Pure Storage, a startup offering enterprises a storage array comprised entirely of Flash memory, promises to change the economics around Flash memory and push hard drives out of the performance storage market. The company just announced $30 million in funding and detailed its product. Read more »
There’s a growing number of social networks providing plenty of ways for users to share the minutiae of their everyday lives. Storytree, on the other hands, wants to provide a platform for users to share rich memories with their family and friends. Read more »
Inkling, the digital textbook software startup, has closed on $17 million in new funding to expand its software for converting college textbooks for use on the iPad. Inkling CEO Matt MacInnis says the money will be put toward meeting the “effectively unlimited demand” for its platform. Read more »
For years, Europe’s startup community has been painted as the undernourished younger cousin of Silicon Valley. In reality, Europe’s web scene is now thriving. and we’ve compiled a list featuring some of the best and brightest European web startups — what we’re dubbing the GigaOM Euro 20. Read more »
Trover, the travel app aimed at sharing off-the-beaten-path discoveries, has formally launched out of limited beta. The app, which was initially available only on iPhone through Facebook Connect, is now also open as a web app on Trover.com and accessible to anyone with an email account. Read more »
Pixazza, a digital ad platform that embeds e-commerce links to items within online photos, has renamed itself Luminate. The newly branded company is broadening its services, turning into a platform for apps that generate in-photo links for a wider array of categories beyond clothing and accessories. Read more »
GigaOM readers agree that encouraging European entrepreneurs is vitally important to the long-term health of local startups. But they have differing opinions about the sharp growth of accelerator programs and bootcamps across the continent: will startups end up being fed to the sharks? Read more »
Nginx creator Igor Sysoev is planning a company based around the wildly popular open-source web server. Sysoev announced the decision on the Ngnix blog Monday morning, writing that the commercial entity’s primary goals will be better support and more consistent feature releases. Read more »
UPDATED. Spotify U.S. is now in T-minus territory. A spokesperson for Spotify has confirmed that the popular European on-demand music streaming service will be available stateside on Thursday morning. GigaOM reported last month that Spotify’s U.S. launch would occur in mid-July. Read more »
PHP Fog is a cloud computing Platform-as-a-Service with a laser focus on PHP applications. It’s what PHP Fog does in the foggy middle that’s so unique and that garnered it a place in our second-annual LaunchPad competition. Read more »
Lot18, the membership-only daily deals website for high end wine, is set to expand into three new product categories: food, epicurean travel, and spirits. Lot18 will start rolling out the new verticals, starting with food, within the next several weeks, CEO Philip James tells me. Read more »
You’re employee No. 20 at a Valley startup. If you’re a great developer, you’ll probably get a four-year option package worth about 0.2 percent of the company. Two years after you join, the company sells for $30 million. You’re rich! Right? Read more »
Even under the best of circumstances– standing desks, ergonomic keyboards, customized chairs– typing can be a major pain. Voice recognition technology startup SoundHound hopes to eventually be a part of the solution by allowing people to simply talk to our computers rather than type. Read more »
Once upon a time, in the year 2007, Dropbox consisted of two engineers coding in their boxers out of a shared apartment in North Beach. To co-founder and CEO Drew Houston, launching a successful company, “looked like a never-ending trail up Mount Doom.” Read more »
At a panel on angel funding, several prominent VCs seemed to agree that early-stage investing is more art than science. But they had very different approaches to what they looked for in startups: anything from a lean executive team to just the tiniest bit of cash. Read more »
In recent months, 500px has become the new favorite site of a lot of Flickr “power users.” What’s especially remarkable is that the company, which is bootstrapped and currently has just four full-time employees, has attracted all this growth purely through word-of-mouth. Read more »
Randy Shoup, the architectural guru credited with scaling eBay, tweeted Monday evening that he has left the online auction giant to co-found a new consumer-focused e-commerce startup, Shopilly.com. He and another former eBay exec are keeping their plans under wraps for now. Read more »
Hoping to get funding for your startup? You’ll have better luck if you aren’t going it alone, according to several venture capital investors on a panel session at this week’s Google I/O Conference. Two to three co-founders is a “sweet spot” for investors. Read more »
Buoyed by the success of Y Combinator and TechStars, a new breed of startup accelerator programs are springing up everywhere. The latest? The U.K.’s Oxygen, which founder Mark Hales says can bring some much-needed tech innovation to Britain’s second-largest city. Read more »
Brainient released a neat little application called Create Station that allows you to take any YouTube video and customize it with filters and text. The app is a proof of concept for Brainient’s BrainStudio platform, which makes it easy to add interactivity to any web video. Read more »
The angels who wrote the first check to Google were also the first backers of startup IO Turbine, which comes out of stealth mode today with details about its fundraising, its founders and its planned product for speeding up I/O bottlenecks on virtualized servers. Read more »
San Francisco has become the destination of choice for consumer Internet and mobile startups. And thanks to liberal venture funding, the rents in SF are headed higher, which in turn is boosting their cost of doing business. Ironically — it is only just a start. Read more »
Xobni co-founder Matt Brezina is back in the startup game with the launch of Sincerely, aimed at making it easy to print photos taken with mobile phones. Postagram, Sincerely’s first product, prints and sends postcards made from Instagram photos for 99 cents. Read more »
Startup video-encoding service Zencoder has raised $2 million for its cloud-based service that lets users get their videos ready for presentation and delivery via web or mobile apps. Investors in this round include firms such as Andreessen-Horowitz and Ignition Partners, and several prominent individuals. Read more »
As we build technology into everything, creating entertainment, recommendation services and applications that can deliver whatever we need at the moment we ask, a new breed of application is being born, and the currency of this new breed of application is the application programming interface. Read more »
Mentorship is a critical catalyst for passage, transition and development as a pre-entrepreneur. But mentorship, like entrepreneurship, can break down in the nitty gritty details. Larry Chiang offers his advice in avoiding the mistakes many entrepreneurs make when they try to get mentored by a VC. Read more »
After closely controlling burn rate through the first two phases of a startup’s life cycle, the third phase is the time CEOs are waiting for — though they may not yet be ready for it. VC David Skok explains how CEOs can spend to grab market share. Read more »
For startups to grow, they need to adopt some big-company practices, especially concerning the sales team. In the first post of a three-part series, entrepreneur-turned-VC Mark Suster shows how growing companies should assess the deals in their sales pipelines and help sales teams focus their time. Read more »
If your Facebook profile picture could talk, what would it say? Anything you want it to is the answer from the makers of Vanityvid, a new site that aims to replace static profile pictures on social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter with short video clips. Read more »
Viral growth for a web startup is great — as is getting to 15 million users in a year — but it is possible to grow a profitable business slowly and see it ramp up after a few years, as I learned from uShip’s founder. Read more »
