Come August 20 and 21, the next Instagram and Hipstamatic could emerge in New York City, ready to do battle in the increasingly tough photo app market. Those are the dates for the Photo Hack Day, billed as the largest photo hackathon for developers. Read more »
DreamIt Ventures graduated its first New York class yesterday, sending 14 new start-ups into the wild. The summer class tackled education, e-commerce and app publishing and a few used video conferencing in interesting ways. Here are few that stood out to me. Read more »
Wi-Fi provider Towerstream is turning its superfast Manhattan Wi-Fi zone into a distribution platform for daily deal apps in a bid to monetize its wireless network, the largest in Manhattan. The company is partnering with BlisMobile, which will handle the app distribution through its AppZone service. Read more »
New York doesn’t have to rival Silicon Valley; it can be its own success story, with its own unique culture. And that is what the region should be looking at first, rather than trying to gain some bragging-rights parity with the San Francisco Bay Area. Read more »
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The effort to solve New York’s engineering talent crunch is coming to the floor of the New York Stock Exchange in a major recruiting event hosted by Next Jump and the NYSE. The event will bring together 500 top East Coast engineering students and 50 companies. Read more »
The FinTech Innovation Lab, an accelerator program for financial tech startups, graduated its first class on Friday. This first batch of companies is bringing some impressive ideas to bear on data, analytics and payments and showing there’s room for new approaches in the financial sector. Read more »
Big data and Platform-as-a-Service offerings highlighted the second quarter, suggesting that we can expect to see a shift in enterprise IT practices around application development and analytics very soon. On the PaaS front, we saw new projects like DotCloud and Cloud Foundry gain incredible momentum in just a few short months. The big-data activity ranged from major new Hadoop vendors to heavy investment in flash storage that will speed the serving of data to processing engines. In other areas, we saw an uptick in cloud-computing plans from large vendors, OpenStack continued to mature and pick up both contributors and users, and Facebook caught our eye by launching an open-source project around the designs for its specialized servers and data centers. Additional companies mentioned in this report include VMware, Salesforce.com, IBM, Heroku and Calxeda. For a full list of companies, and to read the full report, sign up for a free trial. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
The first quarter of 2011 saw plenty of competition between various web companies — and some heated tension, too. Content farms generated the most debate, with Demand Media’s IPO attracting attention and controversy and Google making a major change to its ranking algorithm. Facebook, meanwhile, maintained its heavyweight status online, but this time the social network’s impact was centered on social search, unified communications and comment systems. And Facebook’s ongoing dominance raised the question, Is there room for more than one social network? If niche networks like Quora and Color are any indication, the answer is “yes.” Additional companies mentioned in this report include Twitter, Groupon, Microsoft, LinkedIn and MySpace. To see the full list of companies, and to read the full report, sign up for a free trial. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Business and IT leaders now face significant opportunities and challenges with big data — that is data sets that are so large they are difficult to store, manage and analyze. This report explores the rapidly evolving big data business and technology ecosystem. It examines big data in the context of several different industries: financial services, health care, sports, travel and media. We explore the different big data technologies — from Hadoop and NoSQL derivatives to cloud-based collaboration tools — and their various benefits for enterprises. And we examine some of the existing challenges big data poses, and what enterprise IT leaders can do to overcome them. Companies mentioned in this report include Amazon Web Services, Google, Teradata, IBM and Cloudera. For a full list of companies, and to read the full report, sign up for a free trial. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
DreamIt Ventures, the Philadelphia start-up accelerator program that is expanding to New York, announced a list of freshly-minted CEOs and founders who will sit on its first Entrepreneur Advisory Board, helping mentor the upcoming class of start-ups this summer. Read more »
AOL’s recent acquisition of the Huffington Post for $315 million has centered a lot of attention on its content strategy — big part of which is automating and standardizing content that attracts search-related advertising. While there are some clear benefits to this “content farm” approach to content, there are also some significant disadvantages. Here we look at some of the leaders in this sector and their histories, as well as the key risks and benefits of the content farm strategy. Companies mentioned in this report include AOL, The Huffington Post, MySpace, Demand Media, Google and Associated Content. For a full list of companies, and to read the full report, sign up for a free trial. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Accel Partners, the firm backing Facebook and Groupon, announced has opened an office in New York, giving the city’s growing tech scene another profile-raising boost. It’s further recognition that New York has grown in importance and could signal more eastward migration from Valley VC firms. Read more »
Last week Google showed off its progress on Chrome OS. It introduced an apps store in support of it, and offered up a pre-release hardware trial program as a concession that real machines wouldn’t ship till mid 2011. But it’s likely all for naught. Google CEO ... Read more at GigaOM Pro »
New York City aims to join the city bike sharing wave and has issued a request for proposal for the new system. Here are 10 factors that could help teams gain an edge over the competition, including connectivity and the ability to harvest data. Read more »
The live-stream video market is entering an upturn in the typical hockey stick growth chart. Tens of millions of desktop viewers use browser-based players to find live-streaming content on an ever-increasing number of web sites and mobile devices. Raw viewership will grow fastest in the consumer segment, where sites like Justin.tv and Qik are focused. Those like Kyte, Livestream, Ustream and BitGravity, meanwhile, primarily offer platforms to commercial content providers seeking a mass audience. And as the market grows, both in terms of viewers and of the number and type of content providers, it will support both those with a diverse, one-stop-shop approach and those who specialize in particular content and audiences. Additional companies mentioned in this report include YouTube/Google, Sony, HTC, Vivu, Facebook and Apple. To see a full list of companies and to read the full report, sign up for a free trial. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
As Om shared earlier this month, New York’s tech scene is getting a flood of venture capital for Internet deals, rivaling San Francisco. I sat down with Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures to discuss the New York renaissance, how it came about and where it’s headed. Read more »
As the data landscape changes, so must the databases used to gather, store and analyze the rich information within them. Consumer-facing Internet companies are able to scale by using NoSQL data stores, and CIOs can learn from what’s worked for hugely successful web sites. Here, we offer a number of recommendations for enterprise decision makers. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
The worldwide online market for digital goods will grow amid a state of continuous disruption across all forms of content markets. Fueled by an ever-growing user base, migration from physical formats to digital distribution, and a proliferation of new connected devices, the overall market for digital goods will grow to $36 billion by 2014, up from $16.7 billion in 2009. This report examines the state of paid content and the various monetization and payment models across each of the various digital goods markets. The report examines key players and market dynamics in the film and video, newspaper, online game, music and social networks space relative to their paid content strategies, and includes a revenue forecast of each of these segments relative to the overall paid content market. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
New York is the capital of media, advertising, and finance, but historically Silicon Valley and Boston have overshadowed New York’s efforts to encourage and fund technology entrepreneurs. In the past two years, this has changed, especially when it comes to media-related ventures. Read more »
Programmers can compete with journalists if they like, but they’d be wise to instead arm journalists with the power of their programming. Reporters and editors shouldn’t need to know how to code web apps any more than they should know how to create word processing apps ... Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Utilities and companies are so desperate to grab a piece of the soon-to-be announced stimulus funds for smart grid projects that some groups are positioning their proposals like the awards are already a done deal. According to the New York State Smart Grid Consortium, a non-profit […] Read more »
The emergence of a commercially significant electronic book (e-book) market in the past three years has been the result of two quite-recent technological developments. The first, and most critical, has been a breakthrough in the technology for manufacturing reflective electronic paper displays (EPDs), allowing for the introduction of affordable, lightweight and portable e-book readers such as Amazon’s Kindle and Sony’s Reader.
The second has been the rollout of reliable “3G” wireless broadband networks, which have made it possible to deliver digital books directly to reading devices without the intermediate steps of downloading files to a PC and then transferring them to a reader. Direct-to-device sampling and delivery, particularly with Amazon’s Kindle and Apple’s iPhone, have enabled impulse-driven e-commerce, which has been critical to early consumer adoption of e-books.
The technology for e-books, however, remains nascent. The Kindle and its ilk are very much first-generation devices that deliver the minimally acceptable experience. Further development of the business will be closely tied to future technological developments, including flexible and color displays, format standardization and rich-media applications. As the market grows, there are numerous opportunities for other technology players, from social networks to cloud service providers and more. This report examines the trends and opportunities ahead. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
There was as much grumbling about the Twitter-style format of the 140 Character Conference in New York this week as there often is about 140-character limit in Twitter itself. Anything new or different can drive some people up the wall. Others, however, embrace the newness and […] Read more »
New Work City is more than just a Manhattan coworking center; it might even turn out to be a movement. One thing is for sure, the founders of NWC are not sitting idly by during this economic crisis. Founded in November 2008 by Tony Bacigalupo (co-author […] Read more »
Place your iPhone on the floor and prepare to dance a merry jig, it’s the weekend and that means I’ve prepared a selection of fresh picks from the App Store. As ever, before we get stuck in to a hand-picked selection of the latest releases from […] Read more »
