“‘What?.’ ‘We made it to Disrupt,’ Sarah said calmly. ‘We screamed so hard we woke up the building.’”
After the screaming ended, the Israel-based Shaker team ditched Burning Man plans for TechCrunch Disrupt SF 2011 rehearsals in San Francisco, devising a plan that would buy them some time (asking if they could have all 13 founders on stage) and having that plan backfire (we said “Yes.”).
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It’s been over 72 hours since Facebook first debuted a series of groundbreaking new features at f8, which is all the time I need to predict the company’s long-term outlook, the way it will reinvent the web, and the pricing of its inevitable IPO.
Okay, maybe not. But it’s given me some time to try the features out, as opposed to basing my impressions off of Facebook’s well-crafted keynote presentations. And while many of these obviously have a lot of potential, in practice I’m finding them to be a mixed (or, in some cases, a downright irritating) bag.
Social Overlubrication
One of the big announcements at f8 was something called frictionless sharing. Here’s the gist: Facebook will let third-party sites and apps integrate what’s effectively a sharing firehose. Turn it on, and everything you do in the app gets shared with your Facebook friends.
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This is a joint guest post from security camera tech entrepreneur / startup finance blogger Nick Pelling and “sweat equity” investor/consultant Andrew Lockley. They report on The UK government’s ongoing consultation on to the Enterprise Investment Scheme (EIS), which could well reshape the UK startup investment landscape during 2012.
The UK government has spent most of 2011 whacking the same pro-enterprise rhetorical stake into the ground. It wants to turn the UK into ‘Venture Central’, “the best place in Europe to start, finance and grow a business”; and it claims that it will do pretty much whatever it takes to achieve this.
10/10 for ambition, but… what’s the plan? Aside from Tech City grandstanding (a bit shallow, but decent enough PR) and the whole Enterprise Zone fiasco-to-be (more offices? Why?), what the government wants to happen now is for business angels and VCs to start funding lots of high growth startups – fast.
So apparently there’s a new Xoom in the works. Big surprise, right? The old one is nearing its eight month birthday and thanks to the rapid Android aging process, it’s about as a relevant as a Handspring Visor at this point. But in all seriousness, does anyone care any more? I ask that with void of snark or sarcasm. I’m serious: Does anyone care about Honeycomb tablets anymore?
Honeycomb was supposed to be the iOS killer. It was supposed to stand-up, challenge the mighty iOS and ultimately slay the champion through a power combo of multitasking and openness. But it didn’t happen mainly because consumers don’t care about that nonsense. They want apps, which Honeycomb has very few. So here’s Android tablets now, sitting on retailers’ end-caps and shelves, huddled together, sharing the warmth of a single power brick just hoping someone will figure out how to unlock their screens. → Read More
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