The latest from TechCrunch
- In The World Of Tech, Women Can Have It All
- 4 Pro Tips For Publishers Building A Native Ad Strategy
- Defining A Growth Hacker: Three Common Characteristics
- The 7 Deadly Sales Sins Committed By Startups
- You've Got One More Day To Apply For The Savannah Fund Accelerator
- How Machines Will Use Social Networks To Gain Identity, Develop Relationships And Make Friends
- Things to Consider Before Asking Friends and Family to Invest In Your Venture
- Labor Day Ready: White House Releases Beer Recipe Thanks To Direct Democracy
- Why The Space Democratization Movement Blows My Mind
- Ecosystem 101: The Six Necessary Categories To Build The Next Silicon Valley
- How Apple And Google Could Make QR Codes Mainstream
- Amazon's Big Hollywood Announcement: All About UltraViolet?
- Gillmor Gang: Not the Republican Convention
- Vibease: The Long-Distance Relationship You Always Wanted
- Google+ Is Going After Yammer To Flank Facebook
- Apple's Patent Win Is Bad For Us All
- Solving The Developer Deficit In The Cloud
- Amazon Web Services Adds Long Requested Web Browser Specification
- Now In 600+ Schools And Open To Any Student, Lore Gives Higher Ed A Next-Gen Social Network
- Anticipating a Blended Classroom Boom Led by Education Startups
| In The World Of Tech, Women Can Have It All | Top |
 Editor's note: Michal Tsur is a serial tech entrepreneur, having co-founded online security firm Cyota and open-source video platform Kaltura, where she is currently president. Leah Belsky is a fellow at the Information Society Project at Yale Law School, where she contributes on online collaboration and technology policy, and is currently SVP of Kaltura. The blossoming tech startup generation, and the new wave of professional women seeking success in the workplace and at home don't always cross paths. Tech industries suffer from a noticeable lack of strong female leadership at the top, while powerful women have mostly flocked to traditional industries. Although the concept of "having it all" might itself be elusive, it's time that women who value both a rich home life and a fulfilling career explore the tech startup world. | |
| 4 Pro Tips For Publishers Building A Native Ad Strategy | Top |
 Editor's note: Dan Greenberg is the founder & CEO of Sharethrough, the native video advertising company. Dan has been honored as an AdAge "Media Maven" and was recently named to the Forbes "30 under 30″ list. You can find him on Twitter at @dgreenberg. Entrepreneurs are rapidly rolling out bold new online media designs that are changing our perception of how content publishers and platforms should look and operate (see Medium, Branch, and Devour). Instead of sites designed solely to maximize page views, we are now seeing an influx of publishers that incorporate content streams, grids and galleries to produce a more fluid, less interruptive content discovery experience. This design evolution has also led to a new approach in monetization, where sites are now being designed from the ground up to integrate native advertising formats, rather than the traditional display ad placements. For those unfamiliar with the term 'native advertising,' it is defined as ad strategies that allow brands to promote their content into the endemic experience of a site in a non-interruptive, integrated way (see the native ad market breakdown here). Dominant social media and content discovery platforms including Facebook, Twitter, StumbleUpon and Tumblr have all chosen not to employ traditional display or interruptive ads and instead incorporate native ads to drive revenue. The next generation of publisher entrepreneurs have taken notice of this shift and are thinking hard about how they can also build advertising formats that can be as native to their sites as Promoted Tweets are to Twitter or Paid Discovery is to StumbleUpon. | |
| Defining A Growth Hacker: Three Common Characteristics | Top |
 In this series titled "Defining a growth hacker", I will be exploring the meaning and practical application of growth hacking through a number of interviews with prominent growth hackers. This is the first post the series and will outline the common characteristics of a growth hacker. Growth hackers are making their mark in technology. Job postings are popping up all over the web looking for a growth hacker. Companies at all stages are itching to find these professors of growth and often recruiting as aggressively as UX and CS candidates. Sean Ellis was right when he first coined the title growth hacker in 2010 when he wrote, "Where are all of the growth hackers?" The demand for growth hackers became widespread when Andrew Chen wrote "How to be a growth hacker" that went viral. Despite the buzz and increasing commercialization, most companies are unaware of the true meaning of growth hacking other than the simplistic acknowledgement that "they grow stuff" or "get users". Unlike most professions in technology, a growth hacker isn't a set of skills or a stock of knowledge. Dan Martell, founder of Clarity, says, "Growth hacking is a mindset more than a toolset." It is a set of disciplines learned through doing and out of necessity. Growth hackers have a common attitude, internal investigation process, and mentality unique among technologists and marketers. This mindset of data, creativity, and curiosity allows a growth hacker to accomplish the feet of growing a user base into the millions. | |
| The 7 Deadly Sales Sins Committed By Startups | Top |
 Editor's note: Steli is the Co-Founder / Chief Hustler of ElasticSales and an advisor to several startups and entrepreneurs. You can follow Steli on Twitter here. At ElasticSales, we've had the honor to create and run sales campaigns for some of the hottest Silicon Valley startups today. We've also consulted with dozens more each week to learn the challenges their sales team face. We realize we can't work with every startup just yet, but we have seen the same, avoidable mistakes made by many young companies as they conduct their sales campaigns. Below are "7 Deadly Sales Sins" committed by many startups today. Some of these may sound familiar to you, but by identifying and address these mistakes, you will help your company succeed. | |
| You've Got One More Day To Apply For The Savannah Fund Accelerator | Top |
 The Savannah Fund is an African seed investment fund that aims to "bridge the early stage/angel and venture capital investment gap" in the region. A big part of that strategy is the fund's startup accelerator — and the deadline to apply is Sunday evening. The fund says each session will run for three months and operate out of the iHub in Nairobi, Kenya. It's looking to select five startups and invest $25,000 each in exchange for a 15 percent equity stake. | |
| How Machines Will Use Social Networks To Gain Identity, Develop Relationships And Make Friends | Top |
 Activity streams and social networks now represent a fundamental aspect of the modern application. We use activity streams on Twitter to converse in 140 characters or less. We use the "like" gesture on Facebook to show approval for an update to a friend's activity stream. In the enterprise, Salesforce.com Chatter uses activity streams to show application updates. Enterprise social network Tibco Tibbr users may create data hubs by geotagging places. For instance, an airport gate can be tagged to give agents, pilots and flight attendants relevant information as they approach it. | |
| Things to Consider Before Asking Friends and Family to Invest In Your Venture | Top |
 Editor's Note: Charles Moldow is a general partner at Foundation Capital, focusing on consumer Internet companies. He was previously a founding executive at TellMe Networks and at @Home. Friends and family can be an essential source of funding for fledgling entrepreneurs. Sometimes, they are the only source. But before you ask for funding, you have to ask yourself some tough questions, and one in particular: "What happens if I lose their money?" It happens all the time. It happened to me, and it forced me to learn hard lessons that can hopefully prevent other entrepreneurs from making the same mistakes. Before I became a venture capitalist, I was an entrepreneur with a new endeavor that I firmly believed in. I was wildly optimistic about the future and was eager to bring in friends and family to help get the company off the ground. I dreamed of the day when the company would become successful and make a big profit for those closest to me. And then I lost their money. All of their money. | |
| Labor Day Ready: White House Releases Beer Recipe Thanks To Direct Democracy | Top |
 Ready your grocery list for Labor Day: the White House has released the recipe for its official home brew, The White House Honey Ale. In a pun-tastic blog, Assistant Chef, Sam Kass, buckled to overwhelming demand from the White House online petition platform, We The People, "with public excitement about White House beer fermenting such a buzz, we decided we better hop right to it." | |
| Why The Space Democratization Movement Blows My Mind | Top |
 There's real movement behind the democratization of space. Not in the form of sending more people into space, but in giving more people access to satellites. Nano-satellites are getting cheap enough now that groups can raise enough money on Kickstarter to buy and launch them. That's only a slightly interesting development on its own, but what fascinates me is that some of these groups are promising amateur scientists to opportunity to write software for these satellites and essentially rent time on the satellites the way you might have rented time on a mainframe back in the day. That kind of blows my mind. | |
| Ecosystem 101: The Six Necessary Categories To Build The Next Silicon Valley | Top |
 Editor's Note: Benjamin Joffe is the founder of the Asia-focused digital research & strategy consultancy +8* | Plus Eight Star and has been living in Asia (China, Japan, South Korea, Singapore, Malaysia) since 2000. Benjamin has spoken at over 100 conferences (SxSW, TEDx, LeWeb, GamesBeat, etc.) on innovation, Asia, gaming and his keynotes gathered over 250,000 views on Slideshare. The topic is not new (see here articles on China, Japan, Japan, South Korea, Singapore, Singapore) and investors are also pretty excited about it (see Sequoia's latest round). As I was answering by drawing from my 12 years across Asia (China, Japan, South Korea, Singapore, Malaysia), I had a sort of epiphany and started to write down the criteria I thought composed an ecosystem. I then proceeded to score several markets using those, which brought interesting comparisons. The initial draft expanded into this column. It is far from perfect and comments to improve it are welcome! | |
| How Apple And Google Could Make QR Codes Mainstream | Top |
 Editor's Note: Brenden Mulligan is an entrepreneur and product designer who created Onesheet, Webbygram, TipList, ArtistData, MorningPics, and PhotoPile. You can find him on Twitter at @mulligan. QR codes are everywhere. Frustratingly everywhere in my opinion. Countless companies put them on marketing materials, but not a single person I know actually scans them. I'm friends with lots of smartphone owners, and I've literally never, ever seen someone pull out their phone and scan a QR code. There are even a handful of startups that consider QR codes part of their core offering to small businesses. They're relying on people actually scanning these stupid things for their products to work. Silly. However, as negative as I am about them, QR codes actually make a lot of sense. | |
| Amazon's Big Hollywood Announcement: All About UltraViolet? | Top |
 Amazon is holding a press event in Los Angeles on Thursday, in which it's likely to announce new versions of its Kindle tablets. You know, now that the Kindle Fire is all sold out. There have even been some leaks about what that product will look like, and the fact that it could be ad-supported. But the location of the press event in Santa Monica could also mean that Amazon will be making a big announcement around new video content that's available through those new products. As Seth Porges astutely points out at Forbes, when a big tech company does an announcement in Los Angeles, that usually means there's some sort of Hollywood studio connection. That isn't always the case -- check out Microsoft's L.A. announcement of the Surface tablet for proof -- but usually if a company like Amazon is gonna make a trip to Southern California for a product release, you can probably expect some studio execs in the room. | |
| Gillmor Gang: Not the Republican Convention | Top |
 The Gillmor Gang — Robert Scoble, Keith Teare, John Taschek, Kevin Marks, and Steve Gillmor — laughed all the way to the bank, if the bank was the burgeoning integration of the push notification bus. Amid the usual technical glitches (Skype noise cancellation meets ComCast bandwidth blockages) the Gang nonetheless persevered into an ahead of the curve consensus. Google + remains an inordinate locus of interest, as Google continues to blur the Apps/Docs/Gmail/GDrive services together. On the iOS side of the fence, AirPlay and iMessage retain an edge in differentiation, with Microsoft and Amazon bringing up the rear. Those (@kteare) who predict third party bridging of the unification services may be waiting for Clint Eastwood to ride to the rescue. Bring on the Obamacrats. | |
| Vibease: The Long-Distance Relationship You Always Wanted | Top |
 We've seen quite a few startups try to disrupt relationships lately. There's Dejamor, which sends you a box of romance each month, Boink Box, which sends you a box of sex toys, and I seem to remember a somewhat embarrassing interview with OhMiBod at CES. And today, yet another sexy startup joins the space. It's called Vibease, and it's a "massager" as they say, that hooks up to your smartphone via Bluetooth. | |
| Google+ Is Going After Yammer To Flank Facebook | Top |
 Editor's note: Rob May is the CEO and co-founder of Backupify, the leading provider of backup and recovery solutions for Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) applications. Google recently announced that it will begin offering corporate control features for its Google+ social network to businesses for free -- at least for a while. If you run a Google Apps domain, you can set up domain-wide restrictions on how your users interact with Google+. Your users can also make "restricted" posts to Google+ which are visible only to members of your domain. It's social networking, but with corporate oversight. That's sounds a lot like Yammer (which Microsoft recently bought for $1.2 billion) and Salesforce Chatter: Sharing streams designed for employee collaboration rather than personal socialization. It sounds less like Facebook, the undisputed heavyweight in social networking that Google+ was supposedly intended to depose. | |
| Apple's Patent Win Is Bad For Us All | Top |
 Look, I get it. It's a great story, maybe the greatest in the history of American business. From Day One, Apple did things the right way: clean, elegant, beautiful. But they were brought to their knees by Microsoft's colossal mediocrity. Their visionary founder was forced out. They teetered on the brink. And then--bam! They were saved (ironically, by Microsoft.) They regained their footing. And then they built one of the most remarkable corporate empires that has ever been constructed. And they did it by doing things their way. Clean. Elegant. Beautiful. Insanely great. So I can see why people who were Apple users during the dark days have a messianic zeal. Their ultimate triumph, after such long suffering at the brutal hands of inferiors, must seem to them more than remarkable. It must seem righteous. Add that to one of the weirdest and most unexpected things about the twenty-first century--the extent to which so many people defensively identify with the operating system on their phone--and Apple must seem like a living testament to the ultimate victory of truth, justice, and the American way. But there's nothing even remotely admirable about their latest coup. | |
| Solving The Developer Deficit In The Cloud | Top |
 Editor's note: Ruben Daniels is CEO and co-founder of Cloud9 IDE, a leading cloud-based Integrated Development Environment (IDE) that enables web and mobile developers to work together and collaborate in remote teams anywhere, anytime. Software is taking over the world. This sentiment has become widely accepted throughout the tech community, most notably examined in depth by Marc Andreessen last year. However, as software continues to infiltrate nearly every industry, there's a serious consequence taking shape. The demand for development continues to grow exponentially, but the amount of qualified developers that are available to produce this commodity is not. Simply put, the world is running out of developers. | |
| Amazon Web Services Adds Long Requested Web Browser Specification | Top |
 Amazon Web Services (AWS) added support today for a browser specification that defines ways for apps to allow resources to be accessed by web pages from different domains. The practice is called Cross Origin Resource Sharing (CORS) and has been requested by AWS users for the past few years. The new service represents another way that AWS automates tasks that developers once had to do themselves. We see this over and again fron AWS. They abstract arduous tasks so developers can focus on building apps. | |
| Now In 600+ Schools And Open To Any Student, Lore Gives Higher Ed A Next-Gen Social Network | Top |
 With social networking having permeated the way we look for jobs, share photos and music, and discover news, a startup named Lore is on a mission to do the same for higher education, and potentially re-shape the way teachers and students communicate. Formerly known as CourseKit, the Thiel and Founder's Fund-backed startup is doing that with a platform that is part Facebook and part Blackboard -- for courses. In other words, Lore aims to act as a replacement for the infamous course management system with a gradebook, calendar and document uploading (for class assignments), while giving students a social network-style newsfeed for classroom conversations. However, until now, Lore has been primarily focused on creating functional communities around courses, and students could only join Lore if a teacher invited them. While courses are remaining the central axis of the network, the startup has launched "Lore For Students," which now lets students join themselves and create academic profiles, follow classmates and professors and join groups (like study sessions or clubs). | |
| Anticipating a Blended Classroom Boom Led by Education Startups | Top |
 As kids head back to school this month and next, some will find a rather new arrangement greeting them: blended classrooms. These don't feel like the ways that many of us attended class, with a single teacher lecturing at students from front and center ("Bueller?"). As it's difficult--if not impossible--for cash-strapped schools to develop their own original learning products in house, startups are at the forefront of these changes. Thanks to many of them, more instruction is now being simultaneously delivered--by a live teacher, via web-based curricula, and in the form of students teaching one another, among other forms--within the walls of traditional classrooms. | |
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