When asked what is the biggest difference between Los Angeles and Silicon Valley accelerators, five from LA told me they’re more focused on startups that don’t take years to start monetizing. Leaders from Amplify, Launchpad LA, MuckerLab, Start Engine, and Originate Labs convened at this weekend’s Silicon Beach Festival in Venice, California. They explained that since there’s less capital down South, they’re less concentrated on long-term plays, even ones that could return bigger multiples down the line.
So Bay Area startups in ecommerce, media, advertising, and fashion looking to raise money or enter an accelerator might consider a drive down the Pacific Coast Highway. → Read More
If you’re in business, you can’t ignore China. The economy is booming and it is the manufacturing capital of the world. In the last six years as founder and CEO of Kogan, I’ve travelled to China countless times. Each time, I fall more in love with it. It’s developing very quickly and has rapidly become a global commerce hub. A lot of people still think of China as cheap and dirty – this may have been the case once, but not anymore. The hotels I stay at in China are nicer and more luxurious than any hotel I’ve seen in Manhattan.
In this two-part series, I’ll share the lessons I’ve learned and the approaches that have worked best for me to avoid hassle, find great deals and ensure our products remain the best value money can find.
In part one, I’ll share some killer tips that I’ve learned during my time in China – all of which have helped me keep the upper hand in critical business negotiations. In part two, I’ll share practical advice to help you navigate China’s complex business landscape. → Read More
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It’s been a long time since Sony released a smartphone in the U.S. market that had a chance of hitting it off with customers — too many of their recent releases have either been meant for niche markets (the Xperia Play 4G) or were expensive and unlocked (nearly all of these things).
That said, they’re looking to give it another go with the new Xperia ion, and it certainly looks like it could go all the way. It’s the company’s first LTE-enabled phone to land in the United States, it packs a much touted camera, and it’ll only set AT&T customers back $99. What’s not to like?
Read on for all the juicy details.
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Facebook has created a new feature that lets users find friends and potential friends nearby. Currently Initially called “Friendshake” and also accessible through a URL that is the abbreviation of “find friends nearby” (http://fb.com/ffn), it’s another step in Facebook furthering its reach into mobile, and creating services to meet new people — rather than building up more connectivity with the ones you already know. And, in keeping with Facebook’s emphasis on being as ubiquitous as possible, for now it’s not being delivered in a native app, but via the mobile web. Update: it’s accessible via Facebook’s mobile apps, too (see below the break for more details, including comments from the developer).
The service comes a little under two months after Facebook announced the acquisition of Glancee, a mobile app that helps users discover people near them with similar interests, whose three founders have now joined Facebook and closed down their app. It is not clear if Friendshake has been created out of that acquisition, or if it has been developed along an altogether different thread — or how the functions of the two may eventually dovetail.
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When I’m not writing for TechCrunch, my “day job” is working with healthcare providers the disruptive innovators who are reinventing healthcare and slaying the healthcare cost beast as a byproduct. In some cases, these are entrepreneurs. In most other cases, they are pioneers within existing healthcare providers fighting to make changes within otherwise slow-moving organizations. → Read More
Right now, someone is tinkering with a billion dollar secret — they just don’t know it yet. “What people aren’t telling you,” Peter Thiel taught his class at Stanford, “can very often give you great insight as to where you should be directing your attention.”
Secrets people can’t or don’t want to divulge are a common thread behind Thiel’s most lucrative investments such as Facebook and LinkedIn, as well as several other breakout companies of the past decade. The kinds of truths Thiel discusses — the kinds that create billion dollar businesses in just a few years — are not held exclusively by those with deep corporate pockets. In fact, the person most likely to build the next great tech business will likely be a scrappy entrepreneur with a big dream, a sharp mind, and a valuable secret. → Read More
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In a surprising move this week, with just a short post on their Developer Blog, Facebook has ended their three-year experi ment with the virtual currency of Facebook Credits.
Credits will be phased out by the end of the year and users will simply have a Facebook account with a balance measured in Dollars in the U.S., or whatever currency is native to a country. Facebook’s new member accounts will function similarly to an iTunes account: a user adds a credit card to their account, digital goods can be purchased and immediately charged to the card on file, or can be drawn from stored value in that account. If you are given a Facebook gift card, in card or digital form, you would add that reward code to your account and that value would be stored until you use it – just like an iTunes gift card is added to your account and stored until spent. → Read More
Back in May, Josh James, the co-founder of analytics company Omniture and now CEO of business intelligence startup Domo, announced an eyebrow-raising idea: He was kicking off an eight-week initiative that would require every one of Domo’s 130 employees to become active on social media. Now James says the initiative is paying off, and he has numbers and anecdotes to back it up. → Read More
I love me some subscription commerce. Whether it be getting new underwear sent to me in the mail, or having someone pick out shirts for me, I love the idea of paying a flat fee and having shit just show up at my doorstep once a month. It’s even better if whatever’s being sent is kind of a surprise.
That said, there’s a recent trend in subscription commerce that’s disturbingly popped up and recently been flagged in the TechCrunch tips line: The rise of the subscription condom service. Over the past few weeks, it’s been suggested that we (separately) look into DollarRubberClub.com, as well as Rubber of the Month Club. A cursory Google search reveals that there are others, like Lucky Bloke — “the ultimate condom subscription service,” it claims — and Sir Richard’s Subscription Condom Service. → Read More
A lot has been written about the real estate turf war between San Francisco and Silicon Valley. Most point out that many of the developers these companies target live in the city. The nightlife, walkability, and culture are identified as reasons for the trend. But if the heart of Silicon Valley is losing its allure to startups, why is there no real estate space available? The answer is that Silicon Valley is as hot as ever and here’s why.
The basic premise of these reports is that San Francisco is winning the startup real estate battle right now as companies like Zynga, Twitter, and AirBnB are choosing to put down big roots in the city. This trend is not new to the Valley. Downtown Palo Alto has been ground zero through numerous growth cycles, including this one.
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If you’re headed away this summer, leave the Knut behind to keep and eye on things. This small, Wi-Fi-capable widget can transmit various measurements to your iPhone anywhere in the world.
The Knut is a Kickstarter project by Richard Pasek and Jay Gondelman in Boston. They’re looking for $80 per Knut and it has various sensors built in as well as functional sensors for various other measurements. → Read More
Apple is making potentially significant changes to the search algorithm in the App Store, at least according to some app developers. If you’re a developer or publisher counting on a well-chosen name to help with visibility, things could get tougher from here on out. But if you’re a popular and well-reviewed app, things might be looking up.
This could be an early step in the general revamp of App Store search and discovery that MG Siegler heard about when he broke the news in February that Apple had acquired app discovery startup Chomp. → Read More
The Gillmor Gang — Robert Scoble, John Borthwick, John Taschek, Keith Teare, and Steve Gillmor — found plenty to write home about in Microsoft’s Surface tablets and Windows 8 rewrite of the Windows platform. Coming hard on the WWDC Apple announcements, it’s clear Redmond is stepping up its game.
With Skype and the still-not-closed Yammer acquisitions, Steve Sinofsky is trying to buy his way in to social. But once the smoke clears, straddling the desktop and tablet metaphors may turn out to be the biggest threat to Office yet. The only way to save Office revenue may be to give away social and the hardware to run it. → Read More
Today’s Google Doodle is a working Turing machine that contains six puzzles. Sophia Foster-Dimino on Google’s Doodle team built the app in honor of Alan Turing’s 100th birthday.
What’s a Turing machine? It’s not an actual machine, per se, but a thought experiment that allowed for the advent of digital computing. → Read More
I wanted to have 100,000 Facebook fans for my blog. I don’t have a product to sell. I’m not trying to get advertisers on my blog. I’m not even trying to get more speaking gigs because of my blog. But I believe in the message of my blog and I enjoy having an audience for it. So I wanted to expand that audience.
We have entered the “Choose Yourself” era. No longer do you have to wait for the big media companies to reach down from the heavens and bless you with a column, a book advance, a TV show, a job, a career, money, or even customers. In 2008 the tide came in, the financial system collapsed, and we saw that the myth of corporate safety was just another example of the brainwashing that we had undergone since we were kids. → Read More
Suppose you dropped your phone — a real fall, like from the second story — and it broke. You’re picking up the pieces, cursing and trying to think of the last time you backed up your contacts, when you notice something. Deep within the phone’s hardware, hidden from everyday use, you find a message — etched right onto the chassis.
What kind of message? Let’s say you found a Darwin fish, or the letters YHWH? Or perhaps something a little more difficult to decipher — a code or symbol of some kind, not an inventory number, but still something meant to be seen and read? What would you make of it?
This isn’t actually a hypothetical situation or something out of a Neal Stephenson book. Apple has actually done this — and the symbol they’ve chosen is as arcane and ominous as it is unmistakable. → Read More
What’s wrong with this picture? It’s 2012, cheap broadband is ubiquitous in the developed world, and TV still isn’t dead. In fact it’s thriving. Sure, for the first time ever, Nielsen says more people watch videos on the Internet than on a TV–albeit barely–but if you look at how much time is spent on the two, there’s no comparison: TV utterly dominates. Which explains why, again according to Nielsen, more money is spent on TV advertising than all other ad platforms combined.
A few doomsayers say the TV industry “may be starting to collapse” and that excessive production costs are its weak spot. Yeah, if only. Television as constituted today makes no sense at all; it’s a kludged-up legacy system that’s enormously painful and expensive to maintain. But TV’s entrenched economic interests and cultural inertia are so pathological that even HBO GO wouldn’t make sense as a standalone app–as HBO confirms–and the rumors of a brand-new Apple TV ecosystem were, alas, dead wrong. Sure, YouTube, Netflix, and Hulu are mighty powers in their own right, but if even nigh-omnipotent Apple has given up, what hope do they have?
Funny you should ask. I just happen to have an answer. → Read More
I like Joe Fernandez a lot, more than I like most people. He’s a true entrepreneur and badass, asking specifically to be onstage with me at LeWeb London because he knew that I had serious misgivings about his product, Klout. He told me he wanted a challenge and to put himself outside his comfort zone, both before and after the interview. Cool, anyone who’s not scared of being in the hot seat garners my immediate esteem. → Read More
It was only a matter of time before healthcare providers would start prescribing mHealth apps as soon as they proved to be as or more effective than prescription drugs. Happtique, a mobile health application store and app management solution startup will launch a trial of mRx. They claim this is the first program to enable doctors to prescribe mHealth apps to patients. mHealth pioneers are calling it an “app formulary” that complements (and competes) with a traditional drug formulary (i.e., the list of approved drugs a clinician can prescribe). → Read More
Unikey Technologies, a company made known by ABC’s Shark Tank for technology that turns your smartphone into a universal door key, has raised $1.1 million according to an SEC filing. The amount appears to be in addition to a $500,000 equity stake raised from Mark Cuban and Kevin O’Leary earlier this year on the season finale of the program.
Once the Unikey locking system is installed in a door, any paired Android, iOS, or BlackBerry device can unlock it. The system is not dependent on an app, but rather the system unlocks the door by simply detecting when the phone is in the immediate vicinity. “As long as I’m in range of the lock, I can control it,” said Unikey founder and CEO Phil Dumas on the show. → Read More
San Francisco, CA
San Francisco, California
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