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BuddyTV, improves the television watching experience by making it more interactive. The business is based off of the idea that people have iPads and smartphones on while watching television, to interact with other people that are watching the same show at the same time. This week, the company is launching a new feature to go after the broadcast tv market.
It’s becoming the TVGuide Channel for the 21st century. With comments. Continue reading
Yesterday, news started cycling that the hit HBO show “Game of Thrones” is the most pirated television show in history. And while this might be a great talking point to use when arguing that “Game of Thrones” should be for sale on iTunes or on Netflix, it doesn’t make good business sense.
Before we all get out the pitchforks for HBO, let’s take some time to understand the company, and why ignoring the piracy is actually a savvy business move. Continue reading
I’m considering giving up my vegan ways for a couple of weeks, because I hear that where I’m headed, there is great steak. In Austin, Texas. Continue reading
Seattle is a great city, full of passionate entrepreneurs, with plenty of capital, billion-dollar success stories, and a high standard of living. But is it a good place to build a company, grow it over time, and go big? To find out, let’s look at the city’s pros and cons. Continue reading
Seattle has a problem. It’s a good place to build a company, it has a deep talent pool, and it has a deep well of potential capital from historical exits. But the money isn’t being used effectively, and the entrepreneurs who have seen exits are keeping it close to their chests.
In the last two years, Seattle’s biggest exits for startups were PopCap Games, which sold to EA for $1.3 billion, and real-estate company Zillow, which went public on NASDAQ, valued at more than $1 billion. Aside from being technology companies, the two shared a defining characteristic: Neither was funded by Seattle-based venture capitalists.
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Some people see Microsoft as a company in decline, in part because it draws such a large part of its revenues from old and not that innovative business lines. (It does, however, still make some innovative products.) But reputations aside, what of its real world effect on startup culture?
According to people I spoke to from Seattle’s tech industry, Microsoft’s influence on the startup ecosystem has little to do with product or innovation inside the company and more to do with sheer scale. With 100,000 employees and billions in the bank, there’s always going to be some collateral productivity.
The phenomenon is true for Seattle as much as it is for the rest of the world. Because of its stature, and despite management missteps (like literally betting on a losing horse), the company attracts a wealth of talent, which can have positive spin-off effects for the tech community. Continue reading
Of the few questions outsiders have about Seattle’s star startup ecosystem, the most common is: “Why haven’t Amazon and Microsoft done more for the area?” Microsoft deserves a post of its own, but the truth is that Amazon has had a bigger impact on startups than nearly any other company in the world.
The key words are Amazon Web Services.
Startups don’t require much to get off the ground these days, but among the top-five needs is solid hardware to build on. When Amazon introduced AWS in 2006, it simplified startup creation and vastly reduced the overhead startups need.
AWS’s impact shouldn’t be overstated, and cost reduction isn’t the only benefit. But AWS now powers roughly 1 percent of the Internet, with popular companies like Yelp and Foursquare running on top of the structure. It is one of the largest supercomputers ever created. And, if that’s not enough: Netflix relies on AWS.
If AWS didn’t exist, the startup world would be incredibly different. But despite so much of the Internet’s reliance on Amazon, the company is sometimes seen as the neglectful parent of Seattle. Continue reading
I’ve spent much of this week talking to people at some of Seattle’s largest gaming companies, and whenever I ask “Why is gaming so popular in Seattle?” the response is nearly always: “Well, I’d never really thought about it before.”
Gaming in Seattle is like social networking in Silicon Valley – it’s huge, growing, and nothing’s going to kill it any time soon. Companies such as BigFish Gaming, PopCap, and Valve are here. Then there are Microsoft’s Xbox division, Bungee, and Zynga’s satellite offices. And that’s to say nothing of the dozens of gaming companies that quietly push out best-sellers but remain largely off the radar. The gaming community, it would seem, is a natural extension of Seattle’s strengths and flaws as a technology ecosystem. Continue reading
A new service from Y Combinator-backed book publisher Hyperink aims to take blog posts, stir in a coherent narrative, and bake them into marvelous ebooks. To help it achieve that ambitious goal, the company has today announced that it will be bringing on three new investors.
The blogs-to-book service works largely as you’d imagine it might, with Hyperink gathering together 30 to 50 blog posts by a single author, and then compiling them into an ebook format. The company assigns an editor to work directly with the author to create a cohesive narrative and the final version is released on all of the major ebook stores (with the temporary, but important, exception of the iBooks Store).
This repackaging strategy is going to be a tough nut to crack, from both a literary and logistical perspective. Continue reading
For most small game studios, designing for the iPhone and Android is a major pain point.
Double Fine, the studio that made waves in February for its insanely record-breaking Kickstarter campaign, has found a clever solution via a partnership with Zipline Games, a Seattle-based gaming company that offers a mix of cloud optimization with a cross-platform framework for game developers called Moai. Continue reading
