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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Demibooks, a Chicago-based publishing technologies company, announced yesterday it has secured equity investment from Educational Development Corporation (EDC), a publicly traded company. EDC sells children’s books, including Usborn Books and the Kane/Miller line of international children’s titles, through a multi-level sales organization of independent consultants. Demibooks provides a publishing platform for interactive books. They recently…
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LiveFyre, the San Francisco-based software platform that enables anyone to add a commenting system to a website, has secured an additional $4.5 million in a new round of funding led by Greycroft Partners and digital media investors Cue Ball, HillsVen Group, and ff Venture Capital. Livefyre’s commenting platform is currently installed on more than 14,000 websites, including…
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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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Yesterday, the Wall Street Journal launched a standalone news product built entirely on Facebook. The new product, called WSJ Social, leverages the Facebook sharing to compile the most popular and relevant WSJ news based for you based on your social network. WSJ has decided to “fish where the fish are,” and leverage the popular social…
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Your favorite movies have their own unique soundtracks, and now your favorite books can, too. Founded by Paul Cameron, Booktrack is a startup that is changing reading – and the publishing industry – forever. Booktrack creates synchronized soundtracks for ebooks to enhance the reader’s imagination and engagement. Combining music, sound effects and ambient sound, Booktrack’s…
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I am a big fan of Chartbeat, the real-time analytics platform, as it offers an up-to-the-second look at who is visiting a specific site, what pages are being looked at and where traffic is coming from. It also offers an iPhone application for a quick snapshot on-the-go. It can be addictive as you watch the…
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Unless you’re the next Mark Twain or Stephen King himself, the world of book publishing can be a dog eat dog place for the newbie author. Only 18% of manuscripts ever make it to a publisher’s website, and from that pool, 98% of them get rejected. With FastPencil‘s social self-publishing platform, novice authors don’t have…
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With eReaders taking over the book world and rendering hard copies of books obsolete, e-book publishers have been popping up left and right. Seth Godin launched The Domino Project last year, around the time we covered BookBrewer, a service that lets people turn blogs and documents into e-books within a few minutes. A Google search…
Read MoreAre you a social media fanatic? Do you like to read? Look no further than Cool Blue Press, the upcoming publishing company primarily focused on social media marketing books launching this week at SXSW. Where better to launch a social media book publishing house than at the “primary” social media conference? This coming year, founder…
Read MoreEver fancy yourself a teacher? Itching to share your expertise with the world? Startup Udemy (Academy of You) offers a simple-to-use online course publishing tool. With Udemy, you can find or create a course on just about anything. Just choose from one of eleven course categories, from academic to hobbies and crafts. Creating a course is free and easy—in…
Read MoreThis could be a troubling day for Amazon, Barnes and Noble and Apple as the eBook race just added another competitor: Google. Last week there was an announcement from Google and today they launched the Google eBookstore. But they didn’t just launch it with a few titles, Google launched with over 3 million titles, many…
Read MoreBack in July, we published an interview with an author who self published her work through LuLu.com. In that short time, we’ve run into countless others who have self-published their own books via other methods (and some of us who have promised to, but haven’t quite gotten around to it yet). We thought we’d bring…
Read MoreYou can’t be on Twitter for more than a day without seeing a link to someone’s self-published book. Whether it’s an ebook, or an actual paperback or hard cover, the options for self-publishing are endless and have leveled the playing field for anyone with a laptop who’s ever dreamed of being an author – which…
Read MoreHow do I love thee? Let me count the ways. Sonnet 43 – by Elizabeth Barrett Browning You could just count them, or you could actually list them all in a book from LoveBook Online and show how you really feel. But don’t let the name deceive you. It’s actually a book you create online,…
Read MoreI first saw Take Comics as part of the TechStars 2009 program and instantly was reminded of my days reading Spiderman and X-Men comic books. I used to love to reading comic with my younger brother and we could exchange ideas about how one character was better than another or visa versa. I got a…
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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