The latest from TechCrunch
- Lost And Found In The Paneldome: The iRiffPort
- The New Political Battleground: Your Social Network
- Things Entrepreneurs Should Avoid When Raising Capital
- SOPA Supporters On The Run
- The Seductive Danger Of Half Measures
- Liveblogging Platform CoverItLive Hacked
- A City Is A Startup: The Rise Of The Mayor-Entrepreneur
- OK, MG, I Take It Back
- The DC Taxi Commissioner's Attacks On Uber Have Gotten Even More Ridiculous
- How To Start Smart: The Five Things To Know When Approaching An Incubator
- 5 Ways For Startups To Grow Their Brands On Twitter
- 9 Things Every Entrepreneur Needs to Learn From Woody Allen
- Daily Crunch: Into The White
- Tech News Can Be So Dramatic
- WalkScore Raises $2M To Rate The "Walkability" Of Potential Housing
- ITC Sides With Motorola In Key Apple Patent Suit
- Putting The Google-Is-Ripping-Off-A-Kenyan-Startup Story In Perspective
- LG Styler Refreshes Your Stinky, Wrinkly Clothes With Steam
- Droid RAZR MAXX To Launch On January 26th?
- A Million Developers On A Million Keyboards: Ecosystems Require R&D Density
| Lost And Found In The Paneldome: The iRiffPort | Top |
 We get mailed a lot of stuff at TechCrunch and sometimes a good item will slip through the cracks. This iRiffPort has been sitting in my pile of gear since it came out in October. I wrote a review. Shot some photos. It was all ready to roll and then somehow it got misplaced and I forgot about it completely. Too bad, because it is a good cable. This week, I received a postcard from Kevin Robertson, head honcho at PocketLabWorks and also the creator of the iRiffPort. He asked me what I thought of his device (and the software with which it works). The iRiffPort...Oh yeah, I think I remember that I liked that thing. What happened to it? I dug through my closet, found it, plugged it in and lo and behold, I had remembered correctly—it was a solid device. | |
| The New Political Battleground: Your Social Network | Top |
 I have a stark fact to share with the majority of registered voters in the United States: your vote is worthless. Yes, that's right—worthless. Due to the "winner take all" nature of this country's Electoral College system, if you live in California, New York, Idaho, or any other state that safely votes for one party, your vote in the Presidential election is essentially treated as a pro forma. Instead, campaigns focus their real attention (and war chests) on targeting a small number of swing states where the outcome could go either way, ignoring the vast majority of voters. Social networks, however, are changing this dynamic in new and exciting ways. We now have the ability through our friends, followers, and fans to reach the voters in particular geographic areas that campaigns find so valuable. For example, you may live in California now, but if you grew up in Florida (or Ohio, or Pennsylvania, or any of the other 2012 battleground states), you're likely to be connected to the exact people whose votes are so prized by the campaigns. As a result, we are likely to see a Presidential campaign where many citizens are valued more for their personal networks than for their actual votes. | |
| Things Entrepreneurs Should Avoid When Raising Capital | Top |
 Alright, in my last post I argued that bootstrapping is just as over-rated as raising venture capital. But for those who decide to pursue fundraising, here are some things entrepreneurs should avoid when raising capital. For all of the talk about how much excess capital there is, it's actually hard to raise capital because very few projects fit the VC profile—even though many VC-funded projects come across as frivolous, me-too projects. | |
| SOPA Supporters On The Run | Top |
 Support in Washington for the SOPA anti-piracy bill in Congress (and its Senate equivalent, PIPA), is waning. After weeks of mounting uproar online, Congressional leaders started backpedaling last week and the Obama Administration weighed in on Saturday in response to online petitions to stop the bills. The White House issued a clear rejection of some of the main principles of SOPA. While the White House supports the major goal of the bills to stop international online piracy, the growing chorus of complaints about the ham-fisted way the law is going to be implemented may finally be acting a s a counterweight to all the media-company lobbying which is trying to push the bills through. In fact, the White house blog on the subject almost amounts to a pre-veto of the bills as they now stand (and which have yet to be voted on, much less approved, by either house of Congress). | |
| The Seductive Danger Of Half Measures | Top |
 In the wide world of startups, we mostly like to think of ourselves as go-getters, ass kickers, "in all the way" sorts. We also like to think of ourselves as iterators, tinkerers, rapid iterators who test unceasingly. But the combination of those two traits can lead to one of the most dangerous cycles in startup - half measure syndrome (HMS). Interestingly, HMS starts off as something very intelligent - the team does not want to commit to a single strategy until it can prove that that strategy will create the hockey stick. When controlled and focused, that impulse is an excellent driver of evolution, but when not properly grounded in the reality of where you are, it becomes quite dangerous. | |
| Liveblogging Platform CoverItLive Hacked | Top |
 CoverItLive, the Demand Media-owned liveblogging platform used by many outlets to cover major events in real time, has just alerted their users of a potential data compromise. | |
| A City Is A Startup: The Rise Of The Mayor-Entrepreneur | Top |
 On stage at last month's Le Web conference Shervin Pishevar, a Managing Director at Menlo Ventures, stated "The World is a Startup." It's an interesting perspective and I think what's true for the world is also true for countries, states and cities. With developments like last month's announcement that Cornell was selected to build a new tech campus in New York City, it seems to follow that if "a city is a startup" then the best mayors are the ones who are looking at their cities in much the same way as entrepreneurs look at the companies they have founded. The ingredients for a successful startup and a successful city are remarkably similar. You need to build stuff that people want. You need to attract quality talent. You have to have enough capital to get your fledgling ideas to a point of sustainability. And you need to create a world-class culture that not only attracts the best possible people but encourages them to stick around even when things aren't going so great. | |
| OK, MG, I Take It Back | Top |
 A few weeks ago, I wrote: A couple weeks ago, MG wrote: Android development itself remains a huge pain in the ass. I hear this again, and again, and again. Which took me a bit aback. I've developed numerous Android and iOS apps (though not games, so I can't speak to the differences there) over the last few years, and neither set of developer tools seems to me to be hugely superior: both have their strengths and their really irritating failings. Oh, the irony. Up until recently all the Android apps I'd worked on had had fairly vanilla graphics requirements. But for the last few weeks I've been in crunch mode developing an Android app with moderately elaborate graphics -- and. Well. I stand by what I said, to a point: the developer tools for the two platforms are comparable. But Android's fragmentation has become a giant millstone for Android app development, leaving it far behind its iOS equivalent. It's not the panoply of screen sizes and formats on devices running Android; the Android layout engine really makes that annoying, but no big deal. It's not the frequent instances of completely different visual behavior on two phones running exactly the same version of Android; again, annoying, but relatively minor. Device fragmentation is just an irritation. OS fragmentation, though, is an utter disaster. | |
| The DC Taxi Commissioner's Attacks On Uber Have Gotten Even More Ridiculous | Top |
 Private car service Uber entered Washington, DC a month ago and has loaded up lots of local support. But now it has hit a regulatory traffic jam. Taxi Commissioner Ron Linton personally led a sting yesterday to bust one of its drivers for trying to transport him within the district, following up on his declaration earlier this week that Uber is "illegal." Whether or not Uber is actually breaking any rules is still unclear. He hasn't told the company anything directly, and he hasn't responded to its requests for more information. He's just talking to the media about the issue. That includes inviting The Washington Post and local blog DCist to personally witness his sting outside the Mayflower Hotel. The sting involved Linton personally using Uber's mobile application to order a sedan (from his DC office, apparently). It arrived as scheduled, and took him to the Mayflower Hotel. Then, Linton's Taxi Commissioner officers surrounded the car, handed the driver a variety of fines, and impounded the driver's vehicle. "We did it," Linton told a local ABC station later that day, "to send a message to drivers who are signing up with Uber that we are going to enforce our laws." | |
| How To Start Smart: The Five Things To Know When Approaching An Incubator | Top |
 Incubators are playing an increasingly vital role in acquiring meaningful investment for first-time entrepreneurs. TechCrunch reported that elite accelerators like Y Combinator receive on average one application every minute, and AngelPad reminds its participants that it is many times more selective than the Harvard Business School. Incubators ask for a 2 to 10 percent stake in your company, a sum that could alternatively be used to attract a junior co-founder or provide meaningful ownership to the first few engineers you enlist. In return, incubators offer intensive coaching, networking with other founders, and warm introductions to likely investors. Incubators give first-time entrepreneurs and international teams alike a crucial link to Silicon Valley. | |
| 5 Ways For Startups To Grow Their Brands On Twitter | Top |
 Last week I began an effort to answer the questions I get asked most frequently by entrepreneurs, starting with how to create an early-stage pitch deck. Today, I address a topic as relevant for early stage startups (vying for consumer attention) as it is for more mature companies (focused on customer relationships): How to grow your brand on Twitter? Twitter is the ultimate marketing platform. But the scale of Twitter activity is so extraordinary (250 million tweets per day) that it is quite easy to get lost in the noise… particularly if you are an early-stage startup and/or an emerging brand. | |
| 9 Things Every Entrepreneur Needs to Learn From Woody Allen | Top |
 I hate Woody Allen. Here's why. Because if you're Jewish and a little neurotic then it has become a cliché that nerdy neurotic Jewish people describe themselves as "Woody Allen-esque" thinking it will attract women. They do this on dating services. The idea is that they will then attract some waif-like Mia Farrow-ish (or the 17-year-old Mariel Hemingway in Manhattan) blonde who will love all of their neuroses and want to have sex all the time and will, in the ideal case (the 17-year-old Mariel Hemingway in Manhattan, the 21-year-old Juliette Lewis in Husbands & Wives), be the most mature in the movie and yet still be madly in love with the 30-year-older Allen. This only happens in Woody Allen movies. And power to him. He made the movies. He can do whatever the hell he wants in them. If Mariel Hemingway wants to have sex with him all the time then no problem. He wrote the movie! It's up to you whether you believe it or not. Allen puts out a new movie or two every year. So he's built up a substantial body of work that we can learn from. Why learn? Because clearly he is a genius, regardless of what other opinions anyone might have of him (and I only know him through his work. I don't know his personal life at all). It is interesting to see how he, as an artist and creator, has evolved. To see how his idiosyncratic humor has changed, how he twists reality further to stretch our imagination. He always stands out and stays ahead of the other innovators. And for other people who seek the same, he is worth observing. | |
| Daily Crunch: Into The White | Top |
 Here are some of yesterday’s Gadgets posts: Hands-On With Blue Microphones' 2012 Lineup Health Sensors Are Everywhere: Up Close With Striiv And Fitbit LG Styler Refreshes Your Stinky, Wrinkly Clothes With Steam A Million Developers On A Million Keyboards: Ecosystems Require R&D Density All The Little (But Awesome) Things You Definitely Missed At CES | |
| Tech News Can Be So Dramatic | Top |
 So I tend to think of news in this industry as falling into two basic categories 1) Boring as fuck 2) So hyper-dramatic I feel like I need to take a ton of anti-anxiety medication just to read Techmeme. While tons of | |
| WalkScore Raises $2M To Rate The "Walkability" Of Potential Housing | Top |
 You might have seen the subtle brag at the bottom of Craigslist apartment searchposts -- WalkScore 99! WalkScore 100! WalkScore 85! Well, why should you care about whatever a WalkScore is? Because the score rates accessibility by foot to things people want to access by foot like restaurants, theaters and public transit for any address in the US, Canada and New Zealand. Useful right? Well it made sense to investors, who've just angel funded the company to the tune of $2 million -- those investors included Shel Kaphan, Rudy Gadre, Edward Yim and Geoff Entress. | |
| ITC Sides With Motorola In Key Apple Patent Suit | Top |
 Back in fall 2010, Apple filed suit against Motorola alleging that the company was violating several of its patents with its flagship line of Droid smartphones, all of which run Android. The case was filed with the US International Trade Commission — a favorite battleground for these smartphone suits, as it has the ability to block potentially infringing devices from import into the United States. Today, Motorola has gotten some good news: the ITC has released its initial determination on the case, and it is ruling in Motorola's favor. The news was first broken by CNet. As the CNet article reports, this is only an initial determination, and won't become final until it's been voted on by the ITC's full committee. | |
| Putting The Google-Is-Ripping-Off-A-Kenyan-Startup Story In Perspective | Top |
 When you think about what Google, the 32,000-employee search engine conglomerate, is strategically focused on these days, here's one thing that doesn't come to mind: an initiative to get more Kenyan businesses online via manually grabbing data from a local startup that's trying to do something complementary. I've been looking into the well-researched story that Mocality, a Kenya-based business listing service, published this morning. There are certainly serious issues it brings up, as Google has admitted. But there's nothing anywhere near the same magnitude as, say, the press fallout and antitrust probe around the new Google+ search integration, or the Motorola acquisition, the Android patent licensing issues, or the many other efforts and problems it has happening every day. | |
| LG Styler Refreshes Your Stinky, Wrinkly Clothes With Steam | Top |
| If you needed any more proof that the future is already upon us, take a gander at the LG Styler. It looks like a refrigerator at first glance, but opening the door reveals that it isn't meant for food -- rather, it's your clothes are meant to go inside. | |
| Droid RAZR MAXX To Launch On January 26th? | Top |
 While there wasn't much to say about the recently announced Droid RAZR MAXX to begin with (it's essentially the Droid RAZR with a bigger battery and more storage), Motorola and Verizon decided to leave out one key bit of detail: the launch date. That, it seems, has been fixed. | |
| A Million Developers On A Million Keyboards: Ecosystems Require R&D Density | Top |
 Walking around CES this week it's easy to see the future: just look at the components being sold in the nether regions of the show. These include specific things - Bluetooth powered electrical cords, for example - and "pieces" like smaller motherboards, cases, and materials. When planning a launch line-up, major manufacturers peruse catalogs of potential hardware and materials solutions to decide what to create next, then task their hardware designers to choose the proper parts in order to build in the features that meet their initial requirement. Does this TV need a 64-inch LED backlit screen? Four HDMI ports? A blue bezel? Designers figure out which parts fit where and place their parts and assembly order. It's been like this for decades. When I write that Samsung could be the next Apple, I meant that Samsung seems to have finally bucked this trend, at least in part. The problem with the above shop-design-build process is that there is little synergy among various business units. The mobile guys have a certain menu from which to pick while the TV guys have a different menu. The phone OS has always been different than the TV "OS" (really UI, but TVs need a little code in them). Work may be duplicated multiple times, even from year to year. | |
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