SimpleGeo, the once promising location startup, has been acquired, I’ve heard. The buyer is Urban Airship.

This is an all stock acquisition apparently, totaling around $3.5 million in value. Since SimpleGeo has raised nearly $10 million in venture capital, it’s likely that all or nearly all of the acquisition price would go to the last round investors due to their liquidity preference.

It’s a soft landing for SimpleGeo. But at least the service may live on.

Urban Airship has raised $6.5 million.

After 42 successful weekly auctions of shares of Facebook stock, SecondMarket hit a snag – they weren’t able to make a market between buyers and sellers in the 43rd, and no sales were closed. The same thing happened in the 44th auction, no sales.

Things have changed this week, though. And it was the sellers who folded, not the buyers.

The weighted average offer (sell) price in today’s auction was $32.37 (down from $32.42 last week). The weighted average bid (buy) price was $28.47, unchanged from last week. The clear price was an even $30 per share.

And just 14,000 shares closed ($420,000 in aggregate). About 130,000 shares, nearly 10x the volume, were purchased in Auction 42 three weeks ago.

See also: FACEBOOK WILL PROBABLY BE MORE PROFITABLE THAN AMAZON THIS YEAR

“I don’t think Mike Arrington is a racist” – Angela Benton

It’s never a good day when people you don’t know are having a raging Internet debate about whether or not you’re a racist. But that’s exactly what’s happening, thanks to CNN.

In July CNN reached out to me and AOL to ask if I’d do an on camera interview with Soledad O’Brien. Not A SINGLE WORD about the actual topic of the interview. Here’s their pitch:

We are producing, what we think is the first major broadcast news documentary on the Silicon Valley accelerator phenomenon and start-up culture. In this culture, Michael Arrington is God and TechCrunch is the bible.

The CNN “In America” documentary unit, led by special correspondent and anchor Soledad O’Brien, has produced a number of award winning long form documentaries.

This particular documentary will be told through the experience of a group of digital entrepreneurs who travel to Silicon Valley to chase their dreams.

Obviously Michael is extremely knowledgeable about the valley/start up culture and the rise of accelerator programs, as chronicled minute by minute in Tech Crunch. We would like Michael to share some insight into the allure of tech entrepreneurship… what drives people to pour their blood, sweat and tears into these startups? Who succeeds? Who fails? and why?

We would love to have Soledad conduct a brief interview with Michael when she is in Silicon Valley in July.

This documentary will air in November.

Any questions – please let us know.

Kimberly Arp Babbit
Producer
CNN In America with Soledad O’Brien

I ignored the request as I do most press inquiries. Generally it’s a waste of time.

AOL was excited, though, and pestered me to do it. My internal response was “I really don’t like these things very much. But it may be good to have them at our july event, the party.” I was thinking they’d go to the party, shoot some footage, and go away.

But I was talked into it by AOL. And so I showed up for this thing, thinking that we were talking about accelerators – Y Combinator and the like. Nothing in their first email, or any subsequent email, told me that this was going to be about the lack of minorities in Silicon Valley. I came prepared to talk about Y Combinator stats and how awesome these programs are.

In fact, CNN went to great lengths to hide the truth about the topic of the interview, as you can see from their email above.

So I sit down in the chair, with lights on me from everywhere and Soledad in my face and she starts asking me why there aren’t any black entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley.

It took me a while to catch up.

Very early in the interview she asked me to name my favorite black entrepreneur. I thought about it, and I drew a complete blank. Nothing. So I answered honestly. “I don’t know a single black entrepreneur,” I said.

See, my brain database doesn’t categorize people in terms of skin color. Or hair color. Or sexual orientation. When I queried that database, under stressful circumstances, I got zero results.

The interview went on for 45 minutes or so after that, and I amended my statements. I talked about Clarence Wooten, the CEO of Arrived. Wooten has been my friend since the mid 90’s, and I was his lawyer for his first startup, a wildly successful company that made Wooten rich. I’ve followed his career and I’m now a shareholder in Arrived. And tons of other friends and acquaintances who are black popped into my head as well.

CNN has apparently edited most of that out. Or at least they’re not highlighting it along with the gotcha statement.

But mostly we talked about why there are so few non Asian minorities getting funded in Silicon Valley. My answer is that none are asking, nor are they asking for press on TechCrunch. When we met them, we wrote about them.

The problem, I said, was that there weren’t enough minorities getting computer science degrees, or otherwise finding entryways into Silicon Valley. To fix the problem, we need to fix that.

Soledad was following NewMe, an accelerator for black entrepreneurs, for the documentary. She wanted to know if I’d heard about it.

Nope.

But I said that sounded awesome, just like the accelerators for women entrepreneurs. That we always write about.

And after the interview I asked Alexia at TechCrunch to cover NewMe’s demo day, which we did, enthusiastically.

And I went on with my life, thinking that the interview as a whole would show my true enthusiasm for supporting startups founded by minorities and women.

Nope.

CNN used the quote and nothing else I said (apparently) in a clip of the upcoming documentary. And today they put this “controversy” as the top story on CNN.com, outranking all other world news, with a huge picture of me. Various CNN staff enthusiastically retweeted the story.

It’s been a strange day, dealing with racial hatred coming at me on Twitter from people who have no idea what I said or didn’t say. Having debates with some of the black entrepreneurs I know about why I blanked on them during the interview, and whether or not there is some hidden bias in Silicon Valley against black entrepreneurs. And my statement that there’s actually reverse bias because everyone is falling all over themselves to invest in minorities and women (which sparks new outrage).

Anyway, there are actually some great things going on which can really help solve this problem. At Google Zeitgeist I sat with Will.i.am, Ron Conway, Larry Page, and others over lunch. Will.i.am was proposing an ambitious new idea to help get inner city youth (mostly minorities) to begin to see superstar entrepreneurs as the new role models, instead of NBA stars. He believes that we can effect real societal change by getting young people to learn how to program, and realize that they can start businesses that will change the world.

I said I’d support that in every way I can, and to let me know when, to start things off, I can write about it.

So anyway, I just don’t feel like a racist. Even though many, many people are telling me that I am and that I just don’t know it.

I wish CNN had told me the topic of the interview so that I could come prepared. Maybe check out NewMe beforehand, and some of the amazing black entrepreneur role models that are part of Silicon Valley.

But, really, that isn’t what CNN wanted. Soledad told me afterwards how much she loved that killer question. “Everyone pulls a blank, it’s perfect,” she said. No one she interviewed had any idea that the real topic was about minority entrepreneurs.

“Perfect” meaning she could make hay out of it at other people’s expense.

Because the fact is that it’s awesome that I pulled a blank. It’s awesome that I don’t have a fucking perfect sound bite ready at the tip of my tongue for a question like that. Awesome because I don’t categorize people as black or white or gay or straight in my head. They’re just smart or not smart.

It sounds like a cliche but my reaction on camera proves I’m not just saying that. I know tons of black entrepreneurs and, clearly, it would have been in my best interest to name them (and if I had CNN would have cut that out and never aired it).

I may be the poster child for racial ignorance in Silicon Valley, but my motives are pure and I always have and always will do anything to help out the underdog. Frankly, I’ll invest my time in people like Will.i.am, who are actually trying to fix the problem at the root level. Soledad, not so much. Even the NewMe people are complaining that she turned their very serious effort to promote black entrepreneurs into a circus by lying to people they interviewed about the topic and then hyper editing the footage to grab all the gotcha moments. I feel bad for them, this is all at their expense.

Maybe now some of you can begin to understand why I never wanted to be called a “journalist” at TechCrunch. It is a shameful profession.

I’m turning comments off on this post.

So CrunchFund invested in Codecademy, along with Union Square Ventures and a whole pack of others.

Codecademy teaches people how to code. Starting with the assumption that you know absolutely nothing at all about coding. It eases you in by asking you to type in your name.

And, suddenly, you’re coding.

It gets a lot harder from there. But it walks you through it. Short description of what you want to do, why, and how. Then you do it. Then the next step. There are hints, but sometimes it’s not enough and you have to go back and re-take a previous lesson. The best part are the achievement badges that you get every few steps. Seriously, before you know if you’ve spent two hours on the site and know a smidgen of javascript. And, it was fun.

I also like that Codecademy is asking users to create new lessons. They have a tool for creating it and released it to 50 people. Ten high quality lessons came out of it and Codecademy will be releasing them soon.

There’s a great reason for investing. The service came out of nowhere in the summer Y Combinator class and launched in August.

That’s two months since launch. 750,000 people have used it. It’s growing like crazy every day.

There are hugely obvious business models down the road. Particularly talent spotting and steering those people into the right jobs.

Codecademy says that their goal is to become the way that anyone can learn complex coding concepts, even people who’ve never coded before.

Future of Learning?

What really excites me about Codecademy is that you can learn almost anything this way. The service comes from CEO Zach Sims wanting to learn how to code. Cofounder Ryan Bubinski had been teaching people to code for years as a side job in college, and he found that this approach – short explanation, then go do it, then talk again, with everything in small constantly reinforced increments, really worked.

All I can think of is how if this was around when I was in college I may have actually learned calculus this way. I got a B in that class but I can clearly remember at the time being completely lost, and anything I did learn is now permanently wiped from my brain.

I’d still have gone to college because college was four years of concentrated fun. But who learns anything in college? Not me. I needed something like Codecademy.

I’m very excited to see how this turns out. Meanwhile, I’ve earned two badges on Codecademy – “first lesson” and “ten exercises completed.” I’ve never been so proud of a virtual badge on my screen.

A few months ago Daily Booth CEO Brian Pokorny told me that most of his team was working on a second product. “What is it?” I asked, “A mobile photo sharing app?”

I was joking, because everyone and their mother seemed to launch a mobile photo sharing app in the last year or so, to the point that we groaned whenever we saw a new one.

“Yes. And it’s going to liberate the countless photos that everyone has stuck in their phones.”

“Ha ha. Seriously?”

“Yes.”

“No, you’re not serious.”

“Yes.”

“Hah.”

And so the conversation went. I didn’t believe him until he pulled out his iPhone and showed me an early internal version of Batch, his new mobile photo sharing app.

Batch is now in the iPhone app store.

And it is absolutely amazing.

Batch allows people to create albums, called “Batches,” with photos from an event or whatever. Yeah, not so exciting. But it lets you auto upload them as you take them from the app, and you can mass select photos already stuck on your iPhone as well.

That last sentence is the important one. We all have hundreds or thousands of photos on our phones that we’ve never bothered to upload to Facebook or Flickr. Batch makes it exceptionally easy to do that, dozens at a time.

You sign in via Facebook, so it already knows your friends. Tagging them into Batches is really easy as well. They’ve taken a lot of time with the interface and it’s both beautiful, fast and functional.

It’s the perfect app to add to my new iPhone (with Google Voice!). Android users will have to wait a bit to use it.

Photos can be kept private or shared with others. It’s amazing seeing notifications pop up in real time as new photos are added to a Batch while you’re still at an event.

There are some features I’d like to see them add to Batch soon. Multiple people can’t contribute to a single Batch, they have to create their own. So there will be multiple Batches at a single event when all your friends start using this.

I’d also like to have the ability to tag photos, not just batches. And I’d like to be able to download or bookmark individual photos as well. Right now you can only see a list of all Batches you’ve been tagged in. That’s great, but over time that list will become unmanageable.

But the app as it is today is absolutely great, and I’ll be using it constantly. As I tag friends at events they’ll get notifications on Facebook, so they can see the photos. This will spread fast.

As for Daily Booth – Pokorny says it’s still growing nicely (they just passed 1 million users), and the team will continue to develop both products. The company has raised about $7 million to date. It was originally part of Y Combinator.

Try this. You’ll love it.

If you’ve used Uber, there’s a good chance you love it. The company lets users request an immediate black car service from a mobile app. The car usually arrives in a few minutes and takes you wherever you want to go. The fee is automatically charged to your credit card on file.

The service launched in Summer 2010. By February of this year they’d raised $12.5 million, with Benchmark leading the most recent round. That valued the company at $60 million.

Now, Uber says it’s worth $300 million. At least that’s what it’s telling venture capitalists while pitching a new round of financing. Some have passed. But others are still at the table.

Redfin has a classic disruption model. Find a huge inefficient industry (in this case real estate broker fees) and then rip it apart to make consumers happy. The overall size of the market shrinks. But there are huge profits to be made. Investor Josh Kopelman calls it “Shrink a Market!”

Back in 2006 when I first wrote about Redfin this was all just a dream. The company had sold a few homes in the Seattle market, representing buyers instead of traditional brokers and dealers. They then reimbursed 2/3 of the fee back to the buyer, averaging $11,402.

They’ve grown substantially since then. Redfin is now available in twenty or so areas. Since launching in 2006 they’ve represented buyers and sellers in more than $6 billion in home sales, returning a whopping $85 million to consumers. The average reimbursement is now $7,000.

The company is announcing a new round of funding today – around $15 million from Globespan Capital Partners and previous investors Venture Group, Vulcan Capital, Draper Fisher Jurvetson and Greylock Partners. To date, the company has raised nearly $46 million. See TechCrunch for more details.

A good day for the Seattle tech scene, and a great day for Redfin. A bad day for the rest of the real estate industry. Adapt or die, because the real estate broker/dealer scam has gone on long enough.

Here’s the press release:

Redfin Raises $14.85 Million Round Led by Globespan Capital Partners

Oct. 27, 2011 – SEATTLE – Redfin Corporation, the technology-powered real estate brokerage, today announced that Globespan Capital Partners has led a $14.85 million investment in the company. Previous investors, including Madrona Venture Group, Vulcan Capital, Draper Fisher Jurvetson and Greylock Partners, also participated in the financing. Prior to this investment, Redfin had raised nearly $31 million, so the new total is almost $46 million.

Redfin, a company of local real estate agents and software engineers working together to give people a smarter way to buy or sell a home, will use the money to launch its service in new cities and to deepen its investment in research and development.

The funding caps another successful year for Redfin. Even as fewer homes have sold nationwide, the company has grown fast. Since launching its service in 2006, Redfin has represented customers in the purchase or sale of more than $6 billion in homes, saving consumers more than $85 million in commissions, an average of more than $7,000 per transaction.

Ninety-seven percent of customers would recommend their Redfin agent to a friend; though Redfin is still most popular among first-time buyers and sellers, the company’s fastest-growth customer segment is now among customers over 45. According to Hitwise, Redfin.com is the U.S.’s fastest-growing brokerage website. Since Redfin tours homes with its own agents, it can publish to its website more than 80,000 notes per year about active listings, which in turn has accelerated traffic growth.

“In Globespan, Redfin has found the perfect partner: an investor committed to customer service as well as technology, who understands from its partners’ Zipcar experience how to grow neighborhood by neighborhood,” said Redfin CEO Glenn Kelman. “Not many venture investors appreciate the different ways in which online and retail businesses grow, and even fewer think about the long-term competitive advantage you can create when the two work together.”

“Globespan invested in Redfin for one big reason: service,” said Globespan Managing Director Venky Ganesan. “We had used the site extensively, and talked to customers, so we knew that this was one of the few companies that could deliver consistently higher-quality service than any of its competitors. The more we learned about Redfin’s single-minded service focus, the more we became convinced that Redfin was building the foundation to lead a market that generates $40 – $60 billion in brokerage fees every year.”

As part of the financing, Globespan Managing Director Venky Ganesan is joining Redfin’s Board of Directors. Before Globespan, Mr. Ganesan founded Trigo, a successful product-information company sold to IBM; he also worked as a consultant at McKinsey in Los Angeles and Johannesburg, South Africa.

Alan Smith of Fenwick & West represented Redfin in the financing.

About Redfin
Redfin is a company of local real estate agents and software engineers working together to give people a smarter way to buy or sell a home. Redfin’s agents handle every facet of a transaction, including tours, pricing analyses, negotiations, inspections and closings. The company pays its agents customer-satisfaction bonuses, not commissions, and surveys every client, publishing each survey alongside the agent’s complete deal history.

Redfin’s service is available in the metropolitan areas of Atlanta, Austin, Baltimore, Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Denver, Las Vegas, Phoenix, Portland (Oregon), Seattle, Washington DC, New York’s Long Island and Westchester County as well as most of California, including the San Francisco Bay Area, Sacramento, Los Angeles, Orange County, San Diego and Palm Springs. To keep track of our daring exploits, subscribe to blog.redfin.com or our Twitter feed @redfin.

Last week I wrote about how Google Voice junkies can, finally, use the service properly with the iPhone 4S (or any other iPhone Sprint sells). No quirky apps to download that can’t take over the address book or call log anyway. Nope. If you’re willing to live with a Sprint iPhone, you can have it use your Google Voice number natively. It just works perfectly.

Background – Google Voice has never worked properly with the iPhone because Apple didn’t want Google to take over that much control over the phone. But a Sprint deal with Google this year gives every Sprint user the option of either (1) using their Sprint number as a Google Voice number, or (2) replace their Sprint number with their existing Google Voice number.

Then Sprint got the iPhone deal and, BINGO, Google Voice just backdoored their way into the iPhone natively. The only way for Apple to stop this now would be to put a policy in place banning it.

But Apple will not create a policy banning Google Voice on Sprint iPhones.

Here’s what you see when you go through the process on Google Voice. I chose #2 because I want to keep using that Google Voice number. Clicked a button, verified the phone with a code and…bam. I got myself the purest idea of a Google Voice phone to date – one that needs no app whatsoever to work, and work perfectly.

Calls, voicemails and text messages all go through the normal iPhone native apps. And I’ll be using all of those all the time because with Sprint’s horrible data speeds (confirmed by me today, just awful), I won’t be doing much Internet stuff on this very pretty phone.

My next purchase will be a 3 watt cell phone booster, DIY converted to backpack form for portability. It won’t be pretty, but I’ll get a signal everywhere I go, right up until the day I die from brain cancer.

You can’t accuse Andreessen Horowitz of spending money too slowly. Their first fund, $300 million, was raised in 2009 and was promptly invested in companies like Skype and Fusion.io. In late 2010 they raised Fund II, a $650 million monster (Groupon, Airbnb, Twitter, Facebook, Zynga, etc.), followed in mid 2011 with a $300 million annex fund (which makes follow on investments from the earlier fund it’s tied to).

That’s a whopping $1.25 billion under management. Andreessen Horowitz is not yet two and a half years old.

Now, double that. The firm is in the early stages of raising a third fund that, says a source who’s seen the documents, will have a target size of $900 million. That’ll mean the firm will have $2.15 billion under management shortly.

If they subsequently raise an annex fund, add another half billion or so to that.

That’s a lot of cheddar.

Recently Andreessen Horowitz has said that they’ve invested in 70 or so companies, about half of them are seed stage investments under $200,000 or so. The new fund will have flexibility to make investments ranging anywhere from $10,000 to $100 million.

See TechCrunch for details. The most important thing to know about this video is that I was holding the microphone (off camera) when they filmed the will.i.am parts. I’d also like to see an animated gif made of Marissa Mayer dancing at 1:47.

Here’s my interview with Mayor Lee at TechCrunch Disrupt in September.

San Francisco and Tech Celebrities Remake “2 Legit 2 Quit” for Mayor Ed Lee

Video Features Brian Wilson, Hammer, Ronnie Lott, will.i.am, Willie Brown

SAN FRANCISCO – A campaign committee supporting Ed Lee for Mayor of San Francisco today launched a remake of Hammer’s “2 Legit 2 Quit” video featuring cameos by San Francisco Giants pitcher Brian Wilson, NFL Hall-of-Famer Ronnie Lott, will.i.am of the Black Eyed Peas, 49ers owner Jed York, former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown, Twitter co-founder Biz Stone, Marissa Mayer of Google, Hunter Walk of youtube, and Hammer himself.

The video was announced through tweets by Brian Wilson and Hammer with the hash tag #fearthestache.

The video was commissioned by Silicon Valley angel investor Ron Conway, head of the campaign committee “San Franciscans for Jobs and Good Government Supporting Ed Lee for Mayor 2011” and was created by Portal A and Ashkon – the production team and performer who teamed up for last year’s viral video hit for the San Francisco Giants, “Don’t Stop Believing.”

“This is a great way to show the support of prominent San Franciscans and tech leaders for Ed Lee,” said Conway. “Since so many San Franciscans are not reached through traditional methods such as phones, TV ads, and mailers this is an innovative tactic to reach voters through social media. We hope it creates a buzz that encourages people to learn about and vote for Ed Lee.”