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startup rundown

By Jane Gayduk 3/13 3:35pm

startup rundown

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Startup News: Disrupting Burner Phones and Brunch With Jake Lodwick and Bre Pettis

Here’s A Tip. Are you travelling outside the U.S. soon? Are you afraid of getting publicly humiliated by an Austrian waiter because you rounded his tip up to the nearest 5 percent, not 10? Well How Much Should I Fucking Tip has a goddam solution! Just type the country or city of your choice into the search bar and get the proper percent to tip at restaurants, at hotels, and in taxis. There are also convenient notes on countries with sneaky service charges, or specific parking rules. But don’t exit your browser until you’ve typed in “North Korea.” Read More

By Jeremy Unger 2/27 3:31pm

startup rundown

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Startup News: Angel Investors Now Live In College Dorms, Cable Becomes More Irrelevant, and Bloomberg Loves Nerds

Because Angel Investors Can Live In Dorms Too The New York tech scene can never have too many venture capitalists, but sometimes it can be difficult for student entrepreneurs to bridge the age gap between themselves and their investors. Enter the Dorm Room Fund, an investment team started by firm First Round Capital, which is run and Read More

By Jeremy Unger 2/20 3:51pm

startup rundown

Sony's PS4 Announcement

Startup News: Sony’s ‘Secret’ Gaming Announcement, Vimeo Enters the GIF Game, and Outer Space Gets an App

Sony Needs to Work On Keeping Secrets Although Sony is still only referring to it as the, “future of Playstation,” everyone knows that tonight’s press conference at the Hammerstein Ballroom in New York City will be for the reveal of Sony’s Playstation 4, codenamed Orbis. An image of the next generation system’s controller was Read More

By Jane Gayduk 2/13 4:31pm

startup rundown

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Startup News: You Can Still Erase Your Ex In Time for Valentine’s Day

Bad education? CampInteractive and Reddit cofounder Alexis Ohanian are hosting an ed tech hackathon at General Assembly this weekend, inviting developers, students and ed tech influencers to tackle improve the classroom experience. Since gold stars are being offered for hacks that help engage students with “unusually compelling learning experiences,” we’d like to suggest a Read More

By Jane Gayduk 2/06 3:42pm

startup rundown

What about a V-day date at MakerBot? It could work.

Startup News: Classes at MakerBot, a Birchbox for Valentine’s Day and Lady Makers on PBS

Your heart-shaped Birchbox. Tired of cellophane-wrapped boxes full of chocolate-flavored fat? On February 7, Birchbox is launching a limited edition V-day box—the “We Heart” Collection. For $36 you can have goodies like nail polish, bobby pins and some mascara product advertised as “triple action,” in case you’re not getting any this year.

Newsreels Tonight at 6 p.m. marks the premier of “MAKERS: Women Who Make America,” at Lincoln Center’s Alice Tully Hall. This video and broadcast initiative is a collaborative effort between AOL and PBS that aims to communicate stories of revolutionary women who help shape today’s world. Read More

By Myles Tanzer 1/30 12:45pm

startup rundown

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Startup News: Quora Gets Bloggy and Foursquare Gets Down to Business

Do We Really Need More Blogs? For the last three years, Quora has been the site for headsdown homebodies to ask their fellow coding brethren about what it’s like to go outside. But the company has recently announced two new developments that show a shift of attention to writers. The question site now has plans to include blogs. Quora has also announced the release of a rich text editor for their mobile app which should help Quora users ask bolded crazy questions while they’re on the go. Read More

By Myles Tanzer 1/23 1:25pm

startup rundown

Mr. Vinh (Photo: Tumblr.com)

Startup News: Etsy Goes Shopping for a Twee App Maker and Dwolla Goes to the Gov

Shopping Site Goes Shopping Back in 2011, Khoi Vinh, the former design director for The New York Times’s website, attempted to launch an iPad collage maker called Mixel that even Taylor Swift would love. The interface was kind of clunky, and the company soon pivoted to a smoother iPhone product, which became fairly successful. And now Mixel has been acquired by the custom product giant Etsy.

No, you won’t be creating any collages of your twee collectables any time soon. According to AllThingsD, The Mixel team is being acquired for its stellar mobile talents. Mr. Vinh and his cofounder Scott Ostler, along with employees Akiva Leffert and Roy Stanfield, will all make the move to Etsy’s Brooklyn offices. Mixel will be shutting down the social side of its app, but will leave up its collage-making tool. In an email to Betabeat, Etsy CTO Kellan Elliot-McCrea explains, “We expect our mobile traffic to surpass desktop traffic by the end of 2014.”  Read More

By Myles Tanzer 1/16 1:04pm

startup rundown

Katie Couric in Warby Parker (Photo: Facebook.com)

Startup News: Warby Parker Ate Way Too Much Salad and Sold a Lot of Monocles This Year

Rose-Colored Glasses Warby Parker just released its annual report for 2012, and it’s a pretty fun slideshow to click through. The glasses empire now has 113 full-time employes and 42 part-time employees. Of those bespectacled folks, 108 have company-sponsored gym memberships. In other Warby Parker health news, 2,507 pounds of salad were eaten in the office this year. Although there are not too many exact sales figures in the package (besides the fact that 296 monocles were sold this year) a diagram on the last page shows that sales from the first quarter of the year to the last one have nearly tripled. Warby Parker says it gave out 250,000 pairs of glasses this year, some of which went to victims of Hurricane Sandy. Read More

By Ross Barkan 1/09 3:30pm

startup rundown

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Startup News: Kickstarter and IndieGogo Show Off Their Metrics and Middle Schoolers Get Appy

Kickstarted The crowdfunding king released its annual highlights for 2012 this week. And the startups is going about as gangbusters as well, an oversubscribed, blockbuster Kickstarter campaign. In 2012, 2,241,475 people pledged almost $320 million and successfully funded a little over 18,000 projects. That works out to about $606 per minute. Monetization is so much easier when it’s baked into your platform, isn’t it?

Indie No More Kickstarter competitor Indiegogo also released data for 2012. Campaigns raised 20 percent more in last year than they did in 2011 and successful campaigns took an average of 11 days preparing for their launch. Read More