Pinboard (guardiantech)

Follow the money: Twitter fundraising is now legal >> Fast Company

guardiantech — 2013-07-11T07:23:51+00:00

Startups can now announce that they're seeking funding and investment via social media and print publications. The Securities and Exchange Commission announced the change earlier today. It's the result of section 201(a) of the JOBS act, which reverses 80-year-old limits on fundraising advertising. While the bureaucratic details may be boring, the implications aren't: Startups can now solicit funding from the general public - and everything that entails.

This is going to make those penny stock spam emails look like a tea party.

My one talk with Marissa Mayer >> Dave Winer

guardiantech — 2013-05-21T06:22:51+00:00

Winer recalls a day in 2003, when Mayer was working for Google, which had bought Blogger and promised not to treat it specially:

a few weeks after the deal they broke the promise. They added a BlogThis! button to Google Toolbar. It only worked with Blogger. It would have been a simple matter to make it work with any blogging tool. But they didn't see why they should do that.
Back then Google cared a little about what I thought, so the result was a conference call between me and an exec at Google, Marissa Mayer. I was driving cross-country from California to Boston, so I stopped in Utah, in the parking lot of a 7-11 just east of Salt Lake City, and we had the call. All I remember of it was there came a point in the conversation when Mayer had had enough. She just got up and left. I think the people remaining in the conference room were a little embarassed. Google didn't do anything to change the BlogThis! button.
All this is to say that the promises execs make on acquisitions are meaningless. They own the thing, they will do what they want to with it. It doesn't matter how many nice sounds Mayer makes on the deal. At the core she cares not one bit what the users of Tumblr think. She's saying what she needs to say to make the deal happen. To avoid a PR crisis on Day One. To make the team at Tumblr feel like their work has value to the new owners. That somehow this acquisition isn't actually an acquisition.

How the Technology Strategy Board spent £635 million – company by company >> Business Leaders Network

guardiantech — 2013-03-14T22:35:13+00:00

Hats off to Lyndsay Williams at Girton Labs who has used the Freedom of Information act to see how the Technology Strategy Board has allocated £635 million of public funding to projects. This will be interesting reading if you want to consider applying as you can now see exactly what is funded, by company, by project, by date and by amount. Also has the salaries (2010) for the Technology Strategy Board senior staff, as at November 2010. The TSB is hard to find out about because parts of it aren't accessible for FOI requests.

The Ecosystem Of Hype >> PandoDaily

guardiantech — 2012-09-05T12:33:51+00:00

Case in point, there are not one, but two incubator launched companies selling subscriptions to men’s underwear in a box, and both of them have been written up in TechCrunch. Since VCs and the various other players of the hype machine don’t want to be embarrassed, once founders/companies are in the loop, it then becomes in everyone’s best interest to keep the cycle moving, oftentimes to an acquisition or long enough for the incubator to cash out to a later stage investor.

If you feel that you have been underserved by the lack of coverage here of startups which offer subscriptions to men's underwear in a box, we apologise. (Subscriptions to underwear in a box?)

Google Slaps $100M Golden Handcuffs On Wildfire To Retain Employees After $350M Acquisition >> TechCrunch

guardiantech — 2012-08-06T21:50:41+00:00

The price of doing business.

Y Combinator's First Batch: Where Are They Now? >> The Next Web

guardiantech — 2012-08-06T06:56:39+00:00

Some of them have been acquired and made a hell of a lot of money. Some of them haven’t. Some of them have seen through their initial ideas and are still going strong, while some abandoned their ideas before even finishing the program.

There are real achievements at Silicon Roundabout | Monty's Outlook

guardiantech — 2012-07-09T16:05:43+00:00

Dan Crow, CTO of Songkick:

I left the UK in 1996, despairing of finding technologists and business people interested in building world-beating companies.
After 13 years in the US, I returned to find that there are real, meaningful companies building great technology right here in London. Perhaps [Telegraph head of blogs Damian] Thompson [who said Tech City is full of handout-seeking inconsequential flops] should look come see what’s really happening in Silicon Roundabout? I think he will be surprised.
Thompson claims nothing of worth has been produced by Silicon Roundabout, and compares the area unfavorably with Cambridge and the M4 corridor. Of course there are great success stories that have come out of those areas.
ARM Holdings, founded in 1990, makes the chip designs at the heart of many mobile devices; Autonomy, founded in 1996, was recently sold to HP for $10bn.
Perhaps it is a little unrealistic to expect similar levels of success from a group of companies many of which are less than three years old. But even so, there have been notable successes.

An effortless putdown.

Why Silicon Valley tech wunderkinds will only ever have one good business idea during their entire lives >> Forbes

guardiantech — 2012-06-21T20:41:41+00:00

The Valley culture also supports the idea of “serial entrepreneurs” – those who do it again and again. It’s just a matter of time, if you keep at it, before you’ll strike oil. And, when you’re surrounded by so many other successful entrepreneurs in the Valley, success seems so close you can touch it.
But there’s another side to all the start-ups: lots of failures. A few years ago, I was in the Valley meeting with a CEO of a photo-sharing start-up. I thought it was quite good. He was almost 40. He had spent his entire career in the Valley. He gave me a tour of the offices, we talked about all the prestigious VCs he’d signed up, and then we went back to his office and closed the door. About 45 minutes into the discussion, he shared something with me…

Esther Dyson on the Angel Crowd: It's "Very Self-Referential" >> peHUB

guardiantech — 2012-03-23T06:20:36+00:00

Dyson, who has been investing in startups for ages, talks about both whether there are women angel investors (there are, you just don't hear about them) and whether the buyouts you hear about are overpriced.

As Staff Flees, TechCrunch’s Traffic Plummets | paidContent

guardiantech — 2012-02-28T22:42:13+00:00

TechCrunch, the long-time darling of the digerati, is smashed to bits and all of AOL’s horses and men will be hard-pressed to put it together again. The site has lost almost every one of its top writers and traffic has fallen sharply, dropping by 35% from a year ago.

That's $25m spent by AOL it isn't going to see back. Though the estimate of pageviews comes from ComScore, so if you chose not to believe yesterday's story on time spent on Google+, why, then everything's just hunky dory at TechCrunch.

Instant Quote Search >> Quotecoil

guardiantech — 2012-01-23T21:46:15+00:00

Search for a quote by a person, quote, keywords and so on. Intriguing. But what's the business model?

Exclusive: SV Angel's investment portfolio - The Term Sheet >> Fortune CNN

guardiantech — 2011-11-22T22:11:22+00:00

"Overall, SV Angel reports 290 active portfolio companies through the end of October. Notables include Facebook, Foursquare, Gerson Lehrman Group, Square, Twitter and Zynga." ... And Groupon, whose shares were ticking back around IPO price last we checked.

Can Tudou Break China IPO Bed Spell? >> Chinese Investor

guardiantech — 2011-08-17T16:23:33+00:00

"Each and every Chinese IPO failed investors in 2011 so far. This doesn't mean Tudou (NASDAQ:TUDO) will fail as well, but it raises a red flag."

‘Angry Birds’ Maker Seeks Funds at $1.2B Valuation >> Bloomberg

guardiantech — 2011-08-12T07:33:49+00:00

"Rovio Entertainment Oy, the Finnish creator of the “Angry Birds” mobile-phone game, is in talks to receive funding that would value the company at about $1.2 billion, two people with knowledge of the discussions said."

Fresh IPOs stumble amid market tantrum. Is the IPO window closed? >> VentureBeat

guardiantech — 2011-08-09T06:23:46+00:00

"LinkedIn (Debut: May 19) — $75.16, down 18 percent

Zipcar (Debut: April 14) — $21.59, down 10 percent

Renren (Debut: May 4) — $6.75, down 11 percent

Pandora (Debut: June 15) — $12.55, down 7 percent

Zillow (Debut: July 20) — $26.17, down 7 percent

Fusion-io (Debut: June 9) — $24.78, down 5 percent"

It's So Obvious >> Biz Stone

guardiantech — 2011-06-28T21:36:05+00:00

"As for the bulk of my time day-to-day, I'm thrilled to announce that Evan Williams, Jason Goldman and myself will be relaunching The Obvious Corporation as co-founders. Our plan is to develop new projects and work on solving big problems aligned along a simple mission statement: The Obvious Corporation develops systems that help people work together to improve the world. This is a dream come true!"

Collaboration? Lots of things this could be. Then again, he has a good track record - Twitter, Blogger. Should it have been Obviouser to guarantee success?

Registration >> silicon milkroundabout

guardiantech — 2011-05-05T21:47:22+00:00

"Are you a developer or engineer with a passion for building real products and crafting great code? Fresh out of uni, or looking for your next move?

"Did you know that London's top tech startups are hiring for over 100 technical roles right now?"

There will be no Tech City in London if BT is not brought to heel >> Techcrunch

guardiantech — 2011-04-21T21:05:13+00:00

"While there are sceptics about the whole ‘East London Tech City‘ project, I do know that there is a big appetite to nurture this industry. Nothing happens over night, but at least we’ve started.
"However, one thing I have been banging the table about – increasingly angrily as the weeks and months have past – is the provision for broadband to startups in London.
"Time and time again startups are telling me that while they can deal with hiring people, deal with finding lawyers and partners and VCs, what they can’t deal with is the achingly slow response times of broadband service providers."