As great as the web is, I still haven’t been able to kick my habit for buying fashion and lifestyle magazines off the newsstand. One of the things I love the most about monthly glossies are features like Vanity Fair’s My Stuff and Us Weekly’s What’s In My Bag, in which notable people reveal the exact products that they actually buy and use (celebrity chef David Chang uses Sensodyne toothpaste and wears Levi’s jeans, FYI.) It’s just compelling to find out more about people through their stuff.
The folks at New York-based startup Vaunte think so too, and in fact, they think it could be the next generation of luxury e-commerce. Vaunte has created a web platform where notable people (think starlets, fashionable executives, designers, and socialites) show off the stuff in their closets — and put things up for sale. Vaunte started off as purely a consignment market that takes 30 percent commission for photographing and shipping seller’s items, but it has since expanded to also sell new versions of the items people show off.
TechCrunch
A HREF=”http://www.fiftythree.com/paper”>Paper by FiftyThree is one of the most beautiful digital products on the market today. 
Expect a swathe of consolidation in the European e-learning sector in the coming months. Edxus Group, a new London-based corporate operating edtech company, is planning to plough in €50-60 million ($ 64-$ 77m) over the next 18 months to develop and acquire European e-learning businesses and build out a single regional player with the scale to compete against U.S. edtech giants, it said today.
To paraphrase Cracker, I would wager what the world needs now is another content management system like I need a hole in the head. However, I’m pleased to note that I will allow Ghost a pass. Ghost is an open source publishing platform with Markdown compatibility and a real-time preview features as well as a very robust statistics-gathering system. It is on Kickstarter now and is fully funded. Funders will get early access to the platform which will be free. $ 16 gets you access to the service. “I came up with Ghost due to the frustrations of trying to manage both small and large blogs with other platforms. They generally fall into two categories. Either complicated content management systems which can “do everything” – or overly simple social networks which are pretty much just for sharing photos of cats. Ghost is about bloggers, it’s about publishing, it’s about journalism, and it’s about promoting and enabling real writing for the web,” said the founder, John O’Nolan. O’Nolan worked as Deputy Head of the WordPress UI Group until he decided to strike off on his own. “Ghost is different from competitors in that it’s open source, completely focused on publishing (not content management like Squarespace/WordPress), and non-profit. And it’s lead by a designer (me) as opposed to most open source projects, headed up by devs,” he said. O’Nolan has built websites for Microsoft, Nokia, and Virgin Atlantic. He is working with Hannah Wolfe, senior developer at Moo.com, and Rob Hawkes of Mozilla. The product allows WordPress programmers to convert their code quickly and easily into Ghost’s native framework. The open source version of the software will launch in September 2013, a month after the launch of the Kickstarter version. The real value of the platform isn’t quite ready to demo but thus far it looks quite promising. The Markdown compatibility is obviously important as is the multi-user features that O’Nolan is building in. Furthermore, any new publishing platform is worth a second look – or a $ 16 investment – especially when it looks so darn beautiful.
This week, NEA’s 
Jolla, the Finnish startup comprised of ex-Nokians who left to keep the MeeGo fire burning, has confirmed it will be showing off its first handset next month, and kicking off a “pre-sales” campaign to allow fans to register to buy its first phone. Although Jolla has demoed its Sailfish UI in some detail it has not shown off the hardware design so next month will be another big reveal.
Hip online eyewear startup Warby Parker has, over the last two years, been partnering with boutiques to open “stores-within-stores,” or small Warby Parker showrooms, where customers could try on their eyeglasses in 3-D. These showrooms popped up in L.A., Nashville, San Francisco and many others. Today Warby Parker 
We all remember the last scene in The Godfather, where Michael Corleone is depicted as the next Don, taking over the role from his father as the figurehead of the mafioso Corleone family. As a viewer, we are partly left with a sense of relief — finally, Don Corleone’s wishes for his dynasty to carry on through his son will come true, Michael Corleone has finally accepted his destiny as a mob boss, and the infamous Corleone family will live on for another generation. Horsehead-in-the-bed behavior aside, the way that VC firms groom their talent isn’t all that different from how the older Corleone groomed his sons.
Back in early 2011, Austin, Texas lost to Kansas City, Kansas for the distinction of being the first city in the United States to get wired up with Google’s high-speed Fiber internet service despite 
Build is Microsoft’s developer conference for its Windows, Windows Phone, Windows Server and Azure platforms and the company just announced that Build 2013 will take place June 26-28 at San Francisco’s Moscone Center. Registration will open next week, Tuesday, April 2 at 9am PT and early bird pricing for the first 500 registrants starts at $ 1,595. As Steve Guggenheimer, Microsoft’s Corporate Vice President and Chief Evangelist, notes in today’s announcement, “it’s been a while since our last developer event in the Bay Area.” The last Build, which happened last October, right after the Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8 launch, took place in Redmond, where the company put up a massive tent on its sprawling campus to host a few thousand developers. Build 2011 was held in Anaheim California. Guggenheimer, of course, didn’t reveal anything about the company’s plans for Build besides saying that Microsoft will “hare updates and talk about what’s next for Windows, Windows Server, Windows Azure, Visual Studio and more. Build is the path to creating and implementing your great ideas, and then differentiating them in the market.” Blue Earlier today, however, Frank X. Shaw, Microsoft’s Corporate Vice President of Corporate Communications at Microsoft, publicly acknowledged that “product leaders across Microsoft are working together on plans to advance our devices and services, a set of plans referred to internally as ‘Blue.’” This, as far as I can see, marks the first time the company has publicly acknowledged this project and chances are we will hear quite a bit more about it come June 26. As is tradition at Microsoft now, Shaw also took a less than subtle swipe at Google in an earlier post today. “While some folks were out doing ‘spring cleaning,’ we used the opportunity to look back a bit at what has happened in the past season, and to look ahead at what we have coming,” wrote in post that recapped some of Microsoft’s product releases over the last year.
In this week’s Ask A VC, Comcast Ventures’ Managing Director
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