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Silicon Valley, London, NYC: Startup Genome Data Reveals How The World’s Top Tech Hubs Stack Up

Silicon Valley, London, NYC: Startup Genome Data Reveals How The World’s Top Tech Hubs Stack Up
Last year, we covered an ambitious collaborative R&D project called “Startup Genome,” created by three young entrepreneurs, Bjoern Herrmann, Max Marmer, and Ertan Dogrultan. The goal of the ongoing project was (and is) to take a comprehensive, data-driven dive into what makes tech startups successful — and not so successful. Out of its research came, among other things, Startup Compass: A free benchmarking tool that leverages its data to allow entrepreneurs to evaluate their progress compared to other startups in their space. The product’s overarching goal is to allow founders to make more informed product and business decisions by “utilizing a data-driven feedback loop,” according to its mission statement. While part of the team has since split off to focus on Blackbox, an educational program and startup accelerator, Herrmann and Marmer have continued toiling away at Startup Genome, collecting data from the some-16K startups that signed up for Startup Compass — and beyond.

Wavii Launches In Public Beta, Aiming To Be Your Big Data News Aggregator Of Choice After years, yes years, in various states of stealth mode, Seattle-based personalized news aggregation startup Wavii is finally launching to wide scale public consumption. Backed with a list of angel investors that reads like a who’s who of today’s tech industry — Ron Conway, Aydin Senkut, Mitch Kapor, Dave Morin, Shawn Fanning, Keith Rabois, Max Levchin, Paul Bucheit, Rick Marini, Joshua Schachter, and Mike Arrington’s CrunchFund to name just a few — Wavii is built upon some big ideas, and naturally is going to be greeted with some high expectations. Will it possibly be able to live up to them? In short: Maybe yes, maybe no. But first let’s talk about what exactly it is. Wavii provides a personalized feed of the news and current events that are relevant to you. That’s when Wavii’s magic is meant to start. Here Are The Good Parts Seeing Wavii in action is really impressive. And Here Are The Iffy Parts Will anyone really use it? Paying It Forward To The Open Web?

From 0 To $1 Billion In Two Years: Instagram’s Rose-Tinted Ride To Glory Even now, it’s still shocking how the remarkably low distribution costs of the web can change a founder’s fate overnight. Many startups are duds, and most grow at a clip that’s just not fast enough to justify an interesting valuation. But once in awhile, a company comes along and just nails it. I met Instagram’s co-founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger before they were working together. Systrom, meanwhile, had just come off of a year at Nextstop, a travel-oriented startup that had sold to Facebook in a talent acquisition. In early 2010, Systrom was messing around with a few ideas. So Systrom, ever the connoisseur of fine whiskeys, tested an app called Burbn. Users weren’t exactly checking in all the time on Burbn. It was around this time that Krieger, who was ready for change after a year and a half at Meebo, came on board. The pair looked at how users in Burbn’s beta gravitated toward photo-sharing and then studied every single popular app in the photography category.

Pinterest Clone Script Download version 2 coming up! | Pinterest Clones Blog Hello, We are already working on the next pinterest clone script for download. People who have already ordered will automatically get an updated version of the script. Remember we provide free support for our pinterest clone script! These new pinterest clone script features are being built to expand on our growing feature list and also make it easier for pinterest clone script owners to manage and deploy their pinterest clone scripts. Create your pinterest clone now! 1. Friends Find friends Your followers People you follow This will make it easier for users to find their friends and follow them. 2. drag the bookmarklet into the browser (firefox and chrome) Will give you users the ability to drag and drop your bookmarket into multiple browserr 3. search We definitely need to give users a quick way to search the pinterest clone script. 4. like, tweet, imbed, reporting This gives an easy way for users to share good pins and report bad ones 5. a. editing of static pages from the cms b. user logins 8.

Why Mobile Ads in Emerging Markets are the Future [INFOGRAPHIC] There are 5.3 billion mobile subscribers around the world, meaning 77% of the world's population uses a phone. The majority of those users — 3.8 billion or 73% of the group — live in emerging economies. Yet mobile advertising dollars spent around the world do not begin to compete with traditional platforms or Internet ads. As the Internet spreads throughout the developing world, it's arriving on phones before traditional computers. Some 70% of Internet users in Egypt, 59% in India, 57% in South Africa, 50% in Ghana and 44% in Indonesia get online via mobile phones alone. This Jana infographic poses a question for advertisers — how will relevant content be delivered via mobile device? One idea: in Brazil, 74% of mobile users said they would like to receive advertisements in their devices in exchange for voice minutes. Do you have an answer to Jana's question? Thumbnail image courtesy of iStockphoto, hadynyah

How To Use Remote Installation Service to Install Windows Server 2003 on Remote Computers This step-by-step article describes how to use Remote Installation Service (RIS) to install Windows Server 2003 on remote computers. You can use RIS to remotely set up new Microsoft Windows Server 2003-based computers by using a RIS network shared folder as the source of the Windows Server 2003 files. You can install operating systems on remote boot-enabled client computers. Client computers are connected to the network, and are then started by using a Pre-Boot eXecution Environment (PXE)-capable network adapter or remote boot disk. RIS Hardware Requirements Client Hardware Requirements The following list describes the minimum hardware that is required for RIS client computers: Meet the minimum operating system hardware requirements. Software Requirements Several network services must be active and available for RIS. Prerequisites for Client Installations Make sure that the client computer's network adapter has been set as the primary boot device in the computer BIOS. Set Up RIS

Virtual Currency Is The Next Big Platform Editor’s note: Ari Mir is the co-founder and CEO of virtual currency platform Pocket Change. He also co-founded GumGum.com, the world’s largest in-image ad-network. This week, Mir is attending the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco. My youth was spent jumping turtles, killing 16-bit Nazis, connecting kickflips with manuals and nube tubing. For two decades, selling hard and soft copies of games proved to be a very lucrative business. Virtual goods are purchased with virtual currency, a digital medium of exchange similar to dollars and cents. The advertising industry has already seized the opportunity. Engaging with advertisers won’t be the only way to earn virtual currency. As millions of users begin to build liquidity in a system such as FB Credits or other virtual currency providers it becomes possible to disrupt the trillion dollar mobile payments space. Virtual currency as a mass consumer product may sound far off. [image via flickr/epSos.de]

Wikimedia Brings The Wikipedia Approach To How It Runs Its Servers Wikipedia and all of its related projects are obviously driven by the work of thousands of volunteers. Interestingly, though, while Wikipedia runs on top of an open-source stack, it’s been traditionally very hard for volunteers to help the organization run its sites. Most of that work is currently done by paid employees. For about a year and a half, though, the Wikimedia Foundation – the organization behind Wikipedia and its sister projects – has been quietly working on Wikimedia Labs, a new project based on OpenStack that will allow volunteers to help the Wikimedia team develop, test and deploy changes to the organization’s back-end infrastructure. Wikimedia Labs launched as a closed beta back in October 2011 and is still in closed beta today. To be clear, Wikimedia Labs isn’t so much about developing the Wikipedia software, as about running and improving the infrastructure that keeps massive projects like Wikipedia up and running smoothly. The reasons for this are understandable.

The “Unhyped” New Areas in Internet and Mobile Editor’s note: Legendary investor Vinod Khosla is the founder of Khosla Ventures. You can follow him on Twitter at @vkhosla. All Khosla Ventures investments, as well as ventures related to Vinod Khosla, are italicized. We are in a whole new world of platforms, a post-PC era, which I’d more aptly describe as the always/everywhere era, finally, and that means a whole new set of opportunities. What you get as a result are the recent successes in the Internet/mobile space like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Zynga, Groupon and others, all of which have reenergized both entrepreneurs and investors. A few will be successful, many will fail, some will be acquired for a piece of technology or for the team (acqui-hires). The post-PC always/everywhere platform will be defined by the many variations of mobile, always available, silent complementary standbys (like home or personal networks and agents) and more. Of course, it is hard to classify any startup into a single category.

Tinychat Now Has 20 Million Registered Users, Hits Profitability Tinychat, the web-based video chat service, just surpassed 20 million users. Founded in 2009, the company has been on a roll lately and is showing some impressive momentum. Just about a year and a half ago, after all, Tinychat only had about one million users. The company’s co-founder Dan Blake also tells us that the site currently sees about 400,000 daily users and signs up about 50,000 new users every day. The average user now spends a good 22 minutes on the site per session. Tinychat allows its users to chat simultaneously with up to 11 of their friends (that is, 12 people can be on camera at the same time. Hitting 20 million registered users wasn’t Tinychat’s only good news today. Tinychat started out as a bootstrapped startup, but just over a year ago, the company raised $1.5 million from a group of investors that included Naval Ravikant, Ashton Kutcher and Sean Combs.

GTD & Kanban: Similarities, Differences & Synergies Between The Two | Personal Kanban Let's Work Together In this article in the “GTD & Personal Kanban Series” we will explore the why? behind bringing GTD & Personal Kanban together. What is Getting Things Done (GTD)? GTD emerged as a highly effective and popular personal productivity approach in the early two thousands. On a personal note, I find that GTD frees my mind enabling me to focus totally on the tasks at hand, and also represents a concrete approach to help achieve Stephen Covey’s first three habits of his famous: The Seven Habits of highly Effective People. What is Kanban? This whole site is about Kanban in the context of solving personal and group problems around the home and workplace, for a great 101 head over to here. Kanban has allowed me to increase the throughput of things getting done. Similarities Though targeted at different problems, there are similarities between Kanban & GTD. This is encouraging, it would appear that we have a lot to work with in terms of bringing these ideas together. Differences Synergise

Cloud services for Windows 8 and Windows Phone: Windows Live, reimagined - Building Windows 8 We have talked quite a bit about SkyDrive and using your Microsoft account for the sign-in and roaming capabilities of Windows 8. These are just two aspects of a broad service infrastructure that you can tap into when using Windows 8 (and Windows Phone, Xbox LIVE, and a host of other services and apps). We want to talk more about the capabilities and features of cloud services for Windows 8 and Windows Phone. To get started, Chris Jones, the VP of our Windows Live group responsible for the development and operations of all of the services and apps, authored this post to introduce the reimagined role of cloud services in Windows 8. --Steven Windows Live was first announced on November 1st, 2005, and in our press release we described it as “a set of personal Internet services and software designed to bring together in one place all of the relationships, information and interests people care about most, with more safety and security features across their PC, devices and the Web.”

21st century sandbox will blow your mind. : videos Create a Stylish Contact Form with HTML5 & CSS3 Follow this step by step process to create your own stylish contact form completely out of HTML5 and CSS3. We’ll be using a couple of the handy new features in HTML5 to add cool functionality to our form, while making use of cool CSS3 properties to recreate our Photoshop concept purely in code. The design we’ll be building features all the things that make a rich interface; gradients, highlights and shadows! We’ll create a visual concept in Photoshop first of all, but when it comes to building the form we’ll recreate every effect with HTML5 and CSS3. View the HTML5/CSS3 form demo Open up Photoshop and create a new document. Use Photoshop layer styles to add a subtle drop shadow at around 30% opacity and a thin 1px stroke using a very light grey. Add a title to the design using the darker blue colour swatch. Use the same font styling on each of the labels, then draw a rounded rectangle with 5px corner radius to create an input field. The visual concept is now complete. <!

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