Connie Loizos
While a number of location-based application services like Gowalla and Whrrl dominated the buzz at the South by Southwest conference again this year, a team of five collaborators was introducing what is arguably a far more important technology to attendees: the Eyewriter, a new, $50 eye-tracking device designed to provide people suffering from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, […]
April Fool’s Day is fast approaching, and the blogosphere is already on the hunt for Google’s latest hoax. In the meantime, it’s worth revisiting Google’s most recent gags, including one of its funniest, centering on a product called Google TiSP, a “fully functional, end-to-end system that provides in-home wireless access by connecting your commode-based TiSP wireless […]
For Matt Mireles, 29, life after graduating from Columbia University in 2008 was “hard and lonely,” he says. “I was on my own, trying to make things happen” for his startup, 18-month-old SpeakerText, a Web application that lets users navigate and search through video.
Then, in January, Mireles began writing about launching the startup at his blog, the Metamorphosis. First came an attention-grabbing two-part series titled “How to Start a Company in a Recession” that was republished by Silicon Alley Insider, where Mireles once moonlighted as a writer.
Last month, Mireles wrote a newer post titled, “Face It: NYC Is Not the Best Place for a Startup,” which “caused quite the shit storm,” as one commenter on Metamorphosis noted, adding that from now on, he'd be reading Mireles's writings.
By this past weekend, Mireles’s newest piece, “How I Judge Investors” had practically become required reading for tech reporters, entrepreneurs and, seed-stage investors, the latter of whom wondered what Mireles might say about them this time.
Sometimes you can’t get too much of a good thing. So believes serial entrepreneur Sam Yagan, who is right now organizing a new, 13-week, Chicago-based training camp a la TechStars for high-tech entrepreneurs that’s modeled after the Boulder, Colorado program. Called Excelerate Labs, applications for its program, which will award between 5 and 10 startups as much as $20,000 in seed capital, are being accepted through April 2.
“We’re treating this as much as a venture fund as we are a community activity,” says Yagan, who co-founded the file-sharing service eDonkey in 2002 and the online dating site OkCupid in 2003. “We want the investments to be good. We also want to make a contribution to the city.”
Yesterday, an Italian mobster was apprehended while he surfed around Facebook, but he’s far from the only Facebook user-turned-Facebook addict. In a survey of a thousand Internet users by Retrevo, a consumer electronics site, researchers made the following observations: * 55% of the survey’s respondents over the age of 25 check Facebook at least once […]
It’s not easy to waltz into an established, crowded market and convince investors that you can lead it. Yet the San Francisco-based Web analytics and advertising firm Quantcast has managed that trick, already collecting $53.9 million over three rounds, including a $27.5 million round in January led by Cisco Systems -- with more funding to come, possibly soon.
“We’re well capitalized but are always open-minded to ways we might accelerate our business and better serve the market,” said co-founder and CEO, Konrad Feldman, when we chatted briefly yesterday.
How Quantcast is accelerating its growth is a well-guarded secret from a technical perspective, although its large-scale analysis models seem to be working. The four-year-old company is reluctant to share details about how it creates its rich data sets about Web users and their online behavior. But it claims that millions of Web destinations use its service, including two-thirds of Online Publishers Association members, and that it is measuring millions more Websites, games, and widgets. Last week, Quantcast began a push for much stronger customer adoption abroad, too.
Since last fall, the New York Post and other interested parties have been trying to suss out who had fathered a child with glamazon Padma Lakshmi. Lakshmi, 39, host of the Bravo show “Top Chef,” had been involved for years with buyout giant Teddy Forstmann. She is also famously the ex-wife of novelist Salman Rushdie.
Recently, the New York Post and other outlets began speculating that it might be venture capitalist Adam Dell, you-know-who’s brother. Turns out they were right, and he may want to spend more time with one-month-old Krishna than her mom would like. So says the Post, which reported yesterday:
Read the Chicago papers, and you’re a lot less likely to read about a new entrepreneur on any given day than sales for fast-food giant McDonald’s Corp., based in nearby Oak Brook, Il. It’s enough to make Eric Lefkofsky, a highly successful serial entrepreneur and investor, want to scream. “Chicago is an incredible city,” he […]
Jerry Seinfeld and Seth Meyers recently teamed up for a “Really!?!” segment on "Saturday Night Live" about former Congressman Eric Massa, who kept coming up with new -- and often contradictory -- explanations for his resignation last week. (We'll never think of tickle parties the same way again.)
The segment came to mind yesterday, when I received an impassioned email from Joanna Rees, co-founder of VSP Capital and soon-to-become candidate for mayor of San Francisco. It was in response to last week's post about a glowing profile of Rees in the San Francisco Chronicle, which called her a “star” in the world of venture capital.
As a San Francisco resident and someone acquainted with Rees’ track record, I had pointed out that “star” was overstating things. After all, the limited partners of VSP Capital demanded their money back just months after VSP raised its third fund.
Still, Rees, dubbed the “Alley Cat” by Forbes in the late ‘90s, claws at every opportunity for coverage, and we don't mind giving her the platform she wants. In fact, we believe the best way to present her note is via our own “Really!?!” segment:
For the very public Ning, CEO Gina Bianchini’s departure is a very private matter.
Yesterday morning, Marc Andreessen announced in a blog post that Bianchini had “decided to step down after five-and-a-half years of hard work” at Ning, the company they co-founded in 2004. Though Andreessen added that Bianchini is now becoming an entrepreneur-in-residence at his venture firm, observers immediately began speculating that Bianchini had been fired from Ning, noting that she appeared very focused on the company during an interview on “Charlie Rose” late last week.