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Howdy, I'm MG Siegler. I’m a general partner at CrunchFund and a columnist for TechCrunch. This is where I collect things.

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Crowdtilt, a Group Funding Service, Raises Funds of Its Own

Given my love of Kickstarter, it should be no surprise that I’m also extremely excited about a company like Crowdtilt, which is aiming to push the crowd-funding model into real world events. And it should be even less of a surprise that CrunchFund has invested. 

When I first met with co-founder James Beshara to chat about the service, we talked about the episode of Friday Night Lights where Billy and Tyra raise money for the massive party they throw after one of the games. Just imagine if they could Crowdtilt it…

Sold.

TechCrunch has more as well.

Tags tech startups crowdtilt funding crunchfund

The Gong Show: Our Investment in Priceonomics

thegongshow:

A few vertical marketplaces have their own pricing guides. In cars, Kelly Blue Book has been the industry standard for years, and nearly all car purchases use KBB as a starting reference point. Cars are a high ticket item, a considered purchase, and a fairly liquid market, so it’s not surprising…

I’ll echo everything Andrew Parker of Spark Capital wrote about Priceonomics, which CrunchFund has also invested in. I’m a total sucker for this type of data and their simple execution of the “Blue Book for everything” idea is brilliant. 

TechCrunch has a bit more about the company — and the Priceonomics blog is also pretty awesome.

Tags tech crunchfund startups priceonomics

Reblogged from The Gong Show  Source thegongshow

Snapguide Gets Pinterest Integration

This is a smart way to integrate with Pinterest while they work on a proper API — it’s similar to how some apps passed photos to Instagram before they had a proper mobile write API (which is still limited to Hipstamatic, I believe). 

Here’s a quick video showing how it works.

I get the feeling that Pinterest write API access for mobile will be huge. Huge as in, a lot of startups are going to integrate it before they worry about something like Google+. It will be Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest.

Snapguide parent Heavy Bits is a CrunchFund portfolio company. Mainly because they’re awesome. 

Tags tech snapguide heavy bits crunchfund pinterest instagram startups

Just The Facts, Jack. Just The Facts.

I used to be addicted to my RSS reader. Now I basically never use it anymore. I’m not sure the last time I had Google Reader open, but it’s just the backend for Reeder now. And even that is just my “catch all” to check quickly at the end of the day.

Instead, I use Twitter, and Facebook, and Tumblr, and Flipboard, and Pulse, and Techmeme to catch up on the news. I used to think I’d miss things this way. But I don’t. If anything, I get the news faster because humans are faster at tweeting things than Google Reader was at delivering the feeds.

The problem with this method of scanning the news is that it’s not all that scanable. For every news story, there will be 20 other personal tweets or status updates from friends.

That’s where Wavii comes in. The CrunchFund portfolio company launched earlier this week after years (quite literally) in the making. 

At a high level, Wavii takes a look at the news being published on the web and extracts the key elements of any story. It then presents this information in Facebook Newsfeed-esque snippets. So, for example, if “Rovio Mobile warns that fake versions of Angry Birds contain malware designed to attack your Android phone.” — an actual Wavii snippet right now — you can easily read that rather than having to read an entire 500-word story on the issue, hunting for the facts.

…More

Tags tech crunchfund wavii startups

Rethinking Smaller, Smarter Social — Then Rethinking It Again

Back in October of last year, I wrote about one of our early CrunchFund portfolio companies, Everyme. At the time, they were rethinking social networking through the lens of the original digital social network: your mobile phone address book.

They put an app out there and a lot of people were testing it, sending feedback. That’s when the team had a realization: they were onto something, but they weren’t quite there. So they went back to the drawing board and rethought their rethinking of social. The result is the Everyme app launching today.

Address book information is still key, but it’s no longer about recreating your address book to make it social. It’s now about using the connections in there to create small, private networks — called yes, Circles. By syncing your address book information with Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn, Everyme can automatically cluster people together and populate some key Circles for you. Your hometown, your college, your current city, your work, etc.

This is similar in concept to what Google does with Google+ Circles, but the key is that most users won’t have to set up their own. And managing them is much simpler. The concept of Google+ Circles is right, but no one is going to manage them. No one does. It’s flawed.

With Everyme, the idea is to keep the Circles very small. And again, private. There are no options to share things to Twitter and Facebook — this is on purpose.

Everyme Circles are actually closer to Facebook’s Smart Lists, which the social network also populates for you based on relationships. But for many people, Facebook has become too large. It’s a network about sharing as broadly as possible for many now. Everyme is about the people you really know and care about — again, those in your address book.

In using the app and seeing how people are using it today, they definitely have some onboarding issues they need to work out. One great thing about the service is that you don’t need to use the app to use it — you can use email or SMS to interact with Everyme. But the flipside is that people are getting pinged to sign up and have no idea what is going on. They’re undoubtedly working on this.

The fact that so many people are working on smaller, more personal networks is a good sign for Everyme. They’re clearly onto something. With investments in Path, Just.me, and Pair, we’re obviously following this whole space closely as well. 

In the age of the Facebook IPO, the smaller network resonates. And that’s especially true on mobile, which is the most personal form of computing. My hunch is that Everyme isn’t an app that will easily win over the early adopter tech crowd, but it’s something a more mainstream audience should love. 

More coverage on Everyme today from The Next Web, TechCrunch, AllThingsD, and GigaOm.

Tags crunchfund everyme startups tech on

Snapguide

Yesterday, Heavy Bits launched Snapguide, an iPhone app for making and viewing how-to guides.

Since we’re investors in Heavy Bits (through a personal investment Michael brought into the fund), I’ve had the privilege of trying the app out for a couple weeks. It’s both brilliant and beautiful. 

The reality is that co-founder Daniel Raffel probably could have launched the app a couple months ago, but he was beyond meticulous here to make sure everything was just right. The dedication has paid off. 

There are already guides ranging from how to bottle beer to how to make origami birds to how to catch crabs (the kind you eat). The app has exposed my utter lack of expertise in being able to make anything. But now I can learn!

Lots of good coverage yesterday, I like Brit Morin’s who is an ideal user, and has already made a few great guides.

Tags tech crunchfund snapguides startup

Highlight Post-SXSW

Some good thoughts on Highlight (a CrunchFund portfolio company) by my good friend Brenden Mulligan. I wrote up my thoughts leading up to SXSW, Brenden’s thoughts are obviously post-SXSW.

I’m with him that SXSW was far from an ideal place for the app to fully break out for a number of reasons, but remember that Highlight didn’t actually launch at SXSW, it has been out for weeks. Instead, I viewed SXSW as more of an interesting challenge for them to figure out how the service would/will work at scale. I think they learned a lot in a few days.

I also think Brenden focuses too much on one use case: meeting people. It’s easy to see why that is — that’s the most obvious application, and the one that apps in the space have clung to in the past. But in my opinion, if Highlight is to be a success, it won’t be primarily devoted to meeting people. This will always be a part of the app, but ideally just one part. 

I still think we have yet to see the actual break-out application of the app. (Though I do still like this idea.)

I also think it’s extremely important to remember that many of us in the tech sphere are not the end goal in terms of users here. Brenden hits on this towards the end of his post when he talks about why he thinks Highlight can work down the line. I think he’s right.

Just to use networking/meeting people as an example at SXSW, clearly many of us don’t need a way to network more. My schedule, for example, was already packed nearly solid with meetings while I was there. But I remember going to SXSW for the first time a few years ago when I had just taking my first writing gig at VentureBeat. I knew almost no one in the industry. And I was alone in Austin. An app to help guide me to who I should connect with (or at least know) would have been very useful.

Having said that, the networking issue would likely remain from the other side. Even if I wanted to connect with someone, that person may have been busy already. Still, just going up and introducing myself would have been nice. Many people did that to me this year at SXSW, which is great. Hopefully some of them saw that I was around thanks to Highlight.

One more quick related story: I was at brunch one day with Paul Davison, the co-founder of Highlight, in Austin. A young woman came up and tapped him on the shoulder asking if he was the co-founder of Highlight. She had seen that he was nearby on the service and wanted to introduce herself and talk a bit about the app. She went on and on about how she and her group of friends loved the app. 

For those of us who have seen thousands of apps come and go, it’s easy to be cynical. But cynicism doesn’t make or break services; the real world does. 

Tags tech sxsw highlight crunchfund

Brilliant

It’s becoming more and more apparent just how jackasserific Yahoo’s Facebook patent lawsuit really is. At least now some (soon-to-be-former) employees may directly benefit from the stupidity. 

(CrunchFund is happily an investor in Yammer because Sacks does awesome stuff like this.)

Tags tech yahoo yammer crunchfund