StartUp RockOn is all about startups helping startups. At Sunday night’s Inauguration Celebration at the Hamilton Live, organizers set out to honor innovative visionaries with grants, accolades and a party worthy of the success we achieved at the RNC and DNC this summer.
Lupe Fiasco performed at this private event, and as you may have read, he left the stage earlier than we had planned. But Lupe Fiasco was not “kicked off stage” for an “anti-Obama rant.” We are staunch supporters of free speech, and free political speech. This was not about his opinions. Instead, after a bizarrely repetitive, jarring performance that left the crowd vocally dissatisfied, organizers decided to move on to the next act.
The party continued as planned, and we celebrated the announcement of CodeNow’s winning the Grant Challenge. CodeNow is a non-profit startup based in Washington DC that teaches “underrepresented high school students basic skills in computer programming.”
StartUp RockOn was founded last year by three startups: HyperVocal, EventFarm and Fighter Interactive.
It is worth emphasizing that the event, while tied to the inauguration, was private in nature and some attendees did pay hundreds of dollars to be there.
We get bullshit turf battles like Tumblr not being able to find your Twitter friends or Facebook not letting Instagram photos show up on Twitter because of giant companies pursuing their agendas instead of collaborating in a way that would serve users. And we get a generation of entrepreneurs encouraged to make more narrow-minded, web-hostile products like these because it continues to make a small number of wealthy people even more wealthy, instead of letting lots of people build innovative new opportunities for themselves on top of the web itself.Anil Dash • Discussing the freedom we had with certain features of the Web—features that are now gone due to eventual changes. The title? “The Web We Lost.” Preach it, brother. (ht seldo)
There was no agreement. We have always been opposed to price fixing.Uber CEO Travis Kalanick • Disputing the portrayal of his company by Washington DC city council member Mary Cheh, who claimed they agreed to an amendment we reported about last night, which would have set a minimum price for Uber’s cab-disrupting model. After much outcry by fans of Uber, the amendment got held back from a taxi modernization bill, and will likely remain shelved until later this year. Uber also has a mini-protest of their own going on — they cut their minimum fare in the city to $12, an apparent defiant act against the amendment, which would have enforced a minimum fare price of $15.
For some people, cabs can simply suck. In big cities, trying to tag down a cab can be annoying or (if you live in a bad or far-away neighborhood) an exercise in futility. One startup, Uber (which, via an app, sends a private sedan right to wherever you’re standing), cuts through the annoyingness of cabs — you pay a little more, sure, but it’s much less frustrating. However, it’s also disruptive, which is why Washington DC’s City Council is considering a new taxi modernization bill that would effectively limit Uber’s future ability to expand — by preventing the company from offering a low-cost service. The company actually rolled out one recently, but because of the proposed new law (which also, to be fair, does such things as force DC cabs to have GPS devices and take credit cards), couldn’t launch it in the District. Understandably, the company is kind of upset about this. Though, on the other hand, DCist points out that the amendment effectively legalizes the more-expensive service in the District, too. source
Seeing this image was weird, because I know the guy on the left, though I haven’t seen him in over a year. — Ernie @ SFB
Meet Michael Lazerow. You probably don’t know him, unless you’re intimately familiar with the tech startup industry. His company, Buddy Media, just sold to this major company called Salesforce.com. And in honor of the event, he made this video — telling everyone how he managed to overcome a heart defect and two near-death experiences to build his career. This is only one of the companies he’s sold in his career — but this one is by far the biggest. Watch this, and try not to cry.
Pinterest already has become an attractive destination in particular for Facebook-ers who are looking for the thrill of a small startup versus working for the big company. Pinterest has about 40 employees. Five of the top positions are filled by former Facebook employees.
Key sign you’re not cool anymore? All the hipsters at your company move on, like moths to a light source. (thanks Greg Bufithis)
Made in New York City
A map of NYC start-ups, incubators and investors. Also includes information about companies that are hiring if you’re in the market.
Why just NYC? We’d like to see a similar map of startups around the country. Who knows, we might just surface a latent hotbed in the Rust Belt.
A big get that could make Pinterest more valuable: Tim Kendall has joined the Pinterest team, according to an exclusive interview with CEO Ben Silbermann published by Fortune this morning. As the former Director of Monetization for Facebook, Kendall was responsible for creating the vast majority of the company’s early money-making strategies. Now, a year removed from his time at the house Mark Zuckerberg built, Tim will be responsible for finding ways to monetize the web’s next up-and-coming social network. source
Today, and for the following 19 days, the Knight News Challenge is open for business. The theme of the challenge is Networks.
The most common question I’ve been asked since we announced the challenge is exactly what we mean by Networks. We’re trying not to define the term too…
If you have an itching for technology and journalism, get involved in this. Popular startups, including EveryBlock, received funding through the Knight challenge in prior years.
I’m moving back to New York in a few days. Unlike past...
OMG. I got so...
In this week’s Newsweek, a little...
Tumblr this morning. [h/t anne]
#@#$%!.tumblr.com
Here’s a hidden feature that shipped in...
We were mortified to learn that a team of people working on a Google project improperly used Mocality’s data and misrepresented our relationship with Mocality to encourage customers to create new websites. We’ve already unreservedly apologised to Mocality. We’re still investigating exactly how this happened, and as soon as we have all the facts, we’ll be taking the appropriate action with the people involved.
Is that apology enough? There was some serious shady stuff going on. They could’ve hurt Mocality’s business in a truly unethical way.
What if a little site you love doesn’t have a business model? Yell at the developers! Explain that you are tired of good projects folding and are willing to pay cash American dollar to prevent that from happening. It doesn’t take prohibitive per-user revenue to put a project in the black. It just requires a number greater than zero.Pinboard founder Maciej Ceglowski • Offering a rarely-heard take on the free-Web-app movement — that startups without business models are only hurting end-users, an argument that’s fresh in the minds of some after Gowalla’s staff got acquired by Facebook, but not its product. (This is a pain we know all too well, thanks to the pending death-by-acquisition of Apture and our scramble to replace it.) And in case you’re wondering, Ceglowski follows his own advice — he charges a one-time $9.55 fee to join his Delicious competitor. We’re with him (though we’re not opposed to the freemium idea that sites like Reddit use). We’ll gladly pay a $10 one-time fee to use a product if it means the product’s still going to exist in three years. source (via • follow)
Read more about it here, and leave a comment here. Our public page is here. (Must have your ask box open and be willing to hand out your e-mail address so we can send you an invite.) What are you waiting for?
EDIT: We have ten, thanks; please get back to me if we DMed you!
WOW. This is awesome. TheNextWeb just put up this mind-blowing content-copying tool called Clipboard, and we totally recommend you grab it. (It’s invite-only, but TNW has a link to an invite site.) This tool is like a combination of copy-paste and taking screenshots. Totally painless, seriously. (Our public profile is over here.) This is what content curation SHOULD be.
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