The Lean Hardware Startup: Investing in Hardware Startups

At Not Just The News, the privacy of our visitors is of extreme importance to us (See this article to learn more about Privacy Policies.). This privacy policy document outlines the types of personal information is received and collected by Not Just The News and how it is used.

Log Files

Like many other Web sites, Not Just The News makes use of log files. The information inside the log files includes internet protocol (IP) addresses, type of browser, Internet Service Provider (ISP), date/time stamp, referring/exit pages, and number of clicks to analyze trends, administer the site, track user"s movement around the site, and gather demographic information. IP addresses, and other such information are not linked to any information that is personally identifiable.

Cookies and Web Beacons

Not Just The News does use cookies to store information about visitors preferences, record user-specific information on which pages the user access or visit, customize Web page content based on visitors browser type or other information that the visitor sends via their browser.

DoubleClick DART Cookie

• Google, as a third party vendor, uses cookies to serve ads on Not Just The News.


• Google"s use of the DART cookie enables it to serve ads to users based on their visit to Not Just The News and other sites on the Internet.


• Users may opt out of the use of the DART cookie by visiting the Google ad and content network privacy policy at the following URL - http://www.google.com/privacy_ads.html.

These third-party ad servers or ad networks use technology to the advertisements and links that appear on Not Just The News send directly to your browsers. They automatically receive your IP address when this occurs. Other technologies ( such as cookies, JavaScript, or Web Beacons ) may also be used by the third-party ad networks to measure the effectiveness of their advertisements and / or to personalize the advertising content that you see.

Not Just The News has no access to or control over these cookies that are used by third-party advertisers.

You should consult the respective privacy policies of these third-party ad servers for more detailed information on their practices as well as for instructions about how to opt-out of certain practices. Not Just The News"s privacy policy does not apply to, and we cannot control the activities of, such other advertisers or web sites.

If you wish to disable cookies, you may do so through your individual browser options. More detailed information about cookie management with specific web browsers can be found at the browser"s respective websites.

The Lean Hardware Startup: Investing in Hardware Startups

On-Demand Ride-Sharing Startup Lyft Is Raising Another Big Round Of Funding

At Not Just The News, the privacy of our visitors is of extreme importance to us (See this article to learn more about Privacy Policies.). This privacy policy document outlines the types of personal information is received and collected by Not Just The News and how it is used.

Log Files

Like many other Web sites, Not Just The News makes use of log files. The information inside the log files includes internet protocol (IP) addresses, type of browser, Internet Service Provider (ISP), date/time stamp, referring/exit pages, and number of clicks to analyze trends, administer the site, track user"s movement around the site, and gather demographic information. IP addresses, and other such information are not linked to any information that is personally identifiable.

Cookies and Web Beacons

Not Just The News does use cookies to store information about visitors preferences, record user-specific information on which pages the user access or visit, customize Web page content based on visitors browser type or other information that the visitor sends via their browser.

DoubleClick DART Cookie

• Google, as a third party vendor, uses cookies to serve ads on Not Just The News.


• Google"s use of the DART cookie enables it to serve ads to users based on their visit to Not Just The News and other sites on the Internet.


• Users may opt out of the use of the DART cookie by visiting the Google ad and content network privacy policy at the following URL - http://www.google.com/privacy_ads.html.

These third-party ad servers or ad networks use technology to the advertisements and links that appear on Not Just The News send directly to your browsers. They automatically receive your IP address when this occurs. Other technologies ( such as cookies, JavaScript, or Web Beacons ) may also be used by the third-party ad networks to measure the effectiveness of their advertisements and / or to personalize the advertising content that you see.

Not Just The News has no access to or control over these cookies that are used by third-party advertisers.

You should consult the respective privacy policies of these third-party ad servers for more detailed information on their practices as well as for instructions about how to opt-out of certain practices. Not Just The News"s privacy policy does not apply to, and we cannot control the activities of, such other advertisers or web sites.

If you wish to disable cookies, you may do so through your individual browser options. More detailed information about cookie management with specific web browsers can be found at the browser"s respective websites.

On-Demand Ride-Sharing Startup Lyft Is Raising Another Big Round Of Funding

Cory Booker"s Start-Up Still Soliciting Investors As He Runs For Senate

Eric Lach August 14, 2013, 4:59 PM

Waywire, a small video aggregation website, continues to court potential investors even as its most famous co-founder, Newark, N.J. Mayor Cory Booker, runs for an all-but-assured seat in the U.S. Senate.

Booker, who won the New Jersey Senate Democratic primary on Tuesday, has said that if he is elected he will step down from the company’s board and put his holdings in a public trust. But in the meantime, a company spokesperson told TPM on Wednesday, Waywire is still looking for funding much as it did before Booker got in the race.

“It’s been the same,” Waywire spokesperson Michele Clarke said, when asked to describe Booker’s participation in the company’s latest funding round, which began last year and is ongoing.

Booker’s role in the company — he recently disclosed that his stake in Waywire was worth between $ 1 million and $ 5 million — was spotlighted in a New York Times front-page story last week. The article detailed how the company raised $ 1.75 million last year thanks to Booker’s network of powerful friends and supporters, including Oprah Winfrey, Google’s Eric Schmidt, and LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman.

Set up in March 2012 by Booker and two tech world executives, Nathan Richardson and Sarah Ross, Waywire bills itself as a place to “discover the best video from across the web via the sources you choose and trust.” Booker told the Times that it had not been difficult to raise the money “because of the power of the idea,” but the young company has already had to lay off at least eight workers and give up its office space in Manhattan.

As a privately held company, Waywire does not disclose financial details, and the company’s spokesperson declined to tell TPM how much money the company had raised in the ongoing round or from whom the investments had come. But she did say it was wrong to suggest that Booker had raised the company’s first $ 1.75 million all by himself.

“All three of the cofounders work together,” Clarke said, referring to the company’s fundraising. “There’s two ways it happens. One is that people approach the company. And that happens, and that continues to happen. Unsolicited. And then the other way is that there would be people in their professional networks, all three of them, who they may make an introduction for the other cofounders.”

TPM asked Clarke if Booker had been involved in presentations to potential investors since kicking off his Senate campaign this June. Clarke said that “discussions are ongoing with people,” but that she did not believe Booker had been involved in any meetings since he formally began to run.

“I know that the co-founder who is the CEO has done a couple of meetings, and I know that the co-founder who is the chief marketing officer has done a couple of meetings,” Clarke said. “But I don’t know about [Booker].”

Clarke told TPM she would confirm whether or not Booker had met with potential investors since his campaign began. But minutes later, she called back to criticize TPM’s use of the word “ridiculous” in the headline of Tuesday’s story about Booker and Waywire. She subsequently sent TPM an email detailing “the success points that #waywire is experiencing.”

“To folks who understand the economics and progression of start-ups and early-stage companies, this is strong progress,” Clarke wrote.

Clarke pointed out that the company is still in beta testing, that it has created a proprietary technology allowing users to “assemble video collections using videos from anywhere on the Web,” and that the website’s number of registered users is up to 29,000.

“So thanks in advance for removing the word ‘ridiculous’ from the headline, as it is inaccurate and has no basis in fact or support from the content in your post,” Clarke wrote.

Clarke did not respond before publication time to TPM’s questions about Booker’s attendance at meetings with potential investors. In response to similar questions from TPM, the Booker Senate campaign sent the following statement:

“Mayor Booker has no day-to-day responsibilities with #waywire. He does have occasional discussion with the management team, Board and existing investors, consistent with his role as a co-founder.”

Cory Booker, Waywire

Eric Lach

Eric Lach is a reporter for TPM. From 2010 to 2011, he was a news writer in charge of the website’s front page. He has previously written for The Daily, NewYorker.com, GlobalPost and other publications. He can be reached at ericl(at)talkingpointsmemo.com

TPM News

Cory Booker"s Start-Up Still Soliciting Investors As He Runs For Senate

Transactional Big Data Startup ERN Bolsters Its Analytics By Acquiring Elucidata, Inspired Analytics

ERN, the London-headquartered startup that’s planning to use Big Data to enable banks and merchants to create loyalty-based offers for cardholders, has acquired two U.K. companies to bolster the analytics side of its platform.

In a transaction consisting of “undisclosed fees and stock”, the company has purchased Inspired Analytics, which offers analytical consultancy services — specifically to help design and build production analytics solutions — and Elucidata, which also provides consultancy and specialises in “data strategy and high-complexity, regulated data implementations”.

As a result, Jim Jeffrey, Inspired Analytics’ Director of Analytics, will become ERN’s Analytics Director, and James Baldwin, Managing Director of Elucidata, will become Managing Director of ERN’s Analytical Consulting Division. If it smells like an acqui-hire, it probably is an acqu-hire, though a spokesperson for ERN stressed that the acquisitions are for both the tech and the teams of the respective companies.

Meanwhile, ERN is announcing yet another round of seed funding. This time it amounts to a further $ 1 million, once again from unnamed high-net worth individuals, all of whom have previously helped finance the startup to the tune of $ 3.6 million. This brings the total raised by the company before it’s shipped a commercial product to $ 4.6 million. As we’ve noted before, Big Data costs big money, not least when you’re gunning to be a major player in the FinTech/transactional data space. However, my understanding is that ERN is on the cusp of announcing its first commercial customer after trials with a number of “household names”. More on that should follow shortly.

ERP’s analytics platform, dubbed “Looop”, enables banks (or more specifically, card issuers) and participating merchants to boost customer loyalty by creating new products and offers based on the analysis of their card transactions. The idea is that by drilling into the Big Data around a customer’s transactional history — after they’ve opted in, of course — individually-tailored offers can be pushed to their smartphone via the Looop app, in the form of an e-coupon redeemable in-store.

In addition to insights gained through mining customers’ transactional Big Data, the targeting of offers can also be geo-fenced e.g. only push an offer when a customer who has previously bought a dress is within a certain radius of the participating store.

The new management personnel picked up via the two acquisitions being announced today are definitely a good fit for ERN’s mission, and presumably should provide in-roads to exactly the type of B2B customers that the young startup is hoping to sign up.

Inspired Analytics’ Jeffrey is the former Head of Data Innovation at Barclaycard Freedom, where he developed “market basket analysis algorithms” for retailers, and was also a Business Partner within Lloyds Banking Group’s Customer Insight area.

Elucidata’s Baldwin also has ties with Barlaycard as former Head of B2B Targeting where he developed the analytics platform for the bank’s cardholder offers programme.

ERN is a pioneering big data technology company, committed to enabling all parties of the payment eco-system to analyse transactional Big Data in order to turn data into insights and insights into action. ERN’s high performance big data analytics platform “LOOOP” enables clients to more fully utilise transactional Big Data to provide insights into consumer lifestyles and behaviours, central to the evolution of lifetime consumer value models, acquisition, retention and loyalty strategies and business development. As a high performance…

→ Learn more

TechCrunch

Transactional Big Data Startup ERN Bolsters Its Analytics By Acquiring Elucidata, Inspired Analytics