Startups
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Reading Rainbow Has More Backers Than Any Kickstarter Campaign Ever
Ever since Reading Rainbow went off the air in 2006, LeVar Burton has been working to bring it back. In 2012, he launched a tablet app program, and just recently, he launched a Kickstarter campaign asking for $1 million to develop Reading Rainbow programming across all platforms, which will be provided to classrooms for free. Flash forward to today, and the Reading Rainbow Kickstarter… Read More
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Mail Digitization Startup Outbox Relaunches As Able, A Collaborative Small Business Loan Provider
In January, the intriguing but ultimately unsuccessful startup Outbox announced it was shutting down its service that digitized U.S. postal mail. However, the team said at time that they weren’t done yet – having raised a $5 million Series A round just last summer, the founders were going to focus their efforts on a new product, they explained. Now we know what that new product… Read More
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Mobile, Social News Startup NowThisNews Acquires Video Distribution Platform Cliptamatic
New York-based NowThisNews, a startup looking to reinvent video journalism for the mobile and social era, has acquired a company in a similar space, Cliptamatic, a platform which helps premium content owners distribute video to social media in real-time. Terms of the deal were not disclosed but the acquisition was for equity.
Cliptamatic had raised north of $2 million a few years… Read More
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#Love: Pride
I’ve been gay since I was… well, born. At seven years old, I knew something was different when I felt an overwhelming affection for my 19-year-old basketball coach, Cathy. By the time I figured out how sex worked, I had also learned that my Southern Baptist private school and religious community weren’t cool with the whole “gay” thing. At 13, despite truly… Read More
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Startups And The Un-Banking Of America
Historically, when looking for opportunity in the financial industry where technology can have the greatest impact — for investors and entrepreneurs — the best place to start has been with one of our oldest institutions: banks. However, while critical to our economy, banks are generally inefficient, have high fixed costs and don’t exactly elicit happy thoughts from the… Read More
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VCs Don’t Think We’re In A Tech Bubble — Yet
Andreessen Horowitz managing partner Scott Kupor argued that there doesn’t seem to be a bubble in tech at the PreMoney 2014 conference in San Francisco this morning. In a presentation that lasted a bit over ten minutes, Kupor laid out a series of trends that indicate things aren’t quite as exuberant as some fear. Read More
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Open Platforms Fuel Startup Ecosystems
Companies face an inherent tension between being open or proprietary, but we’ve seen, again and again, that open systems can act as catalysts for entirely new businesses built on top of a popular platform. Earlier this month, we encountered examples of each approach, as Tesla Motors opened up its patents and Netflix decided to shut down, or at least severely limit access to its API. (To… Read More
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Aereo’s Dissent
I’ve been waiting for the Supreme Court ruling on Aereo all week. When it came down yesterday, it felt a little bit like Groundhog Day. If the Supreme Court sided with Aereo, winter would be over; if they didn’t, six more weeks of cold. Either way, I think Aereo will eventually have its own spring… but now it will take a while. So here’s the bad news: the Supreme… Read More
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Please Join Us For The 9th Annual August Capital Party In Silicon Valley
TechCrunch’s annual summer soirée is almost here. As in years past, August Capital will host TechCrunch and hundreds of local investors, founders and developers at its sunny office on Sand Hill Road. All are welcome to the August 1 event, but space is very limited. Loyalty And Marketing Analytics Startup CrowdTwist Raises $9M More
CrowdTwist is announcing that it has raised $9 million in Series B funding. Since the company offers tools for creating online loyalty programs, co-founder and CEO Irving Fain said that a few years ago, CrowdTwist was sometimes “gravitationally lumped into the intense fervor around gamification,” but he pointed to the new funding is a sign that it has a bigger vision, one that… Read More
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