Startups

The social 'gifting' boom: Wrapp now sending 1M cards a week

A handful of players -- one of them named Facebook -- have worked hard over the past year to create a new category of business known as social gifting. Facebook saw enough opportunity that last spring it snapped up a startup called Karma and built what became Facebook Gifts -- a way for any of Facebook's billion-plus users to send a gift a friend, whether it's a bottle of wine, an iTunes gift card or an item of clothing.

Square, meantime, added gift cards this month to Square Wallet to help its battle with PayPal. And a … Read more

CES 2013: 139 startups, and one that stinks

Among the throng of startups heading to the 2013 International CES next month will be one that's trying to crack through all the noise by stinking up the joint. Literally.

This is the goal of Charlene Coleman, the founder and CEO of Sensory Acumen, a bootstrapped venture from Orinda, Calif., that's spent the last three years working on a device, called GameSkunk, that spews all sorts of scents at people as they play video games. At least that's the hope.

"We thought this would take games to another level," said Coleman, who's now working … Read more

Path shows Facebook how to do social search right

There's been much talk this year about the future of search in social networks. Facebook processes more than a billion queries a day with a notoriously underpowered search engine. "We aren't even trying," Mark Zuckerberg has said. Not yet, anyway.

Today we're getting a good idea of what "trying" looks like. Path, the social-networking startup that brands itself as "the smart journal," is rolling out an update today that brings some innovative search features to its apps for smartphones and tablets.

Path consists of a series of saved moments -- photos, … Read more

How to prevent and respond to a user revolt

The last thing you need as an entrepreneur is for your company to be engulfed in a public controversy. Just ask Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Path, Airbnb, Geeklist, and the countless other companies, big and small, that have been the target of press backlash and user vitriol.

It doesn't matter how careful you are: the more successful you become, the more likely it is that you'll make a mistake that ignites the blogosphere. There are ways to minimize the fallout and, more importantly, ways to prevent a large-scale user revolt in the first place.

Let's take Instagram's recent Terms of Service controversy … Read more

Photo organizer startup Everpix expands to Windows

PARIS -- After a year doing its Apple-centric groundwork, start-up Everpix is ready to find a wider audience for its photo sync and organization service.

Today, the company announced version 1.0 of its Windows software, an out-of-the-way utility that slurps photos from people's hard drives and uploads them to company's servers. There, Everpix analyzes each photo mathematically for a variety of characteristics then synchronize the files with iPhones, iPads, and the Everpix Web site.

Everpix, though, isn't really about syncing files like Dropbox or Google Drive. It's also not about online photo communities such as … Read more

Leap Motion giving 10,000 developers free Leaps

Leap Motion, which created an innovative gesture control technology that measures users' movements to an accuracy of a hundredth of a millimeter, is expanding its developer program and releasing a new software development kit.

According to Michael Buckwald, CEO of the San Francisco startup, Leap Motion is giving 10,000 developers free Leap units over the next two weeks in a bid to dramatically increase the number of potential applications being designed to work with the new technology.

All told, 40,000 people have applied to be part of Leap Motion's developer program, in part because the number of … Read more

Video app ShowYou works to make mobile couch surfing easier

For a couple of years now, executives at YouTube have been working on what they call "the lean-back experience" -- ways of watching online video that don't require viewers to choose something else to watch every two or three minutes.

The company has tried various tactics to increase the time users spend on its site, from deep integrations with connected televisions to funding channels led by celebrities. It has also redesigned its Web site and mobile apps to emphasize a left-hand "guide" feature, which is designed to make it easier to find stuff you might … Read more

Quantum computing goes mainstream? New VC fund debuts

Quantum computing tends to sounds like something out of a science fiction novel or at least The Big Bang Theory. But a new venture capital fund, launching today, is trying to take it mainstream.

The Quantum Wave Fund, which will set up shop in Boston, plans to invest solely in early stage, private companies working on breakthroughs in quantum technology. It won't be providing funding for early research but instead will seek out companies who already have viable and promising products related to quantum computing.

"Too many people take quantum computing as hypothetical," Serguei Kouzmine, managing partner … Read more

Remote-vision quadcopter soars over LeWeb

PARIS -- LeWeb's focus this year on "the Internet of things" this year brought Net-enabled door locks, houseplant monitors, and footstep loggers to the conference stage. But the gadget that caught the most attention was a remote-controlled quadcopter.

Quadcopters are all the rage these days, popularized best by the Parrot AR.Drone. Here at LeWeb, startup Team BlackSheep showed its take on the tech with a model that's remotely piloted by an operator who sees what's going on from a camera mounted on the drone itself.

Raphael Pirker, founder of the company, piloted a TBS … Read more