Founders Archive

  • Get swyping: Swype for Android available now in English, Spanish and Italian

    Get swyping: Swype for Android available now in English, Spanish and Italian

    Posted on June 16, 2010 | No Comments
    We told you this was coming: Swype has just made it possible for any Android handset owner to download their innovative touch-screen enabled text-input application straight from the website. Which means a whole lot of people can henceforth start challenging that Guinness World Record for speedy textin' using Swype. Up until today, Swype came pre-installed on only a fraction of available Android phones (including the all new Motorola Droid X) due to its licensing business model, although the company did open up to 25,000 eager beta testers a couple of months ago - most of whom seem to have completely fallen in love with it. Well, anyone can download it now, but only for a limited time (a couple of days) and with a somewhat limited feature set. Important: it won't work if you have a phone that came pre-installed with Swype and support will be via Swype's forums only.

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  • SXSWi 2010: Brightkite’s Brady Becker and Martin May Demo Multi Check-in App

    SXSWi 2010: Brightkite’s Brady Becker and Martin May Demo Multi Check-in App

    Posted on March 16, 2010 | No Comments
    My dialogue with those at the forefront of mobile, location based social networking continues here at SXSW Interactive 2010. Brightkite founders Brady Becker and Martin May were kind enough to take a moment and talk with me about some current and unreleased features of their service/software called Brightkite. They also showed me an unreleased demo of their new multi check-in web app. Stay tuned for some follow-up conversations soon.

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  • Infinity Ward vs. Activision: Whose side are you on?

    Infinity Ward vs. Activision: Whose side are you on?

    Posted on March 4, 2010 | No Comments
    I’m sorry, but I’m absolutely loving this Infinity Ward-Activision brouhaha. Here you have one of the most respected developers out there at odds with a publisher that must seriously have no idea what it’s doing. If Activision thinks it can slap the Call of Duty name on any ol’ game, made by any ol’ developer, [...]

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  • Shanzaistudios.com: The next big thing in China is “socialist” production

    Shanzaistudios.com: The next big thing in China is “socialist” production

    Posted on February 28, 2010 | No Comments
    The guys behind Shanzai.com - a blog covering the very best in China and Indian shanzai products - are taking the world of shanzai online with a new crowdsourcing site called Shanzaistudios.com Basically, its your standard crowdsourcing model or better yet "Social Production" - the site puts up a product they can manufacture in China and everyone visiting the site gets to help form the final design that gets made and sold. While the first product is very interesting to tablet fans (a tablet bag 'natch) its how deep they plan to go that is exciting. While in Hong Kong, I was able to chat with one of the founders and they were telling me that ultimately this is the way to get a more personalized cellphone or a tablet device, but starting smaller and building it up is their initial goal.

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  • RightSide Capital Announces New Seed Fund; Will Make 100-200 Investments Per Year

    RightSide Capital Announces New Seed Fund; Will Make 100-200 Investments Per Year

    Posted on February 21, 2010 | No Comments
    RightSide Capital Management is about to change the funding landscape. Led by David Lambert, Kevin Dick and John Lee, RightSide Capital believes that seed-stage capital needs a complete overhaul. RightSide will make 100-200 investments per year, and literally manufacture companies in a way that no firm has ever done. The fund, announced at TheFunded.com’s Future [...]

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  • Playmesh Tops the Charts with #1 Game on the iPhone: iFarm downloaded 1 million times in 10 days

    Playmesh Tops the Charts with #1 Game on the iPhone: iFarm downloaded 1 million times in 10 days

    Posted on November 30, 2009 | No Comments
    You might find this suprising, but the top social gaming companies on the iPhone are not the same ones you know of from Facebook and MySpace. Zynga, despite $54.2M in funding, has hardly made a dent on the iPhone. Neither has Playfish, which was recently bought for $300M. Playdom hasn’t done squat, either. Although “the [...]

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  • Sony First Big Label To Try Amie Street Variable Music Pricing

    Sony First Big Label To Try Amie Street Variable Music Pricing

    Posted on September 22, 2009 | No Comments
    Amie Street always made sense to me. The idea is to show demand for music via variable pricing. Songs start off free and move up in price (up to 98 cents) as more people buy them. I first wrote about them in 2006 when the founders were still living in a dorm at Brown University. In 2007 Amazon invested in the company.

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  • Live at the Sony Daily Edition eReader announcement

    Live at the Sony Daily Edition eReader announcement

    Posted on August 25, 2009 | No Comments
    You’ve been waiting for it. You’ve been talking about it. You’ve sent long, rambling letters to Jodie Foster about it. You’ve been calling your local Congresswoman about it: It’s the Sony Daily Edition e-reader with built-in wireless. Erick Schonfeld is on the scene live and we’ll be reporting once the doors open at 10:30am EDT. Refresh this [...]

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  • Interview: Nicholas Francis, COO of Unity, a leading iPhone game development platform

    Interview: Nicholas Francis, COO of Unity, a leading iPhone game development platform

    Posted on August 14, 2009 | No Comments
    If you’re like me you’ve always wondered about making an iPhone game. What mad skillz do you need? What course in computer science will teach you how to vector a jet across the screen? Well, Nicholas Francis set out to solve that problem and came up with Unity, one of the most popular games development [...]

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  • Daily Crunch: Catapult Edition

    Daily Crunch: Catapult Edition

    Posted on July 11, 2009 | No Comments
    Nixie Tubes: Like Pixy Stix with caffeine Review: Scottevest Cotton Hoodie Interview: Greg Grunberg and August Trometer, founders of Yowza, action heroes

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  • Interview: Greg Grunberg and August Trometer, founders of Yowza, action heroes

    Interview: Greg Grunberg and August Trometer, founders of Yowza, action heroes

    Posted on July 10, 2009 | No Comments
    Greg Grunberg and his partners August Trometer and Rick Yaeger have a successful iPhone App called Yowza - it’s basically a location-aware coupon app that gives you great deals at major merchants - and Greg plays Matt Parkman on NBC’s Heroes, a program I’m told is quite popular with a certain demographic. They are two [...]

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  • Yes, The Pirate Bay was sold, will cease to exist as you know it (but will still exist)

    Yes, The Pirate Bay was sold, will cease to exist as you know it (but will still exist)

    Posted on June 30, 2009 | No Comments
    My initial reaction to the news that some company called Global Gaming Factory X has agreed to buy The Pirate Bay was, “Pfft, why should I care? The was only garbage on there anyway.” And while that's still my opinion—there really was only garbage on there—we really ought to recognize that, for better or worse, The Pirate Bay was something of a symbol for the greater “music/movies/whatever wants to be free” “movement,” if you can even call it that.

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