Oh the “where do I find hot startups?” problem … VCs have been grappling with this for ages, resorting to such avenues as rampant gossiping, reading TechCrunch, informally tapping into early stage investor networks for intros to later stage deals and apparently, according to PandoDaily’s Sarah Lacy, setting up formal programs where entrepreneurs who are “network rich and cash poor” serve as deal scouts. Makes sense.
Thus becoming the platform for startup discovery presents a huge opportunity for anyone who comes up with a grand solution: And, because which hot startup isn’t mobile these days, Apple itself is rumored to be trying to solve the problem with its own app discovery and promotion platform, aiming to go beyond its Featured section and expand into more intensive forms of app publicity. Its recent acquisition of Chomp harkens to this ambition and project, though as far as I can tell it still has a long way to go. → Read More
This is the second part in a two-part series on strategic investors in healthcare.
Healthcare IT departments have focused much of their attention on the $19 billion portion of the stimulus bill that is providing billions of subsidies for the adoption of electronic health records. While this is logical given the available money, it is paying for health IT systems optimized for the “do more, bill more” model of reimbursement that is rapidly being replaced by a value and outcomes based – a 180 shift in focus.
It’s hard to argue with modernizing the record-keeping in healthcare that isn’t far beyond how medicine was recorded in the time of Hippocrates. Thousands of lives are saved as a result of this modernization (e.g., avoiding frequent, deadly prescription errors). On the other hand, most companies benefiting from the stimulus have two massive gaps that will need to be addressed for health systems to thrive in the new environment they are facing. → Read More
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AT&T has just announced a new security and home-automation system called Digital Life, which will be an IP-based platform that allows users to monitor and detect activity throughout their house remotely, and “take action” (as AT&T put it) on devices like PCs, tablets, and smartphones.
AT&T actually goes so far as to say “there are no capacity limits to the number and variety of devices [they] can connect to and integrate,” since it’s an all-digital system.
Functions include access to automation, energy and water controls, and security systems. AT&T will thus be introducing a new branch called the Digital Life group, which will work in “AT&T owned-and-operated 24/7 security monitoring centers.” → Read More
Photos, location, professional networking, or all your real-life friends… Instagram, Foursquare, LinkedIn and Facebook lead social networking today because they’ve found existing the types of networks to connect users around.
Now a new generation of startups has been showing up in recent months, trying to nail another type of networking that so far has yielded no big success: small, very personal networks. Like you how use texts with your closest friends.
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Naming your company Thefuture.fm is kind of a bold move. Sure, it’s fun at first, but if things go badly, you’re setting yourself up for lots of bad puns (“No future for Thefuture.fm,” etc.). Luckily, the site seems to be off to a good start.
Founder and CEO David Stein says the service first launched about eight months ago as Dubset, which he now describes as a beta test. After refining and iterating on that initial version, the site relaunched on April 25 under its current, awesomer name. In the first three days after the launch, Thefuture.fm claims to have doubled its user base to more than 100,000. → Read More
The Internet is a lot like the American Dream. It’s this huge opportunity for anyone who wants to make something of themselves — a nearly ubiquitous platform to showcase skills and talents. Yet, it is so incredibly saturated with people trying to do exactly the same thing that the opportunity gets smaller and smaller, shrinking to the size of a pin point as more people hop online.
Countless industries have seen this saturation play a role in who rises to the top, and who fizzles out as one of the millions of never-will-be stars. And porn isn’t exempt from this rule. → Read More
As a resident of NYC, I find little use for the SF Climates iOS app that all of my San Francisco-based friends (read: social media whores) are boasting over today.
But a lot of you do live there, so you might find it useful. Let’s say you live in the Marina and for some reason need to go to the Dogpatch or vice versa but you’re unsure what the weather is like. Or maybe the grit of the Mission is getting to be a bit much and you want to hang out with a bunch of babies in Noe Valley. Do you pack a sweatshirt or put on shorts? → Read More
With all the press releases masquerading as news, Techmeme has felt more like Craiglist for articles in the past few months, or is it years. But recently we finally got some real news, when Google of all people released Gdrive. We knew of course that it was coming, but not how it would actually feel when it got here. I haven’t signed up yet, but already it’s a big deal for me.
I haven’t signed up because the iOS versions are not done, or ready, or whatever imminent means. When they are shipped, I’m there. Gdrive is the kind of disruption that lurks beneath the surface, behind the marketing campaign, irrespective of even Google’s position in the market. It is like Gmail was when it started, a harbinger with real muscle that marks the beginning of something bigger than a single vendor.
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Despite fears that streaming access cannibalizes sales, classical music record label X5 tells me when it launched an app within Spotify and saw streams of one album increase 412% in a month, that album’s iTunes sales shot up 50%. The Swedish label’s “The 50 Greatest Pieces of Classical Music” soon reached #1 on the iTunes Classical charts, and broke into the iTunes Top 200 album charts for the first time, hitting #152.
The stats back up claims by some record labels and Spotify’s CEO Daniel Ek that there’s no evidence of Spotify or other streaming services negatively impacting music sales. More data like this could encourage artists and labels to promote their streaming music presences, and push acts like The Black Keys and Paul McCartney who’ve pulled their catalogues from Spotify to come back. → Read More
After a long vacation, TechCrunch Cribs is back! But as TechCrunch alum Jason Kincaid left us with some pretty big shoes to fill, for our first installment we decided to start with a company that knows the Cribs drill already — enterprise cloud storage company Box. → Read More
Congratulations. You’re the CEO of a startup. You’re doing the hardest job in business. You’ve raised money from venture capitalists and turned down better-paying jobs elsewhere. You’ve mastered complicated things such as capitalization tables and common things, such as payroll. You’ve fought with competitors, coworkers, friends and even yourself without losing your way or your wits. You’ve inspired others to work beside you each day to make your dream a reality. I salute you.
Now, everybody else calling himself or herself a CEO—listen up, this is for you: stop it. Just stop calling yourself a CEO. → Read More
SolarCity, the cleantech company backed by Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, filed for an IPO this past week. But there’s hardly been a peep about it compared to most offerings.
That’s because under the recently passed JOBS Act, SolarCity didn’t have to publicly share anything about its financial performance when it filed. This is unlike LinkedIn and Pandora, which had to publicly release three years of data in filings that were more than 150 pages long. In SolarCity’s case, the company merely put out a two-paragraph statement saying that it had confidentially filed with the SEC and planned to have an IPO.
This is the new world under the JOBS Act, which was hastily passed last month. SolarCity qualifies as an “emerging growth” company, or one that’s had less than $1 billion in total revenues in the most recent year. → Read More
One of today’s most challenging yet promising markets is the educational system. If you want to see startups hungry to disrupt an industry, look no further. Founders are trying to solve the problems plaguing our education system: including reconciling student debt, providing students with the skills required to land a job both before and after graduation, and offering the best course material online regardless of age, location and educational level.
Millions of people are headed to the Internet to learn. And now everyone, from professors to entrepreneurs, are looking to launch a platform to solve the problem of a broken traditional educational system — And many believe that Silicon Valley will have the answers. → Read More
“Money alone isn’t enough to bring happiness . . . happiness [is] when you’re actually truly ok with losing everything you have.” – Tony Hsieh, Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose
Disclaimer: This article’s sole purpose is to address the core principles of advertising in a new and edgy way. This is not for the faint of heart or those highly sensitive to socially charged public issues. So suck it up and buckle up. You’re about to be taken to school (of hard knocks). Class is now in session. → Read More
It was less than a week ago that Tenthbit, the developers of the buzzy, new social-networking-app-for-couples (or other partners) Pair, picked up a $4.2 million seed round, money the founders said would be used to expand its mobile development and design teams. Now it looks like some of those funds might also need to go to legal bills.
Tenthbit is getting sued by pair Networks, a hosting and domain registration company based in Pittsburgh, for trademark infringement.
Tenthbit, meanwhile, has also sued pair Networks, to prevent the other suit from going ahead. Pair Networks is asking for an injunction on Pair the app, as well as “other relief as this Court deems appropriate.” Tenthbit argues the two do not compete directly, and would therefore not result in any brand confusion. → Read More
For years, companies have been known to flock more to SF’s southern suburbs or to San Jose some 50 miles south, where space is often cheaper and the tax situation has historically been more lax. But surrounded by tech-focused supporters such as Ron Conway and Marissa Mayer, Ed Lee has made it a major priority of his administration to bring more technological innovation and startup businesses into the city of San Francisco. → Read More
For anyone who enjoys (or has a knack for) planning, organizing a hackathon is not terribly difficult: it’s a matter of understanding your goals, assessing needs, and figuring out how to bridge the two. Naturally, this is much easier said than done.
The most important part of a hackathon, by far, are the demos. Why else — it’s what makes the event worth attending in the first place. Sponsoring companies wouldn’t offer money to anything that didn’t provide exposure. Developers wouldn’t forsake sleep if they couldn’t show an eager audience the hacks they built overnight.
Pulling off demos at Photo Hack Day and Photo Hack Day 2, for example, has proven to be a continuous learning process, with a much more public (and much less forgiving) learning curve. There’s no need to be a n00b, I’ve done a lot of the screwing up for you. → Read More
An automated Facebook spam filter, not purposeful censorship, is to blame for startup enthusiast Robert Scoble and some other commenters getting blocked, according to a company spokesperson.
Users attempting to comment on blog posts have recently been prevented from doing so, with warning text from the company saying that “this comment can’t be posted” because it is “irrelevant or inappropriate.” We’ve heard back from Facebook, and here’s what it says has been going on. → Read More
As we put more of our private information online and entrust it to web services, privacy breaches become almost inevitable. One major problem with online privacy is that there is really no enforceable chain of confidentiality. So when a third-party service makes your information available to another party, things can get complicated. A new paper by Samford University law professor Woodrow Harzog argues that traditional privacy laws aren’t the best ways to protect private information online. Instead, he suggests an approach that more like the U.S. HIPAA rules that currently govern how private health information can be shared between your health provider and third parties. The system he proposes would be based on established principles in confidentiality and contract law.
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Updated. Today was just another Saturday morning in blog land when Robert Scoble, the well-known tech startup enthusiast, went to post a comment on a Facebook post written by Carnegie Mellon student (and TechCrunch commenter extraordinaire) Max Woolf about the nature of today’s tech blogging scene. Scoble’s comment itself was pretty par-for-the-course — generally agreeing with Woolf’s sentiments and adding in his own two cents.
But when Scoble went to click post, he received an odd error message: → Read More
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