The areas around Old Street tube station, Shoreditch and Hoxton, just North of London’s Square Mile and on the border of East London, have come to be known, lightheartedly, as Silicon Roundabout, given that there is now a recognisable cluster of startups there. I’ve been tracking the trend since 2008. But what’s missing is the VCs. While, in Silicon Valley the VCs on Sand Hill Road are but a short drive from Palo Alto and Menlo Park, the VCs in London have preferred to stay in Mayfair, often close to the offices of the Limited Partners who back their funds. It’s not far away from Old Street – 3.2 miles – but it’s different in culture and scene. But to stay close to what’s happening in tech today it makes a lot of sense for investors to co-locate with the startups.
Leading the advance guard almost a year ago was White Bear Yard, a large space backed by three prominent Angel investors. But soon the area will be welcoming well-known startup accelerator programme Seedcamp, dubbed the Y Combinator of Europe by some. And today news reaches us that leading tech VC Index Ventures is to take some desks in the area, co-locating in Scrutton Street. → Read More
“6:30a and I am on my way into the office for the first time since November. Man, time flies,” tweets Yahoo front end engineer Dav Glass. Dropping by the office once every 4-5 months and still getting a full time paycheck sounds like the life to me.
Glass lives in Illinois and has been working for Yahoo remotely for the last year. But he’s been with the company since 2006. He’s “one of the few talented front-end developers left there,” a former Yahoo employee tells me, adding “Yahoo is probably the best company to work for if you have above average talent and want to coast. You’ll stand out like crazy.”
I’m certainly not implying that Dav is just “phoning it in,” but I will say this: I love the way he’s set up his work life. I may try something like that myself. → Read More
This is quite a coup for 7digital. The UK company’s music download store has bagged Radiohead’s new album “The King of Limbs” as a world-wide digital exclusive, meaning that it’s the only place online to purchase said album as a download. What’s more, 7digital is offering up an extremely high quality 24bit FLAC version of the recording – audiophiles rejoice – a first for a major recording artist, says the company. → Read More
http://player.ooyala.com/player.swf?embedCode=trMWRjMjqH3UYnH2UMaGXgKiwaRIeDQn&version=2 Valve is punching the throttle on the Portal 2 launch with a set of self-made commercials that are, in essence, a big FU to ad agencies. In this one we learn why the two Portal bots were created: because humans suck. → Read More
Hell hath no fury like an Apple fanboy scorned. Verizon is just now starting to feel the rage previously directed at just AT&T. That’s what happens when iPad 2 orders fail to ship on time. Fanboys take to the forums and unleash the beast.
There’s a large thread of complaints over on Verizon’s official forum that details most of the transgressions. It seems that more than a few customers where promised their iPad 2 would ship either immediately or within 2-3 days upon ordering. That’s not the case. It’s more like 2-3 weeks for some but according to two separate trusted Verizon retail sources, that was the same estimated shipping window given on day 1. → Read More
Just a few days ago, Apple released iOS 4.3.1 — and already, the endlessly ingenious jailbreaking crowd has found their way in. However, let it be known: these early hacks tend to have a caveat or two, and this one’s certainly not the exception. → Read More
When you do things the same way each and every year, people start to expect it. Take the iPhone, for example; after the first iPhone was announced at the now mostly perished MacWorld conference, every subsequent iPhone announcement (3G, 3GS, 4) came at Apple’s own WWDC. After 3 years of back-to-back-to-back WWDC iPhone releases, people have started to look at WWDC as the iPhone announcement that also happens to have a developer conference built in. This year, though, things might be a–changin’ — we might not see a new iPhone at WWDC. → Read More
In 2000, Internet pioneer Bob Metcalfe published a book entitled Internet Collapses and Other InfoWorld Punditry. Eleven years later, you can buy used copies of Internet Collapses for $0.01 on Amazon.
But while Bob Metcalfe may have been wrong about the collapse of the Internet, he’s been right about many many other things. Metcalfe not only invented the Ethernet in 1973 (and, by extension, wi-fi as wireless Ethernet), but he also has an eponymous Law named after him – the famous Metcalfe’s Law about the power of the network – as well as being the founder of 3COM, a one-time publisher of InfoWorld, a general partner at the Boston based Polaris Ventures and currently a Professor of Innovation at the University of Texas at Austin. → Read More
Israeli startup Wix, which allows users to build flash websites, has just raised $40 million in Series D funding led by Insight Venture Partners and DAG ventures, with Benchmark Capital, Bessemer Venture Partners and Mangrove Capital Partners participating in the round. This brings Wix’s total
funding to $61 million.
Founded in 2006, Wix provides a simple mechanism for anyone to create Flash-based websites. Users can customize their Wix websites with a drag and drop editing tool and pretty templates, making the site user-friendly for users who may not be tech savvy. The site makes its money from a freemium model where users pay for extra customization and design features. → Read More
Aside from Dopplr’s quiet disappearance after its acquisition by Nokia and Tripit’s exit to Concer, web-based travel planning is still, arguably, one of the holy grails of the web. flextrip, a new startup operating out of Europe and the US and founded by long time entrepreneurs Leith Stevens, Alex Kremer and Andrew Glover, aims to facilitate travel planning by offering real-time offers for tours and activities – a branch of the travel industry that is still somewhat neglected despite its estimated global market size of $89 billion.
Flextrip is a stand alone service that lets you plan your travels by pulling in your Dopplr or Tripit travel details, analyzing that data and serving real-time offers from local operators. Tour operators working with flextrip on the other hand receive SMS notifications whenever a potential travel customer plans a tour in some city or region. They in turn can then make targeted offers to the traveller . → Read More
Utopic, the service that lets you see what content is trending amongst your friends, has closed a $70k convertible note from a number of angels, including Ahti Heinla, one of the founding team of Skype and its chief technical architect.
We’ve also learned that Vitaly Rubstein has also participated. He is an ex-majority owner and the “product brain” behind Russia’s largest social network Odnoklassniki.ru, which was recently acquired by DST, as well as majority shareholder in Forticom. → Read More
tunesBag, an Austrian music sharing startup that has been around for quite some time, has just raised €250,000 through a government fund and an undisclosed investor. The platform itself is, like many others, a cloud-based iTunes where you can sync your local music library via the cloud to a variety of devices. But the startup has recently added a nifty feature that lets users connect their Dropbox account with their tunesBag library, making the service effectively iTunes-meets-Dropbox.
Through tight API integration, this works well and lets users sync all of their tracks to Dropbox so that they can be streamed. The question remains how many people are actually using Dropbox as a music storing and sharing service with the arrival of many other cloud-based ‘locker’ services dedicated to music. → Read More
Uh oh, Paypal; looks like you’ve got a new challenger in the person-to-person payments space. American Express has just announced the launch of their new money spendin’ service, Serve. At its foundation, it’s just a fancied up PayPal, allowing users to send one another money via e-mail address (as long as both users have Serve accounts.) Past that point, however, it’s got a few cool twists; you can pull funds from your account into a refillable pre-paid card, or you can create “subaccounts” that let other users (say, your kids) spend monies from your account while you limit and monitor everything that goes down. With today’s launch, they’re already offering up payment applications for both iPhone and Android. Given PayPal’s almost exclusive dominance of this market, there is by all means room for competition — but it’s certainly not as if others haven’t tried. Remember Obopay? Yeah — bet you didn’t know that still exists. → Read More
LinkedIn is using the food truck phenomenon to publicize the launch of its new social news product, LinkedIn Today. In San Francisco and New York, LinkedIn has hired food trucks to give away coffee at locations around both cities.
The trucks, which you can follow on Twitter here, are emblazoned with advertisements for LinkedIn Today. Similar to the way that food trucks use Twitter to advertise their locations, the LinkedIn Today trucks will be posting their locations in San Francisco and New York, for the entire week on the account. → Read More
Japan-based Furukawa Kiko has developed a “magical” robot hand [JP] that can scoop off semi-liquids like mayonnaise and ketchup and replace them without destroying their shape. Dubbed SWITL, the hand was first shown back in 2007 and is supposed to handle bread dough in bakery production lines one day. → Read More
Since our rise from the primordial ooze, mankind has wanted one thing and one thing only: the ability to play Fruit Ninja inside of a little white room while using our hands as swords. That goal, friends, has been met and surpassed. I present to you Fruit Ninja in the CAVE, a version of Fruit Ninja played entirely in virtual reality. → Read More
Last year, a group of Australian startup veterans and executives created Startmate, a seed fund and incubator designed to provide small, early-stage investment and hands-on mentoring to local startups.
Bringing the Y Combinator model to Australia, Startmate chooses 5 startups to participate in its 3-month incubator program. It then seeds those 5 companies with $25,000 and offers them access to its impressive list of mentors, which includes Mike Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar, the founders of the software company Atlassian that last year raised $60 million in funding from Accel Partners.
Startmate’s 3-month program includes two demo days, one in Sydney and one in Silicon Valley, and culminates in a two-week trip to Silicon Valley, in which the startups are introduced to American investors. → Read More
This morning in London, the UK’s answer to Startup America launches, titled – guess what? – Startup Britain. That similarity aside, the initiative has been put together by a number of existing UK entrepreneurs and is not being backed by any government money, unlike the Obama initiative. Instead, we have here a ground-up entrepreneur-led initiative which is seeing over 60 leading brands offer services to up-and-coming startups in the UK. This is not specifically about tech startups – but it may well appeal to that sector.
The campaign is being launched by Prime Minister David Cameron, who is known to be very pro-enterprise. In a statement he said: “We need to see a country where new businesses are starting up on every street, in every town; where entrepreneurs are everywhere. We put out a call to business to rise up and help us drive the recovery and Startup Britain is part of the answer to that call.”
The UK has 270,000 businesses that start up every year but many fail due to a lack of support.
In effect the initiative is doing a few things. It’s offering a package of discounts and free trial on business services like insurance, broadband, advertising, office space and more. The claim is that this amounts to over £1,500 in value for every startup company in Britain. Startup Britain is a portal site to a package of these services. → Read More
Jack Dorsey is back at Twitter in a big way. He just tweeted that he is now taking on the lead product role at Twitter, the company he co-founded and where he’s remained as chairman. To reflect his new operating role, his title will now be executive chairman. Dorsey will remain CEO of Square.
News that Dorsey was negotiating with Twitter for an expanded role came out last week. There was some speculation that he might even take the CEO spot, but it is very difficult to be the CEO of two technology companies at the same time and Dorsey is “200%” committed to Square. All you have to do is watch this video to see how much he cares about building great products. And now he will be doing that at both Twitter and Square, while leaving the business side of Twitter to CEO Dick Costolo. → Read More
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