Just after the markets closed on its first day of public trading, Facebook amended its S-1 with a complete prospectus detailing how much stock each underwriter got to sell. Morgan Stanley, the lead-left bank, received 162.1 million shares ($ 6.15 billion worth) followed by J.P. Morgan with 84.8 million ($ 3.22 billion), and Goldman Sachs pulled down 63.1 million shares ($ 2.4 billion).

E*Trade and Itaú got the short end of the stick, receiving just $ 80 million in stock. That’s less than any of the other underwriters despite being listed in the middle of the pack in the previous versions of the prospectus. But none of the banks made too much on the Facebook stock. FB shares closed just $ 0.23 above its IPO price this morning. That means Facebook maximized the amount it raised in the offering, but its underwriters didn’t receive the massive cash windfall many expected.

TechCrunch

Editor’s note: Joe Kraus is a partner at Google Ventures, focusing on mobile, gaming, and local services. In 1993, he co-founded Excite.com, an early Internet search engine. He also co-founded JotSpot in 2004, a wiki company acquired by Google in 2006. Follow him on his blog, JoeKraus.com, and on Twitter: @jkraus.

One of the things I wish I had done in both of my companies (Excite.com and JotSpot) was to take a piece of advice that I now give most entrepreneurs I meet. That advice is: “Right after you sign your term sheet for your Series A, write the fantasy deck for your Series B (complete with whatever metrics, graphs and customer lists you would love to have).”

I say this because of the way I’ve both done fundraising and seen it done. Whether we like to admit it or not, the way it’s usually done tends to be very haphazard and bottom’s up. It starts with…

“We have about 4 months of cash left, it’s time to raise money”.

With that statement, companies go about trying to weave together a narrative from the various facts that are true at the time. You look at your metrics, your sales, your customer lists and you try to create something cohesive. The problem is that it’s a bottoms up story; it’s composed of whatever facts are lying around. You didn’t set out twelve months before to create an intentional story. Your pitch deck ends up feeling a bit underpowered, a bit awkward. You try to emphasize the facts that look good and gloss over the ones that aren’t so hot.

At the heart of the problem is that startups often get trapped being busy and making general “progress” instead of driving, intentionally, down a path toward a fundable story.

A better approach is to use all the feedback you’re getting during your current fundraising process to create the ideal story for your next round. In the process of raising money (be it seed, series A or B), you hear from potential investors what they’re excited about and what they’re worried about. At the end of the process, you’re in a perfect position to create the fundraising pitch that would be absolute music to any investor’s ears.

So, do it. Write your Series B deck immediately after signing the term sheet for your Series A.

THEN, use this as your plan for how you spend that round of money. Use that presentation as the goal posts for the next 18 months. Begin with that end in mind and that presentation becomes your operating plan. Even if you don’t hit all of it, you will have a story and a company that holds together so much better than if you just run as fast as you can and try to create a story from the random assortment of facts that are lying around when you’re coming close to running out of money.

[image via the New Line Cinema film Glengarry Glen Ross]

TechCrunch

This week, two of the major players in the credit card industry, Visa and MasterCard launched their online digital wallet services. Known as V.me (Visa’s) and PayPass Wallet Services (MasterCard), both are very similar initiatives which see the companies clamoring to become the credit card of choice for digital transactions, the way they fight today to be the credit card for all the other transactions taking place out there in the real world.

And, to be clear, a “digital” wallet isn’t necessarily the same as a “mobile wallet,” although a digital wallet service could also be housed in a mobile app interface, as both MasterCard and Visa plan on offering in the near future.

While neither of these companies are the types of early stage startups TechCrunch typically favors, their moves will have an impact on a number of companies already operating in this space, like PayPal and Square, as well as those that aim to disrupt the payments industry like Dwolla. Below are the details of what was announced and how the two services compare.

Visa V.me

Visa’s digital payments service, V.me, wants to make it easier for consumers to shop online, whether via web, mobile or tablet. The service is effectively a digital wallet, which stores not only your Visa card information, but also your MasterCard, American Express and Discover cards. When you’re on a supported merchant’s website, instead of entering in your payment information and shipping preferences manually (as is par for the course today), you only have to enter in your V.me email and password. The merchant still receives your payment through Visa’s network, but your 16-digit card number is not displayed on the site, which adds another layer of security to the transaction.

In the future, Visa plans to introduce a mobile payments element to the service as well by leveraging NFC, QR codes and “other technology,” which would allow you to tap your phone to a secure reader at the point-of-sale in order to pay for your purchase, scan a QR code or perfrom some other type of interaction. Support for offers based on your activity and interests will be rolled out later on, too, the company says.

This week, Visa took a major step in making the V.me service a reality. The company announced its beta launch, with its first online merchants, PacSun.com and Buy.com, adding support for the program on its site. The V.me acceptance mark is now visible on the login and checkout pages of both sites.

Visa says it’s currently focused on scaling V.me within the U.S. market, but a global rollout is on its roadmap. Over the coming months (Visa won’t provide exact dates), V.me will launch on a number of other e-commerce sites.

MasterCard PayPass Wallet Services

MasterCard, too, has its own take on digital wallets, and unveiled its new PayPass Wallet service this week. The PayPass Wallet is an extension to MasterCard’s already fairly well-known PayPass brand, which offers tap-and-go, NFC-enabled payments that work via PayPass-enabled (NFC) phones, cards, key fobs, or mobile tags at over 441,000 locations worldwide. The same credentials stored in the digital wallet for online payments (PayPass Wallet) can also be accessed for tap-and-go purchases on an NFC-enabled phone through a mobile app.

Like V.me, MasterCard’s PayPass Wallet is an open solution, and allows consumers to add their Visa, American Express and Discover cards, whether credit, debit or prepaid. It also keeps your shipping info on file, for faster online checkouts. And, like V.me, PayPass Wallet is making a splash with some big-name launch partners. In this case: American Airlines and Barnes & Noble. Both merchants will incorporate the PayPass Online checkout button on their websites, and American Airlines will go a step further and integrate PayPass Wallet into its own mobile application.

Other merchants committed to the solution include  Jagex, JB Hi-Fi, MLB Advanced Media (MLB.com), Newegg, Runningshoes.com, TigerDirect.com and Wine Enthusiast Companies.

Several banks are on board too, including Banesto, Bank of Montreal, Commonwealth Bank, Citibank, EURO6000, Fifth Third Bank, Grupo Banco Popular, Grupo BBVA, ICBA, Intesa Sanpaolo, Metro Bank, National Bank of Canada, PSCU, RBS Citizens Financial Group, SEB Kort AB Sweden, Sovereign Bank, Swedbank Sweden and Westpac.

The solution will be offered as a white label, meaning banks, merchants and other partners can use the PayPass Wallet platform within their own digital wallets. This option will go live by Q3 2012, initially in the U.S., Canada, U.K. and Australia.

Finally, like V.me, MasterCard’s PayPass Wallet will roll out to point-of-sale and as a mobile application in the future, but MasterCard isn’t providing exact timeframes on when those solutions will arrive. The mobile app, though, is not necessarily being targeted at consumers, but at the banking partners.

“This initiative provides issuers with a turnkey solution to quickly launch a wallet with their own branding using our reference wallet or the freedom to connect their own wallet into our PayPass network,” explains Ed Olebe, Senior Vice President and Group Head, Emerging Payments, MasterCard. “PayPass Wallet Services will accept all credit, debit and prepaid MasterCard, American Express, Discover and Visa cards as long as the merchant or financial institution accepts those cards,” he says.

Those with an NFC phone can continue to tap-and-go as they do now, but soon, both NFC and non-NFC users will be able to take advantage of the other benefits of the PayPass platform, including at-a-glance account information which you can peek at prior to making a purchase, spending controls, real-time alerts, and, of course, coupons and targeted offers.

The above solutions from the top two credit card companies are notable because of their news this past week, but they’re far from being the only competitors in the space. Outside of startups like Square and PayPal, mentioned above, Google is dabbling with its own mobile wallet/mobile checkout play called Google Wallet and the U.S. mobile carriers are ramping up a mobile payments initiative called Isis. (Worldwide, other carriers have their own programs, too).

However, in terms of credit card companies, American Express is another important player in the space. With its previously announced Serve platform, it’s not only competing head-to-head in the online payments space, it’s also working to enable other features like peer-to-peer payments, for example.

With so many similarities between the services and some confusion on branding, the problem will soon become one of too much choice. Should you go with V.me or MasterCard’s PayPass (or a PayPass Wallet rebranded by your bank, perhaps?), Serve or PayPal? Wait, PayPal works at point-of-sale too? Does Google Wallet work on my phone? What’s Isis?

Although the names of the credit card companies are already familiar, the programs themselves are not. All the players will need to work to deliver clear messages to consumers about what they can and cannot do.

TechCrunch

EveryMove, an alum of TechStars’ Seattle accelerator program building what they’ve dubbed a “mileage plan for health benefits, today announced that it has closed a $ 2.6 million round of series A financing. Participating investors include Penera Blue Cross, Blue Cross, Blue Shield of Nebraska, BlueCross BlueShield Venture Partners, Founders Co-op, Summit Capital, Jonathan Sposato, Voyager Capital Partner Geoff Entress, Matt Shobe, William Lohse, BuddyTV Co-founder Andy Liu, Ken Kuntz, and others.

As the startup is currently in private beta, it will be using this infusion of capital to ramp up its team as it prepares to launch into the market more broadly in the third quarter.

So what is EveryMove all about?

Founder and CEO Russell Benaroya tells us that the way health care is set up (in the U.S.) today, the people making healthy lifestyle choices end up subsidizing those who are making unhealthy decisions; instead, they should be rewarded for it. If the country is going crazy for consumer-centric healthcare, then that inherently demands that people be given control over their health (and healthcare).

EveryMove is looking to give consumers control by way of an interactive web and mobile platform that helps them connect and organize their health and fitness activities while turning their lifestyle actions into rewards and incentives within their health plans. The market has been primarily focused on “wellness” and “behavior change,” but wellness, Benaroya says, happens to crowded and employer-centric, while behavior change is actually really hard to get right because building building a “one size fits all,” scalable platform tends to do so by sacrificing the individual.

In turn, health providers have less than growing reputations among consumers (let’s be honest here — just ask Castlight) so they’re looking to build closer/better relationships with their customers. Generally speaking, to do this, they’re looking to partner with them to encourage actions that have a positive outcome on their long-term health — and their wallets. (This latter part is, admittedly, hard to believe given where their interests lie, but again, see our Castlight coverage.)

In other words, U.S. health insurance premiums increased by an average of 8 percent between 2008 and 2009 (which has gotten worse since) and health care costs comprise a bigger portion of America’s household budgets year-over-year than most others as costs rise and income growth remain flat. As a result, Americans are trying to be smarter, make better lifestyle decisions to avoid going to the doctor, and EveryMove wants to reward them for doing so.

Instead of going after wellness or behavior change, EveryMove is taking a different approach: Marketing. The service connects people through their lifestyle actions, which are captured through the passive collection of data via health apps, devices, and platforms, with companies that want to engage those healthy customers. This can be plans, employers, or brands, the EverMore CEO tells us, but, importantly it’s the consumer that gets to main control of their data — data which is portable and isn’t tied to their employer or insurance company.

EveryMove plans to monetize its platforms on a cost-per-action basis by taking a fee when users redeem rewards or incentives from their plan, brands, or employer. As EveryMove plans to sit in the middle of the marketplace, it takes a toll on each transaction.

Benaroya has been working on EveryMove for the last two years, working closely with Premera Blue Cross, he says, to understand their goals and objectives as the healthcare landscape changes. Benroya himself is a co-founder of Blink Digital Health, REM Medical, and a former senior associate at Blue Point Capital Partners. Taking the customer development work with the insurance plan and his experience with the marketplace, the founder has been looking to build something that’s not just a “nice to have” app, but a “need to have” source of information that will be critical to core business decision making.

The founder also sees real opportunity long-term in big data around lifestyle analytics — how that data and info can help inform decisions companies are making around positioning their products and services.

The ability to offer health plans that provide customized incentives for leading healthy lifestyles “is key to helping meet both employer and individual needs,” says Kent Marquardt, the executive vice president and CFO of Premera Blue Cross. (Premera is also an investor.) Programs like EveryMove, he says, can help them find better ways to do just that.

For more on EveryMove, check them out at home here. Below you’ll find Benaroya’s pitch from TechStars’ Demo Day:

TechCrunch

The Internet is a lot like the American Dream. It’s this huge opportunity for anyone who wants to make something of themselves — a nearly ubiquitous platform to showcase skills and talents. Yet, it is so incredibly saturated with people trying to do exactly the same thing that the opportunity gets smaller and smaller, shrinking to the size of a pin point as more people hop online.

Countless industries have seen this saturation play a role in who rises to the top, and who fizzles out as one of the millions of never-will-be stars. And porn isn’t exempt from this rule.

A new poll taken by XBIZ, “the adult entertainment industry’s leading social network”, shows that less than half of the respondents polled (47 percent) believe there will be another mainstream porn superstar, like Jenna Jameson. Meanwhile, 27 percent say that the era of the porn superstar is over thanks to the Internet, with the other 27 percent saying that only moderate success can be achieved by porn performers.

It makes sense. Think about how many people have actually made it big from YouTube, compared to the number of people who have tried. It’s the exact reason why startups like TalentSplash are working to offer a platform for hopeful talent to showcase their skills. Granted, I don’t watch as much porn as say, John Biggs, but I can’t think of really any porn superstars outside of Jameson.

The real end of the porn superstar may be due to the democratization of porn production. With cheap video cameras and editing equipment, anyone can give it a shot. It’s not that porn is any less popular. It’s likely much more so. But attention is now divided across thousands of demi-stars with their own websites and Twitter accounts.

While the Jenna Jameson’s of old might have made just a dollar or so per sale of a big studio porn movie they’re featured in, today’s demi-stars could rake in the same revenue by keeping most of $ 30 monthly site subscription fees from their hardcore (pun intended) fans. Up and comers (hah!) like Bree Olson and Sasha Grey (who left the porn biz altogether last year) seem to have achieved modest success through utilizing their Facebook and Twitter followings. But will that eventually amount to Jenna Jameson level success?

The results of the XBIZ poll are a tad optimistic considering the landscape. It reminds me a bit of forthcoming iPhone rumors: “It’ll support holographs!” “It will fly!”

All of that is just wishful thinking, and certain industry top dogs seem to share in that hopeful optimism.

CEO and co-chair of Vivid Entertainment Steven Hirsch believes that “there absolutely will be another superstar as big as Jenna. How she gets there remains to be seen but it certainly will happen.”

Digital Playground co-founder Joone shares the sentiment. “I think there will always be porn superstars,” said Joone. “The fans are always looking for that next ‘it’ girl. It’s all about the right girl with the right company behind her to let the world know.”

Even the more realistic responses are speckled with a hint of hopeful naivety. Hustler founder Larry Flynt claims that “the days of the porn superstar will return when the quality of the movies being produced are improved.”

Still other big names in the adult entertainment biz see things differently. Jenna Jameson’s long time co-star Ron Jeremy has a fittingly cocky response:

There’s so many things that I did that are almost impossible to follow. The work I’ve done outside of porn has dwarfed what I’ve done in porn. There are other people who have done good work in the same arenas, but keep in mind it gets tougher and tougher as so many medias get involved, between computers and cell phones and DVDs and pay-per-view and video-on-demand. There will not be another Jenna Jameson any time soon. It could happen, but I wouldn’t stake my life on it.

Kayden Kross, another award-winning adult entertainer, seems to have a grasp on reality:

I think when Jenna Jameson became Jenna Jameson, no one had become Jenna Jameson yet. It was still very taboo to be a porn star and she really made that a more mainstream thing. Then there were others that came up, not to her level, but came up around that time. And now, it’s just like anyone can be a porn star. It’s over-saturated.

It’s interesting to see how different answers from industry executives and former performers are. The performers know the perils of making it big as talent, whereas the executives are likely desperate to bank on an up-and-coming star as big as a Jenna Jameson.

Only time will tell if the porn industry can adapt to our almost entirely digital lifestyles. The camera industry failed, publishing is struggling big time, and both the music and movie industries are holding on to their traditional business models with cold, lifeless fingers.

But the question isn’t whether or not the “talent” exists. The question is whether or not we want another “it” girl. Jenna was great, but is she any better than having millions of free (and paid) titillating vids to enjoy over a bit of spit and Kleenex?

TechCrunch

With the Google Translate gadget, visitors to your blog can select their preferred language from the drop-down menu, and using Google’s free translation service, it will display your posts in any of the 50+ languages Google Translate supports.

Blogger Buzz

As Ned Flanders would say, education in the U.S. is in “a dilly of a pickle.” At the risk of sounding like a broken record, the cost of education has become unsustainable. Student loan debt is over $ 1 trillion, unemployment remains high for the recently graduated, and non-traditional students — older people, single mothers, workers looking to re-train — are returning to academia and learning programs in droves, putting even more competitive pressure on already-scant on-site resources. Higher ed institutions struggle with the cost of expanding to meet demand. Yale, for example, recently decided to add 250 students to its incoming class, which came with a price tag of a quarter of a billion dollars.

Luckily, a number of startups are tackling the problem, which, along with the maturation of online content distribution, are helping to lower the cost of both higher, primary, and continuing education — both making it easier for teachers to do what they do best as well as transforming learning into something that’s more engaging and personalized for students. Startups like Khan Academy, 2tor, ShowMe, Udemy, Udacity, Grockit, Coursera, and StraighterLine are all beginning to show how easy it is to flip the educational process – in other words, to use video and advanced web platforms to make learning more affordable and effective.

However, while these startups should be recognized for their mission-driven approaches, some of these startups evidence undercooked business models, obviously a problem for for-profit businesses when the funding (if they have any) dries up. There’s also plenty of money to go around in Silicon Valley right now, and many startups have become way too focused on raising seed and Series A financing, which can be detrimental to the system and a distraction to individual companies.

That’s why the story of Lynda.com has such relevance in today’s landscape. Founded in the ’90s, the company is, compared to the slew of year-old edtech startups, an old-hand. For those unfamiliar, Lynda.com offers a virtual video library of over 1,200 educational, how-to videos. Unlike the awesome Khan Academy, Lynda’s video courses are taught by industry experts, working professionals, and veteran teachers, served up in installments for a monthly subscription fee of about $ 25.

In 2010, Lynda delivered over 1,000 hours of content, and while it provides its paid online learning content to individuals, today it also works with nearly all of the Ivy League schools as well as companies, like Disney, Time Warner, Sony, Pixar, ABC, and HBO to supplement their learning content. What’s also different about Lynda, and perhaps old-school given today’s emerging DIY online video models, is that it produces 90 percent of its content in-house. It’s a big video production operation beyond simply being an online distribution platform.

Since the beginning, Lynda.com has been focused on tech content, offering videos how-to videos on some of the most popular apps from Adobe, Apple, Autodesk, and Microsoft — on everything from web design to learning to use Excel in a way that doesn’t make you want to blow your brains out.

Content companies have struggled to monetize on the Web, and there has been plenty of debate over the effectiveness of paywalls. Newspapers are finally starting to see growth in their circulations, and ABC’s figure for daily Times paid digital subscribers was 807,000, with the WSJ in second at 552,288. Of course, as the NYTimes points out, under audit rules, newspapers can count paid digital subscribers more than once if they have access to multiple platforms, like apps, tablets, etc.

This means that, as a content company, Lynda.com is looking pretty good in comparison. Yes, the Times’ digital offerings are much younger, but Lynda currently has over 1 million paying members, and saw 42 million uniques over the last 12 months, a 20 percent increase from the year prior. That’s not mind blowing, as there are a number of digital publications and blogs that see that much unique traffic in a month, rather than a year. But the real kicker is that Lynda hit $ 70 million in revenues in 2011.

Co-founders (and couple) Lynda Weinman and Bruce Heavin started by sinking $ 20K from their savings into Lynda. They were profitable, Heavin says, within a few weeks, and they haven’t taken a penny of outside funding since. And that’s not for lack of offers, as both founders hinted that sizable investment offers have been put on the table on a number of occasions, but the company has been content to fly under the radar and rely on word-of-mouth marketing, subscribing to a “if you don’t need money, don’t take it” policy.

The real key to the company’s success is how it’s become an alternative to the Demand Medias and eHows of the world. Lynda.com won’t blow you away with shiny graphics or interactivity, its videos often consist of basically what is the equivalent of screen-sharing, with narration from experts laid over it. But, as the company now has some-300 employees and has a serious studio north of Los Angeles, the production quality of its videos is high.

Compared to Khan, or YouTube how-tos, or eHow, Lynda’s videos are offered in installments, and depending on what users want to learn, they can graduate to more advanced content that goes high up the ladder. For example, Lynda is about to publish its 500th course on Adobe apps and software. CS6 begins shipping on Monday, and Lynda already has courses for the creative suite ready to go.

These courses on advanced PhotoShop, for example, may include up to 10 hours of content, broken down into 60-odd subgroups. While it’s not true for every subject, Lynda.com can be as basic or as advanced as you’re willing to go. And, with the growing interest in programming and coding education, the buzz around CodeAcademy being one example, the company is beginning to get very serious about expanding and diversifying its content around programming languages and web development.

For educators and teachers, part of the appeal of Lynda is that they’re guaranteed a paycheck for the content they help produce. Since Lynda is a veteran of the publishing industry, Lynda’s compensation model is not unlike book deals. Once teachers are vetted (and the co-founders told me they find more than 50 percent of the time that authors don’t necessarily make great teachers), they’re given an advance for their work. From there, the company offers a cut of revenues depending on the popularity of their videos.

Even if their videos don’t blow up, they’re guaranteed that supplementary revenue stream. But, somewhat surprisingly, the co-founders tell us that nearly 90 percent of its educators earn their entire annual income by producing videos for Lynda.com.

In the end, having been able to weather the stampede of content producers to the Web, and grow its business to $ 70 million in revenues, it seems that its founders might have some valuable perspective for startups and young entrepreneurs looking to do the same. Like many others, the co-founders began the process with other income streams, and it took almost 5 years before its online content was outpacing the number of courses they themselves were teaching in the classroom.

But what they kept coming back to was the fact that they started their business not as eager young people looking to get rich quick or find some niche to exploit, like becoming the Airbnb for pets, they were experts — and they were passionate about education. Weinman herself had been working in web design and film special effects, along with teaching, for years — and had published several books.

The co-founders attribute the success to becoming industry insiders before becoming entrepreneurs, and on focusing on the product before profit, allowing customers to keep you honest, and listening to their feedback to help push your business forward. Early on, everything they had and made was poured into Lynda.com. As Heavin said, it took years of “walking through the desert,” before they were able to see any real profit, but being passionate about finding better ways to educate people using online tools, and taking into account the modalities of learning — being intimately familiar with their user or target customer — can lead to a positive result.

As to what’s next, Lynda.com just added a course queue so that users can keep track of and save subjects or chapters they’re interested in watching later, and continuing to ramp up its educational content for developers. And, since 20 percent of its users are international and its content is presently English-only, the company hopes to begin translating its videos into other languages. Hopefully sooner rather than later.

For more on Lynda.com, check them out at home here.

TechCrunch

Y Combinator might be best known for software plays like Dropbox and Airbnb. But it’s also harbored a few hardware companies, notably the one that blew out Kickstarter funding records with Pebble Watch this month.

There’s actually one more waiting in the wings.

Per Vices is a startup from the latest class that’s looking to disrupt how wireless communications are sent. They’ve built a device called Phi that can interact with any wireless or radio signal. It’s a transceiver that can demodulate and process signal data up to 4 Gigahertz.

In plain English, that means one of Per Vices’ devices can re-route your cell phone calls through your landline connection, if for example you have bad 3G service in your house. In theory, that means you could set up a decentralized wireless network where mobile devices and desktops are sending communications to each other instead of one where all mobile phones have to send and receive signals from carrier-operated cell phone towers. It’s a critical issue the industry needs to solve as data-hogging mobile subscribers eat into the profit margins of the carriers.

For now, however, the company is focusing on the hacker and hobbyist market as the device is a PCI card that supports Linux machines. (So yes, that limits the current potential audience size).

However, the longer-term goal is to build something that’s both accessible and affordable to the mainstream market. On their site, Phi retails for $ 666 for just the card or $ 750 with antennas, but the cost of producing it (as with many interesting hardware products) is getting lower every year. Comparable products from rivals like Ettus Research sell for $ 1,300 or higher.

They’ve hacked a few demos with the product, including one where you can pick-up HDTV transmissions and watch shows on your phone or call a walkie talkie using your mobile phone. They’re hoping that hackers will find even more interesting ways of using the Phi, like how some developers figured out how to subvert Microsoft’s Kinect.

Per Vices founders, Victor Wollesen and Yi Yao, are a physicist and an electrical engineer who used to work in the defense industry. But sales cycles there are endlessly long, so going the consumer route promises a faster time to market.

TechCrunch

Google Glass isn’t the only game in town.

Misfit Wearables, a wearable computing startup from the founding team of mobile health company Agamatrix and former Apple chief executive John Sculley, just raised $ 7.6 million in a round co-led by Founders Fund. The other notable firm in the deal isn’t disclosed, but we hear through a source that it’s Khosla Ventures.

Misfit isn’t saying too much about what it’s working on, except to say that the next generation of wearable devices shouldn’t compete with fashion, has to be ambient and has to have functions outside of sensing. It has to be the kind of thing a consumer wouldn’t need to remember to wear and ideally, it would be something that’s so critical that a person would go back home if they left it there.

“Wearables from the 1.0 era make people look like Iron Man,” said chief executive Sonny Vu.

The name of the company has a super-interesting backstory. Up until last fall, Vu, Sculley and his Agamatrix co-founder Sridhar Iyengar, were tossing around some pretty lackluster name ideas like Etherware. He, Iyengar and Sculley were sitting around at a table at the Rosewood on Menlo Park’s Sand Hill Road, having trouble deciding when news flashed that Steve Jobs had passed away.

“It was a real shame we never got them together after John’s departure from Apple, so we decided to name the company in honor of Steve,” Vu said.

The name Misfit Wearables is inspired by the opening line in the famous 1997 Apple commercial that launched the “Think Different” slogan: “Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes.”

The other thing that’s notable about the company is the team. Vu and Iyengar co-founded Agamatrix. It isn’t a household name in Silicon Valley, but it made the first medical device add-on that Apple approved for the iPhone. It’s a glucose meter that diabetes patients use to test their blood sugar levels regularly.

Over 10 years, Vu and Iyengar built it into a business that makes between $ 50 and 100 million per year through the sale of glucose test strips. The two of them started tinkering with glucose sensing technology, and found a way that was twice as accurate as the leading technology on the market purely through better math. Vu said since most research and development teams working on glucose sensing were led by biologists, his team could fix inefficiencies that experts from other disciplines couldn’t see. When Agamatrix originally entered the market, there were more than 30 competing products. Yet they managed to gain a foothold.

Then when the iPhone came out, they dreamed up a new concept: a glucose meter that would upload and track a patient’s blood sugar levels through an app. It took nine months of back-and-forth with Apple to get approved it for the iPhone. It also took a few years for them to get insurance companies and Medicare to cover the cost of glucose meters for diabetes patients. The FDA cleared it last December and pharmaceutical giant Sanofi-Aventis now markets it under the name iBG Star.

So for all of you who might complain about how hard it is start a mobile or Facebook app company, this was crazy hard!

Vu says he’s using the new round of funding to grow his team. He’s relocating to San Francisco from Boston where he’ll build a hardware and industrial design team locally. Then, interestingly enough, Misfit’s software team is located in Vietnam, because Vu found some world-class machine learning experts there that were trained in good U.S. technical Ph.D. programs like the one at University of Illinois-Urbana Champaign. (Honestly, this isn’t so crazy though. I run into companies every week that have serious development studios in Eastern Europe, Pakistan and East Asia.)

“We’re doing algorithms (machine learning) and app development in Vietnam because of speed, not just cost,” Vu said. “There’s lots of this kind of talent in Silicon Valley but they’re just not readily available, at least not to newcomers like us.”

TechCrunch

AOL has had a few knocks from shareholders over whether it’s on the right track with its content strategy — a mix of high-volume, ad-based websites that cover lifestyle, tech, travel, news and more — but CEO Tim Armstrong has stayed the course, and today the company is launching a video portal that it hopes will prove that the value of those holdings extends beyond even what you see on the sites themselves.

AOL On, as the new site is called, is a premium content portal that will work across desktop, mobile and tablet optimized sites and apps, as well as connected TV devices. And the guy running it, Ran Harnevo, SVP of AOL On, makes clear that it is nothing like a YouTube wannabe: “No dogs on skateboards, and no upload button,” he says.

Instead, it brings together all the video offerings from AOL’s various content properties, including sites like HuffingtonPost, Engadget, AOL.com and (of course) TechCrunch — 14 properties in all with a total reach of 57 million U.S. consumers monthly. It will also bring together content that once existed on AOL Video, goviral, StudioNow and AOL HD brands.

But wait! There’s more: it will also include a program of commissioned, original content. Initially that list will include mainly factual/unscripted programming, shows with titles like “Digital Justice,” “Little Women Big Cars” (that’s me! no, just kidding) and “Next Door Hero.” It will also include at least one comedy show thrown into the mix: “Fetching,” written by Amy Harris of Sex and the City fame. The whole of AOL On is the brainchild of the team from 5min, the video syndication network that AOL bought for $ 65 million, coincidentally at the same exact time as it bought TechCrunch.

Another contrast to YouTube: a focus on a simplified interface. While the homepage will have a search window that lets you access some 320,000 videos at launch, AOL On will also be offering a curated selection as well: simple tabs with subject headings like lifestyle and health will take you to a selection of videos that will change regularly; and a playlist on the homepage will focus on a slide-deck of nine different pieces of content.

AOL’s idea here is to capitalize on the growing interest in watching online video, and specifically professionally produced online video — evidenced as well by YouTube now moving into a more premium content channels; sites like Hulu continuing to gain ever more momentum; and, closer to home, HuffPo launching the “HuffingtonPost Streaming Network.”

While some of this video under the AOL umbrella may not be getting the audience scale it needs to monetize that well on individual sites, the hope seems to be that if you consolidate all of it on to a single platform, that will create the kind of audience needed to drive much better returns on ads. Taken together AOL says the holdings catapult it into a top-10 video platform, with  861 million video streams per month, and a total of 2.4 billion minutes consumed.

For now, the site will be run as the main websites are — no paywalls and funded by ads, which will come in the form of pre-rolls to the videos. When I asked whether there were plans to also introduce paid services into the mix, Harnevo would not rule it out.

TechCrunch