As a fourth generation venture investor, Adam Draper was pretty much predestined to work with startups. The son of Tim Draper, the founder of global VC firm Draper Fisher Jurveston, Adam has made it his mission to do everything in his power to help entrepreneurs bring their ideas to life — without relying on his family name to do so. After taking the plunge as an entrepreneur himself, co-founding… → Read More
Apple’s AirPlay streaming media technology has a neat trick up its sleeve for game developers, enabling them to create multi-screen experiences that allow a player to interact with an interface on a portable device like the iPad or iPhone, and see something different broadcast through their television attached to an Apple TV. One game that takes advantage of this is from Toledo, Ohio-based… → Read More
Because there are so many small businesses out there on Main Street that don’t have access to the same juicy venture capital rounds that seem pervade today’s tech industry, On Deck set out in 2007 to provide mom-and-pop business owners with an easy way to secure the capital they need to grow their businesses. Using data aggregation and electronic payment technology, On Deck aims to simplify the… → Read More
Startups still have a hard time finding the right applicants for their jobs. During our Disrupt NY 2013 hackathon, Codecademy engineer Bob Ren wrote a little web app that takes the Common Application for college admission as its inspiration. Just like high school students can use the Common Application to apply to multiple colleges simultaneously, Startup Common Application will take your… → Read More
Conscious Company, a Portland, OR-based retail startup that lets its users subscribe to variety of different sample boxes it delivers once per month, just announced that it has closed a $400,000 seed round led by Birchmere Ventures and an undisclosed angel investor. Similar to Birchbox and comparable “box” startups, Conscious Company also runs an online store where its subscribers can… → Read More
Matygo emerged out of Vancouver’s GrowLab accelerator in late 2011 to take advantage of the growing popularity of the “flipped classroom” philosophy in education, which, as Knewton describes it, seeks to invert traditional methods of teaching by delivering instruction online (through videos, etc.) outside of class, while moving homework into the classroom. Khan Academy is one of many examples of… → Read More
Ask any entrepreneur about what it’s like finding the right office space for their company, and they’ll probably respond with a grimace and some grumbling. Few light up at the thought of it. Founders have enough to worry about in trying to build an awesome product, please their customers, find quality talent and raise money without adding the struggle to find office space to the list. Part of the… → Read More
The price of airfare is an ongoing point of frustration for travelers, especially considering that it feels like airlines find every conceivable opportunity to shake you down for a few more bucks. Many startups and businesses have come and gone trying to find a way to give leisure travelers access to cheaper airfare, as airlines just keep shutting them down. The reason? Airlines make more money… → Read More
A/B testing has long been a fundamental part of developing applications and products for the web, and, with the explosion of smartphones, developers are naturally eager to use the process to test new designs and updates for mobile apps. The problem is that, traditionally, this has been tricky to manage, especially on iOS given Apple’s approval process, requiring app developers to wait weeks to… → Read More
According to Y Combinator’s estimates, today, there are more than 100 startup accelerators in the U.S., which is almost awe-inspiring considering that there were only four as recently as 2007. While the number of accelerators and incubators continues to rise, popping up in nearly every vertical, Education has been slower to get the memo. → Read More
Today, over five million businesses are now using Google Apps to help their employees collaborate and connect via the cloud. In just a few years, the adoption of Google’s productivity suite has skyrocketed and, while small businesses have long been its core customer, adoption up the chain is increasing as well. At the same time, as the Google Apps ecosystem continues to expand and evolve, with new… → Read More
Hiring good developers is one helluva process.
First you’ve gotta find the rare developer who isn’t already drowning in job offers. Then you’ve gotta sit down and chat ‘em up to make sure they’ll be a good fit for your team. Then you’ve gotta make sure they can actually, you know, code.
By combining a collaborative code editor with live video chat, Codassium makes the process a bit less… → Read More
The results are in for Filipino accelerator IdeaSpace’s startup competition, and the top ten picks have a heavy focus on social projects. A glance at the list reveals a strong emphasis on environmental and health-related projects, especially those that will likely benefit the developing nation’s poorer regions. Armtech – affordable water purification machine for households DateCola… → Read More
Zozi launched in 2010 to become the go-to destination for those looking for an (affordable) excuse to take break from the daily grind by offering daily deals on a wide range of local adventures — everything from cocktail classes in Atlanta to kayaking in San Francisco Bay. However, after fighting it out in the crowded daily deals space for two years, Zozi shifted its focus to offering high-end… → Read More
Back in January, we reported that GE would be partnering up with healthtech startup incubator StartUp Health and selecting 13 consumer healthcare startups (originally 10) to participate in a three year program designed to nurture and accelerate their growth. After a two month screening process, today they’re announcing those 13 finalists. → Read More
Back in December, the sort-of-Series-A-crunch led VC analysis firm CB Insights to predict that more than 1,000 startups will be orphaned at the seed stage. But it seems there is silver-lining to the seed boom/cash crunch — at least for CB Insights itself, which is selling a list of “dying” startups. The price-tag for the list? Almost $5,000. → Read More
The Portland-based Vizify came out of TechStars’ accelerator in 2011 with the goal of helping everyday people turn their personal data — the stuff that’s fragmented across scores of profiles, networks and websites — into one, unified visual profile. Essentially, piggybacking on the rise of digital portfolio platforms that aim to recast how we use the resume, Vizify wants to help change how we… → Read More
Toronto’s ClearFit, a company that uses automated software and algorithms to bubble up the top applicants for employers looking for quality hires, today announced the close of a $7 million Series A round. The financing, led by Boston’s GrandBanks Capital and including Relay Ventures, will help ClearFit grow to keep pace with demand, company co-founder and CEO Ben Baldwin told me in an… → Read More
Location analytics startup Placed is debuting a new monetization option for mobile devs today, via its Placed Affiliate program. The new system would see mobile apps request that their users opt-in to sharing their anonymized location data with Placed for market research purposes, in exchange for affiliate fees based on both a 7-day and 30-day volume measurement. The more quality location data… → Read More
In January of last year, Gil Ben-Artzy and Shuly Galili launched a startup accelerator with the intent to expose Silicon Valley to the next generation of hot Israeli tech companies — and vice versa. While Israel has long been a hotbed for innovation and is home to the R&D labs of many of the world’s biggest tech companies, the founders saw an opportunity to create a more fluid connection… → Read More
Sometimes it takes a bit more time to get something right — especially when it’s technically challenging.
That’s why Amiato, a Palo Alto, California-based startup, labeled itself as one of the “off the record” Demo Day companies when it graduated last spring from the Winter 2012 class of Y Combinator. But today Amiato, which was previously known as Nou Data, is coming out of the shadows with… → Read More
Sensors are quickly becoming a category of external hardware gadgets unto themselves, and Slovenia-based CubeSensors is creating a set that essentially monitor your living space to provide you with aggregate data about noise, temperature, humidity, light, air quality and more to provide clues about how your environment might be affecting you and those around you. → Read More
Boxbee, a startup that’s looking to make urban storage (not of the digital variety) less of a pain in the ass, just won the best new startup award at the Launch conference in San Francisco.
The winner was chosen by a jury from the 50-plus startups that demonstrated on-stage at Launch over the past three days. The conference included a bevy of categories, 12 awards in total, including “1.0,” for… → Read More
At the Launch Conference in San Francisco today, Twitter co-founder Ev Williams took the stage to talk to conference founder Jason Calacanis about everything from his experience at Twitter and the rise of Vine to sharing his take on Google and Facebook as well as the latest from Medium, his latest effort to shape the future of digital publishing.
For those unfamiliar, a serial entrepreneur… → Read More
Apple’s greatest innovation in recent version of iOS was clearly enabling emoji keyboard support for all iPhone and iPad users, regardless of region. Emojis are fun for everyone, but they could potentially get better thanks to a new Kickstarter project. The TeleSound is an iPhone and Android device accessory that lets users send sound messages, by translating the emojis built into iOS into a… → Read More
If you’ve been to a live event recently, like a football game or a, you’ve probably noticed that the majority of people around you spent most of their time huddled over their smartphone. It’s true of life now, too, as people now interface with the world through Instagram rather than their eyeballs, but this even more true for live events.
BuzzMob launched in 2011 to capitalize on our mobile… → Read More
“In the Studio” welcomes a first-time founder with a diverse set of experiences — ranging from economics to advertising, from product management to design, and from startup CEO to advisor of a venture capital firm — who now is at the helm of one of the most interesting online education startups on the web today. → Read More
For small businesses, buying and managing health insurance is a “pain in the buns,” to quote my new favorite ad. Not only are its complicated terms, lack of transparency, slow quoting and on-boarding process and paper trail a pain in your buns, but health insurance can be a massive pain in your wallet, to boot. Hidden costs are everywhere.
Y Combinator-backed SimplyInsured is launching today… → Read More
If you do a search for “AngelList” in the Apple App Store, you’ll only get four results – and one is an app featuring quotes from entrepreneurs. In other words, there’s not a lot of selection despite AngelList’s readily available API. That being said, in the past an app called AngelList Wings has served as a useful resource for browsing, searching and following early-stage startups, founders and… → Read More
After five months of testing, iterating, spit balling and pavement pounding, today Rock Health’s fourth class of HealthTech startups took the stage at Demo Day to pitch their fledgling businesses to investors. More than anything, these fourteen startups confirmed that digital health is not just alive and well, but beginning to gain some real traction. (More on that here.)
Like education, the… → Read More
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