In this series titled “Defining a growth hacker,” I will be exploring the meaning and practical application of growth hacking through a number of interviews with prominent growth hackers. This is the third post of the series on product. You can find the first post on common characteristics here and growth hacking’s impact on marketing here. “Viral marketing is not a marketing strategy,”… → Read More
Today, at Y Combinator’s Startup School at Stanford University, Rakuten Founder and CEO Hiroshi Mikitani took the stage to talk about the company’s culture, acquisitions and its crazy growth over the last year.
Mikitani said that Rakuten was currently seeing about $5 billion/year in revenues and that 25 percent of that revenue was coming from mobile mobile phones, both feature and smartphones. → Read More
We wrote about Vibease back in early September and I called it the long-distance relationship you’ve always wanted. Since, LovePalz (with his and her’s toys) has launched, along with quite a few other players in the general mobile… sexual… hardware segment(?).
Anyways, Vibease originally launched the Android app before having an accompanying Bluetooth vibrator to launch along with it. But… → Read More
Surprising news for a Saturday evening in London, and another post-IPO executive departure for Facebook, this time on the international front. Joanna Shields, the vice president and managing director of Facebook’s Europe, Middle East and Africa operations, is leaving to become the chief executive of the Tech City Investment Organisation, a David Cameron/Conservative government initiative to… → Read More
I just got back to San Francisco from the 15-year celebration of LIVESTRONG, the Lance Armstrong Foundation. It was an interesting time to be in Austin, as most of the world is still shell-shocked from Armstrong stepping down as the Chairman due to outside pressure from his doping scandal. However, most people had a positive attitude when it comes to the direction that LIVESTRONG is going in, but… → Read More
Busuu – the language learning community offering largely free audio-visual online courses – has been playing has been boostrapping away relentlessly for a few years and only last year raised an Angel round from FON-founder and serial entrepreneur Martin Varsavsky. So while US-based Livemocha spent $14 million in VC getting to around 12 million members, Busuu stuck to its knitting with its free to… → Read More
I read the news today oh boy. Well actually, I didn’t. In a realtime Twitter world where everything looks like news, none of it is. The Steve Jobs anniversary stories are just one measure of this logjam, but something deeper than his tragic demise is troubling the technology business. What news is and why we crave it are being disrespected by Twitter’s recent moves, and the result may be a… → Read More
Several people have contacted me and asked whether such-and-such a game would work with crowdfunding, or whole sectors. Could educational games benefit from crowdfunding, for example. Or what about game-like projects, or gaming hardware innovations? The answers to these questions have little to do with the product itself. They are driven by what I call marketing stories. → Read More
At Startup School today in the Memorial Auditorium at Stanford University, Facebook co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg spoke to Y Combinator founder Paul Graham about the early days of Facebook. He revealed that, early on, the team did not intend for the TheFacebook.com (as it was called) to become a business.
In fact, being at Harvard and all, Facebook had no cash to run the business and… → Read More
Facebook didn’t guess that users wanted to share photos. It learned it, Mark Zuckerberg explained in his talk at Y Combinator Startup School. “We really listened to what our users wanted, both qualitatively listening to the words they say, and quantitatively looking at behavior that they take.” Users didn’t necessarily say they wanted photos, but were uploading new profile pics every day. → Read More
Mark Zuckerberg took the stage at Y Combinator’s annual Startup School event this morning for a one-on-one conversation with Y Combinator co-founder Paul Graham. It was his second major sit-down, on-stage interview since taking Facebook public earlier this year, and he spoke to a packed house at Stanford University’s Memorial Auditorium about the early days of Facebook and his personal… → Read More
Editor’s note: Steli Efti is the Co-Founder/Chief Hustler of ElasticSales and an advisor to several startups and entrepreneurs. You can follow Steli on Twitter here. Selling to the U.S. market can be a significant milestone in the life of an international technology startup. The U.S. is the largest market in the world, and a successful foothold here can mean dramatic growth as well as further… → Read More
Robin Sloan is the kind of guy who could write a book like this one. He’s a writer and “media inventor” which seems to be a lofty term for “cool guy who gets the Internet and understands that discourse needs to be both intelligent and entertaining to effect any sort of meaningful social change.” He also writes a damn good intellectual thriller, if you’re into that sort of thing. → Read More
How’s Your News began 15 years ago when a set of developmentally disabled adults hopped on a bus and travelled around the country interviewing folks on the street. The mixture of charm, astuteness, and fascination with the little things that these reporters exhibited has always been great fun and their work is a real tonic in this age of blowhards blowing hard at each other. → Read More
On eBay’s earnings call this past week, CEO John Donahoe revealed that the company’s Square competitor, PayPal Here, had landed its first U.S. retail deal. PayPal Here is now being sold at 1,800 AT&T stores across the US. Previously, PayPal only had an international retail deal in Japan with Softbank. → Read More
There are any number of good reasons why Windows 8 will do just fine in the work world. But in today’s market, success is not guaranteed, especially as PC sales continue to slide. Gartner Research reports that third quarter shipments for PCs are down 8% compared to last year. → Read More
I speak with little fear of contradiction when I tell you this is the first TechCrunch article posted from Myanmar aka Burma. Only a few years ago the Internet here was both tightly censored and insanely slow. But now that this country is “on the path to democracy,” according to Daw Aung Sun Suu Kyi herself, Free Wi-Fi signs are widespread, and its Internet is freewheeling and … merely… → Read More
Well, many have travelled but few will make the end. SmartThings won the Dublin Web Summit startup competition this week beating off the other three finalists Vibease, Ovelin and Tictail and winning €100,000 in cash, as part of the Electric Ireland Spark of Genius competition. Over 1,000 entries to the competition were shortlisted to 100 which then pitched from two stages (social, mobile… → Read More
Brewster, the relationship-centric iOS address book app that went live in the U.S. in July with some fanfare (and a little controversy for good measure), is picking up some more steam. On the heels of an app update earlier this month, this week it is launching across Europe, available for the first time in iOS App Stores across the region. → Read More
So hey, remember that Sony Nexus X image that made the rounds earlier this week? The one that more than a few commentors called a hoax after I ran a story about it? Well, the skeptics among you were right — creator of the faux-Nexus came forward not long ago with a tell-all Tumblr spelling out what he did and (more importantly) how he did it. → Read More
TechCrunch Disrupt winner Qwiki appears to be shifting its focus, from a web-based creation tool to mobile-only. → Read More
The poor reception for Apple’s new maps app temporarily boosted usage for other map applications, but it didn’t actually increase longer-term marketshare for any of them — except for one.
Israel’s Waze boosted its market share to 10 percent of U.S. iPhone users from 7 percent, according to a study from Sequoia Capital-backed mobile data compression company Onavo. → Read More
Pheed — the celeb-fuelled social networking site that has gone a bit viral in the last few days — may be going on a diet. → Read More
The city of New York has just launched the ConnectNYC Fiber Challenge to help small NY-based companies get a free high speed fiber build-out in their offices. In order to win the prize, you have to submit an application to justify that you need very high speed connectivity — tech startups seem to have an edge in the challenge. In all, 240 companies will each receive a chunk of the $12 million… → Read More
Mark Zuckerberg has been understandably very busy in the months since he took Facebook public — closing and integrating the billion dollar Instagram acquisition, overhauling Facebook’s mobile strategy, jetting to far-flung places to build the company’s international presence, and such — that he has spent remarkably little time giving interviews and speeches. In fact, his talk with Michael… → Read More
GoDaddy’s email service experienced an extended outage this morning, affecting a portion of its customer base. The outage took down the email systems beginning around 7:00 AM ET (estimated) this morning, and the problems were fixed by 10:30 AM ET, according to the company. → Read More
Newsweek, the magazine that wasn’t U.S. News & World Report or Time, is going completely digital and will offer something called Newsweek Global in place of its international selection of paper tiles. Editor Tina Brown describes this move, which will take place at year’s end, as “embracing the future.” → Read More
GOG (formerly known as Good Old Games) is having a huge Interplay sale that gives you 32 games for $34.99 (or more), or anywhere between $13.95 and $34.99 for 20 titles, or 8 games for whatever you want to pay under that. This is an amazing deal that will get you some classic titles you may well have grown up with. And that could make you feel old, but maybe good also. Nostalgia. → Read More
Tomorrow hundreds will meet up for Startup School, YC’s annual event for gutsy hackers thinking about founding a company. It’s one of my favorite events, and this year’s attendees will get to hear from everyone from Mark Zuckerberg to Stripe’s Patrick Collison to Weebly’s David Rusenko. It’s oversubscribed again, so here are some thoughts on how to choose an idea for your startup for… → Read More
I’ve been avoiding writing about Foldable.Me for a while because I find the process of paper craft to be in the realm of obsessive hobbies that require a degree of intensity and sufficiently unsweaty palms that I simply do not possess. But, we must ask ourselves, what if a startup did the hard, hard work of printing out laser-cut paper craft models for you without all that mussing about with an… → Read More
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