On Monday, I was in the audience watching the Disrupting Location competitors battling it out in front of the judges—Chris Dixon (Hunch), Soraya Dorabi (FoodSpotting), …
One of my personal goals over the last year was to see MakerBot Industries’ 3-D printer in-action, making stuff.
I can check that off my startup bucket list. I got the video to prove it.Continue reading
Lark, the morning bird, is a great name for a product that gently wakes you up. I stopped by Lark’s TechCrunch Disrupt booth to talk …
I’ve been to many, many trade shows and conferences over the years. TechCrunch Disrupt is the first I’ve attended that’s devoted to startups.
You notice differences.
No security detail of marketing and PR staffers who hover around a sprawling booth that has its own zip code. No rock wall. No laser light shows. No roboticized, soulless pitches.
At Disrupt, the startups run lean: there’s a table, the product, and the CEO or CTO him- or her-self enthusiastically handling the foot traffic.
That was the case with invoiceASAP. They have a tablet app for the small business marketplace that I am completely charged up about.Continue reading
I ducked into the “What Makes Great Entrepreneurs Great” session this morning and listened to Michael Arrington and Ron Conway explore and mull over a survey results collected from over 300 startups during a ten-year period.
The conclusions were not totally surprising. The ideal startup is one in which there are multiple founders all under the age of 30.
This holds very true for ventures that exit with a $25 million and over valuation, and more so for ones lucky enough to reach the $500 million mark.
In some ways, these startups parallel the success arc of a good ball club: youth and teamwork, at least among the originators.Continue reading
This was a NYC-class hack gathering: a big stage set up in the large Pier 94 hangar, enormous video screens, an enthused audience, and more demos than there were lights on Broadway.
With a long line of hackers waiting to be guided to the appropriate demo computer on the crowded dais, TechCrunch staffers I think must have consulted the New York Department of Transportation for traffic management tips.
I had my own traffic problems of a more traditional kind: a massive jam up on the West Side highway prevented me from seeing two of the eventual winners—Gilt-ii and Docracy. Continue reading
Last night, NYU’s ITP program put on its vernal show of student projects. I couldn’t resist.
I made the trip to lower Broadway to see solenoids, DC motors, pulleys, gears, transformers, cameras, OR gates, laser-etched plexiglass, magnets, propellers, large touch screens, finger puppets, spare parts from Xbox, and clever software (of course) mashed up to create something pretty, gadgety, joyful (sometimes dark), and at times vaguely practical.
Can you believe that none of the object de gadget had even a reference to Twitter, Facebook, or other social media forms? Continue reading
One of the advantages of living close to a major NJ academic institution is that universities, especially tech-oriented ones, are often hubs of entrepreneurial activity.
That is the case with NJIT, which is located down the road from me in Newark
This engineering-focused school boasts an incubation program at their Enterprise Development Center, which to date has hatched over 80 businesses and continues to attract seed money.
And NJIT also hosts interesting conferences, like the New Jersey Technology Council (NJTC) Bootcamp, where entrepreneurs get to tap into the wisdom of business veterans, investors, accounting firms, lawyers and the rest of the ecosystem that keeps the tech scene in this area rolling along.Continue reading
I wasn’t brave enough for sitesimon, the browser add-on that lets you share your click stream with the world.
To accommodate me and the millions of other shy people of the world, the crew at sitesimon updated their model to allow for more selective publishing.
In adopting a traditional following-follower approach, subscribers to this service can choose to reveal their URLs to just their loyal friends and followers.
Or if they prefer to go radio silent for awhile, they can adjust their profile to hide their web activity altogether.Continue reading
I had a brief chat this afternoon with Alex one of the co-founders of BridesView, the wedding site that picked up an honorable mention at NYCSW last month.
Alex told me he will be following through on his vision of a photo-intensive web experience that captures the dreaminess of weddings, along with offering some practical tips on where to find all the wedding accoutrements.
After I got off the phone, I took a quick peek at iVillage, a potential competitor. Continue reading
A year later, I’m still smarting over the loss of UJAM, the software that makes music from off-pitch voices, to Soluto, the (gasp) Windows utility at last year’s TechCrunch Disrupt.
The show is back in town May 23 – May 25 at Pier 94. Startup battlefield, lots of A-list speakers (Armstrong, Crowley, Dixon, Conway), and a hackathon.Continue reading
With an alpha invite in my inbox, and since I haven’t seen enough videos in my lifetime, I tuned into Shelby.tv.
Shelby’s premise, from what I understand, is that you don’t know which videos to watch, but your social network— Twitter and Facebook pals—instead holds the key to your viewing preferences.
Shelby works by pulling in videos that have been posted by cohorts. Unfortunately, my Twitter network, which includes lots of telecom and tech companies, is not a media watching kind of group.
So Shelby could find just two links, and then played the videos over and over and over again.
Apparently someone in my social graph had tweeted a music video link to “I just had sex” by The Lonely Island.
Could it be Twilio—they seem awfully happy lately? Or perhaps this is a bit of clever marketing by BridesView?Continue reading
Stevens Institute held its Research and Entrepreneurship Day conference this past Friday.
It was a chance for this engineering school to give the public a peek at tech projects that have been incubated by professors and students with the goal to commercialize the university’s IP.
Project such as CADEyes (dimensional maps from lasers and cameras), Attila (broadband technology that grabs simultaneous bandwidth from multiple networks), and other efforts were presented during the afternoon’s Venture Forum.
I wasn’t able to make it.
However, one of the spin-off companies, called Instream Media, which developed algorithms to detect deception in text communication, has software that can be tested by anyone.
I decided to give it a try.Continue reading
I thought I recognized one of the developers at Sunday’s NYC Startup Weekend final presentations. It took an email from Animotion developer Jerry Gabra to …
Did I really hear 20 or so presentations in a little over 2 hours at the conclusion of NYC Startup Weekend?
According to my barely legible notes, scribbled while standing up in the very crowded kitchen area in General Assembly’s co-working space, I had a few insightful comments on each one of them.
My quick, emotional assessments differed from the judges: I didn’t quite ‘get’ PlayMob, the first place winner; dismissed too quickly the second place winner, WeTrip.it, the on-line group vacation piggy bank, and perhaps let my group conference calling prejudices get in the way of appreciating third-place Bridg.me.
No matter, I was impressed with many of the pitches, amazed at what Red-Bull fueled developers could accomplish in 48 hours, and learned that even cold NYC falafels still taste really good.Continue reading
They gather at their East Village temple to listen to their leaders chant arcane codes involving greek letters as they attempt to divine the future.
I am of course referring to the NYC Predictive Analytics monthly meetup held at the 6th floor of 770 Broadway, AOL headquarters.
I stopped by last night to see if I could learn how to create my own digital crystal ball. Continue reading
I launched my own StartUp Week festivities by attending last night’s Entrepreneur Panel at NYU’s Kaufman Auditorium, a place I’ve become quite familiar with lately.
Having reached saturation on pure software startups, I decided to take in the Biotech-Cleantech-Social panel that was scheduled for the second half.
I wanted to hear, for a change, about entrepreneurs who made or had more intimate connection with actual physical stuff, in this case drug molecules, smart thermostats, and software that maps and helps preserve flora and fauna, the organic stuff of the world.Continue reading
Mayor Bloomberg just announced the winners of the NYCEDC’s Next Idea Contest.
And did we call this or what?
Congrats to Radim and Babak of VerifEyed, and Andy Tsai and his team at ReFleX.Continue reading
I missed yesterday’s New York Tech Meetup. I’ll be fine.
However, I would have liked to have seen the Readability demo and learned more about this company’s plans.
Their FireFox plug-in de-clutters a typical web page, removing graphics, Flash, and other visual ephemera leaving you with just the nutritious text.
The software was reviewed by David Pogue in November 2009. And it ended that year with a coveted Pogie Award.
Since the Pogie, Readability added some new features to boost the original text-centric idea. And then in a move that as far as I’m concerned nailed their dedication to the written word, they’ve installed a micro-payment system for authors. Continue reading
The New York City Economic Development Corporation is an agency tasked, not surprisingly, with stimulating the local economy. This includes our booming information economy, and in fact NYCEDC are the folks behind the BigApps competition.
Final presentations for another idea of theirs called, naturally, NYC Next Idea, were held this morning at Columbia University’s Shapiro Center. The six startups that made their presentations to the judges—as assortment of entrepreneurs, investors, and Steven Strauss, an NYCEDC director— had been winnowed from over 150 worldwide entries.
The common theme among this group of university student finalists was their desire to set up shop in NYC.Continue reading
