Yesterday we went over some the ways entrepreneurs can set themselves up for success with VCs by building a relationship far before they ever need funding. Part of that strategy involves picking the right VCs based on experience, success and, yes, even how well you get along. There are several factors that should be considered when finding the…
Is Playtime the Road to Bigtime for Augmented Reality?
Science fiction author and Wired blogger Bruce Sterling passed along the interesting augmented reality video embedded below. It’s an iPhone app from the Japanese company Sazanami called Amazing3D that lets users augment still photographs with playful 3D objects which they can then interact with. While it’s not the most amazing example of…
The Startup Financing Dating Game: Courting Potential Investors
A majority of the advice aimed at helping startups manage relationships with venture capitalists is tailored for when that startup is raising or has raised funding. Certainly a lot of the interaction between startups and investors takes place during and after financing rounds, but there is a lot entrepreneurs can be doing before they seek funding…
GetGlue for iPad Wants to Be Your Couch Surfing Companion
Social check-in app GetGlue has been making significant strides in the mobile space lately with the release of an Android app following success on the iPhone earlier this summer. Today, the popular app which allows users to check-in, rate and like things like movies, TV shows and music, has come to everyone’s favorite “lean back” entertainment…
Amazon Upgrades Checkout, Plays Catch-up with Google, PayPal
It’s been a few years since online retail giant Amazon started offering hosted e-commerce payment services in the form of Checkout by Amazon, and today the company has rolled out some upgraded features that should be good news for merchants. Third-party sellers now have the ability to provide customers with a full-blown Amazon.com experience from…
Valuable Startup Advice Emerges from Debate Between Angels & VCs
One of the big debates in the venture capital industry lately has been the growing argument between so-called “super angels” and traditional VCs – the former being prone to mention how they feel the latter “sucks.” As one would expect, many voices in the industry have made themselves heard in the form of VC blog posts and passionate…
Cross-Platform App Dev Startup Appcelerator Now Fuels 4,000 Apps
Though Mountain View-based startup Appcelerator has been working together for roughly 3 years, it wasn’t until this past March when the venture-backed company launched Titanium to the general public. Appcelerator’s flagship product, Titanium offers a platform on which Web developers can build native mobile applications that are easily portable from…
Yahoo Adds Handwritten Search for Chinese Characters
Google isn’t the only search engine introducing innovative features today. In an effort to be more accessible to international users, especially those new to computing, Yahoo has made it possible for Chinese users to enter searches with their own handwriting. Visitors to Yahoo! Taiwan and Yahoo! Hong Kong can now use a special handwriting panel…
“Intelligent” Stamps and the Maturation of Augmented Reality
Last week, The Royal Mail (the national postal service of the United Kingdom) introduced what it called an “intelligent stamp” that displays a video using augmented reality when it is scanned with a smartphone. Stamps are a heartwarming, sentimental collectors item that often memorialize historic people, things and events. This campaign – part of…
Leaner Than Lean: Is Ultralight a New Class of Startups?
There is a fascinating article online this morning from the San Francisco Chronicle’s Tom Abate in which he profiles Raymond Lei, a 19-year-old Berkeley student and entrepreneur. While still in high school Lei founded ooShirts.com with just a computer and an idea. A few years and just a couple thousand dollars in capital later, Lei runs a…
Did Your Startup Get Work Done This Labor Day?
In a post last week about how to measure the effectiveness of startup employees, we mentioned that perhaps the number of hours worked isn’t the best metric. With that said, this weekend was Labor Day weekend in the U.S., one of the more popular get-out-of-town weekends of the entire calendar, but does that apply for entrepreneurs and startups…
Tumblr’s Improved Attribution is Good News for Publishers
Tumblr is quickly becoming one of the Web’s most popular and unique platforms on which to share and discover interesting content of all media. According to Tumblr, over 5.3 million posts are made each day by the service’s over 7.5 million users. Posts are passed on over and over through Tumblr’s “reblog” feature, but at such a high volume it’s easy…
IBM Helps Tennis Fans “See Through Walls” with Augmented Reality
It may come as a surprise to some but augmented reality and the wide world of sports go way back. Glowing hockey pucks and yellow first-down lines on the football field are just a few of the early examples, but today AR is a part of every-day sports broadcasts. More recently, however, AR has begun to make its way into the live sports experience…
Startup Employee Metrics: Looking Beyond Work Hours
Montreal-based entrepreneur and blogger Ben Yoskovitz knows a thing or two about hiring employees at startups. Yoskovitz formerly founded his own company, Standout Jobs – a tool designed to improve hiring and recruiting techniques for small businesses on the Web. Needless to say, the hiring and performance tracking of employees at the SMB level…
Phases of App Maturity: Roadmapping Your Startup’s Mobile Strategy
Back in August, after the release of the company’s Android app, I spoke with GetGlue CEO Alex Iskold about how his startup prepared itself for making the move to mobile. The app first launched on the Web, and thus the company’s developers were most familiar with languages native to the Web. In order to transition to mobile, Iskold and GetGlue…
One Week Later, Digg VP Talks v4 Launch, Backlash & Future
The Internet was in flames last week as popular social news curation site Digg.com launched the latest iteration of its platform, unleashing a groundswell of outrage and protest from a majority of the site’s loyal users. A week later, Digg has begun to respond to its passionate community, making rapid changes and bug fixes as its exhausted back-end…
Did Steve Jobs Accidentally Confirm Cameras for Next Gen iPads?
There was a flurry of activity today at the YBCA Theater in San Francisco as Apple unveiled a whole slew of new products and services to the public. With all of that information to remember, it’s no surprise that Steve Jobs may have let something slip out that he perhaps wasn’t intending to say. While discussing the latest version of the iOS…
Apple Event Announcements Rundown: iOS 4.1, New iPods, iTunes 10, Ping and Apple TV
It was a busy day at the YBCA Theater in San Francisco today as Apple unveiled a slew of new products and services to its crowd, and to those watching live on the Web. We saw upgrades to the iOS software for all iOS devices (even the iPad), a new line-up of iPods for the holiday season, iTunes 10 with its social network Ping and of course, the…
iTunes Features Location Apps with New “On the Grid” Section
When social networking behemoth Facebook launched its foray into the location game with Places, some declared that apps like Foursquare and Gowalla would be rendered obsolete. The result, so far, has been quite the contrary, as the megaphone of Facebook has helped spread the word about location apps to the laypeople. Today, the mobile location…
Traction for Your Startup: How to Get It & How Much is Enough
You could have the greatest idea for a startup in the world. You could even have the best team working together to build a great product. That’s all fine and dandy, but for first-time entrepreneurs, if you don’t have traction, you’re not going anywhere. Traction means having a measurable set of customers or users that serves to prove to a potential…