Why is it that Viddy, Socialcam, Pinterest, and others have suddenly accelerated their growth in such a short timeframe? The surface answer is, of course, the integration with Facebook’s open graph. But that’s the symptom, not the cause.

Groupon has had a rough quarter. A rough year, even. No clear road to profitability, a disastrous accounting mistake, that beer-swilling meeting. The stupid Earth Day email. The company has become a punch line and cautionary tale. Even the Daily Deals summit — an event created for an industry created by Groupon — was

In a dingy converted apartment building off Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood, there’s a startup revolutionizing online video discovery and curation. Cough. Buzzword. Cough. Skepticism. I had exactly these reservations, when I first heard the pitch about Chill. Then I took the product for a spin with co-founder Brian Norgard and did some research about user statistics. Consider me “un-reserved.”

People hate ads, with two exceptions: A) Sometimes one particular ad campaign will strike the public fancy, or B) Sometimes people happen to be in the ad business and, thus, are paid to like ads. In general, people hate ads so much that they’ve made ad avoidance an art. A tool that facilitates skipping ads is 

Four classes of startups in the books over two years and Bay Area incubator AngelPad ”hasn’t had an oops” yet, according to co-founder Thomas Korte. Well thats about as exciting as elevator music and it’s equally as likely to produce a 100x return on investment. With the ambitious plan AngelPad has laid out, and the very nature of startups, this batting...

Quick – name a first-person shooter game that you can play on Facebook. If Uberstrike didn’t immediately come to mind, you must not be one of the 5 million gamers playing it. The free-to-play and cross-platform game is doing crazy numbers and is set to explode on the iPad and Android tablets. It has more than 800,000 Likes on…

Last week Forbes ran a story in which Fred Wilson discussed the challenges facing the venture capital industry. According to the piece, he said, “The biggest issue: there is simply too much money.” I have the utmost respect for Fred, but I think framing the problem as “too much money” is like saying gamblers lose in Vegas, because they’re…

Thomas Edison’s saying that “Genius is 1 percent inspiration, 99 percent perspiration,” has served as New York-based Behance’s guiding principle since the company’s founding in 2006. Today, though, the quote would have to mention $6.5 million in funding to be completely relevant. The funding round – Behance’s first – was led by Union Square Ventures, which was  joined by…

Share links and earn rewards! It sounds like a shady Internet get-rich-quick scheme. Or a way to spam your friends in exchange for pennies. There is a reason pay-per-tweet businesses geared at average Joes and Janes haven’t quite taken off. But word-of-mouth marketing is so damn tempting to capitalize on, especially when social media allows us to track and…

Regular readers will know that PandoDaily has been somewhat, ah, skeptical of Bravo’s new “Silicon Valley” reality show, which begins shooting next month. “Snobs!” cried one critic. “Wait until you know more details before you judge!” wailed…well, actually, the exact same critic who in no way has been lobbying for a cameo on the show. And, sure enough, now…