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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.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.
LayerVault aspires to be a designer’s best friend
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.
Baghdad Community Hackerspace Workshops by Bilal Ghalib
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.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.
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.
16 Chinese Startups Came Out With A Bang At The ChinaBang Conference
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.
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.
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.
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.
10 Hot Web Startups Changing the Face of Retail
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.
10 Tips for Building a Strong Online Community Around Your Startup
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.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.
Q&A: Seth Godin on Squidoo - Liz Gannes - Social
Alex Ljung and Eric Wahlforss, both Swedes, moved to Berlin in 2007 and started SoundCloud . Their original idea was born from the need of musicians to exchange large files over the web in order to collaborate. Since then the company has expanded its ambitions and now wants to be an audio platform for the web. The company is growing at a rapid clip and has added more than a million users since the introduction of its new mobile apps .