Fred Wilson wrote a great piece this week on the pain and frustration felt by mobile app publishers who rely on iTunes or Android Market as the primary distribution channel for their apps. In Fred’s words: “Centralized control of an ecosytem never offers as much opportunity and diversity as a decentralized system. And in the continue…
NOTE: I started this post before Steve Jobs announced his resignation as Apple’s CEO, but it’s particularly poignant in light of that news… I had a fun, thought-provoking conversation this morning with Darien Brown, CEO and co-founder of YongoPal (a recent 500 Startups grad). The general theme of our conversation was the new kinds of social continue…
If you’ve been following our recent investment activity here at Founders Co-op, you know we love social games (e.g., Big Door, Massively Fun) and developer platforms (e.g., Urban Airship, PHP Fog). Today we’re excited to announce an investment that takes these themes to a whole new level: Zipline Games. The mobile games business is exploding: depending continue…
I’ve been very skeptical of Microsoft’s ability to play a significant role in the exploding smartphone marketplace. Despite the company’s incredibly strong position in the enterprise, Windows Phone 7 has so far been promoted as a consumer offering, with snazzy UI tricks and lots of built-in social media, apps and photo-sharing goodness. But between Apple’s consumer-delighting continue…
That quote jumped out at me in an announcement this week from Ireland-based NewBay that they’ve decided to set up their US headquarters here in Seattle. To be honest, I hadn’t heard of NewBay before this news found its way into my feed reader, and I can’t vouch for the quality of their “digital lifestyle continue…
If you’ve been paying attention to the massive disruption underway in the mobile ecosystem (think iPhone, iPad, Android, app stores + platform wars) you’ve probably gotten the message that carriers aren’t what moves the market any longer. Operating systems (iOS, Android, BlackBerry, WebOS, Windows Phone 7, etc) and the app ecosystems they support are where continue…
I’ll be attending CTIA for the next few days – I’m on a panel Thursday afternoon and have a bunch of meetings lined up on behalf of Founders Co-op portfolio company AppStoreHQ – but I’d love to connect with anyone at the show who’s interested in the Android platform, the mobile developer community and the continue…
One of Andy’s favorite expression around Founders Co-op is “GFA” (Get Fucking Aggressive). Here’s a mini-case study on that from the past 24 hours: Yesterday afternoon FC portfolio company AppStoreHQ reached out to Jolie O’Dell at Mashable to get her take on AppESP, an on-device personalized app discovery engine for Android they’d just released to public continue…
I was out for the past two weeks so TechCrunch beat me to the punch, but just before I left town we closed an investment in SPARQCode (the company has been operating as MSKYNET but is rebranding to match their flagship product name). I think of SPARQCode as “Bit.ly for the real world” – a drop-dead easy way continue…
This story is all over the news today (here’s a link to the New York Times take on it) but I can’t get over how great an idea this is. Google is releasing a software development framework that makes it drop-dead easy to build and publish simple Android apps. My kids are only 3 and continue…