After traveling five years through the solar system, Juno has finally reached its destination and is currently in orbit around Jupiter, traveling nearly 250,000 kilometers per hour (150,000 mph). Read More
Emerging markets’ challenge to Silicon Valley
Silicon Valley leads the global technology innovation markets with the credentials and an ecosystem that is second to none. We have had contact with many of the leading technology accelerators operating out of Silicon Valley; their opening line for the conversation is often: “How are you relevant to us?” However, those of us living in the rest of the planet have to ask: “When… Read More
Wi-Fi sharing community Instabridge picks up backing from Draper Associates
Swedish startup Instabridge, a Wi-Fi sharing community and mobile app, has picked up $1 million in new funding. Noteworthy for a European startup is that Silicon Valley investor Tim Draper’s Draper Associates has led the round, with participation from existing backer Balderton Capital. Read More
Invoxia’s Voice Bridge puts your landline in your pocket
If you’ve ever wished you could roll out a five-mile extension cable for your home phone so you can get your calls when you’re out and about, Invoxia’s new Voice Bridge may be the solution to your globetrotting woes. It’s a virtual phone that connects your landline to your Wi-Fi, making it available via an app. Read More
Jabra is all talk with its Halo Smart Bluetooth earbuds
At $80, the Jabra Halo Smart is in a bit of a gray area. It’s hardly what the majority of users would call “cheap,” but it still comes in well below other wireless offerings from companies like Jaybird. They’re not fitness buds, nor are they focused on sound or comfort. Jabra, much to its credit, went a different route entirely, eschewing the focuses of most… Read More
Echobox raises $3.4M to let publishers intelligently share content to Twitter and Facebook
Now calling itself an Artificial Intelligence (AI) service for the online publishing industry — because, why not? — Echobox, which has developed tech to help publishers share content on the likes of Twitter and Facebook in a more intelligent way, has closed $3.4 million in new funding. Read More
Novelist Eliot Peper talks about fiction as a foreign country
This week on the Technotopia podcast I talked to Eliot Peper, the author of the cyberpunk novel Cumulus. Peper talked about the value of science fiction as travel for the mind. He has been an entrepreneur and VC and finds that those industries are often more about checking off boxes in a spreadsheet rather than true exploration. By writing – and reading – speculative fiction… Read More
The things any startup could be doing to get Fortune 500 customers
New-market disruption is a rare phenomenon and usually comes in waves in conjunction with some form of dramatic technological advance. Many disruptive companies (both new and existing) created new markets in periods following the introduction of PCs (Apple, Microsoft), mobile phones (Apple, Samsung) and cloud computing (Facebook, Airbnb). And this is what we are seeing in the enterprise… Read More
The art of relationships for fundraising success
With the incessant talk about unicorns, it’s easy to lose sight of the opposite end of the investment funnel. What feeds the industry is not unicorns, but first venture round companies. Yet raising investments from institutional venture capitalists is becoming increasingly difficult for early-stage entrepreneurs — and it likely won’t ease up through the remainder of 2016. Read More
Knocki turns your tables and walls into smart device controllers
By most standards, Knocki has had a home run Kickstarter campaign, blowing way past its $35,000 target with more than $1.1 million committed. But it sounds like CEO Jake Boshernitzan is still hoping for more support in the campaign’s final hours (it’s scheduled to end at 3am Eastern on Saturday). After all, he said that Knocki deliberately set the campaign target on the low… Read More