My close friends from college just launched a phenomenal new location-based game called Duality. Its alpha is available now for iPhone and iTouch.
You can sign up now by clicking the photo above. You can get points, prizes, and virtual currency by checking in to local restaurants and cafes and building an empire with your friends.
I’ve been playing Duality for the past few weeks on my itouch and it’s addicting on every level. Check it out…
Remember TheFacebook (via 2004). Ahhhh…so clean and no privacy issues. The good ol’ days of social networking.
I have found Chris Dixon’s blog to be an amazing resource for anyone who wants a candid and intelligent opinion on all things start-up. Here is a great post about VC’s and why management fees versus performance based fees aren’t necessarily a good incentive for effective venture financing:
“Bill Gurley posted a really nice summary of one of the main problems with the venture capital industry, and Fred Wilson responded here. I totally agree with their analysis, but would add one more major problem with the venture industry to the list. The fact that most VCs get rich via “management fees” just by showing up every day.
For those who don’t know, most VC’s get paid by so-called 2 and 20. The 2 refers to the 2% of the fund they use to cover operating expenses and pay their salaries. The 20 refers to the (normally) 20% “carry” fee – the percent of the profits they make for their investors that they get to keep.
Now I fully support carry fees – it is very similar to equity in a startup. VC’s should get paid when they make money for their investors.
The problem is the management fees. 2% made sense back when VC funds were much smaller, but not now that they have gotten so large. As peHUB said in their email newsletter today, Benchmark had an $85M fund in 1995 but today has a $500M fund. That seems to be the typical trend for most big VCs.
Let’s do a little math. 2% of $85M is $1.7M. Assuming 8 partners, that means salaries are in the $100-$200K range. Much higher than national averages but, by the standards of finance, they aren’t getting “rich.” 2% of $500 is $10M, so each partner is probably getting $1M+ in salaries. Over the 10 year life of the fund that’s $10M. Even on Wall Street that is considered pretty rich. And they get that money even if they make only bad investments and don’t return a dime to their investors.
This is why you see VCs raising bigger and bigger funds, why you frequently hear them say things like “I need to do 2 deals this year” and, worst of all, why you often see VC’s arguing for larger round sizes even if the startup has no productive use for the additional money – and even for the same percentage ownership. In other words, in many cases VCs argue for a higher valuation just so they can “put more money to work.” Why? If you raise a $500M fund and tell your LPs you are going to invest it over, say, 4 years, then its pretty hard to go back to them after a year and say “thanks for the $10M in management fees, I decided not to make any investments this year.”
VC’s seem to be a big fan of performance-based compensation when it comes to startups. They should adopt it for themselves as well.”
Stalqer, available as a free iPhone app since earlier this month, has solved this problem by connecting to your Facebook, Twitter and Foursquare accounts and providing a map of your friends based on information it gathers from those services, even if they don’t use Stalqer.
If your friend uses a geo-tagged Tweet, or if they check in on Foursquare, Stalqer knows where they are. Stalqer can even pull your friends’ location from their Facebook profiles if they publicly display that information, but in most cases this is limited to the city level.
You can also view your friends’ locations in a list, or even in an augmented reality view by turning the phone on its side while in the map view, but Stalqer’s killer feature is its workaround of a pesky iPhone limitation.
Audi E-Tron= The first (sexy) electric I really would buy (If I had the funds)….
Yesterday an early build of UberTwitter Beta 6 was leaked to the public. That leaked version, which was v0.932, generated a ton of buzz on the Internet and particularly Twitter. In fact it was so big on Twitter that at one point yesterday #UberTwitter hit the popular Trending Topics list. As you can imagine UberTwitter wasn’t too happy about this and released the statement below on their website.
“We have been working very hard to provide you with a ‘knock-out’ release for Beta-6. Unfortunately, the first pre-release of this version was shared widely beyond our group of testers, and to compound this, they didn’t properly post the correct BlackBerry OS builds. We recognize that many of our users unfortunately downloaded this version, most with the wrong OS build. In order to rectify this problem, we are putting the first pre-release out there for anyone that wants to download it and give it a try. We have builds for 4.5, 4.6, 4.7, and 5.0. Please understand that this is not a finished product, the UI, colors, and some inner workings are not complete, but do work. The final release is still a few weeks away, but I hope that you agree that it will be well worth the wait!”
I’ve got the link for you right here (PS you need to do it on your BB Browser)
