With the rise of cheap and affordable manufacturing facilities, combined with new sources of financing such as crowd-funding, hardware startups are hot once again.
And there is no better evidence of this than a quick dash through the Hardware Alley at TechCrunch Disrupt last week in San Francisco.
We started with a new kind of connected coffee maker and ended with a startup that lets you look at your thoughts. Enjoy. → Read More
Facebook’s share price has rocketed up from 19.46 to 22.00 since Mark Zuckerberg talked at TechCrunch Disrupt Tuesday, and numerous sources in the investment community tell us it was his declaration that Facebook will tackle search that excited them most. Rather than incremental increases in revenue that better ad units could bring, the prospect of the social network taking on a whole new business offers an upside worth betting on.
But what would Facebook search look like? Not a straight-up, standalone search engine say experts and a Facebook employee. But that doesn’t mean Facebook’s double-down on search won’t threaten the mighty Google. → Read More
Not only were there country pavilions at TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco last week, but also themed ones like Hardware Alley and the Impact Pavilion.
Here, you could peruse startups in the themes of health, energy and transport, a few of which of which were put together by the Greenstart accelerator programme and Solar Mosaic.
We caught up with the guys to hear what they had on display.
Here are the companies we talked to in this segment: → Read More
At the time that Path was first introduced as a new social network for mobile devices, there were already many options for connecting with friends, family, and coworkers. So why build another? Path CEO and co-founder Dave Morin told me in an interview backstage at TechCrunch Disrupt that he and his cofounders were looking for ways to connect users closest to one another — and building for mobile was the best way to do that.
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The Chilean Pavilion joined the roster of other Latin American startups at TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco last week.
Our task was to show you as many of them as we could in as short amount of time as possible – that meant a fast run through with a camera.
Thus we found companies doing facial recognition, ad retargeting, opinion polls, algorithmic trading and a social network for freelancers, amongst others.
Here are the companies we ran into: → Read More
“In the Studio” taped a special segment this weekend during TechCrunch Disrupt San Francisco, welcoming backstage an engineer, PhD dropout, entrepreneur, founder, and long-time investor in enterprise IT to talk about current trends in the space.
Jim Goetz, a partner at Sequoia Capital, has amassed an impressive career in the enterprise field, helping found VitalSigns and investing in companies such as Jive, Nimble Storage, and Palo Alto Networks, among many others. While many folks believe the enterprise space is hot all of a sudden, the reality is that entrepreneurs, such as Nir Zuk, who co-founded Palo Alto Networks, and investors like Goetz, among others, who back them, have been toiling away in the space for the last decade, if not longer, and show no signs of slowing down. → Read More
LinkedIn co-founder and Greylock partner Reid Hoffman has become known for giving solid advice — both to the entrepreneurs in which he invests, as well as the general public with his recent book The Startup Of You. So when he came backstage at Disrupt SF earlier this week after his fireside chat with Michael Arrington, we just had to ask him: What is some bad advice that people often give to entrepreneurs that they should ignore? → Read More