Category: Tech news

Back in 2010, Nurph was a tiny boot-strapped startup working on a platform which turned Twitter into a realtime chat platform. Developed by Neil Cauldwell, the app got a little Angel cash and tinkered away. Nurph chats are very easy to create with a Twitter handle (like TechCrunch) and a place to invite friends to join and chat in real-time, instead of via slower @ replies. Just be warned though.… Read More

Dropbox’s business software is ready for a big sales push a it bounds towards an anticipated IPO, so today it announced the opening of a sales and engineering office in New York City. In its first place on the east coast, the cloud storage startup developed at MIT will house ten sales people and two to three engineers in a temporary space near NYU before before growing into a permanent spot. Read More

One of the most important functions of any modern financial institution is conducting valuations. On Wall Street, this means developing financial models – projections of how a company will perform based on a set of assumptions. Get these models right, and suddenly you can make trades on public equities that bring in enormous profits. Blow it, and see billions of dollars evaporate. Read More

VCs are publicly and privately debating the morality of investing in the burgeoning “anonymish” app space, after a series of negative posts, mainstream gossip, a high profile resignation and even bomb and violence threats have pushed the volume of the debate to eleven. Last night, Netscape founder Marc Andreessen had one of his characteristic Twitter surges. He began his speech by referencing… Read More

On a 10- to 20-year horizon, large-scale technologic innovation is going to center around machine intelligence, robotics and sensors. Each of these fields requires gargantuan amounts of capital and a lot of patience, a combination well beyond the scope of even the most progressive venture capital firm. Read More

Tableau Software would like some more, please. The company, less than a year after its IPO that spiked 64 percent in its first day, plans to sell $345 million in Class A shares to the public. Here’s what’s fun: That sum is greater than what the company raised in its IPO. That total, $254 million, now all but feels quaint compared to the new, coming cash. This is not even the first… Read More

Gillmor Gang – Robert Scoble, Kevin Marks, Keith Teare, and Steve GIllmor. Live recording session has concluded for today. Read More

Interest in startup accelerators and incubators has exploded in the past several years, but how effective have they been? One thing that has become clear is that “incubator” and “accelerator” refer to two very different models for startup workspaces, and the distinctions may have significant effects on startup success. Read More

The Book of Berners-Lee And lo, it did come to pass, as prophesied by the geeks of yore, that in the twenty-fifth year of the Web, the world entire, from Kathmandu to Timbuktu to Zanzibar to New York, began to notice its devouring by the Law of Moore. And the eyes of the world were turned upon those places where that Law had been birthed, and numberless throngs of geeks still teemed, and… Read More

You like chicken. You like 3D printed stuff. Why not slam them together to make the ultimate in 3D printable model food? How does that sound? Cool, right? I thought so. So what’s going on here: some designers at iJet in Yokohama, Japan wanted to surprise the staff of Lifehacker. They grabbed a tasty KFC drumstick, scanned it using a high-resolution laser scanner, and then printed it in full… Read More

It started with one evocative name shouted into the phone from one developer to another: “Potcoin!” The Founding Fathers had to work for years to craft a Constitution that would grant the government the power to “coin money.” However, three developers in the frozen north, who were only able to provide me with pseudonyms because the businesses and investors they’re associated with… Read More

Microsoft Founder Bill Gates doesn’t worry that Silicon Valley is the home of billion-dollar texting apps and farming games. “Innovation in California is at its absolute peak right now. Sure, half of the companies are silly, and you know two-thirds of them are going to go bankrupt, but the dozen or so ideas that emerge out of that are going to be really important,” Gates told… Read More

So you are a company. You’re about six years old. You’ve raised $181 million dollars to date, including a Box-esque $100 million Series D bloc. The tough bit is that your revenue in 2013 was a mere $13 million. Even more troubling, your losses are accelerating, increasing from $19.9 million in 2011, to $35 million in 2012 to $62.2 million in 2013. Read More

Sina Weibo, the microblogging and social media service that’s often called China’s answer to Twitter and Facebook, has filed documents with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission to raise up to $500 million in an initial public offering. Weibo was launched by Chinese online media giant Sina in August 2009. Today, Sina owns a 78 percent stake in the company, with Alibaba holding a minority… Read More

Not many companies in the Y Combinator stable have executives who’ve spent time at both Tom Ford’s fashion powerhouse and the Korean online ticketing platform TicketMonster. I’m betting Memebox is the only one. It’s the first Korean company accepted into the Y Combinator program and arguably one of the more mature, with a $1.5 million round of venture funding already under… Read More