Editor’s note: Ross Rubin is principal analyst at Reticle Research and blogs at Techspressive.
In last week’s Backed or Whacked, I discussed watches, one of the mixes of fashion and function that many wear every day. Another example of such a combination is eyewear, where crowdfunding endeavors have taken approaches that range from high art to high volume in pursuit of recreational… → Read More
Editor’s note: Michael Chang is CEO of YesVideo, a video-transfer and sharing service.
There are three trends in the world of personal video, and they have one common theme: answering the call of the consumer. Here’s how personal video tech is being affected by consumer demand and what companies like Apple and Google are doing about it. → Read More
Editor’s note: Doug Renert is a co-founding partner of Tandem Capital, Silicon Valley’s first and largest mobile accelerator fund. Follow him on Twitter @dougrenert. Mary Meeker explains in her oft-cited report that the world’s 1.1 billion smartphone users still comprise only 17 percent of mobile subscribers. Yet, these users have tripled mobile Internet access over the last two… → Read More
Editor’s note: Michael Weinberg is vice president at Public Knowledge where he focuses primarily on copyright, issues before the FCC and emerging technologies like 3D printing.
Mashups are one of the great art forms of our time. Although remixes, mashups, sampling, and collage predate the Internet by decades (if not centuries), easy and accessible digital tools have allowed anyone to remix… → Read More
It’s not if, but when. Between crooks, hackers, and foreign governments, Facebook probably can’t avoid a serious user data breach forever. When it happens, Facebook may never be able to quiet fears that “personal data isn’t safe there”. That could cause a chilling effect on sharing, jeopardize its future in commerce, and cut its lifetime short. → Read More
Editor’s note: Leonid (“Lenny”) Kravets is a patent attorney at Panitch, Schwarze, Belisario and Nadel, LLP in Philadelphia, PA, focusing on patent prosecution and intellectual property transactions in computer-related technology areas.
One of the main changes resulting from the passage of the America Invents Act (AIA) is the transition of U.S. patent law from a “first-to-invent”… → Read More
Palantir just scooped up some fresh minds to aid its mission of analyzing the world’s information. Today Y Combinator Summer 2012 startup Voicegem announced its team is joining Palantir, and it will shut down its voice email service in mid-March. Voicegem had delivered over one million seconds of voice recordings, but now its makers are moving to a team that’s “truly changing the world.” → Read More
Last May, Incident Tech launched the gTar, a guitar with real strings that connected to a smartphone for some amazing sound processing. In the last few months, the founder, Idan Beck and his team have been busy preparing the 800 guitars he pre-sold on Kickstarter for shipment. Theirs is a story of creativity, cool, and the next generation in music technology. I spoke with Idan briefly about his… → Read More
Entrepreneur-turned-investor is a classic story arc in Silicon Valley but recently the plot has earned a twist. Certain operators are foregoing the traditional path of joining a traditional VC to instead create a studio-like holding operation. By doing so, they remain engaged with the grit and grassroots challenges of building a startup. They remain company builders. → Read More
Editor’s note: Andy Rachleff is President and CEO of Wealthfront, an SEC-registered online financial advisor.
Entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley love to talk about disruption, though few know what it really means. They mistake better products for disruptive ones. Silicon Valley was built on a culture of designing products that are “better, cheaper, faster,” but that does not mean they’re… → Read More
The Gillmor Gang — Robert Scoble, Keith Teare, Kevin Marks, John Taschek, and Steve Gillmor — pondered the debatable relationship between Netflix’ House of Cards and the tech community. From HBO’s Jeff Bewkes calling the Kevin Spacey series “pretty good” to Comcast buying the rest of NBC/Universal from GE, the economics of streaming TV took a big leap forward.
Not so much email, which… → Read More
Editor’s note: This guest post is written by Erica Kochi, the co-lead of UNICEF’s Innovation unit. Her team started UNICEF’s open source RapidSMS platform which has been adopted in developing countries worldwide. She co-teaches a class ”Design for Unicef” in NYU’s ITP Program, is a global partner of Stanford’s New Product Design Innovation course, and has lectured at Harvard, Yale… → Read More
Editor’s note: Roman Stanek is CEO and founder of GoodData.
Private or public – either scenario for Dell will be interesting to watch. One of the most difficult skills I’ve worked hard to master as an entrepreneur is the ability to see the world six months out. Even more difficult is finding that balance between pleasing shareholders and driving innovation forward, which is why I respect… → Read More
Editor’s note: Vivek Wadhwa is Vice President of Innovation and Research at Singularity University, Fellow at Stanford Law School, and Director of Research at the Center for Entrepreneurship and Research Commercialization at Duke University.
Thank you for responding to my TechCrunch post in which I asked you to release your hold on Silicon Valley. I agree with everything you wrote and… → Read More
Editor’s note: Dave Girouard is founder and CEO of Upstart, a company that lets college grads raise capital in exchange for a small share of their future income.
“Nobody uses email anymore – you get too much of it” – Yogi Berra
In last Sunday’s New York Times, we were treated to another rant about how dysfunctional and burdensome email has become. This particular piler-on lays the… → Read More
“Technological revolutions happen in two main phases: the installation phase and the deployment phase,” observes Angel of the Year and new Andreessen Horowitz GP Chris Dixon, who says that the turning point between those phases for the Age of Information is…now.
Meanwhile, “profits have surged as a share of national income, while wages and other labor compensation are down,” notes Paul… → Read More
The Internet makes it easy to collaborate across borders. But despite the rise of remote work and virtual teams, founders still need to travel for business sometimes. For some, travel practically becomes the job. And while data and capital now flow virtually unrestricted across borders, physical border crossing have gotten no easier. That’s causing headaches for global startups. → Read More
Editor’s note: Taylor Buley is a senior developer at Conde Nast’s PARADE. He’s a former staff writer at Forbes and graduated from University of Pennsylvania and Stanford.
On Thursday Lars Rasmussen, Google Maps co-inventor turned Facebook Graph Search guru, took to Reddit for an “ask me anything” open thread. The Australian native avoided questions about the competitive landscape for Graph… → Read More
Lonely? Wish you had someone to geek out with about the weird stuff you’re into? Sodisco wants to find you a play date. It’s the soon-to-launch startup from Christian Taylor, ex-CEO of Facebook e-commerce platform Payvment that just got bought by Intuit. Taylor called me up to reveal what Sodisco’s all about: analyzing your interests and introducing you to your nearest clones. → Read More
In an effort to show the rest of the corporate world how “cool” and “spontaneous” their jobs are, hipster office workers around the globe have been making “Harlem Shake” tribute videos this week. Perhaps because we spend the most time online, the startup community is the dryest kindling to create viral video fire: In addition to Facebook, Google, Groupon, Path and Intel, yes Intel, have succumbed… → Read More
It was just a matter of time before Twitter shut the blogging platform Posterous down, after acquiring the company last March. The team had already been folded into the flock, but this means that nobody has to worry about pesky service interruptions of keeping the service’s diminishing number of users happy. The site will be shutting down on April 30th, but it’s not a completely sad… → Read More
This week’s Ask A VC show put Bain Capital Ventures’ managing director Ajay Agarwal in the hot seat. Agarwal heads the firm’s recently launched Palo Alto office. → Read More
One nifty feature of HTML5 is that apps can store data locally on your computer and have it available even when you are offline. Google today introduced a new API for Chrome, the Sync FileSystem API, that offers an app-private sandboxed file storage system, similar to what’s already in the HTML5 specs. The interesting new feature here is that this data is also automatically synchronized across… → Read More
A number of Silicon Valley investors are starting the long weekend with a smile. That’s thanks to Xoom Corporation, the online money transfer technology and services company, which made a very successful debut today on the NASDAQ stock market.
The company’s stock zoomed (sorry, I had to do it) up a full 59 percent from its $16 per share initial public offering price to close out the trading… → Read More
As you might have noticed, TechCrunch went down entirely (thanks to WordPress VIP), sporting a fun “502″ error. If you’re not sure what that means, here’s the skinny on why you might see a 502 error: The server, while acting as a gateway or proxy, received an invalid response from the upstream server it accessed in the attempt to fulfill the request. If you know exactly… → Read More
Analytics company KISSMetrics has acquired SourceNinja, a startup offering to help companies manage security flaws in their open source libraries.
KISSmetrics co-founder and head of product Hiten Shah made it sound like a pretty standard talent acquisition. Shah’s company won’t be using the Source Ninja technology, but it’s bringing on the startup’s two founders (and only team members)… → Read More
With the looming threat of faceless drones buzzing around American cities, congress has proposed banning armed drones and regulating their use for law enforcement surveillance. The Preserving American Privacy Act introduced by U.S. Rep. Zoe Lofgren (CrunchGov Grade: A) would require warrants for unmanned aircraft systems to collect personally identifiable information and a public notice to collect… → Read More
GitHub has open-sourced “Boxen” an automated way to set up GitHub on just unboxed Macs.
The one-command automation tool promises that a developer can install GtHub with one-command and be ready within 30-minutes to start coding. → Read More
TV commercials that automatically play could soon hit Facebook’s news feed. This week Facebook VP of Business David Fischer admitted auto-play video ads might be distracting, but said “I believe there are ways we could do it.” Fischer said during his Stanford Future Of Media Conference keynote that he admired YouTube’s video ads. But auto-play video spots could be annoying in the quiet news feed. → Read More
Google Plus experienced an outage this morning, and almost no one noticed. Gizmodo poked fun. Engadget wrote a few sentences. Someone posted it to Hacker News. Where it gained zero comments. Google+, reportedly the fastest-growing social network in history (or fastest-growing “thingy” ever), and reportedly the second-biggest social network worldwide, experiences an outage, and nothing hits … → Read More
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