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Posts Tagged ‘startup’

Are We In A Tech Bubble? Here’s The History [INFOGRAPHIC]

13 Jul


We’ve spent the past year wondering whether we’re currently in a tech bubble akin to the last decade’s dotcom boom.

Mashable has offered facts and opinions on both sides of the question. We’ve heard that the current boom is much different from the heyday of the late 1990s and that we have cause for confidence.

But we’ve also heard (from the likes of legendary investor Warren Buffet, no less) that the newest crop of tech darlings are highly overvalued at worst and unpredictable at best.

And we’ve even asked you, our readers, what you thought about current startup valuations and funding amounts. (Most of you responded that you were not optimistic about the future of the tech startup ecosystem.)

Now here are a few straightforward graphs and charts (created by KISSmetrics and FeeFighters) to help you get some better perspective on the issue. Clearly, the dotcom era was a different beast. But looking back on that insanity should help temper our excitement about new technologies with realistic revenue expectations.

Click image to see full-size version.

Top image courtesy of iStockphoto, patrickheagney

More About: bubble, investment, startups, tech bubble, technology

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Space Exploration: 9 Private Sector Companies Ready to Take Off

08 Jul

When Atlantis launched on Friday morning, it was the last of NASA’s space shuttle flights.

The event marks the end of a 30-year program that has put 777 people in orbit.

But it is not the end of space exploration in the United States. Companies have been engaging in a private sector space race alongside and in partnership with NASA for quite some time.

SEE ALSO: Space Shuttle Launch: Photos from the Final Atlantis Flight

In April, NASA awarded four of these companies $269 million to develop spacecraft, and companies in the private sector have also established expertise in other aspects of space travel, like space suits and climate control. Some are even famously selling tickets for consumer space flights.

Here are what some of them are working on.


1. Armadillo Aerospace





What it does: Builds reusable rocket-powered vehicles.

Claim to fame: An exclusive agreement with Space Adventures, a consumer space travel company. "Eventually, we wish to provide a platform for civilian flights to suborbital space, and ultimately, we plan to reach orbit," reads the site's FAQ.


2. Masten Space




What it does: Designs and builds reusable space vehicles. Unlike most other commercial space companies, Masten specializes in unmanned, suborbital flights.


3. Oribital Outfitters




What it does: makes space suits for commercial and government space travels.

Most interesting project: Orbital Outfitters partnered with a company called SpaceDiver on a project that will demonstrate the capability to dive from a space shuttle and return to Earth safely.


4. Oribital Sciences




What it does: About 3,700 employees help make space launch vehicles, missile defense systems and satellites as well as offer space technical services at this more than 29-year-old company. It's like a department store for space.

Claim to Fame: In 2002, the company signed its largest contract ever: $900 million to develop, build, test and support missile interceptor booster vehicles for the Boeing Company.


5. Paragon Space Development




What it does: Makes environmental controls for extreme and hazardous environments, like space.

Claims to fame: Paragon is responsible for the first full-motion, long-duration video (4 months, 60 total minutes) of plant and animal growth on orbit, the first multigenerational animal experiment in space and the first commercial experiment on the International Space Station.


6. Virgin Galactic




What it does: Sells tickets for consumer space trips. The company has already sold about 430 tickets.

Cost per ticket: $200,000


7. XCOR Aerospace




What it does: Flight vehicles, piston pumps and rocket engines. And of course, consumer sub-orbital space travel. Its two rocket-powered vehicles, the X-Racer and EX-Rocket, have safely completed 67 piloted demonstrations.

Cost per ticket: $95,000


8. SpaceX




What it does: Space transport. Eventually wants to put a man on Mars.

Famous Founder: SpaceX was founded by Elon Musk, the cofounder of PayPal and Tesla Motors.


9. Blue Origin




What it does: Develops vehicles and technologies to lower the cost and increase the reliability of human access to space.

What Amazon and space have in common: Blue Origin is owned by Amazon-founder Jeff Bezos.


10. Bigelow Aerospace




What it does: "Expandable space habitat technology." The company creates space stations that have more breathing room than your everyday "aluminum can" International Space Station by using inflatable components. Eventually it hopes to lease space on one of its stations for experiments and research. Two prototypes are already in orbit.

Great Expectations: "We anticipate construction of our first space station to begin with a Sundancer launched in early 2014, and that by 2015 the station will be available for client use," says Bigelow's website.

More About: astronomy, Atlantis, List, Lists, Science, space, startups, tech

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Tumblr Now Has More Blogs Than WordPress.com

15 Jun


According to their respective websites, 4-year-old microblogging platform Tumblr now hosts more blogs than 8-year-old WordPress.com.

In January, Tumblr had more than 7 million individual blogs. At the time of this writing, the total blog ticker on its site read about three times that at 20,873,182 — beating out WordPress.com’s current count by about 85,000 blogs.

WordPress.com’s count doesn’t include sites that people host themselves with the open source software via WordPress.org, but given that the hosted service had about a four-year headstart, surpassing it in number is still an impressive feat for Tumblr.

Clearly a flood of individuals have been signing up for Tumblr lately. But top companies in entertainment and news and fashion have also recently launched Tumblr blogs. They’re using the platform in a very different way than they use WordPress.com.

WordPress.com has long hosted the main sites of top brands such as the National Football League, CNN and TED. Most Tumblr blogs function much more like another social media presence — something like a cross between websites and Facebook profiles.

More About: trending, tumblr, WordPress

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Why 3 Startups Are Betting That You’ll Want to Stream Your Browser History

18 Feb


At one point, e-mail was the best option for sharing something interesting online. Blog posts made it a bit easier, and 140-character Twitter messages have brought us into the age of near-effortless sharing.

Several startups are betting that there’s another (rather large) step to go before sharing content is as easy as it can be. Voyurl, Sitesimon, and Dscover.me have all launched platforms for automatically sharing your clickstream data, or browsing history, with friends.

The concept of automatic sharing feels counter-intuitive at a time when the U.S. Congress just introduced its first “Do Not Track” bill, but these startups are betting that shared clickstream data has an important role to play in the future of web browsing. We talked to each of them to get their perspective on how clickstream data could become the next sharing trend.


Dscover.Me: Put Recommendations in Context


Friends Paul Jones and Josh Payne started Dscover.Me while trying to stay in touch after college. Instead of sending each other interesting articles, they could just see what the other person was looking at and start their discussion there (Jones notes that this is also useful for long-distance relationships).

The site’s approach is different than that of Sitesimon and Voyurl in that it revolves around a white list of sites that a user shares, rather than a black list of sites that he does not want to share. A suggested white list that includes Wikipedia, YouTube, popular publications, retailers, and travel sites is provided. Users can see a stream of what their friends are looking at on white-listed friends and also see what the entire community is doing.

But that’s not entirely the point: “People enjoy seeing what are the popular articles in their community, but they don’t really care about seeing a stream of random people and what they’re checking out,” Jones says.

Eventually, Dscovr.Me will partner with web publishers to provide recommendations for users as they browse. For instance, if a user were on the New York Times website, he would be able to see which articles his friends looked at on that site with the highest priority given to the articles that the highest number of their friends looked at. The end goal is to help publishers keep people on their sites longer.

The next version will also take into account links being shared over the user’s Facebook and Twitter feeds, and it will filter out any sites that the user has already visited.

“I think as long as there’s a limitation and the company that asks to track your information can demonstrate value back to you and say ‘OK, we tracked all of this information, but now you have a much better experience.’ Then clickstream sharing can catch on,” Jones says.


Sitesimon: Prove You Saw it First


Sitesimon, founded by three recent NYU grads, attempts to generate recommendations not only from friends, but from people who share your browsing habits. In the process, the site adds a competitive component to web browsing.

The original version of Sitesimon allows users to either select a list of sites that they were willing to share (white list) or to instead share everything by default but select the sites they aren’t comfortable sharing (black list). The next version will scratch the white list.

“As you’re browsing, we don’t want to have people create a white list because a lot of what is fun about clickstream sharing is discovery through your friends,” co-founder Steven Gutentag says. “And if your friends end up on a random fun site and it’s not white listed it’s not going to show up and it’s a hassle to do it.”

Right now, the site operates on a friending system. You see what your friends are browsing and vice versa. Other user data comes in to play when assigning each user a “site score” that measures influence. Your score improves when you see a webpage earlier than other Sitesimon users and when other people on Sitesimon view pages through your clickstream. Much as there is a cachet associated with being the first to submit an interesting webpage on Digg, Sitesimon’s founders are betting that giving people credit for discovering cool stuff on the web will attract users.

But they also want to leverage non-friend data in order to give users personalized recommendations based on others with similar browsing patterns. Gutentag compares it to the way that StumbleUpon learns what users like and don’t like as they spend more time using the service.

“Our dream is that we can offer up better recommendations for what you should be looking at than you’ve ever had before without you having to do any work, such as [StumbleUpon's] thumbs up and thumbs down — without changing how you browse normally,” Gutentag says.


Voyurl: Use Natural Behavior to Power Recommendations


Working in the ad industry, Voyurl founder Adam Leibsohn occasionally hears stories about clickstream data collection methods that repulse him. Voyurl is a play on data collection that he feels good about.

“I wanted a place that was driven by data, but uses that data to provide value back to the consumer,” he says.

Voyurl’s current private beta site (which Mashable readers can check out any time in the next 36 hours by clicking here) gives users access to a feed of the community’s browsing data. They can follow other users to create a personalized feed or filter sites by categories that they’re interested in (Culture or Music, for instance). Any user can submit their data anonymously, and a “discover” feature gives recommendations based on their browsing habits and the browsing habits of their friends. People who are looking for great new sites can also browse top users, top URLs, top domains, and top categories.

Leibsohn considers sharing content this way to be more conducive to conversation. “When someone engages you about the content, they’ve already consumed it,” he says. “So the conversation skips ahead of ‘Look at this thing, consume this thing,’ and instead goes into discussing the merits of it one way or another and a substantial dialog actually comes out.”

Platforms like Twitter, Foursquare, and Facebook all take pains to collect data. The problem, Leibsohn says, is that these platforms only have access to their own users. Clickstream data paints a fuller picture of online activity.

Voyurl is planning to somehow use this data in its business model (they won’t be selling it), but the startup is being a bit stealthy for now. “We intend to use data to make other services that people use way better,” Leibsohn says.


More Startup Resources from Mashable:


- How an Online Game Plans to Reward Kids for Playing Outside
- What We Need to Win the Entrepreneurial Race [OP-ED]
- 5 Startup Tips From the Father of Gmail and FriendFeed
- 6 Ways to Recruit Talent for Startups
- HOW TO: Land a Job at 9 Hot Startups

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, inkastudio

More About: browsing history, clickstream, dscover.me, privacy, sharing, sitesimon, startup, voyurl

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Cortex for Chrome Makes Sharing Faster, Prettier & More Fun Than Ever [EXCLUSIVE]

08 Dec


We’re having a blast tonight playing with Cortex, an insanely fast, beautifully built extension for Google Chrome. It’s lightweight as all get-out, and it lets you share content all over the web literally faster than you can say, “Hey, look at this.”

Here’s the gist of it: Install the extension, find content you want to share, then click and hold. When you do, your mouse will be surrounded by a wheel of options. Flick your mouse in the correct direction, release your finger and voilà, your content is shared to Twitter, to Tumblr, to a specific Facebook friend’s wall — wherever you desire — accompanied by a charming “whoosh” sound.

The entire process takes about two seconds, and it’s as good-looking as it is fast.

The Cortex interface is incredibly unique. We’re generally big fans of apps that get out of your way when you don’t need them; we love it when features are unobtrusive and recede gracefully.

In that sense alone, Cortex is the perfect antidote to the array of hideous sharing mechanisms that populate the web today — those obnoxious bars, frames and buttons that clutter up the visual space and make your eyes long for rest. From a design perspective, Cortex is a breath of entirely fresh air.

In terms of user experience, the extension also makes sharing incredibly easy for users. It chooses header text and shortens URLs; it even lets users share just an image or specific selected text. Cortex also lets you track your history of shares. The only thing we wish worked a tad better is image sharing; right now, Cortex sends a link to Twitter and Facebook when we try to share images.

Right now, you can share to Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr and Instapaper. More options will be coming soon.

Here’s a brief demo video that shows how Cortex works:

Cortex was just launched along with the all-new Chrome Web Store. It comes from the brain of Google intern-turned-entrepreneur Joey Primiani, who said in an e-mail, “Learning from building successful products at Google, I love focusing on things people use on a daily basis. It’s a technology that I think is really focused, very simple and useful.”

Expect to see tablet and mobile features for Cortex soon. In the meantime, give it a shot and let us know in the comments what you think.

Demo video courtesy of Good Morning Geek.


Reviews: Facebook, Google, Tumblr, Twitter, instapaper

More About: chrome, chrome extension, cortex, Google, joey primiani, trending

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Simultaneously Publish Your Content to the Web, Facebook, iPhone and iPad

07 Jul


Mashable’s Spark of Genius series highlights a unique feature of startups. If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion, see details here. The series is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark.

Name: Publisha

Quick Pitch: Publisha is a free browser-based solution that allows integrated publishing across digital platforms with built-in social media, analytics and revenue streams.

Genius Idea: Publisha is a free new platform that enables users to simultaneously format and publish content to the web, Facebook, RSS, iPhone and iPad from a single dashboard.

You can import and host your blog or online publication on publisha.com, or keep it at its current domain and simply take advantage of the service’s Facebook, iPhone and iPad publishing features.

The Facebook app is particularly robust. It creates an articles tab you can add to your Facebook Page, complete with a searchable archive, polls and other interactive content. Readers can like, rate and comment on the articles, and respond to polls.

You can also use the platform to publish your content on Publisha’s iPhone and iPad apps; the company has also offered to help “qualifying early adopters” create their own branded apps and drive traffic to their content. The apps host all participating publications on Publisha’s network. To minimize the size of the app, audio and video content are not supported.

Although Publisha is free to use, the company will take a 20% cut of all ad, affiliate and subscription revenue, and charge $2 per every GB of bandwidth used beyond 10GB if you decide to host your publication on Publisha’s website. It will also use 20% of your ad space if you have a free account. Publisha eventually plans to offer two premium packages — priced at $50 and $250 per month, respectively — that offer more bandwidth and take a smaller share of revenue.

Publisha’s Head of Marketing Anna Sjostrom also told us that an aggregated ad service is in the works, which will help match publishers with advertisers. The company also plans to add support for the Kindle and other e-book readers, as well as Ping FM and podcasts.

While we think the costs of Publisha’s services are pretty steep for users who want to build up a publication on publisha.com, we think many could take advantage of Publisha’s Facebook app and keep their sites on a blogging platform like Wordpress or on their own domains. It also couldn’t hurt to push your content to Publisha’s iPhone and iPad apps in the interest of attracting new readers.

What do you think of Publisha’s offerings? Do you plan to use them for your online publication?

[img credit: smaedli]


Sponsored by Microsoft BizSpark


BizSpark is a startup program that gives you three-year access to the latest Microsoft development tools, as well as connecting you to a nationwide network of investors and incubators. There are no upfront costs, so if your business is privately owned, less than three years old, and generates less than U.S.$1 million in annual revenue, you can sign up today.


Reviews: Facebook, WordPress, iPhone

More About: bizspark, Facebook app, ipad, iphone, publisha, spark-of-genius

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18 Sites for Finding Startup Jobs

10 Sep

Though it may seem like many of the job opportunities in the United States have dried up as of late, you can find a wealth of job postings on the Web that may be right up your alley. From programmers to promotions, there are many startup companies looking to hire just the right people for the positions they have open.  These 18 services represent a mixture of well-known mainstream sites and companies that focus on nothing more than listings in the Web 2.0/startup market.

Have you had success using these sites? Tell us more in the comments.

General Job Site Startup Listings

AOL.CareerBuilder.com - The nice thing about the AOL.CareerBuilder.com site is that you have the salary range listed on the summary page as opposed to having to go into each listing.

Jobster.com - While they have a startups section, finding Microsoft intermixed in their thousands of listings makes you think it’s more a general technology area.

Monster.com - One of the longest running online job sites has numerous job listings for startups that you can search by company, date, job title or relevance.

Yahoo Hot Jobs - Yahoo’s job listings includes numerous listings for jobs at startups, most of them seem to be centered on the technical side.

Startup Specific

AsiaWired.com - Looking for startups in Asia?  This may be the solution for you.

CoNotes.com - Focusing on nothing but jobs at startups, CoNotes has been around since 2007.

Dice.com - Browse jobs by city or pull up the category that applies to your skill set.

ejob.com - ejob focuses on staffing needs in and around Silicon Valley.

GoBigNetwork.com - A one-stop-shop for startups to form business plans, find funding and locate employees that can fulfill their needs.

HotStartupJobs.com - Aggregates startup listings from a multitude of sites.  You can read a lengthier write up of HotStartupJobs by our own Paul Glazowski here on Mashable.

Jobs.Mashable.com - Our very own marketplace features categories for listing jobs and looking for them also.

NeoHire.com - Lets you look up jobs by category, add them to your basket as you find ones that interest you and then apply to all of the ones you’ve saved.

nPost.com - Besides offering numerous job listings at startups, they have 225+ interviews with people from some of the companies explaining what they are about and what they are looking for in an employee.

StartupAgents.com - Both startups and potential employees can set up profiles to try to find the perfect match for each other.  The service is completely free to potential employees, but will cost employers to contact potential hires.

StartupJobs.biz - A small jobs board with unique listings that you can search by type of job or occupation.

Startuply.com - Covers various industries related to Web 2.0 and startups, lets you also browse by job type.

StartupZone.com - Allows you to search jobs by occupation, location or even what stage of funding they are in.

VentureLoop.com - Provides internship listings for students at certain schools and has job listings you can search by country or occupation.

Image via CoNotes

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