Hi there!
Here's the latest feed from TechCrunch.
Add feeds@feed2email.net to your contact list to make sure you receive all your emails
Make sure to visit feed2email.net to get more feeds sent to your inbox.
To find out which feeds you are subscribed to, or to get further help, just reply to this email.
The 7 Deadly Sales Sins Committed By Startups
Sep 02, 5:00AM
Editor's note: Steli is the Co-Founder / Chief Hustler of ElasticSales and an advisor to several startups and entrepreneurs. You can follow Steli on Twitter here.
At ElasticSales, we've had the honor to create and run sales campaigns for some of the hottest Silicon Valley startups today. We've also consulted with dozens more each week to learn the challenges their sales team face. We realize we can't work with every startup just yet, but we have seen the same, avoidable mistakes made by many young companies as they conduct their sales campaigns. Below are "7 Deadly Sales Sins" committed by many startups today. Some of these may sound familiar to you, but by identifying and address these mistakes, you will help your company succeed.
You've Got One More Day To Apply For The Savannah Fund Accelerator
Sep 02, 2:00AM
The Savannah Fund is an African seed investment fund that aims to "bridge the early stage/angel and venture capital investment gap" in the region. A big part of that strategy is the fund's startup accelerator — and the deadline to apply is Sunday evening. The fund says each session will run for three months and operate out of the iHub in Nairobi, Kenya. It's looking to select five startups and invest $25,000 each in exchange for a 15 percent equity stake.How Machines Will Use Social Networks To Gain Identity, Develop Relationships And Make Friends
Sep 01, 11:37PM
Activity streams and social networks now represent a fundamental aspect of the modern application. We use activity streams on Twitter to converse in 140 characters or less. We use the "like" gesture on Facebook to show approval for an update to a friend's activity stream. In the enterprise, Salesforce.com Chatter uses activity streams to show application updates. Enterprise social network Tibco Tibbr users may create data hubs by geotagging places. For instance, an airport gate can be tagged to give agents, pilots and flight attendants relevant information as they approach it.Things to Consider Before Asking Friends and Family to Invest In Your Venture
Sep 01, 11:00PM
Editor's Note: Charles Moldow is a general partner at Foundation Capital, focusing on consumer Internet companies. He was previously a founding executive at TellMe Networks and at @Home. Friends and family can be an essential source of funding for fledgling entrepreneurs. Sometimes, they are the only source. But before you ask for funding, you have to ask yourself some tough questions, and one in particular: "What happens if I lose their money?" It happens all the time. It happened to me, and it forced me to learn hard lessons that can hopefully prevent other entrepreneurs from making the same mistakes. Before I became a venture capitalist, I was an entrepreneur with a new endeavor that I firmly believed in. I was wildly optimistic about the future and was eager to bring in friends and family to help get the company off the ground. I dreamed of the day when the company would become successful and make a big profit for those closest to me. And then I lost their money. All of their money.Labor Day Ready: White House Releases Beer Recipe Thanks To Direct Democracy
Sep 01, 9:09PM
Ready your grocery list for Labor Day: the White House has released the recipe for its official home brew, The White House Honey Ale. In a pun-tastic blog, Assistant Chef, Sam Kass, buckled to overwhelming demand from the White House online petition platform, We The People, "with public excitement about White House beer fermenting such a buzz, we decided we better hop right to it."Why The Space Democratization Movement Blows My Mind
Sep 01, 9:00PM
There's real movement behind the democratization of space. Not in the form of sending more people into space, but in giving more people access to satellites. Nano-satellites are getting cheap enough now that groups can raise enough money on Kickstarter to buy and launch them. That's only a slightly interesting development on its own, but what fascinates me is that some of these groups are promising amateur scientists to opportunity to write software for these satellites and essentially rent time on the satellites the way you might have rented time on a mainframe back in the day. That kind of blows my mind.Ecosystem 101: The Six Necessary Categories To Build The Next Silicon Valley
Sep 01, 7:00PM
Editor's Note: Benjamin Joffe is the founder of the Asia-focused digital research & strategy consultancy +8* | Plus Eight Star and has been living in Asia (China, Japan, South Korea, Singapore, Malaysia) since 2000. Benjamin has spoken at over 100 conferences (SxSW, TEDx, LeWeb, GamesBeat, etc.) on innovation, Asia, gaming and his keynotes gathered over 250,000 views on Slideshare. The topic is not new (see here articles on China, Japan, Japan, South Korea, Singapore, Singapore) and investors are also pretty excited about it (see Sequoia's latest round). As I was answering by drawing from my 12 years across Asia (China, Japan, South Korea, Singapore, Malaysia), I had a sort of epiphany and started to write down the criteria I thought composed an ecosystem. I then proceeded to score several markets using those, which brought interesting comparisons. The initial draft expanded into this column. It is far from perfect and comments to improve it are welcome!How Apple And Google Could Make QR Codes Mainstream
Sep 01, 6:00PM
Editor's Note: Brenden Mulligan is an entrepreneur and product designer who created Onesheet, Webbygram, TipList, ArtistData, MorningPics, and PhotoPile. You can find him on Twitter at @mulligan. QR codes are everywhere. Frustratingly everywhere in my opinion. Countless companies put them on marketing materials, but not a single person I know actually scans them. I'm friends with lots of smartphone owners, and I've literally never, ever seen someone pull out their phone and scan a QR code. There are even a handful of startups that consider QR codes part of their core offering to small businesses. They're relying on people actually scanning these stupid things for their products to work. Silly. However, as negative as I am about them, QR codes actually make a lot of sense.Amazon's Big Hollywood Announcement: All About UltraViolet?
Sep 01, 5:31PM
Amazon is holding a press event in Los Angeles on Thursday, in which it's likely to announce new versions of its Kindle tablets. You know, now that the Kindle Fire is all sold out. There have even been some leaks about what that product will look like, and the fact that it could be ad-supported. But the location of the press event in Santa Monica could also mean that Amazon will be making a big announcement around new video content that's available through those new products. As Seth Porges astutely points out at Forbes, when a big tech company does an announcement in Los Angeles, that usually means there's some sort of Hollywood studio connection. That isn't always the case -- check out Microsoft's L.A. announcement of the Surface tablet for proof -- but usually if a company like Amazon is gonna make a trip to Southern California for a product release, you can probably expect some studio execs in the room.Gillmor Gang: Not the Republican Convention
Sep 01, 5:00PM
The Gillmor Gang — Robert Scoble, Keith Teare, John Taschek, Kevin Marks, and Steve Gillmor — laughed all the way to the bank, if the bank was the burgeoning integration of the push notification bus. Amid the usual technical glitches (Skype noise cancellation meets ComCast bandwidth blockages) the Gang nonetheless persevered into an ahead of the curve consensus. Google + remains an inordinate locus of interest, as Google continues to blur the Apps/Docs/Gmail/GDrive services together. On the iOS side of the fence, AirPlay and iMessage retain an edge in differentiation, with Microsoft and Amazon bringing up the rear. Those (@kteare) who predict third party bridging of the unification services may be waiting for Clint Eastwood to ride to the rescue. Bring on the Obamacrats.Vibease: The Long-Distance Relationship You Always Wanted
Sep 01, 4:45PM
We've seen quite a few startups try to disrupt relationships lately. There's Dejamor, which sends you a box of romance each month, Boink Box, which sends you a box of sex toys, and I seem to remember a somewhat embarrassing interview with OhMiBod at CES. And today, yet another sexy startup joins the space. It's called Vibease, and it's a "massager" as they say, that hooks up to your smartphone via Bluetooth.Google+ Is Going After Yammer To Flank Facebook
Sep 01, 3:00PM
Editor's note: Rob May is the CEO and co-founder of Backupify, the leading provider of backup and recovery solutions for Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) applications. Google recently announced that it will begin offering corporate control features for its Google+ social network to businesses for free -- at least for a while. If you run a Google Apps domain, you can set up domain-wide restrictions on how your users interact with Google+. Your users can also make "restricted" posts to Google+ which are visible only to members of your domain. It's social networking, but with corporate oversight. That's sounds a lot like Yammer (which Microsoft recently bought for $1.2 billion) and Salesforce Chatter: Sharing streams designed for employee collaboration rather than personal socialization. It sounds less like Facebook, the undisputed heavyweight in social networking that Google+ was supposedly intended to depose.Apple's Patent Win Is Bad For Us All
Sep 01, 1:00PM
Look, I get it. It's a great story, maybe the greatest in the history of American business. From Day One, Apple did things the right way: clean, elegant, beautiful. But they were brought to their knees by Microsoft's colossal mediocrity. Their visionary founder was forced out. They teetered on the brink. And then--bam! They were saved (ironically, by Microsoft.) They regained their footing. And then they built one of the most remarkable corporate empires that has ever been constructed. And they did it by doing things their way. Clean. Elegant. Beautiful. Insanely great. So I can see why people who were Apple users during the dark days have a messianic zeal. Their ultimate triumph, after such long suffering at the brutal hands of inferiors, must seem to them more than remarkable. It must seem righteous. Add that to one of the weirdest and most unexpected things about the twenty-first century--the extent to which so many people defensively identify with the operating system on their phone--and Apple must seem like a living testament to the ultimate victory of truth, justice, and the American way. But there's nothing even remotely admirable about their latest coup.Solving The Developer Deficit In The Cloud
Sep 01, 9:00AM
Editor's note: Ruben Daniels is CEO and co-founder of Cloud9 IDE, a leading cloud-based Integrated Development Environment (IDE) that enables web and mobile developers to work together and collaborate in remote teams anywhere, anytime. Software is taking over the world. This sentiment has become widely accepted throughout the tech community, most notably examined in depth by Marc Andreessen last year. However, as software continues to infiltrate nearly every industry, there's a serious consequence taking shape. The demand for development continues to grow exponentially, but the amount of qualified developers that are available to produce this commodity is not. Simply put, the world is running out of developers.Amazon Web Services Adds Long Requested Web Browser Specification
Sep 01, 6:29AM
Amazon Web Services (AWS) added support today for a browser specification that defines ways for apps to allow resources to be accessed by web pages from different domains. The practice is called Cross Origin Resource Sharing (CORS) and has been requested by AWS users for the past few years. The new service represents another way that AWS automates tasks that developers once had to do themselves. We see this over and again fron AWS. They abstract arduous tasks so developers can focus on building apps.Now In 600+ Schools And Open To Any Student, Lore Gives Higher Ed A Next-Gen Social Network
Sep 01, 5:55AM
With social networking having permeated the way we look for jobs, share photos and music, and discover news, a startup named Lore is on a mission to do the same for higher education, and potentially re-shape the way teachers and students communicate. Formerly known as CourseKit, the Thiel and Founder's Fund-backed startup is doing that with a platform that is part Facebook and part Blackboard -- for courses. In other words, Lore aims to act as a replacement for the infamous course management system with a gradebook, calendar and document uploading (for class assignments), while giving students a social network-style newsfeed for classroom conversations. However, until now, Lore has been primarily focused on creating functional communities around courses, and students could only join Lore if a teacher invited them. While courses are remaining the central axis of the network, the startup has launched "Lore For Students," which now lets students join themselves and create academic profiles, follow classmates and professors and join groups (like study sessions or clubs).Anticipating a Blended Classroom Boom Led by Education Startups
Sep 01, 5:00AM
As kids head back to school this month and next, some will find a rather new arrangement greeting them: blended classrooms. These don't feel like the ways that many of us attended class, with a single teacher lecturing at students from front and center ("Bueller?"). As it's difficult--if not impossible--for cash-strapped schools to develop their own original learning products in house, startups are at the forefront of these changes. Thanks to many of them, more instruction is now being simultaneously delivered--by a live teacher, via web-based curricula, and in the form of students teaching one another, among other forms--within the walls of traditional classrooms.Open Source in Action: LinuxCon 2012
Sep 01, 4:49AM
I participated in a panel discussion at LinuxCon today with other journalists who cover Linux and open source goings-on, including our own Alex Williams. One of the questions that was asked was "What was the most important story for you this week?" The answers from my peer journalists were interesting, and reflect the diversity in interest (and beats) between us all. From Google's admission to using -- and paying for support for -- Ubuntu on the desktop, to Linus's revelation of a Linux 4.0 release within the next couple of years, the things that piqued our various interests covered the spectrum of what happened this week. When the question was posed to me, my immediate response was "The Hallway track".Kippt, Pinboard Help Digg Users Find New Home For Old Data [Here's How]
Sep 01, 1:58AM
After Digg's long fall, Betaworks acquired the site in July and put its News.me team in charge. Six weeks later, the new operators launched a complete overhaul of Digg. However, while interest in Digg had remained (a surprising amount, according to new CEO John Borthwick), the new site removed user access to old data, i.e. everything Digg users had ever posted to the old iterations of the site, Diggs, comments, articles, etc. Yesterday, the team rectified that and actually seems to have gone beyond what is usually characteristic for new management or a deadpooled/acquired startup to do in terms of access to historic data. They launched the "Digg Archive," which gives users of the old site (i.e. before July 2012) a tool to retrieve their submissions, saved articles, and more (by JSON and CSV) and by partnering with Kippt and Pinboard to give old data a new home.Hey Vendors — It's Too Early For An API Death Match
Sep 01, 12:18AM
I am not one to argue with abundance. I am a big believer in the way we can create so much, all the time. But I can't stand an abundance of vendor one-upmanship and that's just what I heard this morning at CloudOpen in a panel discussion about Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) v. Platform as a Service (PaaS).If at any time you'd like to stop receiving these messages, just send an email to feeds_feedburner_com_techcrunch+unsubscribe-hmdtechnology=gmail.com@mail.feed2email.net.
To stop all future emails from feed2email.net you can reply to this email with STOP in the subject line. Thanks
