The indie Steve Jobs biopic continues chugging along, locking in cast members with an eye to that award-season-friendly timeline. With Ashton Kutcher firmly ensconced in the lead role, the latest addition to the cast is Book of Mormon star Josh Gad. Variety reports he’s in talks to play Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak. But how’s his tango? Read More
He may not be all that great at articulating his advice about startup culture, but movie mogul and serial investor Ashton Kutcher must know something about successful startups: Tinychat, a web-based video chat service backed by celebrities like Mr. Kutcher and P. Diddy, announced today that it has surpassed 20 million users. Read More
UPDATE, April 11, 4:02 p.m.: Numerous readers, including Ashton Kutcher’s publicist, objected to the suggestion that Mr. Kutcher was high during his interview with Dwolla. In truth, Mr. Kutcher appears sober in the interview; the word “high” was used to imply that his answers did not make sense—but this appeared to be due to the overuse of jargon and simplicity of ideas, not the influence of mind-altering substances. We have updated the headline.
Iowa native Ashton Kutcher returned to the homeland today to officially announce an investment in Dwolla, one of the hottest investments of the moment, and appear with Dwolla founder Ben Milne for a special episode of Silicon Prairie News’s PrairieCast. The A-list actor has invested in A-list startups from Skype to Twitter to Airbnb to Path to Flipboard Gidsy to Zaarly to New York’s Foursquare, GroupMe and The Fancy. He’s reportedly invested in some 40 companies. He’s the Real Deal, we’re told, and not an opportunistic dabbler who only got into the whole startup thing because a long time ago he challenged CNN to a race to be the first Twitter account to hit a million followers.
“Ashton as an investor is brilliant,” Mr. Milne said today.
“I’ve come to realize he’s one of the most insightful investors I’ve worked with,” David Lee, who co-founded SV Angel, told the New York Times.
Mr. Kutcher actually has a lot of suggestions about product, other founders have told Betabeat in the past.
So we were curious to hear the actor riff on startups at length in the live question and answer session with SPN’s live studio audience. Like Paul Graham’s on stage office hours at TechCrunch Disrupt, it offered a rare peek into what meetings between a famous investor and his investments must be like.
We came away… underwhelmed. Read More
In real life, the actor Ashton Kutcher has made a name for himself by backing several of today’s biggest startups–like Airbnb, Foursquare and GroupMe, to name a few–so it’s no surprise that he wants to take his tech obsession to the big screen.
Mr. Kutcher will be taking on the role of the late Read More
Wilkommen! This is part three of Betabeat’s new mini-series, Die Startup-Szene, a peek at the up-and-coming tech hub of Berlin, Germany. We sat down with entrepreneurs from three leading young companies here in the city that is only very, very occasionally referred to as Silicon Allee.
Earlier this week on another gloomy Berlin day, Betabeat found ourselves in a gated office park. To the left: a Turkish convenience store. To the right: a restaurant that only serves whole roasted chickens. In front of us: a waterpipe decorated with stickers, including a Tumblr logo. Yep, this was Kreuzberg, the Williamsburg of Berlin, and if we were playing “you might be a hipster if,” we’d admit that yes, later that night we went to see Tune Yards at a beer hall around the corner. But it was only because Edial Dekker, the adorable hipster CEO of Gidsy, recommended the show to us.
When we shlepped up to Gidsy’s office on the fifth floor, we discovered the source of the Tumblr sticker. Two girls in sundresses working out of a corner of Gidsytown, an open, white office with irregularly-angled walls like an attic, comprise the New York startup’s Berlin bureau. A three-person consultancy also shared the office, dubbed The Maker’s Loft, as Friends Of Gidsy.
Mr. Dekker appeared, a 27-year-old with tight golden curls and a flushed face, dressed in a red checkered shirt. A closeup of his half smile and crystal blue eyes recently appeared on the cover of CNBC magazine over the headline “Meet the Brats: Bored, restless, agile, tech savvy… and your deadliest rivals.” Read More
With more than 11 million users Pinterest is the current King Kong of sites featuring curated collections of images of doilies and Quaker-style furniture (among many other things). The Fancy may have trumped Pinterest in one respect–businesses can profit directly from items posted on the site. This differs from the current model used by Pinterest which monetizes content through affiliate links:
Merchants need to claim items already posted on the Fancy site in order to sell there. Right now, the startup will only accept one merchant per item. Eventually, like Google, it will list many merchants who sell an item. If no merchant claims an item, users still need to travel to a third-party site in order to make the purchase.
Joe Einhorn launched The Fancy in 2011. High profile backers include Ashton Kutcher and Twitter’s Jack Dorsey sits on its board. Until today, though, it was a lesser-known Pinterest competitor and like that site unprofitable. Business Insider, however, says The Fancy’s users are “highly engaged” and the site is more “male-focused” than Pinterest. Read More
The lesson here is that Internet mobs can sometimes get results.
Domain registrar GoDaddy, previously a supporter of the much-derided SOPA, or Stop Internet Piracy Act, suddenly pulled it support for the bill earlier today, after widespread Internet outcry and calls for a boycott.
In a conversation with Betabeat, brand-new GoDaddy CEO Warren Adelman credited “the sum of feedback from various sources,” including emails from customers, stories in the technology press, feedback from Internet leaders, and anti-SOPA blog posts, as being the impetus that forced them to take another look at the situation. Read More
Bowing to pressure from Reddit, Y Combinator founder Paul Graham, Ashton Kutcher, and other Internet users, domain registrar GoDaddy has pulled its support of the controversial Stop Internet Piracy Act (SOPA), which is backed by many large movie studios and broadcasters as a law that would protect intellectual property rights, but vehemently derided by most everyone else as a law that would ruin the Internet. Read More
Redditors can now count a sitcom star among their ranks, well sort of. As we told you yesterday, a Redditor named self-prodigy started a grassroots campaign to punish GoDaddy for supporting SOPA (the draconian, Internet-destroying Stop Online Piracy Act) by urging others to switch their domains to a different provider. Cheezburger CEO Ben Huh followed suite and now it seems even newbie tech investors have joined the fray.
@aplusk just tweeted out: “I am moving my domains off of @Godaddy due to their support for #SOPA. Paul Graham is also doing the right thing (cc @paulg)” Read More
The big news out of Silicon Alley yesterday was the big $40 million round raised by Fab, a start which pivoted its business model less than a year ago and has now scored a $200 million valuation led by Andreessen Horowitz.
What drove Fab’s sudden success? It’s got a seasoned leader in Jason Goldberg. Flash sales are a big opportunity when executed right. The company builds its own technology. But according to folks in the know, a lot of the credit goes to Ashton Kutcher, who holds a much larger stake in the company than has been reported. Read More
