Saturday, September 29, 2012

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Bootstrap's Maintainers Leave Twitter For GitHub And Obvious Corp., Will Move It Into Its Own Organization Top
Twitter BootstrapTwitter's Bootstrap, an open-source framework for quickly building web sites and apps, has been a massive success. It's even starting to spawn its own ecosystem of related services now. Mark Otto and Jacob Thornton, the two developers behind the project, however, have now decided to leave the company to pursue new opportunities at GitHub and Biz Stone's and Evan Williams' Obvious Corp. respectively.
 
Should You Trust Your Gut? The Answer Is Yes. Top
Screen Shot 2012-09-29 at 1.16.30 AMEditor's note: Derek Andersen is the founder of Startup Grind, a 30-city event series hosted in 15-countries that educates, inspires, and connects entrepreneurs. He's ex-Electronic Arts as well as the founder of Commonred. A few years ago I asked a successful entrepreneur for advice on what I should do with my latest product idea. His reply was simple. "Trust your gut. What does your gut tell you?" I confidently replied, "That this is a $100MM business." To which he added, "Then go for it." So that's exactly what we did. We went for it and a year later we didn't have a $100MM business or even a $10MM business. We didn't even have a….ok I'll stop there. But how did I get it so wrong? Is my gut untrustable? Was I wrong to follow it? Or was my stomach just acting up after a recent trip overseas? I recently sat down with Charles River Ventures Partner George Zachary who has had his fair share of big successes.
 
PSA For Win8 Devs: The Only Way To Distribute Your Metro Apps Is Through The Windows Store Top
3482.Windows Store_thumbHere is a reminder for developers who want to write apps for Windows 8's Metro mode (or whatever Microsoft prefers to call it these days): the only way to distribute your apps to consumers is through the Windows Store. This isn't actually a new policy but one that Microsoft announced a year ago. Judging from this Hacker News thread, though, this still comes as a surprise to many developers and it's clearly something Microsoft hasn't stressed enough in the run-up to the Windows 8 launch on October 26.
 
Gillmor Gang: Platformicide Top
Gillmor Gang test patternThe Gillmor Gang — John Borthwick, Robert Scoble, Kevin Marks, Keith Teare, and Steve Gillmor — watched in amazement as Twitter made good on its promise to hobble the core of its viral power adopter developers and users. By shutting down third-party clients to focus monetization on its core clients and the Web, Twitter leaves itself exposed to its challengers for control of the realtime wave. To some of the Gang, Apple's move to eject Google Maps in favor of its own immature product seems similarly motivated and fated to bad results. But Twitter has historically made these kinds of protective overreaching moves in order to protect the fledgling company from being overrun by more powerful competitors. This time it's different, as Twitter releases services designed to capitalize on the innovations of its ecosystem. The real calculation is whether the openings provided to Google+ and, to a lesser extent, Facebook can be leveraged before innovation dries up in the Twitter pipeline. A high-stakes game of Chicken.
 
Apple's Maps Is A Black Eye, Nothing More Top
IMG_9634Editor's Note: Jim Dalrymple is a former Editor at Large at Macworld, and contributing expert on Apple-related topics on CNN, Fox, CBS and ABC. You can follow Jim on Twitter at@jdalrymple, and on his blog The Loop. With the release of iOS 6 last week, Apple introduced a brand new version of Maps, the company's new turn-by-turn mapping application that replaced Google's offering on the iPhone. While the fervor over Maps has given Apple a black eye, it's certainly not the beginning of a downward spiral for the company, as some tech pundits like to say.
 
Lessons From The Dramatic Slow-Motion Death Of Wikitravel Top
broken-globeOnce upon a time, in 2003, there were two entrepeneurs with a dream. Their names were Evan Prodromou and Michele Ann Jenkins, and they dreamed of a collectively edited global travel guide -- a Wikipedia for travel, if you will. So they created Wikitravel. And it went over like the proverbial "lead zeppelin." Two years later, a company named Internet Brands bought it from them for $1.7 million; pretty good money for those long-lost days before the startup craze began. And Wikitravel thrived, and lo, it was good. Until Paradise came crashing down in flames.
 
Startup Success Requires The Drive For Data Top
Jeff MaEditor's note: Jeff Ma is the founder of tenXer, a startup that provides tools to help people better understand their performance, progress, and productivity at work. Previously, he helped start GolfSpan.com, CircleLending, and Citizen Sports. Follow him on Twitter. The first thing you learn when you start playing Blackjack is something called basic strategy - a decision matrix that tells you the correct play for every hand based on your cards and the dealer's exposed card. Data and statistics will tell you that basic strategy is always the optimal strategy. In fact, following it perfectly reduces the casino's edge over the average player from 3 percent to 0.5 percent.
 
Here Are The Singers Competing In Next Week's 'American Idol For The Geek Set' Top
silicon valley voice logoEarlier this month, I wrote about Silicon Valley Voice, a karaoke competition for the tech world hosted by Silicon Valley Bank and Coverflow (a cover band made up of techies including Mayfield Fund's Tim Chang, Facebook's Ethan Beard, and Fandalism's Philip Kaplan). Now, the finalists have been selected, and you don't even have to wait until next week's event to hear them sing. Coverflow member (and Mayfield managing director) Raj Kapoor  tells me that all of the regular tickets have sold out, with 800 RSVPs. But the organizers convinced Silicon Valley Bank to expand the budget, which means there's room for another 200 people.
 
Rest In Peace, Charles Alfred Eldon: A Pioneer Of Silicon Valley, A Role Model For This New Generation Top
180px-Eldon_005Decades before Steve Jobs, the Google founders, and Mark Zuckerberg, small groups of unglamorous technologists turned Santa Clara Valley into the world-changing region we are still reinventing today. My grandpa, Charles Alfred "Bud" Eldon, was one of them, a Hewlett-Packard engineer and executive since the days of the apricot orchards. He passed away at 7:45am this morning. I'm going to share a little bit about his life below, because my generation in Silicon Valley and the tech world needs to know about all the shoulders of giants we are standing on, and the heights we can also reach. Too many of us don't right now. His story begins in Hawaii during the Great Depression.
 
Ford CTO Paul Mascarenas On Bridging The Worlds Of Silicon Valley And Motor City [TCTV] Top
Screen Shot 2012-09-28 at 5.41.04 PMWhen you think about Detroit, you don't often think first about technology; you think about automobiles. But the reality is that nowadays, the two industries are more intertwined than ever. Indeed, it's becoming increasingly apparent that, as Marc Andreessen likes to say, "software is eating the world" and becoming more central to the future of many traditionally non-techie companies. Ford Motors is no exception to this trend.
 
Post-SingTel Acquisition, Photo Aggregation App Pixable Gets An Image-Centric Redesign Top
pixable_newA little more than a week after announcing its acquisition by telecom giant SingTel, Pixable is releasing a substantially redesigned version of its iPhone photo aggregation app. As with the old version, the Pixable app aggregates photos and videos from social networks, highlighting the ones that are most likely to be interesting to you. The big theme with the redesign, the company says, is "letting the photos shine." That may seem like an odd claim for a photo app — weren't the photos front-and-center before? Well, the change is obvious when you compare at the old home page and the new one.
 
Apple Adds A Clarifying Description To Its "Apps For Passbook" Page In The App Store Top
passbook-app-storeApple has made a small but significant tweak to its App Store for iOS 6 users, changing the Apps for Passbook section of the store. Before, when you clicked through in Passbook the link that brings you to a list of apps, that's all you saw: a simple listing of compatible apps. Now, there's a new paragraph describing what Passbook is, and what Passbook-enabled apps are capable of.
 
TechCrunch Giveaway: Free Tickets To Box's 2012 #BoxWorks Event Top
picHappy Friday! We have something special to give away. Box is hosting its annual BoxWorks event October 7-9 in San Francisco and we have a bunch of tickets. Box has some amazing speakers on tap. Box CEO Aaron Levie kicks things off, followed by Marc Andreessen, John Donahoe, and Clayton Christensen. There's also Tony Fadell, Gary Reiner and Gary Kovacs along with Adam Lashinsky, Andreas Bechtolsheim and our own Drew Olanoff. It's three days, six keynotes, 55 speakers, and a ton of fun.
 
Cloud Security Firm Qualys' IPO Opens At $12/Share, Raising $71.8M Top
qualys logoAs of today, one more enterprise cloud startup is now a publicly-listed company. Qualys -- trading as QLYS -- opened trading today on the NASDAQ with shares priced at $12, in the mid-range of the expected offering of between $11 and $13. After a slow start in the morning, the shares climbed up to $14.85 during the day, to settle down at $14.12 at close. Not quite as much of a rise as Palo Alto Networks when it had its IPO in July 2012 -- where it saw a 26% increase on its opening price of $46 -- but still an increase of 17.7%.
 
The FeedBurner Deathwatch Continues: Google Kills AdSense For Feeds Top
Dia de los Muertos | Flickr - Photo Sharing!As part of its latest round of "spring cleaning," Google just announced that it is shuttering AdSense for Feeds. The service, which allows publishers to earn a bit of extra revenue by adding Google's ads to their RSS feeds, will be retired on October 2 and will close on December 3. Given that Feedburner has long been expected to be on one of Google's next spring cleaning lists, it doesn't come as a surprise that the company is now shutting down the only way it was actually making money from the product.
 
Google's "Spring" Cleaning In Fall: AdSense For Feeds, Classic Plus, and Spreadsheet Gadgets Get The Axe Top
4781607809_13d04ce5da_zIt's that time again when Google does its "Spring Cleaning." Basically, that means the company axes the stuff that really isn't working and takes up too much time or resources. But lets' call it what it is, these things failed or fizzled.
 
Facebook Shares Jump More Than 6% After Gifts Launch. (Hooray For New Revenue Streams.) Top
Screen Shot 2012-09-28 at 1.41.36 PMWell, Facebook shareholders sure like the sound of Gifts. Around Wall Street's close yesterday, the company launched a much anticipated e-commerce initiative that lets Facebook users send real, physical gifts to friends and family on birthdays and special events like engagements and weddings. It gives the company a third business model beyond advertising and payments revenue. Shares have jumped by 6.6 percent today to $21.66. So what could Gifts mean for Facebook's bottom line? Let's do some guesswork.
 
Evernote Listens To Unhappy Skitch 2.0 Users: Brings Back Some Old Features And Version 1.0 Top
skitch_logoEarlier this month, Evernote launched version 2.0 of Skitch, the popular screenshot tool the company acquired in 2011. Sadly, Skitch 2.0 didn't just do away with Skitch's idiosyncratic but highly functional user interface, but it also dropped a number of features in the process. Version 2.0 currently has a 1.5-star rating in the Mac App Store and almost 600 1-star reviews. Today, Evernote is launching version 2.0.1 of Skitch and thankfully, this version brings back a number of features that went missing in the first update. In addition, Evernote is making Skitch 1.0 available for download again.
 
Groupon's Leadership Shuffle Continues: New North American Sales VP Named To Replace Muhr, Who Now Heads EMEA Top
Groupon-Logo1The churn at Groupon's executive level continues apace. The company has just announced that it has appointed a new vice president for North America, Rob Kilgarriff, who is taking over the role from Chris Muhr. Earlier today Reuters reported that Chris Muhr was being shipped out to Europe, where he had first started his career with Groupon, to become the new SVP for the Europe, Middle East and Africa as the daily deals company looks to fix its flagging European business. Muhr has replaced Veit Dengler, who had joined from Dell only in April to take up the reigns as the Sawmer brothers began their gradual stepping away from management roles at the company. (The Sawmers' CityDeal, acquired by Groupon, forms the basis of Groupon's European operation.) Kilgarriff will report to SVP of global operations Kal Raman.
 
Ptch Partners With Paramount, Letting Users Remix Their Own Paranormal Activity Found Footage Top
PTCH_EditorEver since Paranormal Activity hit it big in movie theaters five years ago, fans have been making their own spoof videos, essentially trying to replicate the found footage style of the movies in homage to the original. Shot on a shoestring budget, Paranormal Activity became a huge hit and has inspired a series of sequels, one of which -- Paranormal Activity 4 -- is set to be released next month, just in time for Halloween.
 

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