California Governor Jerry Brown intervened to stop another BART strike this week, and observers say he’s likely to impose a 60-day cooling-off period on negotiators, meaning Bay Area commuters may not have to worry about transit disruptions again until October. But memories of last month’s 4.5 day strike, which left 200,000 commuters stranded, spurred long … Continue reading “The Antidote for Strike Stress: Take Carma to Work”
Author: Elise Craig
Elise Craig covers technology, innovation and startup culture in the Bay Area. She has worked as a news producer on the breaking news desk of the Washington Post and as an assistant research editor at Wired magazine. She is also an avid freelance writer and editor and has written for Wired, BusinessWeek, Fortune.com, MarketWatch, Outside.com, and others.
Craig earned her bachelor’s degree in English from Georgetown University in 2006, and a master’s of journalism from the University of California at Berkeley in 2010.
Instacart Bets the Market Is Ripe Again for Grocery Delivery
Instacart CEO Apoorva Mehta submitted an interesting application to get into startup acclerator Y Combinator. Instead of going through the normal process, he used his grocery delivery service startup to send the partners beer—a month after the program’s spring 2012 term had started. It worked. The company was admitted. Apoorva had founded Instacart at the … Continue reading “Instacart Bets the Market Is Ripe Again for Grocery Delivery”
New York Rock Exchange Sells Fans Shares of the Music They Love
Setting up New York Rock Exchange, an Emeryville, CA-based marketplace that sells music lovers shares of individual songs, wasn’t easy for Jeff Annison, CEO and co-founder of Underground Labs. The idea itself was simple: allow fans to buy pieces of their favorite bands’ songs, letting them get a little closer to their beloved artists. But … Continue reading “New York Rock Exchange Sells Fans Shares of the Music They Love”
Breaking Up Is Hard To Do; Wevorce Aims to Make It Easier
Michelle Crosby, co-founder and CEO of divorce mediation start-up Wevorce, knew what she wanted to do when she was nine. Six years into an epic custody battle, one of her parents’ lawyers put her on the stand and asked her which parent she would want to be with on a desert island. “At nine, you … Continue reading “Breaking Up Is Hard To Do; Wevorce Aims to Make It Easier”
Tips from TravelNerd Offer a Smoother Ride Through the Airport
There are tons of travel apps out there to help you plan for everything from booking tickets to translating foreign languages to finding your way through museums. But TravelNerd offers something a little different: an app that will help improve what’s often the most chaotic part of any trip—the journey through the airport—-by directing you to the … Continue reading “Tips from TravelNerd Offer a Smoother Ride Through the Airport”
Online Galleries Help Shoppers Get Smart About Art
When San Francisco-based UGallery came on the scene in 2006, co-founders Stephen Tanenbaum and Alex Farkas purposely targeted a demographic new to serious art: people who were ready to graduate from posters taped on their walls to unique pieces to decorate their homes and offices, but weren’t necessarily going to auction houses and storing their … Continue reading “Online Galleries Help Shoppers Get Smart About Art”
Startups Offer Webcam Workouts for the Gym-Averse
From the Nike+ FuelBand to the Wii Fit, and from YouTube workout videos to Fitbit, there are more ways than ever to work out and track exercise and health without ever setting foot in the gym. But there’s still a lot these apps and gadgets can’t do. Wearing a sensor to track your steps/strokes/stairs can … Continue reading “Startups Offer Webcam Workouts for the Gym-Averse”
Shipwire Gives Mom-and-Pops the Fulfillment Services of Big Retailers
Shipwire CEO Damon Schechter started his company with a simple goal: “To help small businesses take on the efficiencies that big businesses have.” He cofounded the Palo Alto-based order fulfillment services operation with chief technology officer Evan Robinson at the end of 2006, but to get there, he had to wait until the timing was … Continue reading “Shipwire Gives Mom-and-Pops the Fulfillment Services of Big Retailers”
Scanadu Aims to Empower Patients with DIY Vital Signs Device
An accident changed Walter de Brouwer’s life. Over the past few decades, the Scanadu CEO had his hands in everything from semiotics and academia to publishing computer and cyberpunk magazines to founding an early Internet company acquired by Qwest Communications International to working with the MIT Media Lab and Nicholas Negroponte’s One Laptop per Child … Continue reading “Scanadu Aims to Empower Patients with DIY Vital Signs Device”
Misfit Wearables Puts Design First in New Activity Tracker
Misfit Wearables cofounder and CEO Sonny Vu learned a valuable lesson at his last company, AgaMatrix. The mobile health startup produced a blood glucose meter called the iBGStar, which allows users to check, monitor and share their readings on their iPhones. With only a glucose strip and the iPhone plug-in, users could track and analyze … Continue reading “Misfit Wearables Puts Design First in New Activity Tracker”
Giftly Looks to Disrupt Traditional Gift Card Market
When CEO Tim Bentley founded Giftly, a site that allows users to give gift certificates through recipients’ credit cards, he realized business would be heavily seasonal. The three big holidays for gift cards are Christmas, Mother’s Day, and Father’s Day, and almost 50 percent of the market is sold in the fourth quarter of the … Continue reading “Giftly Looks to Disrupt Traditional Gift Card Market”
Search Engine Blekko Brings Human Evaluation to Search Results
Two years after he sold his second start-up, the online news aggregator Topix, to a trio of media companies, Blekko CEO Rich Skrenta was ready for a new challenge. During his 20-year career, the computer engineer had worked for AOL, Sun Microsystems, Unix Systems Labs, and Commodore Business Machines, and had also founded two companies … Continue reading “Search Engine Blekko Brings Human Evaluation to Search Results”
PokitDok Helps Patients Connect the Dots in a Fragmented Healthcare System
Before co-founding PokitDok, a forum and marketplace for health services, CEO Lisa Maki was in the midst of a major health issue. A serious athlete, Maki had rowed crew at Stanford and snowboarded in Utah, but she was experiencing back pain so severe she couldn’t walk 50 yards, and had to rest halfway through a … Continue reading “PokitDok Helps Patients Connect the Dots in a Fragmented Healthcare System”
Subscription Service Love With Food Helps Gourmets Discover New Treats
When Aihui Ong, founder and CEO of Love With Food, a Birchbox-style food subscription service, was applying to the incubator 500 Startups last fall, she wasn’t too optimistic. She believed in her company, which she had conceived as a sort of Groupon for small food producers, but she knew that she faced tough odds as … Continue reading “Subscription Service Love With Food Helps Gourmets Discover New Treats”
InstaEdu’s Brother-Sister Team Puts Tutoring Online, On Demand
InstaEdu, a San Francisco-based startup that provides teens with on-demand online tutoring, began as a side project ginned up by siblings Alison and Dan Johnston. Alison, who had been part of search startup Aardvark and wound up as an associate product marketing manager at Google after Aardvark’s acquisition, was itching to start her own company, … Continue reading “InstaEdu’s Brother-Sister Team Puts Tutoring Online, On Demand”
Cater2me, ZeroCater Bring Food-Truck Lunch To Startups
Free catered lunches for employees aren’t just for tech giants like Google anymore, thanks to Bay Area startups that are bringing food to even the smallest tech companies. San Francisco-based Cater2.me and ZeroCater are two startups that make it possible for tech outfits to outsource their lunches to mom-and-pop food shops, from taco trucks to … Continue reading “Cater2me, ZeroCater Bring Food-Truck Lunch To Startups”
Drawbridge Ads Follow You from Desktop to Smartphone
Drawbridge founder and CEO Kamakshi Sivaramakrishnan is reimagining the way advertisers target consumers. When Google acquired mobile advertising network AdMob back in 2009, Sivaramakrishnan, the company’s lead applied research scientist, went along with it. But six months after starting work at Google, she decided to strike out on her on in the mobile ad space. … Continue reading “Drawbridge Ads Follow You from Desktop to Smartphone”
Wifarer’s Smartphone App Makes Sense of the Great Indoors
The inspiration behind Wifarer, an indoor positioning technology company, came to CEO and co-founder Philip Stanger during a visit to the National Portrait Gallery in London in 2005. As he followed one docent around the museum, he realized that a nearby tour had a better one. “I started following the other one, who was contextualizing … Continue reading “Wifarer’s Smartphone App Makes Sense of the Great Indoors”
Getaround Aims to Tackle “Car Overpopulation”
Car-sharing service Getaround burst on the scene a year ago a when it emerged as the big winner at TechCrunch Disrupt in New York, capturing the $50,000 prize. The San Francisco-based car sharing service put a twist on the usual model, allowing car owners to rent their vehicles out to the carless for an hourly … Continue reading “Getaround Aims to Tackle “Car Overpopulation””
99designs Crowdsources Its Own New Website Design
Crowdsourcing design startup 99designs is putting its own product to the test with a competition to redesign its homepage. The company, which connects businesses in need of design help with freelancers willing to compete for design work, wrote a request of its own, asking its 158,000 registered designers to revamp its site for a chance … Continue reading “99designs Crowdsources Its Own New Website Design”
Personal Capital Shows the Affluent All Their Money in One Place
Personal Capital, an online financial advisory company, came out of the gate with a big mission. “We’re looking to tear up the financial services world,” says company CEO Bill Harris, former CEO of PayPal . The startup’s Web-based service has been described as “Mint for rich people,” but it’s more than that. In addition to … Continue reading “Personal Capital Shows the Affluent All Their Money in One Place”
Clio Searches for Music—Using Music
In 2007, Clio founder and principal scientist Dr. Greg Wilder saw a fundamental problem with music search engines: they all required words. So he set out to build an engine that could not only find music based on other music, but actually compare tracks to one another to find something similar—a music-based analysis, search and … Continue reading “Clio Searches for Music—Using Music”
Mobile Game Maker Storm8 Competes With Goliaths of the Industry
Unlike a lot of revenue-poor startups with freemium business models, mobile game maker Storm8 is rolling in cash. The fully bootstrapped producer of 25 Android and iOS games like iMobsters, World War, and Pets LIVE brought in $1 million dollars in a single day last year, and hit more than 200 million downloads in June … Continue reading “Mobile Game Maker Storm8 Competes With Goliaths of the Industry”
Quixey’s ‘Power Search’ Helps Users Weed Through Universe of Apps
The idea for Quixey, the search engine for apps, came from a simple problem. When co-founder Tomer Kagan was still the CEO of his last company, Your Logo Here, a colleague was looking for a password manager. Typing in “password vault” didn’t bring up anything useful. Kagan realized people needed a better way to find … Continue reading “Quixey’s ‘Power Search’ Helps Users Weed Through Universe of Apps”
Localmind Aspires to Answer Questions Around the Globe
Last weekend, Localmind founders Lenny Rachitsky and Beau Haugh took their location-driven question-and-answer app back to South by Southwest, where it first launched a year ago. This time, they put every party at the hip tech conference on the app’s map, so that SXSW users could ask which parties to go to, which had the … Continue reading “Localmind Aspires to Answer Questions Around the Globe”
Foodspotting CEO: It’s About Discovery, Not Food Porn
As Foodspotting founder and CEO Alexa Andrzejewski prepared for the launch of the company’s third-generation app last month, she had an interesting challenge: making potential users realize that the service is more than just a photo sharing app for serious foodies. “It’s kind of not what we intended—it sounds very niche,” she says. “It’s not … Continue reading “Foodspotting CEO: It’s About Discovery, Not Food Porn”
FaceCash Founder Claims New Regulation is Unconstitutional
For months, Aaron Greenspan, the founder of the now-defunct mobile payments service FaceCash, has been getting deeper into a legal battle with the State of California over the way it regulates money transfers. And he thinks the implications of his fight go well beyond his startup. According to an open letter Greenspan wrote to Governor … Continue reading “FaceCash Founder Claims New Regulation is Unconstitutional”
Eric Schmidt-Backed Slice Helps Users Track Their Online Purchases
Slice, the online purchase-tracking site backed by heavy hitters including Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt and Playdom founder Rick Thompson, started as a research project. While looking for a new business venture, company founders and Scott Brady, Harpinder Madan, and Eric Botto took a close look at the e-commerce industry and the massive amount of … Continue reading “Eric Schmidt-Backed Slice Helps Users Track Their Online Purchases”
Edmodo’s K-12 Social Network Helps Teachers Connect with Students
Back in 2008, when Edmodo co-founders Nic Borg and Jeff O’Hara were still working in IT for Chicago-area school districts, they noticed a big problem. Teachers were increasingly trying to bring Web tools into the classroom, but they didn’t have a safe and secure way to collaborate with students online. (Clearly, Facebook wasn’t an option—and … Continue reading “Edmodo’s K-12 Social Network Helps Teachers Connect with Students”
CrowdOptic Taps Smartphones to Track the Crowd’s Attention
The idea behind CrowdOptic, a service that allows event organizers to figure out what a crowd is looking at by tapping their smartphones, came to CEO and co-founder Jon Fisher last year during a routine meeting. As he sat down to chat with an investor in one of his earlier companies, he caught sight of … Continue reading “CrowdOptic Taps Smartphones to Track the Crowd’s Attention”
GEA Geothermal Energy Finance Forum 2012
The Geothermal Energy Association hosts a meeting on investing in the geothermal business. From the event listing: “The Geothermal Energy Association (GEA) will be holding a one-day Geothermal Energy Finance Forum on Wednesday, January 18, 2012 at the Marriott Marquis in San Francisco, CA. This program will bring the finance and investment community of the … Continue reading “GEA Geothermal Energy Finance Forum 2012”
Fandor Launches Indie Movie Rentals—Sundance Meets Netflix
The inspiration for Fandor, an online movie service for independent and international films, came in late Spring of 2009, as two of its cofounders were bemoaning the fact that neither had been able to see many films lately. Dan Aronson had hardly made it to any of the films he wanted to see at the … Continue reading “Fandor Launches Indie Movie Rentals—Sundance Meets Netflix”
Catch: The Online Notekeeping System for the Non-Organized
Steve Brown, co-founder and CEO of Catch.com, a cloud-based personal content management system, says he’s the only dad at his daughter’s end of the season pizza party who remembers every single soccer game. And he can pull out the notes and pictures to prove it. During the season, Brown uses his phone to snap pictures, … Continue reading “Catch: The Online Notekeeping System for the Non-Organized”
StudentMentor Matches Mentors and Protégés Online
[Editor’s note: due to an editing oversight, this story was originally published under the byline Wade Roush. It was actually written by freelance contributor Elise Craig. Sorry Elise!!] When StudentMentor.org co-founders Ashkon Jafari and Stephanie Bravo were in college, they felt lost. Bravo, a first-generation college student, had her sights set on medical school, but … Continue reading “StudentMentor Matches Mentors and Protégés Online”
At Beautylish, Three Men and a Beauty Editor Build a Community Around Cosmetics
When Beautylish co-founders Vu Nguyen, Sameer Iyengar and Nils Johnson started raising money for their beauty-focused social network last July, they turned to angel investors who could give them more than just dollars (though they got about 1 million of them); they sought out founders of companies like YouTube and Yelp to get advice about … Continue reading “At Beautylish, Three Men and a Beauty Editor Build a Community Around Cosmetics”
LawPivot: The Google-Backed, One-Stop Shop for Startup Legal Advice
For startups, getting good legal advice can be costly and time-consuming. And for new lawyers, building up a client list also takes a big time commitment. Now there’s a Web Q&A site backed by Google Ventures that aims to solve both problems at once. It’s called LawPivot, and it recently set up shop right on … Continue reading “LawPivot: The Google-Backed, One-Stop Shop for Startup Legal Advice”
FaceCash’s Aaron Greenspan Is Out to Kill Plastic with Mobile Payment System
For Aaron Greenspan, president and CEO of Palo Alto, CA-based Think Computer Corporation, it’s been a long road to FaceCash. The mobile payment system, which next week launches a new feature that allows shoppers to place orders before they even arrive at a store, is the result of years of work that started when Greenspan … Continue reading “FaceCash’s Aaron Greenspan Is Out to Kill Plastic with Mobile Payment System”
Inkling Reinvents Textbooks for the iPad
Throughout the two years Matt MacInnis spent working as senior manager in international education at Apple, he had plenty of opportunity to watch teachers integrate technology into their classrooms as a learning tool. And he found it wholly disappointing. “If you walk into a classroom today, and then you roll back the clock and walk … Continue reading “Inkling Reinvents Textbooks for the iPad”