The narrative of the little guy going up against the hulking giant is baked into the history of Silicon Valley, starting with the traitorous eight leaving Shockley Semiconductor to subsequently found Intel, AMD, Kleiner Perkins, and many other industry disruptors of their time. Fighting unnaturally large battles is part of the technology industry’s DNA, and yet it would seem that every startup begins the process anew, rewriting the story of how to compete and succeed in the face of formidably large competitors.
There are times when competing against the incumbent feels like an insurmountable challenge (and by “times,” I mean pretty much every day). Your larger, more established and better-resourced competitor is an ominous and omnipresent danger to your existence. It will subsidize its products to compete with you, monopolize the distribution channel, spend more on marketing a single launch than you will ever raise, and create uncertainty in the market about your product among customers. Given all this, startups should be in an inherently disadvantaged position in any market, emerging or mature. And in most industries outside of technology – those that rely on high fixed costs, retail distribution, or a vast network of partners – this is absolutely the case. But in the world of internet-delivered services, rapid innovation and evolution, and constant disruption, no one’s power is guaranteed. This creates huge opportunities for startups going up against the big guys, if executed properly. → Read More
Yesterday, Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg took the stage at Y Combinator’s Startup School in a candid interview with Y Combinator Partner Jessica Livingston. You can watch the full interview here, and it starts around the 43 minute mark, and lasts for roughly 40 minutes. If you have some time to spare, it’s well worth a look.
Zuck revealed a number of fascinating things about entrepreneurship, founding Facebook, and product development, but one of the more interesting (and surprising points) came at the end of the interview when Livingston asked him what he would do different if he could go back in time. Zuck replied: If I were starting now I would do things very differently. I didn’t know anything. In Silicon Valley, you get this feeling that you have to be out here. But it’s not the only place to be. If I were starting now, I would have stayed in Boston. [Silicon Valley] is a little short-term focused and that bothers me. → Read More
In episode II of Erick Schonfeld’s Founder Stories interview with Dropbox co-founder, Drew Houston, Houston describes how releasing a demo video to Hacker News during Dropbox’s early days catapulted his company into elite company.
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What fuels Silicon Valley is a never ending desire to solve problems, make things work and get things done, no matter what the obstacles. If anything is testament to the universality of this spirit, it is the emergence of a fervent strain of entrepreneurship in China — most recently evidenced by the 46 hacker teams that poured their hearts and minds into their computers at the TechCrunch Disrupt Hackathon. → Read More
In a moment as historic as Alexander Bell’s call to his assistant, an iPhone hacker wrote on Twitter that he had successfully ported Siri to the iPhone 4 and iPod Touch.
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Between bridging the translation gap, the lack of and then abundance of morning coffee, collective Internet struggles and the many many hacks using TianJi’s (“the LinkedIn of China”) API, the TechCrunch Disrupt Beijing Hackathon just happened, and it was nothing short of amazing.
Around 300 hackers signed on to spend 24 hours together, and 100 actually braved a night full of spotty connectivity and vegetable noodles in order to present their hacks at 11:00 am Beijing time. Each team was given a minute to show their stuff in front of the multi-lingual audience and judges. → Read More
Ni hao! It’s now morning and all of us here at the Disrupt Beijing Hackathon are somehow awake. We’ve got around 50 survivors of a grueling night spent coding about to take the stage and present the fruits of their labors, the excitement is palpable.
For the many of you not in China, you can (miraculously) watch the very first ever international Disrupt hackathon on the livestream above.
Good times. → Read More
If you search for “Yelp” on Google from your mobile phone the top paid result, even above the organic result to Yelp.com, takes you to Zagat. While it is a common practice for companies to advertise against their competitors’ names in search advertising, in this case it is Google itself which is bidding for that search term and taking the top spot. A classy move.
Google bought Zagat last September to shore up its local reviews for Google Places, which is its answer to Yelp. Google Places and Yelp have a contentious history, with Google borrowing liberally from yelp to help build up its local directory. Now with Zagat, Google finally has a large corpus if its own review, in addition to the ones people are slowly adding to Google Places. By redirecting some of the people who are looking for Yelp to Zagat, Google is keeping up its pattern of punching Yelp in the face every chance it gets. → Read More
Back in March, we posted a demo of C3 Technology’s extremely cool 3D maps. The reconstructions of landmarks and buildings are created by a technique (as I understand it) similar to the Kinect hack we posted that uses compiled depth and parallax data to continually build and refine a 3D model of whatever it’s looking at. C3′s version obviously works on a larger scale and thus has different strengths and requirements, but it’s almost completely automated as long as you can afford to send a plane or copter up with the equipment.
They were bought earlier this year, but the purchaser was not known at the time. 9to5Mac has been informed that the buyer was none other than Apple. It makes sense: Apple has bought two other mapping companies, Placebase in 2009 and Poly9 in 2010. It seems beyond a doubt that they are deep into a skunk works operation to revamp their maps. → Read More
Last week TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington wrote a post highlighting the fact that iPhone users can get a surprisingly good experience using Google Voice if they’re willing to switch to Sprint. Google Voice on the iPhone typically has some hurdles, mostly because Apple won’t let the native Google Voice app ‘take over’ the dialer the way it can on Android (not to mention the fact that the iOS GV app is notoriously buggy). But Sprint has done some unique, deep integration at the carrier level that minimizes these issues.
His post got me thinking about my experience with Google Voice since I began using it exclusively in November 2009. My conclusion: there are a lot of areas for improvement. The latency and occasional cutouts range from mildly annoying to infuriating. Text messages sometimes seem to arrive much later than they should. And MMS simply isn’t offered for most people (Sprint just launched support, but none of the other carriers do).
But a few hours later, as I dealt with my carrier T-Mobile dropping two calls in succession, I realized there’s one simple feature that Google Voice could easily offer that would do a lot to make up for all of its quirks: VoIP support. → Read More
There was a girl at a party, Ona, who then started telling me how she met her current boyfriend. She just simply told him she liked him. I was insanely jealous right then of this guy. Here was this beautiful, hysterically funny girl who told a guy she liked him and now he was having regular sex with her.
That doesn’t happen, right? It never happened to me. I sat there nodding, not being able to say anything but thinking, what if she said, “I like you” to me right then. I would’ve been happy. Instead, I got depressed and went to sit on the stairs.
There was another girl there. She was crying.I tried to comfort her by telling her I was an artist. → Read More
Yes, it’s really true. Nobody can hide anything anymore in our digital age of transparency. And thus, Dov Seidman, author of the re-released How and CEO of LRN, says we have entered an “era of behavior” in which we can no longer separate our private and public lives.
As Seidman told me when we caught up earlier this week on Skype, the era of behavior means that our reputations now always “precede us”. And this “unprecedented transparency” compounds the possibility of doing both good and evil. For Seidman, this is all excellent news. → Read More
With all chips in, see what our hackers are up to in the wee hours of the night at the TechCrunch Disrupt Beijing hackathon! → Read More
After churning out a parade of sequels to all of their flagship games, has EA finally learned its lesson? Last month, EA CEO John Riccitiello said that his company is taking dead aim at Zynga, implying that perhaps the company understands what’s at stake, and is determined to be just as much of a player in digital games as it has been on consoles.
EA’s acquisition of PopCap Games, the makers of Plants Vs Zombies and Bejeweled, was a great way to convince investors (and fans) that it’s serious about making a play into online and social games. Granted, EA paid upwards of $1.3 billion for PopCap (with a market cap of right around $8 billion!), but it succeeded in snatching the casual game maker from the eager claws of Zynga, which made a $1 billion offer for the game developer. → Read More
It’s 12:49 am at the TechCrunch Disrupt Beijing Hackathon; Unlike any other hackathon I’ve attended, the late night hacker snacks here take the prize for unique brain fuel. They include Tea Eggs, Italian Red Meat Flavor potato chips, Yanjing beer, Apples, and Pokki sticks. Other differences? Well I’m writing this through a VPN because Wordpress is blocked, and I’m probably going to have to go back to the hotel room to finish because the Internet keeps crapping out half way in the middle of my post.
Despite it being a hard day’s night basically, there are about 100 intrepid programmers still here at the CNCC conference center in the Olympic Village, working all through the night with the fervor of well, programmers. Despite the lack of Red Bull. And Internet.
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I went down to the demonstration today, to get my fair share of bemusement. Occupy Wall Street seemed drizzly, dejected, and oddly disconnected from the world around it. I approve of their goals, and I think their message is very clear indeed, but I’m not so sure their methods are effective. We’ll see. But they did spur me to go back and reread, of all things, some Mark Cuban.
I don’t usually have much time for Cuban, but in a post last year he made a really interesting point: “Wall Street is a platform. It’s a platform to be exploited by every technological and intellectual means possible. The best analogy for traders? They are hackers. Just as hackers search for and exploit operating system and application shortcomings, traders do the same thing.” Matt Taibbi, in a recent Rolling Stone piece, is far more adversarial — “Wall Street Isn’t Really Winning, It’s Cheating” — but he makes essentially the same point. Most of the “cheats” he cites are examples of hacking the system, rather than breaking the law. (The big exception being the now-infamous Abacus case, but intelligent people have argued otherwise.)
It’s worth noting that the tech world’s attitude towards hacking the system, any system, generally ranges from “grudging respect” to “outright approval.” Steve Jobs was a phone phreak. MIT memorializes its finest hacks. Mark Zuckerberg’s famous FaceMash hack was the precursor to Facebook. → Read More
While everyone is making up their minds about whether Klout is an utterly meaningless service or the divine “standard for influence” the world has been clamoring for, I had an interesting chat with Klout co-founder and CEO Joe Fernandez the other day at the F.ounders conference in Dublin, Ireland.
When I informed him that, if anything, I think that the name of the company was well chosen, he told me the story of how he obtained the domain name klout.com. Since I have a huge interest in that type of small behind-the-scenes story – and in domain names – I loved it and found it interesting enough to be worth sharing here. → Read More
Mobile advertising as you’ve likely heard, is hott right now. (With two “t’s”, yes.) According to comScore, mobile advertising spend is projected to hit $2.5 billion by 2014, with $2.7 billion projected in mobile ad revenues for this year and $6.6 billion by 2016.
What’s more, in August, 84.5 million people in the U.S. owned smartphones, and that number continues to grow… → Read More
Our own Greg Kumparak walked through the Hackathon Hall this evening, talking to all and sundry about their projects. Some notable hacks included an app for the ladies. How does it work? In Asia, guys buy girls gifts before they ask them out. With this app, the ladies can take a picture of an item and then broadcast her desire for it to the men nearby. The fellow who is quickest to his wallet will, it is assumed, receive a date. For those still working on projects, may I suggest a related app that would involve a system for giving me beer and Peking duck on demand, no dates promised or expected?
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