Category Archives: Startups

“Seattle is the mobile Silicon Valley”

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…

DiscoveryBeat 2010: “App discovery is the key to customer satisfaction in the smartphone era. Discuss.”

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…

Taking risk and dealing with the consequences – a case study

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…

Please welcome SPARQCode to the Founders Co-op family

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…