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Archive for March, 2011

Searching for New Tech at South by Southwest

Posted in Board Of Intellectual Capital, tagged , , , , , , on March 16, 2011| Leave a Comment »

Article from NYTimes.

“We’re here on the ground in Austin South by Southwest Interactive, the annual gathering of tech enthusiasts, entrepreneurs, investors and leaders in the industry.

The weeklong event is crammed with panels, parties, talks, the introduction of new apps and services, demos of said services, networking and the occasional breakfast taco.

Tech companies will be looking for support among tech-savvy festival attendees in the hopes of bubbling up above the noise of the hundreds of companies vying for attention. For a young business, the stakes can be high. South by Southwest, which attracts early technology adopters, has earned a reputation for helping propel companies like Foursquare and Twitter out of relative obscurity. And this year, the numbers of attendees is expected to swell to nearly 20,000. Last year, around 14,000 people attended.

Among the companies looking to create some buzz are Uber, which makes a mobile application that lets people avoid taxi shortages by requesting a car service to give them a ride.; it has seeded this city’s downtown with special pedicabs to lug tired pedestrians around. GroupMe, one of the mobile messaging applications I wrote about on Friday, says it will be handing out grilled cheese sandwiches with the company’s logo toasted into the bread. Breakfast, a digital agency in New York, has rigged several photo booths that will print physical photos snapped with the popular iPhone app Instagram. Eightbit.me, a service that creates cute cartoon avatars for members, has hidden several hard drives shaped like vintage Nintendo game cartridges, around downtown. To win one, users must check into various locations in the city to find and unlock the prize.

Even Apple, which rarely appears at any major technology conferences, is rumored to have a pop-up shop somewhere on the conference grounds, most likely to coincide with the release of the iPad 2, which went on sale Friday.”

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STYLEAUTEUR – Fashion guidance for professionals and corporations

Posted in Fashion, Styleauteur, Uncategorized on March 14, 2011| Leave a Comment »

What’s ‘Hot”, what’s “Not” — Today Fashion, for professionals and corporations.  http://styleauteur.com/

au·teur

noun, an artist (as a musician or writer) whose style and practice are distinctive
–Merriam Webster Dictionary

STYLEAUTEUR is a cutting edge fashion consulting firm that translates runway, lifestyle, and pop culture trends into reality for select individuals, organizations, and the media. We are style pioneers, identifying leading cultural movements before they hit the mainstream and preparing clients to strike a perfect balance between the appropriate and the fashion forward. Our trend forecasting techniques render runway, television, and magazine trends accessible – our finely tuned services range from creating a ‘look for less’ to dressing for ‘the carpet,’ from Hollywood to Capitol Hill. Styleauteur has specific domain expertise in working with hard to fit fashionistas and creative clients facing unique physical challenges in their style search. At Styleauteur, our objective is to guide our clients in the creation of their signature style and to impart strategies that empower them to realize their style and beauty goals.

Lauren A. Rothman, founder of Styleauteur, is a fashion, style, and trend expert. At the vanguard of emerging trends, Lauren is in high demand for her unique talent of demystifying the world of fashion and discussing ‘what’s hot’ for the season on television, radio, and in print. Known as the essential style contributor, Lauren is regularly featured in segments covering all wavelengths of the style spectrum, from back to school to campaign trail fashion on networks like Fox, CBS, and ABC, as well as Washington, DC local morning show Let’s Talk Live. Her tips on wardrobe management and creating a versatile, fashion-forward closet have also been featured in Glamour, Real Simple, and Washingtonian magazines, Politico, and on NPR and XM/Sirius radio.

Greatly sought after as a public speaker and commentator, Lauren has produced events for the Washington Redskins and led in-depth discussions on style and fashion at the Corcoran Gallery of Art and the American Institute of Architects. A trend spotter and fashion maven, Lauren has her finger on the pulse of fashion – from shopping closets across the country to scouting the best pieces available worldwide. She works with our servicemen and women returning from tours overseas as well as top brass at the Pentagon. Lauren’s background is built on a solid foundation with an auspicious start as a cool hunter and trend director at Faith Popcorn’s BrainReserve, a trend-based marketing consultancy based in New York City, followed by a ‘master class’ experience in personal shopping and wardrobe consultation for Nordstrom and Saks Fifth Avenue. A native speaker of both Spanish and English, Lauren’s wide-ranging experience includes placements at Elle Magazine and MTV Networks Latin America as well as in-depth fashion and pop culture research while living and traveling in major international fashion cities throughout Europe and Asia.

Contact – – To set up an appointment, seminar or to book Lauren for a tv, radio, or personal appearance
please contact info@styleauteur.com, 202.631.8878

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Are You Ready for the New Peer-to-Peer Economy?

Posted in Board Of Intellectual Capital, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , on March 12, 2011| Leave a Comment »

Article from GigaOm.

“Unless you really don’t give two hoots about the world of technology, it’s highly unlikely you would have missed the big brouhaha between San Francisco-based startup Square and VeriFone, a payment processing services provider. VeriFone accused Jack Dorsey’s product of not being secure and being easily hackable. Dorsey denied.

This week’s dust-up makes me wonder if VeriFone quite understands its own business. To me, they are a company that provides payment-processing services to big retail outlets, fast food chains and other large transaction volume establishments. That’s what really makes them a good company. Square isn’t going after those customers. It’s going after people who would rather not be VeriFone’s customers. Earlier this year, in a conversation, Square COO Keith Rabois told me that

“Most of our competitors (including the likes of VeriFone and Intuit) focused on 7 million merchants who have the ability to get merchant accounts from say Visa or MasterCard. We are going after 26 million folks who are not merchants in a classic sense.”

When I look at Square, I see a company that’s all about helping payment processing for a different class of customers: you, me and the guy selling apricots at Sunday’s Farmer’s Market. Square is about transactions that are more peer-to-peer in nature. These kinds of transactions are mere crumbs on trail to a much bigger economic trend.

The New Peer-to-Peer Economy

For the lack of a better term, let’s call this trend a peer-to-peer economy. Here, transactions happen between individuals or a group of individuals and not between corporations and individuals.

Just look at AirBnB, a perfect example of a peer-to-peer economy company. It offers a platform for folks to rent rooms (or villas) from other folks. The company takes a piece of the action for making the connection between the buyer and seller — who more often than not, are individuals. Typically, this would be an economic transaction between a traveller and an hotelier. Several other iterations of this basic idea have emerged; for instance, OneFineStay is doing peer-to-peer vacation rentals. RelayRides is another startup that allows you to share cars.

One of the companies I am absolutely fascinated by is New York-based Kickstarter, which I think is less a company and more a socio-economic movement.

KickStarter is a simple site that marries patronage and commerce. Artists come and list their projects and get in touch with friends and supporters, who pledge their money. If the money needed by a project is pledged, the artists get to work. If not, it’s back to the drawing board for them.

In less than two years, Kickstarter has come out of nowhere and is now helping projects raise as much a million dollars a week — from individuals like you and me. It helped raise a lot of money for open-source Facebook rival Diaspora and the iPod watchbands TikTok and LunaTik.

The Network Is the Dollar

This peer-to-peer economy is a throwback to an older way of life, where folks used to barter for goods. It was a different kind of economic transaction, but still it was an economic transaction.

The onset of industrialization brought in mass production and mass consumption into our societies. The Internet and by extension, mobile is going to help change that.

One of the things the Internet enables is our ability to connect with each other very quickly. These connections can go beyond sharing of tweets, photos and links.

The network is a springboard for services and platforms that enable one-on-one (or one-to-many) interactions. The easy to use tools — web and mobile — make it easier for like-minded people to congregate and engage in commerce.

I wouldn’t be surprised if we see more companies try to tap into the shift to the peer-to-peer economy. The winners will be those with big platforms and the likes of Square who provide enablement services. Perhaps next time, VeriFone needs to remember that.”

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Foursquare Grows Up and Beyond the Check-In

Posted in Board Of Intellectual Capital, tagged , , , , , , , , , on March 9, 2011| Leave a Comment »

Article from GigaOm.

“Originally, Foursquare was designed with the goal of “making cities easier to use.” But along the way, it became synonymous with check-ins and the game mechanics behind it. That was a good thing when it was new, unique and fun. But the world has moved on, and so have location competitors, who are looking beyond simple games to expanded deals, bigger competition and recommendations of places. Foursquare is now taking a big leap ahead in its story with version 3.0 as it matures into a much more complete and polished location-based service capable of tackling its original vision.

Founder and CEO Dennis Crowley said in a blog post that the service is now closing in on 7.5 million users after adding about 7 million since last year’s annual South By Southwest event. Users checked in almost half a billion times in the last year. That’s a lot of check-ins, but Crowley rightly understands that the check-in is just a starting place. Now with Foursquare 3.0, available tonight on iPhone and Android, the company has made strides on a number of fronts that should keep it at the front of the location pack.

Interestingly, many of the updates put the focus back on check-ins, but infuse the action with much more meaning. Now users have more reasons to check in to places, instead of just broadcasting their location. Here’s a look at the improvements:

Discovery. Foursquare has been talking about offering recommendation services, just like many competitors, and now with a new Explore tab, users can get suggestions on where to go. The recommendations factor in a bunch of signals, from the places a user and their friends visit and favorite, to the categories and types of places they frequent. Interestingly, Foursquare said it will also tailor suggestions based on the day of the week or time of day. Crowley said the recommendation engine will shine with both basic and quirky inquiries. This is likely why the company was casting about for a data scientist a little while back: so it could build a recommendation engine that made use of all of its data. The Explore feature brings Foursquare up to par with many competitors, though as we’re learning, there are many ways to do recommendations. The Explore feature also puts more emphasis on the check-in, because it helps provide Foursquare with more data to build its recommendations.

Rewards. Foursquare was out early with its game mechanics, but the system has become stale for some time. Now, Foursquare is revamping its leaderboard, awarding points for a wider range of activities. Users can get points for trying a new type of restaurant, visiting a new place, traveling to new cities, getting friends together and many other actions. The leaderboard is now limited to the last seven days. This again re-emphasizes check-ins, because the system rewards a lot of different activities. And the week-long time frame encourages people to keep trying out new things and remaining active. There are still mayorships, which are increasingly hard to get. But with a revamped leaderboard, users have more ways to compete and get recognized for their efforts.

Loyalty. Keeping users engaged is paramount for a service like Foursquare, which can burn through new users if it doesn’t give them a reason to stick around. Now the site is expanding its specials deals for mayors to more sets of people, enabling merchants to engage with customers in a lot more ways. Merchants can now extend specials to swarms, groups of friends, regular visitors, new customers, mayors or to everyone. This is an important element, because it gives people some tangible benefits of participating. Points and mayorships only work for more motivated users, but deals are always attractive.

Foursquare got out early in the location game, but in many ways, it was in need of improvements befitting its status. Crowley said many upgrades didn’t take place as fast as he’d like, because the company had to deal with a lot of internal growth as it increased its headcount to about 40 people. Now, finally, Foursquare’s larger vision is starting to take shape, and it’s a good thing. The company is showing no signs of slowing growth, but the name of the game is engagement, not just downloads. I have no insight into Foursquare’s churn, but it’s a definite concern for any app with a large following like this. Now with some key improvements, Foursquare has a chance to keep those users engaged and grow into something more useful than a real-world game.

UPDATE: Foursquare has provided more information about its updated specials program, which now allows merchants to instantly set up special deals at multiple locations for users and get additional insight into user engagement through a new dashboard. Early partners include Sports Authority, Applebee’s, Radio Shack, Barnes & Noble, Chili’s, Whole Foods, Toys R Us and others.”

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InnerPulse, Inc. – Update to the Bidding Process – Procedures for the sale of certain assets and Intellectual Property of InnerPulse, Inc.

Posted in boic, Distressed Intellectual Property, Distressed IP, Gerbsman Partners, Inetellectual Property, Investments, Life Science, Medical Device, National Venture Capital Association, NVCA, Venture Capital on March 7, 2011| Leave a Comment »

Update to the Bidding Process – Procedures for the sale of certain assets of InnerPulse, Inc.

Further to Gerbsman Partners e-mail of February 23, 2011 and February 14, 2011 regarding the sale of certain assets of InnerPulse, Inc., I attach the legal documents and wire transfer information that we will be requesting of bidders for certain assets of InnerPulse, Inc.  All parties bidding on the assets are encouraged, to the greatest extent possible, to conform the terms of their bids to the terms and form of the attached agreements.  Any and all of the assets of InnerPulse, Inc. will be sold on an “as is, where is” basis.  I would also encourage all interested parties to have their counsel speak with Fred D. Hutchison, Esq., counsel to InnerPulse, Inc.

The refundable deposit/wire transfer, will be held in the trust account at Hutchison Law Group and will be refunded back to interested parties that are not chosen as the winning bidder.

For additional information please contact Fred D. Hutchison Esq., of Hutchison Law Group, counsel to InnerPulse, Inc.  He can be reached at 919 829 4300  and/or   fhutchison@hutchlaw.com

Following an initial round of due diligence, interested parties will be invited to participate with a sealed bid, for the acquisition of the InnerPulse Assets. Sealed bids must be submitted so that the bid is actually received by Gerbsman Partners no later than March 18, 2011 at 3:00 p.m. Eastern Standard Time (the “Bid Deadline”) at InnerPulse’s office, located at 4025 Stirrup Creek Drive, #200, Research Triangle Park, NC 27703.  Please also email steve@gerbsmanpartners.com with any bid.

For your convenience, I have restated the description of the Updated Bidding Process.

The key dates and terms include:

The Bidding Process for Interested Buyers

Interested and qualified parties will be expected to sign a nondisclosure agreement (attached hereto as Exhibit A) to have access to key members of the management and intellectual capital teams and the due diligence “war room” documentation (the “Due Diligence Access”).  Each interested party, as a consequence of the Due Diligence Access granted to it, shall be deemed to acknowledge and represent (i) that it is bound by the bidding procedures described herein; (ii) that it has an opportunity to inspect and examine the InnerPulse Assets and to review all pertinent documents and information with respect thereto; (iii) that it is not relying upon any written or oral statements, representations, or warranties of InnerPulse, Inc., Gerbsman Partners, or their respective staff, agents, or attorneys; and (iv) all such documents and reports have been provided solely for the convenience of the interested party, and neither InnerPulse nor Gerbsman Partners (or their respective, staff, agents, or attorneys) makes any representations as to the accuracy or completeness of the same.

Following an initial round of due diligence, interested parties will be invited to participate with a sealed bid, for the acquisition of the InnerPulse Assets.  Sealed bids must be submitted so that the bid is actually received by Gerbsman Partners no later than March 18, 2011 at 3:00 p.m. Eastern Standard Time (the “Bid Deadline”) at InnerPulse’s office, located at 4025 Stirrup Creek Drive, #200, Research Triangle Park, NC 27703.  Please also email steve@gerbsmanpartners.com with any bid.

Bids should identify those assets being tendered for in a specific and identifiable way.  The attached InnerPulse fixed asset list may not be complete and Bidders interested in the InnerPulse Assets must submit a separate bid for such assets.  Be specific as to the assets desired.

Any person or other entity making a bid must be prepared to provide independent confirmation that they possess the financial resources to complete the purchase where applicable.  All bids must be accompanied by a refundable deposit check in the amount of $200,000 (payable to InnerPulse, Inc.).  The winning bidder will be notified within 3 business days after the Bid Deadline.  Non-successful bidders will have their deposit returned to them.

InnerPulse reserves the right to, in its sole discretion, accept or reject any bid, or withdraw any or all assets from sale.  Interested parties should understand that it is expected that the highest bid will be chosen as the winning bidder and bidders may not have the opportunity to improve their bids after submission.

InnerPulse will require the successful bidder to close within 7 business days.  Any or all of the assets of InnerPulse will be sold on an “as is, where is” basis, with no representation or warranties whatsoever.

All sales, transfer, and recording taxes, stamp taxes, or similar taxes, if any, relating to the sale of the InnerPulse Assets shall be the sole responsibility of the successful bidder and shall be paid to InnerPulse at the closing of each transaction.

For additional information, please see below and/or contact:

Fred D. Hutchison, Esq.
(919) 829-4300
fhutchison@hutchlaw.com

Steven R. Gerbsman
(415) 456-0628
steve@gerbsmanpartners.com

Kenneth Hardesty
(408) 591-7528
ken@gerbsmanpartners.com

Jim Skelton
(949) 466-7303
jim@gerbsmanpartners.com

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