Scottish Startup Sensewhere Promises Accurate Indoor Location-Tracking
december 2011 by doffm
As location gradually becomes more important to the on-the-go consumer, what with daily deals, check-in coupons, and local promotions, so that consumer’s fine location becomes more important to merchants. GPS and wi-fi can only get you so far, though, and inside a mall or airport it’s much more difficult and inefficient to narrow down a user’s location to anything approaching usability.
There are systems for tracking people and devices indoors, but Scottish startup Sensewhere (formerly Satsis) says they’ve leapfrogged existing solutions. Their new “self-correcting” location-sensing network will allow for quick and low-power situation of devices to within 5m by forming a sort of constantly updated mesh of self-aware devices.
The company, which split off from research at the University of Edinburgh and got its launch money through awards and loans, received £1.2 million in funding from private equity firms just this last August. They’re making their public launch nowish (there have been a few news items over the last week or so) and have made an app available on iOS and Android.
Their technology is similar to existing indoor-tracking systems, but the company says theirs is superior due to its self-updating nature:
By cross-referencing this information from different sources, at different times, sensewhere improves the accuracy of indoor location over time, autonomously mapping RF reference points in a way that is self-correcting, updated by every device that determines its own position, reliable, and more accurate than other solutions.
If you cut through the marketing there, what you basically have is a self-updating network with devices pinging a central server with the networks they see (wi-fi, Bluetooth, RF, etc.) and their position as best they can determine, and that central server continually collates this data and updates the map, using mobile nodes as reference as well as stationary ones.
Assuming the system works, it could be a great add-on for megastructures like department stores and airports, with tons of device traffic and square footage. While I’m sure it falls short of the idea right now, one imagines the endpoint: get a promo deal when you walk into a store that expires when you walk out – that sort of thing.
Right now it’s available as an app, but it seems unlikely that they’ll see uptake in that form. They’ll have to go white-label and market themselves as a customizable solution for individual locations – that or talk with mapping or deal companies and get themselves integrated at a lower level. No hardware is required for setup at your local mall, but places will still have to tie in and do setup – there’s a lot of low-level work to be done there interfacing with small stores, corporate offices, and so on. Retail is a nightmare but they are always up for new marketing opportunities.
The Sensewhere site is pretty spartan at the moment, but you can get more info on the apps into which the service is integrated through them. The system is described in more detail in their press release and at Crowdsourcing.
Startups
TC
from google
There are systems for tracking people and devices indoors, but Scottish startup Sensewhere (formerly Satsis) says they’ve leapfrogged existing solutions. Their new “self-correcting” location-sensing network will allow for quick and low-power situation of devices to within 5m by forming a sort of constantly updated mesh of self-aware devices.
The company, which split off from research at the University of Edinburgh and got its launch money through awards and loans, received £1.2 million in funding from private equity firms just this last August. They’re making their public launch nowish (there have been a few news items over the last week or so) and have made an app available on iOS and Android.
Their technology is similar to existing indoor-tracking systems, but the company says theirs is superior due to its self-updating nature:
By cross-referencing this information from different sources, at different times, sensewhere improves the accuracy of indoor location over time, autonomously mapping RF reference points in a way that is self-correcting, updated by every device that determines its own position, reliable, and more accurate than other solutions.
If you cut through the marketing there, what you basically have is a self-updating network with devices pinging a central server with the networks they see (wi-fi, Bluetooth, RF, etc.) and their position as best they can determine, and that central server continually collates this data and updates the map, using mobile nodes as reference as well as stationary ones.
Assuming the system works, it could be a great add-on for megastructures like department stores and airports, with tons of device traffic and square footage. While I’m sure it falls short of the idea right now, one imagines the endpoint: get a promo deal when you walk into a store that expires when you walk out – that sort of thing.
Right now it’s available as an app, but it seems unlikely that they’ll see uptake in that form. They’ll have to go white-label and market themselves as a customizable solution for individual locations – that or talk with mapping or deal companies and get themselves integrated at a lower level. No hardware is required for setup at your local mall, but places will still have to tie in and do setup – there’s a lot of low-level work to be done there interfacing with small stores, corporate offices, and so on. Retail is a nightmare but they are always up for new marketing opportunities.
The Sensewhere site is pretty spartan at the moment, but you can get more info on the apps into which the service is integrated through them. The system is described in more detail in their press release and at Crowdsourcing.
december 2011 by doffm
It’s time for startup founders to think bigger
december 2011 by doffm
Thanks to the efficiency boost provided by cloud computing’s debut about five years ago, web applications can now launch on almost a shoestring budget. That’s why there are so many new web companies that deal in things such as photo sharing, daily deals websites, travel planning and the like. The truth is, it’s easier than ever to put together a web or mobile app and call yourself a startup.
But there are a few recent developments that, taken together, are creating an even more powerful efficiency boost: one that puts resources that were once limited to well-funded corporations and research universities within the reach of a new generation of startup founders. Perhaps it’s time entrepreneurs took advantage of this new environment to solve larger problems, instead of building yet another lifestyle app.
The way I see it, the big components at play here are:
New money is investing in big ideas
Even though the larger economy is rocky, there are a lot of people just itching to pour money into the next big technological thing — hence pre-launch photo sharing startups that net $41 million in funding. While many tech investors are focused on funding sure short-term bets (i.e. the tried and true realm of web and mobile apps), there’s a budding sect aggressively looking to invest in larger, long-term innovations.
Peter Thiel’s Breakout Labs is one of the most explicit examples of this. As we reported at the program’s launch last month, Breakout Labs will aim to fund nascent research proposals: opportunities too early stage or radical to attract dollars from VCs or government grants. Basically, Thiel, who recently told the New Yorker he doesn’t consider the iPhone to be a major technological breakthrough, is saying: Enough with the toys and games. It’s time for us to make something big.
Supercomputers are going mainstream
The next “something big” in tech might not require all that much money to make.
If you want to build something really complex — think aeronautics, new pharmaceutical drugs, medical devices, jet engines, and the like — you need high-performance computing (HPC). HPC solves advanced computational and scientific problems by using a massive amount of computing power to solve very complicated problems that involve a lot of moving parts.
HPC facility at Argonne National Labs (attribution below)
It has historically been so prohibitively expensive to do HPC that only entities such as governments, militaries, well-funded universities, or huge corporations have the kind of access to the machines needed for computational fluid dynamics problems and the like.
But last year, Amazon started offering HPC as a service with “Cluster Compute,” making high-performance computing available in the same way that EC2 made regular servers available in the cloud. Earlier this month, Amazon souped up its Cluster Compute offering significantly — now, Amazon’s HPC-as-a-Service offering provides access to one of the world’s top 500 supercomputers for around $1,000 per hour. Meanwhile, tools such as CUDA and OpenCL give programmers the ability to harness massive numbers of compute cores without having to learn a special programming language.
This takes HPC out of the realm of scientists and makes programming for massively multicore HPC systems accessible to software engineers. What Amazon’s EC2 did for democratizing the ability to develop scalable web apps, HPC-as-a-Service can do for democratizing the ability to solve computationally heavy engineering problems or build gigantic predictive models.
3-D printing is becoming a reality
Printed engine prototype by Mcor Technologies
Once challenging technology problems have been mastered with the help of HPC, some of the solutions will need to be prototyped and put into physical production. This is still a very labor- and cost-intensive process, which is a big reason why many startups prefer to stay in the virtual realm. But the emergence of viable 3-D printing technology is on the cusp of changing that, making it cheaper and easier than ever before to make a physical prototype of a new design.
How much of a reality is 3-D printing today? It’s now available at the consumer level with a startup called MakerBot, which makes a 3-D printer called a Thing-O-Matic. The Thing-O-Matic costs $1,200 and makes relatively simple items such as small toys and gadgets like bottle openers on demand. Three-dimensional printers from companies such as Mcor Technologies are aimed at making more complex prototypes for enterprise-level applications.
Of course, startups have the option of skipping the prototype step and selling simply the IP of their HPC-developed designs to a larger company. But if a startup wants to have more control over the production of what it has made, 3-D printing brings that much more within small companies’ reach.
What will be the hot startup of the next era?
If everything works out as it should, the smart, early stage entrepreneurs of the near future won’t be thinking about how to build the perfect restaurant recommendation app. Instead, they’ll devote their energy to designing a more efficient airplane wing to conserve jet fuel, or a tiny device that can perform real-time monitoring of kidney enzyme levels, or an even more awesome landing gear apparatus for the next Mars Rover. Starting the next SpaceX or Virgin Galactic won’t need the kind of funding that only an Elon Musk or Richard Branson can provide.
Today, the lion’s share of companies that emerge from incubators such as Y-Combinator and 500 Startups deal in consumer-focused web apps. Here’s hoping that in the near future, incubators will look for startup founders who are taking real advantage of their new-found access to serious tech tools to build bigger and bolder products. It seems to me that driving toward that kind of world is where the attention of the tech industry — and the media that covers it — should focus.
“What’s Next?” image courtesy of Flickr user Crysti
Image of the HPC facility at the Center for Nanoscale Materials at the Advanced Photon Source courtesy of Flickr user Brian Howard on behalf of the Argonne National Laboratory.
Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.
Flash analysis: lessons from Solyndra’s fallCleantech Financing Trends: 2010 and BeyondConnected world: the consumer technology revolution
@CNN
funding
high-performance_computing
hpc
incubator
incubators
startup
startup_incubators
Startups
tech_incubators
technology
VC_funding
venture_capital
from google
But there are a few recent developments that, taken together, are creating an even more powerful efficiency boost: one that puts resources that were once limited to well-funded corporations and research universities within the reach of a new generation of startup founders. Perhaps it’s time entrepreneurs took advantage of this new environment to solve larger problems, instead of building yet another lifestyle app.
The way I see it, the big components at play here are:
New money is investing in big ideas
Even though the larger economy is rocky, there are a lot of people just itching to pour money into the next big technological thing — hence pre-launch photo sharing startups that net $41 million in funding. While many tech investors are focused on funding sure short-term bets (i.e. the tried and true realm of web and mobile apps), there’s a budding sect aggressively looking to invest in larger, long-term innovations.
Peter Thiel’s Breakout Labs is one of the most explicit examples of this. As we reported at the program’s launch last month, Breakout Labs will aim to fund nascent research proposals: opportunities too early stage or radical to attract dollars from VCs or government grants. Basically, Thiel, who recently told the New Yorker he doesn’t consider the iPhone to be a major technological breakthrough, is saying: Enough with the toys and games. It’s time for us to make something big.
Supercomputers are going mainstream
The next “something big” in tech might not require all that much money to make.
If you want to build something really complex — think aeronautics, new pharmaceutical drugs, medical devices, jet engines, and the like — you need high-performance computing (HPC). HPC solves advanced computational and scientific problems by using a massive amount of computing power to solve very complicated problems that involve a lot of moving parts.
HPC facility at Argonne National Labs (attribution below)
It has historically been so prohibitively expensive to do HPC that only entities such as governments, militaries, well-funded universities, or huge corporations have the kind of access to the machines needed for computational fluid dynamics problems and the like.
But last year, Amazon started offering HPC as a service with “Cluster Compute,” making high-performance computing available in the same way that EC2 made regular servers available in the cloud. Earlier this month, Amazon souped up its Cluster Compute offering significantly — now, Amazon’s HPC-as-a-Service offering provides access to one of the world’s top 500 supercomputers for around $1,000 per hour. Meanwhile, tools such as CUDA and OpenCL give programmers the ability to harness massive numbers of compute cores without having to learn a special programming language.
This takes HPC out of the realm of scientists and makes programming for massively multicore HPC systems accessible to software engineers. What Amazon’s EC2 did for democratizing the ability to develop scalable web apps, HPC-as-a-Service can do for democratizing the ability to solve computationally heavy engineering problems or build gigantic predictive models.
3-D printing is becoming a reality
Printed engine prototype by Mcor Technologies
Once challenging technology problems have been mastered with the help of HPC, some of the solutions will need to be prototyped and put into physical production. This is still a very labor- and cost-intensive process, which is a big reason why many startups prefer to stay in the virtual realm. But the emergence of viable 3-D printing technology is on the cusp of changing that, making it cheaper and easier than ever before to make a physical prototype of a new design.
How much of a reality is 3-D printing today? It’s now available at the consumer level with a startup called MakerBot, which makes a 3-D printer called a Thing-O-Matic. The Thing-O-Matic costs $1,200 and makes relatively simple items such as small toys and gadgets like bottle openers on demand. Three-dimensional printers from companies such as Mcor Technologies are aimed at making more complex prototypes for enterprise-level applications.
Of course, startups have the option of skipping the prototype step and selling simply the IP of their HPC-developed designs to a larger company. But if a startup wants to have more control over the production of what it has made, 3-D printing brings that much more within small companies’ reach.
What will be the hot startup of the next era?
If everything works out as it should, the smart, early stage entrepreneurs of the near future won’t be thinking about how to build the perfect restaurant recommendation app. Instead, they’ll devote their energy to designing a more efficient airplane wing to conserve jet fuel, or a tiny device that can perform real-time monitoring of kidney enzyme levels, or an even more awesome landing gear apparatus for the next Mars Rover. Starting the next SpaceX or Virgin Galactic won’t need the kind of funding that only an Elon Musk or Richard Branson can provide.
Today, the lion’s share of companies that emerge from incubators such as Y-Combinator and 500 Startups deal in consumer-focused web apps. Here’s hoping that in the near future, incubators will look for startup founders who are taking real advantage of their new-found access to serious tech tools to build bigger and bolder products. It seems to me that driving toward that kind of world is where the attention of the tech industry — and the media that covers it — should focus.
“What’s Next?” image courtesy of Flickr user Crysti
Image of the HPC facility at the Center for Nanoscale Materials at the Advanced Photon Source courtesy of Flickr user Brian Howard on behalf of the Argonne National Laboratory.
Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.
Flash analysis: lessons from Solyndra’s fallCleantech Financing Trends: 2010 and BeyondConnected world: the consumer technology revolution
december 2011 by doffm
Asana Adds Calendar Syncing To Its Task Lists: Another Simple, Subtle Iteration For Better Productivity
november 2011 by doffm
Asana wants its task-list tool to feel so simple that you only encounter complexity when it’s useful. In other words, the opposite of how most enterprise software feels. And it has just added a little new piece of complexity in the form of a feature that lets you sync tasks to calendars. The result is that users have to make smarter decisions about which tasks matter most, which should end up helping their productivity.
The feature looks obvious enough. A drop-down in the project menu lets you syndicate any task with a due date to apps like Apple iCal, Microsoft Outlook or Google Calendar. Select the sync option, and you can either click to add to Gcal, or click the URL to add to iCal, Outlook or other services. You can then use your calendar app to fine-tune things like how often you sync.
But there’s more going on. The core interface lets you create projects for different sets of task lists, and within that, creating any task is as simple as hitting return on a project page then writing a few words. The date-creation option is purposefully buried in a window to the right of the list, that you need to click on to open. This means that if you create a calendar date for the task, it’ll be because date is going to be pretty important for whatever the task is. The importance of the date implies that you’re going to want to track it carefully.
The new calendar-syncing feature reinforces the value of adding dates by only letting you sync entire projects. Does any given task really matter enough to appear on your general calendar, or is it so nebulous that it shouldn’t even have a date?
The end result is a better process for keeping track of what matters than just using a calendar. And there’s an added bonus for people like me who don’t think too highly of the date creation and task features in the calendar apps we use (by which I mean iCal’s frustrating new interface). Now I can see the dates for important tasks show up on my calendar without actually having to enter them.
There’s not much to complain about with Asana’s version, although I think it could use a little more complexity. The main thing I’d like is a way to schedule a specific task down to the minute and hour if necessary. Right now all tasks are just for the full day, so they’ll appear at the top of each day within calendar apps. For a few important tasks, the timing matters too much to gloss over. I’d also like a way to schedule some tasks to repeat by week or month.
Apps
Enterprise
Startups
TC
productivity
from google
The feature looks obvious enough. A drop-down in the project menu lets you syndicate any task with a due date to apps like Apple iCal, Microsoft Outlook or Google Calendar. Select the sync option, and you can either click to add to Gcal, or click the URL to add to iCal, Outlook or other services. You can then use your calendar app to fine-tune things like how often you sync.
But there’s more going on. The core interface lets you create projects for different sets of task lists, and within that, creating any task is as simple as hitting return on a project page then writing a few words. The date-creation option is purposefully buried in a window to the right of the list, that you need to click on to open. This means that if you create a calendar date for the task, it’ll be because date is going to be pretty important for whatever the task is. The importance of the date implies that you’re going to want to track it carefully.
The new calendar-syncing feature reinforces the value of adding dates by only letting you sync entire projects. Does any given task really matter enough to appear on your general calendar, or is it so nebulous that it shouldn’t even have a date?
The end result is a better process for keeping track of what matters than just using a calendar. And there’s an added bonus for people like me who don’t think too highly of the date creation and task features in the calendar apps we use (by which I mean iCal’s frustrating new interface). Now I can see the dates for important tasks show up on my calendar without actually having to enter them.
There’s not much to complain about with Asana’s version, although I think it could use a little more complexity. The main thing I’d like is a way to schedule a specific task down to the minute and hour if necessary. Right now all tasks are just for the full day, so they’ll appear at the top of each day within calendar apps. For a few important tasks, the timing matters too much to gloss over. I’d also like a way to schedule some tasks to repeat by week or month.
november 2011 by doffm
Path revamps with ‘Path 2′: A diary for the social, mobile world
november 2011 by doffm
This past spring, the team at Path realized it was time for a change. The San Francisco-based startup had debuted its flagship photo sharing app (accompanied with a serious amount of media buzz and some mixed reviews) in November 2010, and had spent the first several months post-launch working to perfect the original product.
“Six months ago we stopped. We just said, ‘Okay, what are people really using Path to do?’” Path co-founder and CEO Dave Morin said in an interview this week. The company surveyed Path users and found that many were using the app to remember moments in their daily lives — it wasn’t just about sharing photos, it was about cataloging personal memories for themselves. “Ultimately we realized that we had to completely re-imagine Path.”
Path 2, the new version of Path that is launching Tuesday for both iPhone and Android, is what’s emerged from that redesign effort. But to think of this as the 2.0 version of Path would be a big mistake: Path 2 is a dramatically different product than the app the company launched one year ago.
A diary for a mobile and social world
Path 2 aims to be a “smart journal” that catalogs all the big and small moments of your daily life. Along with your photos and videos, the new app has features that let you keep track of your thoughts, the music you’re listening to, where you are, who you’re with, and even when you wake and when you sleep. You can choose to keep each update entirely to yourself, share it with your Path contacts (limited to 150 based on Dunbar’s number), or share it publicly via Facebook, Twitter, or Foursquare (Tumblr support is on the way.)
Path 2 screenshot (click to enlarge)
Morin took me through an in-depth demo of Path 2, and for me it had the perfect combination that I look for in the increasingly crowded world of mobile apps: It was both beautiful and actually useful. Lots of people — myself included — maintain personal blogs or use social media sites partly for the same reason that they would maintain a diary: To personally remember what they’ve done. Every New Years’, I vow that I will be better about tracking the little things that make up my days by keeping a journal, but I typically start slacking off on it a couple months in. With Path 2, it could be a lot easier to keep my resolution: It’s on my mobile phone which makes it easy, and the social options make it more fun.
More complexity, more competition
With this redesign, Path is going more squarely into competition with services such as Evernote and even Facebook, the platform on which it was conceived as a much simpler photo-sharing app one year ago. When asked about this, Morin stressed that Path is different from Facebook on several counts: “We’re private by default and always will be, while Facebook is often public by defualt. We’re a tech company, Facebook is a media company. We’re a freemium business, and Facebook is advertising driven.” He was more accepting of an Evernote comparison, but pointed out that many people use Evernote primarily to keep track of their business lives. “What Evernote does for work, we do for life.”
Path 2 music post (click to enlarge)
This move also brings up questions for Path that weren’t there when it was a simple photo sharing app. When you position your service to be something as personal as a diary, users have the right to be a bit more demanding than they would with a more standard social app. For example: Path 2 still does not have a one-button export feature for all your content, although Morin says this is on the way. Right now, the only way to get all your data from the system is by sending an email request to customer service.
Also, the ability to view and analyze your Path data from other perspectives — say by zooming out to see an annual timeline, or a month view — is not yet available. These types of features could be made possible if Path releases an API, which Morin says is a definite possibility for the future.
But will it have staying power?
The question of money is an important one here. Many web startups don’t start thinking seriously about revenue in the first couple years of business, but if you’re going to use an app as your personal journal, you want to have confidence that it will stay around for a while. Evernote, for example, is a profitable business: The company charges $45 per year for its premium app and the company’s CEO Phil Libin has been forthright about his mission to make Evernote a going concern for the next 100 years.
Path, which has 20 employees, is not at a point where it can cover its own costs. Path 2 is a totally free app and Morin says he has no plans to start running ads. The business model is a “freemium” one, but for now the only premium products Path sells are small: Additional photo filter options and the like. Path has other premium offerings in the pipeline, Morin tells me, and the good news is the company won’t have to worry about keeping the lights on for a while: It has taken on some $11 million in funding since its inception.
All in all, Path 2 is a great looking app and it stands a chance to become a big hit in the months ahead. But if it wants people to really be serious about committing to the new app, Path could do well to outline its financial plans a bit more firmly for prospective users.
Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.
Connected world: the consumer technology revolutionNewNet Q3: Facebook remakes headlines in social mediaFlash analysis: the tech startup investment environment, Q3 2011
Android_apps
Facebook
iphone_apps
Mobile_Apps
Path
photo_sharing_apps
Startups
vc_funded_startups
from google
“Six months ago we stopped. We just said, ‘Okay, what are people really using Path to do?’” Path co-founder and CEO Dave Morin said in an interview this week. The company surveyed Path users and found that many were using the app to remember moments in their daily lives — it wasn’t just about sharing photos, it was about cataloging personal memories for themselves. “Ultimately we realized that we had to completely re-imagine Path.”
Path 2, the new version of Path that is launching Tuesday for both iPhone and Android, is what’s emerged from that redesign effort. But to think of this as the 2.0 version of Path would be a big mistake: Path 2 is a dramatically different product than the app the company launched one year ago.
A diary for a mobile and social world
Path 2 aims to be a “smart journal” that catalogs all the big and small moments of your daily life. Along with your photos and videos, the new app has features that let you keep track of your thoughts, the music you’re listening to, where you are, who you’re with, and even when you wake and when you sleep. You can choose to keep each update entirely to yourself, share it with your Path contacts (limited to 150 based on Dunbar’s number), or share it publicly via Facebook, Twitter, or Foursquare (Tumblr support is on the way.)
Path 2 screenshot (click to enlarge)
Morin took me through an in-depth demo of Path 2, and for me it had the perfect combination that I look for in the increasingly crowded world of mobile apps: It was both beautiful and actually useful. Lots of people — myself included — maintain personal blogs or use social media sites partly for the same reason that they would maintain a diary: To personally remember what they’ve done. Every New Years’, I vow that I will be better about tracking the little things that make up my days by keeping a journal, but I typically start slacking off on it a couple months in. With Path 2, it could be a lot easier to keep my resolution: It’s on my mobile phone which makes it easy, and the social options make it more fun.
More complexity, more competition
With this redesign, Path is going more squarely into competition with services such as Evernote and even Facebook, the platform on which it was conceived as a much simpler photo-sharing app one year ago. When asked about this, Morin stressed that Path is different from Facebook on several counts: “We’re private by default and always will be, while Facebook is often public by defualt. We’re a tech company, Facebook is a media company. We’re a freemium business, and Facebook is advertising driven.” He was more accepting of an Evernote comparison, but pointed out that many people use Evernote primarily to keep track of their business lives. “What Evernote does for work, we do for life.”
Path 2 music post (click to enlarge)
This move also brings up questions for Path that weren’t there when it was a simple photo sharing app. When you position your service to be something as personal as a diary, users have the right to be a bit more demanding than they would with a more standard social app. For example: Path 2 still does not have a one-button export feature for all your content, although Morin says this is on the way. Right now, the only way to get all your data from the system is by sending an email request to customer service.
Also, the ability to view and analyze your Path data from other perspectives — say by zooming out to see an annual timeline, or a month view — is not yet available. These types of features could be made possible if Path releases an API, which Morin says is a definite possibility for the future.
But will it have staying power?
The question of money is an important one here. Many web startups don’t start thinking seriously about revenue in the first couple years of business, but if you’re going to use an app as your personal journal, you want to have confidence that it will stay around for a while. Evernote, for example, is a profitable business: The company charges $45 per year for its premium app and the company’s CEO Phil Libin has been forthright about his mission to make Evernote a going concern for the next 100 years.
Path, which has 20 employees, is not at a point where it can cover its own costs. Path 2 is a totally free app and Morin says he has no plans to start running ads. The business model is a “freemium” one, but for now the only premium products Path sells are small: Additional photo filter options and the like. Path has other premium offerings in the pipeline, Morin tells me, and the good news is the company won’t have to worry about keeping the lights on for a while: It has taken on some $11 million in funding since its inception.
All in all, Path 2 is a great looking app and it stands a chance to become a big hit in the months ahead. But if it wants people to really be serious about committing to the new app, Path could do well to outline its financial plans a bit more firmly for prospective users.
Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.
Connected world: the consumer technology revolutionNewNet Q3: Facebook remakes headlines in social mediaFlash analysis: the tech startup investment environment, Q3 2011
november 2011 by doffm
The Cambrian Explosion In Startups
november 2011 by doffm
The sheer number of new startups forming and getting funded these days is dizzying. It’s never been easier to start a company to harness new technologies and turn them into products. Traditional venture capital may not even be able to keep up with it. We are at the beginnings of what may very well become a Cambrian Explosion of startups, which will have implications well beyond the technology industry to the entire economy.
We’ve spent the last 15 years building out the tethered web. The next 15 years will be about connecting the web, and the broader internet, to the physical world. And mobile is just the start.
We will soon be able to shrink fully-functional computers into almost anything—mobile phones and tablets today, TVs, car dashboards, and wearable devices tomorrow. And they will all be connected to the network. The only limit to what can be done with these connected computing devices will be what entrepreneurs and engineers can dream up.
The Cambrian Explosion is a useful metaphor. During the real Cambrian Explosion, of course, many new species were created. But how many of them thrived? How many quickly became extinct? It was a period of rapid evolution, with new species both emerging and dying off quickly. In the end, the world was better off from an evolutionary perspective, but not every new animal survived, just like every new startup won’t survive.
Early evidence of this Cambrian Explosion is already showing itself. Last year, for instance, there were more than 1,100 seed/angel funding rounds, up from 855 in 2008, according to Crunchbase. That was a 33% increase in just two years, and 2011 looks like it will surpass 2010. Why are there so many more early stage startups? I believe there are two reasons. The barriers to creating a startup are falling away, and the market opportunities have never been greater. (This is tempered by the current global economic malaise, and serious concerns about how many of these early stage startups will make it past the seed stage, which I will address later on).
Let’s talk about the lower barriers to startup creation. First, there is less capital required than ever before, while at the same time there is more capital available (at least for seed stage companies). The advent of cloud computing, open source software, and plug-and-play APIs for every web platform means that 3 coders can create a product for a few hundred thousand dollars instead of the few million it would have cost just ten years ago. They can start lean, learn from their early customers, and improve the product along the way.
On the opportunity side, the potential online audience is bigger than it’s ever been before, with 2 billion people online, and even more of them are moving to mobile. The Internet is no longer just the desktop Web. It is apps for mobile phones and tablets which pull data from the internet but never launch a browser. It is connected devices like Jawbone’s Up bracelet that monitors your physical activity. And that is just scratching the surface.
There are whole industries yet to be seriously touched by the Internet, but which could benefit from better information: health, education, transportation, energy consumption—to name just a few. The consumer internet has basically zero barriers to entry, which is why we see so much action there, but brave entrepreneurs are beginning to take the same principles and apply them elsewhere. In health, for instance, where there are regulatory requirements or in education, where institutions hold the keys to the kingdom, internet startups are beginning to make some serious headway.
The internet is today’s steam engine. Anyone can tinker and build an app or a web business. The pace of innovation is similar to what was seen during the tail end of the industrial revolution in the late 1800s when anyone with a barn (the garage of its day) could apply steam engines to all sorts of practical uses, including machinery and vehicles. The barriers to experimentation were similarly low back then. But now the engine is the internet itself. Any product or service that is not connected to the internet is dead in the water.
Today’s most productive machine is the computer. But that machine is increasingly useless if it is not connected. What is the first thing you do when you turn on your computer? Launch a browser or check your email. Imagine a Kindle Fire or iPad as a standalone device. You wouldn’t be able to download any apps, books, or movies. Tablets and smartphones are merely interfaces to the network.
It’s not just that the network is the computer. The network is society, the market, and politics all rolled into one. We live our lives connected to the network at practically all times through various devices.
What seems frivolous in one context (using mobile technologies to organize a night out with your friends) can literally overturn governments in another (the Green Revolution in Iran, which gave rise to the Arab Spring, used Bluetooth-connected phones as its basic organizing network). Mobile, social, and local technologies are having a much deeper impact across the world than being able to offer up local deals on your mobile phone.
The internet is at its core an information network and a communications network. The ideal of better information, of perfect information, changes everything it touches. And while that creates new opportunities, it also creates new challenges. Every single industry, every single business that profits from information asymmetries, will be challenged.
Technology is not a panacea. It might very well be eliminating jobs faster than it can replace them. Technology makes industries more efficient, yes, but that also means they need to employ fewer people.
Just look at the data. Economic growth and employment growth used to go hand in hand, but now it appears as though they have been decoupled. Apple’s big new server farm in North Carolina, for example, employs only 50 people.
The Cambrian Explosion not only created millions of new life forms, it eliminated many of the weaker species that preceded it. They just couldn’t compete. I believe we are going to see a similar phenomenon in the coming decades on the economic front. The question is not whether it will happen. It is what side of the evolutionary divide do you want to be on?
Image via Ecology and Evolution
Opinion
Startups
TC
TCTV
Cambrian_Explosion
from google
We’ve spent the last 15 years building out the tethered web. The next 15 years will be about connecting the web, and the broader internet, to the physical world. And mobile is just the start.
We will soon be able to shrink fully-functional computers into almost anything—mobile phones and tablets today, TVs, car dashboards, and wearable devices tomorrow. And they will all be connected to the network. The only limit to what can be done with these connected computing devices will be what entrepreneurs and engineers can dream up.
The Cambrian Explosion is a useful metaphor. During the real Cambrian Explosion, of course, many new species were created. But how many of them thrived? How many quickly became extinct? It was a period of rapid evolution, with new species both emerging and dying off quickly. In the end, the world was better off from an evolutionary perspective, but not every new animal survived, just like every new startup won’t survive.
Early evidence of this Cambrian Explosion is already showing itself. Last year, for instance, there were more than 1,100 seed/angel funding rounds, up from 855 in 2008, according to Crunchbase. That was a 33% increase in just two years, and 2011 looks like it will surpass 2010. Why are there so many more early stage startups? I believe there are two reasons. The barriers to creating a startup are falling away, and the market opportunities have never been greater. (This is tempered by the current global economic malaise, and serious concerns about how many of these early stage startups will make it past the seed stage, which I will address later on).
Let’s talk about the lower barriers to startup creation. First, there is less capital required than ever before, while at the same time there is more capital available (at least for seed stage companies). The advent of cloud computing, open source software, and plug-and-play APIs for every web platform means that 3 coders can create a product for a few hundred thousand dollars instead of the few million it would have cost just ten years ago. They can start lean, learn from their early customers, and improve the product along the way.
On the opportunity side, the potential online audience is bigger than it’s ever been before, with 2 billion people online, and even more of them are moving to mobile. The Internet is no longer just the desktop Web. It is apps for mobile phones and tablets which pull data from the internet but never launch a browser. It is connected devices like Jawbone’s Up bracelet that monitors your physical activity. And that is just scratching the surface.
There are whole industries yet to be seriously touched by the Internet, but which could benefit from better information: health, education, transportation, energy consumption—to name just a few. The consumer internet has basically zero barriers to entry, which is why we see so much action there, but brave entrepreneurs are beginning to take the same principles and apply them elsewhere. In health, for instance, where there are regulatory requirements or in education, where institutions hold the keys to the kingdom, internet startups are beginning to make some serious headway.
The internet is today’s steam engine. Anyone can tinker and build an app or a web business. The pace of innovation is similar to what was seen during the tail end of the industrial revolution in the late 1800s when anyone with a barn (the garage of its day) could apply steam engines to all sorts of practical uses, including machinery and vehicles. The barriers to experimentation were similarly low back then. But now the engine is the internet itself. Any product or service that is not connected to the internet is dead in the water.
Today’s most productive machine is the computer. But that machine is increasingly useless if it is not connected. What is the first thing you do when you turn on your computer? Launch a browser or check your email. Imagine a Kindle Fire or iPad as a standalone device. You wouldn’t be able to download any apps, books, or movies. Tablets and smartphones are merely interfaces to the network.
It’s not just that the network is the computer. The network is society, the market, and politics all rolled into one. We live our lives connected to the network at practically all times through various devices.
What seems frivolous in one context (using mobile technologies to organize a night out with your friends) can literally overturn governments in another (the Green Revolution in Iran, which gave rise to the Arab Spring, used Bluetooth-connected phones as its basic organizing network). Mobile, social, and local technologies are having a much deeper impact across the world than being able to offer up local deals on your mobile phone.
The internet is at its core an information network and a communications network. The ideal of better information, of perfect information, changes everything it touches. And while that creates new opportunities, it also creates new challenges. Every single industry, every single business that profits from information asymmetries, will be challenged.
Technology is not a panacea. It might very well be eliminating jobs faster than it can replace them. Technology makes industries more efficient, yes, but that also means they need to employ fewer people.
Just look at the data. Economic growth and employment growth used to go hand in hand, but now it appears as though they have been decoupled. Apple’s big new server farm in North Carolina, for example, employs only 50 people.
The Cambrian Explosion not only created millions of new life forms, it eliminated many of the weaker species that preceded it. They just couldn’t compete. I believe we are going to see a similar phenomenon in the coming decades on the economic front. The question is not whether it will happen. It is what side of the evolutionary divide do you want to be on?
Image via Ecology and Evolution
november 2011 by doffm
Dylan’s Desk: The time to start a company is now
november 2011 by doffm
Much of what happens at a startup happens out of sight of journalists and their readers.
It’s not the stuff of compelling reading, either. Running a business involves a vast amount of logistical work, stuff that has to be learned step by step if you don’t already know how to do it.
You don’t find this out in business school. The only way to learn it is by doing it. That’s why, if you’ve got a killer business idea, you should go out and do it.
You don’t find this out by being a journalist, either. Back in the dot-com era, another writer and I got together, decided we had a pretty good grasp on this digital publishing thing, and started a company.
We probably did have a good idea. Our plan was to write and syndicate how-to content like tips and tricks, starting with tech products and then expanding into other categories. We figured we’d sell advertising, and syndicate our content to sites that needed to make themselves stickier, like e-commerce sites. A better-funded competitor, eHow, went on to dominate the how-to category before getting acquired. It’s still around. Meanwhile, syndication turned out to be a decent model for making money from content. We were just 10 years too early.
At least, that’s what I like to tell people. In reality, we had a great idea but no clue how to execute it. Despite great advice from more experienced business people and investors, we were good at the writing and editing business but not so hot at the generating-revenue and organizing-a-team business.
Things you wouldn’t ordinarily think twice about, like incorporating and taking care of our (nearly nonexistent) finances took up a huge amount of time, as we realized that we were out of our depth. We then spent too long talking with lawyers and accountants who cost way too much. Eventually, we realized we didn’t really need such heavy-duty firepower helping us, but by then we had spent thousands on them.
We were convinced we needed to raise a lot of money, and quickly, so we could “get big fast” and then figure out our revenue model. In reality, that was exactly backwards: For our kind of business, we should have stayed small, kept the company simple, built a product that we understood and could sell, and then grown the business once we had some idea what we were doing.
Eventually, we ran into one too many roadblocks (including the dot-com bust) and wound the company down. We didn’t make ourselves or our investors rich, but we did return more than half of what they’d invested to them — which is more than you can say about Pets.com or Boo.com.
But here’s the thing: I think our experience is typical of many, many startups. Unless you’ve been through a startup at its earliest stages before, you have no idea what kinds of unexpected, and possibly stupid, things you’re going to have to deal with. Do you need desks? How is your team going to communicate: on ICQ, AIM, Yammer or something else? Should you incorporate or form some kind of simpler partnership? What happens when a customer asks for an invoice? How do you handle it when one of the cofounders refuses to bathe and smells terrible? (Just to be clear, that last example comes from Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs, not from my experience.)
One of the advantages that entrepreneurs have today is that, thanks to cloud technologies like Amazon EC2 and S3, it’s easier than ever to build a prototype, get a website up and running, and start testing your business with real customers.
It’s also easier, thanks to the examples of companies like Craigslist and 37signals, to ignore the received wisdom about “getting big fast” and raising venture capital. If you haven’t read Rework, the 2010 book by the founders of 37signals, check it out — it’s an excellent book with lots of practical advice for people in regular jobs as well as startups.
But one thing remains the same: Starting a company is a risk. Doing that when you’ve got kids, a mortgage or other obligations is a lot more challenging than it is when you’re in college, or just out of school.
In my case, the entrepreneurial thing to do would have been to learn from my failures and jump straight into another startup. Silicon Valley is full of repeat failures, and one of the strengths of the area is that failing in business is not stigmatized, as long as you learn from your experience. With kids on the way, I didn’t have enough flexibility, so I went back to the lucrative, stable world of journalism. (Ha!)
So if you’ve got an idea for a company — or want to work at a startup, like our new columnist Julia Plevin — do it before you’ve incurred a lot of other responsibilities.
“You can’t build a world-changing company in between classes or while servicing six figures of debt,” the president of the Thiel Foundation said this week, when announcing the foundation’s plan to give $100,000 “un-scholarships” to 20 people under 20 years of age. The scholarships are meant to help students with good ideas so they can drop out of college and work on their business.
I think that’s a great idea — and the Thiel Foundation is right. Whether you can get an un-scholarship or not: Do it now.
Image credit: Robert S. Donovan/Flickr
Related articles
Dylan’s Desk: How stressful product launches make stressful products (venturebeat.com)
Startup and the City: Lessons from landing my first startup job (venturebeat.com)
Peter Thiel will give you $100K not to go to college, opens 2012 Thiel Fellowship class (venturebeat.com)
The lean startup: How to stay lean when your company takes off (venturebeat.com)
Filed under: Entrepreneur Corner, VentureBeat
Entrepreneur_Corner
VentureBeat
Dylan's_Desk
startups
from google
It’s not the stuff of compelling reading, either. Running a business involves a vast amount of logistical work, stuff that has to be learned step by step if you don’t already know how to do it.
You don’t find this out in business school. The only way to learn it is by doing it. That’s why, if you’ve got a killer business idea, you should go out and do it.
You don’t find this out by being a journalist, either. Back in the dot-com era, another writer and I got together, decided we had a pretty good grasp on this digital publishing thing, and started a company.
We probably did have a good idea. Our plan was to write and syndicate how-to content like tips and tricks, starting with tech products and then expanding into other categories. We figured we’d sell advertising, and syndicate our content to sites that needed to make themselves stickier, like e-commerce sites. A better-funded competitor, eHow, went on to dominate the how-to category before getting acquired. It’s still around. Meanwhile, syndication turned out to be a decent model for making money from content. We were just 10 years too early.
At least, that’s what I like to tell people. In reality, we had a great idea but no clue how to execute it. Despite great advice from more experienced business people and investors, we were good at the writing and editing business but not so hot at the generating-revenue and organizing-a-team business.
Things you wouldn’t ordinarily think twice about, like incorporating and taking care of our (nearly nonexistent) finances took up a huge amount of time, as we realized that we were out of our depth. We then spent too long talking with lawyers and accountants who cost way too much. Eventually, we realized we didn’t really need such heavy-duty firepower helping us, but by then we had spent thousands on them.
We were convinced we needed to raise a lot of money, and quickly, so we could “get big fast” and then figure out our revenue model. In reality, that was exactly backwards: For our kind of business, we should have stayed small, kept the company simple, built a product that we understood and could sell, and then grown the business once we had some idea what we were doing.
Eventually, we ran into one too many roadblocks (including the dot-com bust) and wound the company down. We didn’t make ourselves or our investors rich, but we did return more than half of what they’d invested to them — which is more than you can say about Pets.com or Boo.com.
But here’s the thing: I think our experience is typical of many, many startups. Unless you’ve been through a startup at its earliest stages before, you have no idea what kinds of unexpected, and possibly stupid, things you’re going to have to deal with. Do you need desks? How is your team going to communicate: on ICQ, AIM, Yammer or something else? Should you incorporate or form some kind of simpler partnership? What happens when a customer asks for an invoice? How do you handle it when one of the cofounders refuses to bathe and smells terrible? (Just to be clear, that last example comes from Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs, not from my experience.)
One of the advantages that entrepreneurs have today is that, thanks to cloud technologies like Amazon EC2 and S3, it’s easier than ever to build a prototype, get a website up and running, and start testing your business with real customers.
It’s also easier, thanks to the examples of companies like Craigslist and 37signals, to ignore the received wisdom about “getting big fast” and raising venture capital. If you haven’t read Rework, the 2010 book by the founders of 37signals, check it out — it’s an excellent book with lots of practical advice for people in regular jobs as well as startups.
But one thing remains the same: Starting a company is a risk. Doing that when you’ve got kids, a mortgage or other obligations is a lot more challenging than it is when you’re in college, or just out of school.
In my case, the entrepreneurial thing to do would have been to learn from my failures and jump straight into another startup. Silicon Valley is full of repeat failures, and one of the strengths of the area is that failing in business is not stigmatized, as long as you learn from your experience. With kids on the way, I didn’t have enough flexibility, so I went back to the lucrative, stable world of journalism. (Ha!)
So if you’ve got an idea for a company — or want to work at a startup, like our new columnist Julia Plevin — do it before you’ve incurred a lot of other responsibilities.
“You can’t build a world-changing company in between classes or while servicing six figures of debt,” the president of the Thiel Foundation said this week, when announcing the foundation’s plan to give $100,000 “un-scholarships” to 20 people under 20 years of age. The scholarships are meant to help students with good ideas so they can drop out of college and work on their business.
I think that’s a great idea — and the Thiel Foundation is right. Whether you can get an un-scholarship or not: Do it now.
Image credit: Robert S. Donovan/Flickr
Related articles
Dylan’s Desk: How stressful product launches make stressful products (venturebeat.com)
Startup and the City: Lessons from landing my first startup job (venturebeat.com)
Peter Thiel will give you $100K not to go to college, opens 2012 Thiel Fellowship class (venturebeat.com)
The lean startup: How to stay lean when your company takes off (venturebeat.com)
Filed under: Entrepreneur Corner, VentureBeat
november 2011 by doffm
Genbook, The eScheduling Solution For SMBs, Passes 10 Million Appointments Scheduled
november 2011 by doffm
It always annoys me when I want to make an appointment, whether it be for a haircut or a doctor’s visit, and I go online to make said appointment only to find that the company or provider doesn’t offer eBookings. You would think that, if airlines have managed to do it, most businesses might have followed suit by now. Online scheduling software enables customers to book appointments from their browser, reducing friction for them, and streamlining workflow for SMBs. And, hey, even Siri can schedule appointments.
Of course, for SMBs, adding a scheduling option to their website can be a pain in the ass. Or, at least the prospect of building a calendar app/module can feel like a pain in the ass. Which is why there are companies like Genbook, which offer local merchants the ability to automate their appointment scheduling through cloud-based software that can integrate with SMBs’ existing software — or allow them to introduce that capability.
Genbook’s solution adds a “BookNow” button to merchants’ websites and Facebook Pages, so that customers can scroll through available times, schedule and confirm their appointments with a few clicks. The online appointment and CRM platform is accessible from any computer, iPad or iPhone or Android smartphone, and for merchants, Genbook automatically collects and publishes customer reviews to help promote local merchants within their communities. And they’re genuine reviews, not just canned comments.
While Genbook has competitors like Schedulicity, Appointy, and BookFresh, each of which offers a similar service with varying limitations on how much functionality you’ll get for free (Genbook is free for 30 days, and then it’s $20 a month after that), the startup seems to be having some success. (Even though a lot of startups have opted for freemium plans to monetize, and I’d like to see Genbook do the same.)
Today, Genbook is announcing that it has scheduled over 10 million appointments for SMBs in the U.S., and has scheduled more appointments in 2011 than in any of the four years it’s been around. Just in October, local businesses scheduled 500,000 appointments.
The cloud scheduling platform has attracted 5,000 customers, which it says consists of businesses like massage therapists, spas, photographers, chiropractors, etc. — obviously any small company that requires appointments to do business.
And for those SMBs, as one can imagine, this can have a positive effect on their bottom lines, as scheduling software that lets customers book in realtime, at any time of day, can prevent no-shows and reduce friction. What’s more, plugging that capability into a social network via Facebook Pages, for example, extends the reach and can presumably provide a boost to customer acquisition.
And at less than $250 a year for solo operators and less than $500/year for SMBs, it’s not a bad deal. For more on Genbook, check out the video below:
Startups
TC
Genbook
from google
Of course, for SMBs, adding a scheduling option to their website can be a pain in the ass. Or, at least the prospect of building a calendar app/module can feel like a pain in the ass. Which is why there are companies like Genbook, which offer local merchants the ability to automate their appointment scheduling through cloud-based software that can integrate with SMBs’ existing software — or allow them to introduce that capability.
Genbook’s solution adds a “BookNow” button to merchants’ websites and Facebook Pages, so that customers can scroll through available times, schedule and confirm their appointments with a few clicks. The online appointment and CRM platform is accessible from any computer, iPad or iPhone or Android smartphone, and for merchants, Genbook automatically collects and publishes customer reviews to help promote local merchants within their communities. And they’re genuine reviews, not just canned comments.
While Genbook has competitors like Schedulicity, Appointy, and BookFresh, each of which offers a similar service with varying limitations on how much functionality you’ll get for free (Genbook is free for 30 days, and then it’s $20 a month after that), the startup seems to be having some success. (Even though a lot of startups have opted for freemium plans to monetize, and I’d like to see Genbook do the same.)
Today, Genbook is announcing that it has scheduled over 10 million appointments for SMBs in the U.S., and has scheduled more appointments in 2011 than in any of the four years it’s been around. Just in October, local businesses scheduled 500,000 appointments.
The cloud scheduling platform has attracted 5,000 customers, which it says consists of businesses like massage therapists, spas, photographers, chiropractors, etc. — obviously any small company that requires appointments to do business.
And for those SMBs, as one can imagine, this can have a positive effect on their bottom lines, as scheduling software that lets customers book in realtime, at any time of day, can prevent no-shows and reduce friction. What’s more, plugging that capability into a social network via Facebook Pages, for example, extends the reach and can presumably provide a boost to customer acquisition.
And at less than $250 a year for solo operators and less than $500/year for SMBs, it’s not a bad deal. For more on Genbook, check out the video below:
november 2011 by doffm
The Rise Of The Health Startup? A Peek At The 13 Companies In Rock Health’s Inaugural Batch
november 2011 by doffm
There’s been a bit of a debate going on of late among venture capitalists and investors over whether or not web startups are currently experiencing a cash crunch when it comes to early-stage and series A financing. (You can read Alexia’s recent breakdown here.) As per usual, the answer depends on whom you ask. This recent debate contrasts with the data seen in Column Five Media’s infographic from June, which showed venture funding and investment levels picking back up in the first half of 2011, poised to storm back to pre-2008-collapse levels.
Of course, the data showed that not all tech sectors were experiencing the boom times: Health and medical-related investment, for example, was on the low end, receiving only 3 percent of venture funding over the last year. Yet, there may be some evidence that investment in the digital health space may in fact be heating up. Looking at this data compiled by new healthtech startup incubator Rock Health, we see a list of 41 healthtech startups have been funded in 2011. CrunchBase’s data, which uses slightly more generous paramaters for defining “health tech”, puts that number over 120 or so.
Of those startups that were founded this year, Aza Raskin’s Massive Health raised $2.25 million in seed funding from Andreessen Horowitz, Charles River Ventures, and more. (Well, Massive Health was actually founded in December 2010, but close enough.) And Azumio, which was founded this year, raised $2.5 million in seed funding from Founders Fund and Accel in July.
What’s more, we just covered 100Plus’ $500K seed raise from Founders Fund earlier this week. The personalized health prediction startup was not mentioned in Rock Health’s list, I assume because it is still in private beta.
But the point is, as we’ve seen in Dave Chase’s series of guest posts, the healthcare industry is ripe for disruption. Sure, the industry has a long way to go, but we’re seeing some great progress from startups like Practice Fusion, for example, which is busy becoming the largest provider of electronic medical records in the industry.
There’s also plenty of room for help in the way of incubators. On Friday, Rock Health, the startup accelerator for health-focused startups, hosted its Demo Day at UCSF Mission Bay, where the 13 startups in its latest class introduced their businesses to 250 attendees, among them investors from Accel, NEA, Khosla Ventures, True Ventures, Benchmark, Kapor Capital, SV Angel, The Social+Capital Partnership, Founders Fund and more.
For those unfamiliar, Rock Health provides seed funding ($20K grants, without taking equity), office space, and mentorship to entrepreneurs that want to break into healthcare. We covered their debut here.
The thirteen startups that demo-ed range from BitGym, which makes motion-sensitive iOS video games for working out; to IDEO-spinoff Omada, an online support group to reverse diabetes; to CellScope, a smartphone plugin designed to remotely diagnose ear infections.
It was also great to see that these teams included entrepreneurs that have previously worked in other areas of tech and media and are now bringing their talents to health: For example, Gabe Vanrenen, the former Founder and CTO of Flurry, Jackson Wilkinson, the former head of UX for Posterous and LinkedIn, to Jeff Lieberman, the host of Discovery Channel’s Time Warp.
Again, we covered the initial eight Rock Health startups that were ready to introduce their wares back in June, and you can read about them here. However, five of the startups were not yet ready for the limelight, so we’re providing brief introductions to those below:
Bigevidence provides clinicians focused access to the universe of medical evidence at the point of care and within electronic health records, improving quality of care, while reducing costs and risks.
BitGym thinks you should be using video games to exercise. Their patent pending technology uses an iPad to turn any cardiovascular machine into an interactive
gaming experience.
Cake Health is the best free way to manage your healthcare expenses online. The startup was a finalist at TechCrunch Disrupt San Francisco in September. You can read our initial profile here.
Crohnology is a social health network for people with chronic medical conditions to share and learn what treatments work, meet others near them, and track and share their health.
Heartbeat is a salesforce.com-like enterprise solution for wellness professionals that aims to empower people to be successful doing what they love.
Applications for Rock Health’s next class beginning in January 2012 are open until Wednesday, November 16th.
Startups
TC
rock_health
HealthTech
from google
Of course, the data showed that not all tech sectors were experiencing the boom times: Health and medical-related investment, for example, was on the low end, receiving only 3 percent of venture funding over the last year. Yet, there may be some evidence that investment in the digital health space may in fact be heating up. Looking at this data compiled by new healthtech startup incubator Rock Health, we see a list of 41 healthtech startups have been funded in 2011. CrunchBase’s data, which uses slightly more generous paramaters for defining “health tech”, puts that number over 120 or so.
Of those startups that were founded this year, Aza Raskin’s Massive Health raised $2.25 million in seed funding from Andreessen Horowitz, Charles River Ventures, and more. (Well, Massive Health was actually founded in December 2010, but close enough.) And Azumio, which was founded this year, raised $2.5 million in seed funding from Founders Fund and Accel in July.
What’s more, we just covered 100Plus’ $500K seed raise from Founders Fund earlier this week. The personalized health prediction startup was not mentioned in Rock Health’s list, I assume because it is still in private beta.
But the point is, as we’ve seen in Dave Chase’s series of guest posts, the healthcare industry is ripe for disruption. Sure, the industry has a long way to go, but we’re seeing some great progress from startups like Practice Fusion, for example, which is busy becoming the largest provider of electronic medical records in the industry.
There’s also plenty of room for help in the way of incubators. On Friday, Rock Health, the startup accelerator for health-focused startups, hosted its Demo Day at UCSF Mission Bay, where the 13 startups in its latest class introduced their businesses to 250 attendees, among them investors from Accel, NEA, Khosla Ventures, True Ventures, Benchmark, Kapor Capital, SV Angel, The Social+Capital Partnership, Founders Fund and more.
For those unfamiliar, Rock Health provides seed funding ($20K grants, without taking equity), office space, and mentorship to entrepreneurs that want to break into healthcare. We covered their debut here.
The thirteen startups that demo-ed range from BitGym, which makes motion-sensitive iOS video games for working out; to IDEO-spinoff Omada, an online support group to reverse diabetes; to CellScope, a smartphone plugin designed to remotely diagnose ear infections.
It was also great to see that these teams included entrepreneurs that have previously worked in other areas of tech and media and are now bringing their talents to health: For example, Gabe Vanrenen, the former Founder and CTO of Flurry, Jackson Wilkinson, the former head of UX for Posterous and LinkedIn, to Jeff Lieberman, the host of Discovery Channel’s Time Warp.
Again, we covered the initial eight Rock Health startups that were ready to introduce their wares back in June, and you can read about them here. However, five of the startups were not yet ready for the limelight, so we’re providing brief introductions to those below:
Bigevidence provides clinicians focused access to the universe of medical evidence at the point of care and within electronic health records, improving quality of care, while reducing costs and risks.
BitGym thinks you should be using video games to exercise. Their patent pending technology uses an iPad to turn any cardiovascular machine into an interactive
gaming experience.
Cake Health is the best free way to manage your healthcare expenses online. The startup was a finalist at TechCrunch Disrupt San Francisco in September. You can read our initial profile here.
Crohnology is a social health network for people with chronic medical conditions to share and learn what treatments work, meet others near them, and track and share their health.
Heartbeat is a salesforce.com-like enterprise solution for wellness professionals that aims to empower people to be successful doing what they love.
Applications for Rock Health’s next class beginning in January 2012 are open until Wednesday, November 16th.
november 2011 by doffm
ExtremeU: Facebook To Offer Product Strategy, Design Mentorship To Toronto Accelerator
november 2011 by doffm
Extreme Venture Partners, the Toronto and Palo Alto-based early-stage venture firm, today announced that it is launching a new-and-improved version of its accelerator program, Extreme University — also known as “ExtremeU”. Extreme Venture Partner’s accelerator program has been up and running since 2009 and is aimed at becoming a training ground and valuable ecosystem for Canadian startups targeting the social, mobile, and local spaces.
Extreme University graduates, like Locationary and Uken Games have gone on to raise millions in follow-on financing rounds. Jon Evans also recently wrote about Maide, a current ExtremeU participant that’s turning iPads everywhere into 3-D controllers.
Extreme University’s revamped model will consist of a 12-week program, in which five selected teams will share office space at the venture firm’s offices in Toronto, along with access to its network of founders, advisors, and developers. Extreme University will run two 12-week programs a year, each with five participating startups. What’s more, founders will also have the opportunity to participate in weekly personal sessions with experts and advisors, as well as work directly with key members of of some of the tech industry’s biggest companies.
Case in point: The accelerator is today announcing the first of its collaborating partners, which is none other than the social network of record, Facebook. Representatives from Facebook (which will include Elmer Sotto, FB’s head of growth in Canada, and his team) will work with startups to design and build socially-enhanced products in addition to offering product strategy and design mentorship, including educating founders on the best ways to leverage its Open Graph to create powerful distribution channels for their products.
Facebook reps will also enable startups to test new features on the platform and offer feedback on the tools startups create during the program before they’re launched to the public.
In addition to this awesome collaboration with Facebook, the startups chosen to participate in ExtremeU will receive $50,000 in funding. The venture firm will be taking an equity stake in the companies chosen to participate. While the exact level of equity taken has yet to be decided, it will likely be between 5 to 10 percent.
Among the mentors that will be sharing their wisdom with ExtremeU’s class of startups will be former Facebook VP (and the founder of Social+Capital Partnership) Chamath Palihapitiya as well as Albert Lai of Kontagent, Tomi Poutanen of Yahoo Answers, and more. You can check out the list of mentors here.
Extreme Venture Partners has forged (and is forging) some deep relationships with Facebook, Google, and other well-known tech companies that have significant presences in Canada. While Y Combinator, TechStars et al get a lot play in the media (and deservedly so), it’s nice to see our neighbors to the north building a valuable resource (and ecosystem) for early-stage companies — and encouraging them to stay in Canada and help to build Toronto into a vibrant tech community.
For more on Extreme Ventures, check ‘em out at home here. Startups can apply to ExtremeU here.
Crunchbase
EXTREME VENTURE PARTNERS
FACEBOOK
Financial-organization:
Extreme Venture Partners
Website:
extremevp.com
Extreme Venture Partners (EVP) focuses on providing early stage venture capital and management expertise to startup businesses to help propel them into the big leagues. We work with smart people who have great ideas and the energy and abilities to deliver on them.
EVP has deep roots in the technology and investment communities. We get involved as early as possible in a startup’s development. Beyond the financial resources we provide, we like to take a hands-on approach to supporting our...
Learn more
Company:
Facebook
Website:
facebook.com
Launch Date:
January 2, 2004
Funding:
$2.34B
Facebook is the world’s largest social network, with over 500 million users.
Facebook was founded by Mark Zuckerberg in February 2004, initially as an exclusive network for Harvard students. It was a huge hit: in 2 weeks, half of the schools in the Boston area began demanding a Facebook network. Zuckerberg immediately recruited his friends Dustin Moskowitz and Chris Hughes to help build Facebook, and within four months, Facebook added 30 more college networks.
The original idea for the term...
Learn more
Fundings_&_Exits
Social
Startups
TC
facebook
Extreme_Venture_Partners
from google
Extreme University graduates, like Locationary and Uken Games have gone on to raise millions in follow-on financing rounds. Jon Evans also recently wrote about Maide, a current ExtremeU participant that’s turning iPads everywhere into 3-D controllers.
Extreme University’s revamped model will consist of a 12-week program, in which five selected teams will share office space at the venture firm’s offices in Toronto, along with access to its network of founders, advisors, and developers. Extreme University will run two 12-week programs a year, each with five participating startups. What’s more, founders will also have the opportunity to participate in weekly personal sessions with experts and advisors, as well as work directly with key members of of some of the tech industry’s biggest companies.
Case in point: The accelerator is today announcing the first of its collaborating partners, which is none other than the social network of record, Facebook. Representatives from Facebook (which will include Elmer Sotto, FB’s head of growth in Canada, and his team) will work with startups to design and build socially-enhanced products in addition to offering product strategy and design mentorship, including educating founders on the best ways to leverage its Open Graph to create powerful distribution channels for their products.
Facebook reps will also enable startups to test new features on the platform and offer feedback on the tools startups create during the program before they’re launched to the public.
In addition to this awesome collaboration with Facebook, the startups chosen to participate in ExtremeU will receive $50,000 in funding. The venture firm will be taking an equity stake in the companies chosen to participate. While the exact level of equity taken has yet to be decided, it will likely be between 5 to 10 percent.
Among the mentors that will be sharing their wisdom with ExtremeU’s class of startups will be former Facebook VP (and the founder of Social+Capital Partnership) Chamath Palihapitiya as well as Albert Lai of Kontagent, Tomi Poutanen of Yahoo Answers, and more. You can check out the list of mentors here.
Extreme Venture Partners has forged (and is forging) some deep relationships with Facebook, Google, and other well-known tech companies that have significant presences in Canada. While Y Combinator, TechStars et al get a lot play in the media (and deservedly so), it’s nice to see our neighbors to the north building a valuable resource (and ecosystem) for early-stage companies — and encouraging them to stay in Canada and help to build Toronto into a vibrant tech community.
For more on Extreme Ventures, check ‘em out at home here. Startups can apply to ExtremeU here.
Crunchbase
EXTREME VENTURE PARTNERS
Financial-organization:
Extreme Venture Partners
Website:
extremevp.com
Extreme Venture Partners (EVP) focuses on providing early stage venture capital and management expertise to startup businesses to help propel them into the big leagues. We work with smart people who have great ideas and the energy and abilities to deliver on them.
EVP has deep roots in the technology and investment communities. We get involved as early as possible in a startup’s development. Beyond the financial resources we provide, we like to take a hands-on approach to supporting our...
Learn more
Company:
Website:
facebook.com
Launch Date:
January 2, 2004
Funding:
$2.34B
Facebook is the world’s largest social network, with over 500 million users.
Facebook was founded by Mark Zuckerberg in February 2004, initially as an exclusive network for Harvard students. It was a huge hit: in 2 weeks, half of the schools in the Boston area began demanding a Facebook network. Zuckerberg immediately recruited his friends Dustin Moskowitz and Chris Hughes to help build Facebook, and within four months, Facebook added 30 more college networks.
The original idea for the term...
Learn more
november 2011 by doffm
500 Startups Peels Back The Curtain On Its Third And Largest Batch Yet
october 2011 by doffm
It’s Halloween, so it’s the perfect day to unveil the newest group of 500 Startups’ “little monsters”. Yes, this is the name that founder Dave McClure and his partner in crime Christine Tsai give to all the rock star entrepreneurs that grace the halls of their Mountain View offices.
500 Startups, as you may have heard by now, is the early-stage seed fund and incubator program founded in 2010 by the globe-trotting angel investor, which seeds between $25K to $250K in each of its startups that meet its “Three Ds” criteria: Design, data, and distribution.
The fall batch kicked off on October 10 and includes 34 awesome startups, which makes this its largest roster to date (the initial batch consisted of 12 startups and the second came in at 21, bringing 500 Startups’ total to 174).
The breakdown of this batch’s demographics shows this to be a diverse group of companies, as 8 of the startups have female founders: 72Lux, DressRush, Gizmo, LoveWithFood, MeMeTales, Talkdesk, Tiny Review, WeddingLovely; Fifteen of the startups have international founders (UK, Croatia, Canada, Brazil, Netherlands, Australia, Portugal, Bulgaria, Estonia, Russia, Japan). The distribution is also impressive, as the majority of the batch hails from outside of Silicon Valley, with teams from Chicago, Denver, Seattle, Los Angeles, New York City, Washington DC, Boston, and more among its ranks.
Two of the companies, TinyReview and WeddingLovely, have also received investments from Designers Fund, which, for those unfamiliar, is a community of designers that invests in design-experienced founders through mentorship, angel funding, and network access. Designers can also apply for investment, much in the same way founders apply to AngelList.
The “Demo Days” for this batch of startups has not yet been confirmed, but we do know that they will take place sometime in January 2012. It should also be noted that, in the spirit of Halloween, the third batch of 500 Startups companies is not only made up primarily of zombies, but it also appears that part of the strict regimen of business plan-building and product-honing also includes instruction in the fine art of dance. Thrilling, thrilling dance.
These 34 startups will give a more complete peek into their various products and plans to take over the world at 500 Startups’ Demo Days in January, but for those of you who are too antsy to wait until then, here’s a sneak preview below in alphabetical order:
300milligrams is a priority inbox for team conversations. The team hails from Estonia, which just so happens to be a country with a disproportionate number of startups per capita.
72Lux offers consumers a universal checkout and personalized
shopping experience while also offering a white-label version for publishers.
BrandBoards is bringing Google Adwords simplicity and reach to live event digital advertising.
BrightNest is the Mint.com for home maintenance, helping homeowners manage their most valuable asset with customized tips and reminders.
Cadee helps golfers understand and improve their game.
Central.ly wants to connect all of the social media profiles for small business owners.
Chorus is customer feedback without the hassle. It automatically extract meaning from thousands of customer messages as they arrive in real time.
ContaAzul is a web-based, SaaS accounting system for Brazilian SMBs.
Contactually is a personal assistant for your professional email contacts that connects directly with your CRM.
DressRush (“Gilt for Weddings”) wants to make “bridezillas” everywhere clamor to get couture without the cost. Up to 100% off retail.
eSpark Learning is “Pandora for education”, creating custom playlists of fun education apps on iPads for elementary school students.
Farmeron is a Croatian startup that helps farmers across the world to manage their production data online and to do automatized farm performance analysis using exciting statistics.
Fileboard is a service accessed from the iPad that helps manage files and attachments across email, Dropbox, Evernote, and other cloud repositories.
Fitocracy turns fitness into an addictive gaming experience where you level up in real life. (Check out TC’s early coverage of Fitocracy here.)
Forrst is where developers and designers improve their craft and companies come to hire them.
Gizmo is a cloud-based multichannel marketing platform for mobile, tablet, social, and the Web.
GoVoluntr is a social platform that brings together volunteers, nonprofits, and businesses to solve today’s social problems.
Hapyrus offers the easiest way of leveraging Hadoop to make your system highly scalable.
HighScore House turns a child’s chores and boring routines into a game, making the lives of families a little less hectic and a little more fun.
Intercom lets web businesses build powerful, personal relationships with their users, turning them into loyal customers.
LookAcross is a sales productivity tool helps you to have more conversations and up your connect rates by improving your company’s odds of connecting with people.
LoveWithFood, is the easiest way to find culinary deals & samples, curated by a community of foodies for foodies. Like Tom’s shoes for food, with every deal served, LoveWithFood donates a meal.
Meloncard wants to keep your personal information private and out of the hands of the companies that sell it.
MeMeTales is a mobile game and reading platform for kids. “Fun like Angry Birds without the guilt”.
MoPix wants to define what the movie experience can be on tablet devices and make distribution accessible to anyone with film or video content.
OneSchool is a free mobile app that connects students to the people, places, and things around them.
PayByGroup wants to make it so that you never have to front money for your group purchases again. The startup coordinates your friends’ payments to the merchant so you can plan activities without the hassle.
Redeemr helps businesses and celebrities get un-ignored by their social media fans.
Rotadosconcursos is a Brazilian test prep service designed to get users into those coveted government positions.
Spinnakr simplifies website targeting and increases your click-throughs and conversions by automatically displaying the right message to the right visitor.
Switchcam recreates the concert experience by combining and syncing fan-recorded videos.
Talkdesk lets your company have a contact center in the browser. It provides information about the caller by integrating with services like Salesforce and Zendesk.
Tiny Review is “Instagram for Yelp reviews”, or a fast and fun way to say what you think about a place.
WeddingLovely is building tools and directories to promote small and independent wedding vendors.
One of the best parts of becoming a 500 Startups company is its strong list of advisors and mentors, which you can check out here. Not to mention the fact that more than 50 percent of its first batch raised at least $250K, two raised a million or more, and every startup finished with some money in their pockets.
For more McClure on why 500 Startups is like the Oakland A’s of seed-stage investing, compared to Sequoia as the Yankees, check out Alexia’s interview here, or for seven of the most interesting startups from the accelerator’s last batch, check out our coverage here.
Crunchbase
500 STARTUPS
Financial-organization:
500 Startups
Website:
500startups.com
Launch Date:
January 4, 2010
500 Startups is an early-stage seed fund and incubator program located in Mountain View, CA. They invest primarily in consumer & SMB internet startups, and related web infrastructure services. Their initial investment size is typically $25K-$250K.
Selected areas of interest include financial services & e-commerce, search/social/mobile platforms, personal & business productivity, education & language, family & healthcare and web infrastructure.
Learn more
Fundings_&_Exits
Mobile
Social
Startups
TC
500_startups
from google
500 Startups, as you may have heard by now, is the early-stage seed fund and incubator program founded in 2010 by the globe-trotting angel investor, which seeds between $25K to $250K in each of its startups that meet its “Three Ds” criteria: Design, data, and distribution.
The fall batch kicked off on October 10 and includes 34 awesome startups, which makes this its largest roster to date (the initial batch consisted of 12 startups and the second came in at 21, bringing 500 Startups’ total to 174).
The breakdown of this batch’s demographics shows this to be a diverse group of companies, as 8 of the startups have female founders: 72Lux, DressRush, Gizmo, LoveWithFood, MeMeTales, Talkdesk, Tiny Review, WeddingLovely; Fifteen of the startups have international founders (UK, Croatia, Canada, Brazil, Netherlands, Australia, Portugal, Bulgaria, Estonia, Russia, Japan). The distribution is also impressive, as the majority of the batch hails from outside of Silicon Valley, with teams from Chicago, Denver, Seattle, Los Angeles, New York City, Washington DC, Boston, and more among its ranks.
Two of the companies, TinyReview and WeddingLovely, have also received investments from Designers Fund, which, for those unfamiliar, is a community of designers that invests in design-experienced founders through mentorship, angel funding, and network access. Designers can also apply for investment, much in the same way founders apply to AngelList.
The “Demo Days” for this batch of startups has not yet been confirmed, but we do know that they will take place sometime in January 2012. It should also be noted that, in the spirit of Halloween, the third batch of 500 Startups companies is not only made up primarily of zombies, but it also appears that part of the strict regimen of business plan-building and product-honing also includes instruction in the fine art of dance. Thrilling, thrilling dance.
These 34 startups will give a more complete peek into their various products and plans to take over the world at 500 Startups’ Demo Days in January, but for those of you who are too antsy to wait until then, here’s a sneak preview below in alphabetical order:
300milligrams is a priority inbox for team conversations. The team hails from Estonia, which just so happens to be a country with a disproportionate number of startups per capita.
72Lux offers consumers a universal checkout and personalized
shopping experience while also offering a white-label version for publishers.
BrandBoards is bringing Google Adwords simplicity and reach to live event digital advertising.
BrightNest is the Mint.com for home maintenance, helping homeowners manage their most valuable asset with customized tips and reminders.
Cadee helps golfers understand and improve their game.
Central.ly wants to connect all of the social media profiles for small business owners.
Chorus is customer feedback without the hassle. It automatically extract meaning from thousands of customer messages as they arrive in real time.
ContaAzul is a web-based, SaaS accounting system for Brazilian SMBs.
Contactually is a personal assistant for your professional email contacts that connects directly with your CRM.
DressRush (“Gilt for Weddings”) wants to make “bridezillas” everywhere clamor to get couture without the cost. Up to 100% off retail.
eSpark Learning is “Pandora for education”, creating custom playlists of fun education apps on iPads for elementary school students.
Farmeron is a Croatian startup that helps farmers across the world to manage their production data online and to do automatized farm performance analysis using exciting statistics.
Fileboard is a service accessed from the iPad that helps manage files and attachments across email, Dropbox, Evernote, and other cloud repositories.
Fitocracy turns fitness into an addictive gaming experience where you level up in real life. (Check out TC’s early coverage of Fitocracy here.)
Forrst is where developers and designers improve their craft and companies come to hire them.
Gizmo is a cloud-based multichannel marketing platform for mobile, tablet, social, and the Web.
GoVoluntr is a social platform that brings together volunteers, nonprofits, and businesses to solve today’s social problems.
Hapyrus offers the easiest way of leveraging Hadoop to make your system highly scalable.
HighScore House turns a child’s chores and boring routines into a game, making the lives of families a little less hectic and a little more fun.
Intercom lets web businesses build powerful, personal relationships with their users, turning them into loyal customers.
LookAcross is a sales productivity tool helps you to have more conversations and up your connect rates by improving your company’s odds of connecting with people.
LoveWithFood, is the easiest way to find culinary deals & samples, curated by a community of foodies for foodies. Like Tom’s shoes for food, with every deal served, LoveWithFood donates a meal.
Meloncard wants to keep your personal information private and out of the hands of the companies that sell it.
MeMeTales is a mobile game and reading platform for kids. “Fun like Angry Birds without the guilt”.
MoPix wants to define what the movie experience can be on tablet devices and make distribution accessible to anyone with film or video content.
OneSchool is a free mobile app that connects students to the people, places, and things around them.
PayByGroup wants to make it so that you never have to front money for your group purchases again. The startup coordinates your friends’ payments to the merchant so you can plan activities without the hassle.
Redeemr helps businesses and celebrities get un-ignored by their social media fans.
Rotadosconcursos is a Brazilian test prep service designed to get users into those coveted government positions.
Spinnakr simplifies website targeting and increases your click-throughs and conversions by automatically displaying the right message to the right visitor.
Switchcam recreates the concert experience by combining and syncing fan-recorded videos.
Talkdesk lets your company have a contact center in the browser. It provides information about the caller by integrating with services like Salesforce and Zendesk.
Tiny Review is “Instagram for Yelp reviews”, or a fast and fun way to say what you think about a place.
WeddingLovely is building tools and directories to promote small and independent wedding vendors.
One of the best parts of becoming a 500 Startups company is its strong list of advisors and mentors, which you can check out here. Not to mention the fact that more than 50 percent of its first batch raised at least $250K, two raised a million or more, and every startup finished with some money in their pockets.
For more McClure on why 500 Startups is like the Oakland A’s of seed-stage investing, compared to Sequoia as the Yankees, check out Alexia’s interview here, or for seven of the most interesting startups from the accelerator’s last batch, check out our coverage here.
Crunchbase
500 STARTUPS
Financial-organization:
500 Startups
Website:
500startups.com
Launch Date:
January 4, 2010
500 Startups is an early-stage seed fund and incubator program located in Mountain View, CA. They invest primarily in consumer & SMB internet startups, and related web infrastructure services. Their initial investment size is typically $25K-$250K.
Selected areas of interest include financial services & e-commerce, search/social/mobile platforms, personal & business productivity, education & language, family & healthcare and web infrastructure.
Learn more
october 2011 by doffm
Hands On With Everpix, The Service That Centralizes All Your Photos From Desktop & Web
october 2011 by doffm
For the past week, I’ve been testing the alpha version of the Everpix service, which aims to automatically centralize and organize all your digital photos, both online and off. I’m happy to report that, so far, it works as advertised.
In case you missed it, Everpix, a creation of ex-Apple engineers, was one of this year’s TechCrunch Disrupt finalists. Using a small utility that runs on your computer, Everpix lets you connect to your local photo stores, online services like Facebook, Flickr, Picasa and Instagram, and even to the photos sent to you in Gmail.
Given that two of Everpix’s Co-founders, Pierre-Olivier Latour and Kevin Quennesson, each spent several years with Apple (Co-founder Wayne Fan was previously at frog design), it’s no surprise that Everpix is launching first for Mac users.
To get started, you install a utility that places an icon in the Mac’s menu bar. Initially, the syncing may slow your computer down a bit as it uploads your entire photo library. For that reason, it might be a good idea to get the upload started before bed so it doesn’t interrupt your work.
Clicking the Menu Bar icon will take you to the Everpix website, where you can configure the various services you want to connect to, as well as point it to which folders on your desktop contain photos you want to sync online.
For those of you with complicated folder-within-a-folder systems for organizing photos on your computer, you may be a bit disappointed to find that with Everpix you can’t choose to upload only a selection of folders or files. You must either globally enable or disable your entire Pictures folder (or optionally, your Documents and Desktop, too). However, I’d argue that, for most people, this will be a feature, not a bug. In providing fewer choices in terms of what can be synced, it simplifies the setup, reducing the amount of clicks it takes to get started. (You click the icon, go to “Photo Sources” then click the folder you want online. That’s just two clicks).
In my case, though, the folder I use to save photos that appear accompany blog posts is in my Pictures folder, and I had no desire to include these alongside my family photos on Everpix’s website. I will be forced to relocate that folder elsewhere, it seems.
By default, all your photos are private and will always remain private unless you specify otherwise, so unless you have some really personal photos, I wouldn’t worry too much about having them posted online. Of course, seeing a secure URL (i.e., one beginning https://…) would make me feel a bit more comfortable.
From the Everpix website, you can choose to enable additional online photo-sharing services, all of which connect using OAuth or, in Facebook’s case, Facebook Connect. The one big disappointment here was Gmail. Despite the fact that Gmail added support for OAuth back in March 2010, Everpix straight up asks you for a Gmail username and password, noting that it will store your encrypted password or its servers. No thank you. When a better method is available, there’s simply no reason to handle things this way. I chose not to connect my Gmail, and will not do so until OAuth is supported.
As for the organizational aspects to the service, Everpix does as promises – it groups photos together by “moments.” These moments are periods of time representing life events. For the most part, I found photos grouped by date, but in some cases, it knew to separate the group of photos I took during the day from those taken later at night.
One wish I had for the “Moments” feature was a desire to manually combine some of these groupings into one. For example, photos from a conference like TechCrunch Disrupt were spread across multiple days, when I’d rather save it as one moment. Since all the photos are fairly recognizable to the human eye as belonging to the same group (i.e., green background, conference stage), it’s clear there’s no super-intelligent machine algorithm handling the groupings.
The other big feature, auto-curation, I liked more. In large photo sets, the service will run through the batch and hide (not delete), bad photos like those that are blurry, out-of-focus, dark, or under or over exposed. You can return these photos to view with one click at the bottom of the page. And to keep the photo unhidden for good, just click the arrow icon on the photo.
The best feature of all is Everpix’s simple privacy settings. As noted above, all photos are private by default, but with one click, you can change that. With a toggle switch at the top of the page, an album (or select photos in an album) can be made accessible via a provided URL which you can share with Facebook, Twitter or via email.
Overall, despite the service’s simplicity, there are still many features Everpix lacked. For example, photos that appeared in landscape when they should be portrait aren’t rotated for you and there’s no mechanism on the site to do so. (Sure, that’s probably how they appear on the original site, too, but it mars the experience.) The forthcoming mobile interface for Everpix is also a much-needed addition, as it would provide the means to actually have your photos on hand wherever you are, plus provide a much simpler method for automatic uploads from your device. That’s in development, though, so it’s only a matter of time. I’d also like to name some of my moments, tag them or search them by people, places, dates or subjects, but search is not provided at all.
It would be great, too, if Everpix could pull in the face tags that iPhoto and Facebook already have and combine them – that would truly be a feat worthy of praise. I imagine that these are the kind of things Everpix is working on next – they would be crazy not to. A comprehensive photo database needs to be searchable and structured, not just organized and pretty, I’d say.
The company still doesn’t have details regarding pricing or a public launch, but in the meantime, I’m fairly happy to have this resource on hand. Before now, my photos had been widely spread out across the Web forever, with no easy way to centralize them. For that feature alone, Everpix is a tool worth having, in my opinion.
Everpix is accepting registrations here.
Crunchbase
EVERPIX
Company:
Everpix
Website:
everpix.com
Everpix lets you have all your photos in the cloud, automagically uploaded, organized and curated. View, rediscover, and share your best photos all in one place, effortlessly.
Taking photos is fun, viewing them is fun, but everything else in between still sucks. People have lots of photos in various libraries and devices, accessing and organizing them is a pain, and putting them online or sharing them is cumbersome.
Compare with the breath of fresh air that Everpix is:
• All your photos...
Learn more
Opinion
Startups
TC
Photography
photos
from google
In case you missed it, Everpix, a creation of ex-Apple engineers, was one of this year’s TechCrunch Disrupt finalists. Using a small utility that runs on your computer, Everpix lets you connect to your local photo stores, online services like Facebook, Flickr, Picasa and Instagram, and even to the photos sent to you in Gmail.
Given that two of Everpix’s Co-founders, Pierre-Olivier Latour and Kevin Quennesson, each spent several years with Apple (Co-founder Wayne Fan was previously at frog design), it’s no surprise that Everpix is launching first for Mac users.
To get started, you install a utility that places an icon in the Mac’s menu bar. Initially, the syncing may slow your computer down a bit as it uploads your entire photo library. For that reason, it might be a good idea to get the upload started before bed so it doesn’t interrupt your work.
Clicking the Menu Bar icon will take you to the Everpix website, where you can configure the various services you want to connect to, as well as point it to which folders on your desktop contain photos you want to sync online.
For those of you with complicated folder-within-a-folder systems for organizing photos on your computer, you may be a bit disappointed to find that with Everpix you can’t choose to upload only a selection of folders or files. You must either globally enable or disable your entire Pictures folder (or optionally, your Documents and Desktop, too). However, I’d argue that, for most people, this will be a feature, not a bug. In providing fewer choices in terms of what can be synced, it simplifies the setup, reducing the amount of clicks it takes to get started. (You click the icon, go to “Photo Sources” then click the folder you want online. That’s just two clicks).
In my case, though, the folder I use to save photos that appear accompany blog posts is in my Pictures folder, and I had no desire to include these alongside my family photos on Everpix’s website. I will be forced to relocate that folder elsewhere, it seems.
By default, all your photos are private and will always remain private unless you specify otherwise, so unless you have some really personal photos, I wouldn’t worry too much about having them posted online. Of course, seeing a secure URL (i.e., one beginning https://…) would make me feel a bit more comfortable.
From the Everpix website, you can choose to enable additional online photo-sharing services, all of which connect using OAuth or, in Facebook’s case, Facebook Connect. The one big disappointment here was Gmail. Despite the fact that Gmail added support for OAuth back in March 2010, Everpix straight up asks you for a Gmail username and password, noting that it will store your encrypted password or its servers. No thank you. When a better method is available, there’s simply no reason to handle things this way. I chose not to connect my Gmail, and will not do so until OAuth is supported.
As for the organizational aspects to the service, Everpix does as promises – it groups photos together by “moments.” These moments are periods of time representing life events. For the most part, I found photos grouped by date, but in some cases, it knew to separate the group of photos I took during the day from those taken later at night.
One wish I had for the “Moments” feature was a desire to manually combine some of these groupings into one. For example, photos from a conference like TechCrunch Disrupt were spread across multiple days, when I’d rather save it as one moment. Since all the photos are fairly recognizable to the human eye as belonging to the same group (i.e., green background, conference stage), it’s clear there’s no super-intelligent machine algorithm handling the groupings.
The other big feature, auto-curation, I liked more. In large photo sets, the service will run through the batch and hide (not delete), bad photos like those that are blurry, out-of-focus, dark, or under or over exposed. You can return these photos to view with one click at the bottom of the page. And to keep the photo unhidden for good, just click the arrow icon on the photo.
The best feature of all is Everpix’s simple privacy settings. As noted above, all photos are private by default, but with one click, you can change that. With a toggle switch at the top of the page, an album (or select photos in an album) can be made accessible via a provided URL which you can share with Facebook, Twitter or via email.
Overall, despite the service’s simplicity, there are still many features Everpix lacked. For example, photos that appeared in landscape when they should be portrait aren’t rotated for you and there’s no mechanism on the site to do so. (Sure, that’s probably how they appear on the original site, too, but it mars the experience.) The forthcoming mobile interface for Everpix is also a much-needed addition, as it would provide the means to actually have your photos on hand wherever you are, plus provide a much simpler method for automatic uploads from your device. That’s in development, though, so it’s only a matter of time. I’d also like to name some of my moments, tag them or search them by people, places, dates or subjects, but search is not provided at all.
It would be great, too, if Everpix could pull in the face tags that iPhoto and Facebook already have and combine them – that would truly be a feat worthy of praise. I imagine that these are the kind of things Everpix is working on next – they would be crazy not to. A comprehensive photo database needs to be searchable and structured, not just organized and pretty, I’d say.
The company still doesn’t have details regarding pricing or a public launch, but in the meantime, I’m fairly happy to have this resource on hand. Before now, my photos had been widely spread out across the Web forever, with no easy way to centralize them. For that feature alone, Everpix is a tool worth having, in my opinion.
Everpix is accepting registrations here.
Crunchbase
EVERPIX
Company:
Everpix
Website:
everpix.com
Everpix lets you have all your photos in the cloud, automagically uploaded, organized and curated. View, rediscover, and share your best photos all in one place, effortlessly.
Taking photos is fun, viewing them is fun, but everything else in between still sucks. People have lots of photos in various libraries and devices, accessing and organizing them is a pain, and putting them online or sharing them is cumbersome.
Compare with the breath of fresh air that Everpix is:
• All your photos...
Learn more
october 2011 by doffm
Calling all startups! What are we going to do with all of these photos?
october 2011 by doffm
Photos, Photos, Photos. Now that photography is all digital, we’ve got hundreds of them, sometimes thousands of them. With the iPhone, we’re taking pictures of meals, our cats and dogs, our feet, a funny sign, and pretty much anything else you can think of.
Taking photos has never been easier. Furthermore, photo sharing has never been easier thanks to services like Facebook, Google, Flickr, Instagram, and the list goes on and on.
Everyone is a photographer now, which is fantastic because moments that have never been captured before, are.
But what are we going to do with all of these photos? It’s an area ripe for innovation where I’m personally seeing little or none.
Photo Hosting
Photo hosting is somewhat easy for startups to get into, since cloud storage has become so cheap on services like Amazon EC2. Facebook has developed amazing technology to host photos for over 800 million users, with next to zero downtime. Google, with its infinite server farms, can host photos for every person in the world. Apple has gotten into the game as well with iCloud, sending photos that you take from your iPhone or iPad and sending it to the sky forevermore. Shoot, even Twitter will host your photos now. These services let you host them there and maybe let you categorize them into albums, but that’s about it.
As far as I’m concerned, the best photo feature I’ve seen in years comes from photo host Snapjoy. They let you see a random photo, and give you simple shuffle button.
But so what? You’re storing our photos. That’s just not enough anymore. What’s next?
Photo Sharing
Photo sharing is something that most of us do with the really great photos that we’re proud of. Be it an artistic shot, or a photo of a street sign that says something ridiculous, we’re posting them on the internet for the world to see. The thing with photo sharing though, is that they’re sent into a stream of a zillion other posts.
When I post a photo on Twitter or even Google+, perhaps 50 of my 15,000+ followers are paying attention at any given second.
Twitter now shares the photos that you’ve posted recently in a place that gets the least amount of traffic, your profile. How much time do you spend on someones profile on Twitter? Not a lot. So that’s just not going to cut it. Google+ has photo albums using its Picasa platform, but it still feels disconnected from the overall experience.
Facebook lets you tag people in photos, which is very social, and even has facial recognition software behind it now. This still feels like a utility sharing overall, but maybe Timeline will bring older photos back to life.
Flickr was the absolute best place to share photos, because the community that used Flickr really used Flickr. We used to spend hours pouring through photos, commenting on them, and marking favorites. And then Yahoo! bought them, and the innovation, heart, and soul died.
Instagram has picked up the slack for Flickr by letting you share a photo, slap a filter on it, and post it to a…stream. Mind you, Instagram has done a wonderful job with its “Popular” feature, which lets you see the photos that have been liked the most on the platform. A real community is building there, and since it’s completely mobile, people are interacting there a lot. It still needs work though.
What’s next for photo sharing?
Photo Editing
Photoshop is great, but requires a lot of attention to detail that most normal folks just don’t have. Editing a single photo requires time and passion. A lot of the photos are tossing into a stream don’t feel like there’s enough passion behind them to spend a half hour making them pretty using Photoshop. It’s also expensive software.
I’m excited that Google purchased Picnik, because it’s a nice editing tool that should evolve under Google’s wing, but as we know with Google, products sometimes get purchased and die. I’d hate to see that happen to a product like Picnik.
You could count Instagram as a photo editor, because of its filters and effects, but it’s a bit of a stretch.
Photo editing just isn’t something that has been innovated on enough to make the average Joe and Jill want to do it. But why not? Hosting is bountiful, and sharing is simple!
Photo cards and postcards
Now we’re getting somewhere. We have a ton of photos, putting them on postcards or greeting cards is a perfect way to bring moments to life in a new and physical way.
Apple Card launched, Postagram is doing well, so that’s a space I’d like to see evolve as well. Surely cards and postcards aren’t the only ways to bring a photo to life in a unique way. Digital prints are just boring, so I won’t even spend time on them.
My point is, photos have been around for a long time. It used to be really expensive and time-consuming to get photos taken and developed. You don’t have to do those things anymore, so we’re taking and taking photos, storing them all over the world, and we’re doing nothing with them other than share them briefly, get a comment or ten, and forget about them. I’m seeing some interesting things starting to happen with Instagram’s API, which is a step in the right direction.
Startups, it’s time to start innovating in photography. Fast. It’s a golden opportunity to give us something to do with amazing moments taken and shared in real-time. It’s the day after we take the photos though that the real innovation can begin. Even further innovation can take place on photos we took years ago. Yes, years. Remember those?
If you’ve seen great apps and companies doing new and cool things with Photos, drop them in the comments!
Apple
Apps
Media
Uncategorized
amazon
apple_card
cloud
ec2
Facebook
Facebook_Photos
Flickr
innovate
innovation
photo_stream
photos
pics
pictures
postagram
postcard
sharing
snapjoy
startups
Twitter
from google
Taking photos has never been easier. Furthermore, photo sharing has never been easier thanks to services like Facebook, Google, Flickr, Instagram, and the list goes on and on.
Everyone is a photographer now, which is fantastic because moments that have never been captured before, are.
But what are we going to do with all of these photos? It’s an area ripe for innovation where I’m personally seeing little or none.
Photo Hosting
Photo hosting is somewhat easy for startups to get into, since cloud storage has become so cheap on services like Amazon EC2. Facebook has developed amazing technology to host photos for over 800 million users, with next to zero downtime. Google, with its infinite server farms, can host photos for every person in the world. Apple has gotten into the game as well with iCloud, sending photos that you take from your iPhone or iPad and sending it to the sky forevermore. Shoot, even Twitter will host your photos now. These services let you host them there and maybe let you categorize them into albums, but that’s about it.
As far as I’m concerned, the best photo feature I’ve seen in years comes from photo host Snapjoy. They let you see a random photo, and give you simple shuffle button.
But so what? You’re storing our photos. That’s just not enough anymore. What’s next?
Photo Sharing
Photo sharing is something that most of us do with the really great photos that we’re proud of. Be it an artistic shot, or a photo of a street sign that says something ridiculous, we’re posting them on the internet for the world to see. The thing with photo sharing though, is that they’re sent into a stream of a zillion other posts.
When I post a photo on Twitter or even Google+, perhaps 50 of my 15,000+ followers are paying attention at any given second.
Twitter now shares the photos that you’ve posted recently in a place that gets the least amount of traffic, your profile. How much time do you spend on someones profile on Twitter? Not a lot. So that’s just not going to cut it. Google+ has photo albums using its Picasa platform, but it still feels disconnected from the overall experience.
Facebook lets you tag people in photos, which is very social, and even has facial recognition software behind it now. This still feels like a utility sharing overall, but maybe Timeline will bring older photos back to life.
Flickr was the absolute best place to share photos, because the community that used Flickr really used Flickr. We used to spend hours pouring through photos, commenting on them, and marking favorites. And then Yahoo! bought them, and the innovation, heart, and soul died.
Instagram has picked up the slack for Flickr by letting you share a photo, slap a filter on it, and post it to a…stream. Mind you, Instagram has done a wonderful job with its “Popular” feature, which lets you see the photos that have been liked the most on the platform. A real community is building there, and since it’s completely mobile, people are interacting there a lot. It still needs work though.
What’s next for photo sharing?
Photo Editing
Photoshop is great, but requires a lot of attention to detail that most normal folks just don’t have. Editing a single photo requires time and passion. A lot of the photos are tossing into a stream don’t feel like there’s enough passion behind them to spend a half hour making them pretty using Photoshop. It’s also expensive software.
I’m excited that Google purchased Picnik, because it’s a nice editing tool that should evolve under Google’s wing, but as we know with Google, products sometimes get purchased and die. I’d hate to see that happen to a product like Picnik.
You could count Instagram as a photo editor, because of its filters and effects, but it’s a bit of a stretch.
Photo editing just isn’t something that has been innovated on enough to make the average Joe and Jill want to do it. But why not? Hosting is bountiful, and sharing is simple!
Photo cards and postcards
Now we’re getting somewhere. We have a ton of photos, putting them on postcards or greeting cards is a perfect way to bring moments to life in a new and physical way.
Apple Card launched, Postagram is doing well, so that’s a space I’d like to see evolve as well. Surely cards and postcards aren’t the only ways to bring a photo to life in a unique way. Digital prints are just boring, so I won’t even spend time on them.
My point is, photos have been around for a long time. It used to be really expensive and time-consuming to get photos taken and developed. You don’t have to do those things anymore, so we’re taking and taking photos, storing them all over the world, and we’re doing nothing with them other than share them briefly, get a comment or ten, and forget about them. I’m seeing some interesting things starting to happen with Instagram’s API, which is a step in the right direction.
Startups, it’s time to start innovating in photography. Fast. It’s a golden opportunity to give us something to do with amazing moments taken and shared in real-time. It’s the day after we take the photos though that the real innovation can begin. Even further innovation can take place on photos we took years ago. Yes, years. Remember those?
If you’ve seen great apps and companies doing new and cool things with Photos, drop them in the comments!
october 2011 by doffm
DreamIt-Backed CloudMine Lets App Developers Bypass The Backend Pain, Focus On Their Product
october 2011 by doffm
I think it’s a fair assumption to say that, for app developers, the enjoyable part of their job is building the actual app, not finding the right web services and hosting provider, setting up databases, and slogging through configuration. I could be wrong to presume this to be true, but CloudMine, a Philadelphia-based startup launching in open beta today is willing to bet that most developers might agree with me.
So, CloudMine has developed a service that will allow developers to reduce the pain by providing a set of RESTful APIs that allow them to quickly create back-end solutions for their apps. Specifically, the startup is offering schema-free data structure storage, user account creation and management, and server-side business logic for computations that are too complex or data-intensive to run on a mobile device.
CloudMine is currently part of the current batch of fledgling startups in DreamIt Ventures’ Philadelphia-based accelerator program, which has invested $20K of seed funding in CloudMine’s backend solution. The service has been in closed beta for several months, where its testers have reported that CloudMine has cut the time it takes for developers to configure backend solutions in half.
Developers can use the service’s REST-based API directly or download its SDKs for the platform of their choice to give app creators the chance to increase their value proposition by focusing on the product (and getting it in front of users) and not worrying about tinkering with servers, web apps, or scaling.
I like that the PaaS service is offering a “B2D” (business-to-developer) solution that enables developers to move their focus away from infrastructure to product testing and iterating. It’s also pretty cool that developers can sign up for free and immediately get an API key for their first app — and quickly generating keys for other apps with one click once they’re ready to do so.
As to who is behind the startup: CloudMine was co-founded by Ilya Braude (formerly of Eastern Research acquired by Sycamore Networks and Drakontas), Marc Weil (who has previously worked at Apple and Oracle), and Brendan McCorkle (also the co-founder of Textaurant.
For more, check out CloudMine at home here.
Mobile
Startups
TC
CloudMine
from google
So, CloudMine has developed a service that will allow developers to reduce the pain by providing a set of RESTful APIs that allow them to quickly create back-end solutions for their apps. Specifically, the startup is offering schema-free data structure storage, user account creation and management, and server-side business logic for computations that are too complex or data-intensive to run on a mobile device.
CloudMine is currently part of the current batch of fledgling startups in DreamIt Ventures’ Philadelphia-based accelerator program, which has invested $20K of seed funding in CloudMine’s backend solution. The service has been in closed beta for several months, where its testers have reported that CloudMine has cut the time it takes for developers to configure backend solutions in half.
Developers can use the service’s REST-based API directly or download its SDKs for the platform of their choice to give app creators the chance to increase their value proposition by focusing on the product (and getting it in front of users) and not worrying about tinkering with servers, web apps, or scaling.
I like that the PaaS service is offering a “B2D” (business-to-developer) solution that enables developers to move their focus away from infrastructure to product testing and iterating. It’s also pretty cool that developers can sign up for free and immediately get an API key for their first app — and quickly generating keys for other apps with one click once they’re ready to do so.
As to who is behind the startup: CloudMine was co-founded by Ilya Braude (formerly of Eastern Research acquired by Sycamore Networks and Drakontas), Marc Weil (who has previously worked at Apple and Oracle), and Brendan McCorkle (also the co-founder of Textaurant.
For more, check out CloudMine at home here.
october 2011 by doffm
Union Square Ventures, Others Invest In Alternative Search Engine DuckDuckGo
october 2011 by doffm
In a blog post, Union Square Ventures‘ Brad Burnham just announced that the firm has invested in DuckDuckGo, a startup building a nifty search engine with less clutter and more privacy.
Scott Banister, Jim Young, Jeff Miller, Joshua Schachter, Kal Vepuri, Joshua Stylman and Peter Hershberg also invested in the round, writes founder and CEO Gabriel Weinberg.
USV Managing Partner Burnham will be joining the fledgling company’s board. He writes:
The company is young and under staffed so there are definitely holes Gabriel hopes to fill, but his observation that “traditional algorithmic signals are not the only authority on the web,” and his clever use of real authorities to curate search results makes Duck Duck Go an interesting alternative to your everyday brand.
It’s unclear how much USV invested in the company, but we’re digging for more info.
From Weinberg’s blog post on the fundraising:
My original plan was to delay raising capital until I saw a compelling reason to do so, perhaps forever. For better or worse, I stuck to that plan, which ended up being about a 3.5yr delay.
So why now? At the end of last year I noticed that the search engine started to really click with a greater percentage of people in a way that it hadn’t before. Don’t get me wrong — we still have a long way to go to reach our vision — but it was obvious that some things were really starting to become compelling, e.g. our Zero-click Info, privacy policy and goodies.
And here’s how DuckDuckGo is growing, according to its internal stats.
Crunchbase
UNION SQUARE VENTURES
:
Website:
Learn more
Financial-organization:
Union Square Ventures
Website:
usv.com
Launch Date:
January 11, 2004
“Union Square Ventures is an early stage venture capital firm based in New York City. We invest in young companies that use information technology in innovative ways to create high growth business opportunities in the Media, Marketing, Financial Services, Telecommunications, and Healthcare industries.
Our venture capital firm was conceived as a place where a small number of very experienced investment professionals, working collaboratively from a single office, could build a portfolio of promising startup companies and then put our experience...
Learn more
Fundings_&_Exits
Startups
TC
DuckDuckGo
Union_Square_Ventures
from google
Scott Banister, Jim Young, Jeff Miller, Joshua Schachter, Kal Vepuri, Joshua Stylman and Peter Hershberg also invested in the round, writes founder and CEO Gabriel Weinberg.
USV Managing Partner Burnham will be joining the fledgling company’s board. He writes:
The company is young and under staffed so there are definitely holes Gabriel hopes to fill, but his observation that “traditional algorithmic signals are not the only authority on the web,” and his clever use of real authorities to curate search results makes Duck Duck Go an interesting alternative to your everyday brand.
It’s unclear how much USV invested in the company, but we’re digging for more info.
From Weinberg’s blog post on the fundraising:
My original plan was to delay raising capital until I saw a compelling reason to do so, perhaps forever. For better or worse, I stuck to that plan, which ended up being about a 3.5yr delay.
So why now? At the end of last year I noticed that the search engine started to really click with a greater percentage of people in a way that it hadn’t before. Don’t get me wrong — we still have a long way to go to reach our vision — but it was obvious that some things were really starting to become compelling, e.g. our Zero-click Info, privacy policy and goodies.
And here’s how DuckDuckGo is growing, according to its internal stats.
Crunchbase
UNION SQUARE VENTURES
:
Website:
Learn more
Financial-organization:
Union Square Ventures
Website:
usv.com
Launch Date:
January 11, 2004
“Union Square Ventures is an early stage venture capital firm based in New York City. We invest in young companies that use information technology in innovative ways to create high growth business opportunities in the Media, Marketing, Financial Services, Telecommunications, and Healthcare industries.
Our venture capital firm was conceived as a place where a small number of very experienced investment professionals, working collaboratively from a single office, could build a portfolio of promising startup companies and then put our experience...
Learn more
october 2011 by doffm
Citrix Acquires ShareFile, The “Dropbox For Enterprises”
october 2011 by doffm
Citrix Systems has acquired ShareFile, a cloud storage, file sharing and collaboration solutions provider, the companies announced this morning.
ShareFile enables businesses to securely store, sync and share business documents and files, both inside and outside the company, across multiple devices.
The financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.
ShareFile CEO, Jesse Lipson, will become VP and General Manager of the newly-formed Data Sharing product group at Citrix, which will be responsible for the ShareFile product line.
The move is in keeping with Citrix’s vision of a so-called “personal cloud” – a collection of files, apps and personal data unique to every person and accessible from any location and device.
ShareFile competed with the likes of Dropbox and Box.net, but was more focused on selling its offerings to IT departments within organizations of all sizes, rather than consumers and small businesses. Other alternatives include Egnyte, Nomadesk, Mozy and Syncplicity.
Crunchbase
SHAREFILE
CITRIX SYSTEMS
Company:
ShareFile
Website:
ShareFile.com
Launch Date:
October 13, 2011
Based in Raleigh, North Carolina, ShareFile allows businesses to create a custom-branded, password-protected area where files can be exchanged with clients easily, securely, and professionally.
The initial version of ShareFile was released in 2003 under a different product name and was distributed to a limited number of clients, many of whom where based in the local Research Triangle Park area. In November of 2005, a completely rebuilt version of ShareFile was released.
In just four years, ShareFile has grown from...
Learn more
Company:
Citrix Systems
Website:
citrix.com
Launch Date:
October 13, 1989
Citrix Systems is an American multinational corporation with a focus on software and services specialized in virtualization and remote access software for delivering applications over a network and the Internet.
Citrix desktop virtualization, application virtualization, server virtualization, application networking, cloud computing and Software as a Service offerings are designed to simplify computing for millions of users, delivering applications as an on-demand service to any user, in any location on any device.
Learn more
Enterprise
Fundings_&_Exits
Startups
TC
Citrix
Citrix_Systems
Sharefile
from google
ShareFile enables businesses to securely store, sync and share business documents and files, both inside and outside the company, across multiple devices.
The financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.
ShareFile CEO, Jesse Lipson, will become VP and General Manager of the newly-formed Data Sharing product group at Citrix, which will be responsible for the ShareFile product line.
The move is in keeping with Citrix’s vision of a so-called “personal cloud” – a collection of files, apps and personal data unique to every person and accessible from any location and device.
ShareFile competed with the likes of Dropbox and Box.net, but was more focused on selling its offerings to IT departments within organizations of all sizes, rather than consumers and small businesses. Other alternatives include Egnyte, Nomadesk, Mozy and Syncplicity.
Crunchbase
SHAREFILE
CITRIX SYSTEMS
Company:
ShareFile
Website:
ShareFile.com
Launch Date:
October 13, 2011
Based in Raleigh, North Carolina, ShareFile allows businesses to create a custom-branded, password-protected area where files can be exchanged with clients easily, securely, and professionally.
The initial version of ShareFile was released in 2003 under a different product name and was distributed to a limited number of clients, many of whom where based in the local Research Triangle Park area. In November of 2005, a completely rebuilt version of ShareFile was released.
In just four years, ShareFile has grown from...
Learn more
Company:
Citrix Systems
Website:
citrix.com
Launch Date:
October 13, 1989
Citrix Systems is an American multinational corporation with a focus on software and services specialized in virtualization and remote access software for delivering applications over a network and the Internet.
Citrix desktop virtualization, application virtualization, server virtualization, application networking, cloud computing and Software as a Service offerings are designed to simplify computing for millions of users, delivering applications as an on-demand service to any user, in any location on any device.
Learn more
october 2011 by doffm
Cloud Storage Platform Box.net Raises $81M From Salesforce, SAP At $600M-Plus Valuation
october 2011 by doffm
Cloud storage platform Box.net has raised $81 million in Series D funding from strategic investors Salesforce.com and SAP Ventures with Bessemer Venture Partners, NEA, and prior investors including Andreessen Horowitz and Draper Fisher Jurvetson Growth participating in the round. The new investment brings Box’s total capital raised to $162 million (the $50 million round we reported on a few weeks ago is part of this D round). We’ve heard from sources close to the company that the Box’s valuation was above $600 million.
Box, which has 7 million users and stores over 300 million documents, is a cloud storage platform for the enterprise that comes with collaboration, social and mobile functionality. Box has evolved into more than just a fils storage platform, and has become a full-fledged collaborative application where businesses can actually communicate about document updates, sync files remotely, and even add features from Salesforce, Google Apps, NetSuite, Yammer and others.
The company was founded in 2005 by Aaron Levie and Dylan Smith out of their dorm rooms in 2005 with the goal of making it easy for people to access and share all their content, from anywhere. Today, the company provides storage solutions for 77% of the Fortune 500. Currently, 100,000 businesses are using Box’s service with 250,000 new users joining each month. This year, Box landed its biggest enterprise deal yet (and one of the largest cloud SaaS deals ever) with 18,000 seats with P&G.
Josh Stein, managing director of Draper Fisher Jurvetson, was an early believer of Box back in 2006. He says that two things stood out then that showed that the idea born out of Levie and Smith’s dorm room had potential. First, he explains Smith and Levie had one of the best work ethics he’d seen.
He recalled that when the firm would ask Levie and Smith questions about the product and business, the two fledgling entrepreneurs at the time would respond with thoughtful several page emails at all hours of the day. And second, the quality of the early product, which at that point was aimed at the consumer as well as businesses, was intuitive, well-designed and had a valuable functionality.
So why has Box been able to scale from an idea in a dorm room to a nearly billion dollar business? Stein says that Box’s cloud storage platform is a ‘terrific product’ that meets needs for variety of industries. He says that in the past few years, Box has created a new category in enterprise products of what the company intranet could have become.
NEA partner Kittu Kolluri agrees with Stein that Box has become an extension of the intranet, but adds that Box has also become a next generation extranet, as Box allows companies to share files and communicate with clients outside of the company.
Kolluri also highlights the growing trend of the consumerization of IT. He said that NEA looked at a few other companies in the enterprise storage and collaboration space but Box had the most compelling solution that offered enterprises both security as well as ease of use.
And because of its compelling product, growing revenue and strong user base, the company has even become a pricey acquisition target, receiving acquisition offers of $500 million. Kolluri says it was a smart decision for Box to turn these acquisitions down (NEA invested after these acquisitions were rejected). And Kolluri wholeheartedly believes that Box can and will be a public company.
Stein also believes in Box’s potential strength in the public markets. “Box absolutely should be a public company,” he says and confirms that an offering is in the company’s future plans. Stein says that as an SaaS company, Box’s recurring revenue model makes it an ideal public company. Of course, raising this growth round gives Box the flexibility of when they want to enter the public markets, adds Stein.
Levie hasn’t planned on raising additional funds this year after picking up $48 million from Andreessen Horowitz and others earlier this year but because of the strong venture market, the company’s strong performance, and the growth in the cloud, an expansion round made sense.
“There’s so much change taking place in the enterprise, and we’re trying to build out go-to platform for how people use data, work, and collaborate,” Levie explains. Part of this is taking on more established enterpruse players like Microsoft. “We’re redefining how enterprises share and manage content on Box, while also building a powerful, open ecosystem of partners and developers to help our customers get more value and flexibility from their information than ever before possible.”
Part of this is creating an ecosystem around the platform. In November, Box plans to launch the Box Innovation Network, which will provide funding, consulting and other resources to developers building off of Box. Today, Box integrates with 120 applications, including leading cloud solutions including Salesforce, SAP StreamWork, Google Apps and NetSuite.
Box plans to use the new funding for product development, international expansion, and to further build out its infrastructure in the U.S., opening a third data center in 2012.
Of course, with this expansion will come challenges, says Stein. Growing fast can put strain on an organization. Box has rapidly scaled its team from 125 to nearly 300 employees in 2011 to date, including key senior hires from companies such as Cisco, EMC, Microsoft, NetSuite, and Oracle. Of course these executives has experience with high-growth companies and can help the company innovate while continuing to grow.
As far as strategic partners go, Salesforce and SAP are interesting choices. Salesforce, in particular, as a partner makes sense says Levie considering both of the company’s bets in the cloud. Box will be debuting integrations with Salesforce’s social network for the enterprise Chatter, and will continue to roll out deeper integrations in the future. And Levie says that most of Box’s customers user Salesforce as well.
“Box is helping organizations make better decisions faster by bringing new innovation to business information,” said Jai Das, managing director, SAP Ventures. “As an investor and partner, we’re excited about how Box is reinventing content management and collaboration, and look forward to working with them to make customers more productive.”
In the end, we want no more limits for businesses, says Levie. But he knows that to do this Box needs to innovate fast. “Steve Jobs reminded us of challenges of time,” he explains. “We’re trying to make the best use of our time and do a large amount of things rapidly. The ability to capitalize on this growth in the cloud is dependent on how quickly we can go to market.”
We can definitely expect more products and features coming out of Box in the next few months. And clearly, we could also see a public offering as soon as next year. 2012 should be an interesting year for the cloud storage company.
Checkout our recent video with Levie below.
Enterprise
Startups
TC
TCTV
box.net
from google
Box, which has 7 million users and stores over 300 million documents, is a cloud storage platform for the enterprise that comes with collaboration, social and mobile functionality. Box has evolved into more than just a fils storage platform, and has become a full-fledged collaborative application where businesses can actually communicate about document updates, sync files remotely, and even add features from Salesforce, Google Apps, NetSuite, Yammer and others.
The company was founded in 2005 by Aaron Levie and Dylan Smith out of their dorm rooms in 2005 with the goal of making it easy for people to access and share all their content, from anywhere. Today, the company provides storage solutions for 77% of the Fortune 500. Currently, 100,000 businesses are using Box’s service with 250,000 new users joining each month. This year, Box landed its biggest enterprise deal yet (and one of the largest cloud SaaS deals ever) with 18,000 seats with P&G.
Josh Stein, managing director of Draper Fisher Jurvetson, was an early believer of Box back in 2006. He says that two things stood out then that showed that the idea born out of Levie and Smith’s dorm room had potential. First, he explains Smith and Levie had one of the best work ethics he’d seen.
He recalled that when the firm would ask Levie and Smith questions about the product and business, the two fledgling entrepreneurs at the time would respond with thoughtful several page emails at all hours of the day. And second, the quality of the early product, which at that point was aimed at the consumer as well as businesses, was intuitive, well-designed and had a valuable functionality.
So why has Box been able to scale from an idea in a dorm room to a nearly billion dollar business? Stein says that Box’s cloud storage platform is a ‘terrific product’ that meets needs for variety of industries. He says that in the past few years, Box has created a new category in enterprise products of what the company intranet could have become.
NEA partner Kittu Kolluri agrees with Stein that Box has become an extension of the intranet, but adds that Box has also become a next generation extranet, as Box allows companies to share files and communicate with clients outside of the company.
Kolluri also highlights the growing trend of the consumerization of IT. He said that NEA looked at a few other companies in the enterprise storage and collaboration space but Box had the most compelling solution that offered enterprises both security as well as ease of use.
And because of its compelling product, growing revenue and strong user base, the company has even become a pricey acquisition target, receiving acquisition offers of $500 million. Kolluri says it was a smart decision for Box to turn these acquisitions down (NEA invested after these acquisitions were rejected). And Kolluri wholeheartedly believes that Box can and will be a public company.
Stein also believes in Box’s potential strength in the public markets. “Box absolutely should be a public company,” he says and confirms that an offering is in the company’s future plans. Stein says that as an SaaS company, Box’s recurring revenue model makes it an ideal public company. Of course, raising this growth round gives Box the flexibility of when they want to enter the public markets, adds Stein.
Levie hasn’t planned on raising additional funds this year after picking up $48 million from Andreessen Horowitz and others earlier this year but because of the strong venture market, the company’s strong performance, and the growth in the cloud, an expansion round made sense.
“There’s so much change taking place in the enterprise, and we’re trying to build out go-to platform for how people use data, work, and collaborate,” Levie explains. Part of this is taking on more established enterpruse players like Microsoft. “We’re redefining how enterprises share and manage content on Box, while also building a powerful, open ecosystem of partners and developers to help our customers get more value and flexibility from their information than ever before possible.”
Part of this is creating an ecosystem around the platform. In November, Box plans to launch the Box Innovation Network, which will provide funding, consulting and other resources to developers building off of Box. Today, Box integrates with 120 applications, including leading cloud solutions including Salesforce, SAP StreamWork, Google Apps and NetSuite.
Box plans to use the new funding for product development, international expansion, and to further build out its infrastructure in the U.S., opening a third data center in 2012.
Of course, with this expansion will come challenges, says Stein. Growing fast can put strain on an organization. Box has rapidly scaled its team from 125 to nearly 300 employees in 2011 to date, including key senior hires from companies such as Cisco, EMC, Microsoft, NetSuite, and Oracle. Of course these executives has experience with high-growth companies and can help the company innovate while continuing to grow.
As far as strategic partners go, Salesforce and SAP are interesting choices. Salesforce, in particular, as a partner makes sense says Levie considering both of the company’s bets in the cloud. Box will be debuting integrations with Salesforce’s social network for the enterprise Chatter, and will continue to roll out deeper integrations in the future. And Levie says that most of Box’s customers user Salesforce as well.
“Box is helping organizations make better decisions faster by bringing new innovation to business information,” said Jai Das, managing director, SAP Ventures. “As an investor and partner, we’re excited about how Box is reinventing content management and collaboration, and look forward to working with them to make customers more productive.”
In the end, we want no more limits for businesses, says Levie. But he knows that to do this Box needs to innovate fast. “Steve Jobs reminded us of challenges of time,” he explains. “We’re trying to make the best use of our time and do a large amount of things rapidly. The ability to capitalize on this growth in the cloud is dependent on how quickly we can go to market.”
We can definitely expect more products and features coming out of Box in the next few months. And clearly, we could also see a public offering as soon as next year. 2012 should be an interesting year for the cloud storage company.
Checkout our recent video with Levie below.
october 2011 by doffm
(Founder Stories) Heiferman: “I Don’t Trust People In Our Industry Who Don’t Use Facebook”
october 2011 by doffm
Episode I of Chris Dixon’s Founder Stories interview with Scott Heiferman‘s concluded with Heiferman giving Dixon some of his thoughts on the future of social media. In this episode, Dixon, who is a light Facebook user, seems mildly surprised that Heiferman is a Facebook fan—mentioning privacy as one reason why.
Heiferman tells Dixon Facebook makes “great product (Dixon agrees) … it’s an elegant beautiful product and what else matters?” He then adds, “I don’t trust people in our industry who don’t use Facebook” saying “it’s the soul of how hundreds of millions of people are really experiencing their first time of participating online.” However, as the two round out their conversation Heiferman also expresses doubts that Facebook will maintain its dominance indefinitely.
Their discussion weaves into the topic of the singularity. Heiferman suggests that “the real singularity is when everyone on the planet has a phone and is connected and is on Facebook or however that social networking happens, and what gets unleashed when that happens, we can’t even imagine.”
In the video below, Dixon switches topics and inquires about Meetup’s origins. Heiferman tells Dixon after 9/11 he read Bowling Alone and was inspired to find a way for people to connect and trust one another. Living in what he calls “a coarser, nastier world” Heiferman says Meetup is designed to show folks that “there are people in your neighborhood who would be really damn helpful to you” so “you all should meet up and meet up regularly and a community can emerge.”
Watch both videos for additional insights, along with episode I of Heiferman’s interview. Past episodes of Founder Stories including interviews with Dustin Moskovitz, Kevin Ryan, Christopher Poole and Dennis Crowley are here.
Episode III is coming up.
Crunchbase
SCOTT HEIFERMAN
CHRIS DIXON
MEETUP
Person:
Scott Heiferman
Website:
Companies:
Meetup, Familybuilder, Wee Web, betaworks, Founder Collective
Scott Heiferman is a Co-Founder and CEO of Meetup, the world’s largest network of local community groups. Over 50,000 Meetups (self-organized community events) happen each week. Millions of people in over more than 100 countries “use the internet to get off the internet” using Meetup, which is built on the idea that every town needs support groups, playgroups, bookclubs, business circles, running groups, community action groups, etc. Previously, Heiferman co-founded Fotolog, a photo sharing network where over 30...
Learn more
Person:
Chris Dixon
Website:
Companies:
Hunch, SiteAdvisor, Founder Collective, TechCrunch, Bessemer Venture Partners
Chris Dixon currently works as the CEO and Co-founder of Hunch. He is also a contributing writer for TechCrunch.
He previously was the CEO and Co-founder of SiteAdvisor, which was acquired by McAfee. Chris is a personal investor in early-stage technology companies, including Skype, TrialPay, DocVerse, Invite Media, Gerson Lehrman Group, ScanScout, OMGPOP, BillShrink, Oddcast, Panjiva, Knewton, and a handful of other startups that are still in stealth mode. In addition to his personal investments, Chris is also a...
Learn more
Company:
Meetup
Website:
meetup.com
Launch Date:
July 1, 2002
Funding:
$18.3M
Meetup is a local community organizing network. Over 6.5 million people have created and joined long-lasting local Meetup Groups around shared interests and purposes. These groups and clubs have held over 1 million local meetups.
Learn more
Startups
TC
TCTV
Chris_Dixon
Founder_stories
scott_heiferman
from google
Heiferman tells Dixon Facebook makes “great product (Dixon agrees) … it’s an elegant beautiful product and what else matters?” He then adds, “I don’t trust people in our industry who don’t use Facebook” saying “it’s the soul of how hundreds of millions of people are really experiencing their first time of participating online.” However, as the two round out their conversation Heiferman also expresses doubts that Facebook will maintain its dominance indefinitely.
Their discussion weaves into the topic of the singularity. Heiferman suggests that “the real singularity is when everyone on the planet has a phone and is connected and is on Facebook or however that social networking happens, and what gets unleashed when that happens, we can’t even imagine.”
In the video below, Dixon switches topics and inquires about Meetup’s origins. Heiferman tells Dixon after 9/11 he read Bowling Alone and was inspired to find a way for people to connect and trust one another. Living in what he calls “a coarser, nastier world” Heiferman says Meetup is designed to show folks that “there are people in your neighborhood who would be really damn helpful to you” so “you all should meet up and meet up regularly and a community can emerge.”
Watch both videos for additional insights, along with episode I of Heiferman’s interview. Past episodes of Founder Stories including interviews with Dustin Moskovitz, Kevin Ryan, Christopher Poole and Dennis Crowley are here.
Episode III is coming up.
Crunchbase
SCOTT HEIFERMAN
CHRIS DIXON
MEETUP
Person:
Scott Heiferman
Website:
Companies:
Meetup, Familybuilder, Wee Web, betaworks, Founder Collective
Scott Heiferman is a Co-Founder and CEO of Meetup, the world’s largest network of local community groups. Over 50,000 Meetups (self-organized community events) happen each week. Millions of people in over more than 100 countries “use the internet to get off the internet” using Meetup, which is built on the idea that every town needs support groups, playgroups, bookclubs, business circles, running groups, community action groups, etc. Previously, Heiferman co-founded Fotolog, a photo sharing network where over 30...
Learn more
Person:
Chris Dixon
Website:
Companies:
Hunch, SiteAdvisor, Founder Collective, TechCrunch, Bessemer Venture Partners
Chris Dixon currently works as the CEO and Co-founder of Hunch. He is also a contributing writer for TechCrunch.
He previously was the CEO and Co-founder of SiteAdvisor, which was acquired by McAfee. Chris is a personal investor in early-stage technology companies, including Skype, TrialPay, DocVerse, Invite Media, Gerson Lehrman Group, ScanScout, OMGPOP, BillShrink, Oddcast, Panjiva, Knewton, and a handful of other startups that are still in stealth mode. In addition to his personal investments, Chris is also a...
Learn more
Company:
Meetup
Website:
meetup.com
Launch Date:
July 1, 2002
Funding:
$18.3M
Meetup is a local community organizing network. Over 6.5 million people have created and joined long-lasting local Meetup Groups around shared interests and purposes. These groups and clubs have held over 1 million local meetups.
Learn more
october 2011 by doffm
Go Forth And Conquer
october 2011 by doffm
Editor’s note: Guest author Aaron Levie is the founder and CEO of Box.net.
The old technology guard of Silicon Valley is rapidly unhinging. From the really old facing oscillating strategies and leaders; to the newly old churning through CEOs as fast as they dead-pool products, refocusing the entire company on competing with Zuckerberg, or causing major customer confusion as they shift into the future; or even the older-new, content with a pivot or two before a friendly landing into Google or Facebook.
With this transition of old to new, and new to old, comes a strikingly rare opportunity to build the next great technology powerhouses. Today’s revolving technology landscape will favor those with a bias toward speed, change, and disruption.
In the past few months alone, I’ve heard of new companies that stand to radically transform how we interact with healthcare, blow open television consumption, and make education mobile. And refreshingly, I didn’t need any modifiers to describe these startups: nothing about “watching television while tweeting,” or “facilitating healthcare with local coupons.” No, these have the potential to be game-changing services from entrepreneurs that have set their eyes on the dream.
Marc Andreessen recently laid out an amazingly tight argument for why software will pretty much take over the world. Or, to be more precise, eat it. But this will only happen if we’re working on truly world-changing technology. Technology that helps us to communicate, save and improve lives, or make better decisions in our businesses, faster.
The launches at Disrupt and Demo a few weeks ago got me thinking about that magical stage in the startup lifecycle: the point in the building process where anything and everything is possible. You have yet to make your first pivot, you couldn’t have been turned down by more than a couple of VCs, and I’m sure the team dynamic is just copacetic. Ah, the glory days.
Well, before you get much farther, here are a few unsolicited lessons I thought I’d share after five roller-coaster years in the valley:
Make sure you’re constantly doing something that wasn’t possible 3 years ago
The only companies worth starting in this industry are those that couldn’t have existed in another era. And with the speed of change on the internet reaching escape velocity, eras are measured in quarters, not years. If you’re not taking advantage of some fundamentally new enabler, you’re toast. Maybe the advantage is an order of magnitude change in the price and availability of infrastructure because of the cloud (Cloudera, DotCloud, Twilio), or the now-ubiquitous access to powerful ‘smart’ devices (Square, Uber, Kno, Airy Labs), or a change in social behavior at both work and home (Yammer, Jive, HealthTap), or all three. The idea is to constantly be reaching for the edge of what’s possible, extending the limits of what’s expected and turning the novel into habit. If you don’t do this, you won’t stand out, you won’t gain traction, and you won’t win. As Andy Grove would point out, if you’re not creating a 10X improvement on the dimension of cost, efficiency, or benefit to the consumer, you’re hosed.
And emerging startups aren’t unique here. The same rule applies to building new products within existing companies. It’s how Apple has stayed “in power” in such consistent yet – at the time – unpredictable ways. It’s how Facebook has modeled its innovation engine. Facebook routinely assures us they’ll remain in a position of strength by enabling experiences and value that is at the bleeding edge of what’s technically and socially possible. And for this same reason, we’ve seen Yahoo flounder over the past decade.
In Yahoo’s case, we witness the fate of an innovator that has ostensibly “lost its way.” On the web, you have very few opportunities for missteps. To be the exception, the pace and frequency with which you need to build and bring new creations to market is incredible. Even then, you’re assured of nothing, but it’s the only way to survive. Consumers are fickle and a single technology cycle or trend that is missed can cost you relevance in the next wave. Yahoo gave Google the keys to the search castle; they saw the internet media revolution coming, but fumbled by disintegrating Broadcast.com and producing poor user experiences throughout their media properties; and they let services exist without any clear and consistent strategy to unify the products, and with little innovation to boot. This is an expensive lesson for one company, and serves as a great reminder to everyone else, large and small.
Do something you’re extremely passionate about
Startups are freaking hard. Pretty much every day you go through a mood swing that would make you a poster child of TMZ (if you were only a little cooler). For every one thing that goes right, there are no less than twenty-five things that have gone wrong. There are dozens if not hundreds of other companies – some you’ve heard of, and some that won’t be launching until the next Disrupt – that would love for you to fail. Andrew Mason has to contend with thousands of competitors, reporters, and speculators that would love to see his Groupon IPO falter. That’s real pressure. Employees, strategy, capital, competitors – and that’s assuming you don’t have any personal baggage. Good luck with that.
If you don’t build something, or solve a problem, that you’re extremely passionate about, you’re really only going to be able to handle the good times. When things are going extremely well, life will be great. You’ll love your job, you’ll love your investors, and your mom will love you, too. But when crap hits the fan you’re going to begin to get weary. And tired. And depressed. And if you’re not extremely passionate about what you’re doing, a market’s quick turn or a VC’s even quicker “no,” is more than enough to discourage you from your effort.
But what kicks you back into gear is the utter energy, drive, and conviction that what you’re doing is so extremely badass – so uniquely tied to your actions and no one else’s – that you must go on. This works even if you did happen to land somewhere other than your initial start.
When we started Box in 2005, we didn’t do so with the goal of eradicating SharePoint from corporations. But we did believe people should fundamentally be able to share and work from anywhere with extremely simple software. The enterprise then became the context in which we executed our vision. The overarching challenge and potential of the technology gave us the passion to drive forward. It also brings us clarity when our marketplace gets ugly, when we experience new threats, and when we’re pressed to make strategic decisions that will determine the fate of the company.
Keep looking up (and never look down)
There have been countless times when Box was supposed to be engulfed by lumbering giants, offering the same services more cheaply to corporations. It’s a risk that all startups face, but competing in a category so dominated by – and important to – legacy enterprise players, we’ve experienced the extreme of this challenge. And at times, the academically correct solution to a problem would have been to over-pivot, to fail fast and cut our losses. Like when Microsoft got into the cloud game. Back in 2007. Well, we’re still here.
And this is where so many startups go astray. Maybe it’s that they never believed in the idea in the first place; maybe it’s that they’re reading the market wrong, or taking faulty advice; maybe it’s because they’re tired. I don’t know. They will give up too early, quick to move onto the next idea, or act too small and not go big enough.
But looking around the ecosystem, the companies that remain relevant today, after years or even decades, are ones that always looked upward. Even at $140B in market-cap, and 35 years in, Oracle still thinks about what it wants to be when it grows up. Amazon has done this fairly masterfully as well, successfully expanding their range of competitive products in various markets in just a few years.
Thinking limitlessly about what you can be doing, and cutting the right moves to get there, is the game. This often comes from a mix of having the right strategy (hard), the right people (harder), and maintaining the right psychology (hardest). Are you growing as fast as you could be? Are you taking on your big competitor in earnest, competing on the dimensions where you’re optimized and they’re not? Is your business model optimal for your market? How are you going to get your product past early adopters? Are you building the right team to 10X your business?
The lean startup methodology, in which startups entrust most of their core strategy, teaches us so much about building products and learning from customers, but painfully little about building companies. I find that we’re often so obsessed with the idea of disrupting the status quo that we sometimes forget what that means and what it entails to do so. Everyone has that opportunity, but not everyone takes that opportunity. Or takes it to the fullest.
Maybe I’m just in a sentimental mood, but we can probably all learn a little something from being introspective now and again. We all have been given the gift of amazing resources, significant access to capital, amazing mentors, and the most democratic distribution channel the world will ever know. Why shouldn’t every ounce of that good fortune go into building the absolutely most impactful and important companies that we can create? Go forth and conquer.
Photo credit: Robert Scoble.
Crunchbase
AAR[…]
Enterprise
Opinion
Startups
TC
from google
The old technology guard of Silicon Valley is rapidly unhinging. From the really old facing oscillating strategies and leaders; to the newly old churning through CEOs as fast as they dead-pool products, refocusing the entire company on competing with Zuckerberg, or causing major customer confusion as they shift into the future; or even the older-new, content with a pivot or two before a friendly landing into Google or Facebook.
With this transition of old to new, and new to old, comes a strikingly rare opportunity to build the next great technology powerhouses. Today’s revolving technology landscape will favor those with a bias toward speed, change, and disruption.
In the past few months alone, I’ve heard of new companies that stand to radically transform how we interact with healthcare, blow open television consumption, and make education mobile. And refreshingly, I didn’t need any modifiers to describe these startups: nothing about “watching television while tweeting,” or “facilitating healthcare with local coupons.” No, these have the potential to be game-changing services from entrepreneurs that have set their eyes on the dream.
Marc Andreessen recently laid out an amazingly tight argument for why software will pretty much take over the world. Or, to be more precise, eat it. But this will only happen if we’re working on truly world-changing technology. Technology that helps us to communicate, save and improve lives, or make better decisions in our businesses, faster.
The launches at Disrupt and Demo a few weeks ago got me thinking about that magical stage in the startup lifecycle: the point in the building process where anything and everything is possible. You have yet to make your first pivot, you couldn’t have been turned down by more than a couple of VCs, and I’m sure the team dynamic is just copacetic. Ah, the glory days.
Well, before you get much farther, here are a few unsolicited lessons I thought I’d share after five roller-coaster years in the valley:
Make sure you’re constantly doing something that wasn’t possible 3 years ago
The only companies worth starting in this industry are those that couldn’t have existed in another era. And with the speed of change on the internet reaching escape velocity, eras are measured in quarters, not years. If you’re not taking advantage of some fundamentally new enabler, you’re toast. Maybe the advantage is an order of magnitude change in the price and availability of infrastructure because of the cloud (Cloudera, DotCloud, Twilio), or the now-ubiquitous access to powerful ‘smart’ devices (Square, Uber, Kno, Airy Labs), or a change in social behavior at both work and home (Yammer, Jive, HealthTap), or all three. The idea is to constantly be reaching for the edge of what’s possible, extending the limits of what’s expected and turning the novel into habit. If you don’t do this, you won’t stand out, you won’t gain traction, and you won’t win. As Andy Grove would point out, if you’re not creating a 10X improvement on the dimension of cost, efficiency, or benefit to the consumer, you’re hosed.
And emerging startups aren’t unique here. The same rule applies to building new products within existing companies. It’s how Apple has stayed “in power” in such consistent yet – at the time – unpredictable ways. It’s how Facebook has modeled its innovation engine. Facebook routinely assures us they’ll remain in a position of strength by enabling experiences and value that is at the bleeding edge of what’s technically and socially possible. And for this same reason, we’ve seen Yahoo flounder over the past decade.
In Yahoo’s case, we witness the fate of an innovator that has ostensibly “lost its way.” On the web, you have very few opportunities for missteps. To be the exception, the pace and frequency with which you need to build and bring new creations to market is incredible. Even then, you’re assured of nothing, but it’s the only way to survive. Consumers are fickle and a single technology cycle or trend that is missed can cost you relevance in the next wave. Yahoo gave Google the keys to the search castle; they saw the internet media revolution coming, but fumbled by disintegrating Broadcast.com and producing poor user experiences throughout their media properties; and they let services exist without any clear and consistent strategy to unify the products, and with little innovation to boot. This is an expensive lesson for one company, and serves as a great reminder to everyone else, large and small.
Do something you’re extremely passionate about
Startups are freaking hard. Pretty much every day you go through a mood swing that would make you a poster child of TMZ (if you were only a little cooler). For every one thing that goes right, there are no less than twenty-five things that have gone wrong. There are dozens if not hundreds of other companies – some you’ve heard of, and some that won’t be launching until the next Disrupt – that would love for you to fail. Andrew Mason has to contend with thousands of competitors, reporters, and speculators that would love to see his Groupon IPO falter. That’s real pressure. Employees, strategy, capital, competitors – and that’s assuming you don’t have any personal baggage. Good luck with that.
If you don’t build something, or solve a problem, that you’re extremely passionate about, you’re really only going to be able to handle the good times. When things are going extremely well, life will be great. You’ll love your job, you’ll love your investors, and your mom will love you, too. But when crap hits the fan you’re going to begin to get weary. And tired. And depressed. And if you’re not extremely passionate about what you’re doing, a market’s quick turn or a VC’s even quicker “no,” is more than enough to discourage you from your effort.
But what kicks you back into gear is the utter energy, drive, and conviction that what you’re doing is so extremely badass – so uniquely tied to your actions and no one else’s – that you must go on. This works even if you did happen to land somewhere other than your initial start.
When we started Box in 2005, we didn’t do so with the goal of eradicating SharePoint from corporations. But we did believe people should fundamentally be able to share and work from anywhere with extremely simple software. The enterprise then became the context in which we executed our vision. The overarching challenge and potential of the technology gave us the passion to drive forward. It also brings us clarity when our marketplace gets ugly, when we experience new threats, and when we’re pressed to make strategic decisions that will determine the fate of the company.
Keep looking up (and never look down)
There have been countless times when Box was supposed to be engulfed by lumbering giants, offering the same services more cheaply to corporations. It’s a risk that all startups face, but competing in a category so dominated by – and important to – legacy enterprise players, we’ve experienced the extreme of this challenge. And at times, the academically correct solution to a problem would have been to over-pivot, to fail fast and cut our losses. Like when Microsoft got into the cloud game. Back in 2007. Well, we’re still here.
And this is where so many startups go astray. Maybe it’s that they never believed in the idea in the first place; maybe it’s that they’re reading the market wrong, or taking faulty advice; maybe it’s because they’re tired. I don’t know. They will give up too early, quick to move onto the next idea, or act too small and not go big enough.
But looking around the ecosystem, the companies that remain relevant today, after years or even decades, are ones that always looked upward. Even at $140B in market-cap, and 35 years in, Oracle still thinks about what it wants to be when it grows up. Amazon has done this fairly masterfully as well, successfully expanding their range of competitive products in various markets in just a few years.
Thinking limitlessly about what you can be doing, and cutting the right moves to get there, is the game. This often comes from a mix of having the right strategy (hard), the right people (harder), and maintaining the right psychology (hardest). Are you growing as fast as you could be? Are you taking on your big competitor in earnest, competing on the dimensions where you’re optimized and they’re not? Is your business model optimal for your market? How are you going to get your product past early adopters? Are you building the right team to 10X your business?
The lean startup methodology, in which startups entrust most of their core strategy, teaches us so much about building products and learning from customers, but painfully little about building companies. I find that we’re often so obsessed with the idea of disrupting the status quo that we sometimes forget what that means and what it entails to do so. Everyone has that opportunity, but not everyone takes that opportunity. Or takes it to the fullest.
Maybe I’m just in a sentimental mood, but we can probably all learn a little something from being introspective now and again. We all have been given the gift of amazing resources, significant access to capital, amazing mentors, and the most democratic distribution channel the world will ever know. Why shouldn’t every ounce of that good fortune go into building the absolutely most impactful and important companies that we can create? Go forth and conquer.
Photo credit: Robert Scoble.
Crunchbase
AAR[…]
october 2011 by doffm
DC To VC: An Inside Look At The Winners Of Morgenthaler’s Health Tech Startup Showcase
september 2011 by doffm
Last week, Morgenthaler Ventures, the 40-year-old Sand Hill Road VC firm wrapped up its “DC to VC Startup Showcase”, a nationwide contest geared towards finding the most promising young health tech startups. From nearly 200 applicants, the pool was whittled down to eleven finalists, which presented to an invite-only crowd of VCs, angel investors and entrepreneurs. The companies were then categorized according to whether they were seeking seed funding or looking to raise their series A.
The live audience of over 350 health tech enthusiasts, as well as those watching on live stream, put the finishing touch on the months-long competition, selecting the winners (after commentary from a panel of VC and entrepreneurial judges). The winner of the seed round contest was EyeNetra, an affordable, mobile diagnostic tool for our eyes, and Jiff Inc (a recent TechCrunch Disrupt finalist) took top prize in the series A flight with its HIPAA-compliant iPad platform for patient communication and education.
Of course, while there were two winners, the DC to VC audience chose from a group of strong finalists. For more on those finalists, check out the quick blurbs below as well as the video of presentations at the end.
Seed Finalists:
Careticker is the world’s first platform that helps patients plan in advance for a hospital or outpatient procedure.
Skimble powers the mobile wellness movement with a cross-platform ecosystem of fun and dynamic coaching applications. Its latest title, Workout Trainer, ranks Top 10 in the free Healthcare & Fitness category on iPhone/iPad.
SurgiChart is a mobile, cloud-based, social-clinical network for surgeons to exchange relevant perioperative, case-centric information.
TeleThrive provides patients an instant connection to doctors for a medical consultation using any telephone or computer with complete audio and video conferencing.
Viewics provides hospitals with cloud-based analytics and business intelligence solutions which enable them to drive enhanced operational, financial and clinical outcomes.
Series-A Finalists:
AbilTo develops and delivers online mental health programs to managed care members and enterprise workforces that help reduce payor costs while improving overall health outcomes.
Axial Exchange moves healthcare organizations towards pay-for-performance, enabling providers to coordinate care and measure clinical quality across disparate settings.
Empower Interactive’s online services deliver proven psychotherapy methodologies via an e-learning platform to greatly improve the economics and accessibility of mental and behavioral health solutions.
YourNurseIsOn.com employs bi-directional text, phone and email communications to help hospitals and agencies put “the right healthcare providers, in the right places, right now.”
And … The Winners:
Hailing from MIT Media Labs, EyeNetra is developing an eye diagnostic tool for mobile phones that will allow anyone (with minimal training) to take an eye test, receive a diagnostic measurement, and access eye care, all with the touch of a button. According to EyeNetra Founder David Schafran, of the 4 billion people who need glasses in the world today, over half of them don’t have access to eye care — or glasses. Not to mention, the patient experience at eye doctors is less than fun, and eye diagnostic tools tend to be archaic, expensive, require trained professionals to use, and are big and bulky.
So EyeNetra wants to empower patients and those in need of glasses by providing them with a low-cost eye test and options for care accessible from anywhere. At any time. EyeNetra thus offers a smartphone app and a cheap eyepiece that can be attached to a phone with ease to perform a simple alignment test, in minutes allowing the user to receive a refractive assessment for nearsightedness, farsightedness, astigmatism, etc. What’s more, the company is seeking to offer on-demand eye care, through an eye care network at which the company will sit at the center, brokering between patients and eye care providers, vendors, and service providers.
According to their presentation, “From ‘store-and-forward your electronic prescription’ to ‘personalized prevention and treatment services’, and ‘access and recruit new patients’”, the startup is looking to create an ecosystem of “value-added services” that will enable “whole new businesses”. EyeNetra is also looking to build a solution that includes a suite of eye care devices; it has already developed a cataracts diagnostic and will soon have retina diagnostics, as it works toward building a “medkit” that people can have at home or community health care workers can have in the field.
Jiff, the inbox for healthcare, was founded by James Currier, a serial entrepreneur who co-founded WonderHill, a social gaming company, and Tickle, which became the world’s largest self-assessment company, registering 100 million people and was acquired by Monster.com in 2004. Currier currently co-runs Ooga Labs, an investment and incubation company in Palo Alto. You may remember the JiffPad as a TechCrunch Disrupt 2011 winner. It’s just that good. Read our full coverage here.
But what is Jiff? Jiff is an iPad app that gives doctors and physicians the ability to create effective and memorable “teaching moments” right in front of patients, just as they might with a wall poster or anatomical model.
Teaching materials, explanations, gestures, and patients’ questions can be preserved and subsequently emailed to patients after consultations. The medical teaching tool brings the wonder of mobile technology into the doctor’s office, giving patients the opportunity to receive more effective and memorable explanations and diagnoses, while doctors have the satisfaction of knowing that their explanations of ailments and treatments are understood in a visual, interactive way.
The JiffPad is aimed at helping improve healthcare communication and curing the doctor-patient relationship of misunderstanding and miscommunication.
For more on the current state of health tech, check out Rebecca Lynn’s talk below. And click over to YouTube for videos of all the finalists.
Excerpt image courtesy of Hook Surgery
Crunchbase
MORGENTHALER VENTURES
Financial-organization:
Morgenthaler Ventures
Website:
morgenthaler.com
Morgenthaler Ventures has been in the venture capital business for more than 40 years, steadily investing through every market cycle.
Among the many Morgenthaler-funded companies that have gone public or were acquired are: Apple, Atria, Brion, Illustra Technologies, IPC – The Hospitalist Company, Medaphis, Microchip, New Focus, NexTag, NEXTEL, Nuance Communications, Perclose, Premisys, Ribozyme Pharmaceuticals, Synopsys and VeriFone.
Learn more
Fundings_&_Exits
Startups
TC
Health_tech
morganthaler_ventures
jiff
eyenetra
from google
The live audience of over 350 health tech enthusiasts, as well as those watching on live stream, put the finishing touch on the months-long competition, selecting the winners (after commentary from a panel of VC and entrepreneurial judges). The winner of the seed round contest was EyeNetra, an affordable, mobile diagnostic tool for our eyes, and Jiff Inc (a recent TechCrunch Disrupt finalist) took top prize in the series A flight with its HIPAA-compliant iPad platform for patient communication and education.
Of course, while there were two winners, the DC to VC audience chose from a group of strong finalists. For more on those finalists, check out the quick blurbs below as well as the video of presentations at the end.
Seed Finalists:
Careticker is the world’s first platform that helps patients plan in advance for a hospital or outpatient procedure.
Skimble powers the mobile wellness movement with a cross-platform ecosystem of fun and dynamic coaching applications. Its latest title, Workout Trainer, ranks Top 10 in the free Healthcare & Fitness category on iPhone/iPad.
SurgiChart is a mobile, cloud-based, social-clinical network for surgeons to exchange relevant perioperative, case-centric information.
TeleThrive provides patients an instant connection to doctors for a medical consultation using any telephone or computer with complete audio and video conferencing.
Viewics provides hospitals with cloud-based analytics and business intelligence solutions which enable them to drive enhanced operational, financial and clinical outcomes.
Series-A Finalists:
AbilTo develops and delivers online mental health programs to managed care members and enterprise workforces that help reduce payor costs while improving overall health outcomes.
Axial Exchange moves healthcare organizations towards pay-for-performance, enabling providers to coordinate care and measure clinical quality across disparate settings.
Empower Interactive’s online services deliver proven psychotherapy methodologies via an e-learning platform to greatly improve the economics and accessibility of mental and behavioral health solutions.
YourNurseIsOn.com employs bi-directional text, phone and email communications to help hospitals and agencies put “the right healthcare providers, in the right places, right now.”
And … The Winners:
Hailing from MIT Media Labs, EyeNetra is developing an eye diagnostic tool for mobile phones that will allow anyone (with minimal training) to take an eye test, receive a diagnostic measurement, and access eye care, all with the touch of a button. According to EyeNetra Founder David Schafran, of the 4 billion people who need glasses in the world today, over half of them don’t have access to eye care — or glasses. Not to mention, the patient experience at eye doctors is less than fun, and eye diagnostic tools tend to be archaic, expensive, require trained professionals to use, and are big and bulky.
So EyeNetra wants to empower patients and those in need of glasses by providing them with a low-cost eye test and options for care accessible from anywhere. At any time. EyeNetra thus offers a smartphone app and a cheap eyepiece that can be attached to a phone with ease to perform a simple alignment test, in minutes allowing the user to receive a refractive assessment for nearsightedness, farsightedness, astigmatism, etc. What’s more, the company is seeking to offer on-demand eye care, through an eye care network at which the company will sit at the center, brokering between patients and eye care providers, vendors, and service providers.
According to their presentation, “From ‘store-and-forward your electronic prescription’ to ‘personalized prevention and treatment services’, and ‘access and recruit new patients’”, the startup is looking to create an ecosystem of “value-added services” that will enable “whole new businesses”. EyeNetra is also looking to build a solution that includes a suite of eye care devices; it has already developed a cataracts diagnostic and will soon have retina diagnostics, as it works toward building a “medkit” that people can have at home or community health care workers can have in the field.
Jiff, the inbox for healthcare, was founded by James Currier, a serial entrepreneur who co-founded WonderHill, a social gaming company, and Tickle, which became the world’s largest self-assessment company, registering 100 million people and was acquired by Monster.com in 2004. Currier currently co-runs Ooga Labs, an investment and incubation company in Palo Alto. You may remember the JiffPad as a TechCrunch Disrupt 2011 winner. It’s just that good. Read our full coverage here.
But what is Jiff? Jiff is an iPad app that gives doctors and physicians the ability to create effective and memorable “teaching moments” right in front of patients, just as they might with a wall poster or anatomical model.
Teaching materials, explanations, gestures, and patients’ questions can be preserved and subsequently emailed to patients after consultations. The medical teaching tool brings the wonder of mobile technology into the doctor’s office, giving patients the opportunity to receive more effective and memorable explanations and diagnoses, while doctors have the satisfaction of knowing that their explanations of ailments and treatments are understood in a visual, interactive way.
The JiffPad is aimed at helping improve healthcare communication and curing the doctor-patient relationship of misunderstanding and miscommunication.
For more on the current state of health tech, check out Rebecca Lynn’s talk below. And click over to YouTube for videos of all the finalists.
Excerpt image courtesy of Hook Surgery
Crunchbase
MORGENTHALER VENTURES
Financial-organization:
Morgenthaler Ventures
Website:
morgenthaler.com
Morgenthaler Ventures has been in the venture capital business for more than 40 years, steadily investing through every market cycle.
Among the many Morgenthaler-funded companies that have gone public or were acquired are: Apple, Atria, Brion, Illustra Technologies, IPC – The Hospitalist Company, Medaphis, Microchip, New Focus, NexTag, NEXTEL, Nuance Communications, Perclose, Premisys, Ribozyme Pharmaceuticals, Synopsys and VeriFone.
Learn more
september 2011 by doffm
Stamped: Forget 1 To 5 Stars, If You Like Something, Just Stamp It
september 2011 by doffm
I’ve always hated the notion of ratings based on five stars. It makes no sense. Sure, something that sucks is “1 star” and something awesome is “5 stars”, but what determines a “2 star” rating? What about a “4 stars”? It’s totally arbitrary. Why not just say something is “bad”, “okay”, “good”, or “great”? Or better yet, why not say nothing unless something is great? That’s the basic idea behind Stamped, a new startup currently in stealth mode.
The startup has deep Google ties — 2 of the 3 co-founders are ex-Google, while 4 of the 7 total team members are — but it’s iPhone-only for now. They’re taking the Instagram-approach to launching in that regard. And they’re taking cues from Instagram in another key regard: simplicity.
“It can be hard to figure out what a 3-star rating from 70 strangers means. We want to introduce simplicity back into the system by reducing it all down to one question: does it deserve your friend’s stamp of approval?,” co-founders and CEO Robby Stein says. ”Every decision we’ve made has been designed to make the act of stamping as fast and simple as possible,” he continues.
I love everything about those statements. And Stein goes further:
“We’re obsessively focused on building a social platform designed for quality over quantity. There is so much value in discovering great things through your friends and too much noise on current platforms to do it easily. We want to change that.”
When it launches, Stamped will be entering an already-crowded space around mobile-based ratings. This reminds me of Instagram launching a year ago just as a plethora of mobile photo startups were launching. Simplicity and speed won the day. Stamped is hoping it plays out the same way for them.
Stein notes that he’s been obsessing over this idea for a few years, but started on it in earnest in April when he left Google (where he worked on Gmail and more recently, Ad Exchange). ”I saw that people loved to talk about the things they liked best over coffee, emails, texts, or even massive Google spreadsheets (I swear my friend has one). I noticed this is information people are naturally drawn to sharing, so I started with building a prototype that made this easier and more efficient,” he says.
There are a few other unique layers to the app, to avoid what the team calls “data diarrhea”. More on that when the app is ready to launch.
The startup, which is entirely New York City-based right now, raised a Series A round of funding from Bain Capital Ventures and Google Ventures earlier this year. The amount is undisclosed.
Look for Stamped to launch in the next few weeks. For now, you can sign up to learn more on their site.
Crunchbase
STAMPED
Company:
Stamped
Website:
stamped.com
Stamped is a mobile startup focusing on simple, fast reviews. You give products your “stamp of approval”.
Learn more
Mobile
Social
Startups
TC
stamped
from google
The startup has deep Google ties — 2 of the 3 co-founders are ex-Google, while 4 of the 7 total team members are — but it’s iPhone-only for now. They’re taking the Instagram-approach to launching in that regard. And they’re taking cues from Instagram in another key regard: simplicity.
“It can be hard to figure out what a 3-star rating from 70 strangers means. We want to introduce simplicity back into the system by reducing it all down to one question: does it deserve your friend’s stamp of approval?,” co-founders and CEO Robby Stein says. ”Every decision we’ve made has been designed to make the act of stamping as fast and simple as possible,” he continues.
I love everything about those statements. And Stein goes further:
“We’re obsessively focused on building a social platform designed for quality over quantity. There is so much value in discovering great things through your friends and too much noise on current platforms to do it easily. We want to change that.”
When it launches, Stamped will be entering an already-crowded space around mobile-based ratings. This reminds me of Instagram launching a year ago just as a plethora of mobile photo startups were launching. Simplicity and speed won the day. Stamped is hoping it plays out the same way for them.
Stein notes that he’s been obsessing over this idea for a few years, but started on it in earnest in April when he left Google (where he worked on Gmail and more recently, Ad Exchange). ”I saw that people loved to talk about the things they liked best over coffee, emails, texts, or even massive Google spreadsheets (I swear my friend has one). I noticed this is information people are naturally drawn to sharing, so I started with building a prototype that made this easier and more efficient,” he says.
There are a few other unique layers to the app, to avoid what the team calls “data diarrhea”. More on that when the app is ready to launch.
The startup, which is entirely New York City-based right now, raised a Series A round of funding from Bain Capital Ventures and Google Ventures earlier this year. The amount is undisclosed.
Look for Stamped to launch in the next few weeks. For now, you can sign up to learn more on their site.
Crunchbase
STAMPED
Company:
Stamped
Website:
stamped.com
Stamped is a mobile startup focusing on simple, fast reviews. You give products your “stamp of approval”.
Learn more
september 2011 by doffm
Graphical Resume Site Vizualize.Me Launches, We Talk To The Founder.
september 2011 by doffm
With over 200,000 pre-launch signups and 40,000 users in their beta program, it’s very likely that you saw a vizualize.me resume link show up in a friend’s Facebook status update last week when the site soft launched. I know I did.
The Toronto based company (and winner of Startup Weekend Toronto 2011, and International Startup Festival’s Top Elevator Pitch) has been gradually taking their resume visualization service live over the last week or so. But they are considering their site fully load tested and “officially” launched today.
If you haven’t heard about it yet (unlikely), vizualize.me is a web service that imports your Linkedin resume information and expresses it as an infographic. It’s a neat idea and an appropriate format for the attention-span-challenged medium in which it lives…the Internet.
The goal, as CEO Eugene Woo puts it, is to “reinvent the resume by building something more relevant, more visual and more dynamic. One way to do that is by transforming your text resume into an infographic”.
I had a chance to speak with Eugene recently and he answered a few questions about vizualize.me that may lend some insight into how the service works and where it is headed.
Jay:
You describe this way of showing resumes as ‘more dynamic’. What do you mean by that?
Eugene:
It’s not like a typical resume where you write some lines of text, and that’s it. It’s dynamic. Let me give you an example. Let’s say you are a designer at an agency. [Your resume will graphically show] a block of time that you have worked there—say from 2010 to the present time. From that block I could then link to relevant work that I have done while at that agency. It’s a clean way of showing that info.”
Jay:
So I’m looking at my resume in vizualize.me. Is this just HTML?
Eugene:
Well, it’s HTML and also SVG. We are drawing vector graphics. It’s all a DOM element.
Jay:
So it’s not Flash?
Eugene:
No, it’s not Flash. God no. (laughs). That would not be cool if we used Flash.
Jay:
This is interesting to see a resume in this format. You can see the overlap of work and as your career goes forward, you can see how more and more things keep happening at the same time.
Eugene:
Yeah, and that’s just one way to visualize a timeline [default template]. We are coming up with new themes that visualize the content differently. That default template is what I would call a very ‘traditional’ visualization. We’re coming up with some new templates like a ‘functional’ resume template that’s more focused on skills (like for someone who has many gaps in the timeline and maybe don’t have a typical career). So, all kinds of people will be able to choose from many different themes that would suit their career—certain theme’s could make them look better, I suppose.
Jay:
So, are you going to let people design their own templates like the way Tumblr has opened their platform up?
Eugene:
Definitely. We are considering creating a theme marketplace where we let anyone sell their themes. Part of the idea behind calling them themes, is that we had the idea of a theme marketplace similar to Tumblr and WordPress.
We’re also building some very basic widgets that will allow a non designer to create some basic visualizations that could be unique. Right now they are all templates that are basically the same. It’s very similar to about.me in that you can customize the colors and the fonts or you can put a background in there.
The next step of customization will be to let the user tweak elements of the visualization. How that’s going to happen, I still don’t know yet, but we are working toward that.
Jay:
The service currently works with Linkedin as the data source. Do you plan to sync with Monster.com or others?
Eugene:
It currently imports from Linkedin only. I think the next site we work with will be Facebook because people do put their resumes in Facebook believe it or not. As far as other sites are concerned, I don’t really have plans to integrate with Monster or others.
We would more likely integrate with social networks like Klout and Twitter. Facebook, Klout and Twitter are basically the three integrations that are on the list and that we will be doing in the near future. So we would visualize your Klout score, we would visualize your Twitter feed. With Facebook, we’re not totally sure if there is anything we can visualize, professionally, but we would integrate with them and pull data, because you can put your work experience in Facebook…so we’ll import that.
Jay:
You say you may open this service up to let people make their own themes. Is the framework open as well? Will this be based on open source tools?
Eugene:
Yes, we are designing the system so that we can open it that way eventually. All data is JSON, everything is JSON format.
Jay:
With regard to your service, designers are a major segment you are targeting right?
Eugene:
There are a lot of creative people interested in our stuff. Initially that was the case, but now it seems to have pretty wide appeal and I think that’s because people realize that sending a resume is pretty formal…you wouldn’t just send a resume to someone you just met to show your work experience.
It would be much easier to say ‘hey, just check out my work experience at vizualize.me’. Someone can get a sense in about 10 seconds of what you do and have done. I think people other than designers appreciate that too.
Jay:
So it sounds like you creating this tool as much for readers of resumes as you are writers of resumes. Is part of your intention to aid Human Resource groups?
Eugene:
Yes, it’s both ways. It’s there to help the user tell the story in a much more visual and relevant manner and it’s also for the reader—whether that be an HR professional, manager or peer—so they can size you up easily, at a glance without having to read your 5 page resume.
The average resume is more than 2 pages, more than 1000 words and unless you are a professional recruiter, they can be pretty hard to read. There are a a lot of recruiters interested. I’ve talked to a lot of business owners and in fact they wanted us to build infographics and visualization tools for them to filter candidates. We may go there one day but right now our focus is on a consumer product.
Jay:
Tell me about the genesis of this idea. How did it come to you? Are you from an HR or technical background?
Eugene:
Originally my background was programming. The idea for this came while I was doing some mobile development consulting. I don’t know if you remember but earlier this year there was one infographic resume by Chris Spurlock that went viral on the Internet.
He was a student; graduated in journalism. He had created a visual infographic resume and he had posted it on Facebook. It went viral, had national coverage, was on TV…it really, really blew up. And then he ended up getting a job a Huffington Post. So, it totally worked. It worked beyond Chris’s imagination.
When I saw that I was like ‘Holy Crap’. I’ve always loved infographics and at the time I was reading a lot of resumes. I had to hire for all kinds of situations [for the mobile consultancy] and people would send me their 3-4 page resumes and I would barely have time to look at them. So I thought this infographic resume concept could be a really big thing.
I thought certainly we can’t beat a designer, but we can surely automate it, put it on the web and make it free (at least some of it for free) or charge a small amount of money and we could have a decent business out of it or at least a pretty popular website.
So I had the idea and sat on it for a while and then I pitched it at Start Up Weekend Toronto and we won. In one night we got 5000 signups. The next day, by the time we presented, we were past 5000 signups. I had another presentation at Demo Camp, four days later, and we were past 12,000 signups. So there was obviously lots of demand and this was just the LaunchRock page…it didn’t really have much description.
Jay:
Are you going to try to replace Linkedin?
Eugene:
The analogy I would use is that Linkedin is like WordPress and we are trying to be like Tumblr. We are trying to be like the cooler more informal network for resumes. I don’t even want to use the word Social Network because we are not a Social Network…we are a tool basically. There are no social features in our product.
Eventually, it’s something we’d like to explore. I wouldn’t say we want to replace Linkedin. In fact we rely on Linkedin right now. We use their login to connect so we have to play nice with them [laughing]. And they have blocked any company or sites that are competing with them…all the big recruiting sites that try to use their content and APIs. And I certainly don’t want that.
Jay:
And they are allowing you to use the content? You have permission?
Eugene:
Yeah, right now we are OK but I’m sure if you write an article that says we are going to be the next Linkedin they will definitely block us [we both laugh].
Jay:
I definitely don’t want that on my conscience. No but seriously, your strategy could also be about possibly being acquired by someone like Linkedin. Has that crossed your mind?
Eugene:
Yeah. I would say that would be OK. Being acquired by Linkedin would be OK. We want to complement Linkedin. The stance we have is that we want to complement Linkedin and actually because we use Linkedin exclusively for logins right now and only import data from them…because of that, what we’ve seen is that users are actually improving their Linkedin profiles because of us. So we are actually helping Linkedin in a way.
We don’t have all the Social Networking tools that they have and we probably won’t do that. I mean, I don’t really see us going that route. We are a much lighter version. We visualize things like skills, recommendations interests and all that, and mos[…]
Startups
TC
visualization
vizualize.me
Resume
from google
The Toronto based company (and winner of Startup Weekend Toronto 2011, and International Startup Festival’s Top Elevator Pitch) has been gradually taking their resume visualization service live over the last week or so. But they are considering their site fully load tested and “officially” launched today.
If you haven’t heard about it yet (unlikely), vizualize.me is a web service that imports your Linkedin resume information and expresses it as an infographic. It’s a neat idea and an appropriate format for the attention-span-challenged medium in which it lives…the Internet.
The goal, as CEO Eugene Woo puts it, is to “reinvent the resume by building something more relevant, more visual and more dynamic. One way to do that is by transforming your text resume into an infographic”.
I had a chance to speak with Eugene recently and he answered a few questions about vizualize.me that may lend some insight into how the service works and where it is headed.
Jay:
You describe this way of showing resumes as ‘more dynamic’. What do you mean by that?
Eugene:
It’s not like a typical resume where you write some lines of text, and that’s it. It’s dynamic. Let me give you an example. Let’s say you are a designer at an agency. [Your resume will graphically show] a block of time that you have worked there—say from 2010 to the present time. From that block I could then link to relevant work that I have done while at that agency. It’s a clean way of showing that info.”
Jay:
So I’m looking at my resume in vizualize.me. Is this just HTML?
Eugene:
Well, it’s HTML and also SVG. We are drawing vector graphics. It’s all a DOM element.
Jay:
So it’s not Flash?
Eugene:
No, it’s not Flash. God no. (laughs). That would not be cool if we used Flash.
Jay:
This is interesting to see a resume in this format. You can see the overlap of work and as your career goes forward, you can see how more and more things keep happening at the same time.
Eugene:
Yeah, and that’s just one way to visualize a timeline [default template]. We are coming up with new themes that visualize the content differently. That default template is what I would call a very ‘traditional’ visualization. We’re coming up with some new templates like a ‘functional’ resume template that’s more focused on skills (like for someone who has many gaps in the timeline and maybe don’t have a typical career). So, all kinds of people will be able to choose from many different themes that would suit their career—certain theme’s could make them look better, I suppose.
Jay:
So, are you going to let people design their own templates like the way Tumblr has opened their platform up?
Eugene:
Definitely. We are considering creating a theme marketplace where we let anyone sell their themes. Part of the idea behind calling them themes, is that we had the idea of a theme marketplace similar to Tumblr and WordPress.
We’re also building some very basic widgets that will allow a non designer to create some basic visualizations that could be unique. Right now they are all templates that are basically the same. It’s very similar to about.me in that you can customize the colors and the fonts or you can put a background in there.
The next step of customization will be to let the user tweak elements of the visualization. How that’s going to happen, I still don’t know yet, but we are working toward that.
Jay:
The service currently works with Linkedin as the data source. Do you plan to sync with Monster.com or others?
Eugene:
It currently imports from Linkedin only. I think the next site we work with will be Facebook because people do put their resumes in Facebook believe it or not. As far as other sites are concerned, I don’t really have plans to integrate with Monster or others.
We would more likely integrate with social networks like Klout and Twitter. Facebook, Klout and Twitter are basically the three integrations that are on the list and that we will be doing in the near future. So we would visualize your Klout score, we would visualize your Twitter feed. With Facebook, we’re not totally sure if there is anything we can visualize, professionally, but we would integrate with them and pull data, because you can put your work experience in Facebook…so we’ll import that.
Jay:
You say you may open this service up to let people make their own themes. Is the framework open as well? Will this be based on open source tools?
Eugene:
Yes, we are designing the system so that we can open it that way eventually. All data is JSON, everything is JSON format.
Jay:
With regard to your service, designers are a major segment you are targeting right?
Eugene:
There are a lot of creative people interested in our stuff. Initially that was the case, but now it seems to have pretty wide appeal and I think that’s because people realize that sending a resume is pretty formal…you wouldn’t just send a resume to someone you just met to show your work experience.
It would be much easier to say ‘hey, just check out my work experience at vizualize.me’. Someone can get a sense in about 10 seconds of what you do and have done. I think people other than designers appreciate that too.
Jay:
So it sounds like you creating this tool as much for readers of resumes as you are writers of resumes. Is part of your intention to aid Human Resource groups?
Eugene:
Yes, it’s both ways. It’s there to help the user tell the story in a much more visual and relevant manner and it’s also for the reader—whether that be an HR professional, manager or peer—so they can size you up easily, at a glance without having to read your 5 page resume.
The average resume is more than 2 pages, more than 1000 words and unless you are a professional recruiter, they can be pretty hard to read. There are a a lot of recruiters interested. I’ve talked to a lot of business owners and in fact they wanted us to build infographics and visualization tools for them to filter candidates. We may go there one day but right now our focus is on a consumer product.
Jay:
Tell me about the genesis of this idea. How did it come to you? Are you from an HR or technical background?
Eugene:
Originally my background was programming. The idea for this came while I was doing some mobile development consulting. I don’t know if you remember but earlier this year there was one infographic resume by Chris Spurlock that went viral on the Internet.
He was a student; graduated in journalism. He had created a visual infographic resume and he had posted it on Facebook. It went viral, had national coverage, was on TV…it really, really blew up. And then he ended up getting a job a Huffington Post. So, it totally worked. It worked beyond Chris’s imagination.
When I saw that I was like ‘Holy Crap’. I’ve always loved infographics and at the time I was reading a lot of resumes. I had to hire for all kinds of situations [for the mobile consultancy] and people would send me their 3-4 page resumes and I would barely have time to look at them. So I thought this infographic resume concept could be a really big thing.
I thought certainly we can’t beat a designer, but we can surely automate it, put it on the web and make it free (at least some of it for free) or charge a small amount of money and we could have a decent business out of it or at least a pretty popular website.
So I had the idea and sat on it for a while and then I pitched it at Start Up Weekend Toronto and we won. In one night we got 5000 signups. The next day, by the time we presented, we were past 5000 signups. I had another presentation at Demo Camp, four days later, and we were past 12,000 signups. So there was obviously lots of demand and this was just the LaunchRock page…it didn’t really have much description.
Jay:
Are you going to try to replace Linkedin?
Eugene:
The analogy I would use is that Linkedin is like WordPress and we are trying to be like Tumblr. We are trying to be like the cooler more informal network for resumes. I don’t even want to use the word Social Network because we are not a Social Network…we are a tool basically. There are no social features in our product.
Eventually, it’s something we’d like to explore. I wouldn’t say we want to replace Linkedin. In fact we rely on Linkedin right now. We use their login to connect so we have to play nice with them [laughing]. And they have blocked any company or sites that are competing with them…all the big recruiting sites that try to use their content and APIs. And I certainly don’t want that.
Jay:
And they are allowing you to use the content? You have permission?
Eugene:
Yeah, right now we are OK but I’m sure if you write an article that says we are going to be the next Linkedin they will definitely block us [we both laugh].
Jay:
I definitely don’t want that on my conscience. No but seriously, your strategy could also be about possibly being acquired by someone like Linkedin. Has that crossed your mind?
Eugene:
Yeah. I would say that would be OK. Being acquired by Linkedin would be OK. We want to complement Linkedin. The stance we have is that we want to complement Linkedin and actually because we use Linkedin exclusively for logins right now and only import data from them…because of that, what we’ve seen is that users are actually improving their Linkedin profiles because of us. So we are actually helping Linkedin in a way.
We don’t have all the Social Networking tools that they have and we probably won’t do that. I mean, I don’t really see us going that route. We are a much lighter version. We visualize things like skills, recommendations interests and all that, and mos[…]
september 2011 by doffm
The New Social Network: Who’s Nearby, Not Who You Know
september 2011 by doffm
There’s a new concept for social networking services taking root, and it’s not about re-creating your offline social graph on the Web, like Facebook does today. It’s about discovering the people who are nearby you now – the ones you probably would like to meet.
This type of discovery mechanism is already being made possible by a number of services, including the checkin apps like Foursquare and Gowalla, the automated discovery of nearby folks via Sonar and Banjo, the group chatting in Yobongo, and the micro-networks that emerge through LoKast. All of these companies are playing with the idea of location-based social networks, attempting to connect you to others around you through varying means.
At this week’s TechCrunch Disrupt conference in San Francisco, even more services emerged to compete in this space, too.
The powerful capabilities of today’s mobile smartphones are allowing for a new kind of networking: social discovery services, not social networking services. Discovery services are focused primarily on highlighting the users within close proximity to you and connecting you to those who you might want to meet.
Facebook, meanwhile, aims to connect you to people you already know. “Discovery” on Facebook is limited to searching for names or networks (e.g., schools, workplaces) where the introductions themselves previously took place.
But there are ephemeral, ever-changing social networks that we participate in daily. These have been left largely untapped by Facebook: the people working out at the gym, shopping for groceries, playing basketball, taking their dog to the park, watching their children on the playground, and so on. They’re the networks you stumble into and out of every day, and they aren’t composed of your close friends, Facebook friends or otherwise. They’re just people who share your interests at that same moment in time. The guy ready for a pick-up game of b-ball. The coupon-clipper finding deals at the grocery store. A new puppy’s owners hoping for a doggie play date.
A couple of standout apps from Disrupt hope to better highlight these types of networks by introducing you to the people you want to know.
One, an app called Holler (iTunes), is based around interests and activities. You join a group (surfers, for example) and the app pushes notifications to you when others nearby are interested in the same thing. For now, the groups are pre-built by Holler itself, but it’s in the process of rolling out a system where users can build their own groups. However, there will be some level of filtering and control, so duplicate groups are not created.
Holler is well-designed, with a clean and minimalist layout, which makes it easy to use from first launch. Unfortunately, it suffers from the same problem many other “social” apps do at first – not enough people are using it. To address the issue, Holler’s creators are thinking of exposing all the groups to the app’s users, not just those nearby, which would still allow for socializing around interests. While that may increase engagement, it takes away from the app’s core promise of proximity-based socializing – its mobile meetups on the fly.
In a similar vein, another TechCrunch Disrupt Startup Alley company, Mingle, has built a mobile app that also aims to connect users based on interests. But in Mingle’s case, it’s about introducing yourself to others nearby, in the hopes that you two share an interest, instead of connecting around a commonly held interest like “shopping” or “exercise,” for example.
Mingle users fill out an introduction card and post it to their current location. Others “mingling” at that location can see one another, and take the conversation offline, if desired. It’s what Foursquare could do, if it wasn’t so stuck on listing the “others here” with only an avatar and a first name, last initial (arguably useless information, unless those people are already real-life friends).
A third app from the Startup Alley is a little more out there, but interesting. Called igobubble, this mobile app lets you leave virtual “bubbles” containing text, photos, videos, music and more at a given location. Others can come along later and find your bubble and interact with it, or even change it. You’ll see who has “touched” your bubble and can then chat with them in real-time. There’s more too it than that, but those are the basics.
igobubble feels more art project than the next big hit in mobile socializing, but at least they’re thinking out of the box. Instead of just re-creating the structure of a traditional social networking site (with profiles, listed interests, avatars), it’s thinking that tying content to a location is the first step in enabling mobile social discovery. That’s certainly a different take. It’s not about who you are, it’s about what you did at that location.
Other intriguing ideas in the location-based social space included Disrupt Startup Alley participant Evertale, makers of a mobile app that will map photos to locations for the purpose of instant scrapbooking and remembering old friends, and Audience Choice winner CardFlick, a contact-sharing app for nearby users.
But have any of the new apps (or old ones, for that matter), really hit the nail on the head when it comes to social discovery? Banjo and Sonar are great, but feel more like tools than networks of their own. Yobongo’s chat seems a bit lacking without context. Holler’s mobile meetups can’t work if it can’t gather enough participants. Mingle feels more business-networking driven than social. igobubble is an interesting idea, but doesn’t have the execution down.
It seems like each service could be a part of a bigger whole – a new proximity-based social network that puts location first, people and content second. A new network no one has yet been ambitious enough to attempt to design, so focused on a single niche or feature instead.
Foursquare, at least, has the critical mass to get there, but is stagnating with its continued emphasis on the manual check-in. The company should be increasing automation for regular check-ins, building out user profiles and letting users connect via common interests surfaced by their regular activities. It should suggest new friends based on behaviors combined with “friend-of-a-friend connections.” At the very least, when a big group of friends check-in together, it should alert the users in the group who aren’t connected to each other of the missed opportunity. It should even consider letting users pick and choose add-on services to run within the app. Yobongo’s chat, CardFlick or Mingle’s introductions, and igobubble’s content sharing could all be Foursquare features one day, and not standalone applications, if Foursquare had a wider vision for its future.
In the meantime, it’s fun to experiment with the latest and greatest in proximity-based social networking, thanks to the new TechCrunch Disrupt Alley startups mentioned here and others. Whether any of them will become breakout hits, however, will have to be left for the market to decide.
Credit: Top image via Mingle
Crunchbase
MINGLE
HOLLER
CARDFLICK
EVERTALE
BANJO
FOURSQUARE
YOBONGO
IGOBUBBLE
SONAR.ME
Company:
Mingle
Website:
minglesocialapp.com
Mingle is a mobile product that surfaces human relevance within a proximity. Leveraging location, Mingle allows users to make introductions anywhere they go with hopes that it allows users to interact. Mingle goes beyond sharing interests, usernames or even checking in and provides a relevance graph to provide context in which users use to help them find interesting people.
Learn more
Company:
Holler
Website:
holler.com
Learn more
Company:
CardFlick
Website:
cardflick.co
CardFlick helps you create and share online business cards using your iPhone in one flick.
1 Click login with services like Facebook and then your card is prefilled with your contact using one of our beautiful themes
Share your card with multiple people at a time just by flicking your phone or even email.
New themes can be purchased in app.
Customers are anyone who has a business to promote and wants to network without the hassle.
Learn more
Company:
Evertale
Website:
evertale.com
Launch Date:
January 3, 2011
Evertale is the self-writing scrapbook of your life.
Relive your favorite memories in their completeness. Evertale automatically generates a scrapbo[…]
Apps
Mobile
Startups
TC
Disrupt
Location
location-based
social_networking
from google
This type of discovery mechanism is already being made possible by a number of services, including the checkin apps like Foursquare and Gowalla, the automated discovery of nearby folks via Sonar and Banjo, the group chatting in Yobongo, and the micro-networks that emerge through LoKast. All of these companies are playing with the idea of location-based social networks, attempting to connect you to others around you through varying means.
At this week’s TechCrunch Disrupt conference in San Francisco, even more services emerged to compete in this space, too.
The powerful capabilities of today’s mobile smartphones are allowing for a new kind of networking: social discovery services, not social networking services. Discovery services are focused primarily on highlighting the users within close proximity to you and connecting you to those who you might want to meet.
Facebook, meanwhile, aims to connect you to people you already know. “Discovery” on Facebook is limited to searching for names or networks (e.g., schools, workplaces) where the introductions themselves previously took place.
But there are ephemeral, ever-changing social networks that we participate in daily. These have been left largely untapped by Facebook: the people working out at the gym, shopping for groceries, playing basketball, taking their dog to the park, watching their children on the playground, and so on. They’re the networks you stumble into and out of every day, and they aren’t composed of your close friends, Facebook friends or otherwise. They’re just people who share your interests at that same moment in time. The guy ready for a pick-up game of b-ball. The coupon-clipper finding deals at the grocery store. A new puppy’s owners hoping for a doggie play date.
A couple of standout apps from Disrupt hope to better highlight these types of networks by introducing you to the people you want to know.
One, an app called Holler (iTunes), is based around interests and activities. You join a group (surfers, for example) and the app pushes notifications to you when others nearby are interested in the same thing. For now, the groups are pre-built by Holler itself, but it’s in the process of rolling out a system where users can build their own groups. However, there will be some level of filtering and control, so duplicate groups are not created.
Holler is well-designed, with a clean and minimalist layout, which makes it easy to use from first launch. Unfortunately, it suffers from the same problem many other “social” apps do at first – not enough people are using it. To address the issue, Holler’s creators are thinking of exposing all the groups to the app’s users, not just those nearby, which would still allow for socializing around interests. While that may increase engagement, it takes away from the app’s core promise of proximity-based socializing – its mobile meetups on the fly.
In a similar vein, another TechCrunch Disrupt Startup Alley company, Mingle, has built a mobile app that also aims to connect users based on interests. But in Mingle’s case, it’s about introducing yourself to others nearby, in the hopes that you two share an interest, instead of connecting around a commonly held interest like “shopping” or “exercise,” for example.
Mingle users fill out an introduction card and post it to their current location. Others “mingling” at that location can see one another, and take the conversation offline, if desired. It’s what Foursquare could do, if it wasn’t so stuck on listing the “others here” with only an avatar and a first name, last initial (arguably useless information, unless those people are already real-life friends).
A third app from the Startup Alley is a little more out there, but interesting. Called igobubble, this mobile app lets you leave virtual “bubbles” containing text, photos, videos, music and more at a given location. Others can come along later and find your bubble and interact with it, or even change it. You’ll see who has “touched” your bubble and can then chat with them in real-time. There’s more too it than that, but those are the basics.
igobubble feels more art project than the next big hit in mobile socializing, but at least they’re thinking out of the box. Instead of just re-creating the structure of a traditional social networking site (with profiles, listed interests, avatars), it’s thinking that tying content to a location is the first step in enabling mobile social discovery. That’s certainly a different take. It’s not about who you are, it’s about what you did at that location.
Other intriguing ideas in the location-based social space included Disrupt Startup Alley participant Evertale, makers of a mobile app that will map photos to locations for the purpose of instant scrapbooking and remembering old friends, and Audience Choice winner CardFlick, a contact-sharing app for nearby users.
But have any of the new apps (or old ones, for that matter), really hit the nail on the head when it comes to social discovery? Banjo and Sonar are great, but feel more like tools than networks of their own. Yobongo’s chat seems a bit lacking without context. Holler’s mobile meetups can’t work if it can’t gather enough participants. Mingle feels more business-networking driven than social. igobubble is an interesting idea, but doesn’t have the execution down.
It seems like each service could be a part of a bigger whole – a new proximity-based social network that puts location first, people and content second. A new network no one has yet been ambitious enough to attempt to design, so focused on a single niche or feature instead.
Foursquare, at least, has the critical mass to get there, but is stagnating with its continued emphasis on the manual check-in. The company should be increasing automation for regular check-ins, building out user profiles and letting users connect via common interests surfaced by their regular activities. It should suggest new friends based on behaviors combined with “friend-of-a-friend connections.” At the very least, when a big group of friends check-in together, it should alert the users in the group who aren’t connected to each other of the missed opportunity. It should even consider letting users pick and choose add-on services to run within the app. Yobongo’s chat, CardFlick or Mingle’s introductions, and igobubble’s content sharing could all be Foursquare features one day, and not standalone applications, if Foursquare had a wider vision for its future.
In the meantime, it’s fun to experiment with the latest and greatest in proximity-based social networking, thanks to the new TechCrunch Disrupt Alley startups mentioned here and others. Whether any of them will become breakout hits, however, will have to be left for the market to decide.
Credit: Top image via Mingle
Crunchbase
MINGLE
HOLLER
CARDFLICK
EVERTALE
BANJO
FOURSQUARE
YOBONGO
IGOBUBBLE
SONAR.ME
Company:
Mingle
Website:
minglesocialapp.com
Mingle is a mobile product that surfaces human relevance within a proximity. Leveraging location, Mingle allows users to make introductions anywhere they go with hopes that it allows users to interact. Mingle goes beyond sharing interests, usernames or even checking in and provides a relevance graph to provide context in which users use to help them find interesting people.
Learn more
Company:
Holler
Website:
holler.com
Learn more
Company:
CardFlick
Website:
cardflick.co
CardFlick helps you create and share online business cards using your iPhone in one flick.
1 Click login with services like Facebook and then your card is prefilled with your contact using one of our beautiful themes
Share your card with multiple people at a time just by flicking your phone or even email.
New themes can be purchased in app.
Customers are anyone who has a business to promote and wants to network without the hassle.
Learn more
Company:
Evertale
Website:
evertale.com
Launch Date:
January 3, 2011
Evertale is the self-writing scrapbook of your life.
Relive your favorite memories in their completeness. Evertale automatically generates a scrapbo[…]
september 2011 by doffm
Amen Aims To Find The Best Of Everything With A Smart Interface
september 2011 by doffm
It’s been a long time since we were delighted and even slightly bemused by the utterly stripped down simplicity of Twitter. And let’s face it, there have been many pretenders to that simplistic interface crown since then. But Amen appears to have come up with a mellifluous new take on a mobile service which is tantalisingly simple, but designed to create masses amounts of data about things people like.
Put simply, Amen is about finding the best of everything, often via arguments over the worst. To get the app go to getamen.com/tc in your Safari on the iPhone, sign up and download it OverTheAir. There are about 2,000 sign ups for Techcrunch Disrupt.
Here’s how it works. You fire up the app on the iPhone or web browser and say a person, place or thing is “the best” or “the worst” ever, like like, the Best Dubstep track ever. Or perhaps, as actress Demi Moore (a beta user) puts it, “After Sex is the Best State For Amening Ever.” Hubbie Ashton Kutcher – an investor – “Led Zeppelin is the best rock band ever.” You can agree with this statement with an “Amen”. But with a “Hell no” you have to suggest an alternative answer. It’s a rigid structure, but you can post whatever you want.
Leaving aside reading between the lines of Demi’s post (as tempting as it is) the creation of the simple “Amen” or “Hell No” mechanic means Amen can create lots of definitive data about something. For instance, right now Amen says “The Best Place for Mexican Food in San Mateo is Taqueria La Cumbre. Of course, you might disagree…
The location of any Amen statement is also built into the app, meaning Amen will start to tell you the best things around you.
But more interesting than that, it generates a feed from users who see lots of potentially divisive statements from their friends.
This is when the gaming element kicks in because you can weigh in and vehemently disagree with a person. This not just a Dilike button – you can only disagree, typing “hell no” – by suggesting a replacement to the post.
That means Amen gets continually more finessed data each time. Crucially, each statement is a data point.
So where as Twitter and its thousands of third party developers have had to apply tortuous natural language algorithms to the firehose in order to work out what the hell is going on, Amen has all this data and structure pre-built in to its system. It’s like one big brawl to find the best stuff, but this time with rules so simple you don’ even notice them.
So the whole system is built from the ground up to bubble-up the best of everything in the world.
Founderr Felix says users of the closed beta have been posting about TV shows, of coffee houses, The worst airline, the best position for sex. Literally everything. In addition people use it to create a kind of status update which their friends can agree or disagree with, e.g. “This bar is the best place for meeting Mike.”
Then again it might be something more nuanced, such as…
Or more inside baseball:
Or more gamed:
The startup has been in closed private beta for the last month and now has 3,500 users, generating quite a lot of engagement. In one month those users created 30,000 statements, created 15,500 score cards and clicked the Amen button 80,000 times.
An unintended use is using is as a Q&A platform, and then finding the thing you were after, like asking “Who is the best Dentist in Berlin” and people disputing that and entering their suggestion.
People have also been talking about everything from brand to what the best jokes are, to the best playlists.
Of course, it’s the brands element to this that has a lot of potential. Brands can get feedback on what people are saying about them, definitely, in realtime and to a high level of accuracy because it’s all structured data. This is much harder in Twitter because there is no structured data to mine, just people random words.
Plus, Amen is de-duping all the words and lists, so there is no duplication, no fat in the system.
And because its starts suggesting things to you, it can start to predict what you are planning to type. The same goes for location where the Amen iPhone might already know you are in a particular bar.
Lists don’t just generate one answer – there is a long tail of answers after the top result. So they get the head and the long tail of results. Even an answer with only two votes will still appear in the system.
Yes, the best movie ever made bay end up being agreed on (it’s 2001: A Space Odyssey).
Amen’s game plan is engagement first, and get big. Then to enable discovery and utility. Monetisation comes afterwards and could consist of ad buys within the lists, like AdWords.
The startup has raised a Seed funding from Index Ventures and Kutcher.
The team itself is sterling. CEO and Founder Felix Petersen formerly founded Plazes, which was acquired by Nokia in 2008. There is also Caitlin Winner (MIT, Nokia) and Ricki Vester Gregersen (Input Squared), and Florian Weber, Twitter’s first engineer interviewed here).
But finally, here is a problem. In theory Amen could be copyable, assuming someone can think out how to structure this data. It’s barrier to entry might therefore be lower. But then, how many startups already have Demi Moore as a private – poised to be public – beta user?
Crunchbase
AMEN.
Company:
Amen.
Website:
Learn more
Mobile
Reviews
Social
Startups
TC
Disrupt
from google
Put simply, Amen is about finding the best of everything, often via arguments over the worst. To get the app go to getamen.com/tc in your Safari on the iPhone, sign up and download it OverTheAir. There are about 2,000 sign ups for Techcrunch Disrupt.
Here’s how it works. You fire up the app on the iPhone or web browser and say a person, place or thing is “the best” or “the worst” ever, like like, the Best Dubstep track ever. Or perhaps, as actress Demi Moore (a beta user) puts it, “After Sex is the Best State For Amening Ever.” Hubbie Ashton Kutcher – an investor – “Led Zeppelin is the best rock band ever.” You can agree with this statement with an “Amen”. But with a “Hell no” you have to suggest an alternative answer. It’s a rigid structure, but you can post whatever you want.
Leaving aside reading between the lines of Demi’s post (as tempting as it is) the creation of the simple “Amen” or “Hell No” mechanic means Amen can create lots of definitive data about something. For instance, right now Amen says “The Best Place for Mexican Food in San Mateo is Taqueria La Cumbre. Of course, you might disagree…
The location of any Amen statement is also built into the app, meaning Amen will start to tell you the best things around you.
But more interesting than that, it generates a feed from users who see lots of potentially divisive statements from their friends.
This is when the gaming element kicks in because you can weigh in and vehemently disagree with a person. This not just a Dilike button – you can only disagree, typing “hell no” – by suggesting a replacement to the post.
That means Amen gets continually more finessed data each time. Crucially, each statement is a data point.
So where as Twitter and its thousands of third party developers have had to apply tortuous natural language algorithms to the firehose in order to work out what the hell is going on, Amen has all this data and structure pre-built in to its system. It’s like one big brawl to find the best stuff, but this time with rules so simple you don’ even notice them.
So the whole system is built from the ground up to bubble-up the best of everything in the world.
Founderr Felix says users of the closed beta have been posting about TV shows, of coffee houses, The worst airline, the best position for sex. Literally everything. In addition people use it to create a kind of status update which their friends can agree or disagree with, e.g. “This bar is the best place for meeting Mike.”
Then again it might be something more nuanced, such as…
Or more inside baseball:
Or more gamed:
The startup has been in closed private beta for the last month and now has 3,500 users, generating quite a lot of engagement. In one month those users created 30,000 statements, created 15,500 score cards and clicked the Amen button 80,000 times.
An unintended use is using is as a Q&A platform, and then finding the thing you were after, like asking “Who is the best Dentist in Berlin” and people disputing that and entering their suggestion.
People have also been talking about everything from brand to what the best jokes are, to the best playlists.
Of course, it’s the brands element to this that has a lot of potential. Brands can get feedback on what people are saying about them, definitely, in realtime and to a high level of accuracy because it’s all structured data. This is much harder in Twitter because there is no structured data to mine, just people random words.
Plus, Amen is de-duping all the words and lists, so there is no duplication, no fat in the system.
And because its starts suggesting things to you, it can start to predict what you are planning to type. The same goes for location where the Amen iPhone might already know you are in a particular bar.
Lists don’t just generate one answer – there is a long tail of answers after the top result. So they get the head and the long tail of results. Even an answer with only two votes will still appear in the system.
Yes, the best movie ever made bay end up being agreed on (it’s 2001: A Space Odyssey).
Amen’s game plan is engagement first, and get big. Then to enable discovery and utility. Monetisation comes afterwards and could consist of ad buys within the lists, like AdWords.
The startup has raised a Seed funding from Index Ventures and Kutcher.
The team itself is sterling. CEO and Founder Felix Petersen formerly founded Plazes, which was acquired by Nokia in 2008. There is also Caitlin Winner (MIT, Nokia) and Ricki Vester Gregersen (Input Squared), and Florian Weber, Twitter’s first engineer interviewed here).
But finally, here is a problem. In theory Amen could be copyable, assuming someone can think out how to structure this data. It’s barrier to entry might therefore be lower. But then, how many startups already have Demi Moore as a private – poised to be public – beta user?
Crunchbase
AMEN.
Company:
Amen.
Website:
Learn more
september 2011 by doffm
Spool Is Instapaper On Steroids
september 2011 by doffm
Spool is a new service aimed at addressing the problem created by the multi-device, multi-screen environment we now live in, where the content consumption experience can vary widely from platform to platform. On iOS devices, for example, you can’t watch Flash videos without serious workarounds. On an iPod Touch or other standalone media player, you need a Wi-Fi signal in order to browse the Web.
But with Spool, you don’t have to think about these sorts of things. Any Internet content, including audio, video and text, can be made available for immediate, offline viewing on mobile, simply by using the Spool app, browser add-on or bookmarklet. And because Spool is intelligent, it knows what part of a webpage to save, and what part to discard.
Simply put, Spool works like an evolved version of Instapaper, the popular service that saves long-form Web articles for later reading either on your computer, iPhone, iPad or Kindle. Like Instapaper, there’s also this idea that what works on the Web isn’t necessarily what works well on mobile. But where Instapaper cleans up and reformats text for easier reading, Spool works with any media type, whether it be text, audio or video. It can even parse multi-page content for you, saving the entire article or forum thread, for example, not just the first page.
The service uses artificial intelligence and a computer vision engine to read the webpage the way a human would and extract the relevant parts, while discarding the rest (like the ads, the header, the footer, etc.). Most importantly, perhaps, it converts video into mobile-friendly, HTML5-based formats that play within any modern smartphone or tablet browser. The videos and other content are also cached to the device, for offline access.
In the short-term, Spool solves the problem of content incompatibly that arises, for the most part, from Apple’s decision to ban Flash from its mobile devices and publishers’ delays in moving to the iOS-friendly Web standard HTML5. It also provides a viable workaround for the still-present “offline” problem that results from poor cellular coverage and dead spots.
Spool’s founders, Avichal Garg and Curtis Spencer, admit that the Flash problem is slowly going away, but they believe that the connectivity issues will remain for some time.
For now, Spool lets you take snapshots of a page using its mobile app, Firefox or Chrome extension, or browser bookmarklet. These saved pages and related media can be viewed within the app or online, and favorited for easy access or archived when you’re finished viewing. The storage space Spool uses can also be adjusted in Settings, and for Android users, storing content to the SD card is supported.
In the future, Spool will focus on adding deep linking (automatically pulling down the content for the links within an article you saved), plus intelligent “spooling” of your favorite sites without an explicit request on your part.
The app is free for now (in private beta), while the founders consider monetization options involving freemium services, search offerings and mobile CDN models.
Spool is currently addressing some real-world problems, but arguably not those that will be around forever. Spool’s technology, on the other hand, may have a longer shelf life than Spool’s apps. The company expects five patents to come of its artificial intelligence, computer vision, video extraction, video transcoding and browser emulation infrastructure. The amount of funding Spool received is currently undisclosed.
Q&A
Judges:Expert Judges: Aileen Lee (Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield & Byers), Dustin Moskovitz (Asana), Michael Parekh (MPi Capital), Joshua Schachter (Jig)
AL: How to grow business?
A: People are already doing this behavior. Big fans of Dropbox, Evernote – sites that have solve pain points for big parts of online population.
DM: What about when network connections are better?
A: Network infrastructure can’t keep up with number of users. Even if it does, that means Spool gets faster pipes, loads pages faster on phones.
MP: Love it, can’t wait to try it. How does it compare to competition?
A: A lot competitors focused on article content (Instapaper). This is about different types of content, too. (Videos, audio, etc.)
JS: Do people really return to read stuff they archive to read later?
A: We can also intelligently fetch things for you in advance, at some point in the future. But yes, it’s not an immediately mainstream product.
Crunchbase
SPOOL
Company:
Spool
Website:
Spool saves your favorite articles and videos to your computer, tablet, and phone. Read and watch your content when you have time, even offline.
Learn more
Apps
Mobile
Startups
TC
tcdisrupt
instapaper
Disrupt
DisruptSF2011
from google
But with Spool, you don’t have to think about these sorts of things. Any Internet content, including audio, video and text, can be made available for immediate, offline viewing on mobile, simply by using the Spool app, browser add-on or bookmarklet. And because Spool is intelligent, it knows what part of a webpage to save, and what part to discard.
Simply put, Spool works like an evolved version of Instapaper, the popular service that saves long-form Web articles for later reading either on your computer, iPhone, iPad or Kindle. Like Instapaper, there’s also this idea that what works on the Web isn’t necessarily what works well on mobile. But where Instapaper cleans up and reformats text for easier reading, Spool works with any media type, whether it be text, audio or video. It can even parse multi-page content for you, saving the entire article or forum thread, for example, not just the first page.
The service uses artificial intelligence and a computer vision engine to read the webpage the way a human would and extract the relevant parts, while discarding the rest (like the ads, the header, the footer, etc.). Most importantly, perhaps, it converts video into mobile-friendly, HTML5-based formats that play within any modern smartphone or tablet browser. The videos and other content are also cached to the device, for offline access.
In the short-term, Spool solves the problem of content incompatibly that arises, for the most part, from Apple’s decision to ban Flash from its mobile devices and publishers’ delays in moving to the iOS-friendly Web standard HTML5. It also provides a viable workaround for the still-present “offline” problem that results from poor cellular coverage and dead spots.
Spool’s founders, Avichal Garg and Curtis Spencer, admit that the Flash problem is slowly going away, but they believe that the connectivity issues will remain for some time.
For now, Spool lets you take snapshots of a page using its mobile app, Firefox or Chrome extension, or browser bookmarklet. These saved pages and related media can be viewed within the app or online, and favorited for easy access or archived when you’re finished viewing. The storage space Spool uses can also be adjusted in Settings, and for Android users, storing content to the SD card is supported.
In the future, Spool will focus on adding deep linking (automatically pulling down the content for the links within an article you saved), plus intelligent “spooling” of your favorite sites without an explicit request on your part.
The app is free for now (in private beta), while the founders consider monetization options involving freemium services, search offerings and mobile CDN models.
Spool is currently addressing some real-world problems, but arguably not those that will be around forever. Spool’s technology, on the other hand, may have a longer shelf life than Spool’s apps. The company expects five patents to come of its artificial intelligence, computer vision, video extraction, video transcoding and browser emulation infrastructure. The amount of funding Spool received is currently undisclosed.
Q&A
Judges:Expert Judges: Aileen Lee (Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield & Byers), Dustin Moskovitz (Asana), Michael Parekh (MPi Capital), Joshua Schachter (Jig)
AL: How to grow business?
A: People are already doing this behavior. Big fans of Dropbox, Evernote – sites that have solve pain points for big parts of online population.
DM: What about when network connections are better?
A: Network infrastructure can’t keep up with number of users. Even if it does, that means Spool gets faster pipes, loads pages faster on phones.
MP: Love it, can’t wait to try it. How does it compare to competition?
A: A lot competitors focused on article content (Instapaper). This is about different types of content, too. (Videos, audio, etc.)
JS: Do people really return to read stuff they archive to read later?
A: We can also intelligently fetch things for you in advance, at some point in the future. But yes, it’s not an immediately mainstream product.
Crunchbase
SPOOL
Company:
Spool
Website:
Spool saves your favorite articles and videos to your computer, tablet, and phone. Read and watch your content when you have time, even offline.
Learn more
september 2011 by doffm
Ex-Googlers Launch Mobile Travel Guide To Kill Lonely Planet; Raise Funding From Chris Sacca & More
september 2011 by doffm
In the days of yore, travel guides were written by intrepid travelers who spent months scribbling in diaries and field journals, or by teams of adventurous souls exhaustively scrap booking their travel experiences into the Lonely Planets of the world. Over the last decade, however, the Web has produced an untold number of personal travel blogs, digital photo albums, community-built travel guides like Tripadvisor and Wikitravel, and cool travel resources like Gogobot.
Today, Jon Tirsen and Douwe Osinga, two ex-Googlers, are officially unveiling their new mobile travel guide Triposo, which doesn’t want to just throw out the old model, it wants to do what Google did for the world’s information: Aggregate that sucka and make it easily searchable. Simply put, Triposo is based on the simple idea that travel guides can be designed in the same way that Google based its aggregation and search on some kick ass algorithms. And a little bit of indexing and semantic icing to boot.
To that end, travel guides like Triposo are possible today, because the content is there. Sites like Wikipedia, Wikitravel, and Openstreetmap have swaths of travel-related content, and Triposo wants to be the site that ranks that content so well you’ll never have to use another preachy, paper-based travel book. The environment will thank you.
Thus, the Triposo algorithm takes travel information from seven of the biggest open source aggregators (and several closed resources as well) and serves its users with content that’s relevant for them. Without any human interference, Triposo COO Richard Osinga tells me, the startup produces travel guides, with information on sightseeing, nightlife and restaurants, all ordered by Triposo’s algorithm — and complete with an easy-to-use (and offline-enabled) map. That very offline functionality in and of itself makes Triposo’s free mobile apps worth downloading.
Along with its web app, Triposo also offers 30 free destination guides for iOS using the same approach. The startup plans to release an iOS world guide, in which users can download a complete travel guide for any destination in the world, next month. Android users, on the other hand, can already find a world travel guide and guides for select cities here.
Triposo has been polishing its travel content algorithms for over a year now, and launched a swath of city guides for iOS and Android to test the algorithmic waters and user response. So far, people are using the guides on average of 20 minutes per session — so far, so good. But the end goal for Triposo is really to hone its all-in-one world travel guides, so that users can pick a destination anywhere across the globe and easily find the best cities and destinations to visit.
But how does Triposo choose these recommended destinations? “One of the things we also use intensively for our ranking algorithms are photographs”, said Co-founder Douwe Osinga. “We have a collection of a few million travel photos geotagged — with time stamps. How many pictures are taken at a place, at what time, on what day: That all helps us decide how important a location is”.
Of course, an algorithm-based company is only as good as its, well, algorithm. At the end of the day, travelers may prefer to receive personalized recommendations on destinations from their friends, or people they trust. (Or self-curated as one commenter pointed out.) And from this perspective, Triposo’s human-less recommendation platform may not suit everyone; but at the same time, it’s nice to have a free mobile app that works the same for everyone regardless. It may miss the mark for some, but the iPad app looks great, and so far, the algorithm hasn’t let me down. Amsterdam, here I come.
Along with platform unveiling, Triposo also told TechCrunch that it has raised $525,000 in seed financing from angel investors, including Chris Sacca, Taher Haveliwala, Google Wave Co-founder and Google Maps Lead Engineer Lars Rasmussen, and InterWest Partners.
The founders said that they will use this new infusion of capital to continue optimizing its algorithm, working towards the goal of becoming the best possible web and mobile destination to answer: Where should I go next? The question, however, for Triposo, is what their revenue model will be when the money runs out. Premium features? Paid apps? More to come.
For more on the interactive travel guides startup, check them out here. Let us know what you think. Travel content algorithms: Yay or nay?
Crunchbase
TRIPOSO
Company:
Triposo
Website:
triposo.com/
Funding:
$525k
Triposo makes free, interactive travel guides for mobile devices.
Using an algorithm based approach Triposo focusses on presenting the most relevant options for a traveler at any given moment in...
Learn more
Mobile
Startups
TC
Triposo
from google
Today, Jon Tirsen and Douwe Osinga, two ex-Googlers, are officially unveiling their new mobile travel guide Triposo, which doesn’t want to just throw out the old model, it wants to do what Google did for the world’s information: Aggregate that sucka and make it easily searchable. Simply put, Triposo is based on the simple idea that travel guides can be designed in the same way that Google based its aggregation and search on some kick ass algorithms. And a little bit of indexing and semantic icing to boot.
To that end, travel guides like Triposo are possible today, because the content is there. Sites like Wikipedia, Wikitravel, and Openstreetmap have swaths of travel-related content, and Triposo wants to be the site that ranks that content so well you’ll never have to use another preachy, paper-based travel book. The environment will thank you.
Thus, the Triposo algorithm takes travel information from seven of the biggest open source aggregators (and several closed resources as well) and serves its users with content that’s relevant for them. Without any human interference, Triposo COO Richard Osinga tells me, the startup produces travel guides, with information on sightseeing, nightlife and restaurants, all ordered by Triposo’s algorithm — and complete with an easy-to-use (and offline-enabled) map. That very offline functionality in and of itself makes Triposo’s free mobile apps worth downloading.
Along with its web app, Triposo also offers 30 free destination guides for iOS using the same approach. The startup plans to release an iOS world guide, in which users can download a complete travel guide for any destination in the world, next month. Android users, on the other hand, can already find a world travel guide and guides for select cities here.
Triposo has been polishing its travel content algorithms for over a year now, and launched a swath of city guides for iOS and Android to test the algorithmic waters and user response. So far, people are using the guides on average of 20 minutes per session — so far, so good. But the end goal for Triposo is really to hone its all-in-one world travel guides, so that users can pick a destination anywhere across the globe and easily find the best cities and destinations to visit.
But how does Triposo choose these recommended destinations? “One of the things we also use intensively for our ranking algorithms are photographs”, said Co-founder Douwe Osinga. “We have a collection of a few million travel photos geotagged — with time stamps. How many pictures are taken at a place, at what time, on what day: That all helps us decide how important a location is”.
Of course, an algorithm-based company is only as good as its, well, algorithm. At the end of the day, travelers may prefer to receive personalized recommendations on destinations from their friends, or people they trust. (Or self-curated as one commenter pointed out.) And from this perspective, Triposo’s human-less recommendation platform may not suit everyone; but at the same time, it’s nice to have a free mobile app that works the same for everyone regardless. It may miss the mark for some, but the iPad app looks great, and so far, the algorithm hasn’t let me down. Amsterdam, here I come.
Along with platform unveiling, Triposo also told TechCrunch that it has raised $525,000 in seed financing from angel investors, including Chris Sacca, Taher Haveliwala, Google Wave Co-founder and Google Maps Lead Engineer Lars Rasmussen, and InterWest Partners.
The founders said that they will use this new infusion of capital to continue optimizing its algorithm, working towards the goal of becoming the best possible web and mobile destination to answer: Where should I go next? The question, however, for Triposo, is what their revenue model will be when the money runs out. Premium features? Paid apps? More to come.
For more on the interactive travel guides startup, check them out here. Let us know what you think. Travel content algorithms: Yay or nay?
Crunchbase
TRIPOSO
Company:
Triposo
Website:
triposo.com/
Funding:
$525k
Triposo makes free, interactive travel guides for mobile devices.
Using an algorithm based approach Triposo focusses on presenting the most relevant options for a traveler at any given moment in...
Learn more
september 2011 by doffm
HealthTech FAIL: Lessons For Entrepreneurs From Health Startups Gone Awry
august 2011 by doffm
Editor’s note: This guest post was written by Dave Chase, the CEO of Avado.com, a patient relationship management company that was a TechCrunch Disrupt finalist. Previously he was a management consultant for Accenture’s healthcare practice consulting to 25 hospitals and was the founder of Microsoft’s Health business. You can follow him on Twitter @chasedave.
Healthtech is an ever-growing sector, but from the $1 billion pool VCs poured into startups over the last year, health companies only received about 3 percent of that total. Not many healthtech startups have been able to secure those big venture rounds; however, last week, I highlighted one healthtech company that seems to be doing it right: Zocdoc, which raised a $50 million round from DST earlier this month, and offered a few takeaways for startups looking to learn from Zocdoc’s experience. (Check out the post here.
As the aforementioned venture numbers from Rip’s post show, many startups really haven’t demonstrated the same wisdom Zocdoc has shown, which has led to an increasing number of healthtech failures over the last few years. One recent study in particular highlights this phenomena. After interviewing 110 digital health entrepreneurs, RockHealth recently released the findings of a study demonstrating the disconnect between the companies that are actually getting funding and the many that have come up empty.
This disconnect sheds light onto why so many healthtech companies have failed to make an impact, or have had to undergo significant pivots in order to survive. Below you’ll find some of the top causes of healthtech startup failure:
Lack of Specific Focus or Adoption point
It’s well documented that a lack of focus kills startups whether they are in healthcare or not but it is particularly prevalent in healthcare. The healthcare industry suffers from an abundance of pain points and is in serious need of disruption, so it’s tempting for new startups to try to solve them all to make the greatest impact. However, these startups are ignoring the old saying about how to eat an elephant — one bite at a time. Too many startups are biting off more than they can chew. It’s best to pick one major pain point to address and go with it.
Expected consumers to pay
With the exception of weight loss programs, there aren’t many examples of consumers paying directly for health services. Over time, this is likely to change as more of the burden of healthcare costs gets shifted to consumers as was highlighted in Part II of the Healthcare Disruption series (see links below). However, I’d be very cautious about any business expecting to have consumers pay in the near-term.
Expected consumer to enter lots of information
While I believe there was a bigger reason why Google Health failed, expecting consumers to enter information is one of the big factors in why Personal Health Records (PHR) have failed to gain meaningful traction. Most PHRs rely on the individual entering information and few are willing to do that.
Required huge amounts of money
This tended to happen in bubble periods where there was a grand vision and frothy funding markets threw huge sums of money. Ultimately, they weren’t sustainable franchises.
Require multiple and intricate partnerships
A startup dependent on too many partnerships is likely to run into issues as those partnerships frequently involve established players. Unfortunately, the established players have a dramatically different sense of urgency. Many good ideas have died on the vine waiting for business development and legal departments at established players who didn’t share the startup’s sense of urgency.
Lacked Understanding of Reimbursement Dynamics
This is by far the number one reason why healthtech startups have failed. The findings from RockHealth’s study highlight an important dimension of this. On a positive note, 77 percent of VCs think healthcare IT investment dollars will increase in 2011. Already 35 digital health companies having received $2M+ in 2011. The important point is that 80% of those receiving funding are B2B (i.e., selling to either healthcare providers, businesses, etc.) yet the majority of digital health entrepreneurs surveyed think consumers will pay for their product or service. Despite this fact, most early stage digital health entrepreneurs are building B2C companies.
Before it’s too late, hopefully these companies will find a way for someone other than consumers to pay. This could be via an advertising model or by licensing the technology to organizations. In this case, the consumer is the product, not the customer. The customer is the organization.
You can find RockHealth’s full study embedded below for your viewing pleasure:
Rock Report: State of Digital Health
The following is the Healthcare Disruption series referenced above:
Healthcare Disruption: Pharma 3.0 Will Drive Shift from Life Science to HealthTech Investing
Healthcare Disruption: Providers Will Use HealthTech to Differentiate and Produce Better Outcomes (Part II)
Healthcare Disruption: Providers Are Making Newspaper Industry Mistakes (Part III)
Image excerpt courtesy of Wikipedia Commons
Crunchbase
AVADO
Company:
AVADO
Website:
http://www.avado.com
Launch Date:
2/1/2010
Avado is a Patient Relationship Management platform that enables a health-driven partnership between an individual and their health & wellness providers and gives the individual a Connected Health Record.
Learn more
Crunchbase
DAVE CHASE
Person:
DAVE CHASE
Website:
Companies
Altus Alliance, Avado
Dave is the CEO and Co-founder of Avado. Avado is a Patient Relationship Management platform that empowers the healthcare partnership between individuals and their health & wellness providers while...
Learn more
Opinion
Startups
TC
Dave_Chase
HealthTech
from google
Healthtech is an ever-growing sector, but from the $1 billion pool VCs poured into startups over the last year, health companies only received about 3 percent of that total. Not many healthtech startups have been able to secure those big venture rounds; however, last week, I highlighted one healthtech company that seems to be doing it right: Zocdoc, which raised a $50 million round from DST earlier this month, and offered a few takeaways for startups looking to learn from Zocdoc’s experience. (Check out the post here.
As the aforementioned venture numbers from Rip’s post show, many startups really haven’t demonstrated the same wisdom Zocdoc has shown, which has led to an increasing number of healthtech failures over the last few years. One recent study in particular highlights this phenomena. After interviewing 110 digital health entrepreneurs, RockHealth recently released the findings of a study demonstrating the disconnect between the companies that are actually getting funding and the many that have come up empty.
This disconnect sheds light onto why so many healthtech companies have failed to make an impact, or have had to undergo significant pivots in order to survive. Below you’ll find some of the top causes of healthtech startup failure:
Lack of Specific Focus or Adoption point
It’s well documented that a lack of focus kills startups whether they are in healthcare or not but it is particularly prevalent in healthcare. The healthcare industry suffers from an abundance of pain points and is in serious need of disruption, so it’s tempting for new startups to try to solve them all to make the greatest impact. However, these startups are ignoring the old saying about how to eat an elephant — one bite at a time. Too many startups are biting off more than they can chew. It’s best to pick one major pain point to address and go with it.
Expected consumers to pay
With the exception of weight loss programs, there aren’t many examples of consumers paying directly for health services. Over time, this is likely to change as more of the burden of healthcare costs gets shifted to consumers as was highlighted in Part II of the Healthcare Disruption series (see links below). However, I’d be very cautious about any business expecting to have consumers pay in the near-term.
Expected consumer to enter lots of information
While I believe there was a bigger reason why Google Health failed, expecting consumers to enter information is one of the big factors in why Personal Health Records (PHR) have failed to gain meaningful traction. Most PHRs rely on the individual entering information and few are willing to do that.
Required huge amounts of money
This tended to happen in bubble periods where there was a grand vision and frothy funding markets threw huge sums of money. Ultimately, they weren’t sustainable franchises.
Require multiple and intricate partnerships
A startup dependent on too many partnerships is likely to run into issues as those partnerships frequently involve established players. Unfortunately, the established players have a dramatically different sense of urgency. Many good ideas have died on the vine waiting for business development and legal departments at established players who didn’t share the startup’s sense of urgency.
Lacked Understanding of Reimbursement Dynamics
This is by far the number one reason why healthtech startups have failed. The findings from RockHealth’s study highlight an important dimension of this. On a positive note, 77 percent of VCs think healthcare IT investment dollars will increase in 2011. Already 35 digital health companies having received $2M+ in 2011. The important point is that 80% of those receiving funding are B2B (i.e., selling to either healthcare providers, businesses, etc.) yet the majority of digital health entrepreneurs surveyed think consumers will pay for their product or service. Despite this fact, most early stage digital health entrepreneurs are building B2C companies.
Before it’s too late, hopefully these companies will find a way for someone other than consumers to pay. This could be via an advertising model or by licensing the technology to organizations. In this case, the consumer is the product, not the customer. The customer is the organization.
You can find RockHealth’s full study embedded below for your viewing pleasure:
Rock Report: State of Digital Health
The following is the Healthcare Disruption series referenced above:
Healthcare Disruption: Pharma 3.0 Will Drive Shift from Life Science to HealthTech Investing
Healthcare Disruption: Providers Will Use HealthTech to Differentiate and Produce Better Outcomes (Part II)
Healthcare Disruption: Providers Are Making Newspaper Industry Mistakes (Part III)
Image excerpt courtesy of Wikipedia Commons
Crunchbase
AVADO
Company:
AVADO
Website:
http://www.avado.com
Launch Date:
2/1/2010
Avado is a Patient Relationship Management platform that enables a health-driven partnership between an individual and their health & wellness providers and gives the individual a Connected Health Record.
Learn more
Crunchbase
DAVE CHASE
Person:
DAVE CHASE
Website:
Companies
Altus Alliance, Avado
Dave is the CEO and Co-founder of Avado. Avado is a Patient Relationship Management platform that empowers the healthcare partnership between individuals and their health & wellness providers while...
Learn more
august 2011 by doffm
InfiniteGraph Steps Out Of Beta To Help Companies Identify Deep Relationships In Large Data Sets
august 2011 by doffm
Last year, Eric Schmidt, the former CEO of Google, told a crowd gathered at the Techonomy Conference in Lake Tahoe, CA that we now create as much information in two days as we did from the dawn of civilization through 2003. While Roger J. Moore would disagree and amend that estimation slightly, the fact of the matter is that today we’re seeing a ridiculous (and exponential) telescoping in data production and consumption — which will only continue to increase.
Thus, in today’s world, data is becoming a valuable commodity. Many companies strive to collect as much data about their customer’s habits and interactions as possible to better serve them with ads, recommendations, discovery tools, and personalized product or service experiences (and so on). But, the fact of the matter is, big data management and analysis is still clunky and without being able to understand what that big data means — without being able to identify the important relationships, connections, and patterns within the data — it’s just a big pile of numbers and symbols.
What’s more, as more and more datapoints are pulled in by social networks (and as those networks scale) with servers often scattered across large geographical zones, it becomes tougher and tougher on backend systems to process the complex connections between data.
Sunnyvale-based InfiniteGraph, the year-old startup and brainchild of enterprise database company Objectivity, is coming out of beta today to help developers and companies identify and utilize deep connections between nodes and edges in large, distributed data sets. InfiniteGraph seeks to reduce the amount of time it takes to make these connections to a matter of seconds, processing large graph datasets, in areas like government intelligence, social networks and social media CRM, location-based services, and financial analytics.
Working with these kind of large enterprises requires support for billions of data points, and so InfiniteGraph has built a system to enable scaling and big data capacity, with realtime functionality. Today, InfiniteGraph is expanding its reach to businesses and developers looking to mine their data stores for complex relationships, be they enterprise apps targeting SMBs, SMEs themselves, or Fortune 500 companies.
But the important thing to point out about InfiniteGraph’s commercial release (the system has been being developed in beta over the last year) is that it doesn’t require developers to re-engineer their databases from scratch to benefit from the technology. Developers can simply use the startup’s dedicated graph API to leverage InfiniteGraph’s relationshop mining on top of their existing data. It also offers a high-scale database management system, which is a nice bonus.
Other features of note in InfiniteGraph’s commercial release include parallel data loading and accelerated ingest, meaning that developers can import and continuously feed apps with data from multiple input streams more speedily. The graph database also allows developers to choose from different indexing options that suit their company’s specific needs (from automatic to manual), as well as enabling devs to view, verify, and test data models in customizable approaches.
As InfiniteGraph aims to help companies leverage social network analysis and business intelligence to increase efficiency and gain competitive advantage in crowded markets, the graph database will now be available in both free and licensed versions. (Check out licensed options here.) As to compatibility, InfiniteGraph’s database is written in Java (with a C++ core), is interoperable across Linux, Windows and Mac OS/X platforms, and “can also be deployed in most virtualized cloud environments”, according to its website.
The platform is also licensed on a “pay as you scale” or usage-based model that allows companies to expand their storage capacity (and aims at being a more cost effective way to use).
InfiniteGraph is also announcing a contest for developers, which will offer up to $12,000 in prizes, in addition to helping developers promote their apps. The contest launches today and will be accepting submissions through September 30th. According to an InfiniteGraph spokesperson, “developers can build any type of software application, web or mobile service around social, game and/or location-based networks, any type of process or knowledge management, or anything else which seeks to find and leverage complex relationships between objects or things”. For more on the contest, check it out here.
Startups
TC
from google
Thus, in today’s world, data is becoming a valuable commodity. Many companies strive to collect as much data about their customer’s habits and interactions as possible to better serve them with ads, recommendations, discovery tools, and personalized product or service experiences (and so on). But, the fact of the matter is, big data management and analysis is still clunky and without being able to understand what that big data means — without being able to identify the important relationships, connections, and patterns within the data — it’s just a big pile of numbers and symbols.
What’s more, as more and more datapoints are pulled in by social networks (and as those networks scale) with servers often scattered across large geographical zones, it becomes tougher and tougher on backend systems to process the complex connections between data.
Sunnyvale-based InfiniteGraph, the year-old startup and brainchild of enterprise database company Objectivity, is coming out of beta today to help developers and companies identify and utilize deep connections between nodes and edges in large, distributed data sets. InfiniteGraph seeks to reduce the amount of time it takes to make these connections to a matter of seconds, processing large graph datasets, in areas like government intelligence, social networks and social media CRM, location-based services, and financial analytics.
Working with these kind of large enterprises requires support for billions of data points, and so InfiniteGraph has built a system to enable scaling and big data capacity, with realtime functionality. Today, InfiniteGraph is expanding its reach to businesses and developers looking to mine their data stores for complex relationships, be they enterprise apps targeting SMBs, SMEs themselves, or Fortune 500 companies.
But the important thing to point out about InfiniteGraph’s commercial release (the system has been being developed in beta over the last year) is that it doesn’t require developers to re-engineer their databases from scratch to benefit from the technology. Developers can simply use the startup’s dedicated graph API to leverage InfiniteGraph’s relationshop mining on top of their existing data. It also offers a high-scale database management system, which is a nice bonus.
Other features of note in InfiniteGraph’s commercial release include parallel data loading and accelerated ingest, meaning that developers can import and continuously feed apps with data from multiple input streams more speedily. The graph database also allows developers to choose from different indexing options that suit their company’s specific needs (from automatic to manual), as well as enabling devs to view, verify, and test data models in customizable approaches.
As InfiniteGraph aims to help companies leverage social network analysis and business intelligence to increase efficiency and gain competitive advantage in crowded markets, the graph database will now be available in both free and licensed versions. (Check out licensed options here.) As to compatibility, InfiniteGraph’s database is written in Java (with a C++ core), is interoperable across Linux, Windows and Mac OS/X platforms, and “can also be deployed in most virtualized cloud environments”, according to its website.
The platform is also licensed on a “pay as you scale” or usage-based model that allows companies to expand their storage capacity (and aims at being a more cost effective way to use).
InfiniteGraph is also announcing a contest for developers, which will offer up to $12,000 in prizes, in addition to helping developers promote their apps. The contest launches today and will be accepting submissions through September 30th. According to an InfiniteGraph spokesperson, “developers can build any type of software application, web or mobile service around social, game and/or location-based networks, any type of process or knowledge management, or anything else which seeks to find and leverage complex relationships between objects or things”. For more on the contest, check it out here.
august 2011 by doffm
Three start-ups to watch: Take the Interview, Re-Vinyl, AppAddictive
august 2011 by doffm
DreamIt Ventures, a Philadelphia-based accelerator program, graduated its first New York class yesterday, sending 14 new start-ups into the wild. I enjoyed the demo day and the investor pitches and I find it always inspiring to see entrepreneurs making a play for the big time.
DreamIt’s class tackled education, e-commerce and app publishing and a few used video conferencing in interesting ways.
Here are three that stood out to me:
Take the Interview CEO and co-founder Danielle Weinblatt
Take the Interview. Hiring manager and recruiters often lose time winnowing down the field of applicants to a handful they can bring in for real interviews. Often, there’s a lot of time devoted to scheduling and conducting phone screening interviews. What Boston-based Take the Interview does is provide a video interviewing platform that allows companies to solicit up to five video-recorded answers from applicants that they can review.
It allows HR teams to screen candidates more quickly and get a better feel for people using a medium that many younger applicants are already used to: video. The videos can be organized by question and can be shared and commented on within an organization. Recruiters can also pull up an applicant’s LinkedIn profile while watching a video. Take the Interview launched this summer and has about 80 companies participating in its beta, including Deloitte and Bausch + Lomb. Monster and Craigslist have also started embedding a Take the Interview button on their sites.
I like Take the Interview, because it seems like a simple way to get gain more valuable information from candidates and use video to really see if there’s a potential fit with an applicant. And as video conferencing and webcams become a common way for people to communicate, it makes sense to leverage that more for hiring.
Re-Vinyl. This Los Angeles-based start-up is taking on the demise of albums with an application that allows labels and artists to create their own digital albums complete with cover art, streaming music, lyrics and liner notes. There’s also an opportunity for high quality advertising within the app including promotions for the artists themselves.
There’s also a chance to include more interactivity with fans using a Remix feature, in which an artist can ask questions of their audience and fans can respond by dragging and dropping media into the app. Right now, Re-Vinyl is working with artists to create apps, which can take about a week, but the company is poised to release a self-serve tool to allow artists to make these apps on their own.
That, I think, will be cool because it will allow serious and also budding musicians to create next-generation digital albums. We’ve seen some of the promise of this kind of interactive multimedia apps from Push Pop Press and 955 Dreams. But this could be, if it catches on, it a way to help musical albums make the transition to the app world. Re-Vinyls plans to make money by selling Vinyls or subscriptions, taking a percentage of advertising revenue or through sponsored content.
AppAddictive CEO and founder Michael Onghai
AppAddictive. While brands move to social media platforms to advertise and engage their users, it’s not always easy or very effective, especially as they try to branch out to multiple networks. AppAddictive, based in New York City, is working to solve that with a marketing platform that allows companies to manage their content, ads and analytics on multiple networks. It comes down to AppAddictive’s ability to engage with users using mini-apps like quizzes, contests, coupon offers, video galleries.
That makes a brand’s page more dynamic and interesting and allows them to gather more information from users on what they like and are interested in. And by leveraging social networks, it can bring in new customers through viral channels for less money. Founder Michael Onghai, one of the first employees at Geocities, left his hedge fund job to give AppAddictive a try. He said already 5,500 companies are testing the apps and 50 million people have tried one of the apps. The company plans on making money through performance-based advertising.
I think as advertisers look to tap the power of social media, having a tool like AppAddictive makes some sense. They can make their brand pages smarter and more engaging and they can gain valuable information on their users while lowering the cost of user acquisition.
I also enjoyed Hoot.me, an interactive learning platform built on top of Facebook that allows users to study with friends, connect via multi-person video chat and bring in tutors to aid in learning. KeepIdeas is also interesting, allowing people to organize recipes and food content in the cloud. You can view a longer list of all the graduates here.
Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.
Mobile payments: forecasts, technologies and opportunitiesCleantech Financing Trends: 2010 and BeyondWhy Startup Visas Don’t Go Far Enough
@CNN
DreamIT_Ventures
e-commerce
enterprise_tools
entrepreneurs
interviews
Marketing_strategy
New_York
start-ups
startup_profiles
startup_strategy
Startups
video_interview
video_interviewing
from google
DreamIt’s class tackled education, e-commerce and app publishing and a few used video conferencing in interesting ways.
Here are three that stood out to me:
Take the Interview CEO and co-founder Danielle Weinblatt
Take the Interview. Hiring manager and recruiters often lose time winnowing down the field of applicants to a handful they can bring in for real interviews. Often, there’s a lot of time devoted to scheduling and conducting phone screening interviews. What Boston-based Take the Interview does is provide a video interviewing platform that allows companies to solicit up to five video-recorded answers from applicants that they can review.
It allows HR teams to screen candidates more quickly and get a better feel for people using a medium that many younger applicants are already used to: video. The videos can be organized by question and can be shared and commented on within an organization. Recruiters can also pull up an applicant’s LinkedIn profile while watching a video. Take the Interview launched this summer and has about 80 companies participating in its beta, including Deloitte and Bausch + Lomb. Monster and Craigslist have also started embedding a Take the Interview button on their sites.
I like Take the Interview, because it seems like a simple way to get gain more valuable information from candidates and use video to really see if there’s a potential fit with an applicant. And as video conferencing and webcams become a common way for people to communicate, it makes sense to leverage that more for hiring.
Re-Vinyl. This Los Angeles-based start-up is taking on the demise of albums with an application that allows labels and artists to create their own digital albums complete with cover art, streaming music, lyrics and liner notes. There’s also an opportunity for high quality advertising within the app including promotions for the artists themselves.
There’s also a chance to include more interactivity with fans using a Remix feature, in which an artist can ask questions of their audience and fans can respond by dragging and dropping media into the app. Right now, Re-Vinyl is working with artists to create apps, which can take about a week, but the company is poised to release a self-serve tool to allow artists to make these apps on their own.
That, I think, will be cool because it will allow serious and also budding musicians to create next-generation digital albums. We’ve seen some of the promise of this kind of interactive multimedia apps from Push Pop Press and 955 Dreams. But this could be, if it catches on, it a way to help musical albums make the transition to the app world. Re-Vinyls plans to make money by selling Vinyls or subscriptions, taking a percentage of advertising revenue or through sponsored content.
AppAddictive CEO and founder Michael Onghai
AppAddictive. While brands move to social media platforms to advertise and engage their users, it’s not always easy or very effective, especially as they try to branch out to multiple networks. AppAddictive, based in New York City, is working to solve that with a marketing platform that allows companies to manage their content, ads and analytics on multiple networks. It comes down to AppAddictive’s ability to engage with users using mini-apps like quizzes, contests, coupon offers, video galleries.
That makes a brand’s page more dynamic and interesting and allows them to gather more information from users on what they like and are interested in. And by leveraging social networks, it can bring in new customers through viral channels for less money. Founder Michael Onghai, one of the first employees at Geocities, left his hedge fund job to give AppAddictive a try. He said already 5,500 companies are testing the apps and 50 million people have tried one of the apps. The company plans on making money through performance-based advertising.
I think as advertisers look to tap the power of social media, having a tool like AppAddictive makes some sense. They can make their brand pages smarter and more engaging and they can gain valuable information on their users while lowering the cost of user acquisition.
I also enjoyed Hoot.me, an interactive learning platform built on top of Facebook that allows users to study with friends, connect via multi-person video chat and bring in tutors to aid in learning. KeepIdeas is also interesting, allowing people to organize recipes and food content in the cloud. You can view a longer list of all the graduates here.
Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.
Mobile payments: forecasts, technologies and opportunitiesCleantech Financing Trends: 2010 and BeyondWhy Startup Visas Don’t Go Far Enough
august 2011 by doffm
Y Combinator-Backed Kicksend Launches In Beta To Make Sharing Big Files A Breeze
august 2011 by doffm
When it comes to file sharing, there is no shortage of tools and services to help you transfer your files, big and small. There’s the old tried and true approach on email, or using VOIP services like Skype, or cloud-based services like Dropbox and Box.net, or the browser-based Ge.tt, to veterans like WeTransfer and YouSendIt. Then there’s newcomer, the social and sharing-focused Minus, which recently scored $1 million in funding and Sendoid, whose launch we covered back in March. The list is long, but new sites continue popping up, because no single business has a stranglehold on the market, and each method of file sharing has its drawbacks — and its limits.
A new startup launching in beta today, incubated in the most recent summer batch of Y Combinator companies, called Kicksend, aims to make it even easier to send and share large files, especially with one’s non-technical friends and family members. There are plenty of file sharing services available, but many of them are confusing to use or have needlessly complicated UIs, are expensive, or come with too much fine print. Even Dropbox, though it’s relatively easy to use, requires an installation process — which may be too involved if you just want to send a few files.
Email is great for small files, but with Gmail’s capacity restriction at 25 megabytes, for example, one needs to go elsewhere to send larger files. And sending via IM and Skype is synchronous, meaning that you need the other person to be online in order to accept the transfer. So Kicksend is trying to offer a better way that lets users automatically receive and download files, even if they’re not there to push the “accept file” button.
For now, there are two ways to use Kicksend: Through a web and desktop app. (Mobile, the important third piece to the puzzle, is on its way and should be available soon.) Users can sign up for an account or just login with their Facebook account to view which of their friends and family are already using Kicksend. Once a user is logged in, they follow a simple three-step process to send the files. Simply drag and drop the files (of any size) into the interface/prompt on Kicksend’s homepage and select the recipients, (the recipients need only an email address, they don’t have to be Kicksend users), and, then, press send. Fairly straightforward, methinks.
Kicksend also makes it easy for users to create lists of recipients, allowing easy group file sharing, and because the site offers realtime functionality, users will see instant notifications (Growl-style) on both the start of transfer and completion. Each file also has its own comment thread, which makes it easy for users to enter into a private conversation about the specific files being sent. Kicksend’s group file sharing and lists are similar in conception to Google+’s circles (except for file sharing, of course).
The site is currently free for up to 1GB of sending bandwidth, and, according to Kicksend Co-founders Pradeep Elankumaran and Brendan Lim, the startup’s future monetization strategy consists of adding premium features, wherein users will likely get a 10GB capacity per month, as well as delivery alerts, and a full set of detailed analytics. The startup also plans to add an enterprise plan for businesses, which will offer notifications, analytics, as well as the ability to mark certain files as fully “private”.
So far, just on a word-of-mouth basis, Kicksend has amassed 15,000 registered users and has sent over 40,000 files. At this point, the founders said, photos have been the most popular files shared, but musicians have also been using Kicksend to transfer large GarageBand files, as the use cases continue to diversify.
Kicksend’s desktop apps, available both for Mac and Windows, allow users to easily send big files, automatically downloading the files to the recipient’s computer. The founders gave the example of the case in which someone sends you a large batch of photos via Kicksend, and the desktop app automatically receives the files and will instantly organize them on your hard drive — all with direct hooks into your social graph via Facebook connect.
The startup’s backend infrastructure is also optimized for content delivery, so that it can rout any type of media and data to any end point; and when the startup launches its mobile apps, users will be able to take a photo on their phone and instantly rout the image to any other device.
The web app, too, is seamless and easy to use, allowing a user to browse all the files he or she receives and sends. The UI is simple, and really seems intended to have Kicksend become part of the infrastructure of one’s daily life, both on the desktop and on the web. Your parents are going to love it.
Kicksend’s current investors include Y Combinator, Start Fund, and SV Angel.
Startups
TC
Y-Combinator
Kicksend
from google
A new startup launching in beta today, incubated in the most recent summer batch of Y Combinator companies, called Kicksend, aims to make it even easier to send and share large files, especially with one’s non-technical friends and family members. There are plenty of file sharing services available, but many of them are confusing to use or have needlessly complicated UIs, are expensive, or come with too much fine print. Even Dropbox, though it’s relatively easy to use, requires an installation process — which may be too involved if you just want to send a few files.
Email is great for small files, but with Gmail’s capacity restriction at 25 megabytes, for example, one needs to go elsewhere to send larger files. And sending via IM and Skype is synchronous, meaning that you need the other person to be online in order to accept the transfer. So Kicksend is trying to offer a better way that lets users automatically receive and download files, even if they’re not there to push the “accept file” button.
For now, there are two ways to use Kicksend: Through a web and desktop app. (Mobile, the important third piece to the puzzle, is on its way and should be available soon.) Users can sign up for an account or just login with their Facebook account to view which of their friends and family are already using Kicksend. Once a user is logged in, they follow a simple three-step process to send the files. Simply drag and drop the files (of any size) into the interface/prompt on Kicksend’s homepage and select the recipients, (the recipients need only an email address, they don’t have to be Kicksend users), and, then, press send. Fairly straightforward, methinks.
Kicksend also makes it easy for users to create lists of recipients, allowing easy group file sharing, and because the site offers realtime functionality, users will see instant notifications (Growl-style) on both the start of transfer and completion. Each file also has its own comment thread, which makes it easy for users to enter into a private conversation about the specific files being sent. Kicksend’s group file sharing and lists are similar in conception to Google+’s circles (except for file sharing, of course).
The site is currently free for up to 1GB of sending bandwidth, and, according to Kicksend Co-founders Pradeep Elankumaran and Brendan Lim, the startup’s future monetization strategy consists of adding premium features, wherein users will likely get a 10GB capacity per month, as well as delivery alerts, and a full set of detailed analytics. The startup also plans to add an enterprise plan for businesses, which will offer notifications, analytics, as well as the ability to mark certain files as fully “private”.
So far, just on a word-of-mouth basis, Kicksend has amassed 15,000 registered users and has sent over 40,000 files. At this point, the founders said, photos have been the most popular files shared, but musicians have also been using Kicksend to transfer large GarageBand files, as the use cases continue to diversify.
Kicksend’s desktop apps, available both for Mac and Windows, allow users to easily send big files, automatically downloading the files to the recipient’s computer. The founders gave the example of the case in which someone sends you a large batch of photos via Kicksend, and the desktop app automatically receives the files and will instantly organize them on your hard drive — all with direct hooks into your social graph via Facebook connect.
The startup’s backend infrastructure is also optimized for content delivery, so that it can rout any type of media and data to any end point; and when the startup launches its mobile apps, users will be able to take a photo on their phone and instantly rout the image to any other device.
The web app, too, is seamless and easy to use, allowing a user to browse all the files he or she receives and sends. The UI is simple, and really seems intended to have Kicksend become part of the infrastructure of one’s daily life, both on the desktop and on the web. Your parents are going to love it.
Kicksend’s current investors include Y Combinator, Start Fund, and SV Angel.
august 2011 by doffm
Social Learning Game Developer Airy Labs Raises $1.5M From Google Ventures, Others
august 2011 by doffm
Airy Labs, a startup building mobile, tablet and browser games with an educational twist for young children, has landed $1.5 million in seed funding from Google Ventures, Foundation Capital and Playdom founder Rick Thompson.
Airy Labs says it wants its social games to come with genuine learning value that parents will approve of.
The company is part of StartX (formerly known as SSE Labs), a Stanford student startup accelerator.
The startup was founded in 2011 by a genius by the name of Andrew Hsu.
Check out this guy’s resume:
Hsu who started molecular biology research at a University of Washington (UW) lab at age 10, won the grand prize at the Washington State Science and Engineering Fair at 11, matriculated at the UW at 12, and graduated with three bachelors of science degrees at the age of 16. At age 19, he was a 4th-year Ph.D. candidate in the Neuroscience Program at Stanford University when he left in early 2011 to pursue his startup dreams. He was recently named a Thiel 20-under-20 Fellow.
He is also the author of several books, and once a competitive swimmer.
Fundings_&_Exits
Gaming
Mobile
Startups
TC
google_ventures
Airy_Labs
from google
Airy Labs says it wants its social games to come with genuine learning value that parents will approve of.
The company is part of StartX (formerly known as SSE Labs), a Stanford student startup accelerator.
The startup was founded in 2011 by a genius by the name of Andrew Hsu.
Check out this guy’s resume:
Hsu who started molecular biology research at a University of Washington (UW) lab at age 10, won the grand prize at the Washington State Science and Engineering Fair at 11, matriculated at the UW at 12, and graduated with three bachelors of science degrees at the age of 16. At age 19, he was a 4th-year Ph.D. candidate in the Neuroscience Program at Stanford University when he left in early 2011 to pursue his startup dreams. He was recently named a Thiel 20-under-20 Fellow.
He is also the author of several books, and once a competitive swimmer.
august 2011 by doffm
Google Acquires Facial Recognition Software Company PittPatt
july 2011 by doffm
Google has just acquired facial recognition software company PittPatt (Pittsburgh Pattern Recognition), according to an announcement on the startup’s site.
PittPatt, a project spawned from Carnegie Mellon University, develops a facial recognition technology that can match people across photos, videos, and more. The company has created a number of algorithms in face detection, face tracking and face recognition. PittPatt’s face detection and tracking SDK locates human faces in photographs and tracks the motion of human faces in video.
Here’s the notice PittPatt has up on its site: Joining Google is the next thrilling step in a journey that began with research at Carnegie Mellon University’s Robotics Institute in the 1990s and continued with the launching of Pittsburgh Pattern Recognition (PittPatt) in 2004. We’ve worked hard to advance the research and technology in many important ways and have seen our technology come to life in some very interesting products. At Google, computer vision technology is already at the core of many existing products (such as Image Search, YouTube, Picasa, and Goggles), so it’s a natural fit to join Google and bring the benefits of our research and technology to a wider audience. We will continue to tap the potential of computer vision in applications that range from simple photo organization to complex video and mobile applications.
Google has reportedly been exploring adding facial recognition to its products (i.e. Google Goggles) more seriously but has held back because of privacy concerns. As the company told Search Engine Land in March, Google wouldn’t put out facial recognition in a mobile app unless there were very strict privacy controls in place.
But in May, Google Chairman Eric Schmidt said the company is “unlikely to employ facial recognition programs.”
Google issued this statement confirming the acquisition:
“The Pittsburgh Pattern Recognition team has developed innovative technology in the area of pattern recognition and computer vision. We think their research and technology can benefit our users in many ways, and we look forward to working with them.”
Startups
TC
google
from google
PittPatt, a project spawned from Carnegie Mellon University, develops a facial recognition technology that can match people across photos, videos, and more. The company has created a number of algorithms in face detection, face tracking and face recognition. PittPatt’s face detection and tracking SDK locates human faces in photographs and tracks the motion of human faces in video.
Here’s the notice PittPatt has up on its site: Joining Google is the next thrilling step in a journey that began with research at Carnegie Mellon University’s Robotics Institute in the 1990s and continued with the launching of Pittsburgh Pattern Recognition (PittPatt) in 2004. We’ve worked hard to advance the research and technology in many important ways and have seen our technology come to life in some very interesting products. At Google, computer vision technology is already at the core of many existing products (such as Image Search, YouTube, Picasa, and Goggles), so it’s a natural fit to join Google and bring the benefits of our research and technology to a wider audience. We will continue to tap the potential of computer vision in applications that range from simple photo organization to complex video and mobile applications.
Google has reportedly been exploring adding facial recognition to its products (i.e. Google Goggles) more seriously but has held back because of privacy concerns. As the company told Search Engine Land in March, Google wouldn’t put out facial recognition in a mobile app unless there were very strict privacy controls in place.
But in May, Google Chairman Eric Schmidt said the company is “unlikely to employ facial recognition programs.”
Google issued this statement confirming the acquisition:
“The Pittsburgh Pattern Recognition team has developed innovative technology in the area of pattern recognition and computer vision. We think their research and technology can benefit our users in many ways, and we look forward to working with them.”
july 2011 by doffm
Meet Proust, a social network that digs deeper
july 2011 by doffm
Nowadays, a lot of information can be found online. The starring actress of the 1996 movie “The Craft”? Fairuza Balk (courtesy of IMDB.) Where was Gordon Moore born? San Francisco (thank you, Wikipedia.) Exactly how hot did it get on the Upper East Side of Manhattan on July 7, 2008? 82 degrees (hat-tip to WeatherUnderground.) Minutiae from our daily lives can be similarly fished out of email inboxes, chat records, and online monthly credit card bills. If I ever want to know the last time I visited my hometown, or had dinner at a certain restaurant, the answer is quickly within my grasp.
So it’s surprising that today, many of the most important moments of our lives remain completely in our own memories. Emotional details about milestones in our personal lives and the lives of our close friends and family members are often never written down. That’s exactly the problem that a website called Proust is trying to solve. Proust is a wholly owned subsidiary within New York City-based media conglomerate IAC that bills itself as “a private place for families and friends to share and preserve memories.” On Tuesday morning, the company announced its launch out of beta testing and debuted interactive maps and timeline features.
Proust, which is completely free to use, prompts users to write about their lives with simple questions such as “Growing up, who did you most admire?” and “What is the most spontaneous thing you’ve ever done?” Answers can be public, private, or shared with small circles of family and friends. Users can accompany their anecdotes with uploaded photos or tagged map locations. Life stories can be viewed in either timeline form or a storybook format over a series of pages.
Proust was inspired by the Proust Questionnaire, a series of questions meant to reveal one’s personality which has been popularized in a monthly Q&A column in Vanity Fair magazine. The Proust Questionnaire is itself inspired by a segment in In Search of Lost Time, a 19th century novel written by Marcel Proust in which the protagonist bites into a certain kind of cookie that brings back a rush of memories from his childhood.
Earlier this month I interviewed Proust’s co-founder and CEO Tom Cortese, who gave me a demo of the website. Overall, I think Proust is a fantastic solution to a problem that many people don’t realize they have until it’s too late. But at the same time, the beautiful thing about Proust is that it does not impart the sobering gravity that characterizes similar websites such as Ancestry.com — Proust is actually fun to use. While ultimately the content can preserve memories for posterity, Proust was designed as “a place for the living,” Cortese told me. “We celebrate these wonderful relationships we have with our closest friends and the closest members of our families. This process of asking and answering questions with each other brings us closer while we’re still here.”
But can Proust be trusted with your most valuable memories? Cortese assured me that he and his company are dedicated to data preservation and privacy. As of now there is no one-click way to export your information from the site, but the CEO said that functionality is coming soon. Additionally, Proust is planning to offer physical products such as printed copies of timelines and books within the next several months. That is also how the company, which has no advertisements, plans to start making money.
Based on the fun and easy to navigate nature of the site, Proust should be popular with a large segment of the population from the get-go. Once the company has a verified way to export data, using Proust could quickly become a no-brainer for anyone who has lived long enough to have a few good stories to tell.
Here are some screenshots of the website (click on them to enlarge):
Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.
Exploring the new frontiers of social readingDefining the next era of social musicThe Near-Term Evolution of Social Commerce
data_portability
IAC
interactive_corporation
proust
social_networking
social_networks
startup_profile
Startups
from google
So it’s surprising that today, many of the most important moments of our lives remain completely in our own memories. Emotional details about milestones in our personal lives and the lives of our close friends and family members are often never written down. That’s exactly the problem that a website called Proust is trying to solve. Proust is a wholly owned subsidiary within New York City-based media conglomerate IAC that bills itself as “a private place for families and friends to share and preserve memories.” On Tuesday morning, the company announced its launch out of beta testing and debuted interactive maps and timeline features.
Proust, which is completely free to use, prompts users to write about their lives with simple questions such as “Growing up, who did you most admire?” and “What is the most spontaneous thing you’ve ever done?” Answers can be public, private, or shared with small circles of family and friends. Users can accompany their anecdotes with uploaded photos or tagged map locations. Life stories can be viewed in either timeline form or a storybook format over a series of pages.
Proust was inspired by the Proust Questionnaire, a series of questions meant to reveal one’s personality which has been popularized in a monthly Q&A column in Vanity Fair magazine. The Proust Questionnaire is itself inspired by a segment in In Search of Lost Time, a 19th century novel written by Marcel Proust in which the protagonist bites into a certain kind of cookie that brings back a rush of memories from his childhood.
Earlier this month I interviewed Proust’s co-founder and CEO Tom Cortese, who gave me a demo of the website. Overall, I think Proust is a fantastic solution to a problem that many people don’t realize they have until it’s too late. But at the same time, the beautiful thing about Proust is that it does not impart the sobering gravity that characterizes similar websites such as Ancestry.com — Proust is actually fun to use. While ultimately the content can preserve memories for posterity, Proust was designed as “a place for the living,” Cortese told me. “We celebrate these wonderful relationships we have with our closest friends and the closest members of our families. This process of asking and answering questions with each other brings us closer while we’re still here.”
But can Proust be trusted with your most valuable memories? Cortese assured me that he and his company are dedicated to data preservation and privacy. As of now there is no one-click way to export your information from the site, but the CEO said that functionality is coming soon. Additionally, Proust is planning to offer physical products such as printed copies of timelines and books within the next several months. That is also how the company, which has no advertisements, plans to start making money.
Based on the fun and easy to navigate nature of the site, Proust should be popular with a large segment of the population from the get-go. Once the company has a verified way to export data, using Proust could quickly become a no-brainer for anyone who has lived long enough to have a few good stories to tell.
Here are some screenshots of the website (click on them to enlarge):
Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.
Exploring the new frontiers of social readingDefining the next era of social musicThe Near-Term Evolution of Social Commerce
july 2011 by doffm
Now backed by Google, Astrid is thinking big
july 2011 by doffm
Astrid Inc. is best known for making a popular web and mobile app that allows users to create to-do lists with social features. But the San Francisco-based startup, which this week announced an undisclosed amount of new funding from Google Ventures and Nexus Venture Partners, has much bigger plans in mind.
“We didn’t raise the money we did simply to be a to-do list company,” Astrid co-founder Jon Paris told me in an interview this week. He was short on specifics, but it seems that Astrid may be keen to expand its services beyond task scheduling — and into helping with task completion.
To date, Astrid has focused purely on helping people make to-do lists — albeit in a very unique way. Astrid’s mobile app allows users to make to-do lists and share them with certain individuals or groups of people. Astrid lists can also be made entirely public, or completely private. Astrid is currently available in the Android app marketplace; an iOS version is in beta testing now and will launch to the public later this month.
Astrid for Android has been downloaded more than 1.5 million times in the past year alone, and it currently has more than 250,000 active users monthly. The reason for Astrid’s popularity is two-fold, Paris tells me: The simple user interface attracts the multitasking-mom contingent, but the app has power features under the hood that satisfy power using “life hacker” types.
Meanwhile, Astrid’s social features add fun to the often staid practice of task management, Paris says. “When my buddies see that I haven’t biked to work in a week, they like to give me a hard time about that,” he said, adding that sharing goals also makes people more motivated to get them done. The CEO said he likes to joke that Astrid is a “cure for the lazy husband and nagging spouse” cliche, since it allows couples to check in and remind each other of things that need to be done in a quicker, less direct way.
But now Astrid has a bigger picture in mind. Paris told me the company plans to put its new funding toward building offerings beyond its signature to-do list app. “We’re trying to discover how to give more help to people to help them be more productive,” Paris said. “I think there are a lot of really interesting ways we can help people get important things done.” Given that one of Astrid’s new investors is Jack Herrick, who co-founded the crowdsourced how-to website WikiHow, does this mean the company could start providing the capability to outsource the completion of certain tasks on their to-do lists to other people — or even robotic services? The question elicited a smile from Paris, but he made a point of holding specific plans close to the chest: “We’re happy to have the domain expertise that every one of our investors bring,” he said.
The task completion space is certainly heating up at the moment: TaskRabbit, an online marketplace where people can pay others to run their errands, recently raised $5 million in funding and is actively working on a nationwide expansion; and new startup Fancy Hands promises to provide virtual personal assistants at affordable prices. Astrid already has the list-making process down pat; it may be smart for the company to get further into helping people cross things off their to-do lists, as well.
Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.
Cleantech Financing Trends: 2010 and BeyondMobile Q2: Smartphone growth surges; iPad’s rule continuesNewNet Q2: Google closes the quarter with a bang
astrid
Google
Google_Ventures
Mobile_Apps
Nexus_Venture_Partners
productivity_apps
productivity_tool
productivity_tools
Startups
task_management
task_manager
venture_capital
from google
“We didn’t raise the money we did simply to be a to-do list company,” Astrid co-founder Jon Paris told me in an interview this week. He was short on specifics, but it seems that Astrid may be keen to expand its services beyond task scheduling — and into helping with task completion.
To date, Astrid has focused purely on helping people make to-do lists — albeit in a very unique way. Astrid’s mobile app allows users to make to-do lists and share them with certain individuals or groups of people. Astrid lists can also be made entirely public, or completely private. Astrid is currently available in the Android app marketplace; an iOS version is in beta testing now and will launch to the public later this month.
Astrid for Android has been downloaded more than 1.5 million times in the past year alone, and it currently has more than 250,000 active users monthly. The reason for Astrid’s popularity is two-fold, Paris tells me: The simple user interface attracts the multitasking-mom contingent, but the app has power features under the hood that satisfy power using “life hacker” types.
Meanwhile, Astrid’s social features add fun to the often staid practice of task management, Paris says. “When my buddies see that I haven’t biked to work in a week, they like to give me a hard time about that,” he said, adding that sharing goals also makes people more motivated to get them done. The CEO said he likes to joke that Astrid is a “cure for the lazy husband and nagging spouse” cliche, since it allows couples to check in and remind each other of things that need to be done in a quicker, less direct way.
But now Astrid has a bigger picture in mind. Paris told me the company plans to put its new funding toward building offerings beyond its signature to-do list app. “We’re trying to discover how to give more help to people to help them be more productive,” Paris said. “I think there are a lot of really interesting ways we can help people get important things done.” Given that one of Astrid’s new investors is Jack Herrick, who co-founded the crowdsourced how-to website WikiHow, does this mean the company could start providing the capability to outsource the completion of certain tasks on their to-do lists to other people — or even robotic services? The question elicited a smile from Paris, but he made a point of holding specific plans close to the chest: “We’re happy to have the domain expertise that every one of our investors bring,” he said.
The task completion space is certainly heating up at the moment: TaskRabbit, an online marketplace where people can pay others to run their errands, recently raised $5 million in funding and is actively working on a nationwide expansion; and new startup Fancy Hands promises to provide virtual personal assistants at affordable prices. Astrid already has the list-making process down pat; it may be smart for the company to get further into helping people cross things off their to-do lists, as well.
Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.
Cleantech Financing Trends: 2010 and BeyondMobile Q2: Smartphone growth surges; iPad’s rule continuesNewNet Q2: Google closes the quarter with a bang
july 2011 by doffm
Visually Launches To Automate The Making Of Infographics
july 2011 by doffm
The whiz kids behind Mint’s infographics, Stewart Langille and Lee Sherman are today launching the first startup that solely focuses on mass producing infographics, Visually. Users who visit Visually this morning can see over 2000 infographics uploaded by designers like Jess3 and Dave McCandless as well as upload their own in a myriad of topics ranging from Science to Sports to the Economy.
In its first launch iteration, Visually has partnered up with The Atlantic, GOOD Magazine CNNMoney.com, Ebay, The National Geographic and others to provide infographics content in exchange for sharing links — On Visually each participating publication gets to upload its own graphics, which are embedded and shared using an code generated by Visually.
Visually plans on monetizing eventually by letting publications subscribe to its offerings via a monthly fee. “Everyone needs to create a graph or a chart or something, and the software that’s currently out there is more focused on business intelligence” Langille says. “There is a definite need to create simple visualizations for people. Within three clicks you can create visualizations for the sites.”
Langille hopes with Visually to create a community of designers a la Dribbble or Forrst, but also hopes to rope in infographic producers that are concerned with issues like exposure and monetization. If and when the basic infographics part of the site includes advertising he wants to incorporate artist friendly business practices like revenue sharing.
In addition to letting people upload and download infographics today, Visually has created a Twitterize Yourself widget that allows Twitter users to compare themselves against celebrities like Lady Gaga and Michael Arrington and create an infographic out of the experience. While there isn’t much practical benefit from this, it is pretty delightful.
This automated process is a harbinger of Visually product developments to come, as eventually Langile is about to introduce an interface where customers will be to be able to enter in data and have the visuals come out, with the choices of various artist’s styles baked in to the service.
The duo have almost 500K in seed funding to make this dream come true. Langille tells me, “It’s already the largest collection of infographics on the web.” Nice.
Startups
TC
Visually
from google
In its first launch iteration, Visually has partnered up with The Atlantic, GOOD Magazine CNNMoney.com, Ebay, The National Geographic and others to provide infographics content in exchange for sharing links — On Visually each participating publication gets to upload its own graphics, which are embedded and shared using an code generated by Visually.
Visually plans on monetizing eventually by letting publications subscribe to its offerings via a monthly fee. “Everyone needs to create a graph or a chart or something, and the software that’s currently out there is more focused on business intelligence” Langille says. “There is a definite need to create simple visualizations for people. Within three clicks you can create visualizations for the sites.”
Langille hopes with Visually to create a community of designers a la Dribbble or Forrst, but also hopes to rope in infographic producers that are concerned with issues like exposure and monetization. If and when the basic infographics part of the site includes advertising he wants to incorporate artist friendly business practices like revenue sharing.
In addition to letting people upload and download infographics today, Visually has created a Twitterize Yourself widget that allows Twitter users to compare themselves against celebrities like Lady Gaga and Michael Arrington and create an infographic out of the experience. While there isn’t much practical benefit from this, it is pretty delightful.
This automated process is a harbinger of Visually product developments to come, as eventually Langile is about to introduce an interface where customers will be to be able to enter in data and have the visuals come out, with the choices of various artist’s styles baked in to the service.
The duo have almost 500K in seed funding to make this dream come true. Langille tells me, “It’s already the largest collection of infographics on the web.” Nice.
july 2011 by doffm
A Look At The Three Startups That Wowed The Judges At Plug And Play’s Summer EXPO
june 2011 by doffm
Like Y Combinator, Plug and Play Tech Center is a startup accelerator located in the heart of Silicon Valley, although you may not have heard quite as much about Plug and Play as you have its counterpart. Nothwithstanding, the five-year-old business accelerator has built a community of over 280 tech startups, across a number of verticals, including Web 2.0, cloud services, systems, semiconductor and telecomms. Since its inception, the tech center has helped its startups raise over $750 million in venture funding.
Not unlike Y Combinator and other accelerators of its ilk, Plug and Play hosts a 10-week summer program designed to immerse young startups and entrepreneurs into the Silicon Valley environment. “Plug and Play Startup Camp”, as its known, provides startups with a curriculum of workshops, speaker series, mentor sessions, as well as offering extensive coaching to help entrepreneurs cement business models, prototypes, and so on. This summer camp for startups runs through August 18th, at which point there will be an EXPO to showcase the accelerator’s latest batch.
Plug and Play also organizes 4 EXPOs (unrelated to Startup Camp) at the end of each quarter, as well as 2 University EXPOs, in which a host of startups present their businesses to as many as 100 VCs and investors. Those esteemed judges vote on the top three companies, which then presumably go on to fame and fortune — or at least have a good shot at raising a bit of funding.
The latest EXPO in the Plug and Play series took place Thursday, and below you will find a brief introduction to the three nifty startups that tallied the most votes and impressed the judges. Definitely worth checking out.
Aisle411 is an in-store retail navigation app for mobile consumers. The startup is building a mobile shopping platform that allows consumers to search, map and navigate to products in retail stores down to the very part of the aisle in which the product is located.
With billions of pre-planned digital shopping lists, aisle411 is set to allow digital publishers to integrate the startup’s in-store solutions with digital lists, recipes, and mobile coupons. aisle411’s ad network has early brand buy-in from Coca Cola, General Mills, as well as several other retail partnerships and is already live in 1500 locations.
Over 70 percent of shoppers use a list prior to shopping, and as smartphone saturation grows, the majority of shopping lists and products searches will be executed in-store on a mobile device. As Google Wallet, Paypal and Square look to deploy mobile payments, aisle411 offers highly targeted, high margin offers delivered seconds prior to the purchase. The startup is also offering an API that includes a proprietary in-store ad engine that can target messaging to specific user based on their current and historical shopping lists, as specific as branded products within specific aisles. Pretty cool.
Creaza Inc is an online video production platform designed to enable users to collaboratively produce, share and store user-generated video. By combining the power of cloud-based computing and broadcast-quality HD, with a user-focused experience, Creaza’s platform is attempting to make video truly social.
Creaza’s social video platform enables users to shoot, edit, share and store their self-generated videos. Content can be shot with any video-enabled decice and easily syncs with the user’s private Creaza media library — all in the cloud. Users can edit their video clips with professional-looking titles, transitions, effects, animation, music and narration. The startup’s cloud-based architecture enables easy and secure video project collaboration and co-creation among friends, colleagues and others. Final videos can be shared in an online workspace: downloaded to a favorite device or stored with Creaza. Everything happens in the cloud. No installs, no upgrade, ad no file conversions.
The startup says that it’s trying to transform the video industry. I like the sound of that, but you be the judge.
XYZ Interactive is developing a series of low cost sensors that can be used to determine the precise location of objects, and use gestures to control devices without touching them. (Kind of like what Gilt Groupe is doing with their iPad app.)
The startup claims that its technology can replace competitors’ sensors at a fraction of the cost with better performance. Advanced sensing arrays are three times less expensive than the competition and overcome limitations such as blind spots and outdoor operation, allowing for mass adaption for touchless and gesture control of displayes, tablets, and mobile devices.
XYZ’s tech is adding depth, touchless control to your devices to help make them smarter, ranging from enabling simple presence, distance and gesture measurement in mobile and consumer electronics devices — to complex 6DOF 3D (six degrees of freedom in three dimensions) absolute position information as required un augmented reality environments, sport simulations, home and industrial automation, retail sales conversion, novel interactive toy and display controllers, and hospital environments.
With granted, pending, and provisional patents, XYZ Interactive provides the technology for sensors and systems to precisely, and very inexpensively, locate objects in 3D to within millimeters of accuracy at meters of range. Awesome stuff.
CrunchBase InformationPlug and Play Tech CenterInformation provided by CrunchBase
TC
aisle411
creaza
Plug_and_Play_Tech_Center
Startups
from google
Not unlike Y Combinator and other accelerators of its ilk, Plug and Play hosts a 10-week summer program designed to immerse young startups and entrepreneurs into the Silicon Valley environment. “Plug and Play Startup Camp”, as its known, provides startups with a curriculum of workshops, speaker series, mentor sessions, as well as offering extensive coaching to help entrepreneurs cement business models, prototypes, and so on. This summer camp for startups runs through August 18th, at which point there will be an EXPO to showcase the accelerator’s latest batch.
Plug and Play also organizes 4 EXPOs (unrelated to Startup Camp) at the end of each quarter, as well as 2 University EXPOs, in which a host of startups present their businesses to as many as 100 VCs and investors. Those esteemed judges vote on the top three companies, which then presumably go on to fame and fortune — or at least have a good shot at raising a bit of funding.
The latest EXPO in the Plug and Play series took place Thursday, and below you will find a brief introduction to the three nifty startups that tallied the most votes and impressed the judges. Definitely worth checking out.
Aisle411 is an in-store retail navigation app for mobile consumers. The startup is building a mobile shopping platform that allows consumers to search, map and navigate to products in retail stores down to the very part of the aisle in which the product is located.
With billions of pre-planned digital shopping lists, aisle411 is set to allow digital publishers to integrate the startup’s in-store solutions with digital lists, recipes, and mobile coupons. aisle411’s ad network has early brand buy-in from Coca Cola, General Mills, as well as several other retail partnerships and is already live in 1500 locations.
Over 70 percent of shoppers use a list prior to shopping, and as smartphone saturation grows, the majority of shopping lists and products searches will be executed in-store on a mobile device. As Google Wallet, Paypal and Square look to deploy mobile payments, aisle411 offers highly targeted, high margin offers delivered seconds prior to the purchase. The startup is also offering an API that includes a proprietary in-store ad engine that can target messaging to specific user based on their current and historical shopping lists, as specific as branded products within specific aisles. Pretty cool.
Creaza Inc is an online video production platform designed to enable users to collaboratively produce, share and store user-generated video. By combining the power of cloud-based computing and broadcast-quality HD, with a user-focused experience, Creaza’s platform is attempting to make video truly social.
Creaza’s social video platform enables users to shoot, edit, share and store their self-generated videos. Content can be shot with any video-enabled decice and easily syncs with the user’s private Creaza media library — all in the cloud. Users can edit their video clips with professional-looking titles, transitions, effects, animation, music and narration. The startup’s cloud-based architecture enables easy and secure video project collaboration and co-creation among friends, colleagues and others. Final videos can be shared in an online workspace: downloaded to a favorite device or stored with Creaza. Everything happens in the cloud. No installs, no upgrade, ad no file conversions.
The startup says that it’s trying to transform the video industry. I like the sound of that, but you be the judge.
XYZ Interactive is developing a series of low cost sensors that can be used to determine the precise location of objects, and use gestures to control devices without touching them. (Kind of like what Gilt Groupe is doing with their iPad app.)
The startup claims that its technology can replace competitors’ sensors at a fraction of the cost with better performance. Advanced sensing arrays are three times less expensive than the competition and overcome limitations such as blind spots and outdoor operation, allowing for mass adaption for touchless and gesture control of displayes, tablets, and mobile devices.
XYZ’s tech is adding depth, touchless control to your devices to help make them smarter, ranging from enabling simple presence, distance and gesture measurement in mobile and consumer electronics devices — to complex 6DOF 3D (six degrees of freedom in three dimensions) absolute position information as required un augmented reality environments, sport simulations, home and industrial automation, retail sales conversion, novel interactive toy and display controllers, and hospital environments.
With granted, pending, and provisional patents, XYZ Interactive provides the technology for sensors and systems to precisely, and very inexpensively, locate objects in 3D to within millimeters of accuracy at meters of range. Awesome stuff.
CrunchBase InformationPlug and Play Tech CenterInformation provided by CrunchBase
june 2011 by doffm
4 Israeli Mobile Startups to Watch
may 2011 by doffm
Israeli innovation met American business know-how (and money) today at the Israel Mobile Showcase. Fifteen of Israel’s best and brightest new mobile startups had the chance to strut their stuff in front of an audience of American investors and tech industry leaders at the Microsoft Campus in Mountain View.
Sponsored by the California Israel Chamber of Commerce (CICC), the showcase was part of a three-day CICC blitz of the Silicon Valley. Participants were selected from a highly competitive pool of Israel’s estimated 3,000 startups (that’s a lot of tech companies for a country with fewer people that the state of Virginia).
Israel is fast emerging as of the world’s hottest tech markets. The country has more engineers and sees more scientific articles published per capita than any other country in the world (Israel has 135 engineers per 10,000 people; the US has 85). Experts speculate that the strong math and science education and mandatory military service, which puts young people in charge of highly specialized technology, are two contributing factors.
CICC Executive Director Shuly Galili says entrepreneurship is simply in the DNA of the Israeli people. She also cites another advantage: From day one, Israeli developers must think global. “They have absolutely no market at home,” she said. “The country is too small. So when they get started building a business, they are already thinking about how this product is going to work in the United States.”
Here is a sampling of the companies that stood out at the Thursday showcase.
fellowup: This is a service just about anyone who isn’t Dustin Hoffman in Rainman can use. The ultimate automated, personalized executive assistant service remembers all your names, dates and events so you don’t have to. A web-extension memory service running through a private dashboard for PC and mobile, it automatically syncs personal connections in one place. But the secret sauce is the algorithm that filters through the noise of all your social networks to let you know who and what is important every day. The more you use it, the smarter it gets. The service notifies and suggests different ways to leverage connections, from congratulating a colleague when he publishes a new article to calling a client in China during the Chinese New Year. It also pulls relevant data from the web on any contact you’re looking for.
RingBow: This elicited one of the biggest rounds of applause from the crowd. Named one of Microsoft Israel’s most promising startups in 2010, Ringbow has created a universal “task ring” that links our fingers and our phones, adding mouse-button and other functionality but maintaining a touchscreen’s ease of use. Consumers can use the ring to play games, draw, and operate apps without ever touching the screen. While they are primarily targeting the gaming market, the company says it sees this product in use by everyone from kids to the business community. And they aren’t just going after tech geeks. The company is pitching a high-fashion line of rings as well as those branded to cartoon characters.
DudaMobile: Duda Mobile makes small- to medium-size business websites mobile. The platform allows businesses to enter their web addresses into the system and customize and publish mobile-friendly sites. Businesses choose a template and can then tweak the page, changing logo sizes, colors and photos and adding widgets such as click to call. The company says it has an existing network of 75,000 website and has deals with AT&T, webs.com and HP logworks. Still in beta, it plans to open a self-service model in July. The company didn’t release its pricing info but says hosting is somewhere along the lines of “a couple dollars a month.” The company has already secured Series A funding and is renting office space from 500 Startups.
Zooz: Everyone and their mother is trying to capitalize on the burgeoning mobile payments market, but few have figured out how to do it in a non-clunky, secure way. Zooz is an end-to-end software solution for point-of-sale mobile payments that incorporates mobile payments, customer loyalty , club memberships, coupons and loyalty points in one space. The company stores all data and payment details on a dedicated central server using a secret (patent pending) encryption technology it claims is hacker proof. The company is currently targeting POS system operators and already operates in retail and restaurant chains in Israel.
Related content from GigaOM Pro (subscription req’d):
Mobile Q1: All Eyes on Tablets, T-Mobile and AT&TCleantech Financing Trends: 2010 and BeyondConnected Consumer Q1: The Over-the-Top vs. Pay TV Battle Heats Up
California_Israel_Chamber_of_Commerce
Israel
Mobile
mobile_payments
Startups
CICC
from google
Sponsored by the California Israel Chamber of Commerce (CICC), the showcase was part of a three-day CICC blitz of the Silicon Valley. Participants were selected from a highly competitive pool of Israel’s estimated 3,000 startups (that’s a lot of tech companies for a country with fewer people that the state of Virginia).
Israel is fast emerging as of the world’s hottest tech markets. The country has more engineers and sees more scientific articles published per capita than any other country in the world (Israel has 135 engineers per 10,000 people; the US has 85). Experts speculate that the strong math and science education and mandatory military service, which puts young people in charge of highly specialized technology, are two contributing factors.
CICC Executive Director Shuly Galili says entrepreneurship is simply in the DNA of the Israeli people. She also cites another advantage: From day one, Israeli developers must think global. “They have absolutely no market at home,” she said. “The country is too small. So when they get started building a business, they are already thinking about how this product is going to work in the United States.”
Here is a sampling of the companies that stood out at the Thursday showcase.
fellowup: This is a service just about anyone who isn’t Dustin Hoffman in Rainman can use. The ultimate automated, personalized executive assistant service remembers all your names, dates and events so you don’t have to. A web-extension memory service running through a private dashboard for PC and mobile, it automatically syncs personal connections in one place. But the secret sauce is the algorithm that filters through the noise of all your social networks to let you know who and what is important every day. The more you use it, the smarter it gets. The service notifies and suggests different ways to leverage connections, from congratulating a colleague when he publishes a new article to calling a client in China during the Chinese New Year. It also pulls relevant data from the web on any contact you’re looking for.
RingBow: This elicited one of the biggest rounds of applause from the crowd. Named one of Microsoft Israel’s most promising startups in 2010, Ringbow has created a universal “task ring” that links our fingers and our phones, adding mouse-button and other functionality but maintaining a touchscreen’s ease of use. Consumers can use the ring to play games, draw, and operate apps without ever touching the screen. While they are primarily targeting the gaming market, the company says it sees this product in use by everyone from kids to the business community. And they aren’t just going after tech geeks. The company is pitching a high-fashion line of rings as well as those branded to cartoon characters.
DudaMobile: Duda Mobile makes small- to medium-size business websites mobile. The platform allows businesses to enter their web addresses into the system and customize and publish mobile-friendly sites. Businesses choose a template and can then tweak the page, changing logo sizes, colors and photos and adding widgets such as click to call. The company says it has an existing network of 75,000 website and has deals with AT&T, webs.com and HP logworks. Still in beta, it plans to open a self-service model in July. The company didn’t release its pricing info but says hosting is somewhere along the lines of “a couple dollars a month.” The company has already secured Series A funding and is renting office space from 500 Startups.
Zooz: Everyone and their mother is trying to capitalize on the burgeoning mobile payments market, but few have figured out how to do it in a non-clunky, secure way. Zooz is an end-to-end software solution for point-of-sale mobile payments that incorporates mobile payments, customer loyalty , club memberships, coupons and loyalty points in one space. The company stores all data and payment details on a dedicated central server using a secret (patent pending) encryption technology it claims is hacker proof. The company is currently targeting POS system operators and already operates in retail and restaurant chains in Israel.
Related content from GigaOM Pro (subscription req’d):
Mobile Q1: All Eyes on Tablets, T-Mobile and AT&TCleantech Financing Trends: 2010 and BeyondConnected Consumer Q1: The Over-the-Top vs. Pay TV Battle Heats Up
may 2011 by doffm
AngelPad’s 13 Demo Day darlings
march 2011 by doffm
Startup incubator AngelPad presented its Winter 2011 class of companies to investors and the media today in its AngelPad Demo Day. Thirteen companies total, ranging from cloud computing startups to car insurance search engines, presented.
The most recent class was chosen from a pool of around 800 applicants. The last batch, AngelPad’s first class, was selected from the extended network of AngelPad’s founders.
Here’s a list of the companies that presented:
Astrid is a mobile to-do list and reminder application for phones running Google’s mobile operating system, Android. Users can rank the importance of each task, and the application automatically prioritizes them. The application has been downloaded 1.7 million times and has picked up 20,000 five-star ratings on the Android Marketplace.
Shopobot is an online site that tracks how prices of certain products change and alerts users when the price falls beneath a certain level. The site focuses on big-ticket items that consumers usually consider before making a purchase. Shopobot searches social networks for experts in the area a consumer is shopping in, picking up recommendations from friends rather than unknown experts. Its founders come from Microsoft and online retail site Amazon.com.
Hopscotch is a mobile app that uses QR codes — two-dimensional bar-codes that anyone can scan with a phone — and links to more related media. Hopscotch users can, for example, scan a QR code on a concert advertisement poster and find out which friends are going and listen to music videos. Businesses like Live Nation, which runs concerts, can attach QR codes to their ads and pick up information about the smartphone users who scan the codes.
Cloudbot is a neutral mobile application that grabs information from multiple cloud-based services like Dropbox, Facebook, Google Contacts and Salesforce. Users type in some keywords like “eat with” and a name and the application calls that information from linked cloud services and social networks. The application can also use location-based services like Foursquare. There are 24 apps connected to Cloudbot right now and 40,000 “nouns” — basically words that correspond to parts of cloud services like Dropbox files or tweets.
Kismet is a mobile dating application that uses real identities, photos and locations to match potential couples. The site focuses on using photos more than large amounts of text such as other dating sites like OKCupid. The app is built on Facebook Connect to validate an identity, but users can remain anonymous through the application until they are ready to reveal their identities. It uses Foursquare and other location-based services to keep track of a user’s activity.
Splash is a single line of code that adds a tab to mobile games that checks which friends are playing that same game. Mobile app users can also share achievements and ask for help within each game within that same tab. The application also gives information about Splash users back to developers that add the application to their mobile games. Michael Powers, a founder of Splash, was the first employee at Slide.
Crittercism is a library in mobile applications that detects errors and lets users submit a crash report for an application directly to developers. The application gives developers a more-detailed dashboard about which errors are most prevalent. The application also lets developers communicate directly with app users. There are 25 applications live in the app store with Crittercism, and the company is testing the application with a number of top-10 applications.
Stickery creates mobile educational games for children. The application combines a number of games with educational concepts and submits feedback to parents. The application became the top education app on the App Store after launching earlier this month.
LocBox is an iPad application that customers check into with a name and e-mail as soon as they enter a store. Customers that check in get a “deal” similar to those Groupon and Foursquare users typically get. Store owners are then able to acquire data about potential customers. LocBox is then able to push out additional deals through Facebook and other social networks to bring those same customers back again.
CompanyLine is an enterprise-style social network that lets employees communicate amongst themselves. Whenever they publish a status update, the application picks up on key words that launch external applications like WebEx or download files from a Dropbox account.
Feedgen is a simple web-based application that prioritizes marketing leads in an e-mail-like interface. Any lead that is missing any information automatically tries to grab missing information from other social networking sites. The more leads and activity a Feedgen user participates in, the smarter the application gets about prioritizing certain leads over others.
Coverhound is a web-based application that has consumers put in a little bit of simple information like name and email address. The application then uses third-party applications to gather a lot of information about the consumer’s credit history and income. Coverhound then ships that information off to insurance companies and pulls in insurance rate quotes.
Secondleap personalizes the process of changing careers. The site asks a few questions to determine whether the new career is a good fit for that individual. The application then recommends schools and gives examples of ways to finance the path to a new career. The recommendations are proximity-based and are organized by how expensive they are.
Tags: Demo Day, startups
Companies: AngelPad, Astrid, Cloudbot, CompanyLine, Coverhound, Crittercism, Feedgen, Hopscotch, Kismet, LocBox, Secondleap, Shopobot, Splash, Stickery
VentureBeat
mobile
Demo_Day
startups
from google
The most recent class was chosen from a pool of around 800 applicants. The last batch, AngelPad’s first class, was selected from the extended network of AngelPad’s founders.
Here’s a list of the companies that presented:
Astrid is a mobile to-do list and reminder application for phones running Google’s mobile operating system, Android. Users can rank the importance of each task, and the application automatically prioritizes them. The application has been downloaded 1.7 million times and has picked up 20,000 five-star ratings on the Android Marketplace.
Shopobot is an online site that tracks how prices of certain products change and alerts users when the price falls beneath a certain level. The site focuses on big-ticket items that consumers usually consider before making a purchase. Shopobot searches social networks for experts in the area a consumer is shopping in, picking up recommendations from friends rather than unknown experts. Its founders come from Microsoft and online retail site Amazon.com.
Hopscotch is a mobile app that uses QR codes — two-dimensional bar-codes that anyone can scan with a phone — and links to more related media. Hopscotch users can, for example, scan a QR code on a concert advertisement poster and find out which friends are going and listen to music videos. Businesses like Live Nation, which runs concerts, can attach QR codes to their ads and pick up information about the smartphone users who scan the codes.
Cloudbot is a neutral mobile application that grabs information from multiple cloud-based services like Dropbox, Facebook, Google Contacts and Salesforce. Users type in some keywords like “eat with” and a name and the application calls that information from linked cloud services and social networks. The application can also use location-based services like Foursquare. There are 24 apps connected to Cloudbot right now and 40,000 “nouns” — basically words that correspond to parts of cloud services like Dropbox files or tweets.
Kismet is a mobile dating application that uses real identities, photos and locations to match potential couples. The site focuses on using photos more than large amounts of text such as other dating sites like OKCupid. The app is built on Facebook Connect to validate an identity, but users can remain anonymous through the application until they are ready to reveal their identities. It uses Foursquare and other location-based services to keep track of a user’s activity.
Splash is a single line of code that adds a tab to mobile games that checks which friends are playing that same game. Mobile app users can also share achievements and ask for help within each game within that same tab. The application also gives information about Splash users back to developers that add the application to their mobile games. Michael Powers, a founder of Splash, was the first employee at Slide.
Crittercism is a library in mobile applications that detects errors and lets users submit a crash report for an application directly to developers. The application gives developers a more-detailed dashboard about which errors are most prevalent. The application also lets developers communicate directly with app users. There are 25 applications live in the app store with Crittercism, and the company is testing the application with a number of top-10 applications.
Stickery creates mobile educational games for children. The application combines a number of games with educational concepts and submits feedback to parents. The application became the top education app on the App Store after launching earlier this month.
LocBox is an iPad application that customers check into with a name and e-mail as soon as they enter a store. Customers that check in get a “deal” similar to those Groupon and Foursquare users typically get. Store owners are then able to acquire data about potential customers. LocBox is then able to push out additional deals through Facebook and other social networks to bring those same customers back again.
CompanyLine is an enterprise-style social network that lets employees communicate amongst themselves. Whenever they publish a status update, the application picks up on key words that launch external applications like WebEx or download files from a Dropbox account.
Feedgen is a simple web-based application that prioritizes marketing leads in an e-mail-like interface. Any lead that is missing any information automatically tries to grab missing information from other social networking sites. The more leads and activity a Feedgen user participates in, the smarter the application gets about prioritizing certain leads over others.
Coverhound is a web-based application that has consumers put in a little bit of simple information like name and email address. The application then uses third-party applications to gather a lot of information about the consumer’s credit history and income. Coverhound then ships that information off to insurance companies and pulls in insurance rate quotes.
Secondleap personalizes the process of changing careers. The site asks a few questions to determine whether the new career is a good fit for that individual. The application then recommends schools and gives examples of ways to finance the path to a new career. The recommendations are proximity-based and are organized by how expensive they are.
Tags: Demo Day, startups
Companies: AngelPad, Astrid, Cloudbot, CompanyLine, Coverhound, Crittercism, Feedgen, Hopscotch, Kismet, LocBox, Secondleap, Shopobot, Splash, Stickery
march 2011 by doffm
The Man Behind Every Expat’s Favorite Software, Hotspot Shield
february 2010 by doffm
AnchorFree’s ad-supported VPN, Hotspot Shield, has been on a tear in the last year. The tool, which people use to protect their browsing privacy and also to access blocked web content, now has more than 7 million monthly users and 1.3 billion pages encrypted per month. Hotspot Shield’s userbase, which tripled in the last 12 months, is filled with expats — such as U.S. Army soldiers and businesspeople in China — according to CEO David Gorodyansky, who stopped by GigaOM today for an interview (see video below). More than 80 percent of Hotspot Shield users are browsing in English, while more than half of users are international. With that geeky, globetrotting demographic, the most effective ads on the service are tech and travel.
Sunnyvale, Calif.-based AnchorFree has raised $11 million in rounds led by Renaissance Capital, and has been profitable since May 2009. It has just 18 employees but a handles an immense amount of bandwidth, given it encrypts every page to which its users browse.
We spoke to Gorodyansky about the paradox of behavioral targeting to a userbase that explicitly wants to be anonymous and other topics in the 10-minute interview embedded here.
Liz's_Posts
Startups
AnchorFree
Hotspot_Shield
from google
Sunnyvale, Calif.-based AnchorFree has raised $11 million in rounds led by Renaissance Capital, and has been profitable since May 2009. It has just 18 employees but a handles an immense amount of bandwidth, given it encrypts every page to which its users browse.
We spoke to Gorodyansky about the paradox of behavioral targeting to a userbase that explicitly wants to be anonymous and other topics in the 10-minute interview embedded here.
february 2010 by doffm
Google’s Fiber Network Could Foil ISPs and Fuel Innovation
february 2010 by doffm
Google said today it plans to build an experimental fiber-to-the-home network in select areas of the country that would offer speeds of around 1 Gigabit per second. It says it plans to serve between 50,000 and 500,000 people and will offer the service for a “competitive cost.” The company is currently seeking a response to its request for information (RFI) by March 26 from municipalities that may want such a service for their citizens, but let me be the first to put my hometown of Austin, Texas, in the running.
When asked about the characteristics of those communities, a Google spokeswoman emailed the following response:
Above all, we’re interested in deploying our network efficiently and quickly, and are hoping to identify interested community partners that will work with us to achieve this goal. To that end, we’ll use our RFI to identify interested communities and to assess local factors that will impact the efficiency and speed of our deployment, such as the level of community support, local resources, weather conditions, approved construction methods and local regulatory issues. We will also take into account broadband availability and speeds that are already offered to users within a community.
Google’s announcement, which has been five years in the making, could positively shift the telecommunications landscape if it leads to new services that galvanize the FCC, communities and consumers to start demanding faster broadband. It also creates a potential testbed for innovative services that rely on broadband as a platform to work — benefiting entrepreneurs and those who invest in them.
With its web DNA and commitment to openness, Google will likely attract entrepreneurs to its network that are willing to try something new on the services front. Presumably it will also offer a faster path to the end consumer than what an existing ISP might. I’ve always felt that much of the innovation around broadband has occurred despite the ISP or even by bypassing the ISP, so imagine what projects we might see if the pipe owner were an active contributor to that innovation.
We at GigaOM have said for years that broadband is the platform for innovation, and Google no doubt agrees. The pace of technological innovation in terms of video conferencing, telemedicine and remote education are rapidly surpassing the average American’s connection speed, which ranges from 3 Mbps to 7 Mbps depending on the study. And without the demand for such services, or a cost-effective way to get there, ISPs and entrepreneurs that want to deliver products that require fat pipes are reluctant to invest. Think of it as a chicken-and-egg issue. Google can help change this.
The network can help spur innovation, but could also become a foil to the lobbying efforts from existing ISPs, many of whom are less than up-front about how their network costs are reflected in their prices, and tend to react with hysteria when faced with regulations that will limit their ability to control the bits running over their pipes. We’ve all read stories about how the web will break under the weight of network neutrality, or how the ISPs needs to raise prices or implement tiered pricing plans because some consumers are using too many resources. What we don’t have is the data showing that there’s an economic reason for this other than profiteering in an uncompetitive market.
More on LTE
AT&T Taps Alcatel-Lucent, Confirms LTE in 2011
Tech Insider
Planet WiMAX
Tech Insider
T-Mo’s HSPA+ Upgrade to Hit the Coasts First
Tech Insider
My Austin WiMAX Experience Was Good, But Not Good Enough
Tech Insider
Google makes almost all of its money from selling ads over the Internet, not from selling the pipe itself. Therefore, if it is truly transparent about its costs and traffic demands, it could provide valuable data to the FCC and the industry that telecommunications companies do not. It wouldn’t exactly make the broadband market competitive, but it could help make the economics of operating such a network more transparent. And that could help regulators determine how competitively priced broadband is.
Om wrote about Google’s interest in controlling its own bandwidth back in 2005 for Business 2.0, laying out an economic rationale for the creation of what he called the GoogleNet:
An even more compelling reason for Google to build its own network is that it could save the company millions of dollars a month. Here’s why: Every time a user performs a search on Google, the data is transmitted over a network owned by an ISP–say, Comcast–which links up with Google’s servers via a wholesaler like AboveNet. When AboveNet bridges that gap between Google and Comcast, Google has to pay as much as $60 per megabit in IP transit fees. As Google adds bandwidth-intensive services, those costs will increase. Big networks owned by the likes of AT&T get around transit fees by striking “peering” arrangements, in which the networks swap traffic and no money is exchanged. By cutting out middlemen like AboveNet, Google could share traffic directly with ISPs to avoid fees.
It didn’t happen five years ago and my hunch is that Google was waiting for a last-mile technology that would last. DSL and cable don’t have the capacity to reach 1 Gbps (although cable can offer up to 200 Mbps), and in 2005, fiber to the home was still an expensive pipe dream. But now fiber to the premise, which has the capacity to meet bandwidth demand for decades, is a reality.
It took Verizon’s $23 billion investment in its FiOS network to drive innovations for delivering fiber to the last mile and lowering the costs. Technologies such as bendable fiber and smaller optical network terminals that fit on desks rather than inside entire closets were pioneered for the FiOS effort. Google will surely take advantage of that with its deployment.
The fiber GoogleNet could become an indirect threat to Verizon and other ISPs because it could open the kimono on actual network costs and lead to services that would suck even more bandwidth on ISPs’ existing networks. So it’s ironic that the creation of such a network might have a large debt to Verizon at it makes its own fiber push. Personally, I can’t wait.
Related content from GigaOM Pro:
When It Comes to Pain at the Pipe, Upstream Is the New Downstream
Broadband
CNN_Big_Tech
NYT_Company_News
SYN_Straight_News
Stacey's_Posts
Startups
Fiber_To_The_Home
GOOG
google
Verizon
VZ
RFI
from google
When asked about the characteristics of those communities, a Google spokeswoman emailed the following response:
Above all, we’re interested in deploying our network efficiently and quickly, and are hoping to identify interested community partners that will work with us to achieve this goal. To that end, we’ll use our RFI to identify interested communities and to assess local factors that will impact the efficiency and speed of our deployment, such as the level of community support, local resources, weather conditions, approved construction methods and local regulatory issues. We will also take into account broadband availability and speeds that are already offered to users within a community.
Google’s announcement, which has been five years in the making, could positively shift the telecommunications landscape if it leads to new services that galvanize the FCC, communities and consumers to start demanding faster broadband. It also creates a potential testbed for innovative services that rely on broadband as a platform to work — benefiting entrepreneurs and those who invest in them.
With its web DNA and commitment to openness, Google will likely attract entrepreneurs to its network that are willing to try something new on the services front. Presumably it will also offer a faster path to the end consumer than what an existing ISP might. I’ve always felt that much of the innovation around broadband has occurred despite the ISP or even by bypassing the ISP, so imagine what projects we might see if the pipe owner were an active contributor to that innovation.
We at GigaOM have said for years that broadband is the platform for innovation, and Google no doubt agrees. The pace of technological innovation in terms of video conferencing, telemedicine and remote education are rapidly surpassing the average American’s connection speed, which ranges from 3 Mbps to 7 Mbps depending on the study. And without the demand for such services, or a cost-effective way to get there, ISPs and entrepreneurs that want to deliver products that require fat pipes are reluctant to invest. Think of it as a chicken-and-egg issue. Google can help change this.
The network can help spur innovation, but could also become a foil to the lobbying efforts from existing ISPs, many of whom are less than up-front about how their network costs are reflected in their prices, and tend to react with hysteria when faced with regulations that will limit their ability to control the bits running over their pipes. We’ve all read stories about how the web will break under the weight of network neutrality, or how the ISPs needs to raise prices or implement tiered pricing plans because some consumers are using too many resources. What we don’t have is the data showing that there’s an economic reason for this other than profiteering in an uncompetitive market.
More on LTE
AT&T Taps Alcatel-Lucent, Confirms LTE in 2011
Tech Insider
Planet WiMAX
Tech Insider
T-Mo’s HSPA+ Upgrade to Hit the Coasts First
Tech Insider
My Austin WiMAX Experience Was Good, But Not Good Enough
Tech Insider
Google makes almost all of its money from selling ads over the Internet, not from selling the pipe itself. Therefore, if it is truly transparent about its costs and traffic demands, it could provide valuable data to the FCC and the industry that telecommunications companies do not. It wouldn’t exactly make the broadband market competitive, but it could help make the economics of operating such a network more transparent. And that could help regulators determine how competitively priced broadband is.
Om wrote about Google’s interest in controlling its own bandwidth back in 2005 for Business 2.0, laying out an economic rationale for the creation of what he called the GoogleNet:
An even more compelling reason for Google to build its own network is that it could save the company millions of dollars a month. Here’s why: Every time a user performs a search on Google, the data is transmitted over a network owned by an ISP–say, Comcast–which links up with Google’s servers via a wholesaler like AboveNet. When AboveNet bridges that gap between Google and Comcast, Google has to pay as much as $60 per megabit in IP transit fees. As Google adds bandwidth-intensive services, those costs will increase. Big networks owned by the likes of AT&T get around transit fees by striking “peering” arrangements, in which the networks swap traffic and no money is exchanged. By cutting out middlemen like AboveNet, Google could share traffic directly with ISPs to avoid fees.
It didn’t happen five years ago and my hunch is that Google was waiting for a last-mile technology that would last. DSL and cable don’t have the capacity to reach 1 Gbps (although cable can offer up to 200 Mbps), and in 2005, fiber to the home was still an expensive pipe dream. But now fiber to the premise, which has the capacity to meet bandwidth demand for decades, is a reality.
It took Verizon’s $23 billion investment in its FiOS network to drive innovations for delivering fiber to the last mile and lowering the costs. Technologies such as bendable fiber and smaller optical network terminals that fit on desks rather than inside entire closets were pioneered for the FiOS effort. Google will surely take advantage of that with its deployment.
The fiber GoogleNet could become an indirect threat to Verizon and other ISPs because it could open the kimono on actual network costs and lead to services that would suck even more bandwidth on ISPs’ existing networks. So it’s ironic that the creation of such a network might have a large debt to Verizon at it makes its own fiber push. Personally, I can’t wait.
Related content from GigaOM Pro:
When It Comes to Pain at the Pipe, Upstream Is the New Downstream
february 2010 by doffm
Why Startups Need Capital Discipline
january 2010 by doffm
While reading through Seth Godin’s free e-book recently, I noticed that Fred Wilson had dedicated an entire page of his blog to the concept of “slow capital.” I like the notion of slow capital; it strikes me as the other side of the coin of agile, capitally disciplined startups.
Since more often than not, a startup’s model and/or product will change from the point of founding and funding, early-stage startups need to have the ability to make informed progress in the face of all challenges. How capital flows into and out of a startup in order to enable such progress is absolutely critical and yet very difficult to manage.
And execution in the presence of too much capital, too little capital, or poorly applied capital defines both the health of the business and the relationship between a startup and its investors. Together, the concepts of slow capital and capital discipline provide a framework for managing this relationship.
A startup has capital discipline when it:
1. Raises just enough to execute to the next business/financeable milestone. The term “just enough” does not mean the absolute minimum. A startup could raise no capital, $20,000 or $20 million, depending on stage and state. Different stages and situations present different capital requirements; of course, different stages require different business proof points and validation as well.
The term “just enough” is helpful because it minimizes the amount of equity sold, demands better clarity in decision-making and sharpens a startup’s focus.
The term also minimizes the investors’ capital risk, which is good for two reasons: One, it allows them to fund a startup when there is more risk than they would otherwise take at bigger valuations and round sizes; and two, their definition of an acceptable outcome is advanced in a healthy, stepwise manner. In other words, the more one raises, the larger the outcome must be in order to make a venture firm’s economics work.
Finally, this characteristic is aligned with early-stage programs such as Y Combinator, Tech Stars and Capital Factory. In these cases, “just enough” capital is augmented by mentorship and business guidance that further accelerates the push toward that next financeable milestone.
2. Practices a lean-oriented, customer development-focused, minimum-viable-product strategy in order to make informed, measured progress. Informed progress is the result of having requisite knowledge . Customer development and MVP strategies are, fundamentally, strategies for accelerating learning. Startups with capital discipline use the best data currently available to direct both capital and focus.
At a high level, the idea is that such accelerated learning minimizes or eliminates waste. Wasted time, wasted focus, wasted features, wasted money — all such waste increases a startup’s operational risk and its investors’ capital risk.
3. Is focused on investing to maximize the business opportunity independent of time frame. Since a typical startup’s model and/or product will change, it’s logical that some opportunities and strategies will only become apparent as a consequence of execution. Indeed, iteration, learning and improvement all aimed at maximizing the business opportunity is a process that takes time…years, in many cases.
The notion of a startup having capital discipline goes hand in hand with the notion of slow capital, which Wilson defined as having the following six characteristics:
1. Doesn’t rush to conclusions and doesn’t expect entrepreneurs to do so, either. This characteristic benefits the investor more than the startup. In general, “delay” is the friend of the investor and the enemy of the startup.
Why? Because “not rushing” allows more time to gather data and better inform the assessment of risk. Is the startup executing well? How is the competition doing? Are other investors interested? Can the startup stretch its existing capital if necessary?
All things being equal, entrepreneurs would prefer not to rush; however, not rushing is usually not an option: gotta beat that competition, gotta talk to those customers, gotta finish that feature and get it tested and deployed. I’ve never known a successful entrepreneur that doesn’t feel like their hair is on fire and, personally, I want entrepreneurs that I work with to feel a keen sense of urgency.
2. Flows into a company based on the company’s needs, not the investor’s needs. A company’s capital requirements change over time as the model and product are proven out and the go-to-market strategy is fully understood; getting to that point should take much less capital than scaling for growth going forward.
It’s generally understood that a company that’s funded beyond its stage-wise needs is more likely to execute poorly because it can afford to not choose a single path of focus and execution. Slow capital wants to find that “just right” level of funding, the one that reinforces good execution but doesn’t starve the company along the way.
This second characteristic suggests that investors “need” to put money into a startup. VC firms need to return to their investors all the money they raised in the fund plus a significant margin above that. So if a VC is investing out of a large fund, putting, say, $3 million into a company and getting $30 million out (a truly great 10x return), that probably doesn’t constitute a drop in the bucket relative to what they need to return to their limited partners. Such a VC might therefore “need” to put much more money to work in each startup they’re investing in, hoping for a much larger exit.
3. Starts small and grows with the company as it grows. Capital requirements should scale over time as good execution illuminates “where” and “when” investments will positively impact the business.
From an investor’s perspective, slow capital should be “risk-adjusted capital” because it allows investors to fund a startup early on, when there’s more risk than they would typically take at bigger round sizes and valuations.
4. Has no set timetable for getting liquid, for slow capital is patient capital. This is an especially entrepreneur-friendly characteristic of slow capital; it’s also well-matched to the current exit environment.
That said, there is an implied qualifier of making “informed progress” along the way. I have yet to see (or be) a patient investor when faced with poor execution within a portfolio company.
5. Takes the time to understand the company and the people who make it up. I believe the intent of this characteristic is to understand the more qualitative elements of what makes a company successful. Revenue, expenses and conversation rates are substantially quantitative. The culture, people, and interpersonal dynamics of a startup are far more qualitative but perhaps the most vital accelerators or inhibitors of good execution.
I would add that slow capital also:
6. Comes with stage-appropriate strategic and operational assistance. It’s hard to do this well if you’ve never been an operator. The perspective and best practices from investors who routinely look across industries, companies and strategies coupled with a startup’s “in the trenches” view helps yield lockstep agreement as to the company’s execution and capital needs.
Stage-appropriate means more assistance for early-stage companies and less as the company grows.
7. Is consistent, transparent and disciplined capital. Slow capital doesn’t apply these principles only when it’s convenient to do so, rather they are built into the operating philosophy of the firm that puts such capital to work. This must remain true even in the presence of investor-side competition for particularly “hot” deals…no matter how hard it is to do so.
Meanwhile, transparency suggests that the data and philosophy driving investment decisions is not a black-box process that precludes the startup from understanding such decisions.
Overall, I believe we’re entering a new phase for investment in technology — call it Venture Capital For the New Decade. The venture capital supply chain is transitioning and startup execution velocity (rapid iteration, learning and adjusting in order to maximize the business opportunity) is more attainable than ever before, but it requires the right amount of capital at the right time.
And that requires a new sort of relationship between startup and investor, one in which the historic friction associated with bringing capital into a startup over time is reduced or eliminated. Together, slow capital and capital discipline provide a framework for just that sort of transparent, trust-based relationship.
Kip McClanahan is currently an investor in startups including SocialWare, SpareFoot and uControl.
Startup_Strategy
Startups
Venture_Capital
Capitally_Disciplined_Startups
Tech_Stars
Y-Combinator
from google
Since more often than not, a startup’s model and/or product will change from the point of founding and funding, early-stage startups need to have the ability to make informed progress in the face of all challenges. How capital flows into and out of a startup in order to enable such progress is absolutely critical and yet very difficult to manage.
And execution in the presence of too much capital, too little capital, or poorly applied capital defines both the health of the business and the relationship between a startup and its investors. Together, the concepts of slow capital and capital discipline provide a framework for managing this relationship.
A startup has capital discipline when it:
1. Raises just enough to execute to the next business/financeable milestone. The term “just enough” does not mean the absolute minimum. A startup could raise no capital, $20,000 or $20 million, depending on stage and state. Different stages and situations present different capital requirements; of course, different stages require different business proof points and validation as well.
The term “just enough” is helpful because it minimizes the amount of equity sold, demands better clarity in decision-making and sharpens a startup’s focus.
The term also minimizes the investors’ capital risk, which is good for two reasons: One, it allows them to fund a startup when there is more risk than they would otherwise take at bigger valuations and round sizes; and two, their definition of an acceptable outcome is advanced in a healthy, stepwise manner. In other words, the more one raises, the larger the outcome must be in order to make a venture firm’s economics work.
Finally, this characteristic is aligned with early-stage programs such as Y Combinator, Tech Stars and Capital Factory. In these cases, “just enough” capital is augmented by mentorship and business guidance that further accelerates the push toward that next financeable milestone.
2. Practices a lean-oriented, customer development-focused, minimum-viable-product strategy in order to make informed, measured progress. Informed progress is the result of having requisite knowledge . Customer development and MVP strategies are, fundamentally, strategies for accelerating learning. Startups with capital discipline use the best data currently available to direct both capital and focus.
At a high level, the idea is that such accelerated learning minimizes or eliminates waste. Wasted time, wasted focus, wasted features, wasted money — all such waste increases a startup’s operational risk and its investors’ capital risk.
3. Is focused on investing to maximize the business opportunity independent of time frame. Since a typical startup’s model and/or product will change, it’s logical that some opportunities and strategies will only become apparent as a consequence of execution. Indeed, iteration, learning and improvement all aimed at maximizing the business opportunity is a process that takes time…years, in many cases.
The notion of a startup having capital discipline goes hand in hand with the notion of slow capital, which Wilson defined as having the following six characteristics:
1. Doesn’t rush to conclusions and doesn’t expect entrepreneurs to do so, either. This characteristic benefits the investor more than the startup. In general, “delay” is the friend of the investor and the enemy of the startup.
Why? Because “not rushing” allows more time to gather data and better inform the assessment of risk. Is the startup executing well? How is the competition doing? Are other investors interested? Can the startup stretch its existing capital if necessary?
All things being equal, entrepreneurs would prefer not to rush; however, not rushing is usually not an option: gotta beat that competition, gotta talk to those customers, gotta finish that feature and get it tested and deployed. I’ve never known a successful entrepreneur that doesn’t feel like their hair is on fire and, personally, I want entrepreneurs that I work with to feel a keen sense of urgency.
2. Flows into a company based on the company’s needs, not the investor’s needs. A company’s capital requirements change over time as the model and product are proven out and the go-to-market strategy is fully understood; getting to that point should take much less capital than scaling for growth going forward.
It’s generally understood that a company that’s funded beyond its stage-wise needs is more likely to execute poorly because it can afford to not choose a single path of focus and execution. Slow capital wants to find that “just right” level of funding, the one that reinforces good execution but doesn’t starve the company along the way.
This second characteristic suggests that investors “need” to put money into a startup. VC firms need to return to their investors all the money they raised in the fund plus a significant margin above that. So if a VC is investing out of a large fund, putting, say, $3 million into a company and getting $30 million out (a truly great 10x return), that probably doesn’t constitute a drop in the bucket relative to what they need to return to their limited partners. Such a VC might therefore “need” to put much more money to work in each startup they’re investing in, hoping for a much larger exit.
3. Starts small and grows with the company as it grows. Capital requirements should scale over time as good execution illuminates “where” and “when” investments will positively impact the business.
From an investor’s perspective, slow capital should be “risk-adjusted capital” because it allows investors to fund a startup early on, when there’s more risk than they would typically take at bigger round sizes and valuations.
4. Has no set timetable for getting liquid, for slow capital is patient capital. This is an especially entrepreneur-friendly characteristic of slow capital; it’s also well-matched to the current exit environment.
That said, there is an implied qualifier of making “informed progress” along the way. I have yet to see (or be) a patient investor when faced with poor execution within a portfolio company.
5. Takes the time to understand the company and the people who make it up. I believe the intent of this characteristic is to understand the more qualitative elements of what makes a company successful. Revenue, expenses and conversation rates are substantially quantitative. The culture, people, and interpersonal dynamics of a startup are far more qualitative but perhaps the most vital accelerators or inhibitors of good execution.
I would add that slow capital also:
6. Comes with stage-appropriate strategic and operational assistance. It’s hard to do this well if you’ve never been an operator. The perspective and best practices from investors who routinely look across industries, companies and strategies coupled with a startup’s “in the trenches” view helps yield lockstep agreement as to the company’s execution and capital needs.
Stage-appropriate means more assistance for early-stage companies and less as the company grows.
7. Is consistent, transparent and disciplined capital. Slow capital doesn’t apply these principles only when it’s convenient to do so, rather they are built into the operating philosophy of the firm that puts such capital to work. This must remain true even in the presence of investor-side competition for particularly “hot” deals…no matter how hard it is to do so.
Meanwhile, transparency suggests that the data and philosophy driving investment decisions is not a black-box process that precludes the startup from understanding such decisions.
Overall, I believe we’re entering a new phase for investment in technology — call it Venture Capital For the New Decade. The venture capital supply chain is transitioning and startup execution velocity (rapid iteration, learning and adjusting in order to maximize the business opportunity) is more attainable than ever before, but it requires the right amount of capital at the right time.
And that requires a new sort of relationship between startup and investor, one in which the historic friction associated with bringing capital into a startup over time is reduced or eliminated. Together, slow capital and capital discipline provide a framework for just that sort of transparent, trust-based relationship.
Kip McClanahan is currently an investor in startups including SocialWare, SpareFoot and uControl.
january 2010 by doffm
The Essential Startup Reader: 10 Lessons in Entrepreneurship
january 2010 by doffm
As a blogger, I spend most of my time writing. But it’s time spent reading that’s most satisfying. Here’s a short (and by no means a complete) list of 10 articles that encapsulate the art of the startup. Most were published during 2009, and I found them educational and full of practical tips that we’ve applied to our business. They’ve also helped me think differently about startups and entrepreneurship. Hope you enjoy reading them as much as I did.
“What Startups Are Really Like” by Paul Graham: This has to be the single best essay I read during 2009. Every entrepreneur should begin the startup journey with this essay. It bottles every essence of entrepreneurship and startups, and is chock-full of practical advise and tips that are applicable to anyone who dares to dream.
“Milestones to Startup Success” by Sean Ellis: Ellis explains the need for minimum viable product, aka MVP, and then outlines how startups can go up his startup pyramid to find success.
“Myth: Entrepreneurship Will Make You Rich” by Eric Ries: “One of the unfortunate side effects of all the publicity and hype surrounding startups is the idea that entrepreneurship is a guaranteed path to fame and riches. It isn’t,” Ries writes in this no-holds-barred essay about the challenges and pitfalls of being a startup founder.
“What Is the Minimum Viable Product?” by Venture Hacks: A great audio conversation on the Venturehacks blog including a slide show.
“The Power of Continuous Improvement” by Mike Speiser: In a guest post for us, Mike talks about the importance of metrics, feedback and how they can drive continuous improvement. Mike’s rules have found eager takers among our team.
“Getting Comfortable With People Who Make You Uncomfortable” by Mike Speiser: In this article, Mike addresses the need for people who challenge conventional wisdom and make everyone around them uncomfortable — which is why every company needs them.
“The Funnel Principle: Software & Making Money” by Tony Wright: It’s good to build great products, but in order to build great companies one needs to have more — a clear path of monetization, an attention magnet, and in general excellence at things beyond product development.
“Does Every Startup Need a Steve Jobs?” by Andrew Chen: A dissection of how insanely great products are built by combining desirability, feasibility and viability. Read this post after reading Wright’s “Funnel Principle.”
“Designing for Social Traction” by Josh Porter
10: “Startup Killer: The Cost of Customer Acquisition” by David Skok: A definitive essay on startup business models, the perils of overoptimism, and the importance of cost of customer acquisitions. Skok is a 3-time entrepreneur with a lifetime of experience.
Bonus links:
Self-serving: “What Every Entrepreneur Can Learn From Derek Jeter” and “What Makes DJ Tick.”
Every startup guy should listen to Jobs’ speech before embarking on their journey.
Om's_Posts
Startup_Strategy
Startups
Uncategorized
from google
“What Startups Are Really Like” by Paul Graham: This has to be the single best essay I read during 2009. Every entrepreneur should begin the startup journey with this essay. It bottles every essence of entrepreneurship and startups, and is chock-full of practical advise and tips that are applicable to anyone who dares to dream.
“Milestones to Startup Success” by Sean Ellis: Ellis explains the need for minimum viable product, aka MVP, and then outlines how startups can go up his startup pyramid to find success.
“Myth: Entrepreneurship Will Make You Rich” by Eric Ries: “One of the unfortunate side effects of all the publicity and hype surrounding startups is the idea that entrepreneurship is a guaranteed path to fame and riches. It isn’t,” Ries writes in this no-holds-barred essay about the challenges and pitfalls of being a startup founder.
“What Is the Minimum Viable Product?” by Venture Hacks: A great audio conversation on the Venturehacks blog including a slide show.
“The Power of Continuous Improvement” by Mike Speiser: In a guest post for us, Mike talks about the importance of metrics, feedback and how they can drive continuous improvement. Mike’s rules have found eager takers among our team.
“Getting Comfortable With People Who Make You Uncomfortable” by Mike Speiser: In this article, Mike addresses the need for people who challenge conventional wisdom and make everyone around them uncomfortable — which is why every company needs them.
“The Funnel Principle: Software & Making Money” by Tony Wright: It’s good to build great products, but in order to build great companies one needs to have more — a clear path of monetization, an attention magnet, and in general excellence at things beyond product development.
“Does Every Startup Need a Steve Jobs?” by Andrew Chen: A dissection of how insanely great products are built by combining desirability, feasibility and viability. Read this post after reading Wright’s “Funnel Principle.”
“Designing for Social Traction” by Josh Porter
10: “Startup Killer: The Cost of Customer Acquisition” by David Skok: A definitive essay on startup business models, the perils of overoptimism, and the importance of cost of customer acquisitions. Skok is a 3-time entrepreneur with a lifetime of experience.
Bonus links:
Self-serving: “What Every Entrepreneur Can Learn From Derek Jeter” and “What Makes DJ Tick.”
Every startup guy should listen to Jobs’ speech before embarking on their journey.
january 2010 by doffm
related tags
500_startups ⊕ @CNN ⊕ Airy_Labs ⊕ aisle411 ⊕ amazon ⊕ AnchorFree ⊕ Android_apps ⊕ Apple ⊕ apple_card ⊕ Apps ⊕ astrid ⊕ box.net ⊕ Broadband ⊕ California_Israel_Chamber_of_Commerce ⊕ Cambrian_Explosion ⊕ Capitally_Disciplined_Startups ⊕ Chris_Dixon ⊕ CICC ⊕ Citrix ⊕ Citrix_Systems ⊕ cloud ⊕ CloudMine ⊕ CNN_Big_Tech ⊕ creaza ⊕ data_portability ⊕ Dave_Chase ⊕ Demo_Day ⊕ Disrupt ⊕ DisruptSF2011 ⊕ DreamIT_Ventures ⊕ DuckDuckGo ⊕ Dylan's_Desk ⊕ e-commerce ⊕ ec2 ⊕ Enterprise ⊕ enterprise_tools ⊕ entrepreneurs ⊕ Entrepreneur_Corner ⊕ Extreme_Venture_Partners ⊕ eyenetra ⊕ facebook ⊕ Facebook_Photos ⊕ Fiber_To_The_Home ⊕ Flickr ⊕ Founder_stories ⊕ funding ⊕ Fundings_&_Exits ⊕ Gaming ⊕ Genbook ⊕ GOOG ⊕ google ⊕ google_ventures ⊕ HealthTech ⊕ Health_tech ⊕ high-performance_computing ⊕ Hotspot_Shield ⊕ hpc ⊕ IAC ⊕ incubator ⊕ incubators ⊕ innovate ⊕ innovation ⊕ instapaper ⊕ interactive_corporation ⊕ interviews ⊕ iphone_apps ⊕ Israel ⊕ jiff ⊕ Kicksend ⊕ Liz's_Posts ⊕ Location ⊕ location-based ⊕ Marketing_strategy ⊕ Media ⊕ mobile ⊕ Mobile_Apps ⊕ mobile_payments ⊕ morganthaler_ventures ⊕ New_York ⊕ Nexus_Venture_Partners ⊕ NYT_Company_News ⊕ Om's_Posts ⊕ Opinion ⊕ Path ⊕ Photography ⊕ photos ⊕ photo_sharing_apps ⊕ photo_stream ⊕ pics ⊕ pictures ⊕ Plug_and_Play_Tech_Center ⊕ postagram ⊕ postcard ⊕ productivity ⊕ productivity_apps ⊕ productivity_tool ⊕ productivity_tools ⊕ proust ⊕ Resume ⊕ Reviews ⊕ RFI ⊕ rock_health ⊕ scott_heiferman ⊕ Sharefile ⊕ sharing ⊕ snapjoy ⊕ Social ⊕ social_networking ⊕ social_networks ⊕ Stacey's_Posts ⊕ stamped ⊕ start-ups ⊕ startup ⊕ startups ⊖ startup_incubators ⊕ startup_profile ⊕ startup_profiles ⊕ startup_strategy ⊕ SYN_Straight_News ⊕ task_management ⊕ task_manager ⊕ TC ⊕ tcdisrupt ⊕ TCTV ⊕ technology ⊕ tech_incubators ⊕ Tech_Stars ⊕ Triposo ⊕ Twitter ⊕ Uncategorized ⊕ Union_Square_Ventures ⊕ vc_funded_startups ⊕ VC_funding ⊕ VentureBeat ⊕ venture_capital ⊕ Verizon ⊕ video_interview ⊕ video_interviewing ⊕ visualization ⊕ Visually ⊕ vizualize.me ⊕ VZ ⊕ Y-Combinator ⊕Copy this bookmark: