startup

Remember when kids used to play stickball, marbles, and hopscotch instead of iPhone games? Well I don't either. But this Kickstarter project wants to revive a medium of simpler times -- with a modern twist.

The Can is a tin can telephone wired for IP phone use. It has a microphone, a speaker, and a jack for your computer, phone, or tablet so you can pretend you're 7 years old and it's 1939 again.

Aside from its patently ridiculous design, alternately listening to and speaking into The Can seems like more fun than just slapping a regular phone to your skull.

As the video below shows, The Can comes in Commander and Mini editions, with the former featuring an indicator light for missed calls. The Mini, meanwhile, jacks into your cell phone with a TRS connector. … Read more

AVOS Systems, the Internet venture started by YouTube co-founders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen, has closed a Series A venture capital financing round with some help from old friends.

Google Ventures led the Series A round, along with New Enterprise Associates, according to AVOS. Madrone Capital and China-based Innovation Works also participated in the financing. AVOS did not divulge how much it raised in the round.

Hurley and Chen made a name for themselves in the Web community back in 2006 when they sold YouTube to Google for $1.65 billion. In their new role as leaders of AVOS, they've bought social-bookmarking site Delicious from Yahoo. … Read more

When a problem arises in OS X because of a software configuration error, often one troubleshooting step to take for clearing the issue or at least investigating it further is to boot into Safe Mode; however, sometimes Safe Mode may not work.

Booting to Safe Mode in OS X is done by holding the Shift key at startup, which triggers a minimal boot environment where only basic Apple-supplied extensions and services are loaded. This will help you determine if problems are happening from peripheral devices or third-party extensions such as those supplied by some security software packages. In addition to … Read more

SAN FRANCISCO--There's a whole lot of mobile startups these days, but how many of them are actually, you know, mobile?

A company called Needle is, and if you'd wandered near South Park here today, you would have seen its so-called Mobile Contact Center -- essentially a huge RV -- parked on the street with several employees working away inside.

Ostensibly based in Salt Lake City, Needle contracts with retail partners to provide them experts to chat with end users. The idea is that there's likely no one better suited to explaining a product, or answering questions about … Read more

No decision is more important in a startup's life than the decision of who to start the company with. The right founding team can quickly find product-market fit, while an imbalanced team can find themselves working two years on a product nobody wants.

"What matters is not ideas, but the people who have them," Y Combinator partner Paul Graham said in 2005. "Good people can fix bad ideas, but good ideas can't save bad people."

I've seen hundreds of startups blow up because of teams that didn't know or respect each other. … Read more

"Too many single white kids are getting funded," 500 Startups founder Dave McClure says. "We're missing a big f---ing market."

McClure is kicking off the MamaBear Family Tech Conference today in Mountain View, Calif., to attack that market. At the same time, he wants angel investing to open up. It's overrun by men, he says.

"There's no lack of female founders anymore," according to McClure. He says that about 20 percent of his portfolio companies are run by women. Many are addressing family markets, he says. There are also a number … Read more

The latest effort from James Cameron has all the earmarks of a science fiction movie -- but in real life.

The movie director has joined Google executives Larry Page and Eric Schmidt in backing Planetary Resources, a mysterious company that promises to "create a new industry and a new definition of 'natural resources.'"

It's not entirely clear what the company does, but according to a press release uncovered by MIT's Technology Review, Planetary Resources "will overlay two critical sectors -- space exploration and natural resources - to add trillions of dollars to the global GDP.&… Read more

SANTA CLARA, Calif. -- Is 3D where photography is going? Two companies at the Demo conference here today are betting on it.

ArqBall makes a mobile app that creates 3D images, or "spins," of physical objects. Designed for commerce initially, it lets you quickly create a 3D spinning model of an object for sale and embed it in a sales page. The demo made the creating app look very easy to use: You put your object on a turntable or lazy Susan, put your iPhone in a stand facing it, and run the app. The software creates the … Read more

If your world isn't already complex enough, or if you're just a control freak, it's time to add some ninja to your life.

Sensor-equipped platforms called Ninja Blocks are designed to bring the Internet of things to a ubiquitous, open-source reality.

The result of a recent successful Kickstarter project that raised more than $100,000, Ninja Blocks obey simple "if this, then that" commands to add functionality to your environment through the Web.

For instance, when your friends are playing on Xbox Live a Ninja Block could trigger an action in your living room, like turning on a lamp. Or a Ninja Block could text your phone when a package is delivered to your door. You could also activate household lights or electronics via your Ninja by talking to Siri. … Read more