Fastly, a startup created this year, is turning the economics of delivering content on it’s head with a content delivery network comprised of solid state drives. By placing two servers packed with SSDs in customers’ data centers, Fastly can speed up the load times. Read more »
Bravo, the cable television network known for such reality shows as The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills and The Millionaire Matchmaker, is apparently looking for young professionals to star in an upcoming reality show based on Silicon Valley. Read more »
Call it the enterprise startup conundrum: How do you earn legitimacy if no one will give you an opportunity to become legitimate? Scott Weiss of Andreessen Horowitz recounts how his company IronPort got around this issue by making it seem like a bigger fish. Read more »
If you’re a major organization like the University of Southern California or a publication like The Economist, it’s still a big undertaking to build and maintain a website that suits your needs. Enter Pantheon: A new service for running a sophisticated Drupal-based website in the cloud. Read more »
Quora, the crowdsourced question-and-answer website, has come a long way in the 15 months since it launched to the public. Quora says it has fostered that growth mostly just by getting out of the way, letting people be themselves — their whole selves. Read more »
myGengo, a startup that provides customized language translation services, has taken raised $5.25 million in new funding. myGengo is unique because it’s priced competitively — less than half the average price of professional translation — but its translations are made completely by humans, with no machine translation. Read more »
Patent acquisitions and litigation dominated the wireless industry in 2011, and it looks like we should expect more of the same going forward. If anything, experts seem to think it’s only going to get worse for anyone wanting to be taken seriously as a mobile player. Read more »
While green startups may have gone through some tough times recently, LinkedIn has seen a major uptick in members who work for small businesses in the industry. From 2009 to 2011, “renewables and environment” was the fastest growing sector within the small business landscape on LinkedIn. Read more »
With Europe’s currency on the brink of collapse, is there anything startups and investors can do to avoid risking their businesses? We asked some of the continent’s top venture capitalists what they are doing to try and sidestep the crisis. Read more »
What if five years into your startup, you decided to move from a revenue-generating consumer business to sell the same product to enterprises for ten times the price? That’s exactly what Stormpulse did, and it’s still signing up customers and breaking even. Read more »
London-based network operator Vodafone announced Monday the three winners of its Mobile Clicks 2011 contest. The top three mobile startup app makers shared both a total of &Euro;225,000, but the apps couldn’t be more different, highlighting the breadth of opportunity in today’s growing app economy. Read more »
This is a moving weekend for me so I am going to keep the list of recommendations to read this weekend very short. So without much ado, here are some posts that are worth reading this weekend. Read more »
Xignite, which is offering financial data that’s hosted on Amazon’s cloud to its clients, has raised $10 million to become the big data repository for financial market information. The company, which was formed in 2004, is betting on the trends of mobile, cloud and big data. Read more »
Union Square Ventures partner Albert Wenger says that while Amazon has revolutionized the traditional book industry with the Kindle, digital storytelling still isn’t really social — which is why his firm has led a $3.5M Series A financing round for Toronto-based social-reading startup Wattpad. Read more »
Dome9, a stealth company that aims to create the equivalent of a firewall for public and private clouds, launched the company and its product Monday. The company, which was founded last year, is just one of several cloud security companies coming out of stealth mode. Read more »
What are the odds that two companies with sound-alike names would launch on the same day? Maybe not so bad in today’s startup world when everyone is chasing the same trends. Be it a mistake or the zeitgeist, Locu and Loku have a problem. Read more »
Austin’s answer to TechStars or YCombinator shows off its graduating class of startups today (plus 15 other companies) as the third year of the Capital Factory accelerator program comes to a close. I went out last week to interview the startups to get readers the scoop. Read more »
Ever since it emerged from Chicago’s small startup community in 2008, Groupon has had nothing short of a spectacular story in terms of its growth: With estimated annual revenues of more than $4 billion after just three years of existence, the poster child for the “group ... Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Reports say Groupon has put its hotly awaited IPO on hold. But was it market volatility that pulled the rug out from under the offering, or the repeated missteps by the company and its CEO, combined with growing skepticism about the viability of its business model? Read more »
Y Combinator is on the hunt for its next batch of startups, and the competition is stiff: The incubator generally accepts only three percent of the applications it receives. I sat down with YC partner Jessica Livingston to find out what they look for in entrepreneurs. Read more »
Solar technology startup Solyndra, which has raised more than $1.5 billion in private and government funds, has suspended manufacturing and laid off 1,100 full-time and temporary employees. We conducted a survey and asked GigaOM readers for their views on the fallout of Solyndra’s decision to file for bankruptcy and what the future holds for the company. This research examines the survey’s results. It also includes an analysis of Solyndra’s struggles over the past two years to move into mass production, and to do it amidst difficult and volatile economic conditions. Companies mentioned in this report include Evergreen Solar, First Solar and SpectraWatt. For a full list of companies, and to read the full report, sign up for a free trial. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
This week Solyndra announced plans to file for bankruptcy and said it will lay off 1,100 employees. How will the event impact the larger cleantech industry, greentech startup funding and the solar sector as a whole? We ask you to weigh in. Read more »
Seesmic, the company best known for making consumer-facing social networking apps, has shifted its strategy for the second time in its four-year history, this time to focus on building mobile apps for the enterprise. Can the third iteration of Seesmic finally bring the company success? Read more »
This week Inkling debuted the 2.0 version of its software, which makes interactive and digital versions of college textbooks for the iPad. So GigaOM headed over to Inkling’s San Francisco headquarters to get an in-person demo from founder and CEO Matt MacInnis. Read more »
On Friday, Delicious founder Joshua Schachter’s Tasty Labs announced its first product to the public: Jig.com. Essentially, Jig allows people to post questions about anything they need — there are no categories yet, just one big stream — and allow anyone out there to answer them. Read more »
Ness has launched its debut iOS app, a “personal search engine” that aims to provide highly personalized restaurant recommendations. Essentially it’s like a Pandora for restaurants: From the start it’s almost creepily accurate with its recommendations, and the more you use it, the better it gets. Read more »
Embrane, which builds tools that will enable cloud providers to scale out networking services faster and with less complexity, has raised $18 million in second round funding. The networking sector is heating up as virtualization complicates communication between servers and data centers. Read more »
With the stock market in flux, do tech startups stand a chance when it comes to luring investors? To find out, we polled GigaOM readers on what’s hot, what’s not, which sectors might favor buyouts versus IPOs and how it all will change in the near ... Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Lot18 has secured a small investment from some big-name backers, just as competition from Gilt Groupe heats up. The New York City-based daily deals site focused on high-end wine and complementary foods announced Wednesday it has received funding from Quidsi founders Marc Lore and Vinit Bharara. Read more »
Silicon Valley startup incubator Y-Combinator held the first of two demo days for its Summer 2011 class on Tuesday, unveiling 63 new companies. It’s the incubator’s largest class yet, and overall, a very impressive one. Here’s five of the most scene-stealing startups from this YC batch. Read more »
Tremor Media executive chairman Jason Glickman is working on a new company called Connected Sports Ventures. While still in stealth, the startup looks poised to change the way people watch sports by connecting their social activity on second-screen devices with what’s happening on the big screen. Read more »
Since its inception, StumbleUpon has worked pretty much as the name advertised, allowing you to stumble upon cool things on the web, rather than through explicit web searches. But a new “Explore Box” expands StumbleUpon’s offering significantly, bringing the app more search engine-like specificity. Read more »
Zimride, the startup that allows people to arrange shared car rides together, has been doing quite well with semi-private, paid networks since its 2007 launch. Now, the company is set to reach a much bigger audience with its first public platform and an in-app payment system. 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 »
For Solo creator Jonathan Nail, producing his own web series was an opportunity to create a showcase for his acting. But after two years of hard work and thousands of dollars, he found that the rewards of independent production are not universal. Read more »
A Boston company called NetBlazr wants to offer businesses free access to a communal broadband network if a user pays for about $300 in equipment and then turns over the management of that gear to NetBlazr so it can continue building the network. Read more »
The online backup provider Carbonite priced its initial public offering last night despite the turmoil in the financial markets. And yes, it priced at $10 per share on the low end of its expectations, but it did make it out. 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 »
GreenSQL, an Israeli-based startup that offers software that secures databases has raised a second round of funding led by Rhodium and Atlantic Capital Partners. The funding will allow the company to expand to the U.S. and build products for NoSQL tools used today. Read more »
The recent volatility in the stock market has had strong effects on many publicly traded companies, and private firms aren’t exactly eager to join their ranks. Five of the 12 companies expected to price IPOs this week have decided to postpone their public market debuts. Read more »
