I’m a native New Yorker, so I am pretty psyched that the Giants are playing in the Super Bowl today. Still, I have to admit – I watch the Super Bowl for the commercials – but I really look forward to the game because it’s a great excuse to cook some awesome food and open…
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Yesterday I wrote about a company that gets it, when it comes to rewarding customers for doing some of the marketing legwork for them. Social Rewards is another clued-in startup that realizes a simple “thank you” – in the form of rewards, of course – can go a long way in building brand loyalty and…
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As an enthusiastic writer and reader, I’m excited for the release of Quotogram, an app for discovering, organizing, and sharing quotes. You can view recent, popular, or your friends’ quotes, and search by author, keywords, and tags. If your favorite quote is nowhere to be found, you can submit it (or correct any misquotes). The…
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Milwaukee residents have a new way to save and share with local online advertising startup Offermation. The company is integrating word of mouth marketing into the daily deal model and has earned kudos as an alternate in the 2012 SXSW Accelerator Program in the Innovative Web Technologies category. Not just another daily deal marketplace, Offermation…
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Chito Peppler served for 20 years in the U.S. Navy, but lately he has traded his uniform for the casual dress of the entrepreneur. “After serving in the military, I wanted to start my own business. I knew how to take orders – now I wanted to be able to make them,” says Peppler. Peppler’s…
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During one lunch hour in 2010, reporter Travis Lowry was listening to NPR and heard about the It Gets Better project, with inspirational videos encouraging LGBT youth to believe that life will improve. Lowry decided that rather than telling them it gets better in the future, he would help them get better now. Launched this…
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If you’ve ever been charged with event planning – in your job or otherwise – you know it can be an overwhelming and detail-driven process. From conventions and expos to festivals and high school reunions, event planning means having lots of balls in the air, so you’d better be a juggler, right? Austin-based Whindo is…
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According to a December study by Yesware, you may be sending your emails at the wrong time. Their analysis of 20,000 emails revealed that recipients opened more work-related emails on the weekend than during the work week. Yesware, which we covered previously, is an email productivity tool for salespeople, with funding from Google Ventures and…
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Leave it to Google to give the perfect illustration of a problem we forget we have. In the video below, Google asks, “What if real-life purchases were like online checkout?” – with all the confirmations, questions about contact info, and even timed-out sessions – to explain why online sellers need Google Analytics. But the video…
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Cardfed is a truly international company. It was started in Amsterdam after founder Ville Kulmala moved there from Finland and incorporated in Hong Kong. Kulmala now lives in Thailand, and his 8-person team is scattered about in Amsterdam, Hong Kong, and Helsinki. Kulmala tells me they have physically worked from 25 countries in the past…
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Curated monthly subscription services took off in 2011, with sites like Lost Crates, Umba Box, and BabbaBox sending out packages of stationery, women’s products, and kids’ arts and crafts. So it’s no surprise that a startup is finally aggregating those services – and giving them the tools to take off. Memberly is an online marketplace…
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Facebook owns social. LinkedIn owns professional. How about recreational? “The bet we’ve made is that people have 3 big persona’s in their life: social, professional, and recreational,” says Gabe Lozano, LockerDome Co-Founder and CEO. ”We want to cover recreational – an area that we believe people are more passionate about than any of the…
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I’m chatting with Peach Rojwongsuriya at a Starbucks in a posh mall in Bangkok. Wearing a white Jimi Hendrix t-shirt, he’s chattering in great English about keeping his startup lean, Ruby, and the state of ecommerce in Thailand. But 23-year-old Rojwongsuriya wasn’t always an entrepreneur. He studied at an international primary school – which is…
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Yesterday afternoon, I spent an obscene amount of time and money buying tickets to a Coldplay concert in July here in DC. Being forced to use TicketMaster is bad enough, but they made it worst with their horrible CAPTCHA system that depends on text so distorted I wasn’t even sure if they were letters in…
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When I first checked out Remixt.us’s beta, I was a bit skeptical: it looked like a bunch of nice image collages, but I wasn’t sure why users would create them. But talking to cofounder Angela Min, I began to see how it could be beautiful and meaningful. Remixt.us’s bookmarklet lets you grab content from all…
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Pho is a traditional Vietnamese soup; the broth is simmered for hours and then served everywhere from restaurants to street stalls to trains. One day, the founder of Pho Ta, an upscale soup chain in Vietnam, sat down for a meal at one of his stores. To his surprise, the waiter said they couldn’t serve…
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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