Every startup pivots at least once during alpha or private beta to improve their concept and/or open up new markets or applications. This has certainly been the case for DC-based Restin Chairs, which was called Restin Digital when I first met co-founders Barry Womack and Frank Taylor last month. Their story is almost a perfect…
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In my blog post last week, I used Pinterest as an example of a website whose Terms of Service (TOS) sells out its users by trying to shift all risk onto them. As I pointed out, Pinterest’s indemnity clause (which made a user liable for any copyright infringement based on an image the user pinned)…
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Groupon has been on quite the acquisition spree this year. In February, they purchased travel site Uptake, which lets you use your social networks to research travel destinations, adding to their Groupon Getaways department. Prior to that, they acquired Hyperpublic, which aggregrates place and deal data to connect people to places better, and Adku, an…
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Fresh off their official launch at SXSW, where they were a showcased startup at our #StartupLife Celebration and competed in the SXSW Accelerator as 1 of 48 startups, Votifi is poised to have a very busy year. Launching during a roller coaster of a campaign season that is preceding a presidential election in the fall,…
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There’s a fine line between using someone’s personal data for good or evil, for their benefit or your bottom line. It’s a line that LoanTek founder, Adam Stein, is familiar with, and he continues to craft his service to stay on the right side of this line, so to speak. Stein’s service, which provides qualified…
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Oftentimes we don’t find the business ideas, they find us. At least that was the case for Russ Whitney, Sawtooth Ideas founder and CEO. “I wasn’t looking for a business idea in woodworking, I just happened upon it.” After leaving his job at Microsoft in 2010, Whitney was looking for a business idea to pursue, but was…
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Trading portal 8 Securities launched in Hong Kong this Tuesday, backed by $8 million in funding. The TechCrunch Disrupt Beijing finalist has built a web app that makes trading social: you can read news and research right within the platform, trade stocks on Hong Kong and US exchanges (with a slightly high fee of $8.88…
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“What are you doing?” This was the simple question posed by Twitter back in its early days. Now with a roughly $8 billion valuation, turns out that was a very valuable question. There stands reason to believe that there is gold buried in the question of “what are you doing later?” - but as of…
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After 2 years of private beta with only an invite wall for a website, Venmo, a mobile payment app that I covered last August, went public yesterday. Thanks to a sometimes over-reliance on the lean startup model and its emphasis on launching an MVP no matter what, waiting 2 years to launch is very unusual…
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Venga spent 8 months “gold plating” their first product: an app for browsing nearby restaurant specials and events. It had the catchy feature names (like A List and Rutbuster), the exclusive deals, even a prize involving a Top Chef – and was available on iPhone, Android, and Blackberry all at once. But as Venga worked…
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circleof6, the winning app in from this summer’s Apps Against Abuse Challenge, which was sponsored by the Office of the Vice President and the White House Office of Science and Technology, is now available in iTunes. This icon-based app is geared for college students, a population that stays connected to their social network via mobile…
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Neil Mylet is a rather atypical startup founder. He was raised on a farm and continues to spend 8 hours a day farming in central Indiana. Naturally, his startup, LoadOut, is agriculture-focused: their goal is to improve mobile adoption in farming. During our SXSW #StartupLife Celebration on March 10, Mylet stopped by to talk about…
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Social capital: is it some high falutin, new-age terminology meant to give relevance to the irrelevant or the most undervalued hiring criteria in today’s economy? Nicole Antoinette co-creator, wordsmith and marketing director for the recently released iPhone wallpaper app, Paper’d, is making a strong case for the latter. In the seven days since the app’s release, Paper’d has already…
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Do you have a pile of other people’s business cards that just sit around collecting dust? Maybe you’ve even forgotten who you wanted to reach out to. Sometimes meeting new people gets the best of us, and we either forget to reach out to the people we met or just don’t make time for it,…
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Acheev.it is a little hard to keep track of – the startup is based in Beijing, but incorporated in Singapore, with developers in Vietnam, an adviser from Australia, and first customers in Malaysia. Oh, and the founders are from the US and Germany. In other words, not the smallest of logistical challenges. But they’ve pulled…
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Who is going to win social discovery? Last week, we interviewed Paul Davison, founder Highlight – this year’s most buzzed about social discovery app at SXSW. We also had the opportunity to sit down with Damien Patton, founder of Banjo, likely the consensus as second place contestant in this race. After talking with each of…
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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
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
We are excited to announce the participating startups for Tech Cocktail's South by Southwest (SXSW) event: #Startuplife Celebration presented by .CO. It was one of... 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