Drew Olanoff has over 10 years of marketing, PR, customer service and support, relationship building and management, product management, and technical support experience in multiple verticals. Online, including mobile.
He prides himself on being a connector. Connecting people, stories, information. He has worked under some amazingly talented and gifted PR pros while working for startups as a “Director of Community”, “Community Manager” and “Technology Evangelist”. He has the knack of working stories both mainstream as well as online. Bridging that gap is his passion.
He is a leader AND a team player, and strives for nothing short of success. His life motto is “failure is not an option”.
Disclosure: I currently hold no stock in any company.
If you’ve been using OpenTable to reserve tables at your favorite restaurants, the latest update for Android will help you discover new places to eat a little better and keep track of everything you have going on. It also got some of that Holo design lovin’. → Read More
If you’re sitting on a bunch of bitcoins that are burning a hole in your digital wallet, you now have another way to spend them. Today, mobile gift card company Gyft has partnered with BitPay to start accepting bitcoin within its app. → Read More
Whether you think Google Glass is something you’d wind up using one day, you have to admit that the technology is impressive. Packed inside of the pair of specs is a computer running Android, camera and all of the wireless capabilities you’d need. The idea of wearable computers is nothing new, and a team that explored Antarctica actually had their own pair of “Glass” long before it was en vogue. → Read More
Today, Google announced the eventual rollout of a brand new look for its Admin Console, an area that only admins of Google Apps will see. The aim of the redesign is to help admins get to information quicker, manage user accounts easier and keep their companies running as smoothly as possible. The company boasts that “millions” of businesses, schools and government agencies are using Google Apps… → Read More
As the days go by and developers get their hands on Glass, the basic apps that we need to survive in the wild and share our photos are popping up. Today, Glass To Facebook is available for those who want to post the moments captured with Glass to the social network. It’s the first third-party app that allows you The setup is similar to that of other third-party apps like GlassTweet, but… → Read More
Google+ Hangouts allow for groups of friends or colleagues have an intimate face-to-face conversation, but the “On Air” feature of the service allows you to broadcast to the masses. The President Of The United States Of America has taken part in these conversations, but anyone can set up their own. Today, the Hangouts team has introduced some new functionality that make participating… → Read More
Google Docs, now Drive, have always had an option to create forms that would drop data right into a spreadsheet. This is super handy until you tried to do something like…collect date and time information. For whatever reason, those structured fields were never an option with Forms, but the team has finally added both as an option today. The product has always been “there,” but… → Read More
Google has become the king of maps because of the technology that it has developed over the past eight years. One competitor, OpenStreetMap, has developed its own tools and built a community of map enthusiasts that now powers services like Hipmunk, Evernote and Foursquare. Today, as promised, the non-profit has released a brand new map editor, code-named “iD,” which was built from the… → Read More
Thanks to Instagram, we rarely see photos taken from camera phones without some type of filter on it. Even Twitter’s photo service uses Aviary to drop an earthy overlay or black-and-white treatment onto your digital masterpiece. Google Glass users aren’t going to be left out of this craze thanks to an app aptly named Glassagram. Again, this is the type of app that we’re seeing… → Read More
After 19 months of working with our founder, Michael Arrington, on setting up CrunchFund, MG Siegler has moved on to a similar role at a firm that continues to make waves in the venture world, Google Ventures. In a post on his own blog today, Siegler discussed the move, saying that he had been speaking with its team and managing partner, Bill Maris, for a few months now. He called the move a… → Read More
As time goes on and more Google Glass developers start tinkering around with their Explorer kits, we’ll start seeing all types of apps pop up for the device. The fun part about this is that we’re going to see all of the very basic, and necessary, apps being built first. You can share photos to Google+ out of the box with Glass, you can tweet them with GlassTweet, but a new service… → Read More
Google Glass is finding its way to developers and others and the reaction has been, well, predictable. So far, there are those who think that Glass will absolutely change the world, that it’s our version of the flying car. Those people are full of shit. On the other side of the coin, there are those who say that Glass will never find a place in the hearts of consumers, that it’s… → Read More
In Q4 of last year, Facebook’s mobile MAUs surpassed desktop for the first time in its history. That trend continued in Q1 2013 with 751M MAUs. This is what we learned with today’s release of Facebook’s Q1 results. Despite claims earlier this month, Facebook didn’t lose users, but gained 2M. Asia continues to be the largest area of user growth, according to the slides… → Read More
One of the common themes that we’re hearing from investors during Disrupt NYC has been that the areas that are ready to be disrupted might not be anywhere close to the sometimes sexier-appearing consumer space. Joe Lonsdale, co-founder of Palantir Technologies and current partner at Formation 8, discussed some of his thoughts on what will be and should be disrupted by way of technology. The… → Read More
During a panel discussion at Disrupt called “Urban Transportation,” the CEO and co-founder of Hailo, Jay Bregman, announced that the on-demand taxi service has gotten the go-ahead to operate in the New York City area within the next couple of hours. The London-based company has raised $50.6M to date, covering cities all over the world such as London, Dublin, Boston, Chicago and… → Read More
After Google’s announcement and demo of app activities being introduced into its Search product, I spoke with Seth Sternberg and Ardan Arac about how Google+ sign-in is coming along and what the company is doing to get developers to adopt the platform. The integration is yet another signal that Google is trying to unify all of its products, with Google+ being the glue that holds everything… → Read More
For large companies that have a long list of suppliers that they work with, it’s not only difficult to manage communication with all of them, but understanding the environmental impact of each supplier is next to impossible. It’s not a sexy space to work in by any means but the addressable market is comprised of Fortune 500 companies and the government itself, which is bound to… → Read More
During Disrupt, Lady Gaga’s manager and Atom Factory founder, Troy Carter, suggested that the area ripe for disruption in the music industry by technology is terrestrial radio. For those who still get in their car to listen to music, Carter feels like there are openings for startups to build on top of the platform to bring people what they really want to hear. He shared: “I think the… → Read More
Google’s No. 1 strength is its search product, so it makes sense that all of their products feed back into it somehow. Today, the company announced the introduction of “App Activities” into Search. What this means is that when you search for something like “Fandango,” which uses Google+ sign-in, you’ll see top movies based on what users are rating. Today at… → Read More
Today during Fred Wilson’s interview with Michael Arrington, the two discussed how, and how not to, pitch a VC. Hearing the two speak frankly about what works and what doesn’t is absolutely helpful to entrepreneurs. The important aspects of pitching a VC is to make sure that there’s a back and forth as you’re discussing what you’re doing, Wilson explained: “What… → Read More
It’s only a matter of time before Twitter releases its own Google Glass app, as Kleiner Perkins’ John Doerr dropped the hint that the company was looking into building one during this month’s Glass Collective announcement. A tweet from an official Twitter Glass app has been spotted, interestingly enough by the gentleman who brought you the first unofficial Twitter app… → Read More
During their work with patients, doctors will frequently contact colleagues with questions, to trade horror stories, or converse about treatment methods. There isn’t really a technological solution to streamline this daily back and forth, but that’s what SharePractice aims to bring.
Founders Dr. Andrew Brandeis and Benoit Carrier built an easy to use the mobile app to serve as a sort of… → Read More
The Social+Capital Founder, early Facebook employee and owner of the Golden State Warriors, Chamath Palihapitiya, joined us onstage at Disrupt NY and gave some brutally honest answers to questions as to why we’re seeing a lull in innovation. I had a chance to talk to Palihapitiya back stage and we dove deeper into the fact that the Valley should “be ashamed of itself” over the… → Read More
During our Disrupt event today, New York City company Foursquare’s co-founder Dennis Crowley spoke about how people are talking about the company these days. One of the interesting things about the company is its strategy to be the “location layer” of the Internet. For four years, the company has been trapping all of this location data, tips and social graph information. On its… → Read More
Chris Dixon joined our co-editor Eric Eldon this morning at Disrupt NY 2013 to discuss his move out to San Francisco for a job at Andreessen Horowitz. One of the areas that interests him the most is the much-hyped Bitcoin space. The reason why Dixon is so interested is because it solves many problems for those who have tried to start a financial company in the past. He said: “There’s… → Read More
When you’re a hacker waiting to take the Disrupt Hackathon stage, you’re probably just making sure that your project actually works. One gentleman decided to scrap his project completely and use his 60 seconds to discuss his political views, attacking large corporations for using your data to make money. The crowd was a bit surprised as he read a prepared statement from his iPad, but… → Read More
Once you’ve had a few drinks at a bar it’s easy to let loose and blow off steam. Unfortunately, while you’re having fun, you could end up annoying others around you, namely the staff at the venue you’re at. By acting like a fool, you’re jeopardizing your future visits, since bartenders tend to remember who was a jerk and who was a great customer. A project at our… → Read More
We’re on the ground in New York City at the Disrupt Hackathon and there are a lot of interesting things being created. Since I’m walking around wearing Google Glass, I’ve obviously been looking for teams building apps for it. I met up with Jonathan Gottfried, Twilio’s Developer Evangelist, and he built a quick and dirty app called GlassTweet, which lets you share photos to… → Read More
The saga of PeopleBrowsr vs. Twitter appears to have come to a close, AllThingsD reports. Last November, PeopleBrowsr took Twitter to court after the company had informed them that they’d be losing access to its full firehose of data. This was a move happening with nearly all third-party developers, but PeopleBrowsr contested that its four-year long relationship with Twitter could not be cut… → Read More
While Pinterest is still rolling out its brand new look to users, it decided to listen to some feedback along the way and make some tweaks. Since the site relies heavily, or completely, on its users pinning things to boards like crazy, some features that were dropped from the new design were re-added due to popular demand. One of the features that caused the community to clammer the most was… → Read More
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