Snapjoy is officially joining up with Dropbox, the two companies announced Wednesday, bringing its talents for storing photos in the cloud to the larger, more established cloud storage company. Both alumni of Y Combinator, the two companies will be joining forces. Read more »
Y Combinator, one of the oldest and most prestigious startup incubators in Silicon Valley, announced a change to its funding structure Monday, taking control of the VC investments made in each of its startup classes, and adding more facetime with local investors. Read more »
Airbnb, the darling success story of Paul Graham’s Y Combinator, began with a few design guys in San Francisco renting out an air mattress to customers, but the service has grown immensely since then, and Joe Gebbia, the company’s co-founder, said it was all about design. Read more »
After leaving the accelerator world, Mikko Järvenpää decided to ask entrepreneurs what they really thought about their experiences inside the startup factories. After talking to more than 150 graduates he discovered that acceleration can work well, but programs don’t always provide the help startups really need. Read more »
Double Robotics’ iPad-eqipped telepresence robot is the first beneficiary of the $25m fund Grishin announced earlier this year. His cash will help Double ramp up manufacturing, which will be useful as early demand has been high. Read more »
Mobile analytics companies provide app publishers with data about their users. Hiptype, a Y Combinator startup, wants to do the same thing for ebooks. That could be huge for data-starved book publishers — except that for now, Hiptype only works on platforms that support HTML5. Read more at paidContent »
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 »
Venture capital firm Khosla Ventures looks to be raising a second seed fund, according to a filing. The filing doesn’t disclose a fund size, but the fund follows behind the first Khosla Ventures Seed fund, which raised $300 million and closed in 2010. Read more »
After similar launches in the UK and Ireland, mobile giant Telefónica is bringing its Wayra accelerator program to Germany later this year — with a six-month scheme for tech startups that comes with up to €50,000 in seed funding. Read more »
Y Combinator founder Paul Graham is right when he says that the continued push for legislation like SOPA and PIPA is a result of a failure to adapt to the changing environment the internet has created when it comes to intellectual property and the content industries. Read more »
The rising number of startup accelerators across Europe can leave budding entrepreneurs bamboozled. Step forward UK investment group NESTA, which is compiling a detailed list of the continent’s programs. Read more »
This report outlines the myriad issues at play in Facebook’s move, from examining how CEO Mark Zuckerberg wants to rewire the world to understanding the company’s infrastructure dependency. But from every angle, it’s clear the effects will ripple throughout the startup and tech communities. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
San Francisco startup 1000memories has integrated its ShoeBox app for scanning and sharing old physical photos online with Facebook’s Timeline user interface. This means that people will be able to easily fill in the gaps on their Timeline between their birthdates and when they joined Facebook. Read more »
Codecademy, which teaches users how to program for free with an interactive and social web application, has garnered more than 1 million users in less than five months. We talked to co-founder and CEO Zach Sims about how Codecademy started and where it’s going. Read more »
Group chat startup Convore had pretty good traction after launching out of Y Combinator last year. But in the competitive world of consumer social apps, “pretty good” isn’t enough. So Convore’s founder Leah Culver built a new, business-focused iteration of the group chat service, called Grove.io. Read more »
A recent post by Andrew Clay Shafer raised doubts about the abilities of growing number of incubators that are imitating the likes of 500 Startups. The key qualities of these incubators are no different than incubators from 1999, as an old Forbes.com piece of mine shows. Read more »
Cardpool, the San Francisco-based startup that lets people buy, sell and trade unused gift cards, has been acquired by Blackhawk Network, a wholly owned subsidiary of grocery giant Safeway. Details about the deal are scarce, but Cardpool co-founder Anson Tsai says his investors “are quite happy.” Read more »
Even today, millions of American businesses are still offline — a situation that Texas startup Ownlocal is hoping to change, with new money and a fresh plan that could even help prop up embattled media companies along the way. Read more »
Shares in Russian Internet group Mail.ru have fallen to their lowest point since the company went public last year. But since the company has been indirectly fueling Silicon Valley’s latest investment boom, a serious slump could have repercussions far beyond Moscow. Read more »
Greenstart, a Y-Cominbator-style accelerator program for greentech startups, kicked off its first program on Tuesday at its new offices in downtown San Francisco, and unveiled its first four startups. Read more »
A new Y Combinator–style incubator that will focus solely on the intersection of energy and information technology is launching in Houston, the founder of the group, Kirk Brand Coburn, told me in an exclusive interview. Read more »
Simon Willison is the ultimate nerd: He’s the face behind several important pieces of web technology and a developer who’s worked for some of the biggest names in the business. Now he and his wife are finding more success with events website Lanyrd. 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 »
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 »
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. Depending on how closely you watch Europe’s online scene, some of these companies may be familiar to you. Others you may not have heard of. But all of them are worth watching closely. In this report, we profile the 20 startups that we feel best represent Europe’s current tech scene. We have organized our list around perception, and as lists go, it is intended to be a guideline rather than a rule book. It’s not exhaustive, and clearly, with such a diverse and vibrant continent as our playing field, it never could be. Companies mentioned in this report include GetJar, Huddle, Made.com and Songkick. For a full list of companies, and to read the full report, sign up for a free trial. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
In the last year Europe has witnessed an explosion of accelerator programs, with more and more launching all the time. But while it looks like good news for entrepreneurs, some worry whether the continent can really support such a glut of activity around startups. Read more »
To take on more established accelerator programs, British startup bootcamp The Difference Engine has changed its identity and stumped up a tantalizing reward: more than $150,000 in funding for the 10 startups who make the cut. Can it spur on a new generation of European innovation? Read more »
It’s not quite the $150,000 offered to Y Combinator companies, but DreamIt Ventures, a Philadelphia-based accelerator program, is dangling some cash of its own to its startups in an attempt to keep them nearby and ensure that it stays competitive. Read more »
The Entrepreneurs Roundtable announced the first 10 companies to participate in its startup incubator program. The New York-based ER Accelerator program, which runs from June through August, gives those companies some startup capital, as well as free office space and access to a number of mentors. Read more »
Real estate website Trulia is set to roll out a new feature that will allow users to view crime statistics for 50 metro areas in the U.S. The new feature, launching in June, is a major exercise in real-time big data processing. Read more »
Will the popular incubator program for young web and mobile start-ups, Y Combinator, work for cleantech? That’s what a group of entrepreneurial investors, including Mitch Lowe, Dave Graham, and Dillon McDonald, are looking to find out. 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 »
Y Combinator was already a popular accelerator program for young start-ups, but with Yuri Milner and Ron Conway offering $150,000 to all YC companies, it has boosted applications by 40 percent for the upcoming class, said Harj Taggar, the newest partner at Y Combinator. Read more »
Friends were skeptical when E la Carte founder Rajat Suri dropped out of MIT to become a waiter — for research. Two years, later, his startup seeks to tame the “chaotic environment” of a restaurant with features designed to streamline tasks for customers and staff. Read more »
In this video, Halle Tecco, co-founder of non-profit seed accelerator RockHealth, gives her elevator pitch about the company’s vision to shake up the world of healthcare. RockHealth is aimed at lowering the barriers for startups developing apps for the healthcare industry. 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 »
Today I attended Y Combinator’s annual Startup School at Stanford University. From the 11 talks from startup founders and funders full of first-person lessons, these were some of the most resonant tips for other entrepreneurs about what to do and what not to do. Read more »
Many Y Combinator startups from this summer’s class already have money in the bank, and many hit up the same angel investors. I conducted an informal survey of investors at YC’s Demo Day to ask how many of the companies they had already invested in. Read more »
Though every street corner in San Francisco seems to house a startup incubator these days, Y Combinator is at the top of the heap. Tonight, Silicon Valley prince Facebook bestowed its endorsement on YC, announcing a relationship with the program to mentor its startups. Read more »
