Startups Archives - Page 10 of 29

SVASE VC Breakfast with Gus Tai, General Partner @ Trinity Ventures

Posted on October 15, 2007 ·

After a long break (for me) I’ll be moderating another SVASE VC Breakfast Club meeting Thursday, October 18th in Palo Alto.

As usual, it’s an informal round-table where up to 10 entrepreneurs get to deliver a pitch, then answer questions and get critiqued by a VC Partner. We’ve had VC’s from Draper Fisher, Kleiner Perkins, Mayfield, Mohr Davidow, Emergence Capital …etc. This Thursday I”ll have the honor of welcoming a repeat guest, Gus Tai, General Partner at Trinity Ventures. Instead of introducing him, I suggest you take a look at his impressive portfolio.

These breakfast meetings are a valuable opportunity for early-stage Entrepreneurs, most of whom would probably have a hard time getting through the door to VC Partners. Since I’ve been through quite a few of these sessions, both as Entrepreneur and Moderator, let me share a few thoughts:

It’s a pressure-free environment, with no Powerpoint presentations, Business Plans…etc, just casual conversation; but it does not mean you should come unprepared!
Follow a structure, don’t just roam about what you would like to do, or even worse, spend all your time describing the problem, without addressing what your solution is.
Don’t forget “small things” like the Team, Product, Market..etc.
It would not hurt to mention how much you are looking for, and how you would use the funds…
Write down and practice your pitch, and prepare to deliver a compelling story in 3 minutes. You will have about 8-10 minutes, half of which is your pitch, but believe me, whatever your practice time was, when you are on the spot, you will likely take twice as long to deliver your story. The second half of your time-slot is for Q&A.
Bring an Executive Summary; some VC’s like it, others don’t.
Last, but not least, please be on time! I am not kidding… some of you know why I even have to bring this up.

For more information check out the SVASE event page, and ~~don’t forget to~~ ~~register~~ . See you in Palo Alto.

Update: I will also have a special guest: former entrepreneur-turned-into-VC, who got his fame as “the entrepreneur who won’t just take VC abuse.” That is of course before successfully selling his startup and becoming a VC Partner himself.

Update: This event is now SOLD OUT. Next Thursday I will moderate a VC Breakfast in San Francisco with Robert Troy, Managing Director of Geneva Venture Partners.

Filed Under: Bay Area, Software, Startups, Technology · Tagged: CleanTech, Digital Media, entrepreneurship, internet, mobility, On-Demand, SaaS, startup pitch, Startups, SVASE, vc Funding, venture Capital

Facebook Just Ain’t For Business, Get Over It (Business Needs Social Networking in Context)

Posted on October 14, 2007 ·

I’ve stolen the first part of the title: Sam Huleatt’s best contribution to the New York Times article is giving it a new title that says it all.

The Facebook vs LinkedIn debate heated up again today, for the millionth time. The Facebook Fanclub’s recurring theme in comparing LinkedIn to Facebook is just how resume- and jobsearch-oriented LinkedIn is: go there, get what you want, then there’s nothing else to do there.

I’m sorry, but since when is this a complaint? Isn’t business all about having an objective and efficiently reaching it with minimum the time and effort? I suspect most of the LinkedIn “deserters” who switched to Facebook are independent types who have the time to hang around in Facebook, and are striving to enhance their personal brand.

Jeremiah’s Web Strategy Group is thriving which certainly helps boost his own brand. Robert Scoble wants to have more than 5,000 friends:

I think it sucks because it isn’t scalable and falls apart at 5,000 contacts. It pisses me off more and more every day because of that scaling wall.

Robert is a celebrity, and this is his fan-club. For the rest of us, I still believe less is more, (update: Doc Searls feels the same) and our online network should reflect our real-life one, instead of being an inflated collection of data records. We already saw the initial “link-mongering” on LinkedIn, but after a while things settled down, and the majority of LinkedIn users max out with 2-300 contacts, which is about the number of people you really, truly can know well. Now, somehow with Facebook all the netiquette is thrown away: I’m sure I’m not the only one flooded with invitations by people whose name does not even remotely sound familiar, and frankly, it’s frustrating.

I also fail to see the usefulness of seeing when my contacts watch a movie, pack for a trip, make coffee, or go to pee. This is a lot of noise with the sole purpose of gluing us to the screen (it works!), and made sense for on-campus dating, Facebook’s heritage, but let’s be real: how is this relevant to business? I’m not saying Facebook can’t be used for business at all – Jeff Nolan quotes a few examples:

Victoria Secret has a group for their Pink product line, 380k members and great interactivity, downloads, user generated content.

Ernst & Young is recruiting through Facebook and experiencing great results as a result of being connected with their candidates where they live.

So, yes, Facebook can be used for business, but these examples are all about external outreach, marketing, communication, recruiting. The point I’m making is, let’s not, while bringing everything Web 2.0 into the Enterprise 2.0 umbrella try to push Facebook to the corporate market – is has no value there. Let’s not equate Facebook to Social Networking, which is, and will be important for the Enterprise, but it needs context.

To illustrate my point, I’ll bring an example originally not “labeled” as Social Networking – oh, and the story has a Facebook-y twist, too.

ConnectBeam started their life as del.icio.us for business, but arguably they have developed into a business-focused social networking tool: in context, with purpose. Ironically, it was Facebook that drove ConnectBeam into this market in the first place.

Founder Puneet Gupta launched CourseCafe in 2005, with the intention of becoming for students’ academic life what Facebook has become for their social Life – in fact I called it “The Other Facebook” for a reason: We thought that while Facebook dominated 80% of students’ life, the fun part, there was room for CourseCafe to help organize the remaining 20%, their studies. They had a good product, received good reviews and started to get traction, spreading through several colleges. Ultimately Puneet became worried about potentially clashing with FaceBook, and at the same time he received interest from the corporate world, so he reinvented his business, this time focusing on the Enterprise.

The new business, ConnectBeam is social bookmarking for the Enterprise – but soon they took a new spin, expanding towards social networking. But doing it in the right way, in context. The context is finding co-workers who are likely engaged in similar activities to yours, or at least have similar interests, since they execute similar searches and are using the same tags you do. Their product is tightly integrated with Google’s Enterprise search, showing a combined result of what Google finds, what is tagged by how many people, and the list of users sharing that item or tag.

Tight integration to Google has become their “secret sauce” in terms of sales success, too: just about any large organization has already a Google (or Fast ..etc) appliance, a dedicated person with a mission and budget to spend on Enterprise Search – so in fact what they sell is “search enhancement”. ConnectBeam has only launched recently, but they already have Honeywell, CSC, Booz Allen Hamilton and other big names as paying customers.

They’ve come full circle: driven away from the college market by Facebook, now offering context-specific social networking, beating Facebook to the Enterprise. They will not get 40 million users, and Puneet will not become a billionaire, like Mark Zuckerberg (likely) will. They follow the good old-fashioned model: deliver value to businesses, who pay for it. That’s pretty good in my book.

Update: Of course the “LinkedIn vs Facebook” and “Facebook Sucks” stories are all over TechMeme:

TechCrunch, All Facebook, vanderwal.net Off the Top, CenterNetworks, Workbench, bub.blicio.us, Scripting News, /Message, WinExtra, Insider Chatter, mathewingram.com/work, Thomas Hawk’s Digital …, even Mini-Microsoft (wow!), PDA/Guardian,

Update #2: The you-don’t-need-more-friends lobby by Robert Scoble. I still belive he does not have 5,000 “friends” but a 5,000 (or more) strong fan-club. When you have 5,000 contacts, it’s a Rolodex (a term Robert used, too), not “live” contacts. And I suggest you read the comments to my old less is more post – re. the same subject, even though it’s on LinkedIn.

Update #3: Pfizer teams with Sermo, the “doctors’ Facebook” – Nick Carr writes about another contextual social network.

Update (10/15): Getting (Anti-) Social, the Web 2.0 Way – @ Wired & TechCrunch.

Wow! I’ve became Doc Searls’ Quote du jour. I’m honored.

Update (10/26): Naughty “Business” on FaceBook

Update (10/28): Beginner’s 5 Step Guide to Using LinkedIn and Facebook

Facebook Isn’t A Social Network, LinkedIn Is

Aussies as Adults: an Enterprise Facebook Story

LinkedIn and The Future of Business Networking

The Facebook Fad

Filed Under: Collaboration, Social Networking, Startups · Tagged: Collaboration, ConnectBeam, coursecafe, del.icio.us, enterprise search, facebook, link-spam, LinkedIn, search, social bookmarking, Social Networking, Social Software, social tagging, tagging

Jaikus Hiatus

Posted on October 9, 2007 ·

Now that Jaiku is part of Google, for many observers the question is why Jaiku, not Twitter? Scoble sees it as part of Google’s social networking arsenal, and predicts Orkut 2.0 to be a Facebook killer.

Tim O’ Reilly says:

Jaiku isn’t a “lifestreaming” company per se. They are a mobile company in the business of creating smarter presence applications. Far from being a runner up behind twitter, they are a leader in a category most people haven’t fully grasped yet. Google is clearly thinking a lot about mobile, and so they do grasp it.

Ben Metcalfe and Ross Mayfield also believe Google got themselves one of the best mobility teams.

My only question is why Google had to apply it’s standard process of freezing newly acquired applications, like they did with Writely, JotSpot..etc? (Existing users can continue Jaiku-ing, but new signups are on hold.)

I admit I don’t use Jaiku, or Twitter, for that matter, but even I get the importance of the networking effect. Google can sit on JotSpot all they want, release it in 2010, it will still be a good wiki, new users will come. It’s used by a well-defined, typically small group, and Writely was a personal productivity tool – neither depended on the network effect. But as soon as Jaiku users can not interact with new friends-of-their-friends, they will defect to the service that still accepts new members: Twitter.

Update: Dodgeball? Jotspot? Jaiku! by Robert Scoble.

Filed Under: Social Networking, Startups · Tagged: entrepreneurship, Google, jaiku, Jotspot, lifestreaming, mobility, Startups, Twitter

Wiki: the Beauty & the Beast. Usability & Functionality (Event)

Posted on September 25, 2007 ·

Silicon Valley Web Builder will host a wiki-focused event tomorrow, Wednesday. While their first wiki event almost a year ago with JotSpot, Socialtext , Atlassian and WetPaint was more introductory, this time the focus will be on – surprise! – the contrast or harmony of Beauty- i.e. attractive UI, vs. the Beast – functional robustness.

The Moderator for tomorrow is Luke Wroblewski, Yahoo’s design guru who has authored a book on Web interface design principles titled “Site-Seeing: A Visual Approach to Web Usability” and is working on thee next one: “Web Form Design Best Practices”.

The Panelists are:

Kevin Flaherty of Wetpaint
Ryan Lukehart of BrainKeeper
Aaron Fulkerson of Mindtouch
Raju Vegesna of Zoho
Joshua Wold of Atlassian

It’s definitely an interesting mix. Playing a bit with the metaphor, I’d say market leader Atlassian is known as the “beast”: whatever enterprise wiki functionality you can think of, their Confluence will likely have it.

Wetpaint got popular for the “beauty” – that’s why I called it the wiki-less wiki. It’s a most user-friendly self-publishing tool that allows anyone to create a site and transform it into an online community. Incidentally, the SV Web Builder site is built on Wetpaint.

Brainkeeper, a user-friendly enterprise wiki startup took me by surprise when they launched in January. Totally out of left field, they aim to be the beast like Confluence and the beauty like Wetpaint, with twists not seen in wikis, like workflow. I’m really looking forward to seeing how far they’ve got since launch.

“MindTouch is transforming the Wiki from the Web’s best collaborative authoring tool into an open source service platform with a Wiki heart. Their Deki Wiki Hayes release is perhaps the most extendable Wiki tool available today.” I had to steal that line from Read/WriteWeb, I couldn’t have said it any bettr – oh, and congrat’s on reaching the 100,000 user mark!

Zoho is not a pure-play wiki player. Their wiki is just a part of a productivity/collaboration suite, and it shows. Beauty? The UI needs improvement, but this is the only wiki with not just simple a WYSIWYG editor, but a full word processor that writes true html, not wiki syntax. Beast? I think the emphasis here will not be on the standalone product, but how well it integrates with other Zoho offerings, supporting a flow-oriented world that matches how we think.

It will no doubt be an interesting event, so please check out the site details, and remember, admission is free if you register online, but $10 at the door. See you tomorrow.

Filed Under: Bay Area, Collaboration, Personal Productivity, Social Networking, Startups · Tagged: atlassian, brainkeeper, confluence, deki wiki, design, mindtouch, silicon valley web builder, Social Networking, svwb, usabiility, wetpaint, wiki, wikis, zoho

Did YOU Invent Facebook? Take a Number.

Posted on September 1, 2007 ·

The ConnectU vs. Zuckerberg case is still open, but The New York Times reports Facebook’s real inventor, at least on a conceptual level might very well be another Harvard graduate, Aaron J. Greenspan, who established a Web service at Harvard, which he called houseSYSTEM:

An e-mail message, circulated widely by Mr. Greenspan to Harvard students on Sept. 19, 2003, describes the newest feature of houseSYSTEM, as “the Face Book,” an online system for quickly locating other students. The date was four months before Mr. Zuckerberg started his own site, originally “thefacebook.com.” (Mr. Greenspan retained his college e-mail messages and provided The New York Times with copies of his communications with Mr. Zuckerberg.)

So Greenspan (Aaron, not Alan) is claimant #3… but wait, perhaps it was ~~Your Momma~~ Nick O’Neill:

For all those that think they came up with an idea similar to Facebook before it was launched: congratulations! Unfortunately you didn’t have the same luck or resources that Mark Zuckerberg had at the time. Oh and by the way: I was one of the founders of Google. Just thought you should know.

They will all have to fight it out with Pete Cashmore, though, whose claim dates back to 1997:

I can only conclude that Zuckerberg used a mind-reading contraption to literally steal the idea from my brain. This will be the basis of my $1 billion lawsuit to be filed later this month.

But thoughts are not enough.. so Zoho CEO Sridhar Vembu’s claim may be stronger, since he has a Thought-ent (thought-patent) on it:

That very moment, his eyes lit up, and he screamed “Yes, YES, OMIGOD, Face on the book, FACE BOOK, I Got It, Now I Really Got It, That’s what I am going to do, Facebook. Thank you, Thank you, Thank you, I LOVE YOU!”

…So naturally I went to my lawyer, because I remember being told that is the first thing you are supposed to do in these situations. You know, like, billions could be at stake here.
He listened to my story intently, and started explaining the legal situation, in that measured, precisely crafted manner that I had come to associate with him: “Clearly you brought the two distinct ideas “FACE” and “BOOK” together in one sentence, on which the whole Facebook foundation rests, and which Mark Zuckerberg took from you, as proved by the reaction he had when the idea was transmitted to him. In legal terms, what you had was a THOUGHT-ent, also known as a thought-patent, which are considered legally equivalent to patents.”

(It’s a long but humorous post, I don’t even know which part to quote, you might as well read the whole story)

Last, but not least, my own claim:

I graduated in ~~CENSORED~~ when Mark Zuckerberg was likely in diapers. I really did not like our facebook on paper – I was seriously considering moving it on the Net. There was only one problem: the Internet did not exist. So first I had to invent it. Now you know: Al Gore did not invent the Web. I did.

Additional reading (claimants?): Insider Chatter, Mark Evans, muhammad.saleem, TechCrunch, Mashable!, Techomical and New Scientist Technology Blog.

Filed Under: Humor, Startups · Tagged: al gore, connectu, facebook, Humor, internet, lawsuit, mark zuckerberg, patent system, patents, thoughtent

Entrepreneur Assist Launched – Powered by Zoho

Posted on August 15, 2007 ·

TechMeme’s algorithm is either buggy or smarter than I thought. This morning it linked two seemingly unrelated posts that both tackle the same underlying concept: measuring web site use.

Read/WriteWeb reported that Web Office suite provider ThinkFree hit the 1 Million mark in number of hosted documents, up from 654,000 in late February. Their 335,000 users (up from 250,000 in February) upload between 60,000 to 80,000 documents per month. Impressive numbers. Of course, numbers can get tricky, revealing more than intended: comparing users and documents, it appears the average ThinkFree user creates 1 document every 4-5 months. Of course there is no “average user”, I suspect the real situation is that a lot of users just signed up and never came back (the famous 53,651), so in reality ThinkFree probably has a lot less but more active users.

Competitor Zoho does not track the number of documents created, but the current user number is 310,000 up about 110,000 on the last few months, showing a faster growth rate than ThinkFree. Today’s announcement of Entrepreneur Assist, a personal homepage by Entrepreneur.com, powered by Zoho applications will certainly accelerate that growth.

Entrepreneur.com is one of the largest small business sites, with millions of unique visitors per month… but why am I talking, let’s see some numbers:

Like I said, numbers are tricky, there are so many ways to look at them. Clearly a visit to search engine Google is a lot shorter than one to a content site, or one where users actually work, create a document, collaborate. For this reason the time users spend on a website is emerging as a an important metric. In fact if we look at time spent at the very same sites, we get a different picture:

As expected, users spend less time per visit on “read-only” sites, vs. the ones where they actually create something – and clearly teh Zoho apps will further improve this metric for entrepreneur.com. This is partly the reason behind the deal, but watch the video yourself.

The next video talks about what you can actually do on Entrepreneur Assist:

Related posts: CenterNetworks, Mind Petals, Web Worker Daily, Zoho Blog.

Somewhat related: American Bar Association launches free legal advice site for small online businesses.

Filed Under: Collaboration, Personal Productivity, SaaS, SMB / SME, Startups · Tagged: entrepreneur assist, entrepreneur.com, entrepreneurship, site metrics, thinkfree, web traffic, zoho, zoho suite

Texty: Not All Good Names Are Taken, After All

Posted on August 11, 2007 ·

The best thing about Texty may be its name. TechCrunch calls it Dead Simple Content Creation And Editing. You just start typing in a simplified editing window on their site, add images if you want to, do some formatting, click a button and pick up an embed code to include in your site.

The result: WYSINWYG: What You See Is NOT What You Get. Your page is a container, it has a little javascript code, but the actual text body is on Texty’s site. The text appears to be there, you can read it, but it does not show up on Google Reader, and certainly does not get indexed by Google or any other search engines: you lose findability.

Of course there may very well be situations when the ability to send / publish a piece in multiple copies, while you retain the ability to centrally update it is beneficial. In fact a Zoho Writer user “discovered” this months ago. Some of Owen Kelly’s scenarios:

Centrally update his resume, while it’s posted in multiple places
Submitting academic paper for a conference – organizers want to publish it early, while it still goes through iterations

(Read the full essay here: Zoho for distributed publication.)

The score for Texty: good for some (distributed publishing), dangerous for others ( no search, text may disappear if the service goes belly up). And, as we’ve just seen, it’s nothing new.

But I have to give it to them (whoever they are) they got just the right name: it’s catchy, simple, and actually tells what they do. I can’t believe such a name was still available! I guess *not* All Good Product Names Are Taken, after all.

Filed Under: Blogging, Personal Productivity, Startups · Tagged: cms, content management, distributed publishing, publishing, texty, zoho, zoho writer

Blog Comment Systems Galore

Posted on August 7, 2007 ·

What a difference (less than) two years make! Here I was complaining about losing half the conversation …. two months later three comment tracking services debuted: coComment , MyComments and co.mments. Of these three, coComment developed decent traction.

Fast forward a year or so, and we have an abundance of comment tracking / conversational tools: TechCrunch just announced Intense Debate:

…a souped-up blog commenting system that adds a lot of features for publishers and commenters alike. Installing the plug-in on your blog (WordPress, Blogger, and TypePad) adds threading, comment analytics, bulk comment moderation across all your blogs, user reputation, and comment aggregation.

TechCrunch mentions JS-Kit, SezWho, and Tangler as competitors. But on the very same day Fred Wilson announced another commenting system:

I am lending a new startup a hand by letting them showcase their new comment system on this blog.
I don’t know how much I am supposed to say about them, so I’ll stay silent on them for now.

Based on some similarities (at least at first glance) I thought it was Intense Debate skinned somewhat differently – but after all, there was a little logo leading to Disqus: another commenting/ conversation system.

Choices, choices … what’s a poor blogger to do?

Update: I’ve met – online – Josh from Intense Debate and Daniel from Disqus. The dilemma still stands (hm, should I say I’m intensely debating which one to try ;-)) but in the meantime I’ve found this video on Daniel’s blog. It’s absolutely off-topic, and absolutely worth watching (till the very end, or you’ll miss the point):

Filed Under: Blogging, Startups · Tagged: blog conversation, Blogging, co.mments, cocomment, comment tracking, disqus, intense debate, mycomments, reputation, Social Networking, tangler

Dvorak on Bubble 2.0

Posted on August 1, 2007 ·

So it’s John Dvorak’s turn to predict Bubble 2.0. Yawn. Why now?

Of course there will be a Bubble – booms are always followed by a bust. Oh, and by the way, I should be a stock-market millionaire: I made all the right calls. Too bad my timing was always off. Timing is everything.

One day we’ll all claim we had spotted Bubble 2.0. These say-nothing article lay the grounds just for that – so one day we can all look smart. Again.

Oh, well. This reminds me, I haven checked my favorite Bubble 2.0 site for a while. Wow! The last post was in August 2006. And a real surprise: the site is run by fellow Enterprise Irregular, Moonwatcher, SyncMeister Charlie Wood. (last I quoted Bubble 2.0 I did not realize it was Charlie’s work). In fact he started Bubble 2.0 (which, I repeat, is a good site, sans the timing) in 2004. But why did he abandon it? Perhaps it had to do with the fact that he got super-busy with his growing business, Spanning Sync – a sure sign of a Bubble, isn’t it?

Update: As much as I claim to Connect the dots I’ve failed to notice the the connection between this post and my previous one, on Elton John. Thankfully, Matthew Ingram didn’t – his title hits the nail on the head: Troll alert: The two Johns — Elton and Dvorak. Hilarious.

Update (8/2): By this morning this has bubbled up to the top of TechMeme:

Silicon Alley Insider, CrunchGear, A VC, CostPerNews, MYBLOG by Ouriel, JD on EP, Marshall Kirkpatrick, Master of 500 Hats, Business Week, Ajaxian, rexduffdixon.com, Don Dodge (gotta love this:” The real bubble that is bursting here is Dvorak’s influence“), Venture Chronicles, Scobleizer, the Constant Observer, Socialtext, Defrag, Industry Girl

Tags: Bubble, bubble 2.0, Spanning Sync, Humor

Filed Under: Business, Startups, Technology ·

TechCrunch 9(00) at August Capital

Posted on July 29, 2007 ·

The wait is over: what was first dubbed as the Second Annual TechCrunch Meet-up at August Capital is now officially TechCrunch 9. If you attended TechCrunch 7 at August Capital last year, and are wondering what you may have missed… relax: # 8 was the New York Party – proof that there is entrepreneurial life outside Silicon Valley. (is there? )

When Mike Arrington published the participant list, I dropped it in a spreadsheet to get a quick count: it was 809! Considering that last year with 500 on the list we were 700 , I figured 1000 would be a safe bet.. and started to wonder if August Capital’s huge terrace is strong enough to hold 1000 people. Security was stronger than last year, so perhaps that explains why the final turnout was around 900. Here’s a snapshot of the TechCrunch 900, courtesy of Jeremiah Owyang.

I’ve made a strategic mistake: got “stuck” with some long-not-seen friends in a corner, and before I realized it, the party was already winding down. As I browse through the photos by Mike Arrington, Scott Beale, Jeremiah, Thomas Hawk, Dan Farber, Brian Solis and others, I’m surprised to see many familiar faces of friends I haven’t bumped into at the party.

I actually wonder if the best-informed “attendees” were those who were not even present. UStream.tv as well as competitor Kyte.tv broadcasted the event to the World, along with a chat room, so the total number was definitely in the thousands. Centernetwork’s Allen Stern liveblogged the party – from 2958 miles away, based on the Ustream.tv feed and chat room.

What a difference a year makes! Sarah Myers got thrown out last year as party-crasher; this year she was officially invited (hey I like the new hair-style) what’s more, if anyone is interested in not just the party details, but the (mostly) startups demo-ing their ware, there’s hardly a better summary than Sarah’s video:

Wow, that’s 16 companies in 2 minutes. Congrat’s to Sarah and the interviewees, almost all were concise, delivered the message. If I may give some advice, when you have 10 seconds, don’t waste it on phrases like “revolutionary product”. It may very well be, but it does not tell me what you do…

But I don’t want to be the judge – much rather have you, dear reader pick the best and worst pitch. Please do it in the poll below – you’ll need to scroll down to get the full list, and if you read this in your feed, you may have to click through.

Update (7/30): Please vote based on the video pitch above, not what you’ve seen at the party, if you were there.

Last, but not least, this was the first TechCrunch party where tickets were “sold” for a nominal fee of $10 – the proceeds were matched by TechCrunch and a total of $10,000 was donated to Kipp Bayview Academy towards the purchase of new computer equipment.