Scratch | My Stuff | AlexandreCombessie. Validation Board - FREE tool for testing new product ideas, stop wasting time and money. Ex-Foursquare Designers Focus On Sunrise, Want You To Do More With Your Calendar. Two of the team of eight designers at Foursquare have recently left to focus on Sunrise, a calendar product to do more with your calendar, with data from Google Calendar, Facebook, LinkedIn and others. They currently offer a daily email and are actively working on the next version. According to them, the calendar can be a very powerful tool and nobody has figured it out yet. “Calendar apps today are mostly broken as they don’t show you useful information, even though you spend a lot of time adding items every day,” UX designer and developer Pierre Valade said in an interview.
“That’s why we first created a daily email combining all the information available on Google Calendar, Facebook, LinkedIn and Eventbrite, and presenting it in a compelling way,” he continued. It first started out as a side project while working at Foursquare. They focused a lot on the user experience and design, with Jeremy Le Van handling design and Valade development. Trntbl. On Sale At Last: Twine, Your Gateway To The Internet Of Things. A year ago, two MIT Media Lab graduates raised half a million dollars on Kickstarter to create Twine, a cigarette-pack-sized chunk of Internet magic that promised to turn any object in your home into a web-connected, interactive "smart product.
" Want your basement pipes to send you a text message when they’re in danger of freezing up, or your garage door to ping you if you forget to close it? No problem: With Twine, building your own personal "Internet of things" is supposed to be easier than programming a VCR. And now that the product is available for purchase, it looks like creators John Kestner and David Carr have very nearly delivered on that ambitious promise. How do you get a non-hacker to even understand a device like Twine? With product design that would make Steve Jobs proud. But Twine is also intriguingly mysterious: Flip the rubbery, featureless box over on its back and two instructions reveal themselves: "Place this side up," and "go to Twinesetup.com. " Brain Games & Brain Training - Lumosity. Find Dishes. The Secret, Selfish Side Of Social-Curation Sites. Here’s my beef with social platforms today: I don’t think they’re very social at all.
As much as Google+, Facebook, and Pinterest promise a way to connect, they’ve also promoted a disconnect--sharing on different platforms, proving a fragmented sense of keeping tabs on any social network. We can track our connections’ job promotions on LinkedIn, photos from their new office on Facebook, and hear their celebratory music on Spotify--but what about how these all link together? And what about the platforms themselves? Unfortunately, competition currently drives their existence.
Specifically, these days every startup, brand, journalist, etc. has set out to associate themselves with the craze that is “social curation": What is this Pinterest? It’s not social, it’s selfish. Social curation companies like Pinterest, Storify, and Foodspotting are essentially creating hubs for crowdsourcing interests like wedding ideas, hipsterized photos, and tweets that appear social on the surface. Misadventures in VC Funding: The $24 Million Moz Almost Raised. Date / / Category / Startups Over the course of this year, I’ve written a couple times about raising a potential round of venture financing for my company, SEOmoz.
At last, the saga’s over, I’ve been released from terms of confidentiality and I can share the long, strange story of how I first rejected, was eventually persuaded, but ultimately failed to raise a second round of investment capital. photo credit My hope is that by sharing, others can learn from our experience and possibly avoid some of the mistakes, pitfalls and pain we faced. Raising money for a startup is an inherently risky proposition. Do We Really Want to Raise a Round? In November of last year, 14 months after my previous failed attempt to raise capital, we started receiving inquiries from a variety of firms – venture capitalists and private/growth equity investors, asking if SEOmoz was interested in pursuing funding. The week of May 8th, I met with 3 investors in New York City and one in Boston. Narrowing Down the Field. Good Strategy/Bad Strategy: the difference and why it matters.
Strategiser! | Leading thoughts about leadingStrategiser! | Leading thoughts about leading. Website Worth Estimation & Web Information Service Company. Extreme Startups - The most prolific ecosystem for entrepreneurs. #imsickof on Twitter. Master of 500 Hats. Startup Professionals Musings. Coal-Eating Microbes Might Create Vast Amounts of Natural Gas. Fracking technology has already made it practical to exploit previously inaccessible natural gas and oil in the United States (see “Natural Gas Changes the Energy Map”). Now several companies are demonstrating a way to use microörganisms that eat coal and excrete methane—the main ingredient in natural gas—as a possible means of extracting fuel from coal resources that had been too expensive to mine. Many coal beds contain large amounts of methane that can be harvested by drilling wells. In recent decades, researchers have demonstrated that a large fraction of the natural gas found in the coal beds is produced by naturally occurring microörganisms that feed on coal, and they have found ways to stimulate the microbes to produce more methane.
Luca Technologies, based in Golden, Colorado, is using this approach to increase production from coal beds with existing methane wells. At this point, it’s too early to know how much methane these techniques could produce. World's leading workshop on Lean Startup methodologies » Lean Startup Machine. Canada’s Entrepreneurial Leadership Initiative. All-in-One Marketing Software | Inbound Marketing with HubSpot.
For Entrepreneurs – Google for Entrepreneurs. KISSmetrics Customer Web Analytics - Event Tracking, A/B Testing and Conversion Funnel Software. Facebook Shop | Import Web Stores to Facebook - StoreYa.com. A Brief History of Text Messaging. Where would we be without text messaging? The feature has grown from being favored by the tech-savvy to a universal staple. It's allowed us to be more efficient, independent and direct. When you're running late, you text someone to let them know. When you're in class or a meeting and there's an emergency, you know immediately. When you need a quick "yes" or "no," you ask via text. How did such a seemingly simple method of communication lead us to the trillions of texts sent today? Texting, or SMS (short message service) is a method of communication that sends text between cellphones — or from a PC or handheld to a cell phone.
The "short" part comes from the maximum size of the text messages: 160 characters (letters, numbers or symbols in the Latin alphabet). The SMS concept was developed in the Franco-German GSM cooperation in 1984 by Friedhelm Hillebrand and Bernard Ghillebaert. The first text message was sent in 1992 from Neil Papworth, a former developer at Sema Group Telecoms. Curriculum Vitae: Chris Eliasmith. Professor Canada Research Chair in Theoretical Neuroscience Department of Philosophy Department of Systems Design Engineering University of Waterloo Waterloo, Ontario N2L 3G1 Canada email: celiasmith@uwaterloo.ca [Education] [Books] [Refereed Journal Articles] [Refereed Conference Papers] [Chapters, Encyclopedia, etc.]
[Edited Publications] [Awards] [Conferences] [Committees and Professional Affiliations] Research Positions Education Books Eliasmith, C. (2013) How to build a brain: A neural architecture for biological cognition. Eliasmith, C. and C. Refereed Journal Articles [Theoretical Neuroscience][Theoretical Psychology][Philosophy] *Note: Many of these publications and related ones not listed can be found in full at my lab's main website. Theoretical Neuroscience Eliasmith, Chris and Oliver Trujillo. Rasmussen, Daniel and Chris Eliasmith. Eliasmith, C., Stewart T. Stewart, T. DeWolf, T., & Eliasmith C. (2011). MacNeil, D., Eliasmith, C. (2011). Eliasmith, C., Martens, J. (2011). Philosophy. Meet iRobot Founder Rodney Brooks’s New Industrial Bot, Baxter | JetLib News.