I’d like to think so. This video of a 5 year old giving her impressions of different companies’ logos is very cute, and reinforces the idea that having an identifiable brand does (probably) still make a big difference for most companies.

Here’s the data, from Localytics:

According to LocalLytics, “Of all users in Localytics’ study who made an in-app purchase, 44% did not do so until they had interacted with the app at least ten times. On average, a user who makes an in-app purchase will do so 12 days after first launching the app.”

Read the entire article – it’s really interesting.

TechCrunch reporter Rip Empson covered the new ScanDrop Mac’s ability to scan, screenshot, save to the cloud and share via social networks.

As Rip explains it, ” announcing updates to its ScanDrop Mac and ScanDrop Lite apps (ScanDrop Lite is free) that let any Mac user integrate scanned paper with digital screenshots to create multi-age, searchable PDFs. But what’s really cool about this is that, with a single click, users can now share these scanned docs via social networks or store them in Evernote, Dropbox, OfficeDrop, and Google Docs.”

He also gives an example of possible workflow that users can take advantage of using the ScanDrop Mac app: “ within ScanDrop, users can merge scans, screenshots, and image files into a single, multi-page PDF to then share as they choose. If a user scans a receipt, he or she can then grab a screenshot of a corresponding spreadsheet of receipts and share that as a single PDF document through Facebook or Twitter, for example.”

Finally, the article mentions our recent, dramatic growth.

Read the article here!

This is both cool and scary.

Of course the part of me that likes seeing new companies have the capital to give it a shot loves this bill!

The side of me that watches American Greed is totally freaked out at how scam artists will use the bill to defraud grandma.

But I think there is a solution that can help out at least a little bit.

If the funds have to be raised through a registered, regulated institution like SecondMarket then there is a chance that some of the most basic fraud can be avoided. For example, if a private secondary marketplace can confirm that the people raising the money are 1) who the say they are and 2) actually own the company in question, then two of the more common frauds (that I can imagine) might be avoided.

I’m not saying this will alleviate all of the potential fraudsters, but at least there won’t be people tricking grandma into believing that they are Zuck or that they are offering an exclusive chance to own pre-IPO shares in some company that’s already public.

I realize that the secondary markets will need to collect a fee to provide this service, but they also will add significant value beyond vetting the “legitimacy” of the startup – they will also provide buyers/liquidity. This is a pretty big deal.

Also, check out the “Healy Jones in Action” shot below from the event. Thanks to Krushtown for all this great content.

Healy Jones in Action

And here you can read a piece by Henry Blodget on what he thinks Groupon will be worth once it goes public. Henry is suggesting a $10 to $15 billion valuation… supposedly Groupon was valued as high as $30 billion or so earlier this year.

The MoneyTree/PWC Q2 venture capital dollars by region shows Boston still on top over NYC for dollars invested in Q2 2011!

NYC vs Boston VC investments

This does not mesh with the data from CBinsights that was released just a few days ago.

I’ve reached out to my contact at CBinsights to see if he has any info on this. I bet there are just some differences in how the data is collected. But in the PWC data above New England is quite a bit over NYC.

At the end of the day this doesn’t really matter too much as long as all the regions software investments are up. I don’t believe that this is a zero sum game, and there can be multiple regions outside of the valley that have thriving internet hubs. NYC and Boston should both be among these. I dream of a interconnected Northeast coast internet hub from NYC to Boston along the Acela route… it makes sense give how connected these two regions are that startup talent, dollars and ideas flow along the coast in a giant melting pot of new startups, people and exits.

But Software VC dollars are up.  So is IT services.

Software VC Dollars

In fact, according to PEhub, “Countering the decline was 23% jump in funding to software startups. With $2 billion invested – 29% of the total – the sector generated the highest quarterly investment level in 10 years, or since the fourth quarter of 2001.” Dollars per software startup was also up a lot.

By stage of development there are some interesting numbers as well… one is that seed investing seems to have taken a dip. Not too surprised – we’ve read a lot about the seed crunch recently. The good thing is that the early stage dollars are hanging in there, so the best seed deals seems to continue to get funding… (I hope.)

Today he penned one on “Building a Business Around Frienemies” for FastCompany.

What’s a Frenemy (or Frienemy, depending on how you spell it)?

An important business philosophy that we have here at OfficeDrop is the concept of “Frenemies” – we will work with other services that would historically have been considered competition if it makes sense for our customers. It means that we value our customers’ workflow and actively look to integrate our cloud filing system with other online, cloud and SaaS services that our customers are using. Our customers are small businesses who want to move to a “digital office” and away from having their different work processes silo’ed into particular, proprietary applications.

This is a big deal and it represents a major shift in the way software is made and consumed. Old, desktop software that wrote special, unique and proprietary files and that trapped your data are out. Remember when a file could only be opened by the program that created it? Well, in the cloud all the smart providers have open APIs, which means your data can now be pushed (securely, of course!) from one application to another – making it easier for you to get your work done. This means that our service may have to work with other online storage companies, or companies that have overlapping features. Should we be competing with these companies and avoid integrating with them?

Nope. We can only survive if our clients WANT to use our service. They can get their data out at any time, so we need to offer the best paper-focused, searchable storage service we can – and let customers use other best in class services in conjunction with ours – like our FreshBooks document management integration. We’ve got an open API, and if someone who might be close in features wants to connect with our service they are very much able to create a tight integration with the OfficeDrop service.