Tag: Startup

Crowdfunding via customers is the new startup capital

When the JOBS Act was signed in April, the startup community gave itself a collective high five. Crowdfunding would enable startups to reach out to the whole world to get access to funding, not just a small cabal of investors living in a 20-mile radius of Menlo Park.

But hidden in the headlines was a much more powerful underlying trend. With the JOBS Act came the creation of an entirely new class of capital that could be far more valuable to startups: customer capital.

Meet the new investor class: Customers.

Instead of raising capital from VCs to build a product, entrepreneurs can skip the line and reach out to customers before the product is actually produced. It’s called a pre-order, but it has a twist. In this case, the pre-order is for a product that doesn’t actually exist yet.

We’ve all dealt with pre-orders before, whether it’s the new iPad or a blockbuster summer movie. But this time customers fund the idea of a product, with the hope that the object itself will someday follow. For example, the Pebble Watch raised $10 million on Kickstarter by crowdfunding from customers strictly through pre-orders. This is just the start.

Kullect: the app for digital packrats

We collect a lot of stuff online — photos, videos, location check-ins, likes, tweets and other thoughts. But many times those things are scattered all over disparate websites or social networks or, more often than not, stay stored in our phones. So how do you build a repository of the stuff you like — or “curate” — and maintain the context in which you collected them? The guys behind Kullect have a cool idea.

Kullect (pronounced like “collect”) is what they call a “social memory” app. It’s a place where you start collections of things you like, whether that’s your favorite lunch spots, pictures of cute cats, inspirational quotes, memes or videos. What you curate is a reflection of you

This might sound like Facebook or a blog, but Kullect is meant to be simpler. No need to mess with complicated privacy settings, nor does it require learning blogging software. Kullect is meant to be an easy, mobile-first experience that anyone can use to build their digital collections while keeping the time and place of where you found it.

When Eric Migicovsky, an engineer, wanted to develop a line of wristwatches that could display information from an iPhone — like caller ID and text messages — he went the traditional route of asking venture capitalists to finance his company.

But he couldn’t even get a foot in the door, let alone secure any money for what he called the Pebble watch.

So he turned to Kickstarter, a site where ordinary people back creative projects. Backers could pledge $99 and were promised a Pebble watch in return.

 

http://www.thewrap.com/media/column-post/mashable-dick-clark-productions-team-on-original-online-content-36863

Mashable, one of the web’s leading news sites for social media, is teaming up with Dick Clark Productions to push into original video programming, starting with “Dojos,” a show that goes behind the scenes at some of the nation’s fastest-rising tech companies.

Think MTV’s “Cribs” for the techie crowd.

Produced by DCP and Tubefilterand distributed by Mashable, the show is part of a larger push into original video by the social media web site.

Mashable, which according to Quantcast has about 9 million monthly unique visitors, will collaborate on and distribute original video through deals likes this and also will syndicate from sites like What’s Trending. (The site claims to have 23 million uniques.)

http://paidcontent.org/2012/04/18/two-startups-aim-to-make-higher-education-more-affordable-or-free/

Higher education costs have skyrocketed by over 430 percent since the 1980s. Now two startups aim to make college courses more affordable. Coursera offers free online courses from universities like Stanford and Princeton. And a new tool from Akademos helps professors find less expensive — or free — textbooks for their courses.

Coursera, founded last fall by Stanford professors Daphne Koller and Andrew Ng, expands today to include non-Stanford classes and also announces $16 million in Series A funding, in a round led by Kleiner Perkins.

Coursera is adding about 30 online courses from the University of Pennsylvania, Princeton, Stanford and the University of Michigan. (More courses and universities will be added in coming months.) The courses, which cover topics from computer science and medicine to business, history and literature, aren’t just class videos — the company is not “just shoving the video on the web and hoping for the best,” Koller said. Rather, Coursera aims to recreate an on-campus experience for virtual students. Its coursers include video lectures with interactive quizzes, homework, interactive assignments and collaborative online forums.

“A professor teaching 100,000 students is almost like a new medium, like moving from papyrus to prose,” Ng told me. “For example, how often do students want to see the instructor’s face? Do they want pre-typed text or should the instructor hand-write the text? We’re still figuring it out. Multiple top universities working on a single site provides the opportunity to leverage resources, and partner institutions can learn from each other about how one ought to teach in this new space.”

http://thenextweb.com/insider/2012/04/16/viddy-shows-no-signs-of-slowing-down-with-6-5m-users-it-is-now-the-2-free-ios-app/

Laser-focus on media, stand-alone social network, celebrity usage, and a fast climb to the top of the iOS app store: this is a story that we’ve heard somewhere before. This time, the story involves video and not photography as the content of choice.

Viddy, an app that we first described as the “Instagram of video” way back in April of last year has been skyrocketing in terms of downloads and usage since it became an Open Graph partner with Facebook. The prominent placement of social 15-second videos has helped catapult the little-app-that-could into the #2 spot of the iOS app store, ahead of Instagram.

The company announced today that its app now has 6.5M users, which means that Viddy has increased its userbase by 2.5 million in one week.

http://www.nypost.com/p/news/business/silicon_alley_now_gold_st_sMjjeGAE6BJEBB7UI52WZP

New York City’s young tech stars are bracing for nasty weather — it’s starting to rain cash.

Thanks to the absurdly high $1 billion Facebook paid for the social and mobile-app maker Instagram — a company with no revenue and just 13 employees — Gotham’s successful tech firms in the mobile space are bracing for a deluge of big-money buyout offers.

“Fasten your seat belts, the social-mobile land grab of 2012 has officially begun,” said Lou Kerner, an expert on private-company valuations.

Last week, the CEO of one the city’s standout tech firms, David Karp of Tumblr, a blogging 2.0 platform, attended a meeting hosted by Evercore Partners as part of its Disruption Speaker Series, where some of the city’s top startup players discussed valuations.

Tumblr’s backers at Union Square Ventures said the company, which raised $85 million last September, has been heavily courted for an acquisition but has resisted selling out, a source with knowledge of the talks said.

All around New York, bankers and venture capitalists were flipping through their portfolios last week and wondering what Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s billion-dollar check meant for local startups they advise.