QFPay‘s card reader admittedly looks a bit clunkier than its U.S. or European equivalents Square or iZettle.
It looks like a wonky, old calculator. But that’s because Chinese consumers don’t trust merchants easily and a basic phonejack reader without a keypad makes them nervous, says COO Tim Lee. He says consumers are worried that their PINs will get stolen by unscrupulous merchants. Continue reading
Dave McClure started his Big Omaha talk warning it would offend some people. He was right.
His focus was on the idea that "everything sucks and nobody notices," but it ended up lost amid potentially offensive exchanges and an abundance of cursing, which quickly sparked a conversation on Twitter. Beyond that, he told the crowd there are … Continue reading
Norway’s Crown Prince Haakon and his wife Princess Mette-Marit were in Silicon Valley this week, and I asked them about their hopes to bring more startups and innovation to their home country.
I interviewed Haakon and Mette-Marit at Norway’s Innovation House Silicon Valley, a co-working space in Palo Alto for Norwegian startups looking to enter the US market. The couple saw demos from several startups — the prince even tried on some Oculus Rift virtual reality goggles — it was part of Making View‘s demo of its technology for capturing and exploring 360-degree video footage. (He said it was “pretty awesome.”) Continue reading
We’d like to thank Omaha’s own Hayneedle for its sponsorship of Big Omaha 2013. Hayneedle is a classic example of a startup from the Silicon Prairie that not only has made it big but understands that it’s important to support other entrepreneurs in the community.
Hayneedle is the exclusive sponsor of the Big Omaha 2013 livestream and also provided much of the awesome furniture available in KANEKO’s simulcast lounge … Continue reading
As the founder of If We Ran the World and Make Love Not Porn, Cindy Gallop is taking steps to tackle the absence of honest conversation in society about sex. At Big Omaha this afternoon, she described the business model of Make Love Not Porn as shared values combined with shared action to create shared profit.
The difference from mainstream porn? All of the site’s content is user-generated and depicts … Continue reading
Bing‘s social sidebar, which shows relevant entries from your Facebook friends, Twitter, Klout, Quora and other services, just got a lot more interactive. You can now like Facebook posts in the social sidebar and add their own comments. In additi… Continue reading
Bing‘s social sidebar, which shows relevant entries from your Facebook friends, Twitter, Klout, Quora and other services, just got a lot more interactive. You can now like Facebook posts in the social sidebar and add their own comments. In addition you can now also see all of the existing comments on a post right in the sidebar, too. This, Microsoft believes, will make the social search experience on Bing even more interactive, engaging and helpful than before. It also means users don’t have to leave Bing to engage with these posts. Chances are, after all, that they will get distracted by all of the other goodies Facebook has to offer once they leave Bing and won’t return anytime soon. Personally, I’ve never found these social search results all that useful. Microsoft, however, clearly believes that this, in combination with what they are doing around semantic search, will allow it to continue to compete with Google, which seems to have de-emphasized social search over the last few months. With its Scroogled campaign and “Bing It On” challenge, Microsoft has obviously been taking a far more aggressive stance against Google in recent months and it’s slowly adding new users. Currently, Google has a market share of about 67 percent in the U.S., and Bing is close to reaching 17 percent. There have been some recent rumors, however, that Yahoo is looking to drop Bing as its search provider (Yahoo currently commands just under 12 percent of the U.S. search market with its Bing-powered search), but given the long-term deal between the two companies, that isn’t likely to happen anytime soon. Continue reading
Yes, we do need high-skilled immigrants because we don’t have enough qualified workers. Contrary to a widely publicized report claiming that a tech-talent shortage is a myth, A new Brookings Institute study confirms our argument that there is a shortage and businesses need immigrants to fill the innovation vacuum. Continue reading
Yes, we do need high-skilled immigrants because we don’t have enough qualified workers. Contrary to a widely publicized report claiming that a tech-talent shortage is a myth, A new Brookings Institute study confirms our argument that there is a shortage and businesses need immigrants to fill the innovation vacuum. Continue reading
Serial entrepreneur with too many ideas rattling around in your head? Then you’re going to like this one: a new mobile app called Elevatr will help you keep track of your inspirations, as well as develop a business model, in order to turn your passing thoughts into plans actually worth pursuing some day. The beautifully designed app was dreamt up by New York-based David Spiro, a recent college of engineering and business school grad from the University of Michigan, who had spent time working with the standard tools for business model development, like the Business Model Canvas and Lean Canvas, while in school. “It became very clear that entrepreneurship – and people inspired by the startup revolution – is more than those actually studying entrepreneurship,” Spiro explains. “I was really inspired to take those tools that I was taught to use, and create a mobile-first product that could apply to more than just those people who were in my classes,” he says. Having shelved the startup idea he had been working on in college, Spiro finally decided to commit himself to the creation of Elevatr full-time, after first doing some consulting for a local angel following graduation in spring 2012. By the end of the year, he had an MVP ready to go, after contracting with Fueled, a mobile app development agency in Soho who had previously built apps for JackThreads and Urban Daddy. Spiro now works out of Fueled’s offices, and has hired a small team (with help from AngelList), including CTO Rafael Amorim. The product itself is simple. Elevatr is essentially a note-taking app which takes the structure of a traditional business plan, and makes it more accessible to design and develop on the smaller screen of mobile devices. After tapping the button to add your idea, the app prompts you to describe the idea in 140 characters or less, just like Twitter. That’s actually a challenge for some entrepreneurs, who can’t seem to condense their business’s idea to a single sentence, as we’ve discovered in the past, much less 140 characters. But Spiro thinks it’s a good first step, noting “if you can’t explain it in less than 140 characters, you probably don’t know what you’re doing.” On the following screens, you’re walked through the other standard pieces to business model creation, filling out details as to the target market, market size, competition, differentiation, features and uses, and so on. There’s also plenty Continue reading
