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Royalty-Based Venture Financing, Born in Boston, Could Shake Up
Every once in a while, an investment model comes along that turns the innovation community on its head. The venture capital industry, still less than 50 years old, is one example. Now an emerging paradigm called royalty-based financing, applied to early-stage startups, may be another. The approach has its roots in the Boston area, and is starting to generate some serious buzz in the Northwest. If you’re a VC, angel investor, or entrepreneur, it definitely needs to be on your radar.
TIME has published its top 10 of everything 2009, and the winner in the gadgets category is a relative newcomer: the Droid. The Motorola phone on the Verizon network is a great device on the best network, TIME argues, making it the obvious choice despite being new to the market. TIME writes :
TIME Names Gadget of the Year: Droid
Music: An Instrument Inventor Hears Music Everywhere | Magazine
Photo: Zen Sekizawa When the earth quakes, most people run for the closest doorway. Trimpin heads to the studio. The German-born artist-inventor has been generating sounds inspired by oddball sources since he was a kid. So when a tremblor struck his adopted hometown of Seattle, Trimpin tuned in to the sonic chaos.
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Tips for entrepreneurs
5 reasons why other people will spread your personal brand - Hol
Are you real? If your personal brand is something you put on and take off like a hat -- why would someone run the risk of exposing you to their network? There are many posers (as Steve Farber calls them) out there. Don't be one of them. One thing I often get when I meet people from my online community for the first time is their amazement that I am the same in real life as I come across online.[France] Paris-based Pearltrees has been catching interest around the web the last few days not least because a gaggle influential Silicon Valley bloggers have descended on Paris for Le Web , but mainly because of its interesting model for visually mapping how people collect and share information on the Web. But today the startup opens the kimono on its full system. They will announce two new things today: Twitter synchronization (enabling a user to create a pearl automatically from Twitter and to tweet automatically from their new Pearltrees), Pearltrees search, Real time discussion and connection.
Pearltrees launches Twitter sync and reveals its social system
pearltrees > blog
Why change? First, because Pearltrees has changed and we felt it was important that they blog should reflect these changes. Second, to improve readability. Post are now featured in the middle of a cleaner page. Finally, we revised the right column to make it clearer and give you better access to the most important categories: Pearltrees, Information and Keep posted. Le blog de Pearltrees a fait peau neuve.
Square Payments System Gets a Free Hardware Boost | Technomix |
Square --that plastic gizmo that plugs into your iPhone and reads magnetic stripes--may, or may not, revolutionize the credit-card system. Inventor Jack Dorsey has, however, removed one big barrier to success: He wants to give it away. Dorsey was speaking to CNBC journalists at the Le Web conference in Paris when he plainly responded "We're going to try to give these away for free" in response to a question about pricing. It'll involve some business model juggling, of course, as Dorsey went on to note: "we're trying to get costs down significantly." Considering that the hardware must consist at least of the plastic housing, the magnetic reader, and some basic electronics to amplify the reader signal and send it in to the iPhone--bits that are all cheap--it should be possible for Dorsey to achieve his goal.
Whether a binding climate change agreement will be reached at this week's UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen is still up in the air, but at least some progress has been made in the realm of renewable energy. Nine European countries--Denmark, Germany, France, Belgium, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Sweden, and Ireland--signed the "North Seas' Countries Offshore Grid Initiative," a plan to create an offshore wind power supergrid in the North and North West seas. The plan means that offshore wind parks in various countries could all be linked--so wind power from Ireland could be used in Germany, for example. According to a press release from Ireland's Department of Communications, the plan will allow Irish wind farms to "connect directly to Europe, not only securing our energy supply but allowing us to sell the electricity produced on a wider market."
Copenhagen Update: European Countries Agree to Construct Offshor
We’ve known that a major privacy overhaul has been in the works for some time at Facebook , and last week a letter from founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg let everyone know that changes were imminent. Today, the company plans to start asking all 350 million of its users to review and update their settings as they roll out the new simplified privacy interface. While Facebook’s spinning the changes largely as being about making things easier for users (which is true; the current privacy settings are enormously complex if you care to dive in), it’s also all about encouraging them to share more stuff publicly by letting them choose an “everyone” option each time they post something. That will be key for Facebook becoming as valuable as Twitter in the realm of real-time search, where both are now integrated in Google . Although it has many times more users than Twitter, to date, most Facebook data remains private and, hence, inaccessible to search engines.
