Foursquare is not a consumer social app business, it’s a data company. And only when it admitted that to itself and revalued as such was it able to pull in more capital and keep chugging. Today at LA’s Upfront Summit, Foursquare’s lead investor from Union Square Ventures Fred Wilson stuck up for the startup while trying to make people understand how it’s… Read More
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“Nearly everyone I know is addicted in some measure to the Internet,” wrote Tony Schwartz in a recent essay in The New York Times. It’s a common complaint these days. A steady stream of similar headlines accuse the ‘Net and its offspring apps, social media sites and online games of addicting us to distraction. There’s little doubt that nearly everyone who comes… Read More
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Sonatype, a company that helps customers create automated, policy-driven software component security, announced a $30 million round today led by Goldman Sachs. The investment was a mix of debt and equity financing and was handled by Goldman’s Principal Strategic Investments Group, rather than Goldman’s venture capital arm, Sonatype CEO Wayne Jackson explained. Although this… Read More
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Remittance has always been a shady business. Migrant workers need to send money they earn home to their families, but get hit with fine print fees so less cash comes out the other side than they might assume. Remittance companies earn extra by keeping the margin between their own made up exchange rate and the real one.
Western Union is the best known remittance company, with 500,000… Read More
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Now Facebook has its own holiday it calls “Friends Day”. On February 4th, the social network turns 12 years old. But in typical self-less Zuckerberg fashion, Mark said “rather than having this birthday that focuses on us, we should make sure that the world focuses on what’s important”. Namely, its users. So today Facebook is sending everyone a Friends Day video… Read More
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We’ve seen startups helping brands tap influencers to promote themselves on social media platforms like Vine and Instagram, so it might be time for a new influencer marketing startup, Applause, that’s focused on live video — particularly Twitter’s Periscope app. It’s certainly a platform that CEO Jon Jacques is familiar with. In addition to working for a couple… Read More
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Cisco announced today it was buying Jasper Technologies, developers of an Internet of Things cloud platform for $1.4 billion. With Jasper, Cisco gets a company that understands the burgeoning Internet of Things market. While the IoT term gets bandied about quite a bit, it simply means connected machines talking to one another over the internet. This could be industrial automation equipment on… Read More
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Instagram today announced that it began running its first 60-second video ads, starting with T-Mobile and Warner Brothers. Until now, the maximum length for video ads was 30 seconds, already longer than the 15-second videos users are allowed to post. Instagram tells me that “We recognize that advertisers have a variety of creative resources and want to bring more choice to help them… Read More
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French startup La Belle Assiette just raised another $1.5 million (€1.3 million) to expand its services. The company has become a leading on-demand chef service in Europe, and is now looking at other opportunities in the events catering industry. 
Former Jolla co-founder Marc Dillon has a new job in hardware: Finnish startup Asmo, which has been crowdfunding a mobile charger that switches off automatically when the device is fully charged, has today named Dillon as its new CEO.