Feastly Launches Its Airbnb of Shared Meals in NYC

By Whitney Phaneuf August 20, 2012

In Cuba, they have a name for it: Paladares, privately owned small restaurants often inside the cook’s home. In America, Noah Karesh is calling it Feastly, a website in private beta that aims to be the Airbnb of shared, private dining. Next week Feastly extends its service to New York City after enabling 60 meals for 1,000 users in...

If Coffee Is for Closers, Xactly Wants to Be the Caffeine

By Whitney Phaneuf August 17, 2012

A few years back I foolishly agreed to help a friend create a PowerPoint to motivate his startup’s sales team. He wanted to add a video clip of the scene from “Glengarry Glen Ross” when Alec Baldwin gives his ABCs of selling speech. My friend meant no irony, no nod to David Mamet’s masterful script about capitalism and cruelty,…

InfoArmy Rethinks Competitive Intelligence, Hits 1,000 iPad-Only Crowdsourced Reports

By Whitney Phaneuf August 17, 2012

When it launched in mid-June, InfoArmy made two bold moves toward its goal to hit 100,000 competitive intelligence reports on leading companies: It’s available only on iPad and its data comes from crowdsourcing. This week InfoArmy hits 1,000 reports, some of which are free via its iPad app including Yammer, Glassdoor, ZOHO, Evernote, and Trilliant. InfoArmy founder Jim Fowler...

Ben Lerer: I Started Thrillist To Prove I’m More Than My Last Name

By Whitney Phaneuf August 16, 2012

In a more serious moment at tonight’s PandoMonthly New York, Ben Lerer talks about getting out from under the shadow of his successful father, also his partner at New York-based venture firm Lerer Ventures. “The reason I think I’ve been successful has actually been…through insecurity,” says Lerer. “I don’t want to be some guy that people look at and say…

Ben Lerer on What’s Next: No “Thrillista,” Likely Gadgets and Electronics

By Whitney Phaneuf August 16, 2012

Don’t expect a “Thrillista” says Thrillist CEO Ben Lerer at tonight’s PandoMonthly New York. “We don’t have the confidence to think that we know how to talk to women,” says Lerer, a bottle of Budweiser by his side. Lerer tells Sarah Lacy he’s planning to enter new verticals using Thrillist’s $13 million series A. The company is looking closely at…

Bright Funds Modernizes the United Way Model for Giving

By Whitney Phaneuf August 15, 2012

The United Way pretty much invented social cause crowdfunding when it started collecting and allocating donations to select charities 125 years ago. But the nonprofit never moved beyond paper-driven campaigns. Launching in September, Bright Funds aims to automate the process by connecting nonprofits, donors and corporations through a consumer website and software platform. “Only eight percent of giving took place...

Newsle Grabs the News On Who You Know, Now Includes Gmail Contacts

By Whitney Phaneuf August 15, 2012

Alright Newsle, you got me. The aggregator that tracks and delivers news on your personal connections just launched a beta feature to import email contacts, starting with Gmail. So far, the results are meaningful and surprising, from news about people I see everyday on Facebook to a college professor I haven’t spoke to in years. When I started writing…

EMC and NetApp: This Startup Wants to Kill Your Closed Model for Storage

By Whitney Phaneuf August 14, 2012

Sometimes the most seemingly boring startups are quietly working behind the scenes to shift an entire industry. For instance, take Nexenta Systems. It launched in 2005 to challenge EMC and NetApp’s proprietary approach to data storage, and now it’s on track to a public offering, closing a $21 million Series C earlier this year and today reports it has...

Big Week for Bump: App Crosses 100M Total Downloads

By Whitney Phaneuf August 13, 2012

When Bump CEO Dave Lieb decided in his first year of business school to make a mobile app, he started researching the most popular ones in 2008 — fart noises and sideways keyboards. “It’s a totally different world,” says Lieb, five years later, sitting in his Mountain View office with a counter clocking the total downloads of Bump, his…

ReelSurfer Turns Our Reid Hoffman Videos Into 30-Second Sound Bites

By Whitney Phaneuf August 10, 2012

I’m giving you my unbiased opinion when I say the video team at PandoDaily is the best around. From last night’s PandoMonthly in San Francisco, we already have the entire candid conversation between LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman and Sarah Lacy up on YouTube, plus 13 of our favorite moments from the night in a YouTube playlist. But if…