Category Archives: Startups

Startup Saves the Image of Other Blossoming Companies

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What is a company to do when their rival company boasts slanderous comments and reviews about their business? They can lose customers and money if they do not act fast. That is precisely where one of the hottest startups right now comes into play: Profile Defenders. As Market Watch reports, their services are designed to repair the images of companies both small and large and is quickly becoming one of the hottest startups in the country, both fiscally and through their glowing, growing reputation.

With easy access to a company’s profile and the effortless ability the internet gives to anyone who wants to hide behind an alias, competition between companies has taken a very different turn. Companies can easily go onto a rival company’s profile and post slanderous comments about their service or product that are untrue or unwarranted. As Market Watch states, “usually the accusations are unjust and designed only to deface the company, outraging the victims of bad press and prompting them to fight back.” For fresh, new companies, image is everything and when you are investing most of your money into your startup and place most of your hopes on its success, a destroyed image can ruin everything.

According to the article, Profile Defenders has a 100% success rate so far in restoring and maintaining a company’s image. Once slander is detected, it is their job to address and fix it, but their work doesn’t stop there. Once the initial restoration of the company’s image has been restored, Profile Defenders keeps a close eye by monitoring the internet for any false, negative comments and fixing them when they do arise. Unlike most startups, Profile Defenders has maintained a great image while also being financially successful. That startup has locations in New York City, Washington, D.C. and Fort Lauderdale, Florida.

SOURCE: Market Watch
IMAGE: Courtesy of Marketwire

Storage Startups Soar As Virtual Storage Demand Increases

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If you think about it, the amount of content on the web has greatly increased over the years as more and more companies, businesses and individuals move to store all of their data virtually. Companies opt to go paperless and the content on the web grows exponentially, as Network World reports. Naturally then, the storage needs of companies and businesses have increased as well.

That’s where the new storage startups come into play. It used to be that a terabytes, which is 1,000 gigabytes, was considered a large amount of space. Now, with all of the content that is being stored virtually, enterprises are beginning to think in terms of petabytes, which is 1,000 terabytes or 1 million gigabytes. As Network World states, with that amount of information and data being stored it’s becoming expensive and difficult to retrieve that data on a timely basis once stored. In order to aid this issue, companies have invested a large amount of money in “technologies such as virtualization and cloud storage that can help them simplify their overall IT architecture, lower their costs and run their storage operations more efficiently.” It is the storage startups that possess this technology and they are beginning to grow and expand because of it.

“There’s not enough physical capacity for the amount of data that’s being generated,” says John Mascarenas, the investment director for Intel Capital in Network World. “It continues to move past the place where we can keep building physical storage.” Mascarenas says the result of this has been a large amount of innovation in a space that was not previously thought of as a cutting-edge industry. As Network World reports, “according to analysis from Strategic Advisory Services International LLC, venture funding for storage companies totaled $458 million through the first three quarters of 2011, or roughly 42.4% more than the $321.5 million in venture funding the storage industry received in the first three quarters of 2010 and more than double the $213.7 million in venture funding storage startups received through the first three quarters of 2009.” That shows how greatly the field is growing and how much companies are investing in storage technology and the startups that utilize it.

Below are three of the top seven storage startups in the field that are worth keeping an eye on. It is likely that as more companies look towards cloud storage, these startups will come out on top.

Amplidata
Located in Belgium, this startup was founded in 2009 and focuses its energy on storage for large unstructured data. “CEO and co-founder Wim De Wispelaere specialized in deduplication and disk backup technologies while working as a director of product management at Symantec.” The company’s major specialization is helping enterprises store large petabyte-scale masses of unstructured data. “Amplidata says that it’s able to store massive amounts of data that can be quickly recalled by using its patent-pending BitSpread Codec algorithms to eliminate redundant data,” as noted in Network World.

Pure Storage
Located in Mountain View, this startup was also founded in 2009 and focuses its energy on all-flash storage. “Pure Storage is still convinced that it can deliver an all-flash storage system that can distribute storage space at a price that’s competitive with standard disk solutions. Similar to Amplidata, Pure Storage uses data-reduction algorithms that compress and de-duplicate redundant data. Pure Storage CEO Dietzen says that eliminating redundant data allows Pure Storage to reduce the total amount of data stored by five to 20 times.”
“Let’s say that we have 38TB of virtual machines running and what actually gets stored is 2.5TB,” Dietzen says in the article. “We’re storing less data than competing systems around the world.”

NexGen Storage
Founded in 2010 and located in Louisville, Colorado this storage startup focuses on SSD optimization. NexGen Vice President of Marketing Chris McCall says that companies have a choice when it comes to data storage. They can have more speed or more capacity ie., faster retrieval with some issues or bottlenecking, or more space with less speed. As stated in the article, “The company says that its PCIe-based offering can deliver “22 times more I/O” than standard SSDs that are located behind storage controllers and are 43% less expensive than SSDs behind storage controllers. Since the architecture delivers the speed of SSDs without the capacity constraints, McCall says that it can give users the ability to provision performance in much the same way that they’ve typically provisioned capacity. This, in turn, lets users maintain quality of service on their mission-critical data volumes “even during system events that impact performance,” the company says.”

To see the other storage startups that are booming, visit Network World’s article. You can also get a more in-depth description of what the startups offer and optimize for.

SOURCE: Network World
IMAGE: A petabyte term photo courtesy of Passive Pundits

We Need An Angel #musicvideo

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The guys over at Undrip, a service that aims to help you filter your twitter stream, is in need of some finding. So what are some entrepreneurial startup founders doing? Rap, of course. Mick Hagen, the founder of Undrip leads the team in a rap addressed to Angel investors. The verses claim it’s the “biggest move I’ve made since I dropped outta Princeton” and they’ll be “crushin it from NDA to IPO.”

SOURCE: Undrip
IMAGE: Courtesy of Undrip

Seattle Best City For Tech Jobs

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Look out New York and Silicon Valley, Seattle is the number one region for high-tech job growth.

“Built on a base of such tech powerhouses as Microsoft, Amazon and Boeing, Seattle has enjoyed the steadiest and most sustained tech growth over the past decade,” reported Forbes. After Seattle, Baltimore; Columbus, OH; Raleigh, N.C.; and Salt Lake City followed as other leading cities for high-tech job growth.

According to the statistics, Silicon Valley came in at number 17 despite being known for its “concentration of tech jobs,” reports the Seattle Times. According to Forbes, that ranking “reflects the little known fact that, even with the recent last dot-com craze sparking over 5% growth over the past two years, the Valley remains the ‘biggest loser’ among the nation’s tech regions, surrendering roughly one quarter of its high-tech jobs — about 80,000 — in the past decade.”

On the other hand though, Forbes claims that the tech industry is always changing and so the locales and regions that are booming can change too. If the boom in social media that is currently taking place continues, the “Bay Area could recover more of its lost jobs and further extend its primacy. … But based on both historic and recent trends, the surest bet for future growth still stands with our top five winners, led by the rain-drenched, but prospering Seattle region.” If that’s the case, startups and those searching for high-tech jobs might want to skip New York and California and hop right on over to Seattle to secure a position.

SOURCE: The Seattle Times
IMAGE: Courtesy of MountainHomeBrew.com

Startup America Set to Help Small Businesses

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“America has always been a nation of do-ers.”

In his address to the country on Thursday, President Obama discussed how the nation needs to help small businesses grow in order to create more jobs for the country. “Because the new businesses they create are responsible for most of the new jobs in this country, helping them succeed is essential to helping our economy grow. That is why we need to do everything we can to make it easier for America’s entrepreneurs to take an idea from the drawing board, to the factory floor, to the store shelves,” explains Obama.

It is Obama’s hope to pass legislation that makes it easier for startups to get the funding they need to grow and prosper, and ultimately create more jobs. The program is called Startup America and has a main goal of helping entrepreneurs get the loans they need and speed up the innovation process.

SOURCE: YouTube
IMAGE: YouTube

Future Startups To Be Driven By Ideas and Inventive Business Models Rather Than Engineer Talent

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When Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak teamed up in the early years of Apple they had between them both engineering talent from Wozniak and marketing and aesthetic talent of Jobs. Between the both of them they birthed the personal computer that we have today, reports The Business Insider.

Today, or in the very recent past, startups have been rooted heavily in engineer talent rather than the marketing and ‘business-model’ like tendencies Jobs had. The article sites that Mark Zuckerburg, CEO of Facebook, is primarily a coder and has uber-COO Sheryl Sandberg on his side as his business savvy, marketing counterpart. It was his raw coding talent that set everything in motion and allowed for his startup, Facebook, to soar to where it is now. According to William Quigley of the Insider, this idea of startups being created by people with raw engineering talent will soon transition into future startups that are driven more by ideas and business models like instead.

As he writes, the world is becoming increasingly globalized and outsourced making it much easier for people who have inventive and revolutionary concepts to turn those ideas into reality – even if they lack the coding or engineering talent needed. Quigley writes, “I think we’re going to see an interesting trend in the next decade: as the world becomes increasingly flat, globalized and outsourced, our great startups – as Apple, Facebook and Google were all once were – will be driven more by the genius of ideas and inventive new business models, as Apple created in the last decade under Jobs as a multinational giant, rather than its early-stage engineering talent or coders.”

Quigley goes on to note that it is extremely easy for startups to expand internationally at a low cost. At the same time, the rise of global engineers is exponential as China and India alone doubled the amount of engineering graduates they had. As greatly skilled engineers become more abundant and globalization more profound, the team up of genius ideas and raw engineering talent is inevitable. With that, people who have groundbreaking ideas and concepts but are lacking in computer science skills can easily turn to an engineer and create the startup they dreamed of. “Given how cheaply engineering talent can be had in places like India and China, and how easy it is to now communicate with and do business in those parts of the world, startups will be able to outsource this resource more easily. Genius, however, will remain always impossible to outsource.”

Some people like Fred Wilson, VC and principal of Union Square Ventures, disagree with this idea and says that he would never invest in a company that hired someone else to do their coding for them. There may be differing opinions, as with anything, but one can’t ignore that the spike in engineering talent is sure to ignite a fire within the startup scene when paired with those who have great business models and concepts. According to Quigley, they are bound to disrupt the market and “are the ones that, like Steve Jobs before them, know how to hit a target we can’t even see yet.”

SOURCE: The Business Insider
IMAGE: Photo of Google cofounders Larry Page and Sergey Brin courtesy of Business Insider

Harvard Investing in Startup Companies

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Harvard University wants the in on the booming startup scene that is in Massachusetts and particularly Boston right now. According to Business Journal, Harvard is contemplating adding a new specialty to the institution in August. This, among other ventures helping startups on the east coast, is working to change the idea that Boston is not a place where consumer web ventures can thrive.

Harvard has already invested $20 million into the startup community in Boston by creating the Harvard Innovation Lab. It’s a 30,000 square-foot building Harvard built that will be used to help startup companies “hatch and scale” at the university, reports Business Journal. Gordon Jones, the director of the Harvard Innovation Lab was quoted saying, “It’s a great time to be getting into the game in an institutional way. Our hope is to be able to grow the pie of students interested in entrepreneurship, and have the impact felt in the greater Boston innovation community.” With the launch of the Harvard Innovation Lab Friday this week and the university’s first ever Startup Weekend Scramble that took place this past weekend, the university hopes to build a reputation of spinning out new companies, much like MIT.

In comparison with MIT and its company ventures, a lot of people think that Harvard has the potential to succeed. The Business Journal points out that MIT is engineering at its core and that goes along with startup companies very well. On the other hand, Harvard is focused on liberal arts so there may be a better chance for the university to help produce the consumer web types that are associated with New York and Silicon Valley. Though it is clearly a competitive move for Harvard to invest so much in the startup scene, the Innovation Lab offers something unique and different to Boston. Michael Roberts, executive director of Harvard Business School’s Rock Center for Entrepreneurship was quoted saying, “There are people who we’d like to attract who, I’m sure, do believe we are oriented to big companies and Wall Street.”

According to Joans, the Lab will be free and open in the day for any Harvard student to use. The goal behind this is to give students from all different majors and industries the opportunity to come together and possibly work together on a new venture. It is their goal to “induce structured spontaneity” claimed Joans. In addition to providing a work space for possible future startups, the building holds 250 seats, 4 conference rooms and an 80-seat classroom where entrepreneurship-focused Harvard courses will be taught. “The goal in February will be to add another layer for startups looking to go commercial; the plan is to give those ventures three months of dedicated space in the center, Jones said.”

SOURCE: The Boston Business Journal
IMAGE: Courtesy of Kyle Alspach via Business Journal

Shuffler.fm Adds New Feature Flipboard

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Last year, three guys launched Shuffler.fm, an Amsterdam-based music startup that joined music blogs and the music that they covered together. With Shuffler.fm, users could check out music blogs and listen to the artist’s music as they read the posts. It was a great site for discovering and learning about more music and pooling together music from blogs all over the internet by genre.

As the startup has evolved, users can now play continuous mixes of their favorite music blogs, utilize a search function to browse through songs and different artists and create their own personalized channels by liking their favorite blogs and tracks. The blogs can also utilize a “play this blog” button that launches the blogs own music channel. With all of these features that mesh Pandora and ex.fm together, it’s hard to imagine what more the startup could build upon. To be successful as a company though, startups are constantly adding and growing, and that is exactly was Shuffler.fm has done. They recently added Flipboard, an iPad application that turns music blogs and websites into radio stations that have a “Flipboard-style layout of words, pictures and streaming audio.”

The application basically turns the Shuffler.fm into a magazine that includes content “from a diverse set of music bloggers and experts in realtime (content is updated by the minute), providing a ready-to-consume filtered stream of music optimized for discoverability and at the same time presenting a curated experience so that users don’t have to deal with parsing the ridiculous amount of noise being dished out by music content producers. In other words, it’s music listening with an editorial filter,” as TechCrunch reports. Rather than going along with what most music sites like Pandora do by organizing stations according to existing tastes, it brings audio to its user in genre-based channels that populated by blogs like Pitchfork. While this fusion of music and music-related articles is far from new or groundbreaking but it is the first to fuse it into an application and physical site.

Check out the app here!

SOURCE: Shuffler.fm