Light Phone – Less is More

 Products, Startup  Comments Off on Light Phone – Less is More
May 202015
 

$100 Light Phone - No Texting, No Camera, No Music
I don’t want to text from my phone.

I don’t want to hear music on my phone.

I don’t want my phone to tell me it’s sunny in Beijing, cloudy in Bangalore or snowing in Fairbanks.

I don’t want to watch a Korean movie from Netflix on my phone.

I don’t want to shoot pictures or videos with my phone.

I don’t want driving directions to Chicago or Tbilisi on my phone.

I don’t want a phablet that refuses to fit into my pocket.

Oh God Almighty, please return me to to those good ol’ days when all that a phone did was allow me to jabber with my friends and family.

Not for me these 32GB/128GB, 16MP rear camera, 5MP front camera, $800 smartphones monstrosities with a gazillion features and a million apps that promise a false utopia.

Specs for the Light Phone

Promise of Simplicity

Thanks to Light Phone, my prayers for simplicity, a cheap working phone and freedom from two-year bondage to the carrier may be answered.

A credit-card sized device still in development, the $100 Light Phone is scheduled to debut in May 2016.

All you can do with the Light Phone is talk. Nothing more!

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How Tech VCs Fund ‘Disruptive’ Startups

 Startup  Comments Off on How Tech VCs Fund ‘Disruptive’ Startups
May 112015
 

How 'Disruptive' Startups get Funded in Silicon Valley

The holy grail for a Silicon Valley entrepreneur is getting funded by a venture capitalist.

Here’s how a ‘hot’ Silicon Valley startup’s funding process goes:

1. A bunch of Rich White Men raise several hundred million dollars from pension funds, foundations, super-wealthy families and university endowments through the old boys network of other White Men and hang out a shingle calling themselves Venture Capitalists (VC)
2. Flush with capital, the Rich White Men sit in plush digs on Sand Hills Road, Menlo Park (CA) surrounded by abstract expressionist artwork (abstract expressionism is a school of ‘art’ that makes no sense to anyone except its creator) on the wall waiting for entrepreneur supplicants to show up and plead for money
3. Somewhere in San Jose, an entrepreneur has a “Eureka’ moment and convinces himself he has a ‘disruptive’ idea (‘disruptive’ in plain English = screw other businesses, screw other employees, screw everyone outside the entrepreneur’s self, get others to do the bulk of the startup’s work a la Yelp, Twitter, Facebook, eBay, TripAdvisor)
4. Entrepreneur maxxes out credit card and cajoles friends and family for seed funding for his ‘disruptive’ startup
5. With seed money in hand, excited entrepreneur launches ‘disruptive’ startup in his bedroom and convinces 2.5 naive dolts to join him with a spiel of an ‘opportunity of a lifetime to get in on the ground-floor’ (Think, do you want to change the world or sell soda water for the rest of your life?)
6. ‘Disruptive’ startup sees ‘viral’ growth among itchy, restless Internet teens in USA, China, India and Brazil sniffing for a ‘new high’ Continue reading »

Mover Vows to Makes Cloud Migration Easy

 Cloud Computing, Startup  Comments Off on Mover Vows to Makes Cloud Migration Easy
Aug 082013
 

Mover Helps in Cloud Storage MigrationCanadian startup Mover offers hosted cloud storage migration and backup services that promises to make changing cloud storage operators easy for small and medium sized companies.

Mover says it supports the major cloud storage providers including Box, Dropbox, Copy, Egnyte, SharePoint, Google Drive, Amazon S3, (S)FTP and WebDAV.

The small Edmonton outfit boasts it’s helped tens of thousands of companies transfer hundreds of millions of files.

Seed Funding

Mover recently raised a million bucks in its seed round to pump up its sales and marketing efforts.

Investors in the seed round include Double M Partners, Yaletown Venture Partners, Amplify, Medra Capital, and angel investors Jarl Mohn, Rick Barry of Quant Ventures, and Dennis Phelps.

Mover started life as Backup Box when founders Eric Warnke and Mark Fossen experienced difficulty transferring files from an FTP server to Dropbox. Backup Box was subsequently merged into Mover.

Vancouver startup accelerator GrowLab gave a fillip to Mover by investing in the fledgling.