It’s Friday, and what better way to end the week than to learn that another angel investor is doing business in NYC.
Haig Kayserian is an Australian web entrepreneur, who according to the press release we received, is making investments in three US startups though his new NYC-based KAYWEB Angels.
He is divvying up $900K to Cafrino (gaming), Minute Lister (mobile ecommerce), and You Need My Guy (business networking).Continue reading
I was at Google last night, at their 8th Ave. location in NYC, attending a JavaScript Meetup.
I almost didn’t make it: I was on the waiting list up until the last minute.
So what brought over 125 people into the 10th Floor of Google’s Manhattan franchise?
(By the way, Googlers know how to dress for a NYC summer: they were pouring out of the building around 6:30 all wearing cargo shorts and comfy T-shirts.)
Anyway, we were all there to hear about their JavaScript in-the-cloud service, called Apps Script.
Who would have thunk so many so many passionate developers would be coming out on this rainy night, and why would Google put a client-side language into the stratosphere?
It all became clearer by the end of the talk.
I haven’t been attending New York Tech Meetups lately but there was one demo at last night’s gathering I would have liked to have seen.
Idea Flight from the folks at Conde Nast Digital turns the iPad into a collaborative document and screen sharing tool—think of it as WebEx for tablets.
One person is the host, or as Idea Flight calls it, the pilot, and the attendees are known as “passengers”.
I’m not sure I entirely get the flight metaphor, but this iPad app looks to be an on-the-fly approach to do shared presentations over a WiFi network.
Pavan Katepalli had his ‘aha’ moment about blogs when he was running his second startup, a search engine marketing service.
In trying to expand the online marketing presence of one his clients, he discovered that bloggers hold a lot of power in terms of directing traffic and boosting visits.
After selling the SEM company—his first startup, by the way, was hatched while he was a Rutger’s undergraduate—Pavan then went on to found BloggersCompete.
The idea is simple: advertisers initiate a contest for bloggers, suggesting general themes to write about. Bloggers get exposure by being part of the contest, and the winner or winners receive cash, while runner-ups get some non-cash swag or other prizes. Continue reading
Taap.it, the geo-aware classified mobile app that launched at TechCruch Disrupt in late May, has experienced impressive growth in the last two months.
They’ve seen $2.4 million in transactions cleared through their online marketplace
With the Taap.it iPhone (and Android) app, sellers post a picture of the item they wish to sell along with embedded geo-data. Buyers search using distance and keyword parameters.
The focus here is, of course, on local business, and the assumption is that delivery and payment can be handled without any messy third-parties—perhaps the whole transaction can be settled at the local coffee bar.Continue reading
I was in NYC on Wednesday, attending part of DevCon5, a two-day conference devoted to the magical HTML5 browser standard.
As I was staring at a Pac-Man app during ‘The Power of Canvas” session— actually the largest Pac-Man mazes in the world crafted completely in HTML5— my mind wandered back to the 1980s.
You know that time when people went to special arcades to play videos games, like Pac-Man, and returned home to get the news or watch a movie on their TV sets.
If you wanted an interactive graphical experience, you essentially rented time on an appliance that connected together cathode ray tube, CPU, and memory.Continue reading
Summer is here and the time is right for another Technoverse list of our favorite business apps.
Our files are stuffed with notes from the last few months of attending trade shows and meetups, quizzing CEOs, and testing software in our state-of-the-art lab. The focus of this list, as in our past enumerations, is on small-to-medium businesses.
The distribution of employers in the US is skewed towards small: most businesses—something like 98% — are considered small, with roughly under 25 employees. Even more astonishing: they hire 50% of the US workforce.
But unlike in the past, the cost of starting and running a small business doesn’t necessarily require emptying a bank account.
We have computing to thank for this, everything from cheap biz apps in the cloud, low-cost communications and collaboration, inexpensive social media marketing, the ability to crowdsource certain tasks, and on and on.
Herewith are a few apps that should help you kickstart and manage your business:Continue reading
One eyebrow-raising moment at last night’s Hoboken Tech Meetup was when former Huffington Post CEO Eric Hippeau said that in his new gig at Lerer Ventures, he funds one company per week.
It is a good time to be a startup. Or at least the kind of startup that Lerer Ventures is interested in—those with founders that want to take on huge markets.
Hippeau has led a charmed and fascinating life. This Sorbonne-educated but very worldly media entrepreneur worked his way up from running an English language paper in Brazil (when he was just 20) to taking the CEO helm at giant tech publisher Ziff-Davis.
As you might expect, his presentation on the disruptive power of software was backed up by interesting stories. Like the time he was working at Softbank trying to convince Jerry Yang, who had a company called Yahoo, to take a $100 million investment.
Continue reading
A few months ago I found myself completely captivated by a Google Street View journey I took through Rome: the Forum, Baths of Diocletian, and the Appian Way.
I had missed the last two on a recent trip to the Eternal City, and found Google’s 3D reality was not a bad substitute to actual wanderings in the real places.
A stealthy startup called 3rd Planet has taken this idea and is turning it into a money making travel planning web site that will, in the words of their brochure, “change the face of tourism forever.”
3rd Planet appears to be a kind of Second Life for vacations planners, allowing them to both step through renderings of cities, ruins, museums, etc. but also interact with “fellow online tourists”.Continue reading
Financial blogger Barry Ritholtz has posted a gigantic chart comparing the dot com boom-bust cycle with our current startup and IPO frenzy.
It’s worth gazing at on your iPad or Samsung Tab in between rounds of beach volley ball.
Continue reading
Taap.it is the geographically aware classified buying app that I first saw at TechCrunch.
On Tuesday, the Taap.it crew were on the big stage at New York Tech Meetup.
I wasn’t there, but fortunately the video of their presentation is now on YouTube. Take a look.Continue reading
At the beginning of my call with Eran Gefen, CEO of NYC-based, FanGager, we talked about how CRM 2.0, and even social CRM are not particularly appropriate labels to describe his company.
FanGager software lets businesses measure the frequency of wall posts, tweets, likes, and other social interactions, as well as visitors engaging with surveys, trivia questions, and actual games, like collecting virtual cupcakes.
And FanGager does, ahem, measure and reward customers who actually purchase products.Continue reading
The Consumer Electronics Association, better known for its giant show in Las Vegas, launched its first CE Week in New York City.
There are events around the city for the next few days, including CEA Research Day at the Time Warner Building (today, actually), Digital Downtown (hey, isn’t that NYTM’s Nate Westheimer on the speaker list?), and the CEA Line Show, where the public gets to peek at the newest multi-media gear and gadgetry.
I was in attendance yesterday and saw booth after booth of electronica and other A/V hardware–speakers, headsets, televisions, tripods, solar powered radios.
One couldn’t help but notice that 3D is a major theme for the television industry.Continue reading
Image hotspots have been around for a long time—since at least HTML3—and have allowed developers to add interactivity to graphics.
You know, hover over a state in a map of the US, see the name pop up, and then click to get routed to an informational page.
And of course, Flash and Silverlight have come along to provide ultimate interactivity and media capabilities. But the emphasis has always been on developers, especially with the aforementioned tools.
ThingLink is a San Francisco startup that is bringing hotspots, which they call Rich Media Tags, within reach of HTML- and ActionScript- challenged publishers.
That means bloggers, Tumblrs, etc. can quickly add linkable, position-aware icons to their pics.Continue reading
Wanderfly, the travel planning site we like, has just signed up a few more media companies as curators.
It’s a mutually beneficial arrangement wherein the likes of Mashable, Jaunted (“celeb-favorite destinations”), Havaianas (“beaches that soothe your sole”), and my favorite, the History Channel, control a piece of Wanderfly’s web real estate.
From there the subject matter experts can make travel suggestions and perhaps History Channel curators can inspire readers to learn what really happened at the Circus Maximus or the Baths of Caracalla.
With this announcement, it seemed like the right time to take a deeper tour of Wanderfly.Continue reading
Social Listing, the location-aware classified advertising app launched at TechCrunch Disrupt 2011, has given itself a new, more fluid appellation.
It now calls itself Taap.it, which is a far better name, search-wise.
But this is more than just a rebranding.Continue reading
Last week at TechCrunch Disrupt, I had a chance to see the revamped Wanderfly.
Christy Liu, Wanderfly’s co-founder and Director of Marketing, put me behind the new dashboard of this visually intensive travel recommendation site as we looked for warmer spots while shivering during an unusual late May cold spell.
The photos I looked at for Italy (Rome, Venice, Sienna) are stunning. And for my next job, I’d like to be the house photographer for Wanderfly.
I learned from Liu yesterday that Wanderfly made Time Inc.’s list of “10 NYC Startups to Watch” and Entrepreneur magazine’s “100 Brilliant Companies”. Continue reading
My gut told me that Getaround, the peer-to-peer car rental service, should be the Battlefield winner.
It was a crowd favorite and solved the age-old problem of finding temporary access to wheels without paying any up-front fees.
However, it seemed to me that the judges found this a messy proposition with possible regulatory issues, insurance issues, and potential customer satisfaction headaches—’the car I rented smells funny’, etc, etc.Continue reading
If tweets are the short form of a blog post, then what’s the short audio equivalent for a podcast?
I found the answer at Shoutomatic’s booth talking to its co-founder and COO Michael Levy. The idea is simple: why not give give the people the power to quickly record short audio messages or shouts, and tweet out the embedded link or post it onto a FaceBook wall?
There are other, more cumbersome ways to do this kind of thing in the Web world.
Shoutomatic, though, is its owns ecosystem and social network—profiles, real-time shout stream, follow-follower model, etc.
Most intriguing to me and a powerful differentiator of this service is its celebrity shouters, which include Andy Dick, Eurythmic’s Dave Stewart, rapper Chuck D, Danny Bonaduce, and American Idol winner Bo Bice.
Celebrity and branded shouts are really the core of the for-pay business of this startup.
Continue reading
I was in the middle of getting a demo of Openspace’s app finder technology when the CEO and co-founder Robert Reich cruised up to the booth on his skateboard like he was some whiz developer.
Actually he is! He was also the founder and developer of a mobile advertising network called OneRiot. And with his new startup, he’s continuing his mission to help the developer community.Continue reading
