3 health tech startups to watch from the DC to VC showcase. If healthcare in the United States continues to confuse consumers, waste money and deliver suboptimal care, it’s not because heath tech entrepreneurs are at a loss for ideas. At the DC to VC health tech startup showcase Wednesday in San Francisco, ten startups (selected from a pool of 200), pitched their plans to a panel of judges from the health venture capital community. The annual event, which coincides with the annual Health 2.0 conference, was started three years ago by Morgenthaler Ventures to bring Washington, D.C. -based policy wonks together with Silicon Valley investors and entrepreneurs. With help from the audience — who texted in their top picks American Idol-style — the judges announced two winners (one from each round) and a fan favorite. Take a look at the three featured startups below.
Round 1 winner — Beyond Lucid Technologies Round 2 overall winner and People’s Choice winner — Aidin Round 1 People’s Choice Winner – CarePlanners. LayerVault aspires to be a designer’s best friend. While developers have Github to manage revision control, the answer for designers isn’t so simple. But that’s the gap that New York City-startup LayerVault is trying to fill with its cloud-based application. The app allows designers to store, back-up and track designs as they go through revisions and allows them to deliver their work to collaborators and clients. The paid service, which includes unlimited storage, may sound simple, but revision management is a distinct pain point for many designers, who generate a slew of versions of a design and have to keep track of changes.
LayerVault has attracted close to a thousand paying customers, including big newspapers like the Washington Post, since it launched a year ago. On Wednesday, LayerVault is adding more feedback and delivery tools to expand its usefulness for larger design teams. “These features start addressing the needs of bigger teams and freelancers who work with clients,” said co-founder and CEO Allan Grinshtein. 8 Reasons Startups With Good Ideas Fail. Baghdad Community Hackerspace Workshops by Bilal Ghalib. Why should you fund this project? We've been getting questions about why it's important to run a popup hackerspace and why we're asking for 27,500 dollars.
GEMSI works to create a cascade of hackerspaces across the Middle East and North Africa. We do this by supporting the development of short term and long term spaces. Our efforts start with temporary spaces and workshops to do community discovery and connections then leads to supporting the development of a year round space. With our current funding efforts GEMSI is trying to step up and seriously consider the sustainability of our project and long term impact on the region.
You should probably read this exposition on why I think hackerspaces are awesome. GEMSI works to develop engagement, service, and entrepreneurship by uniting communities of makers around the world, facilitating the creation of hackerspaces, running workshops and creating platforms for storytelling. We need your support to extend our reach into Baghdad. Crowdfunding The Chance For 10,000 Entrepreneurs To Have Better Teams.
Use It Better Helps Developers Understand How Their Games Are Being Played. There are a bunch of companies promising to help businesses get a better understanding of user activity by recording visitor sessions (most recently we’ve covered services like userVOD and Delight.io, which are trying to bring this technology to mobile). Now a Polish startup called Use It Better has launched a user recording and analytics service that’s focused on games. Founder Lukasz Twardowski says that games present unique challenges for developers wanting to record player activity. For one thing, if you’ve got a successful game, you’re dealing with a big audience, and the session times can stretch into the hours, so it’s pretty much impossible to watch more than a couple of recordings.
You’re also trying to track a pretty broad range of behavior — not just where people are scrolling and clicking. To avoid this problem, Use It Better isn’t just recording a video, but also creating a text log listing moves and other relevant player activity. Entrepreneur Spotlight On... SusieCakes Founder Susan Sarich. 7 Reasons Why Venture Capitalists Will Hate Your Idea. Midas List: The VCs Who Are Investing In Health IT. Without Career Options, Young Europeans Turn to Entrepreneurship. Frontline Lessons Of Founder Fallout At SXSW. TEDxConcordia - Tara Hunt - The Unclear Path.
Habits Are The New Viral: Why Startups Must Be Behavior Experts. Editor’s Note: This guest post is written by Nir Eyal, a founder of two startups and an advisor to several Bay Area incubators. Nir blogs about technology and behavior design at nirandfar.com. Face it; you’re hooked. It’s your uncontrollable urge to check for email notifications on your phone. It’s your compulsion to visit Facebook or Twitter for just a few minutes, but somehow find yourself still scrolling after an hour. It’s the fact that if I recommended a book to purchase, your mind would flash “Amazon” like a gaudy neon sign.
If habits are defined as repeated and automatic behaviors, then technology has wired your brain so you behave exactly the way it wants you to. In an online world of ever-increasing distractions, habits matter. Turning Habits Into Cash Ever since the creation of the first online media companies at the dawn of Web 1.0, businesses have made money from their users’ behaviors. Viral Is Nice, But Habits Are Required The Curated Web Will Run On Habits Image Credit My Lot. 16 Chinese Startups Came Out With A Bang At The ChinaBang Conference. Editor’s note: Guest authors Gang Lu, Ben Jiang and Jason Lim are the editors of TechNode, a bilingual blog based in China.
ChinaBang conference, an annual two-day event with a focus on local startups, innovation and entrepreneurship, was held last weekend in Beijing. With a mixture of keynote and panel discussions from local startup founders and entrepreneurs, the awards ceremony recognized the best Chinese startups and founders in 2011 and featured a startup launchpad contest. Organized by TechNode, ChinaBang’s Launchpad competition had 16 teams pitch to 14 judges (from GSR Ventures, IDG, Qiming, Matrix Ventures, Atomico, Singtel, Paypal, Innovation Works, CyberAgent, Rovio, Infinity Ventures, Taishan, CSDN) and a live audience.
Each team was given 10 minutes to present on stage – five minutes pitch time and five minutes for answering judges’ questions. The judges scored each team on a scale of 10 points. Here is the rundown of all startups presented on stage in the launchpad. ShenBian. LLC vs. S Corp: Which Is Right for Your Startup? Choosing the right business structure can be a daunting task for the small business owner or entrepreneur. You may have heard that the traditional C Corporation is overkill for most small businesses, and results in higher overall tax payments through something known as double taxation.
But if the C Corporation isn’t right, then what is? In my last post, I discussed how the LLC (limited liability company) and S Corporation are popular structures for small businesses since they avoid this double taxation burden. With these business structures, the company is taxed like a sole proprietor or partnership, meaning the company itself doesn’t file its own taxes; all company profits are "passed through" and reported on the personal income tax return of the shareholders or, in the case of an LLC, the members. The similarities between these two business entities are significant, but the differences can be even more striking. 1. 2. 3.
This is an important distinction to understand. 4. 5. 6. 7. Top 20 Tech Startups in Africa. Survey Says: WordPress Leads Open Source CMS Market. According to water & stone, the "big three" open source CMSes from 2010 continue to dominate in 2011. WordPress, Drupal, and Joomla all topped the company's survey of open source CMSes, with WordPress "clearly outpacing" Drupal and Joomla. The survey started with 35 systems, which were narrowed down to 20 after getting the survey responses.
The report primarily looked at rate of adoption and brand strength. All we really care about is rate of adoption, so let's look at that. For adoption, the survey looked at downloads, installations and third-party support. WordPress blows the doors off the competition when it comes to downloads. Third party analysis shows WordPress far and away more popular, with 53.6% of the Alexa One Million. The survey also looks at third party developer support by comparing Elance and Guru stats. Another metric? Though not quite up there with the top three in most metrics, Concrete5 made impressive gains. Do You Speak VC? A Beginner's Guide to Investors.
Raising money for my start-up has been one of the most challenging experiences of my entrepreneurial life. Not because there isn't any money out there, and not even because pitching is difficult. The challenge lies in the nuances of hearing what a venture capitalist says—and then translating it to what she really means. I call the language VCili (like Swahili, but more difficult to learn). It sounds something like this: VC: "Love the team.
Interesting product. I look forward to keeping in touch. " Translation: "I don't really get what you are doing, but if someone really popular invests in you, I'll follow blindly. " VC: "Interesting approach. " Translation: "It'll never work. " VC: "How do you plan to make money? " Translation: "If I put my money into this, it will be a never-ending sinkhole of investment, won't it? " VC: "I'll bring this up at the partners meeting on Monday and let you know. " When you first hear any of these lines, you might take them as a positive sign. Just ask. 10 Hot Web Startups Changing the Face of Retail. Macala Wright is the publisher of FashionablyMarketing.Me, one of the leading fashion and retail industry business websites. She is a retail consultant and business strategist who specializes in marketing consulting for fashion, luxury and lifestyle brands.
You can follower her on Twitter at @InsideFMM or @Macala. In 2010, branded content was one the largest trends among retailers and brands. In 2011, branded content shifted to branded entertainment. Now, in 2012, we'll look toward content cultivation and aggregation. By creatively using Pinterest and Tumblr, brands are becoming enthralled with consumer curation, primarily because these types of curated sites create non-linear paths to purchases. First, retailers post visually appealing images and ideas that are accessible to the online user/consumer.
“We’re demonstrating the power of peer-to-peer shopping search,” says Buyosphere’s Tara Hunt. Image courtesy of iStockphoto, tetsuomorita. 10 Tips for Building a Strong Online Community Around Your Startup. Megan Berry is Senior Marketing Manager for Klout, the standard for online influence. She also blogs at The Huffington Post and Brazen Careerist. You can follow her on Twitter as @meganberry. Building a community around your startup can be one of the cheapest ways to create momentum for your product. A community is much more than a one-time marketing campaign, and can help you throughout your company’s life cycle if you take the time to grow it right. Here are 10 tips for getting started. 1. First, take stock of who is already talking about your product or industry and where they’re doing it. Sumaya Kazi, CEO of Sumazi, recommends “It's best to focus on one to two communities to begin with, and really focus your efforts to grow a community one at a time.” 2. Kazi recommends you “use Twitter search to see who is posting about your company, competitor or about a topic that is relevant to your company. 3.
Kazi emphasizes the value of your own friends and connections to start the community. 6 Things to Know Before Starting a Business. This post originally appeared on the American Express OPEN Forum, where Mashable regularly contributes articles about leveraging social media and technology in small business. An entrepreneur’s life can be a real roller coaster. Having started a few businesses in my career, I thought it would be useful to highlight some of the hard-won experience I’ve learned throughout the process — the kind of advice I wish I’d known when I started my first, or even second, business. 1.
Don’t Underestimate a Business Plan If you’re not seeking outside funding at the start, it’s tempting to forgo writing out a formal business plan. In addition, don’t overlook the exit strategy at the beginning. 2. My husband and I launched our first online legal document filing service in 1997, and then re-entered the market with our second company in 2009. The marketplace and your business plan are living entities; they’re continually in flux. 3. I form bonds quickly and make fast friends with people around me. 4. 5. Zoosk: An "Only in America" Immigrant Success Story. Q&A: Seth Godin on Squidoo - Liz Gannes - Social. Pinterest is not the only social content site popular among women that’s growing like a weed, says Squidoo founder Seth Godin.
Squidoo now gets 75 million page views per month, up from 50 million six months ago, according to internal Google Analytics. That’s 50 percent growth on top of a significant base. While Godin is a well-known marketing author, he doesn’t often market Squidoo. Godin told AllThingsD that Squidoo has been profitable for two years, with a small, distributed staff of 12 and no sales force or biz dev deals. He said revenue is growing as fast as traffic, but didn’t specify how much money that is. Where Pinterest is all about curation, Squidoo is more oriented towards content creation, though its users cover similar homemaking and how-to topics.
Browsing Squidoo doesn’t make me do cartwheels over all the compelling content, but it seemed worth talking to Godin to get a better sense of why the site is growing so fast. Here’s more from our phone conversation this morning: SoundCloud CEO Alex Ljung on why Berlin is hot. Five European Startups To Watch. Editor’s note: Guest contributor Amit Shafrir is president of Badoo, a social network for meeting new people based in London with 130 million users. Silicon Valley is famously, and rightly, proud of its place as the spiritual home for startups. And it has an inspiring and awesome track record that’s tough to beat. However, as the recent Le Web conference proved, European tech hubs like London, Berlin and more recently Paris, can now also lay claim to breeding world-class entrepreneurs. There’s a sense that Europe is finally getting its groove on when it comes to startup innovation, and that’s exciting to watch and be a part of. (When even Chanel designer Karl Lagerfeld is getting in on the action, you know that Digital/Tech is having a moment…) Loic Le Meur’s mission for Le Web—to bring the best of Silicon Valley to Europe—is a laudable one.
But hang on a second. With Spotify as a notable exception, there wasn’t a ton of excitement or buzz about those European startups over here. Finance for Geeks. Ï»¿ Summary: Eric Sink provides a geek-oriented overview of accounting and company funding. On my weblog I write a series of articles entitled Marketing for Geeks. The concept of these articles is that a lot of technically-oriented people actually do end up involved in marketing decisions. Most software startups are founded by one or more geeks, often without the presence of experienced people in other areas like marketing. For these people, a little marketing knowledge can go a long way. The series has been quite popular, but marketing is obviously not the only functional area that a geek entrepreneur might need to learn.
Before I get started, let me offer a disclaimer or two. I'll begin with a short summary of what accounting is all about. Three Financial Statements If you are a geek who helps make strategic decisions for your ISV, then you need to know how to read the three basic financial statements: All companies report their financials to somebody. Assets = Liabilities + Capital OK. Generation Y Is Born To Startup. Five Reasons Every Company Should Act Like a Software Startup. With Great Startups It's All About The Execution. 10 Things Entrepreneurs Don’t Learn in College. Codecademy Raises $2.5 Million To Teach You How To Code. Startup Funding by the Numbers [INFOGRAPHIC]