Don’t Let Your Investors Buy All The Options
One of the most pronounced misalignments between investors and entrepreneurs is around the concept of “optionality.” I’m not talking about stock options, but the freedom to choose from a variety of different strategic and tactical options when running your startup.Read MoreProducing Unicorns In The Land Of Fútbol, Samba And El Dorado
There was a time, not very long ago when Latinos living in the U.S. could only point to two successful Internet/software startups in their countries of origin: Mercado Libre and Despegar/Decolar. While these companies were very successful, it was difficult for us to explain why no other startups in Latin America had flourished. Read MoreTech Blog Preps Crowdfunding Campaign To “Bring ReadWrite Back”
Fans of tech blog ReadWrite got a grim message last week. A new page is asking them to “Bring ReadWrite Back,” and it declares, “To be completely frank, we’re struggling — and not just financially.” This is actually the latest iteration of ReadWrite’s crowdfunding campaign. Or, to be more precise, it’s the run-up to a campaign that’s… Read MoreWhy Moore’s Law May Mean Success, Or Death, For Your Startup
Amid talk of the 50th anniversary of Moore’s Law, one may be tempted to ask: so what? Three years before co-founding Intel, Gordon Moore observed that transistors would decrease in cost and increase in performance at an exponential rate. Moore made his observation in a now-defunct trade rag in April 1965 to… not much fanfare. Most people – including Moore – don’t… Read MoreInboxVudu And The Uber That Got Away
We hear a lot of startup origin stories here at TechCrunch, and sometimes they can blur together. But this one’s a little different. It’s about Ramesh Haridas, an entrepreneur and angel investor. He’s backed some successful startups, including Rapportive, which was acquired by LinkedIn. What Haridas told me about, however, was the one that got away — namely, Uber. Read MoreThis Week On The TC Gadgets Podcast: GoPro, Pebble Time, Amazon Fire, And WWDC!
Matt is huddled in Vail, Colorado. Why? To hang out with GoPro, as they “throw stuff into pools and dogs chase after it.” But more seriously, GoPro is reportedly unveiling a service that allows you to record something on your GoPro and instantly view/share it on the cloud. Big deal. Meanwhile, we discuss the Pebble Time (Darrell just finished his review), which Mr. Etherington… Read MoreFresco News Aims To Build A Crowdsourced Network For Breaking News
If you’ve ever wanted to contribute photos or videos to your local newscast, you might get your chance soon, thanks to a new startup called Fresco News. There have been lots of other experiments in crowdsourced journalism, but CEO John Meyer (pictured above) said Fresco has some key differences. Read MoreAnnotation Service Genius Rolls Out An API With Instapaper As Its Debut Partner
Online annotation platform Genius, which originally began as a way to mark up rap lyrics before expanding to support any page on the web, is now making its service – including its collection of annotations and musical metadata – available to third-party developers for use in their own applications. The first partner to take advantage of the new API is Betaworks, which… Read MoreNowThis Media Sees A Big Appetite For Short News Videos, With 200M Views In May
Online video news company NowThis Mediasays it has seen dramatic growth, going from 1 million video views a year ago, to 50 million earlier this year, to 200 million in May. That’s a lot of eyeballs, especially for a startup that’s less than three years old and has a team of 35 people. In fact, Senior Vice President of Strategy and Products Athan Stephanopoulos (who joined through… Read More
On-Demand App Jugnoo Gets $5M To Bring India’s Auto Rickshaws Online
Auto rickshaws have been a staple in Indian cities for decades. Now a company called Jugnoo wants to make it easy to hail them on smartphones for both rides and deliveries. The Chandigarh-based startup just received $5 million Series A led by Snow Leopard, with participation from Paytm and several returning investors from its angel round. Read MoreHow Many Languages Your Startup Needs To Know
Siri can handle questions and make jokes in 17 languages. Is that a lot or little? How many languages must your startup know to reach its entire target audience? We studied some of the most successful companies and found some interesting results. Read MorePassing 5 Million Downloads, JuiceBox Games Announces Second Title
JuiceBox Games today announced the upcoming release of Sword Storm, their second title in the collective card game genre (CCG). Founded by three former Zynga developers, Juicebox has had tremendous success with its first release, recently surpassing $7 million dollars in revenue. Sixty percent of this revenue has come from players buying in-game characters, of which is typically the focus… Read MoreHands-On With Doppler Labs’ Here Active Listening System
On Tuesday, Doppler Labs unveiled their second audio product with the Here Active Listening System. In short, these are two independent ear buds that (with zero latency) give you complete audio control over your environment. If you want to reduce the volume of a crying baby or a screeching subway train (without turning everything down), the Here buds will let you do that. If you’re at… Read MoreSwarm Now Lets You Message Friends Of Friends
Swarm has just released an update that brings with it the ability message friends of friends. This means that whenever you come across a user in the app with whom you have a mutual friend, you’ll be able to send them a direct message. On the receiving end, you’ll be notified that the message is from a friend of a friend and be given the option to accept the message or block it. Read MoreAirbnb Adds A Pricing Recommendation Tool For Renters
Airbnb renters will now get pricing recommendations for their listings as part of an update to the room-sharing service today. It’s called Price Tips, and it creates ongoing suggestions for pricing creates based on several metrics, like demand for rooms, travel, and so on. For example, if there’s a conference in San Francisco, it will suggest the room owner to raise the prices… Read MorePicsArt Raises $15M To Build A Community Around Photo Editing
PicsArt, a photo-sharing service that’s building a community around creatively editing pictures, has raised $15 million in a venture round led by Insight Ventures with Sequoia Capital also contributing. Read MoreSongkick And CrowdSurge Merge, Raise $16M To Combine Concert Discovery And Ticketing
Half of concert tickets go unsold because fans don’t know the shows are happening. To fix that, 10 million user concert discovery app Songkick is merging with white-label artist-to-fan ticket seller CrowdSurge. Under the name Songkick they’ve also raised a $16 million Series C from Access, Sequoia, and Index to grow the team. Together, they could help people find out about nearby… Read MoreWantList, A Tinder For Shopping, Arrives On iOS And Apple Watch
London-headquartered fashion shopping site Styloko, whose image recognition technology helps women find similar products to those they like at better prices, today begins testing the concept that online shopping is an activity that will take place across all platforms, including on the Apple Watch. With its new iOS app called WantList, launching now, Styloko has simplified fashion discovery… Read MoreTinder Hires Hugh Williams As New VP Of Engineering
Tinder has just announced that it has appointed Hugh Williams, formerly of eBay and Microsoft, to lead the Tinder dev team as VP of Engineering. Williams comes from Pivotal Software Inc. where he was SVP and led data and application fabric teams. Before that, he was a VP at eBay focusing on user experience, the search engine, big data technologies and platforms. Previous to that Williams worked… Read MoreLaunchDarkly, A Startup That Helps Companies Soft-Launch Features, Raises $2.6M
Whenever many large technology have a new feature they want to test, they roll it out to a small set of users before letting it go live. That those companies get feedback on the feature and iron out any bugs, and also roll back the changes quickly if anything is wrong or if the users don’t like it. But that requires teams of people to maintain those tools, and smaller startups… Read More
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