Category Archives: Tech Startups

Tech startups information

Steve Bell’s slides for “This Week in Startups” with Jason Calacanis

Photo and coverage, courteousy of Domain Noob <dot com>:

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Startup Trek visits with Mr. Max Shapiro, senior member of the Keiretsu Forum

Yesterday afternoon Startup Trek ventured to Sausalito, CA to visit with esteemed, senior Keiretsu Forum member Mr. Max Shapiro, CEO of innovative human resources firm PeopleConnect.com :

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Keiretsu Forum member and spokesperson Dennis Erokan enters statement responding to Jason Calacanis “Twitter war”

Nine years of helping entrepreneurs equals $200 MM in fundings for 200+ companies. Our track record speaks for itself.
We are not VCs. The Keiretsu Forum is a professionally managed association for Angel Investors. Keiretsu Forum is not the venue for every entrepreneur. With more than 200 fundings, we know we are filling a market need. [...]

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Sequoia-backed blogger Jason Calacanis launches “terrorist Jihad” campaign against Keiretsu Forum

Unfortunately young entrepreneur, blogger, and self-proclaimed startup guru, and Sequoia Capital backed “Mahalo” CEO Jason Calacanis has chosen to launch what he calls a “Holy War to destroy the Keiretsu Forum”.  He is portraying himself as Bin Ladin and calls his rage-a-thon “Jason’s Jihad”.
This absurdity started last Friday with a very uncivil series of blog [...]

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What makes a company a “startup”?

This week Nima Salke, a School of business senior enrolled in Business 454 at Cal Poly, asked me an excellent question: “what criteria exactly, defines a company as a ’startup’?”.
This is an not a particularly easy question to answer, and it is not a question that there is any perfect, black-and-white answer for.  This question [...]

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Wall Street Journal article: “Where Twitter ranks in Venture Capital (VC) History”

Are Venture Capitalists going to lose their shirts on Twitter?
Some historical perspective on the immense bet Venture Capitalists have made on Twitter:
http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2009/09/30/where-twitter-ranks-in-vc-history/
This article shows how the odds are against Twitter returning funds to investors. Because Twitter falls into the zone of “VC insanity” Tulip-bulb style investing, circa the 1999 Nasdaq bubble.
We were big fans [...]

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Cal Poly Business School Seniors tackle pre-launch planning for new Digital Media Firm

Business School Seniors in the School of Business at California Polytechnic University (San Luis Obispo CA; “Cal Poly”) enrolled in “Business 454″ are tackling the pre-launch planning for a new digital media production firm which will launch in January 2010 as “StartupTrek.TV”
The 36 business school seniors in the Orfalea School of business will gain hands-on [...]

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Twitter-Gate update: a hand-delivered appeal for tech support to Evan Williams

As we’ve detailed in a previous post, on July 21 2009, StartupTrek’s Twitter account was hijacked.  Someone — likely someone within a third-party Twitter service provider — seized control of our account and changed the email address, leaving us unable to use Twitter’s automated “password reset”.  We need actual “human” tech support to fix this and recover [...]

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6 Wireless startups spin for 6 minutes, at AlwaysOn 2009

We’ll have video snippets of the highlights from each of these presentations online in this post within 24 hours:
1. Mpowerplayer, Michael Powers, CEO
Provides a socially-enable “Application Store” for major web properties, including Sprint, European Telcos.
2. Promptu, Giuseppe Staffaroni, President & CEO
Slick iPhone application for browsing train and transit schedules by voice command.
3. Mobclix, Vishal Gurbuxani, [...]

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Startup Trek interviews Doron Reuveni, CEO of hot mobile application startup uTest

uTest co-founder and CEO Doron Reuveni interviews with Startup Trek about his fast-growing company during a break at the AlwaysOn 2009 conference. uTest is a venture capital funded startup based in Boston, MA which has invented a “crowdsourced” testing model for mobile device applications.
uTest has invented a way to globally “crowdsource” mobile application testing. [...]

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