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“Klout for Pinterest” may be a catchy company description, bu taking it too literally may lead to legal trouble.
Startup PinClout launched about a week ago, and its name seemed to make the company’s mission clear ― to measure influence on fast-growing Pinterest. And there’s been positive interest, with some tech press coverage and what co-founder Chris Fay said is an average of 2,000 to 3,000 unique visitors every day. However, the company just received a from Klout’s attorney asking it to “immediately cease and desist from all use of or plans to use the PINCLOUT mark and the www.pinclout.com domain name.” → Read More
For the past six years, any startup touching the cloud storage space has lived in anticipation and fear of Google’s entry into the market. G(od) Drive’s arrival was meant to instantly commoditize existing offerings, kill all future opportunity for new players, and leave a charred ecosystem in its wake as it battled Microsoft and Apple for control of our online lives and content. This was seen as all but a forgone conclusion among investors, press, analysts, and even competing startups since 2006 and beyond. And even beyond that.
But the Google Drive never came. Why? → Read More
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Every year, Y Combinator Demo Day, where the latest batch of incubated startups make their pitch to investors, seems to get a little bigger. Now, for the first time since the event began in 2005, it’s moving to a new home ― the Computer History Museum.
At the last Demo Day, in August (they’re held twice a year), you could already sense that the gathering was outgrowing YC headquarters in Mountain View. Organizers pushed out the walls to accommodate a larger audience, and in order to speed through the 63 presenters (an increase of nearly 50 percent), each company was limited to a few minutes of speaking, meaning they had to give rapid-fire pitches instead of full demos. There was even a tiny stage erected for the demos. → Read More
The crowds and hype of South By Southwest make the massive Austin tech and media conference the perfect place for launching, well, any sort of app that needs crowds and hype to break out of tech circles and into the mainstream. So what can we expect to blow up next week, like Twitter, Foursquare, GroupMe and Beluga have in past years?
Highlight is what I’m placing my bets on — and not for what it is today, but for what it could become. That is, the long-sought replacement for business cards. → Read More
“We have trained, hired, and rewarded people to be cowboys. But it’s pit crews that we need,” said Atul Gawande — a surgeon and Harvard professor who writes for The New Yorker in his copious spare time — in a recent TED talk. He was talking about doctors, but what tech profession might fit that description as well? Yes, that’s right. You there, huddled over the IDEs on your MacBook Pros. Step forward, software developers.
Coding has always been seen as lone-ranger work; witness the opening scene in The Social Network. Despite managers’ dreams of programmers as fungible units, it’s nearly universally accepted that a great developer is ten times as productive as a mediocre one, and/or that a small team of the software equivalent of the Special Forces can code rings around an army of hundreds of grunts. The flip side is that one cowboy coder’s bad decisions can cripple you; maybe immediately, or maybe next year, when you suddenly discover that your organization has quietly racked up so much technical debt that it has become the software equivalent of Greece.
There are various ways to try to mitigate this risk. One of the more extreme calls for all development to be performed by pairs of programmers: two coders at one keyboard, at all times, with almost no exceptions. The idea (to oversimplify a bit) is that a second mind will sanity-check every bad idea and support every good one, so you–counterintuitively–wind up with higher per-programmer productivity. Legendary development shops like San Francisco’s Pivotal Labs and Toronto’s Xtreme Labs(1) have adopted a 100 percent pair programming mindset, with considerable success.
Great! Problem solved, right?
…Not so fast.
→ Read More
As tech becomes the world’s hottest subject and one of its few growth sectors, the international borders are straining as talent moves around the globe in search of the best startups and projects. European countries are increasingly alive to this, and we’ve seen huge efforts made by tech celebrities to lobby the White House over the Startup Visa concept. But it seems the news that the tech industry is now a big deal had not reached a certain immigration official at Dublin Airport today.
An unnamed officer today turned away one of the world’s top UX guys from entering Ireland because they didn’t believe his “story”. The “story” turned out to be told by one Brian Flanagan – a name normally recognised as being Irish in extraction, but more to the point, Flanagan is currently working with one Joi Ito on a project.
The problem was that the official simply did not buy the idea that UX is a “real job” and promptly sent him off to a waiting room where he was due to be deported back to the U.S. from where he’d traveled.
Despite telling officials he was in Ireland to HIRE people, he was told bluntly: “You couldn’t be hiring people, you’re – like – 23!” → Read More
The Gillmor Gang ― John Borthwick, Doc Searls, Robert Scoble, John Taschek, and Steve Gillmor ― go through an entire show (almost) without mentioning Apple’s big event next week. Instead, we discuss Netflix’ new 26 hour movie model, why news silos can be good for you, the relationship between the Republican primary process and the secret source of innovation, and Cluetrain vs. the carriers.
Doc’s theory that Verizon killed fiber to get into the mobile market certainly does raise some eyebrows, but @scobleizer is happy just sucking down data because he’s living in the future. Me ― I’ve been living in 1919 and Downton Abbey, waiting for Mad Men to return. So it goes in the Land of Licensing, where the only thing we own is the electric bill. → Read More
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We’ve found Pinterest clones galore since the social pinboard site first launched, but it would seem that the fad is going in a new direction. Recently I stumbled upon Manteresting.com, a Pinterest for men, and couldn’t help but seek out the founders for a quick little interview.
In it, co-founder Brandon and I discuss what it means to be a clone, how Manteresting plans on differentiating itself, and whether or not the user experience is heightened by drawling a line between the two genders. (Unfortunately, co-founder Jesse Michelsen wasn’t able to speak with us.) → Read More
Over the past few weeks, when I’ve visited several startup incubators from Stanford’s Start X, to Los Angeles’ Start Engine, to the NewMe Accelerator, I have noticed many cloud computing companies hoping to get these startups to choose them.
Some of the cloud computing companies are throwing tons of goodies at these startup incubators or accelerators. Rackspace, where I work, sponsors startups at Techstars, Founder’s Den, and other places where startups congregate.
Why? → Read More
Houseplants can be hard to care for, even when watered regularly on a sunny windowsill. A new device from Swiss startup Koubachi takes the guesswork out of plant care through real-time monitoring and notifications when the plant needs attention. → Read More
Oprah Winfrey recently interviewed Anthony Robbins, who talked about “how we’re defined by the stories we tell ourselves”.
Last month, I met two investors; one of them asked how come I’d never raised capital.?I answered with the “story” I’d told for 6 years to the point I believed it: “No one really wants to invest in a producer of video content based in Montreal.”
→ Read More
There are two sayings on the back of every Apple product: Designed By Apple in California and Assembled in China. These statements attempt to say that even though the products might be assembled in a different country, Apple is an American company — a fact Apple proclaimed loudly today with a new web page titled Creating jobs through innovation.
Apple has been under fire lately regarding its overseas manufacturing partners. Apple hired the Fair Labor Association to conduct voluntary audits of the final assembly partners, including Foxconn’s massive Asian facilities. But consumers and activists alike aren’t buying it. It’s a smokescreen, they say. Foxconn will just hide the children and give everyone a new pillow prior to inspector’s arrival. This has rightly put Apple on the defensive. → Read More
Mark this up as one more crucial chapter in the much-thumbed book called “The Consumerization of IT”: a new app has launched from a Y Combinator-backed startup that offers builders the ability to store, manage and view blueprints on and iPad tablet.
The unique selling point for PlanGrid, as the app is called, is that it promises to present building blueprints in a far more efficient way than they have been presented before.
But on a more general level, PlanGrid is a sign of how the iOS platform is maturing and attracting a new wave of developers who target specific enterprise verticals with solutions tailored to their business needs. → Read More
Social game-maker Playdom officially launched Marvel: Avengers Alliance on Thursday, and executive producer Chia Chin Lee says the title is already disproving some of the common assumptions about social games.
The big assumption: that men don’t like to share their activity in social games the way that women do. That could be a problem for Avengers Alliance, since a game about superheroes would probably skew male. But during the beta test period, when the game was played by tens of thousands of users, it actually saw 45 percent more viral installs compared to most Playdom titles, and in fact men were four to six times more likely to send in-game messages. → Read More
Random House, the world’s largest publisher of the kinds of books you and I read, has made some adjustments to the way it sells e-books to libraries. Notably, they have tripled the price of many titles. Librarians across the country are expressing their discontent.
The changes were telegraphed by an announcement a month ago that suggested prices would be going up soon, and most expected significant increases — but across the board popular genres and titles have gone up as much as 300%. Nothing is offered below $25, and some common titles are going for above $100.
As Kathy Petlewski, a librarian in Plymouth, puts it: “The first thing that popped into my mind was that Random House must really hate libraries.” → Read More
The tech world woke up today to reports of an imminent Apple TV, as Apple works to solidify deals with content providers. The rumored television product could indeed be ground-breaking, not just for television, but for computing as a whole. We’re hearing exactly what Nick Bilton reported earlier this year, that Apple is going to integrate Siri into Apple TV as well as other iOS devices.
In fact a multi-platform Siri could be unveiled as early as next week, when Apple announces the iPad 3. → Read More
When I was in Barcelona this week, I met up with Dennis Crowley, the CEO of Foursquare, just after he had gotten off stage from a keynote presentation with the CEOs of Nokia and HTC at the Mobile World Congress event.
The check-in app that was once little known outside of the world of tech early-adopters may only have around 15 million users, but that number has actually made it a leader in its field, and that has amplified the company (and Crowley). → Read More
MindJolt, the gaming company led by MySpace co-founder Chris DeWolfe, recently announced that it’s changing its name to the Social Gaming Network. DeWolfe spoke to me earlier this week about the name change, and about his plans for the coming year.
The new company name may sound familiar, because MindJolt actually acquired SGN last year. (SGN founder Shervin Pishevar is now a managing director at Menlo Ventures.) DeWolfe says the SGN name is a better reflection of what the company is doing.
→ Read More
At the start of 2012 BranchOut had just 1 million monthly active users. Then the professional networking app hired a dedicated growth team, launched a mobile web app, and hit the network effect tipping point. According to AppData, by February it had 2.7 million MAU. Now the Facebook-based BranchOut is blowing up, riding the employment needs of blue-collar workers past the 10 million registration mark to reach 5.5 million MAU, half from overseas.
Take heed?entrepreneurs, this is how you concoct a startup growth formula… → Read More
For Yelp, this has been a very good day. The restaurant review site was received exceptionally well by Wall Street during its first day as a publicly traded company, closing at a price of $24.58 per share, up a full 63 percent from its $15 IPO price. → Read More
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