This is a guest post by Alex Barrera. Alex is Partner and Associate Director at Okuri Ventures, CEO and co-founder at Tetuan Valley, founder at Inkzee.com and mentor in several accelerator programs including Tetuan Valley, StartupBootCamp and Springboard.
The newest edition of the Spain-based Tetuan Valley startup school kicked off in Madrid and Barcelona a few weeks ago. But, what’s Tetuan Valley and what’s the Startup School? Tetuan Valley is a mindset we want to bring to Europe, especially to countries where entrepreneurship isn’t always inherent in our DNA. This is the case for countries like Spain or Poland. → Read More
Social gaming company CrowdStar has hired former Glu and Transpera executive, Alex Galvagni, as the Head of Studios. In his role, Galvagni will be taking on a COO-like position, heading up scaling the company in operations, games, and hiring.
Prior to working at CrowdStar, Galvagni was the President and COO of mobile video advertising company Transpera, which was acquired by Tremor Media in February. Previously, Galvagni was the Senior Vice President of Global product development for Glu Mobile, where he worked for eight years. During his time with Glu, he built, scaled and led the technology and product development of the company. Galvagni also served as an Architect at BEA Systems where he planned the extension of the WebLogic platform to mobile computing. → Read More
Appstores.com, formerly Appbistro, is finally live today with the release of its AppShowcase product. AppShowcase lets platforms like Eventbrite and SimpleGeo automate the process of showcasing (I know right!) apps that are built with their APIs.
“AppStores.com is the most exciting new service for platform companies because it delivers an effective solution that we don’t have to design or develop — allowing us to focus on our platform and core product,” explained Eventbrite’s Mitch Colleran on why Eventbrite decided to use the AppStores platform to highlight its developer ecosystem. You can find the Eventbrite AppStore here. → Read More
If you’re an app developer in the mobile world, promo codes (that is, one-time use codes redeemable for a free copy of your app) are amongst the most important tools you can have in your marketing handbag. Want an app review site to give your app a spin? They’ll probably want a promo code. Want to give away 50 copies of your app on Facebook to kickstart word-of-mouth? Unless you’re going to eat the cost of all 50 installs, you’ll need 50 promo codes. Alas, most mobile platforms to date haven’t bothered to give developers any sort of promo code system. Android Market? Nope. WP7 Marketplace? Nuh uh. The webOS App Catalog? Nada — until today. webOS’ new promo code system has one glaring fault, though… → Read More
Brand Thunder, the site that allows you to skin your browser, is rolling out a slick new theme creation utility called BT:Engage, which allows anyone to easily build and share interactive browser themes. The entire process is web-based with real-time previews of themes as you build them. It’s a little rough around the edges right now, but the long-term plan is to have a sophisticated suite of tools to create themes that are easy to distribute with “an elegant download page”, and a management tool for monitoring downloads and active users as well as managing live themes and promotions. → Read More
Power up your desk with this USB Mushroom Lamp from ThinkGeek. It’s only $10 bucks, which is a small price to pay for the eternal satisfaction of a functional conversation piece. The light comes by way two super bright white LEDs powered by either USB or AA batteries. I’m of the belief that while the lure of an extra life is tempting, the red mushroom’s supersize ability is a better investment — or just spend $20 on both. [ThinkGeek via Technabob] → Read More
Anytime there’s a startup that has been quietly catching fire, you can always find a trail of investors warming themselves by the flames. Take LikeALittle, for example. Though they’ve kept it quiet, we’ve now confirmed with multiple sources that they raised $1 million from Andreessen Horowitz and others at some point earlier this year.
And it makes sense. LikeALittle first popped on our radar back in December of last year while we were looking into a Hacker News thread claiming that one of the Y Combinator Winter ’11 startups had done 20 million pageviews in six weeks — and was growing by over 1 million pageviews a day. That startup, of course, was Likealittle, a social network for flirting started by former Googlers and Microsofties, Evan Reas, Prasanna Sankaranarayanan and Shubham Mittal. → Read More
This odd keyboard features a prominent iPhone dock on the right side in place of a numeric keypad. It has a set of special iPhone-specific hotkeys that allow you to enter data into the iPhone and control music playback and you can use the keyboard on a Mac or PC as well as use it to type directly onto your iPhone. Finally, this weird chimera lets you use the iPhone’s screen as a touchpad for the PC. Weird, wild stuff. The keyboard will cost $99 and will be available May 24. I’m not sure how they’ll pull off a lot of this – looks like a lot of apps on the iPhone itself – but it’s a fascinating concept. → Read More
Now I know what you’re thinking: leave it to the French to come up with a dating site for extramarital affairs (er, cheating?). After all, local entrepreneurs have come up with some rather original ideas in this space before. Remember Ladieshoesme? Or Adoptaguy? There’s event Loue une petite amie (literally translates to “rent a girlfriend”). Yet oddly enough, I haven’t found anything along the lines of Cougarlife…
But actually, believe it or not, the idea behind extramarital dating site Gleeden isn’t unique to France. In fact, Canadian-owned competitor, Ashley Madison, counts over 9 million “anonymous” registered users that are seeking a bit of…well, you get my point. → Read More
When we first looked at Hitpost back in January, it was still just a concept — people taking pictures of sporting events and talking about them as they watch them on TV. Shortly thereafter, the iPhone and Android apps hit and it was off to the races. Today it’s time for the 2.0 launch which brings a couple new big features: tweets and news. The “meat and potatoes” as Hitpost founder Aaron Krane puts it.
When you load up Hitpost 2.0, you’ll now see scores, news, and athlete tweets to go along with the main event: photos. The UI of the app has also been completely reworked. Notably, there is now a “My Teams” view to get an overview of all the aforementioned information about the teams you follow. And full Facebook sharing integration has been added. → Read More
We’re not going to say much about the images above, because… well, there’s just not much to say. 911HTC — a site that many an HTC handset hacker has in their bookmarks, as they seem to get their hands on just about every HTC ROM weeks before the relevant device’s release — released the two images above. The left handset, they say, is called the HTC Kingdom; on the right, the HTC Rider. Outside of the names, the only detail given is that the Kingdom purportedly packs a 960×540 (qHD) screen. So.. what are we looking at here? (We mean that quite literally, as the blurriness of these blurrycam shots makes it tough to say that we’re actually looking at phones, much less new phones) Are these international versions of announced handsets? The Rider sure looks a lot like the EVO/EVO 3D. Be sure to let us know if you hear anything about these guys — we’ll be sure to do the same. → Read More
There’s no doubt that there’s been both an explosion of growth in mobile app downloads and app stores. While Apple’s App Store has dominated in terms of number of apps and downloads, Distimo just released a study that projects the Android Market will become the largest store in terms of number of applications in about five months from now, passing the App Store.
Today, ABI research is reporting that the app industry is on its way to achieving 44 billion cumulative downloads by 2016. Similar to Distimo’s findings, ABI reports that Android and Windows Phone 7 are steadily catching up with Apple in terms of downloads. → Read More
A charming couple in Ottawa, Canada, Chrys and Dom Coballe, is making some handsome, if expensive, iPod Nano watch bands that pop out and even turn at an angle to offer multiple viewing angles. Although I think the hey day of the iPod Nano watch is over, they seem far too charming to just ignore. → Read More
Ancient Chinese proverb says, “Man who goes against Apple will lose his right to eat any fruit ever again.” Digitimes is reporting through Chinese-language sznews.com that three employees were arrested by local police on December 26, 2010 and eventually charged on March 23, 2011 for violating the company’s trade secrets. Reportedly these employees leaked the iPad 2′s design to accessory makers. → Read More
When Color came out with its $41m play, a rather lesser known startup had planned to launch around the same time – as these things go. How often does that happen? Pretty darn often no doubt. But while Color got all the press – not least for its funding – the lesser known Pixamid has had to wait for its time in the sun. But while I have struggled – really I have – to get into Color, Pixamid has given me pretty much exactly what I wanted out of this kind of app [iTunes link] from the word go. Today at the (sixth annual) Next Web conference in Amsterdam, I met CEO and founder Bart Denny who demo’d the app to me. → Read More
With all the larger acquisitions that have taken place in France within the last year – like Exalead, PriceMinister or DailyMotion – it’s easy to almost forget that Alcatel-Lucent bought Sophia-Antipolis-based OpenPlug in September. It was the company’s 2nd acquisition in 3 months.
Well my dear mobile app developer friends, Alcatel-Lucent has now released a free version of OpenPlug’s development platform. → Read More
Good news, everyone! The Not-So-Great Verizon 4G Outage of 2011 is over! If Sony and Verizon are battling for the best outage of April here, we’re going to have to go ahead and side with Verizon. Only down for one day and they didn’t hand all of our personal information over to hackers? High fives, Big Red! As for what caused the outage: gnomes. At least, that’s our best guess — Verizon isn’t saying beyond “Our network engineers and vendors quickly identified the issue and solved it”. (Heads up, 3G/4G Laptop Modem users: you might see some weird delays when jumping from 3G to 4G. Verizon is working on it.) → Read More
Silicon Valley startup Cooliris demoed the next version of its social communication and media sharing app LiveShare to me earlier this week, and I was blown away by exactly how instant the sharing of photos, videos and whatnot has become. The tool, which isn’t available yet, is shown in a demo video (embedded below).
Cooliris LiveShare lets you share photos, videos, maps, articles and more with others by the tap of a button or simply by dragging content to a stream or group of people. As you can tell from the video, the sharing itself is as real-time as real-time can get. → Read More
The more CEOs try to defend their products in the public arena, the sadder they sound. For example, Stephen Elop’s discussion of an upcoming (as in not ever shipping) Nokia tablet smacks of careful CEO talk and whiff of BS. When describing Nokia’s future plans for the device, he hedges his bets, saying that they may go Microsoft or they may go somewhere else (Ubuntu?) and that they don’t want to be another me-to tablet and instead they want to create something amazing and special. The last time Nokia created something amazing and special was probably 1999 when Neo talked to Morpheus on a modified Nokia 8110. → Read More
Another day, another new tablet: this times it’s actually two tablets [JP] coming from Japanese maker Onkyo (they aren’t the company’s first ones). Both devices, the TW317A7PH (pictured) and the TW117A6PH, run on Windows 7 Professional and are primarily aimed at businesses. → Read More
