Chad Hurley And Steve Chen’s AVOS Closes Its Series A Funding

By Greg Kumparak April 27, 2012

Hey, wake up! It may be 3 a.m. where most of our readership lives, but that doesn’t mean the news cycle stops. AVOS, the one-year-old company led by YouTube co-founders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen, has just announced that they’ve closed their Series A round. (more…)

Personal Info Scrubber SafeShepherd Finds its Flock, Doubles its Userbase In a Month

By Greg Kumparak April 26, 2012

The Valley loves a tale of a breakout success that finds a million users on launch day, but such things are usually the exception. While it’s great to celebrate these wins, it’s equally (or perhaps even more) important to study the companies that launch to moderate success but then twist and tweak their formula until their userbase balloons. Take

Snapguide Scores the First Mobile Integration with Pinterest

By Greg Kumparak April 25, 2012

Snapguide, the how-to guide creation/exploration app that I absolutely raved about last month, just got even better. In an update this morning, Snapguide has rolled out a feature that it’s able to claim as a world’s first: direct sharing from its iOS app to the Pinterest app. The user picks a guide, pushes two buttons, and Snapguide preps the...

Iorad Wants To Make Tutorial Building Suck Less

By Greg Kumparak April 24, 2012

Teaching the world how to do something on a computer generally kind of sucks. You’ve got two options: You can record (or “screencast”) a video of whatever it is that you’re trying to show, or you can take a bunch of screenshots and slap them together into one long document. The first option is easy but usually results in a…

Live From PandoMonthly: Sarah Lacy’s Fireside Chat With Peter Thiel

By Greg Kumparak April 19, 2012

We’re live from the Madrone Studios in San Francisco for our third ever PandoMonthly event. We’re lucky enough to have Peter Thiel as our guest tonight, joining Sarah Lacy on stage for a Fireside chat on the state of the Valley, the early days of PayPal and Facebook, and everything in between. Couldn’t make it out to San Francisco? Couldn’t…

Four College Students Take On Tuberculosis Using the Power Of the Internet

By Greg Kumparak April 19, 2012

You know what’s terrible? Tuberculosis. I was tempted to start an online petition to change the name to “Terriberculosis”, but then I remembered that online petitions don’t actually, you know, do anything. Fortunately, a group of students out of Tufts University have come up with a way to use the Internet to fight Tuberculosis in a way that actually would...

The Bootstrapped Rally Charges Forward, Moves Out of Mexico

By Greg Kumparak April 17, 2012

Remember the Bootstrapped Rally? The crazy, multi-day race through the deserts of Mexico, starring a bunch of venture capitalists and startup founders blasting around in pieced-together clunkers? Turns out, people want to race. Just…maybe not through Mexico. (more…)

Screw TVs — Why Isn’t Apple Building A Smartwatch?

By Greg Kumparak April 16, 2012

3.2 million dollars. That’s how much the iOS-friendly Pebble smartwatch has raised on Kickstarter in just six days. It’s the fastest growing project in Kickstarter’s history; by tonight, it’ll almost certainly have raised more than any Kickstarter project before it. Are you listening, Apple? There’s gold in them thar hills. (more…)

Hey, Look! We’ve Got A Shiny New Mobile Site

By Greg Kumparak April 13, 2012

I live a good chunk of my life through the display of my phone. It’s partially because I’m a reporter, partially because my previous gig was as a mobile gadgets editor, and partially because I just friggin’ love phones and think they’re magical. That even I didn’t like to visit PandoDaily on my phone was a bit of…

Kickstarter Gets Yet Another $1M Project: The Pebble, An iPhone-Friendly Smartwatch

By Greg Kumparak April 12, 2012

And my love/hate relationship with Kickstarter only continues to grow. Screw paying bills, I have shiny things to buy. Hitting your self-set funding goal on a Kickstarter project is great and all — but all the really cool kids pull in at least a million bucks. Bonus points for style if you do it in some absurd...