In March of this year I speculated that – between Google Voice and Android – the era of the carrier-free cellphone might be upon us. Many of my mobile-savvy friends scoffed – the existing model was too entrenched, they argued, and the carriers would fight like hell to delay their transition from value-added service provider continue…
As regular readers know, Andy and I have been messing around with a new approach to early-stage tech investing called royalty based finance. It’s still early days, but we’re very excited about the idea because it represents an entirely new “third way” of supporting the growth of young companies vs. the traditional equity-centric angel or continue…
Earlier this week, AppStoreHQ released Hottest Apps on Twitter, a ranking of iPhone apps based on the volume and quality of tweets about each app (if you’re curious, you can read more about the ranking methodology here). The project was a fun one for several reasons, but the biggest eye-opener was the sheer volume of continue…
Sometimes it’s the obvious stuff that’s the hardest to see. The AppStoreHQ team has been hammering away on all kinds of hard technical problems on the topic of helping iPhone owners find iPhone apps. But a friend looked at the site the other day and said something that stopped me dead in my tracks. Instead continue…
My recent conversations with several of our portfolio companies have reminded me of a Zen maxim that goes something like this… Before Enlightenment: chop wood, carry water. After Enlightenment: chop wood, carry water. At Founders Co-op we focus on ideas that come out of the gate fast – they typically ship product, engage customers and continue…
Keith Smith just announced the public launch of his new company, BigDoor Media. The thesis behind BigDoor was formulated and refined by Keith and co-founder Jeff Malek in their Icarus-like journey at their previous company Zango (a.k.a. 180Solutions). As Keith acknowledges in his launch blog post, Zango was built around a powerful insight about online continue…
A few months ago the AppStoreHQ team noticed a spike in visits from The New York Times. We checked our referrer logs and discovered a very flattering description of our iPhone app search offering in this article. This morning we saw a similar bump and wondered if the same piece had been rediscovered. Instead, we continue…
The clever guys at Cooler Planet keep coming up with new ways to shine a light on the U.S. market for residential and commercial solar panel installations. Here’s their latest: a real-time display (anonymized, of course) of the savings estimates provided to consumers and businesses using their solar system cost estimator. You can see an continue…
Today we’re proud to announce a new member of the Founders Co-op family: Nearlyweds! In business since 2007, Nearlyweds! provides personal wedding websites for design-conscious couples. In a market littered with generic free offerings, Nearlyweds! has built a great premium business by focusing on the user experience, partnering with top invitation designers in the industry continue…
I’ve always been kind of a word geek. One of my favorite games when I was a kid was “Mad Libs“, a notebook of short stories with blank spaces provided for strategically placed nouns, adjectives and verbs. Depending on the words you or your friends chose, the resulting story could be hilarious, obscene, or just continue…