For today’s Startup Quick Byte we take a look at another cloud based service, SquadMail. This like yesterdays is based out of Berlin, but aims to make email between multiple people easier. If you are working with someone else, or a team of people, SquadMail makes it so attaching documents, or files into a single folder for easy secure use.
Anarchist, Hackers, Criminals, Freedom Fighters, which ever you want to call them. Hacktivist has become part of the vocabulary over the past two years with groups like Anonymous, LulzSec and others. Below is a graphic explaining where it started recently, the cause and effect of such actions which we’ve seen.
Last week Pando Daily’s Trevor Gilbert struck a nerve in the heart of the midwest when he penned this piece: The Midwest Mentality. He spoke about a Chicago that didn’t live the startup culture life and how entrepreneurs there didn’t get it and went home at five pm. Nothing could be further from the truth, just check out the news that comes out daily from sites like builtinchicago.com
We’ve even featured a bunch of startups based in Chicago including Planfast and KlutchClub and have plenty more on the way. Well it’s apparent that Illinois Governor Pat Quinn didn’t get that memo from PandoDaily as the Illinois state government announced yesterday they are backing a new 50,000 square foot tech center slated to open on May 2nd.
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(photo: Inqusitr.com)
Billionaire tech entrepreneur and Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban offered a great tidbit of advice on his blog, blogmaverick.com last week. That advice “Don’t Follow Your Passion, Follow Your Effort”.
Now to many people this may seem a bit absurd. But if you’ve ever watched Mark in action on Shark Tank this season, or on his guest appearances in season two than you may agree with this advice. Religious watchers of the ABC reality show about startups and pitches have seen one too many “entrepreneurs” leave the shark tank in tears because their passion didn’t transcend to a true business model.
“Mr. Wonderful” Kevin O’Leary is usually the first shark with his jaws open asking the entrepreneurs “That’s great, where’s your sales”. On episode after episode you’ll see people turning out new versions of the snuggie, useless kitchen gadgets and one of my favorites a pet food remedy that the veterinarian promised would prolong a pets life without any data to back it up. The one common thread in many of these unsuccessful pitches was passion.
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Outside of Detroit, North Carolina is a mecca for innovation in the automobile sector. North Carolina also has a thriving tech community in the research triangle area which encompasses Raliegh, Durham, Chapel Hill, Cary and surrounding areas. One of those companies is Evatran.
Evatran is a spinoff of a company called MTC transformers, which is an electronics manufacturer based in Whytheville Virginia. Evatran moved to Morrisville NC to be closer to the global technology hub that exists there.
So what is this start up doing that is Evatran doing that is so phenomenal that Google, Hertz Rent A Car, Duke Energy and Clemson University have come to the plate with funding for them? They are looking to cut the cord to recharge electric cars. Evatran is working on a plugless recharging station for electric cars.
“Fundamentally, what we’re selling here is convenience,” said Evatran co-founder Rebecca Hough told the Winston Salem Journal. “The cord gets really dirty. People run over the cord.”
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In 2010 Napster’s co-founders Shawn Fanning and Shawn Parker quietly started making noise about a new start up. At that time it wasn’t clear if the two were reunited when Fanning received an early seed round of funding in the amount of $200,000 for a startup, at the time called SupYo, as in “What’s Up Yo”. At that time Supyo’s founders were listed as Fanning and Voxli founder Joey Liaw.
Almost a year to the day later in October 2011, Fanning and Parker had competed an $8.3 million series A round. Some of the top investor’s in Silicon Valley were involved including; Founder’s Fund, Accel Partners, Andreessen Horowitz, Yuri Milner, Ron Conway, Marissa Mayer, Ashton Kutcher, Will I Am, Scott Braun and Michael Arrington. With an all star line up like that Parker and Fanning must be on to something big. All that is known so far is that it’s some kind of video chat.
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A really cool infographic has come to us by way of alltopstartups.com. The infographic conceptualizes the startups journey from assembling the team, to retiring and becoming an investor, through the looking glass of a rockband. I know with our extremely long nights, crazy off the wall times for meetings, and being fueled by Ramen and Monster, start ups (including us) feel like Rock Stars now we can see it.
You don’t believe Tech Startups and Rockbands are alike? South by Southwest obviously does.
Shane Snow, curator and designer of this fine infographic, hits the nail on the head. Read through it real quick it’s greatness.
The one time internet giant AOL, which has been declining over the past few years, has been trying desperately to bring readers from other sites to their media properties like TechCrunch, Huffington Post, Patch and other blogs and online content. With some of the more notable websites in the tech community, AOL has always seemed to be very supportive of intellectual property.
In fact, as recent as last week, we published a story about AOL considering licensing patents rather than suing over them. A move to not further clog the arteries of our already busy patent court system.
You would think that AOL, TechCrunch and Crunchbase would be very protective of not just their intellectual property but also the intellectual property of those businesses and members of the community that they serve. You would also think that TechCrunch, Crunchbase and AOL would be protective and supportive of Android developer’s, especially those who have premium apps in the Google Play Store.
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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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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
If that number astonishes you it should. In a study published this week by Verizon, it’s been reported that hacktivists like Anonymous and Lulzsec were responsible for compromising 100 million records.
Now to put the power of the hacktivist groups in perspective; out of an estimated 855 data breach incidents last year, only 25 of them were attributed to hacktivist groups. While they were only responsible for 2% of the data breaches they were by far the most detrimental. Their 2% of data breaches resulted in 58% of the 174 million total records stolen in 2011.
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Window Phones 7 which never picked up any steam now may get a push due to some bribing by Nokia. The Verge and other outlets are reporting that due to no one in the public actually wanting a WP7, Nokia will be bribing AT&T and their employees with their latest one. The Lumia 900 will be free for all AT&T employees as part of their “Company Use” phones. While this isn’t a first for a manufacturer to offer a phone for free to employees as part of a program. This is the first time one paid a company over $25 million to bribe it’s employees to use it.
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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Many were appalled last week to hear that some employers are asking current employees and prospective employees for the passwords for their Facebook accounts. Apparently this practice is bigger than people imagined, and now the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) is involved.
Robert Collins of Baltimore Maryland, was looking to get reinstated in his job as a correctional worker in 2010. He was told that as a condition of his re-hire he would need to give his boss his Facebook password. He reluctantly gave up his Facebook password. Collins reports that the person considering his re-hire immediately went to Facebook and logged into Collins account. The interviewer said he was doing this to make sure that Collins had no gang affiliations.
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Nick Tippmann
Kyle