New York-based SecondMarket Thursday announced that the company was adding former U.S. Congressman Scott Murphy to its board of directors. Murphy, an entrepreneur, was previously managing director at Advantage Capital, a venture capital and small business financing firm. Read more »
Apigee, a company that helps manage and monitor APIs, snagged a $20 million round of funding led by new investor Focus Ventures, with participation from current investors Bay Partners, Norwest Venture Partners, SAP Ventures and Third Point Ventures. Read more »
Blueprint Health, a startup accelerator and co-working space based in New York, is announcing Thursday its ten picks for the accelerator’s latest class of startups. Read more »
The Silicon Strip is coming along nicely, and although they’re mostly young and relatively unknown, Las Vegas’s startups aren’t hurting for good ideas. Some are even growing beyond their wildest dreams. Here are five of the city’s most-promising. Read more »
Interested in trying your hand at worm composting or grant writing? Ever felt the desire to make your own sausage or kimchi? There’s a good chance someone on startup Dabble’s website is teaching just such a class this month, and for $20 you can sign up. Read more »
Aryaka, a startup offering cloud-based wide area network optimization raised $25 million in Series C funding. The round was led by InterWest Partners and brings Aryaka’s funding to $54 million. As the reliance on clouds and remote working grows, Aryaka is poised to succeed. Read more »
If you work at a startup, you will eventually end up organizing an event. Yesterday, LIFFFT co-founder Donald DeSantis shared his advice on how to get your party on the cool kids’ calendars. Today, he explains how to get your network to work for you. Read more »
Can you name America’s largest startup? It’s not Facebook or Amazon. It isn’t even a technology company. This giant startup is the Transportation Security Administration, and its massive scale offers a roadmap for entrepreneurs eager to turn big ideas into sustainable businesses. Read more »
A new competition is trying to tempt more startups to London with a £1m booty. But it turns out the “prize” is actually a cash-for-equity investment on terms that are yet to be decided — and from an individual whose identity is being kept secret. Read more »
Facebook’s shutdown of the Face.com API and Twitter’s increasing clampdown on its API reinforce the lesson that “open” APIs can be very appealing, but they can also become a lot less open over time — and developers and users can get trapped in the middle. Read more »
A new startup is hoping to breathe new life into the MeeGo project let loose by Nokia — just one of a rising number of companies breaking out as the Finnish mobile giant stumbles. That’s what happens when you let 40,000 people go inside two years. Read more »
Zsa Zsa Gabor may not have been able to remember anyone’s names, but a great monicker can make a big difference to a startup. But how you do make sure you pick the right one? And how do you stop yourself wasting time choosing? Read more »
The controversy over new-media startup Journatic and its hyper-local news service says a lot about how difficult it is to find new ways of producing journalism, in part because the traditional media industry and its supporters want to force everything into old models and familiar formats. Read more »
When thinking about the value of the data a company collects vs. the traditional value of the product it may produce, collecting and analyzing broad categories of customer + product data is becoming equally — if not more — valuable than the product itself. Read more »
Chicago-based education technology startup BenchPrep today announced that it has raised $6 million to bring personalized and interactive test prep materials to students via the Web and mobile. Read more »
Working with small municipal governments doesn’t have to suck. In fact, according to Code for America founder Jennifer Pahlka, between the open data movement and a new generation of government workers, making your community better has never been easier. Code for America works with 26 fellows […] Read more »
Plexxi Systems, a stealthy networking startup that wants to bring fiber into the data center at a cost the comprable to existing Ethernet technologies, has scored a $20.1 million third round of financing from Lightspeed Venture Partners, Matrix Partners and Northbridge Venture Partners. Read more »
Twitter has made it clear it plans to crack down on third-party services by tightening the rules on use of the network, but this desire for control — and the drive to monetize its user base — could ruin what made Twitter special to begin with. Read more »
TechStars’ founder and CEO David Cohen talks about the booming tech community in Boulder, the changing landscape for startups and the future of man and machine. Read more »
Stockholm-based Bloglovin says it has raised $1 million from Betaworks, Lerer Ventures and other investors to speed its expansion. Read more »
On the heels of significant growth, Udemy, an online video course startup, today rolled out an overhauled website designed to improve content discovery and student interactivity. Udemy also added Netflix-like course recommendations and a Q&A feature. Read more »
Pinpuff, an India-based startup that measures influence on Pinterest, is Los Angeles-bound. Startup studio Science announced Tuesday that it is acquiring the young startup and moving its founder to its California office. Read more »
According to disruptive innovation expert Clayton Christensen, half of North American higher education will move online in the next ten years, followed by half of k-12 education by 2019. Here’s a guide to seven that are starting to realize that future. Read more »
A good mentor is invaluable for the modern startup founder or tech exec. But what makes for a good mentor relationship, and how do you find one? Get Satisfaction CEO and mentor Wendy Lea explains her approach and what she looks for in a mentee. Read more »
What do you do when Google and Sean Parker kill your idea? Change direction. That’s what Ali Ahmed and his videochat startup Lutebox have done, switching from the idea of helping people chat about premium videos to focusing on social shopping. Read more »
Vungle announced Tuesday that it’s using half of its seed money to create a $1 million fund to bring top mobile app developers into their new platform. Read more »
Networking is the current big bottleneck in scale out and virtualized data centers. It’s also the hottest hardware area around with startups creating fabrics, controllers and alternatives to the current networking regimes in place. Now we can add Plexxi Networks Inc. to that list. Read more »
Advisors may not be as sexy as angels in the startup ecosystem, but the right one can provide a ton of value for young companies. InternMatch Co-Founder and CEO, Andrew Maguire, shares his thoughts on finding and working with the right advisors to help any startup. Read more »
In the first round of its three-part News Challenge, the Knight Foundation has awarded $1.37 million to six startups who are trying to develop video, mobile and crowdsourced solutions to the problem of filtering the vast ocean of news that washes over us every day. Read more »
Igor Zhadanov, 27, is CEO of Ukraine-based Readdle, known for iPad and iPhone apps like PDF Expert and Scanner Pro. As Readdle is about to open its first U.S. office, we talked about staying independent, competing with larger companies, and the challenges of today’s App Store. Read more »
Korea’s future as a startup hub is still a work in progress but I see a lot of reasons to be optimistic about companies emerging from this country of 50 million people. Here are four start-ups that caught my attention at the BeLaunch conference last week. Read more »
Nearly every day, it seems like yet another social commerce site springs up. But as more sites crowd the space, it becomes increasingly difficult for consumers to separate the junk from the gems. That’s where Pickie comes in. Read more »
Thirteen would-be darlings of New York’s tech scene are hitting the stage today at startup incubator TechStars NYC’s third Demo Day to present its latest class of graduates. Read more »
Consumer startups angling for a spot in TechStars NYC better have a plan for earning users. And it better not involve the buzz words “social” and “viral.” Read more »
This week, the book industry gathered at the ugly, cavernous Javits Center in Manhattan for the largest book trade event in the United States. (“I feel like I’m in Costco,” actress-author Molly Ringwald told the AP.) Here are five digital lessons from the week. Read more at paidContent »
Earlier today I wrote about online bra retailer True&Co delaying delivery of its products to customers. It turns out that the supply chain was an issue, but only because the demand for the service outstripped what True&Co thought would be a full year’s supply of inventory. Read more »
Online bra retailer, True&Co, which launched last week to help women find the perfect bra, is having trouble delivering its products. As the Internet crosses over into the real world, not only websites must prepare for a launch, but the entire supply chain. Read more »
Another Color co-founder has split from the company. Alyssa Solomon, Color’s former CFO and co-founder, has accepted a new gig leading business development at consumer health tech startup CakeHealth. Read more »
Paul Graham of Y Combinator has warned startups they have to be more cautious in the wake of the lackluster Facebook IPO. But did Facebook really pop a venture-financing bubble, or did it just allow some of the steam to escape from an overheated market? Read more »
Modern web-scale applications like Google, Twitter, Netflix, LinkedIn, and others are implemented as distributed systems as opposed to single monolithic codebases. Surprisingly, modern startups are generally built the same way. So what can startups learn from web apps? Read more »
![By United States Congress [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons](http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3AScott_Murphy_official_photo.jpg){kind=link}