LSQHA Blog Reviews » startups

As Kids’ Media Use Increases, Will Ed-Tech Investment Follow?

cgseo — Thu, 22 Apr 2010 05:00:00 +0000

A recent study by the Kaiser Family Foundation found that the amount of time young people spend with entertainment media has risen dramatically, with 8- to 18-year olds devoting an average of seven hours and 38 minutes a day to media use. And because they spend so much of that time “media multi-tasking,” young people actually manage to pack a total of 10 hours and 45 minutes worth of media content into those 7½ hours. With this key role that media plays in children’s lives, it is crucial to support the creation of innovative educational technologies that can be used for teaching and learning. Sponsor Are you the parent of a child 12 years old or under? Click here to take a survey about how kids perceive the Web. With this in mind the Venture Capital in Education Summit 2010 will be held in New York City on June 8 and 9. The summit examines some of the key trends in education technology and showcases some of the leading-edge ed-tech entrepreneurs and investors. Keynotes speakers include industry, education and government experts, along with investors. The recent National Education Technology Plan (NETP) indicates the Obama Administration’s support for a number of key technologies, including open-source software, virtual worlds and cloud computing. But funding for these recommendations remains uncertain. The Venture Capital in Education Summit is “designed for the innovators in the K-20 education markets, and those committed to providing the capital and resources to support these change agents.” The difference between consumer technology markets and school technology markets are important, and the summit seeks to share this and other insights into developing and marketing to the education sector. The announcement yesterday that Netflix chief executive Reed Hastings and the non-profit venture capital firm Charter Fund had acquired math-game company DreamBox Learning , and the announcement last week that language learning company Babbel had its first profitable quarter (notably after abandoning the freemium model ) point to education technology as a promising area for tech startups. As ed-tech blogger Kirsten Winkler says , “People are willing to pay for well developed educational products.” Discuss

See the article here:
As Kids’ Media Use Increases, Will Ed-Tech Investment Follow?

Volcanoes, Boot Camps, and Other Opportunities for European Startups

cgseo — Thu, 22 Apr 2010 00:00:00 +0000

The grounding of flights in and out of European as a result of the Icelandic volcano Eyjafjallajökull has been a powerful reminder of how much of our global economy relies on air transportation. As we wrote yesterday , the volcanic ash not only impacted the airline industry, but the tech world as well, disrupting business and conference travel alongside product deliveries. European startups, particularly reliant on quick transportation from country-to-country, may be feeling the consequences of restrictions on air travel even more so. Mike Butcher argues in a Techcrunch Europe article , “It seems that Europe’s startup economy has been running partly on the spread low-cost airlines for the past 5 years, and without airlines the startups, along with the whole of the general business sector, are going to be badly affected.” Sponsor It’s unclear how much the volcanic eruption will further challenge business development, or if it will spur innovation and opportunities, particularly around virtual conferencing and alternative transportation planners. Jame Andrews, co-founder of Loco2 , a site promoting sustainable travel, remarks, “Thanks Iceland volcano for helping us to prove the market for alternatives to flying!” Jacek Kelski, founder and director of f3fundit , a blog and business portal aimed at helping support European entrepreneurs, argues that the major hindrance in Europe remains “investor readiness.” According to Kelski “there are definitely a lot of good ambitious companies out there. There is a lot of activity all over the continent.” But while there seems to be a lot of startup activity, Kelski is less optimistic about investor activity. “We’re seeing very little if any VC activity in Europe at the moment, and the majority of funding is coming from angels and larger corporates.” To help, f3fundit are holding a “Next Top Startup” competition. Ten finalists will take part in a boot camp June 16 and 17 in Barcelona, Spain, where they will work closely with a team of 25 mentors. One of the companies will be crowned the “Next Top Startup” and win a €25,000 prize. Kelsi hopes f3fundit.com’s competition can help provide both the cash and the support for some of the startup community. Hopefully, European volcanic activity will cooperate. Discuss

Read the rest here:
Volcanoes, Boot Camps, and Other Opportunities for European Startups

Columbia and IBM Launch Green Tech Skills Initiative

cgseo — Wed, 21 Apr 2010 05:15:00 +0000

Figures released in February suggested that VC investment in cleantech startups, particularly those focused on energy efficiency, was on the rise. To help prepare college students for jobs in this emerging green economy, Columbia University and IBM are announcing the launch of the Smarter Cities Skills Initiative. Sponsor The Smarter Cities Initiatives opens IBM’s global resources to Columbia faculty and students, including access to the 40 IBM Innovation Centers worldwide. The intiative builds upon Columbia’s existing research efforts on sustainability issues, spanning several academic disciplines including business, law and engineering. The initiative will provide students with free access to: IBM software, both on campus and in the cloud, to develop software for sustainability and green projects Technical support for green technology courses that show students how to build energy efficient IT infrastructure for smart buildings, smart grids and smart water systems Energy efficiency and open standards software development tools on IBM developerWorks 100,000 global business partners and academic communities through 40 IBM Innovation Centers in 30 countries “Smart urban infrastructures are key to long term environmental and economic sustainability,” said Rich Lechner, vice president, IBM Energy and Environment. “IBM and Columbia share a common goal to ensure the next generation of entrepreneurs have access to the skills they need to accelerate sustainability projects and to be competitive when they enter the workforce.” Lechner says the necessary skills for being successful in the emerging green economy include technical skills, particularly in the areas of data analytics, visualizations and security, understanding of business processes, and the historical and policy-based knowledge that can help transform industries like the energy sector. In recognition of Earth Day, the initiative will be announced on Thursday at Columbia University to faculty, students, venture capitalists, policy analysts, and industry leaders at the first annual Smarter Students for a Smarter Planet forum. More than 150 schools around the world are expected to participate via webcast. The forum will explore the skills necessary to prepare students for green jobs, and help academia and industry jumpstart a global collaboration toward developing sustainable technologies and a green economy. Discuss

Link:
Columbia and IBM Launch Green Tech Skills Initiative

TechStars Grad SendGrid Collects $5M Series A Financing Round

cgseo — Tue, 20 Apr 2010 23:20:00 +0000

It was announced Tuesday that email management startup SendGrid had raised $5 million in Series A financing from a handful of prominent investors, including Foundry Group , Highway 12 Ventures , Dave McClure , David Cohen and WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg . SendGrid, a graduate of last year’s summer TechStars program, launched last fall and raised some seed funding from many of the same investors on its way to sending nearly 1.2 billion emails for its over 4,000 clients. Sponsor SendGrid is a cloud-based service that helps companies, big and small, manage automatic transactional emails sent to its users while also providing analytics and delivery assurance. A demo plan gives companies 200 free emails per month, and after that monthly prices range from $10 for 10,000 emails, to $800 for 500,000 emails, along with a few other premium features. More interestingly, the company managed a solid Series A round after strong customer development and acquisition without the blitz of marketing tactics we see from a lot of young startups. Sure it’s important to spread the word about your product, but in other cases, letting your product speak for itself through customer referrals can play a large part of product growth. Ryan McIntyre of Foundry Group mentored Isaac Saldana, SendGrid’s co-founder and CEO, during the TechStars program last summer and spearheaded Foundry Group’s efforts to lead the investment round. Tuesday morning, McIntyre offered a look into the SendGrid investment , which he says fits with Foundry Group’s theme of protocol investments. “As we observed SendGrid’s rapid customer growth, which has occurred through word of mouth and without formal sales or marketing efforts, we made an offer to invest in SendGrid, and, thankfully, they accepted our offer to lead this round,” writes McIntyre. Being a graduate of TechStars has been an obvious benefit to SendGrid. Dave McClure and David Cohen have participated in both the seed and Series A rounds of financing, and some of the programs other graduates ( SnapABug and Next Big Sound ) are users of the service. Other more prominent companies have started using the service as well, including Plancast , HootSuite , Get Satisfaction , SlideShare and Foursquare , all helping to spread the word about the service. Not only is SendGrid providing an excellent service that many startups could take advantage of, but they also serve as an example to other early-stage companies out there looking for funding. First, they are a shining example of the opportunities that come from participating in startup incubators like TechStars, as some of their investors and customers have come from the program. And secondly, SendGrid’s focus on steady customer acquisition and development, instead of on viral marketing, is a valuable lesson. Last Friday we mentioned a book called The Referral Engine which helps companies focus their business strategies to drive customer referrals, and it seems SendGrid has done this well, growing their customer base without traditional marketing blasts. Discuss

Continue reading here:
TechStars Grad SendGrid Collects $5M Series A Financing Round

Visualize Big Data with Flowing Media

cgseo — Fri, 16 Apr 2010 05:00:15 +0000

As a recent article in The Economist observed, we are at the point of an “industrial revolution of data,” with vast amounts of digital information being created, stored and analyzed. The rise of “big data” has led in turn to an increased demand for tools to both analyze and visualize the information. This bodes well for startups tackling the field. One new service is Flowing Media , the new company of Fernanda Viégas and Martin Wattenberg, a consultancy focused on data visualization services. Sponsor Prior to founding Flowing Media, Viégas and Wattenberg worked for IBM’s Visual Communications Lab . Their Many Eyes project was one of the first to put visualization tools in the hands of the public, with the goal of democratizing visualization and the accompanying social analysis. According to Viégas and Wattenberg, visualization is a powerful analytical tool for experts and non-experts. “It’s an excellent way to attract non-geeks to complex data and can spark conversation.” They note that a good visualization can easily go viral on the Web, touching millions of people. As “big data” becomes more accessible, visualization services like Flowing Media are sure to flourish. After all, as Viégas and Wattenberg note, “Today many facets of life are made of nothing but data, from flirting on Facebook to photos on Flickr.” Image credits: Fernanda Viégas and Martin Wattenberg, top: Wired Magazine – “A visualization of thousands of Wikipedia edits that were made by a single software bot. Each color corresponds to a different page.” and bottom: Flickr Flow , the colors in photos uploaded to Flickr. Discuss

More here:
Visualize Big Data with Flowing Media

Social Media Management System Spredfast Secures Series A Funding

cgseo — Thu, 15 Apr 2010 22:26:18 +0000

Taking advantage of the increasing importance of social media management for businesses, Spredfast , a finalist at this year’s Microsoft BizSpark Accelerator at SXSW, has received $1.6 million in funding from Austin Ventures. Featured here on ReadWriteWeb in January, Spredfast is the first enterprise-class social media management system. Sponsor Spredfast supports companies at both the enterprise and SMB levels, allowing businesses to manage their social media campaigns through a single dashboard. Spredfast incorporates data from multiple platforms, including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Flickr and most blogging platforms (such as WordPress, Blogger and MoveableType). As the information from these platforms is in one location, and as the service integrates both Omniture and Google Analytics, Spredfast facilitates social media automation and then ties social media analytics with Web analytics to secure “click to conversion” metrics. The pricing for the services range from free to $100 per initiative per month. Since its public launch in January, Spredfast has attracted Oracle, AOL, HP and IBM to its customer base. “We’ve been working to establish Spredfast as the ‘Omniture for social media’, a valuable tool for anyone trying to effectively manage and measure a social media initiative,” said Kenneth Cho, Spredfast’s CEO. “Our relationship with Austin Ventures, specifically with AV partner Mike Dodd previously of Omniture, is great validation of the huge gap Spredfast is filling in the social media market and the reception so many customers are having toward the product.” Discuss

Apple’s Game Center: More Opportunities for Social Games Developers

cgseo — Sat, 10 Apr 2010 23:00:00 +0000

Most of the initial buzz surrounding Apple’s announcement on Thursday of its new operating system, iPhone OS 4, centered on the support for multitasking . While this feature has been long anticipated by users and developers alike, another important but less discussed aspect of the update involves Apple’s Game Center – a social gaming network to be launched for iPhone and iPod Touch later this summer. Similar to the networks already prevalent in console gaming, Apple’s Game Center will allow friend invitations and multiplayer game-play and will include matchmaking and high-score tracking. Sponsor The Game Center may be Apple’s attempt to compete with Facebook’s dominance over the hugely popular and incredibly lucrative area of social gaming . A report released this week suggested that the gaming company Zynga , maker of six of the seven most popular social games, is worth over $5 billion. Unlike Facebook, Apple does not currently have a social network upon which to automatically connect players and friends, although implementation of the Game Center may well bring this about. Details about the Game Center were not explicit in Thursday’s announcement, although the beta release of the operating system will include a developer preview of Game Center and contain a set of APIs so that mobile game developers can build apps that take advantage of the social gaming network capabilities. Echoing the popularity of gaming on the iPhone, initial analytics since the iPad release point to the continued domination of the App Store by gaming and entertainment applications. The updates to the iPhone OS could provide an opportunity for mobile and social game developers and for entrepreneurs in the gaming industry. Discuss

See the article here:
Apple’s Game Center: More Opportunities for Social Games Developers

This Week in Venture Capital: Jason Calacanis’ Latest Podcast Creation

cgseo — Fri, 09 Apr 2010 17:00:00 +0000

I am a huge fan of podcasts and podcasting and one of my favorites to listen to each week is Leo Laporte’s This Week in Tech (TWiT). Now and then, angel investor and Open Angel Forum founder Jason Calacanis is a guest on TWiT, and not long ago he launched a podcast network of his own borrowing the ” This Week in ” name (with Leo’s blessing, of course). After success with his first podcast This Week in Startups (TWiSt) which Jason hosts himself, he is now creating a brand new podcast that is a perfect resource for startups and entrepreneurs: This Week in Venture Capital (TWiVC). Sponsor Venture capital is a big part of what we discuss here at ReadWriteStart, and Jason’s new podcast is sure to become an excellent source of VC news straight from the horse’s mouth. The premier episode is available now and features two-time entrepreneur turned VC Mark Suster , who authors the Both Sides of the Table blog, and who was previously a guest of Jason’s on TWiSt. In the episode the pair discuss the recent collection of obnoxiously high valuations for startups like Foursquare and Quora, as well as the resurgent IPO market, an issue we mentioned earlier this week after the Nation Venture Capital Association released some record breaking numbers . Suster even discusses how his blog, mentioned above, has changed the way he does business as a venture capitalist. TWiSt usually runs over an hour, and this first episode of TWiVC thankfully comes in around 45 minutes, a much more digestible length for a video podcast. Hopefully they will stay true to this length, as brevity and density is often a more enjoyable listen. Either way, I know I’ll be tuning in each week to catch Jason’s and other’s opinions on the latest VC happenings, and I think any early-stage startup or first-time entrepreneur should do the same. Discuss

See the original post:
This Week in Venture Capital: Jason Calacanis’ Latest Podcast Creation

Founders & CEOs: Who Is More Expendable?

cgseo — Tue, 06 Apr 2010 21:00:00 +0000

Monday’s sudden departure of Jay Adelson as CEO of social news aggregator Digg has raised a few eyebrows in the tech community as some rumors imply that it may have been a decision made by the company’s board. Regardless of the nature of the breakup, it got me thinking about the dichotomous relationship some startups have between founders and CEOs, and which, if either, is more expendable. Sponsor Digg was originally founded by Kevin Rose in 2004 and Adelson, who had experience as founder and CTO of a few companies in the 90s, was given the CEO role while Rose became “the face” of Digg. Many startups have used this same leadership role leaving the passionate entrepreneurial founder as a separate executive from a business-minded CEO. A similar situation has happened at Twitter , with Evan Williams becoming CEO in place of Jack Dorsey who remains as chairman of the board. This seems to separate the single-focus CEO from a serial entrepreneur with other interests. Since founding Digg, Kevin Rose has founded Pownce and WeFollow as well as personally investing in several other companies while Jack Dorsey has used his time to found the mobile transaction platform Square . For the majority of startups, I would think the concept of the free-wheeling founder would be less common, and other times, founders choose to also be CEOs. But in the case of the startups that have two separate people handling founder and CEO duties, who is more vital to the company? In these cases, founders usually start their company and hire a CEO when things start to pick up and they can’t handle everything by themselves. While CEOs do lot of the corporate navigating, the founder, with his passion for the product, is often the forward facing driver of the company. With this argument, I think that losing a CEO over a founder is a better loss than vice versa. Of course, all businesses are different, and people leave for different reasons, and decisions like this should be taken on a case-by-case basis. However, VCs often talk about how they invest in founders just as much as they do ideas, so for a company to lose that passionate individual that the investors initially trusted might send bad signals about later investments. I’d like to hear what you think about this issue, and whether you think either a CEO or a founder is more or less likely to stay when someone needs to go. If you have personal experience with the dual relationship of CEO and founder in a startup, please share you experience in the comments below! Photo by Jim Merithew, Wired.com Discuss

Follow this link:
Founders & CEOs: Who Is More Expendable?

Brightcove Closes Series D Funding, Expects IPO By 2011

cgseo — Tue, 06 Apr 2010 17:00:00 +0000

Web-video management startup Brightcove announced Monday that it had secured an additional $12 million in venture funding and hopes to make its first public offering as soon as next year. As we reported Monday, the first quarter of 2010 saw a significant rise in IPO and M&A activity for venture-backed companies, and Brightcove seems to preparing itself for one of these options in the next year. Sponsor Josh Hawkins, director of corporate communications for Brightcove, mentioned on the company’s blog that the new funding would be used toward “expansion in Asia and Europe, the rollout of new product lines like Brightcove Express on a worldwide basis, R&D innovation, and possible M&A activity.” Brightcove has three offices in the U.S. as well as offices in England, Spain, Germany, China and Japan. Much of its strategy for 2010 seems to be focused on expanding its presence in these regions, possibly by using some of its fresh cash to buy out upstart companies in those areas. The Wall Street Journal reports that the company also plans to use what could be their final round of funding to build runway before going public, and that it could see revenues as high as $50 million in 2010. The news of Brightcove’s plans to go public is further evidence of the rebounding M&A and IPO market that we mentioned on Monday , especially if investors are willing to pump money into the web-video industry which has seen less than stellar revenues. Brightcove also can serve as an excellent example for young startups looking for an IPO or buyout day of their own in the future. The company is not sitting back and hoping the day comes that it can go public or be acquired; it is making sure they have the proper capital to continue to innovate and grow its company to that point. The company realizes that being able to go public is not entirely about having a steady revenue stream, but it is also about carving out a significant portion of its market by expanding its current products and creating new ones. Just last week the company announced it was launching a service to allow its customers to create iPad-compatible HTML5 based video players , keeping the company on the cutting edge of video management. Last year rumors circulated that Google was in talks to buy Brightcove, but the rumors were later revealed to be false . It seems they weren’t far off, however, as Google just last week announced it had acquired video service Episodic . Google, which has been picking up companies left and right in 2010 , could be signaling an impending consolidation within the web-video industry with their recent purchase and rumored interest in Brightcove. Brightcove appears to be hunkered down with its new funding and is ready for future prosperity, a strategy every startup should recognize and attempt to emulate in their future rounds of funding. Followers of Internet startups have been waiting for a major IPO for a few years and Brightcove could provide that in the next twelve months. Discuss

View original post here:
Brightcove Closes Series D Funding, Expects IPO By 2011