Clinkle
Clinkle CEO and founder, Lucas Duplan, raised the largest seed round in Silicon Valley history.
- The inside story of Clinkle, a payments startup run by a 21-year-old, that raised a $25 million seed round, then imploded. It's well-reported, read the whole thing.
- Google bought a high-flying solar-powered drone company called Titan Aerospace. Titan's drones can fly for five years at a time. Google will use them for Mapping, sending Internet to places not yet connected, and other stuff.
- David Fincher is pulling out as director of the Steve Jobs movie over money battles. That's a shame because he directed the Social Network, which was great.
- Sean Parker is going to be the CEO at Brigade, a new startup he's founding to get more people engaged in civic activities like voting. He's putting in his own money. Ron Conway and Marc Benioff are also investors.
- Mozilla, the parent company of Firefox, has a new interim CEO. Former CMO Chris Beard is joining the board and taking over as CEO.
- Looks like Microsoft has killed its "Scroogled" ad campaign that attacked Google. The official company line is that Scroogled is not dead, but based on what we're hearing it's basically dead.
- Samsung testified that it's main advantage in its fight with Apple wasn't copying Apple's software but rather spending billions of dollars on marketing.
- Yahoo reports earnings this afternoon, and Kara Swisher is wondering if Yahoo will announce a new board member since Yahoo is down to just 5 board members.
- Here's how Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba beat eBay years ago. This is a good primer on Alibaba, which is about to IPO.
- Google has a patent for a contact lens with a camera in the lens. We doubt we'll see this any time soon, if ever, but it's a glimpse at Google's long term ambition with Google Glass.