taken the concept of the HTC One's front facing BoomSound™ stereo speakers and pushed it to the extreme. His design is the physical embodiment of BoomSound incorporated within a unique, dramatic and stylish sculpture. And here's what Wolter had to say, when asked whether anyone is actually going to use this as a speaker as, well, a speaker: The design aims to function as both a functional consumer product as well contemporary art. As such, it hopes to capture and element of curiosity as well as prompt further thought / discussion. Based on key acoustic principles, the design does what it says, in successfully amplifying sound waves using resonance. The Bauhaus-ian mantra of ‘form follows function' was always in mind during design development. It also sounds as if the Gramohorn II will be the first in a series of designer eyeball-grabbers coming out of HTC's UK office. “HTC UK's ‘Here's To Creativity' campaign is supporting young designers, writers and artists helping them to bring their ideas to life. More exciting creative projects to change the smartphone experience are happening soon,” noted Peter Frolund, General Manager UK, in a sadly understated statement. He should really have said: ‘YEAH! WOOT! LET'S DO THIS!' This sort of grassroots craziness may not turn HTC's tanker around but in a mainstream smartphone space that's become slabbish and staid it sure is fun to see something a little nuts going on. Here's To Crazy indeed.

With 220M Downloads And $12M From Qualcomm, Magma, TabTale Is Quietly Becoming One Of The Top Children's App Makers

With education apps crossing one billion downloads on iTunes earlier this year, the demand for quality learning content, especially content of the kid-friendly variety, is growing fast - and so is the opportunity for app publishers. Since launching in 2010, Israel-based startup, TabTale, has been on a mission to capitalize on this demand and is quietly becoming one of the App Store's top publishers as a result. With a suite of over 240 apps that have more than 220 million downloads between them, TabTale wants to strike while the iron is hot. The startup announced this week that it has raised $12 million in Series B financing, led by Qualcomm Ventures and Magma Venture Partners, with contributions from Vintage Investment Ventures and existing investors. To complement its organic growth, the company revealed in a statement this week that it plans to use its new capital to grow its team and to continue establishing itself as a buyer in the children and family market. The startup acquired mobile-focused educational app publisher and “Paint Sparkles” maker, Kids Games Club, back in March. In September, TabTale was named the eighth largest publisher by download value by App Annie in September, placing it alongside names like EA, Rovio and Disney, with a significant share of downloads powered by Design It, the company's fashion makeover app. Operating in a fast-growing, hyper-competitive space where the forecast is more of both (growth and increase in competition) for the foreseeable future, what TabTale has managed to accomplish in three years is impressive. It's now raised $13.5 million to date and claims more than 20 million active monthly users and done so behind girly games like “princess party planner” and while largely flying under the radar. And, clearly not one to miss an opportunity to provide a note of emphasis for its competitors (and startups looking for exit opportunities), TabTale said that it also recently hit profitability. Not bad. a milestone TabTale has since underlined by re profitability.

TechCrunch Moscow, 8-9 December - Take The Temperature Of Russia's Tech Scene

TechCrunch International City events are 1-2 day meetups hosted by TechCrunch in coordination with partners. Coming up this December will be TechCrunch Moscow. Since the first TechCrunch Moscow in 2010, the event has gained a great reputation, creating a major splash in the up-and-coming Russian venture industry. It will feature some of the world's leading technology entrepreneurs. I will be moderating the conference once again, with participation of Ned Desmond, the GM of AOL Tech Media. The theme of this year's conference is Innovation Detox. We shall focus on the prime purpose of innovation – addressing fundamental human needs more efficiently to increase the quality of life. From quantified self to healthy lifestyle, from smart choices in personal finance to educated entertainment. We shall discuss global trends, new heroes and spectacular failures, toxic investments and viral startups. As always, the conference will be accompanied by the Startup Alley and pitches competition, featuring more than 50 up-and-coming Russian startups. We are currently open for applications from startups. The TechCrunch Moscow event partners are Digital October and Kite Ventures. Follow TC Moscow on Twitter and Facebook. TechCrunch's International City event partners follow a careful set of guidelines to develop the speaker agenda, a startup pitch competition, a startup exhibit area, and in some cases a hackathon. A TechCrunch editor presides over the event. In 2013 we have International City Events scheduled in Rome (September 26-27), Tokyo (November 11-12), Bangalore (November 14-15), Shanghai (November 19-20) and Moscow (December 8-9). If you are interested in sponsoring this event or more than one International City Event, please contact TechCrunch at sponsors@TechCrunch.com. Potential sponsors may also discuss sponsorships directly with our partners.