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Insurgents

By Myles Tanzer 11/14/12 11:32am

Insurgents

Mr. Karnjanaprakorn (Photo: About.Me)

Tech Insurgents 2012: Mike Karnjanaprakorn

The Principal of New York

Before Mayor Bloomberg signed up for Codecademy, before General Assembly signed its first lease in the Flatiron—even before Peter Thiel started paying kids to skip school—Skillshare founder and CEO Mike Karnjanaprakorn was trying convince New York investors to finance his peer-to-peer learning startup. He billed the company as the Etsy of education, since it set up a market for anyone to teach—and learn—practical skills through an affordable hands-on class, starting at $25 a night. (The hybrid online classes that Skillshare launched this August, with Livestream office hours, start at just $20 a night.) Read More

By Patrick Clark 11/14/12 11:31am

Insurgents

Daniel S. Loeb Headshot

Tech Insurgents 2012: Daniel Loeb

The Poison Pen

Six months ago, Yahoo was a tech dinosaur, a moribund dot-com bypassed by the evolution of the social web and seemingly oblivious to mobile platforms. Kara Swisher had all but written the company’s epitaph when Yahoo made a headline-grabbing hire: Marissa Mayer, an early Google employee who had played a key role in such varied projects as the design of Google’s iconic landing page and the development of Google Maps and Gmail. Read More

By Jessica Roy 11/14/12 11:31am

Insurgents

(Photo: OKFocus)

Tech Insurgents 2012: Ryder Ripps, Jonathan Vingiano and Jules LaPlace

The Merry Pranksters

From Old Spice’s viral “The Man Your Man Could Smell Like” campaign to the contentious Skittles spot that made One Million Moms cry bestiality, bizarre or aggressive advertising has become commonplace in our internet-addled society. To nab the attention of customers toggling between screens, advertisers frequently toe the line between inappropriate and outrageous, but few are as unabashedly controversial as the Queens-based OKFocus. Named to AdAge’s Creativity 50 in July, OKFocus is a rebel brand’s dream, equal parts design snob and attention-seeking internet troll. And as advertising moves online, OKFocus clients like Google and the Museum of Contemporary Art have taken note. Read More

By Kelly Faircloth 11/14/12 11:30am

Insurgents

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Tech Insurgents 2012: Marleen Vogelaar

The Manufacturing Maven

When 3D-printing startup Shapeways held a ribbon-cutting for its new “factory of the future” last month, more pols were in attendance than at a Hurricane Sandy press conference: Mayor Mike Bloomberg, Queens Borough President Helen Marshall and Empire State Development Corporation President Ken Adams all made the trip to the cavernous building that will house 50 3D printers, churning out as many as 5 million products every year. Read More

By Patrick Clark 11/14/12 11:30am

Insurgents

Phin_hires

Tech Insurgents 2012: Phineas Barnes

The Bottom-Up Investor

Gone are the days when New York’s venture capital game was dominated by a few large players; competition for deals is increasingly fierce. So what does a VC do to get ahead? For First Round Capital partner Phineas Barnes, it’s less about sharpening elbows and more about making sure founders feel like they’re getting good service. Read More

By Jessica Roy 11/14/12 11:30am

Insurgents

Mr. Taub and Mr. Schonfeld

Tech Insurgents 2012: Alex Taub and Michael Schonfeld

The Credit Card Killers

With an ever-crowded financial tech market and companies like PayPal and Google Wallet elbowing for industry dominance, the race to kill the credit card is heating up. But among the standouts is Iowa-based mobile payment startup Dwolla, thanks to an innovative pricing structure and a growing New York presence helmed by Michael Schonfeld and Alex Taub. Dwolla has raised money from two New York venture capital firms, Union Square Ventures and Thrive Capital. (Josh Kushner, a Thrive principal, is also part-owner of Observer Media Group.) Read More

By Nitasha Tiku 11/14/12 11:30am

Insurgents

Mr. Dash

Tech Insurgents 2012: Anil Dash

Amiable Agitator

The day after Barack Obama won his second presidential term, @FakeDorsey, a satirical Twitter account mocking serial entrepreneur Jack Dorsey’s precious worldview, tweeted, “Pretty incredible to think we made any progress at all in this world before we had twitter, and @anildash telling us all what we should do.”

As the adage goes, it’s funny because it’s (partly!) true. Read More

By Nitasha Tiku 11/14/12 11:30am

Insurgents

Mr. Webb

Tech Insurgents 2012: Rick Webb

The Undercover Ad Man

Of all the “if you build it, they will come,” social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter, Tumblr seemed the most advertising-averse. Floppy-haired founder David Karp memorably betrayed a visceral distaste for the stuff. It “really turns our stomachs,” he said in 2010, following that up with a vow not to become “wildly profitable” by slapping an AdSense ad on the otherwise elegant dashboard of all 80 million Tumblr blogs. But it seems as though the microblogging site’s methodical approach toward making money has paid off—thanks in part to guidance from Rick Webb, a 20-year veteran of the ad industry and co-founder of digital consultancy Barbarian Group, who was attracted to Tumblr for its aversion to the “crap” ads that permeate the web. Read More

By The Editors 11/14/12 11:30am

Insurgents

(Illustration: Robert Grossman)

Meet Betabeat’s 2012 Tech Insurgents

Jack Dorsey, cofounder of Twitter and Square, recently tried to disabuse the tech industry of its infatuation with the word ‘disruption.’ “We don’t want ‘disruption,’ where we just move things around. We want a direction. We want a purpose,” he said on stage at TechCrunch Disrupt, humbly suggesting the biannual conference change its name. But it’s more than just semantics. The tech sector’s claim to produce world-changing products and services often gets drowned out in a chorus of me-too companies solving problems no one ever complained about. The umpteenth nightlife-recommendations tool or empty real-time dating app can obscure the whirr of a nascent robotics sector in Manhattan or a futuristic, even revolutionary, experiment in manufacturing in Queens. Read More

By Kelly Faircloth 11/14/12 11:30am

Insurgents

Ms. Komissarova.

Tech Insurgents 2012: Valery Komissarova

Rallying the Robots

When longtime Wired editor in chief Chris Anderson left his post earlier this month, it wasn’t for another Condé title or a sabbatical to write his fourth book. He decamped for a robotics startup. It’s just the latest sign, along with drones appearing on the cover of every magazine from The New Yorker to The Economist, that robotics is no longer relegated to science fiction.

New York has never been known as a robotics capital, unlike Boston, with its MIT hackers, or Pittsburgh, with its Carnegie Mellon engineers. But one Russian oligarch wants to change that. Read More