Blank slate has never been so colorful. At last year’s SXSW, Tech Cocktail covered a new robo-ball-toy called Sphero. The robotic ball, controlled by your smartphone, puts a heavy emphasis on design. While the ball’s clear exterior rotates in order to achieve movement, the interior remains balanced. The result- Sphero’s bottom half continually faces the…
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Coming to CES this week are Cubelets, small multicolor cubes you can snap together to create robots that move, chirp, and light up. Cubelets come with different programming, and what they do depends on how they’re combined. “Action” blocks include Drive (with wheels), Flashlight, and Speaker (which chirps). “Sense” blocks respond to environmental factors like…
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It’s a fresh new year, but some of us might not be so excited about returning to the same office we were at in 2011. As you reflect back on the year behind you, do you find yourself thinking about new challenges or a change of scenery? How can you make it the best year…
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Online advertising is such a crapshoot. If you don’t do it right, you end wasting a lot of time and money. Boulder-based startup Trada crowdsources online advertising by harnessing the expertise of creatives and those in advertising to provide you with an optimized ad/image combination. Until today, it was only available for Google, Yahoo, and…
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Last fall, Colorado suffered a devastating wildfire. As the flames spread, they left a trail of tweets, Flickr photos, and collaborative Google maps – disconnected information that was constantly changing. This natural disaster was the inspiration for Crowdspoke, a news platform centered on topics where users vote stories up and down – and a useful…
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A host of startups are helping users save energy, from Opower’s energy reports to the smart thermostat from Nest Labs. But Simple Energy cofounder Yoav Lurie thinks users – despite their good intentions – need more motivation. “The premise in much of the industry has been if you present the data, they will come,” explains…
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Rather than counting pennies with Google AdWords, bloggers have a new option to make money: Blogmutt, which was showcased at our Tech Cocktail Boulder mixer. BlogMutt writers create posts for companies that have no time to blog using suggested keywords. Companies then browse the crowdsourced entries and pick one post per week. BlogMutt’s challenge is…
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According to FullContact, my first name is Kira, my last name is M. Newman, I’m female, and I live in Washington, DC. Other than the middle name blip, that’s pretty accurate, considering I left DC only two months ago. You can see what FullContact knows about you here. FullContact helps developers enhance their app’s contact…
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Lackluster analytics getting you down? ReportGrid, a company that was showecased at our Tech Cocktail Boulder event on Monday night, is here to the rescue with a simple API – and intelligent, eye-catching analytics to boot, which they deliver as a service through a web browser. They are also a Startup Weekend company and graduate…
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Do you lean on certain groups of friends to share and recommend books, websites or videos? Chances are you are sharing via email. Email takes care of one-to-one sharing; Facebook, Twitter and StumbleUpon cover one-to-many sharing, but there are few services that cater exclusively to small group sharing. Skmmr offers a new way to share…
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If you are like most startups, you are working with a tight marketing budget. If you’ve been thinking about spending some of those dollars for online advertising, check out Boulder-based The Trade Desk. Their goals is to help you figure what is this impression, this user, and/or this website worth? Their data-driven marketing suite, which…
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According to Boulder, CO-based startup Radish Systems, research shows that people understand information at least 50% better when both seeing and hearing. If you want to do a better job explaining what it is your startup does to potential investors, partners, or clients, check out their new product ChoiceView. It is a really cool idea,…
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After a short hiatus, I am excited to have the Tech Cocktail team back in Boulder today to host one of our classic Tech Cocktail mixer events. The event will showcase a number of the latest startups from the local area, as well as some of the latest tech innovations from X.commerce and Mapquest. The X.commerce…
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Lijit Networks, which provides advertising and analytics tools to publishers, announced Tuesday its acquisition by Federated Media Publishing for an undisclosed amount. “While the details of the transaction itself weren’t released, this acquisition ranks among the most significant outcomes for the region in the past 10 years,” said Seth Levine, managing director of Foundry Group,…
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Have you ever been curious about what a venture capital firm actually does from day-to-day? Boulder-based Foundry Group, which specializes in investing in technology startups like Zynga, Fitbit, Gist and more (when they were early stage), may be able to help paint a clearer picture. The group lead by Brad Feld, Seth Levine, Ryan McIntyre…
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Today in Boulder was TechStars demo day at the Boulder Theater as the top ranked U.S. startup accelerator program launched it’s latest class. We’ve been covering the TechStars Boulder program since it’s inception and you check out last years class here. This year, lead by Nicole Glaros and the founding team of David Cohen and…
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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