Tech Archives - Page 4 of 5 - Serious Startups

Founders Card, Entrepreneur’s Card Now At 5,000 Members

Two year old Founder’s Card is now 5,000 members strong. The exclusive discount card, geared towards founders and entrepreneurs was started by Eric Kuhn two years ago. Members of the card pay a $495 registration fee and a $60 start up fee to become part of an exclusive club.

While there’s no secret club house in the woods or a secret decoder ring, FoundersCard members enjoy substantial discounts at businesses they typically need like Apple, Virgin Atlantic and several 4 and 5 start hotels.

FoundersCard also gives members access to exclusive members only networking events and cardholders are a who’s who of the rich and powerful in the tech, startup and VC crowd. Having the card is definitely “in”.

Although the baseline cost to join is $495, referrals into the FoundersCard’s exclusive club are given access for just $295. While that may seem like a great deal, Inc Magazine reports that serial entrepreneur Adam Rodnitzky recently responded to a Quora thread about FoundersCard and when asked if it was worth it he replied: “Are you bootstrapping or pre-exit? Then FoundersCard is probably not worth it … yet.”

source: Inc

Millennial Media Stock Opens With A Bang

Millennial Media, the largest independent mobile ad platform in the world, went public this morning on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) under the ticker symbol MM. Millennial had said earlier on that they expected shares to go for between $9 and $11 at their IPO. Yesterday that number was revised to $11 to $13 per share. What happened today was nothing short of amazing.

The opening trade this morning on Millennial stock was $25 it was hovering around $26 per share around 10am eastern time this morning. It was at $25.16 at noon.

CNBC’s Jim Cramer has been talking up the mobile phone space saying that it’s the way of the future. That could be what’s driving the stock for the Baltimore based ad network.

They also have a financially sound business. Millennial did over $104 million in ad placements last year and have been on a steady trajectory of growth since being founded in 2006 by former Verizon VCast honcho Paul Palmeri.

Millennial Media’s stock story this morning has been raising some eyebrows. Yahoo advertising executive, Michael Katz, tweeted this morning:

Millennial Media’s marketcap is almost bigger than the actual Mobile Ad Maket [sic]. Tell me how this makes sense.

The Motley Fool this morning called Millennial Media “The mobile advertising play you’ve been waiting for”. Fool writer Rick Aristotle Munariz speculates that Millennial’s position as the second largest mobile ad player overall, and ahead of Apple’s mobile ad unit, may be driving the success of their IPO.

source: SAI

Rumors Surface About The Next Playstation To Be Called Orbis?

Rumors were hot and heavy on the internet Wednesday about the next generation Playstation console. According to many sites including TFTS the next generation Playstation console will be called Orbis. TFTS was quick to point out that the Latin word Vita, the name of Sony’s latest handheld system, is life. The Latin word Orbis, means circle. Perhaps Sony is working on a “circle of life” concept with the next generation console and handheld.

The most important details to the reader are probably release date and pricing. Well we are far away from pricing but if sources are correct we would see the Playstation Orbis in time for the 2013 holiday season so about a year and a half from now.

The console system is said to rock an AMD x64 CPU and an AMD Southern Islands GPU. That will give it the capability of playing games at a resolution up to 4096×2160 (how much is the tv going to cost to support that???). It’s believed that the PlayStation Orbis will support 3D gaming out of the box.

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Brazilian Kids Being Tracked By Embedded Computer Chips

If the headline sounds like something out of a strange sci-fi movie, well it’s not. This is actually a true story out of Brazil. Grade school students in a northeastern Brazilian city have new uniforms. Those uniforms may look like typical school uniforms but they are not.

Twenty thousand students in a northeastern Brazilian school system are wearing uniform t-shirt embedded with microchips. All 20,000 students attend one of 25 schools in the Victoria da Conquista’s public school system. There are 213 schools in the system and when it’s all said and done 43,000 students aged 4 to 14 will be wearing the chip embedded t-shirts.

The entire program, which cost the school system over $670,000 to implement, is aimed at targeting tardiness and truancy. The chip notifies the parent of the child by text message when their student has entered the school. It also lets them no if the student hasn’t entered the school after 20 minutes with a text message that says “Your child has still not arrived at school”.

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LA Entrepreneur Moves Into His Car To Build New Startup

Nibletz.com, twitter @nibletz, techcrunch, pandodaily, venturebeat, crunchfund

LA Entrepreneur Kurt Varner is bootstrapping it from his car (photo: Kurtvarner.com)

LA entrepreneur Kurt Varner has decided to turn his marriage into a long distance relationship and move himself, in his car from LA to Silicon Valley. Once he arrives there, the creator of Vloggo who’s working on his next start up, Daily Toaster, is going to live out of his Honda Civic.

He writes on his personal blog about his adventure, that his wife is a school teacher in Los Angeles and it’s not economically feasible for them to rent two apartments. Varner also insists because of the thriving culture in Silicon Valley that’s where he needs to be to continue working on the Daily Toaster and hopefully attracting a co-founder that doesn’t mind his infrequent showering.

Varner has arranged to work out of two collaborative work spaces, the first Hacker Dojo in Mountain View. He’ll also work out of Parisoma in San Francisco. Both work spaces offer Varner a desk, internet access, a chair to sit on and a kitchenette which is a vital part to this journey.

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Celebrities In Start Ups A New Trend

Nibletz.com, ashton kutcher, techcrunch, ignition, betabeat, venturebeat, pandodaily

Ashton Kutcher On Stage At TechCrunch Disrupt NY (photo: Nibletz.com)

The LA Times published a huge piece this week on celebrities lending themselves to new start ups. There are a couple ways that celebrities are doing this. Some celebrities of course, can be bought to lend their name, likeness and endorsement to a start up. Then there’s the path that singer and actor Justin Timberlake and Lady GaGa have gotten involved.

Timberlake invested in and led a consortium of investors who successfully bid for MySpace from Fox Media last year. The price $53 million dollars. While some thought that the investors were going to rip the data out of the social network and sell it, they actually pumped new life into it and for the first time in years MySpace has graced the top 50 ComScore list two months in a row.

Timberlake went as far as to be the MySpace pitch man at the International Consumer Electronics show in Las Vegas in January. Pitching everyone that would listen to him both big time investors, and well just everyone. Teen pop superstar Justin Bieber was also at the Consumer Electronics show however in his case it was a paid endorsement of Tosy, a robot company banking on his star power attracting potential buyers to their booth.

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Programmer Takes Fun Out Of Finding Waldo With Algorithm

We’re not sure if this is a case of pure boredom or pure genius however programmers over at the site stackoverflow have found a way to use software to find Waldo. The software program they used is called Mathmatica and the programmer’s who participated in this amazing feat collaborated. Stack Overflow user Heike’s solution worked.

Geekosystem explains in as close to layman’s terms as possible, just how Heike was able to crack the mystery of finding Waldo:

“First, he filtered out all of the colors that aren’t red. Next, he calculated the correlation of the Waldo scene to a black and white image in order to find the red and white transitions in Waldo’s iconic shirt. Then, he picks out the pixels in that image that were found to have a high correlation, and draws a white circle around them. He had to fidget with the level of the image, as when it is too high, the code identifies false positives. Finally, he compares the image the code was working on — the compared one — and joins it to the original Waldo scene.”

Although it’s not foolproof it’s very interesting that they were able to accomplish this. We were able to confirm from another graphic programmer that it would be nearly impossible to use any kind of facial or image recognition program to find Waldo since he is an illustration and not an actual photograph. Also as we all know the iconic “Where’s Waldo” drawings are originally hand drawn wich makes every possible Waldo different than the previous one.

source: Stack Overflow via Geekosystem

Whoops: Apple To Pay $1.2 Million For Lying To Italian Customers

Apple lost an appeal on Thursday in Italy and now has to reimburse Italian customers of their Apple Care product to the beat of $1.2 million dollars. Surely to a company that has $100 billion dollars in the bank $1.2 million dollars is just a drop in the bucket, however the reason for the reimbursement could end up in a PR debacle.

Most customers of Apple products (me included) are aware of Apple Care. Apple Care is an extended warranty and support program for customers of Apple products after their initial one year warranty in the United States. Most Apple Care devices can be covered in 1, 2 and 3 year increments.

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Nibletz: What’s That Small Crunching Sound? Get My Start Up Featured

Nibletz was launched in the summer of 2011. We’ve been here ever since and have seen some phenomenal growth as of late. What’s a niblet? It’s a small crunchy byte from the tech and startup scene.

We’re here to bring you news and news bytes from around the startup and tech world. You’ll see stories here from the hot startup pockets like Silicon Valley, Silicon Alley, Silicon Beach and other places that don’t have Silicon in the name like the GigCity (Chattanooga), New Orleans, Austin, Syracuse, London, Berlin and more.

In these economic times more and more people are trying to find security in themselves and taking their ideas to the next level. Many fail, while many succeed and we’ll continue to bring you those stories from start-ups next door and start-ups across the globe. If it’s interesting, we’ll run it and the editorial team at Nibletz finds many things interesting.

We love to talk to people and want to hear about your startup so if you have a startup or know of an interesting startup send us an email at startup@nibletz.com we also like talking to people on the phone and we have a bad ass phone number for that (202)-NIBLETZ (2O2) 642-5389 it’s real easy to remember.

Another great thing about Nibletz is that we want our readers to understand the news and the lingo in and outside of the valley so you won’t find stories that are backed by old Silicon Valley urban legends. We’ll source stories from everywhere.

We read TechCrunch and PandoDaily, well Daily so we won’t do a lot of regurgitating from those sites, keep visiting them as well. But make sure you add nibletz.com to your RSS reader and drop us a line or a phone call.

If you’re not sure if you have startup news or you know you’ve got some cool tech tip for us send that email to tips@nibletz.com oh and our phone number again is (202)-NIBLETZ (2O2) 642-5389

Amazon Buys Robot Firm For $755 Million To Help Automate Warehouses

Amazon announced today that they are purchasing robotics company Kiva Systems. Kiva specializes in warehouse automation.

Kiva Systems robots can be guides by barcodes on the floor and shelving systems. The robots can then pick and bring items to stationary workers.

By keeping the workers stationary and letting the robots do all of the product picking the warehouse process becomes several times more efficient.

“Amazon has long used automation in its fulfillment centers, and Kiva’s technology is another way to improve productivity by bringing the products directly to employees to pick, pack and stow,” said Dave Clark, vice president, global customer fulfillment, Amazon.com. “Kiva shares our passion for invention, and we look forward to supporting their continued growth.”“For the past ten years, the Kiva team has been focused on creating innovative material handling technologies,” said Mick Mountz, CEO and founder of Kiva Systems. “I’m delighted that Amazon is supporting our growth so that we can provide even more valuable solutions in the coming years.”

Amazon will also pick up 24 contacts Kiva Systems already has in place, including giant toy retailer Toys R Us and outdoor company Timbaland.

Source: Mashable

Government Stranglehold On Kim DotCom Slipping

When the New Zealand government assisted the United States with serving warrants on the founders of megaupload, it made explosive news. Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom (who’s last name has been changed to dotcom from Schmitz), is a resident in New Zealand and lives on a sprawling mansion in the hillside of the country.

The New Zealand government took possession of Dotcom’s home, several cars and several million dollars that Dotcom had in bank accounts in the country. They also held Dotcom without bail as long as they could before extradition.

Three weeks ago Dotcom was finally allowed out on bail. The government in New Zealand had set up an allowance of sorts for Dotcom and his family to live off of while awaiting an extradition hearing later this summer.

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Surprise Surprise: Greg Kumparak Joins Pando Daily

Greg Kamparak photo: Kamparak's Google+

The exodus at AOL owned TechCrunch continues. Earlier this week it was leaked that TechCrunch’s mobile editor, Greg Kumparak, was leaving TechCrunch. At the time Kumparak announced his departure he didn’t say he was going, but of course the obvious place was PandoDaily.

PandoDaily is the new start up focused site that was started by former TechCrunch editor Sarah Lacy. Michael Arrington’s CrunchFund led an angel round for the new site that was over 2.5 million dollars.

Lacy announced a couple of weeks ago that PandoDaily was holding monthly meet ups. The first of which was tonight. Arrington was the featured guest and had a fireside chat with Lacy. It was also announced that Kumparak was joining the PandoDaily team tonight.

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Start Up: Nicira Disrupting Network Providers With Software Defined Networks

As more and more companies move to cloud based servers there’s a huge market for cloud based server companies. Many cloud based providers turn to huge companies with huge server centers to get their information in the cloud.

A company called Nicira is using an old software trick originally used by spy agencies to challenge some of those traditional network providers. With their technology called “Software Defined Networks”

Software defined networks and virtualized servers basically trick servers into doing the taks of several. Virtualized machines run on cheaper components and cheaper semiconductors driving down the cost of hardware.

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Start Up Camp 5 At IT Expo East

Tonight five Telecom, IT and mobile focused early stage start ups are going ti have the chance to pitch their ideas in order to get funding. They are pitching at the ITexpo East going on now at the Miami Beach Convention Center.

All five start ups will get five minutes a piece to give their best elevator pitch. One company will walk away with the investment that they need to expand their company and ideas.