THE CRUNCHIES: With Billions At Stake, San Francisco's Tech Elite Take A Night To Celebrate

Thursday night, hundreds of members of the technology elite—founders, investors, hustlers, hackers—gathered at the Louise M. Davies Symphony Hall for the sixth annual Crunchies Awards, a ceremony which celebrates private-stock valuations and product launches instead of box-office scores and film premieres. When a handful of tech blogs launched The Crunchies five years ago, the notion of an awards ceremony for startups modeled after the Oscars seemed like a self-mocking joke—and indeed, few took it seriously at the time. Fast-forward to 2013, and it's clear as day that the tech world has stars like Marissa Mayer, Mark Zuckerberg, Aaron Levie, Brian Chesky, and Kevin Systrom. And arguably, the digital products they launch on the world are far more important than the ephemeral celluloid narratives of Hollywood. We donned a tuxedo, brought our cameras, and took our seats.First stop: a pre-party thrown by Menlo Ventures, the backer of Uber and Fab. Wall Street Journal reporter Evelyn Rusli shared a moment with Box marketer Ashley Mayer. Sarah McBride from Reuters talked to BitTorrent founder Bram Cohen. Menlo also backed Getaround, founded by Jessica Scorpio. See the rest of the story at Business Insider Please follow SAI on Twitter and Facebook.

The 20 Hot Silicon Valley Startups You Need To Watch

We hit accelerators, spoke with VCs, and met with entrepreneurs to find hidden gems startups in Silicon Valley. We selected 20 startups that are on track to become the next big thing. They're startups you probably haven't heard of yet, but we expect you'll hear a lot from them in the future.Anyone can build web apps with Flotype.

Date Founded: October 2010 Founder: Darshan Shankar, Sridatta Thatipamala, Eric Zhang Concept: Web technology that enables everyone, from startups to enterprises, to easily build large-scale, real-time web applications. Location: Berkeley, CA Funding: Y-Combinator invested $20,000, plus additional financing from others Why You Should Care: Flotype was a Y-Combinator winter 2010 company. NowJS is its main product. The startup is just six months old, but it's on track to generate $1 million in revenue. The founders are young and scrappy too. All three are 19-year-old UC Berkeley engineering dropouts. "NowJS is doing BIG things with some huge clients building things off them," a startup executive tells us. GetAround lets users rent cars from each other.

Date Founded/Launched: September 10, 2009 Founders: Sam Zaid (CEO), Elliot Kroo (Director of Engineering) Concept: Rent cars from other drivers when they're not in use. Location: San Francisco, CA Funding: $1.5 million, including $50,000 for winning TechCrunch Disrupt Why You Should Care: Renting expensive items, like clothing and apartments, has proven to be a promising business model for Rent The Runway and AirBNB. The same model for cars makes sense. GetAround took home first place at this year's TechCrunch Disrupt NYC. The team is working on a cool mobile app to accompany the service too. It gives renters a secure set of mobile car keys; no physical set is needed to rent and start the vehicle. Hotel Tonight lets you book last-minute, overnight stays at discounted rates.

Date Founded: 2010 Founder: Sam Shank Concept: Make a last minute hotel reservation (hip, elegant, or basic) from your phone for a discounted price. Location: San Francisco, CA Funding: Raised $3.25 million series A from Battery Ventures, Accel Partners, First Round Capital and angels Rich Barton, Erik Bachford, Brad Gerstner and Hugh Crean. Why You Should Care: It's been named "best travel app" by Travel & Leisure, and it has been raved about in TechCrunch, CNET, The LA Times, Forbes and Entrepreneur. See the rest of the story at Business Insider Please follow SAI on Twitter and Facebook.See Also:How To Attract Justin Timberlake: Here's The Pitch Dekko Used To Snag The Celebrity InvestorThe Sexiest VCs Alive!Gossip And Golf With New York's Ad Tech Big Shots

Tour Pontiflex, The Startup With 115 Million Mobile Installs, Angry Birds, Nap Rooms, And Tea Time

Pontiflex, the startup that lets users sign up for ads they want, was founded almost four years ago in the heart of Brooklyn. The now-profitable company is shifting gears and heading full-steam ahead into mobile app ads. Hardly any resources are being put into web ads anymore, and the strategy seems to be working. In just six months, Pontiflex has had 115 million installs of its mobile ad software development kit and expects 35 million signups through its platform in 2011. "We've had as many signups this year as in the history of the company with more than triple the revenue," says cofounder Zephrin Lasker. With $14 million in funding, the team has grown to more than 50 employees and they're quickly outgrowing their space. We toured the startup that's busting at the seams.Pontiflex's office is down there on the right. It's in Brooklyn, on Front and Main Street.

The entrance looks more like an art gallery than an office.

Pontiflex is behind an intimidating steel door on the 6th floor.

See the rest of the story at Business Insider For the latest tech news, visit SAI: Silicon Alley Insider. Follow us on Twitter and Facebook.See Also:Video Stars Of Web 2.0: Where Are They Now?The 6 Remaining TechCrunch Disrupt Startups Battling It Out For $50,000We're So Addicted To Our Phones That We Can't Even Watch TV Without Staring At Them Anymore

10 Foolproof Ways To Make A Million Dollars

Inspired by stories of people like Amanda Hocking and the Doodle Jump developers, we found 10 unusual ways to make a quick $1 million online. Sell 477,000 apps in the App Store or 714,000 self-published books on Amazon's Kindle; the choice is yours. Either way you'll be rich!* Here are 10 clever ways to make $1 million online → *We know revenue doesn't always equal profit, but it does for the sake of these scenarios.Sell 714,286 Self-Published Books On A Kindle

Average cost of a book sold: $2 Profits you keep: 70% Million-dollar math: For every $2 book sold, you keep $1.40. $1.40 X 714,286 books = $1,000,000.40 Who did it: Earlier this year, 26-year old Amanda Hocking was the best-selling "indie" writer on the Kindle store. She was selling around 100,000 copies per month at $1 to $3 a pop which set her on track to pocket a few million dollars. Sell 477,483 apps in the App Store

Average cost of an app: $2.26, but since Apple doesn't let people sell apps for that amount well round up to $2.99. Profits you keep: 70% Million-dollar math: For every $2.99 app sold, you keep $2.093. $2.093 X 477,784 apps = $1,000,001.91 Who did it: Doodle Jump's Igor and Marko Pusenjak, Tap Tap Revenge and Peter Verterbacka of Rovio's Angry Birds Rent your car for 8,680 days (208,334 hours) on GetAround

What it is: GetAround lets you rent your car to strangers for an hourly rate of your choosing. GetAround covers all insurance and other costs of operating the service, and renters are responsible for the gas they use. There are no expenses beyond GetAround's 40% commission. Average cost per hour: $8.00 per hour. Profits you keep: 60% Million-dollar math: For every hour, you keep $4.80. $4.80 X 208,334 hours = $1,000,003.20 Who did it: No one yet. Be the first. See the rest of the story at Business Insider Please follow SAI: Silicon Alley Insider on Twitter and Facebook.See Also:These Young Troublemakers Got Hired For Hacking Apple, Facebook, And Microsoft10 Founders Spill What It's Like To Be Acquired By Google, AOL And MicrosoftINSIDERS DISH: Where To Spot A New York Tech Entrepreneur At Lunch

It's True! Mark Zuckerberg Wears The Same Thing Every Day [PHOTOS] (FB)

Mark Zuckerberg says he wears the same thing every day. He's not kidding. We have photos proving he wears the same grey t-shirt with Facebook icons on it over and over. He matches it with blue jeans. Why wear the same thing over and over? Maybe he wants to carve our a persona for himself like Steve Jobs who wore black turtlenecks and blue jeans. Or maybe, like President Obama, he deals with a mind-boggling number of decisions on a daily basis and he doesn't want to deal with one more every morning. Regardless, he keeps its pretty simple.Talking to Matt Lauer. Here is on on a Russian TV show Zuckerberg speaking at TechCrunch Disrupt See the rest of the story at Business Insider Please follow SAI on Twitter and Facebook.

When Insurance Agencies Almost Killed Jessica Scorpio's Startup, She Got Her State Government To Change The Law

Getaround was a hit when it launched last summer at TechCrunch Disrupt; it went on to raise a few million in financing. It's a peer-to-peer car rental service; when one person isn't using their vehicle, they can rent it to a neighbor and give them a virtual set of keys.But insurance companies almost killed Getaround before it could take off."We knew insurance would be our main problem," Scorpio tells Inc.'s Christine Lagorio. Agencies wanted to know who would cover a car renter's accident, the owner or the insurance company. Scorpio says she received a lot of notices that read, "We regret to inform you that we will not provide insurance coverage for this operation." Most people would have admitted defeated, but Scorpio found an impossible-sounding solution. She helped write a new law. "We started to plant the seeds in Sacramento. Democrats really like it because it's green; Republicans really like it because it's small business," Scorpio tells Lagorio of her law proposal. "The California law is AB 1871. It says that when participating in a personal-vehicle-sharing program, the car owner's insurance is never going to be affected. An owner can make up to the value of the car—say, $10,000 a year for a normal vehicle—from renting it, but the car-sharing organization has to provide the insurance during the car-share period," she says. Three states have adopted a similar laws and now Berkshire Hathaway has agreed to insure GetAround. Please follow SAI on Twitter and Facebook.Join the conversation about this story »

This 24-Year-Old Founder Wants To Keep A Billion More Cars Off The Road

During the summer of 2009 at the Singularity University, Google co-founder Larry Page challenged a class of 40 students to pick an idea that could impact a billion people. One of the program's students, Jessica Scorpio, thought that if she could get enough people to share their cars with their neighbors, she could reach a billion people around the world. However, for this to work, Scorpio would need more than a business plan. People would have to start thinking differently, and would have to value access to cars over ownership. After finishing the program, the Canadian-born entrepreneur turned her idea into a company called Getaround. It's basically like Airbnb for cars, allowing owners to rent them out on the spot to one another for short durations. Last week, at a coffee shop across from Getaround's office in San Francisco, Scorpio told us about her life as an entrepreneur and how she plans to change the world -- and keep a billion more cars off the road. Here's what we learned:

Scorpio thinks people should value having access to cars, rather than owning them: "We felt transportation is a major problem. There is an over-population of cars. Cars sit idle 92 percent of the time. It's going to double to two billion cars. There's no reason to put another billion cars on the road. It is our goal with Getaround to make it a global company."

People in the Getaround community become friends: "We noticed recently that a lot of people become repeat renters of a certain car or owner. We've had people become friends through the service. You find a few cars that you like and you like their owner and you just share with them."

Larry Page gave her permission to launch at Google: "The first time we met him, we said, hey can launch Getaround at Google? He said, sure why not. We didn't do that because Google had a lot of transportation options, and we wanted to offer the service to a campus or city that needed it a lot more. So we started it in Mountain View, which had no car sharing options."

Owners make enough to cover their monthly car payments: "Owners, on average, make about $300 a month. We make sure they are getting rentals, so they keep sharing their car."

Renters save money too: About $8,000 a year.

Why Getaround is better than Zipcar: "One of the major differences between us and fleet-based car sharing like Zipcar is that we can operate all over a geography. So Zipcar really only plays in the densest areas like downtown San Francisco. We have members in North Bay, East Bay, and South Bay."

It's her whole life: "Honestly, 7 days a week every hour of the day, I am focused on making Getaround a successful business. I think work-life balance is a personal thing."

Here's a full transcript of our conversation, lightly edited for clarity: Business Insider: What's your relationship to cars?  Jessica Scorpio: I've never owned a car. I love cars, but I've always set my life up in a way I can live car-free. Here, I get a car a few times a month for various tasks, business meetings, or for getting out of the city.  BI: How did you start the company? JS: We did an alpha at Singularity University, which is where we came up with the idea. We did our beta in 2010. We launched officially at TechCrunch Disrupt in May 2011. We are in three cities: San Diego, San Francisco, and Portland.

We just got a $1.7 million grant to launch in Portland. The grant comes from the Federal Highway Administration. Portland should be really great. Portland is the birthplace of car sharing and the city has a lot of people who are into sustainable living. It's ingrained in their culture. A lot of people bike there, or if they own a car, they just use it on the weekend.  BI: So you went to the Singularity University in the summer of 2009? What was that like?

JS: Larry Page was one of the corporate sponsors, as Google. Every idea we came up with, he was like, no, think bigger. He came up with a challenge to come up with an idea that could impact one billion people in the next 10 years. When we were germinating our ideas, we always had that lens. Can this impact one billion people? Is this solving a major world problem? We felt transportation is a major problem. There is an over-population of cars. Cars sit idle 92 percent of the time. It's going to double to two billion cars. There's no reason to put another billion cars on the road. It is our goal with Getaround to make it a global company. BI: What was it like getting advice from Larry Page? JS: Page gave collaborative feedback. To be honest, Getaround was one of our first ideas and just really stuck. The first time we met him, we said, hey can launch Getaround at Google? He said, sure why not. We didn't do that because Google had a lot of transportation options, and we wanted to offer the service to a campus or city that needed it a lot more. So we started it in Mountain View, which had no car sharing options. Today, it's still very popular there. BI: How are you different than Zipcar? JS: One of the major differences between us and fleet-based car sharing like Zipcar is that we can operate all over a geography. So Zipcar really only plays in the densest areas like downtown San Francisco. We have members in North Bay, East Bay, and South Bay.  Zipcar has created a big movement behind car sharing. People now understand that it's better to have access to a car if you can, rather than own one. Each shared car takes about 13 cars off the road. As a person accessing a car, you'll save about $8,000 a year. BI: How does sharing take cars off the road? JS: Basically, what happens is the owner's mindset changes when they decide to share it. They have the choice of sharing it or using it themselves. In general, when they have their own car, they do a lot of trips that are unnecessary. When they share, people will start batching trips and reduce the radius they go to and stay local.  BI: What's the community like?  JS:  We noticed recently that a lot of people become repeat renters of a certain car or owner. We've had people become friends through the service. You find a few cars that you like and you like their owner and you just share with them. It's real car sharing, you're not renting from a company. You're just sharing a car with another person. BI: How do you pick cities? JS: We work hard to make sure it is a great experience every time. We work to get the right amount of renters to owners, so that each owner can make a significant amount of money each month so they are incentivized to keep doing it. Owners, on average, make about $300 a month. We make sure they are getting rentals, so they keep sharing their car. We have tens of thousands of members and we have 8,000 cars signed up across the country. Not all of those cars can actually share yet because we are not national. We go geography by geography. Those people are waiting until we activate their area.

BI: Tell me about the technology. JS: We built our own hardware called the Getaround car kit and build the website and mobile app from scratch. The car kit is really unique because it's easy to install. And it's way lower cost than typical fleet management technology. It tracks the car, so we can find it and so the renter knows where to pick it up. It also allows the renter to unlock the car really easily. Our biggest thing is making this a convenient transaction. If the owner wants to meet the renter for the first time, they can do that. 

They'll get a text message or if they have the app, it pushes a notification to them saying 'Jessica wants to rent your car for two hours, you'll get $20.' They can respond based on if they are using their car and if they want to rent it out at that time. If I have the app, I can pick up the car with my smartphone. BI: What's your day like? JS: It's not to scare people off, but it's really intense. I have several things happening at every hour of the day. I usually get up between 8 am or 9 am, not that early. I'm not an early riser. I used to do 6 am yoga, but it wasn't fun so I don't do that anymore. I usually go to bed at 2 am to 3 am. Honestly, 7 days a week every hour of the day, I am focused on making Getaround a successful business. I think work-life balance is a personal thing. I don't worry about work-life balance, but I do try and have a healthy life. So I try and get 7 hours of sleep. I try to walk or bike to work. I try and incorporate healthy food and vitamins.

BI: So you like being an entrepreneur? JS: I'm close to thinking nothing can phase me. Think of anything and it's probably happened working at Getaround. It loses its sex appeal pretty quickly. Luckily, I'm a hard worker. At the beginning we had a co-founder burn out after like 30 days and the other one decided she wanted to go back to med school. Startups aren't for everyone.  BI: Do you spend a lot of time with your co-founders? JS: Late at night, my co-founders and I have a drink together and go through our accomplishments and have a few celebratory drinks together.

Sam Zaid was part of Singularity University. I was helping out with marketing and PR on Sam's other startup. We met Elliot that summer. Elliot is a really brilliant engineer. Elliot worked at Google for a number of years on the Street View team. Elliot helped build our first iPhone app. What I've learned is that you have to pick your people really wisely. We are around each other about 18 hours of the day. You have to get along and like each other a lot. We are about 30 people now, mostly engineering because we do hardware, mobile, and web. We are starting to build out our marketing and operations side. BI: Why is this idea taking off? What's changed? JS: Now people see an idle asset as waste. People have made that realization and are trying to move their life into the cloud, but also make it very efficient. If you go to Europe for three weeks, you don't just leave your apartment empty and lock it up. Instead you pay for your trip by sharing your apartment on Airbnb. If your car is parked at work, you can pay for your parking by sharing it for two hours on Getaround or you can pay your whole car by sharing it a few days that month. BI: The economy played a role too, right? JS: I think the economic downturn was a big catalyst. When there's a new dip in the economy, there's an opportunity for new businesses to come up and get people thinking differently about stuff. Five years ago, I don't think it would have been possible to do Getaround. The laws weren't there. The technology wasn't there. The social graph wasn't as far along as it is. When money is tight, people are willing to do different things. These days, people are being smarter about how they spend their money. Please follow SAI on Twitter and Facebook.Join the conversation about this story »See Also:Tech Guy Tells His Wife He Wants To Live ForeverThree Australian Ex-Googlers Are Re-Imagining The Future Of EmailThis Google Employee Left Because He Was 'Just There To Make Things Look Pretty'

Here's Everything You Missed At SAI's NYC Startup 2012 Event

Hundreds of people attended Business Insider's Startup 2012 conference yesterday at New World Stages in New York City. Speakers included Huffington Post president and editor-in-chief Arianna Huffington, Gilt Groupe founder and CEO Kevin Ryan, Fab.com founder and CEO Kevin Goldberg and many more. For everyone that couldn't make it, here's a look at what it was like — on the stage and behind-the-scenes — at Startup 2012.Startup 2012 was held at the New World Stages in Manhattan.

Attendees started filing in around 8:00 AM and headed to the desk for their nametags. Here's Business Insider editor-in-chief and CEO Henry Blodget heading in.

The venue's all about creativity — just take a look at this wall covered in designs, words and scribbles.

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This Startup's Office Is Like A Trip Back To The 1940s

Klout CEO Joe Fernandez spends a lot of his time zipping around his offices like crazy. It's hard to get him to stand still on the bottom floor of Klout's wide open office. He sits right next to the product and design teams and is grilling them all the time. We got a chance to trot around the office, which you can see in a series of pictures below. Klout has been growing pretty quickly since launching in 2008 — it's up to 70 employees now and it just finished rolling out anew tool called "brand squads." It's a landing page for a brand that tells you who is most influential online for each brand. Klout, which collects data from your Facebook, Twitter and other online site interactions and hands out a score, is using it as a way to give brands that sign up ways to interact with their loyal customers. It's all about connectivity — which is pretty much the vibe in the office. See for yourself below.The office is tucked away just under a freeway. You might have trouble finding it if not for the logo.

It's pretty easy to spot — a large and bright orange and white decal.

The entrance is actually on the upper level of the office, where the communications and marketing teams sit. They call it the "penthouse."

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7 Entrepreneurs On The Brink Of Greatness

Most startups fail. Few startups matter. Yet every great company began as a startup, from Thomas Alva Edison's lab in New Jersey to Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard's garage in Palo Alto, Calif. And every entrepreneur likewise started out as an unknown. We hear about a lot of new companies and meet a lot of founders, and write about far fewer. That's a selectivity driven by reality: It only makes sense to focus on the companies that matter most to our readers. But lately we've run across some genuinely inspiring company builders who strike us as more than just your typical wannabes. Some are first-timers; others are serial entrepreneurs who have yet to become household names. The one common thread is that they are all at crucial moments for their startups, having proven a concept and gotten ready to test it at massive scale. And in our conversations, buzzwords like "disruption" and "viral loops" never came up. Instead it's the hard, challenging work of signing up customers and breaking into markets. None are assured success. But for each of these seven, this will be a must-watch, make-or-break year. And if they do make it? You can say you read about them before they were famous.Jessica Scorpio, Getaround Zipcar proved there was demand for renting cars by the hour. But it had to buy the cars it rented—a heavy financial obligation that ultimately drove it into the arms of Avis. Now Getaround is proving there's a smarter way to do it, by letting any car owner rent it out by the hour. Where ride-sharing startups have run afoul of the law, Scorpio got the San Francisco-based company's service cleared by California regulators. Now you can even rent a Tesla Model S for $20 an hour. What's next: Getaround launched in Chicago in September, and just introduced a new iPhone app to make rentals easier. But Scorpio has global ambitions. When she spoke at the Women 2.0 conference in San Francisco, Scorpio said her goal is to keep a billion cars off the road, by letting people rent vehicles that already exist. Corey Reese, Ness Computing  Reese, an entrepreneur since high school, has been applying artificial intelligence to the data we spew out on Facebook, Foursquare, and Twitter to tell us what to do with our lives. Specifically, its Ness Dining Guide suggests restaurants based not on overall ratings but on a complex interaction of our own tastes and our friends' preferences. Early on, the app won praise from Square CEO Jack Dorsey. What's next: Ness just teased a new version on Twitter. We're not sure how they're going to improve on the app, unless it just starts telling us which restaurant to go to without our having to ask. Howard Lerman, Yext Lerman's company hooks up local businesses—chain locations and mom-and-pop shops alike—with the hundreds of websites that list their address, hours, and other information. He made an incredibly gutsy move last year, selling its Felix pay-per-call division that accounted for the bulk of its revenues to IAC. By managing listings rather than trying to create a destination site, Lerman doesn't have to worry about who wins the local-search war. What's next: A recent upgrade, PowerListings+, let businesses add content like menus and product lists. An obvious next move: managing the wide array of local-marketing options out there, from daily deals to geotargeted offers. Between the $66 million Yext has raised from investors and the reported $30 million it raised from selling Felix, Lerman has a ton of resources to take this opportunity on. See the rest of the story at Business Insider Please follow SAI on Twitter and Facebook.