“What am I getting arrested for?” said Alvin, a 17-year old New Yorker. “For being a fucking mutt”, the NYPD officer can be clearly heard saying on the recording from Alvin’s iPod, the only known audio from the 1,800″Stop & Frisk” interrogations New York Police do each day.
Watch the video within that demonstrates the power mobile devices give citizens to keep law enforcement in check. → Read More
Lying’s a lot harder than it used to be. Examples –Boss: “Where are you?” Employee: “On my way to the office.” Boss: “Show me.” ||| Mom: “Where are you?” Son: “At Jimmy’s house” Mom: “Show me.”
With geo-coded messages, you have to be where you say you are. Be it a parent or employer, anyone with a little power over you can demand you verify your location. → Read More
Editor’s note: Peter Relan is a former programmer and Internet executive. He founded YouWeb Incubator in 2007, spinning out a string of successful mobile and gaming companies.
Incubators are now an industry segment in their own right. Before starting YouWeb Incubator in 2007, I began to explore the idea of an incubator with friends and colleagues. Most people told me that Idealab and CMGI had… → Read More
I am constantly amazed by the number of startups that build applications and take a huge business risk by building their company on an API call. Countless apps, particularly social apps, have popped up through the last 24 months that have taken data from other systems and re-displayed it in their systems. While there is widespread usage of APIs (and not for a moment am I suggesting that people not… → Read More
Editor’s note: Anthemos Georgiades is founder and CEO of Zumper, a new apartment rental platform. Follow him on Twitter.
Zumper’s seed round story is far from perfect. Like most first-time founders we screwed stuff up at every stage, from having no estimation of what valuation cap we should set, through to really stupid meeting scheduling, which forced us to take several quite important… → Read More
Editor’s note: Nick Sedlet and Elli Sharef are co-founders of HireArt (YC W’12), a platform connecting job-seekers with employers.
Do tech start-ups create or destroy jobs? There is an obvious answer: they do both. In the wake of the most recent jobs report, it has become suddenly fashionable to accuse startups of hindering employment growth. → Read More
There’s no shortage of blog posts, message threads, and Coupa- & Creamery-inspired banter around the topic of fundraising for early-stage startups. And, as nearly every founder knows all too well, the mantra is “always be fundraising.” And yet, at the same time, something doesn’t feel quite right with respect to the manner in which investors and founders court each other today, what with… → Read More
Editor’s note: Oliver Lo is vice president of marketing for App Annie.
Developers the world over are looking to cash in on the Google Play gold mine, and with 137 percent revenue growth in the first seven months of this year, we really can’t blame you for getting a bit excited. It’s easy to get starry-eyed when you see Rovio’s Angry Birds franchise making $100 million a year, not to… → Read More
Editor’s note: Suranga Chandratillake launched blinkx in 2005, ultimately taking it public on the London Stock Exchange in May 2007.
Entrepreneurs have plenty to worry about: raising enough capital, keeping competitors at bay, recruiting talent, acquiring paying customers, rising above the noise, defining new industries and keeping their teams focused on innovating. Another is the worrying… → Read More
Editor’s note: Peter Vogel is co-founder and CEO of Plink, an online-to-offline loyalty program that rewards members for dining and shopping at their favorite national restaurants and offline stores.
Startups face an ever-changing series of challenges. Luckily for us, we don’t have to reinvent the wheel every time we face a new problem. There are lots of companies out there that we can… → Read More
Editor’s note: Robert Wiltbank, PhD, is a professor at Willamette University in Portland, Ore. He is co-author of Effectual Entrepreneurship and of The Catalyst, as well as many academic articles in the fields of entrepreneurship and strategy.
I began studying angel investing returns about 10 years ago as a result of a problem I couldn’t resolve. Over these years I’ve compiled the… → Read More
The successful public market debut of Workday this past week was breathtaking. The initial filing range of $21 – $24 was raised to $24 -$26 while the company was marketing on its roadshow. The IPO was ultimately priced at $28, and amazingly closed on its first day at $48.69, up 74% from the IPO price and up 116% from the mid-point of the initial filing range.
As I’ve discussed earlier, hot… → Read More
Yesterday I walked from Cambodia into Thailand. On the way out of Cambodia, I was fingerprinted; on the way into Thailand, I was photographed. While I waited for the train to Bangkok I read legendary hacker Jamie Zawinski’s tale of how the powers that be “wanted to mandate that I surveil all of my customers, and turn that information over to the Government without a warrant” in exchange for… → Read More
Editor’s note: Bruce Cleveland is a General Partner with InterWest Partners focused on software and services sector investments with an emphasis on cloud computing, mobile and analytical applications.
Most of us are familiar with the adage by George Santayana, who, in his biography said, ”Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” You may recognize it as, “Those… → Read More
Congratulations, Workday. Its share popped 74% when it IPO’d today. Or should I say condolences? $470 million ended up in the pockets of investors instead of the cloud startup’s war chest.
Meanwhile, Facebook is called a flop for filling its coffers with $10 billion by pricing shares at nearly twice its current value. This all raises the question, how should Silicon Valley define a successful… → Read More
“In the Studio” rolls into the fall months by hosting a jack of all startup trades, someone who has founded a company (and is CEO), but who also is extremely generous with his time as an advisor, coach, and storyteller to startups.
Micah Baldwin, CEO and founder of Graphicly, not only knows a lot about books, but also where books are headed. At Graphicly, Baldwin and his team focus on building… → Read More
Editor’s Note: Nir Eyal blogs about the intersection of psychology, technology, and business at NirAndFar.com.
We are caught in an endless cycle of messaging hell and the pattern is always the same. First, a new communication system is born — take email or Facebook, for example. Ease-of-use helps the product gain wide adoption and reach a critical mass of users. That’s when things turn… → Read More
Editor’s note: Scott Rafer is CEO of Lumatic, a company that believes Cities are Humanity’s Future so they must be easier to love.
Maps are really hard, but the industry aspects are even rougher than the technology. That’s why it’s time for mapping people to quit apologizing and go for the throat. → Read More
Editor’s note: Jack Krawczyk is head of monetization at StumbleUpon, the discovery platform. Jack was a founding member of Google+ and tweets about stuff.
Have we forgotten that being social means connecting with the people in your life? In today’s world of growth hacking and viral marketing, we have taken social to mean acquiring likes and followers so that we can post a photo to Facebook… → Read More
Survival in a harsher age. That’s why we evolved to fear for our privacy. Without somewhere secret to sleep, defecate, or have sex so someone couldn’t run up an club us while we were vulnerable.
Times have changed but we carry the fear like a vestigial wing. If we don’t stay conscious of our bias towards privacy, it could retard the progress of innovation. → Read More
The topic of this week’s column is time-honored when it comes to business, perhaps even overused in many cases, and in the startup world, sometimes mocked, and at others, romanticized, but usually only in hindsight: The Pivot. This is a loaded word, so I should be clear that its more to describe a business decision on a spectrum, with “slight shift” on one end and “complete reinvention”… → Read More
Editor’s note: Somrat Niyogi is the CEO of Miso.
Every time I turn on the TV, I see Twitter. Hashtags and Twitter handles are on TV shows. There are dedicated pages to world events like the Olympic Games. Even entertainment news reporting has been transformed because the general population can get in touch with what’s happening in the lives of celebrities instantaneously. → Read More
Editor’s note: Colleen V. Chien is an assistant professor of law at Santa Clara University School of Law. Stefani E. Shanberg is a partner at Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati.
It’s no fun receiving a patent demand, but rest assured, you are not alone. When that dreaded “invitation to license” or, worse, “complaint” arrives at your doorstep, what should you do? → Read More
Editor’s note: Rodney Rogers is chairman and CEO of Virtustream.
I am a large enterprise. I employ many people, and make a good deal of money. I am a large enterprise. A vast array of technologies – with varying degrees of purpose and tenure – are required to run me. I have a complex, heterogeneous technology landscape. → Read More
Editor’s note: Julie Ruvolo is a freelance writer and digital editor for the New York Museum of Sex. You can follow her on.
According to a growing list of religious groups, feminists, celebrities and policy makers, adult classifieds website Backpage.com is profiting from one of the ugliest crimes on the planet: sex trafficking. Backpage’s critics say they are facilitating sex slavery… → Read More
It strikes me as wrong that our most powerful and expensive and familiar objects should be the ones we love the least. We hold them and touch them every day, look at them for hours on end, sleep next to them. But how little we care for them!
Here is the problem: we cannot love an object which knows nothing, which learns nothing, and which says nothing. → Read More
The maker movement is on the cusp of a boom. They’re job-creating world-changers, on the verge of thoroughly disrupting everything from crafts to consumer electronics to, heck, well, everything, by democratizing manufacturing.
Makerbot has released their Replicator 2. Form 1 sought to Kickstart $100,000 for their professional 3D printer; they’re at $1.5 million and counting. Panda Robotics just… → Read More
Editor’s note: Michelle Snyder is executive in residence at InterWest Partners focusing on the transformative role that mobile, social, and data can play in the healthcare industry. You can follow her on Twitter.
It’s hard not to read an article about the healthcare system these days without some reference to the demise of the patient-physician relationship and the risk this poses to us as… → Read More
At its three-day Global Leadership Conference this week, Starbucks announced further details about its planned rollout and support for Square’s mobile payments platform. First revealed in August, the deal will allow iPhone and Android users to pay using the Square mobile app at Starbucks’ 7,000 U.S. locations. Now, we have a more exact timeframe for that launch: early November. (Previously, the… → Read More
Editor’s note: DJ Patil is a data scientist in residence at Greylock Partners. You can follow him on Twitter.
The enterprise is back. We’re seeing a resurgence of companies to help support everyday work tasks. A central theme to this new wave of innovation is the application of core product tenets from the consumer space to the enterprise. → Read More
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