Announcing PostRocket.
Last week we announced an investment in Spindle. Today, I am excited to an investment in another seed-stage, Dogpatch Labs, social media company: PostRocket. PostRocket optimizes Facebook content for...
View ArticleSocial Reputation and Our Online Future
The emergence of companies like Getaround, Airbnb and even Yelp are examples of ways that we as consumers are using technology to get more comfortable doing everything from sharing recommendations to...
View ArticleIt’s Not If (But When) Your Startup Slides Sideways You’ll Find Your True...
Boy has it been a challenging couple of months. The title of the post might be a bit misleading, suggesting my company is indeed going nowhere fast. This is a wrong assumption. It’s definitely...
View ArticleMore Video From paidContent 2012
I'm not feeling well today so instead of fun friday or feature friday, I'm going to post another video from the paidContent 2012 conference. When Mathew Ingram and I got off the stage, the paidContent...
View ArticleGoodbye Photoshop, Hello Cloudinary
Manipulating images for your website is such a tedious chore. You need to open Photoshop, click your mouse about ten thousand times, then save the file and upload it. Then next month you redesign your...
View ArticleCricket's Impact On The U.S. iPhone Market
For as long as the iPhone has been available, people in the U.S. have been clamoring for a prepaid version of it. That was never going to happen when AT&T held the iPhone monopoly. The company has...
View ArticleHow Kinect Spawned A Commercial Ecosystem
When the Kinect was introduced in November 2010 as a $150 motion-control add-on to Microsoft’s Xbox consoles, it drew attention from more than just video-gamers. A slim, black, oblong 11½-inch wedge...
View ArticleCan Tim Cook Escape The Ghost Of Steve Jobs?
At every public appearance by Tim Cook - say, Wednesday's on-stage interview at AllThingsD's annual D10 conference, or the upcoming WWDC keynote - commentators see the specter of Steve Jobs looming...
View Article4 Secrets To Silicon Valley's Productivity
This is a guest blog post from Walter Chen, founder and CEO of iDoneThis, the easiest way for companies to track and celebrate what's getting done. Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest -- at each of those...
View ArticleOnly A Few, Elite Companies Are Attracting The Best Talent
A warning to senior executives of companies across industries: Your recruiters could be repelling your best job applicants. They're providing the same recruiting messages to all candidates. But the...
View ArticleEgypt's Amazing Start-Ups Keep Going, Despite The Outcome Of The Recent Election
It's hard to come to Cairo as an American businessman, especially one interested in and writing about high tech internet start-ups here, and not by shuttled from bubble to bubble of well educated,...
View ArticlePeople Actually ‘DO’ Want To Make Mobile Payments If You Make It Easy Enough
I had a good feeling as the month of May was progressing we would be seeing some awesome Seconds numbers. But since we are now into June and I was able to get some time to crunch the entire May...
View ArticleREVEALED: How The Samwer Brothers Made Billions Cloning Facebook, Groupon,...
The Billion-Dollar Idea came to Arne Bleckwenn suddenly and all at once: What if travelers could use the Internet to book rooms in apartments just as easily as they could book rooms in hotels? What if...
View ArticleBashing Facebook For All The Wrong Reasons
So Facebook’s IPO was a disaster. Or maybe it wasn’t. Yes, it was an utter fiasco. No, wait: “The debacle was not the IPO but all the whining by speculators who didn’t make money.” Nope, it was “the...
View ArticleThe Case For More Choice In The iPhone Line Of Products
There is much to be said for Apple’s current iPhone and iPad strategy being very focused and very limited in terms of product line diversity. Of course you can make the argument that Apple already...
View ArticleWhy Mobile Must Solve Its Data Dilemma – Or Die
As little as 18 months ago, mobile VoIP and IP messaging apps were considered niche by operators. Now we pose the biggest “threat” the industry has even seen. In fact, a Telco 2.0report suggests that...
View ArticleWhy Crowdfunding Is Today's Goldrush
Back in the gold rush days, the smart people were not the ones heading for the hills to dig holes. The smart people were selling picks and shovels. Crowdfunding is like that. With everyone and his...
View ArticleHow This Guy Got Peter Thiel And Sean Parker To Invest In His Campaign Startup
David Binetti saw a problem in the way voters, candidates and elected officials communicate—or don’t most of the time. With partner, Jason Putorti, he created Votizen three years ago to address it....
View ArticleWhy RIM And Other Mobile Giants Are Now Failing
RIM has been pronounced dead by a tech expert, Shelly Palmer, who loved every Blackberry he has ever owned. Hewlett-Packard just announced layoffs of 27,000 employees and has a stock price 60% below...
View ArticleHate SOPA And CISPA? Get Ready For A Steady Stream Of Internet Regulation...
Is 2012 a landmark year for Internet security bills, or is it just the tip of the iceberg? So far this year we’ve had SOPA, CISPA, CSA and SECURE IT - the latter three still up for votes in the...
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