Userplane, an LA based company founded by Mike Jones, was acquired by AOL in 2006. But as you walk into their office in Santa Monica and look at the way they’ve re-invented themselves over the past couple of years, you wouldn’t think they’re part of a big company. Matt Turner, Tech Director for Userplane, is…
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Steve Case and Ted Leonsis, the pioneering founders of AOL, want to give back to the community that played home to their media enterprise’s early success. Frustrated by local businesses having to look toward Silicon Valley for the financial assistance necessary to grow, Case, Leonsis, and partner Donn Davis have raised enough capital to start…
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Mike Jones, serial entrepreneur, investor and most recently, founder of the new LA technology studio, Science, joined us at the DCWEEK Opening Keynotes last week. Tech Cocktail’s own Jen Consalvo interviewed Jones, discussing his early entrepreneurial days, his success with Userplane which he sold to AOL, and his challenges with MySpace which was eventually sold to…
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Disclaimer: This is an opinion piece, based on the facts and most names have not been changed to protect their innocence, or, not. It’s September again and that means TechCrunch Disrupt is taking place this week in San Francisco. The TechCrunch Disrupt event evolved from the now dissolved TechCrunch50 conference that was the creation of…
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Today news has come that TechCrunch founder and editor Michael Arrington is leaving TechCrunch and Aol, the company that it was acquired by just under a year ago, to start his own venture fund which is being dubbed the CrunchFund. The fund has Aol as a limited partner along with a list of venture firms…
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How’s this for a viral promotion? About.me, which we covered previously, as it was founded by Tony Conrad and then quickly acquired by AOL, has launched a campaign that could land your face on a billboard in Times Square. That’s right, the popular profile platform that enables users to create a simple yet classic online…
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Yesterday, we shared some thoughts from SimpleGeo VP of Product Jeffrey Kalmikoff, and today SimpleGeo founder Matt Galligan has decided to move on. We’ve been following Matt for quite sometime now from his days as a TechStars startup with SocialThing, where I first interviewed him at one of our events. Six months later the company…
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The weekend is a great time to get caught up on reading, including any news stories that were missed during the busy work week. News consumers have plenty of newsreader apps to choose from, no matter which device they own. So, why even mention yet another news app? The News360 version 2.0 was released Wednesday,…
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We knew it was coming, and the day has finally arrived – the Editions application for iPad has launched in the iTunes app store. Aol has been working for the past nine months on creating an elegant, simple, yet sophisticated and personalized news magazine for your iPad. I got a sneak peek of Editions in…
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I first interviewed Matt Galligan as he showed off SocialThing at the first Tech Cocktail Boulder mixer event in early March of 2008. SocialThing officially launched into private beta the next day at SXSW, and six months later was acquired by AOL. At that point, I went to work with Matt on lifestreaming and social…
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Work for the government, or create the next Facebook, that is the question. Whether it is nobler to suffer the slings and arrows of startup boom to bust cycles or to work on some of the coolest technology projects while a.) being assured rational working hours, b.) actually being on a first name basis with your kids…
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Our Startup Mixology Conference started out on a high note this morning with a great speech from Steve Case, arguably one of America’s best-known and most accomplished entrepreneurs (AOL and now Revolution, LLC) and philanthropists (Case Foundation). As Chairman of the Startup America Partnership, and co-chair of the National Advisory Council on Innovation and Entrepreneurship,…
Read MoreKevin Plank, founder and CEO of Under Armour, began his foray into entrepreneurship as a University of Maryland undergrad and walk-on football player. While at school, he and his future wife developed a business playing cupid for budding student romances by selling and delivering flowers on the College Park campus. Once a year in honor…
Read MoreSocial media has given voice to, well, everyone. Good, bad, ugly, relevant and irrelevant, this information is all out there – yet finding it all, and making sense of it, and putting it to actionable (and profitable) effort is the challenge for businesses online and off. Two former online advertising executives see cutting through this…
Read MoreFrom the Super Bowl, AOL CEO Tim Armstrong, along side Huffington Post co-founder and CEO Adriana Huffington, just announced that AOL has acquired Huffington Post for $315 million in cash, according to All Things D. In her blog post tonight, Huffington noted that her New Year’s resolution for 2011 was to “take HuffPost to the…
Read MoreToday from the Palo Alto office of Aol, the Mobile First team released a behind the scenes video sharing news about a new mobile iPad application called Editions. The video features Senior Director of Mobile, Sol Lipman, who you may remember was the was the co-founder of 12seconds. Editions, which is supposed to be coming…
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There are a number of startup accelerator and incubator programs in the United States. We are fans of these programs (not to be confused with... Read More
Two months after the iPad 2 debuted in March, around 40% of users surveyed said their iPad was their primary computer, up from around 30%... Read More
With our Startup Mixology Conference coming up next week followed by our classic Tech Cocktail DC Summer mixer which will showcase a handful of early-stage... Read More
Coming off of one of our biggest Tech Cocktail mixer events in Chicago this past week, which showcased 14 early-stage start-ups, we thought it would... Read More