You know Twitter (the micro messaging service) has now hit the marketing mainstream, when you are getting marketing emails from fast food chains about following them on Twitter. I just got a marketing email from Rubio’s trying to drum up followers using the lure of free food. It’s one thing when tech retailers (ie. Buy.com [...]
Ha! The first time I’ve ever–in many long years–posted an article with the words “kidnap” and “extortion” in one of our articles. (Yes, it’s just an exec appointment. But, remind me to NOT negotiate with Hydra’s new Director on anything. It’s like messing with either venture capitalist Beau Laskey, at Steamboat Ventures, or Ted Alexander [...]
We spoke this morning to Baroda Ventures‘ Peter Lee, about the firm’s renewed effort to invest in Southern California startups. Lee also told me that — as part of his outreach effort to entrepreneurs here — he’s jumping into blogging — one of only a few Southern California venture capitalists currently blogging about what they’re [...]
In what can only be a strange alignment of the stars, Southern California’s three venture announcements today are all companies with “X” in their name: OpenX ($10M) – online advertising X1 Technologies (undisclosed) – enterprise search software Ophthonix ($25.9M) – medical devices/visual correction technology
Last week, we mentioned a new Twitter “bot” — @earthquakesLA — which reports on the latest earthquakes in Los Angeles on the popular Twitter micro-messaging service. I contacted Bill Snitzer, the programmer behind the Twitter robot, just to get an idea of how easy it was for him to create the Twitter robot: Why’d you [...]
The big news today is bound to center around Facebook (which just raised $200M, at a $10 billion valuation). That is — despite the huge valuation — a drop from the prior, $15 billion valuation that Microsoft gave the firm back in October of 2007. My only question: how the heck do you earn a [...]
The recent dearth of venture backed, technology IPOs has ended, as of this morning, when SolarWinds (a Texas maker of network management software) had an IPO on the NYSE. It’s been a long drought nationally, but an even longer drought locally for IPOs in Southern California. It looks like OpenTable – out of San Francisco [...]
This post, from the BBC (via ZDNet), is great. A teacher in Los Angeles ran a little experiment weaning her students off technology–cell phones/iPods/TV/Internet/etc. for a week. My favorite quote: “..and when I was outside, I heard the birds and trees…” Aside from the usual comments about the value of disconnecting for awhile and actually [...]
For those of you with the Amazon Kindle, who would like to read our daily news feeds on that device, you can now subscribe to our feed directly from Amazon.com.
Given the number of social media marketers and experts in Los Angeles, looks like they’ve got a new customer to pitch: FTD, the floral delivery business of Woodland Hills-based United Online. United Online bought FTD last year, and just got reamed on TechCrunch for their Mother’s day performance and not using Twitter to address those [...]
Thoughts and commentary from Benjamin F. Kuo, publisher of socalTECH.com.
