Sunday, April 15, 2012

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An Open Letter To Those Not Employed At Instagram Top
instagramDear Non-Instagramers, Sorry that you didn't get bought out for $1 billion last week. That's got to be a bummer. Kevin Systrom just made enough money to buy a boat big enough to make Larry Ellison jealous and you're still living in a studio apartment. Instagram is a one-off. A fluke. An anecdote that many entrepreneurs will mistake for data. Please don't be one of them. This happens about every half a decade. The first mover in a space gets taken out in record time with a ridiculous valuation and the founders look like epic geniuses. Do you remember YouTube? Sure you do. But what about Revver, Metacafe, Guba and Veoh? I didn't think so.
 
How Social Currency Is Driving Identity, Trust and New Industries Top
social-currencyAs our lives increasingly move to the digital realm – whether it's what we read, what we watch, photos that once sat in frames now uploaded to a server farm somewhere in the rural United States, or even the 140-character thoughts we share with the world ­­– comes the very reconstitution of our identities online. A German artist named Tobias Leingruber recently took this concept to its logical extreme when he produced physical identification cards based on Facebook profiles (this attempt at satire was executed so well that Facebook sent Leingruber a cease-and-desist letter three days later). Between the lines of Leingruber's satire, though, is a very real, emerging concept. What Leingruber hit on is something I refer to as social currency. Social currency essentially refers to the idea that every person has an online identity formed through participation in social networks, websites, digital communities, and online transactions. Our everyday activities -- web searches, status updates, 'likes', tweets, and comments -- they all leave a trail of data behind which we tend to see as ephemeral or throwaway.
 
Why Startups Should Pay Attention To Skyrocketing Patent Prices Top
US-PatentTrademarkOffice-SealAs large companies increasingly look to protect their revenue streams through IP risk mitigation, startups with strong patent holdings will become increasingly valuable because they provide an opportunity to remove dual potential threats to the potential acquirer's revenue stream -- as a competitor and as a patent threat. Startups that are able to position themselves as part of an acquirer's IP risk mitigation strategy make themselves more attractive targets for acquisition. For example, Twitter acquired Tweetie days after Tweetie filed for a patent application on the pull down to refresh feature and Google recently acquired Apture and Katango, two small startups with multiple pending patent applications relevant to Google's businesses. Although some have described these deals as talent acquisitions, the value presented by the associated IP to the acquirer should not be ignored.
 
Government Poised To Provide A Huge Boost To Healthtech Startups Top
Regina Holliday - Meaningful UseCurrently, the federal government is poised to level the playing field for healthtech startups. An unprecedented wave of innovative healthtech startups has been developing over the last few years. You can see them at conferences such as Health 2.0, TechCrunch Disrupt, TEDMED and demo day events that Blueprint Health, Healthbox, Rock Health and StartUp Health host. Nonetheless, the health sector may be the single most challenging arena for startups. Nothing would result in population health improvement (and decrease healthcare costs) more than having greater involvement/engagement by individuals in the healthcare process. The Office of the National Coordinator (ONC), which is part of Health & Human Services could catalyze an unprecedented wave of innovation with a stroke of a pen by strong inclusion of patient engagement requirements in the Meaningful Use requirements.
 
Stop Looking For A Technical Co-founder Top
Picture 2Editor's Note: Alexey Komissarouk is a CS senior at the University of Pennsylvania and founder of the PennApps Hackathon. This article is based on an earlier talk to the Wharton MBA Entrepreneurship Club. "How many of you want to start a company?" David Tisch asked. All hundred hands went up. That's why we were there, crowded into a Wharton classroom to seek startup advice from an industry luminary. "Keep your hand up if you are technical." Five hands remained. Maybe six. "Keep your hand up if you are looking for co-founders." The only remaining hand belonged to a CS freshman in the corner.
 
Nokia Lumia 900 Review: This One's A No-Brainer Top
lumia 900-4Guys, this one's such a no brainer that I shouldn't even have to lay it all out. But I will. The Nokia Lumia 900 is an excellent handset, comes packed with a fresh new operating system in the form of Windows Phone 7.5 Mango, and thanks to a nifty AT&T bill credit from Nokia, you can essentially get this $100 LTE-equipped phone for free until the 21st. Repeat: for free. Like I said, this one's a no brainer.
 
Surviving The Scramble For San Francisco Office Space Top
getaroundThe residential real estate bubble isn't the only real estate challenge facing startups in Silicon Valley. Office space within the city limits is becoming more scarce by the day as tech companies continue their aggressive growth. Relief is on the way, but it isn't an instant solution. The San Francisco Giants announced a $1.6 billion plan last week that would add 1000 rental units and 1.7 million feet of office space in the 27 acres that is currently being used as their parking lot. That's wonderful, but construction won't begin until 2015 and the estimated completion date is 2021.
 
Riding The Third Wave of TV Transformation Top
eric-eliaEric Elia (@ericelia) is a member of the founding team at Brightcove, and is currently the vice president of TV solutions. Brightcove, a video and app solutions provider, went public on Feb. 17 on the NASDAQ and now trades with a market cap of $509.3 million. When we started Brightcove seven years ago, we expected a five-to-10-year transformation period until we reached a world of purely Internet-based, on-demand TV, motion pictures and "long tail" content. Sometimes it's hard to see change happen when we are in the middle of it, but amazing to look back and see just how far we've come. I look at the past seven years as driven by three waves of innovation.
 
The Post-PC Enterprise Top
larry ellisonIn 1997, Larry Ellison had a vision for a new paradigm of computing which he called the Network Computer (NC). The idea was simple: a group of partners would build devices and services that leveraged the power of the Internet to compete against the growing Windows monopoly. Ellison believed that the computer in the client/server era had evolved into too complex a machine for most tasks. With the NC, the 'heavy' computation of software and infrastructure would be abstracted from the actual device and delivered instead to thinner terminals via the web, thus radically simplifying access and enabling all new applications and mobility.
 
The Mobile Paradox Top
mobile-addictionGoogle's stock declined by over 4% yesterday. Many have put this down to the company's decision to create a non-voting class of stock as part of a control-retention exercise as the founders sell shares. But more is going on here. In the same week Facebook acquired Instagram for $1 billion as part of its efforts to be more relevant on the growing mobile platform, Google, for the second consecutive quarter, suffered a decline in "Cost Per Click" rates that is in large part attributable to the shift in traffic from the desktop/laptop to the mobile platform.
 
The Cloud Will Kill The Resume, And That's a Good Thing Top
job interviewI was recently going through an old banker's box that I packed up years ago while I was cleaning out my office. There was a Palm Pilot, a mini cassette recorder, and even a stack of floppy disks. It was like a time capsule of obsolete technology. All I needed were a few Polaroid pictures and a beeper to make my time travel complete. In one of the file folders, I found about a dozen resumes that I had wanted to keep and in another there was a bunch of printed product brochures from various vendors. Every gadget I found in that box had evolved or been replaced by some new innovation.  Even the non-gadgets like printed product brochures have been replaced by websites that can present information in much richer context.  Only the folder of resumes stood out as the unchanged medium. It baffles me how the lifecycle of so many products and business processes can be extremely short and are so easily disrupted by innovation, yet an individual's resume is still a one or two page document.
 
FCC Wants To Fine Google $25K For WiFi Investigation Delays Top
street view carIn its investigation of whether Google's Street View cars illegally collected personal data from WiFi networks, the Federal Communications Commission has reached a decision that seems like a mix of good news and bad news for the search giant. The good news: The FCC did not fine Google for violating electronic eavesdropping laws. Instead, it concluded that there was no precedent for the commissions' enforcement of the law in connection with WiFi networks. The FCC also noted that, according to the available evidence, Google only collected data from unecrypted WiFi networks, not encrypted ones, and that it never accessed or used the data.
 
How I Got Ripped At 500 Startups Top
dick talensLittle sleep, lots of stress, free food at all hours, and Paul Singh constantly try to booze you under the table. Sounds like the old college days when you tried to rush for Sigma Chi, doesn't it? But nope. That describes life at 500 Startups. For a former fat kid like me, it's an environment where I can accidentally gain 15 lbs in the blink of an eye.  Put a pizza or a tray of doughnuts in front of me and I will devour the goodies without a second thought.  Unfortunately (or fortunately), being the co-founder of a fitness startup does not afford me this pleasure.
 
Google Finally Gets Right To Gmail Trademark In Germany Top
gmail-de-logoWhen Google launched Gmail in Germany in 2005, it was quickly barred from using the Gmail name for its email product there. German entrepreneur Daniel Giersch, after all, had registered the 'G-mail' trademark (short for Giersch mail) for his physical and electronic mail service in Germany in 2000, long before Google had even announced its own service. Instead of 'Gmail,' German Internet users who wanted to use Gmail had to go to googlemail.com. Google tried to appeal this decision, but ran out of legal options in 2007, after Europe's Office for Harmonization in the Internal Market rejected its appeal. For a long time, it seemed like that was the end of the story, but last week Google quietly settled its dispute with Giersch. According to Germany's GoogleWatchBlog, the gmail.de domain and the Gmail trademark were transferred to Google on April 13.
 
It's Not A Bubble, It's Valleywood Top
ValleywoodThere is a certain type of company that can only exist in Silicon Valley. People outside of the Valley scratch their heads at how a company with no revenue and no apparent business model can be called successful, much less be worth $1 billion. But maybe the problem is that we're mis-categorizing Internet and mobile products as businesses in the first place. What if we looked at them as TV shows instead – where success and failure is determined by ratings not revenue? Isn't Instagram closer to American Idol than it is to Oracle? It entertains millions of us for a few minutes every day – maybe that's enough. Perhaps the Valley is pioneering a new business model, one where revenue isn't the goal but where distribution and engagement are paramount.
 
Court Rules Software Not Protected By Fed Crime Laws, Overturns Conviction of Goldman Engineer Top
High frequency trading-thumb-225x149Before leaving Goldman Sachs to earn a millionaire's salary with Chicago High Frequency Trading (HFT) startup Teza Technologies, Sergey Aleynikov made one last transaction. At 5:20pm on his last day, just before his going-away party, Aleynikov uploaded 500,000 lines of encrypted source code from the Wall Street firm's proprietary HFT system to a server located in Germany. Following the clandestine upload, Aleynikov deleted the encryption program, wiped his command history, and headed to the party. Although Aleynikov later managed to download the source code to his home computer in New Jersey before flying to Chicago, he was apprehended by the FBI while returning through Newark Liberty International Airport. But after his conviction at trial and imprisonment during the appeals process (his dual US-Russian citizenship presented a flight risk), Aleynikov is now a free man. The reasons why touch the entire software industry.
 
Cloud Communications And The Future of Marketing In The Post-PC World Top
315If you are a marketer who has spent the last 10 years mastering the art of capturing and converting customers on the desktop web, the rapid rise of smartphones and the iPad might make you nervous. You've built businesses on paid search, written essays about optimizing lead forms and studied the ever-changing subtleties of SEO. Using cookies that follow us around the web, you've turned display advertising into a performance medium. But just as you were beginning to wrap your heads around the whole social thing, along come the iPhone, Android and the iPad and with them a whole new reality: the post-PC world.
 
Is Direct Selling The Next Driver Of Startup Commerce Companies? Top
avon callingAs my partner Bipul Sinha noted in a post last year, direct selling is one of the most interesting opportunities in commerce in the time of social. Direct selling is being invigorated right now, not just in Latin America, but also in the US, due to three key reasons. The first is the economy. In this slow economy, people are more willing to supplement their income (and seek alternative career paths) than they have been over the last few decades. Direct sales is one of the most attractive and accessible ways for people to supplement their income. The last golden age of direct sales was during a period when women had few traditional career path options. As more women found success in the mainstream economy, the labor pool available to direct sales diminished. In this slow recovery, with unemployment still high, more people are willing to explore direct sales.
 
The New Grabio Lets You Grab Classified Deals On The Go Top
grabio1Grabio has been around for about a year but they've recently updated the app and added a number of features. What does it do? Essentially it's a mobile Craigslist with notifications and location-based searches for classified listings. You can enter any neighborhood, do a quick search, and pick up a broken girls bicycle seat or a gently used full body cast for a few bucks. Pretty slick, eh? Founded by Horatiu Boeriu and Chris Popa, both currently living in Chicago, the company is bootstrapped and went through a number of iterations before it settled on its current incarnation. At launch they saw 5,000 users, although that number is creeping up.
 
The 5 Most Over-Hyped "Future of TV" Topics Top
television-is-deadFrom some of the chatter out there, it seems like the prerequisites to have "deep knowledge" about the TV industry is to have ever watched TV.  Yes, that sounds pretty cynical, but I see post after post espousing wisdom on topics that are so misguided it makes my head shake - involuntarily.  While everyone is certainly entitled to their opinions, there's just something to be said for a little research, a little fact checking, and deep diving with industry experts.  I think the "future of TV" industry at large would benefit greatly from a little more of the above, and a little less jumping on bandwagons. Accordingly, here are the 5 topics I see on practically a daily basis that are just plain tired, and should be put to rest.
 

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