You know that prime commercial location on State Street that keeps on churning out failed businesses? First it was a Moe’s Southwest Grill, then a Fudruckers, then a Goodwill, now it’s vacant again. The developers just can’t seem to figure out what the people want. At best, though, running an in-depth competitive analysis and digging through an…
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The Apps for Communities Challenge announced the winners of $100,000 in prizes to developers who created community-focused apps. A partnership between the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation and the Federal Communications Commission, the national contest attracted 368 apps submissions. The winners – many of them with very interesting backgrounds – created straightforward, useful…
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A new year is like a fresh, clean slate. As you reflect back on the year behind you, do you find yourself thinking about new challenges or a change of scenery? While our economy is still struggling in many ways, there are jobs out there. In fact, in our sector, there are many great paying…
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It was only a matter of time before Apple’s voice activated assistant, Siri, was hacked. With the help of Applidium, hacker and developer Pete Lamoni (@plamoni) released Siri Proxy on GitHub. It’s a proxy server that allows developers and hackers to create custom functionality for the Apple software. Just a week later, here’s a list…
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Chicago-based startup Cerrio, which was co -founded by a former derivatives trader and software developer for the trading industry, is demoing 2 products for developers at Tech Cocktail’s event at Chicago Ideas Week Sunday night: x-stream.ly is a fast, secure, and scalable service that lets web developers add real-time interactivity to their apps. No server…
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Today X.commerce was officially announced at the annual Innovate Developer Conference in San Francisco, bringing together the technology assets and developer communities of eBay, PayPal, and Magento, as well as a number of technology assets across the eBay portfolio. The additional assets being folded into the X.commerce ecosystem include RedLaser, Milo, and Zong, among others – and…
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Sick of daily deal sites yet? We stumbled across a new one that is actually pretty interesting. So, in yet another twist on the daily deal site, we have 3 week old NYC-based startup Stampede.It. Their group buying site is for digital goods and services like mobile apps, social games, ebooks, and web apps. So…
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SweetLabs, the creators of OpenCandy, an advertising network, and Pokki, a desktop app platform, has announced that they have raised a $13 million C Round of funding from Intel Capital. Existing investors Google Ventures and Bessemer Venture Partners also participated in the round. The funding will be used to grow Pokki, expanding on the company’s newest platform that lets…
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Following recent updates to photos and a mysterious new stream, Facebook is launching more changes in structure and design in the coming weeks, which were announced at the f8 Developers Conference. Here they are: Timeline What it is: A new profile page with your most important updates (see pictures here) How it works: Facebook automatically…
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Google+ has been the talk of the summer. It’s been attracting new users at a record pace – all without the help of outside developers. Today, Google announced in a blog post that they have launched the first Google+ developer API. While this is only the first part of the Google+ API, it is still…
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Over the last few weeks, there has been a dialogue emerging around the topic of social media fatigue – too many posts, too many messages and not enough meaningful, personalized information. The rollout of Google Plus finds itself at an interesting point – providing users the strategic placement of friends and contacts within Circles, while…
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Working remotely is de rigueur nowadays, especially in the startup community. We work from home, while on vacation, sitting at the airport, in coffee shops, between offsite meetings, etc. Developers, however, have always been somewhat constrained by long local development environment setups. Compilr has changed that. Compilr is an online integrated development environment (IDE) that…
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In the fun and exciting category, we have product development, marketing, sales. And over here in the boring but necessary category, we have legal paperwork. As we learned from our panel of experts at yesterday’s conference, making sure your paperwork is in order will save a lot of headaches down the road. The panel was…
Read MoreBeing a relatively new father, I’ve gone from being a non-coffee drinker to a Starbucks Gold Card member. So when I first found the Starbucks iPhone app, it was an app that gained instant placement on my first screen, a designation that is hard to come by with all the apps I tend to use….
Read MoreAt our Tech Cocktail SXSW event, aside from showcasing 30 startups which were finalist of the SXSW Accelerator program (see the winners) Microsoft’s mobile development team put three mobile developers to the test as part of a Mobile App Smackdown (think Iron Chef for mobile application development). Working in partnership with Cooliris’s LiveShare photo sharing…
Read MoreAs CTO of Threadless, Harper Reed helped grow the community-based company that prints designs created and chosen by users from 2 barely functioning servers to over 45 devices. He also helped Threadless produce a revenue of over $20 million. Reed has since moved on from Threadless and is working on his own secret startup. Harper…
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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