Uncrunched

I don’t know anyone who still uses the phone company for phone service. We’ve all switched to Comcast, Vonage or Ooma. But wow, it’s still expensive. Comcast charges $45 for phone service (less as part of my $170 internet-tv-phone bundle). Vonage is minimum $13/month for limited minutes with unlimited incoming. Ooma only charges taxes and regulatory fees, but it’s a few dollars a month and the hardware isn’t cheap.

I’m going in a different direction.

I stripped my cable subscription down to pure Internet. It’s guaranteed 22 mbps (I get a steady 15 mbps) and it costs $80 a month, all in. TV and phone are gone.

I bought this device for $45 the other day (shipping included) – the OBi100. It’s much like a Vonage ATA. You plug Internet, electricity and a phone into it. What it doesn’t have is any kind of service, so on its own all you can do is call other OBiTalk users.

You CAN, however, log into Google Voice with with device and use that as your phone service. And since Google Voice is free (for now), there are exactly zero charges for this setup.

Sayonara, Comcast Phone.

I set the device up yesterday, total time was about 20 minutes. It’s plugged directly into my home’s phone network so all the phone jacks work. I’ve been testing it for a day and it works as well as the Comcast phone did. And it’s totally free.

The only issue I can’t resolve is I can’t seem to get call screening to work properly, although I’m guessing I’ll figure it out when I pay enough attention to it.

This is a beautiful add-on service for Google Voice. Google should be building ATAs themselves and selling them to users without any setup hassle at all. Until then, though, I’m happy with this setup. And even happier with the zero dollars I’m now paying for home phone service.

Not many people had heard of Gtar, a fully digital guitar that works with an iOS device, a week ago.

But then they launched at TechCrunch Disrupt, eventually coming in second in the startup competition.

They also launched a Kickstarter campaign to let people support the project and pre-order guitars. Sales shot up immediately. By wednesday they were selling one every few minutes. As of today they’ve raised a whopping $232,251. I ordered two.

Not bad for a week’s work.

Here’s an email founder Idan Beck (pictured above with long time girlfriend Stacey Sumsum Rivet) sent out to all Kickstarter supporters this morning:

Project Update #1: Thank You!!
Posted by Incident
Hey everybody,

We’re completely blown away by the overwhelming support we’ve received for this project and it would not be possible without all of you. We hit our goal in about 11 hours and doubled it in just a few days. We’ve just returned home after spending the entire week in New York City presenting at TechCrunch Disrupt, where after a close call in the finals, we took 2nd place. Regardless of the outcome, we had a blast being there and even sold a few gTars to the judges.

To everybody who’s been reaching out – thank you! We’re reading all of your e-mails, messages, comments, and other communications, it’s just taking us a little while to respond, so thank you in advance for your patience. Many of you have asked whether we’re building a left-handed gTar or designing the gTar to account for potential changes in the next version of the iPhone. We’ve been hard at work with our team in China to explore these issues and others – we will answer them on this forum as soon as we are able.

Thanks again for all your support! We’re exploring different possibilities for a potential second color option and will be posting t-shirt designs soon – so if you’re interested in staying up to date on the conversation, check us out on Facebook and Twitter as well – we want your feedback!

I’m sitting backstage at TechCrunch Disrupt. I’m introduced to (let’s call her) Mary, a 22 year old recent college grad. She spends ten minutes setting up a science experiment on my desk. There are jokes about how she managed to get this thing through airport security. She then performs the closest thing to magic I’ve seen in a long time.

Stuff like that is what makes my job so much fun. In a year or so when this thing is productized you’ll be hearing a lot more about Mary.

I’ve only been skimming the news about Facebook’s IPO over the last 24 hours, but two or three times now I’ve read that Facebook’s CFO David Ebersman “decided” to increase the size of the offering at the last minute. Example (and, shame on the WSJ for just publishing what was fed to them).

This is the fall guy. This is the guy that I suspect Facebook is throwing to the wolves. Because someone has to be thrown to the wolves.

Some would say this is exactly what CFOs are for. The wolves.

Obviously Ebersman didn’t make the decision in a vacuum. If he did then Zuckerberg and the board are really to blame for not paying attention (something none of the stories mention). This was a joint decision by Facebook management and Morgan Stanley.

The whole Morgan Stanley mess isn’t over yet, either. There’s another very big part of the story that I’ve heard whispered at TC Disrupt that hasn’t broken yet. I may track that down tomorrow after the conference if it’s still unpublished.

I refer back to my Facebook IPO Spin article, which in hindsight looks 100% right. I wouldn’t be surprised to see Reuters reporters get subpoenaed at some point as lawmakers try to find out more about their sources.

All this aside, I still think Facebook has a certain destiny to fulfill. They completely blew their IPO from a psychology standpoint. But I like Facebook as a stock. I bought some shares on Monday below the IPO price. That’s both a disclosure and a statement of my belief that they’ll be growing significantly in the future. CrunchFund also owns some shares in Facebook from an acquisition that took place recently.

I’m happy to announce that Dave Feldman has joined CrunchFund as our first Entrepreneur-In-Residence (EIR).

Dave has deep product and engineering experience. Most recently he was at AOL as Senior Director, Special Projects. He volunteered to lead the TechCrunch rebuild last year despite the fact that he worked in a completely separate group under Brad Garlinghouse and did a spectacular job getting the various internal and external designers and engineers to work together (just to be clear, this was one of his least challenging technical efforts). He was well known at AOL as an excellent product executive who didn’t mind getting his hands dirty in the actual code while dealing with the internal politics that come with any large organization. His team was particularly loyal to him.

Prior to AOL Dave was Director of User Experience at Yahoo. He has a computer science degree from Harvard.

When Dave left AOL a few months ago we talked about his desire to build his own company. He’s knee deep in that process now, although he’s still figuring out the team and final product. We’re honored to have him join us as he continues that journey, and look forward to tapping into his leisure time to help us with all this venture capital stuff.

You can follow Dave on Twitter here, and at his personal blog Operation Project.

Dueling Facebook IPO demand stories today:

Bloomberg at 4:53 am: Facebook IPO Said to Get Weaker-Than-Forecast Demand

Reuters at 5:53 am: Facebook’s IPO already oversubscribed: source

Confusing? Yep.

Here’s what’s going on.

The Bloomberg story broke and team Facebook (the company and their investment bankers) reacted, choosing Reuters to voice the counter message.

Bloomberg was first and has named sources. Reuters is all “people close to” sources.

Since the company’s in a quiet period, all the positive stuff they and their bankers say has to be off record. But it’s still worth noting that the first story has named sources, the second (reactive) story has none.

Still, you can’t read much into that. The Reuters story (fed by team Facebook) would read the same whether the Bloomberg story was correct or not.

My sources say that the road show is a bit slow and investors don’t like some of what they’re seeing. In particular, the massive move users seem to be making to mobile.

That doesn’t mean Facebook’s IPO is failing. Not even close. But from what I can tell right now the Bloomberg story is correct, and the Reuters story isn’t.

As an aside, I haven’t talked much about IPOs over the years much because, well, there haven’t been many of them.

But as a lawyer I worked on dozens of IPOs and other public offerings in the late 90s, and the games that are played are fantastically entertaining. Deal psychology is very important and monitored closely.

Interesting line in PandoDaily’s article a couple of days ago about TechCrunch – “Kara Swisher was kicking some tires [about buying TechCrunch] to add the brands to the expanding All Things D franchise.”

Then a full retraction yesterday:

There’s only one part of yesterday’s story that I regret, and that’s mentioning Kara Swisher as a possible buyer. That was my screw up. Sarah didn’t want to put it in, because Swisher hadn’t responded to her attempts to contact her for confirmation. I had heard the “tire kicking” rumour from someone who was in a position to know, and so I felt it important to include Swisher in the paragraph speculating on possible buyers. When Swisher and Sarah finally spoke, Swisher flatly denied the suggestion, adding that her statements about wanting to buy TechCrunch had been just a joke.

Kara’s tweets on the first story:

I founded TechCrunch, so my interest level in hearing the truth about anyone trying to buy it is high. So I called a few people to track down where the story came from.

And here’s what I found. Swisher contacted multiple TechCrunch employees, AOL executives and others about buying TechCrunch earlier this year. She definitely had a “ha ha” attitude about it, but said that Tim Armstrong had personally reached out to her about buying TechCrunch, that “It’s not getting sold for real money,” and that she wanted to know how the writers would, ha ha, feel about her taking over.

Her relationship with News Corp. is less than perfect and, say multiple sources, News Corp. vetoed her attempt to staff up big after the TechCrunch disintegration late last year, to fill that void. Her contract with News Corp. is up in 2013, she hasn’t been happy with that relationship and is looking for a way to move on, say sources who spoke with her.

Hilarious.

Why?

Rocky Agrawal, who writes regularly for VentureBeat, is getting some criticism on Twitter for slamming Groupon repeatedly without disclosing that he has financial bets against the company.

A recent post – Why Groupon Now won’t work, where he heavily criticizes the company. Or yesterday – Why Andrew Mason is still wrong about Groupon’s prospects, where he again criticizes the company.

None of these posts have any disclosure of his short position or various bets on the company’s downfall. He does list all of those on his personal blog. One example: “I have a bet with Mark Rogowsky that Groupon goes to zero by 4/5/13. I can claim early if it is delisted for being worthless.”

He also apparently attempted but failed to get directed shares in the IPO at the offering price. Which is weird (that he tried) given how negative he is on the company.

VentureBeat, which has occasionally (and erroneously) criticized TechCrunch over ethical issues, needs to button this up.

The issue isn’t that Agrawal has a short position and is criticizing the company, in my opinion. Transparency in such a situation is fine by me (the SEC might be a different issue). The issue is that there’s no disclosure in the post, or even on the author page. And his personal blog isn’t linked from that author page, either.

The disclosure needs to be right up front in each and every blog post he discusses Groupon. Anything else is dishonest and unfair to readers and Groupon.

I note with interest that Agrawal thought the Yahoo CEO resume issue was about Silicon Valley snobbery over computer science degrees. It wasn’t about that, it was about the character of the man running Yahoo.

Similarly, this issue isn’t about the conflict of interest (to me at least). It’s about the failure to disclose it in the posts.

I should also add by way of disclosure that Agrawal wrote guest posts for TechCrunch for a time in 2011, before their IPO. We stopped working with him for a variety of non-ethical reasons.

Transparency. Truth. Bias.

Google tells me to be on the lookout for a better Google+ notification experience in email in the next week.

And by “email” they mean Gmail. And by “better” they mean more precious email real estate given up to a service that I don’t use. And by “to users who’ve upgraded to Google+” they mean everyone, since you can’t seem to get rid of Google+ no matter what you do.

Yay.

Great products are not forced on users. Google’s a little more like Microsoft every day.

Thank God for IMAP.