Startups
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Startup Genome
This is a free monthly benchmark for startup founders. After filling out a questionnaire we will compare you against other startups that are similar to you in order to help you evaluate your recent performance. The Startup Genome Compass uses a hybrid Stage and Type model that describes how firms progress through their business development lifecycle. Traditional theory of startup performance hinges on external characteristics of a firm to attribute success factors.
Earlier this week, we covered Blackbox , the young company responsible for creating The Startup Genome Report , an ongoing, collaborative R&D project designed to take a comprehensive dive into what makes Silicon Valley startups successful — and not. ( Read our initial coverage here. ) On Tuesday, we covered the company’s launch of what it calls the Startup Genome Compass , a benchmarking tool for startups that helps founders monitor their progress in different growth categories. Since then, more than 6,000 startups have signed up to use the Compass. Along with the diagnostic tool, Blackbox also released a new research report on the major causes of startup failure, including perhaps more significantly, the primary cause of startups kicking the bucket: Premature scaling. While this was touched on in our prior coverage, we thought it might be worth elaborating on their findings, including presenting a nifty infographic created by the team over at Visual.ly .
A Deeper Look At Blackbox’s Data On Startup Failure And Its Top Cause: Premature Scaling [Infographic] | TechCrunch
500Startups
NYC incubators
The Quora debate
Word Lens More Than Pays for Two Years of Bootstrapping With Its Impressive Launch
It was an app two years in the making, but a blowout week more than made up for the time and money Otavio Good spent bootstrapping Word Lens — the first arguably useful augmented reality experience. Almost perfectly fit for Arthur Clarke’s famous saying that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic,” Word Lens is a translation app. If you open it up on your iPhone and hold it up to any sign in Spanish, it automatically translates it, replacing the foreign words in the viewfinder with English. But besides its magical demo, the impressive thing about the company is that Good and his partner built the optical character recognition and translation technology from scratch. Word Lens doesn’t rely on Google Translate, because Good doesn’t want the app to be totally dependent on a steady Internet connection.Web based Pedagogical tools
When you hear Silicon Valley discuss the European startup scene it’s often negatively. Some say that the investors aren’t brave enough, some say the entrepreneurs aren’t bold enough. Whether there’s any truth in these accusations or not, the fact is that there are startups across Europe that are brimming with original ideas and creativity. Visitors to the LeWeb conference last month couldn’t have failed to spot Pearltrees . The French startup had a stand large enough to rival tech heavyweights like Google and Zynga.
10 European Startups To Watch in 2011
Digital business strategy
Beauty
The Digital Entrepreneur Series is supported by Egnyte . Egnyte Hybrid Cloud File Server delivers critical business infrastructure — online storage, file sharing, collaboration and backup — at LAN speeds. Visit www.egnyte.com to learn more. Digital agency Invoke has a habit of creating products instead of purchasing them. HootSuite , a third-party client for accessing social networks like Facebook and Twitter , is the most successful of the in-house tools that the company has launched as products. When Dario Meli, David Tedman, and Ryan Holmes launched the company in 2006, they weren’t necessarily planning on selling products.
5 Tips for Startup Success From a Co-Founder of HootSuite
Twitter trend maps
Gist - Connected People Change History
Your contacts are everywhere. In email, social networks, and many other sources. Gist brings your contacts into one place to give you the only full view of your network making it easy to find anyone, anytime.Our assets have been purchased for a new website focused on analytics in the luxury shopping space. We really appreciate all the support we've received from all our fans over the past year. It's been a great ride.
Track, Share, Discover
Apple acquires Siri, a personal assistant application for the iP
Apple has acquired Siri, a voice-activated app for the iPhone that acts like a personal assistant. The transaction was approved Tuesday by the Federal Trade Commission. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. Neither Siri nor Apple immediately responded to a request for comment. To use Siri, users need only to type or say something into the iPhone app, and it will carry out the command or find answers to a question.
Google buys social media site Aardvark | Technology | Los Angele
Mechanical Zoo, the San Francisco company that created the Aardvark service, was founded by several ex-Google executives including Max Ventilla and Nathan Stoll. It's a site where users can ask questions and get answers from their social network, a popular new concept being tested by other start-ups. This is the second major social-media move this week for the Internet giant. Google announced Tuesday that it has added Buzz to its Web mail service Gmail.Latitude
Turn on check-in notifications for nearby places once you’ve arrived or choose places to be automatically checked in at. See Latitude’s settings.
Web2.0
Cool Startups
Startups Founded by Yahoo Alumni
Augmented Reality
In the latest cloud-services consolidation move, Internet content security software provider Trend Micro revealed June 11 that it is acquiring Humyo.com, a 3-year-old, privately held online storage and data synchronization company. Terms of the transaction were not disclosed. Humyo, pronounced hew-MY-oh, offers an online file storage service that automatically synchronizes a user's files across multiple computers and a remote data store in order to make content available any time from any type of connected device. The company currently has about 600,000 users—mostly in Europe—storing more than 100 million files, co-founder Dan Conlon said.
Trend Micro Acquires Online File Sync Provider Humyo - Data Stor
Online storage
Beyond Yelp and Foursquare???
The difference between angel investors and venture capitalists The commonly understood difference between Angel Investors and Venture Capitalists can be distinguished by the organizational status of investors involved and the stage at which the investor in question puts money into a new enterprise. The stages of investment in a startup venture can be classified as follows: seed funding, first round funding, second round funding, mezzanine funding, and initial public offering (IPO). Typically, but not always, Angel Investors put money into a startup company at the earlier and riskier seed stages than do Venture Capitalists. The term "Angel Investors" refers to private individuals who take positions in startup companies usually at a very early stage.
The difference between angel investors and venture capitalists -
VC