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Monday 9 September 2013

Take A Stroll Down Disrupt SF's Startup Alley

Screen Shot 2013-09-09 at 3.13.48 PM

Startup Alley is a wondrous mix of foreign and domestic startups of all shapes, sizes and flavors. There are hundreds of companies pitching investors and media, demoing their products and fighting for attention from passersby.


We took a little stroll to check out some of the media/entertainment startups in the alley, and came across quite a few gems.


To learn more about the companies, check out the video above or the list below.



  • My Web Room turns your personal version of the Internet — your favorite websites and services — into a virtual room filled with clickable objects.

  • By The People is a service that allows people to effect change by connecting over issues and coordinating a plan for solution.

  • TheViceJar is an app that helps you kick bad habits and stay motivated with the “swear jar” method, making you pay up each time you fall off the wagon.

  • PowerSlyde is an app that lets you share the apps you’ve downloaded with friends and followers.

  • CrowdFlik is a mobile app that lets users crowdsource mobile video based on location and then edit the videos into a neat little package.

  • MapacheStudios is an educational gaming platform for kids that has a donation-based business model.

  • Zula is a team-collaboration app that offers one-touch conference calls and polls, with hopes to replace email.








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PayPal unveils Beacon: a USB stick that powers hands-free checkout (video)



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New Nexus 7 32GB with LTE now available on Google Play in the US for $349



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Koality Helps Engineers By Eliminating Broken Builds And Making Test Suites Efficient

Koality

Launching at Disrupt SF, Koality is a development tool that fills an important gap for engineering teams. It’s a seamless server-side application that sits between your startup’s repository and your engineers. Instead of submitting code to your repository, you push changes to Koality. The application will then run test suites before submitting to the repository, effectively ending broken builds and countless wasted hours.


“We all worked in software companies, and the most important pain point was broken builds,” co-founder and CEO Jonathan Chu told me in a phone interview before Disrupt. “It happens all the time and it was the most painful thing in our work. If you were working on the same code, you had no choice but to stop working until it was fixed” he continued.


Even though Koality is a very specific tool, it could greatly improve the overall productivity of a startup in two ways. There will never be a broken build again, and testing suites are much faster when you use Koality.


Here’s how it works: Every time a commit fails a test, a notification will be sent to the engineer telling him that something is wrong with his or her code. This way, the engineer has the opportunity to fix the bug before it gets into the repository.


Moreover, you don’t need to run painfully long tests on your computer anymore. You can push your code and shut down your computer. Koality parallelizes the tests as well, greatly improving performances. “When it runs your tests, it spins out replicas of your environment,” Chu said. Asana is a great example of a company that uses Koality already.


“Asana parallelizes its environment 30 times, making it 30 times faster,” Chu said. “Asana had a similar system internally, so it was really excited that somebody else was doing pre-push test suites and that it was even better,” he continued.


While Chu suspects that Facebook and Google have a very sophisticated testing process and internal environment, many growing companies don’t have the right tool and don’t have the resources to build it internally. That’s where Koality is useful. So far, most of the teams already using Koality have more than 25 engineers. Dropbox is one of them.


Koality supports Git and Mercurial, and runs on Unix-like systems. “Your code doesn’t have to leave your firewall,” Chu said. If you prefer, you can run it on Amazon Web Services. After the setup process, engineers can use your version control client the same way you would.


The team of five started a year ago and has received $1.65 million in funding so far from FF Angel, Webb Investment Network, Uj Ventures, Index Ventures and others. The two founders used to work at Palantir where broken builds happened every day. The company is still figuring out how much the product will cost, but you can expect a per-seat license with a free tier.









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Cota By Ossia Aims To Drive A Wireless Power Revolution And Change How We Think About Charging

Ossia Cota Technology

Wireless power. It’s less sci-fi sounding than it once was, thanks to induction charging like that based on the Qi standard, but that’s still a tech that essentially requires contact, if not incredibly close proximity. Magnetic resonance is another means to achieve wireless power, and perfect for much higher-demand applications, like charging cars. But there’s been very little work done in terms of building a solution that can power your everyday devices in a way that doesn’t require thought or changing the way we use our devices dramatically.


That’s where Cota by Ossia comes in. The startup is the brainchild of physicist Hatem Zeine, who decided to focus on delivering wireless power in a way that was commercially viable, both for large-scale industrial applications and for consumer use. Zeine has been hard at work developing his wireless power technology and refining its delivery for over a decade now, and has built Ossia under wraps, managing to raise an impressive $3.2 million along the way while also keeping the startup almost completely invisible to the outside world.


Today, however, Zeine is ready to show what Ossia can do, and he’s presenting the first public demo of the Cota wireless charging prototype on-stage at Disrupt and revealing his company Ossia publicly for the first time. Despite the fact that no one’s heard of Ossia, the Cota prototype in its current form already managed to deliver power wirelessly to devices over distances of around 100 feet, delivering around 10 percent of the total original source power to recipient devices using the same unlicensed spectrum that powers Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, Zigbee and other wireless communication standards.


“I got fascinated by electromagnetic radiation, the way that light and optics and radio waves are the same thing,” Zeine said, explaining how he got interested in the subject while studying physics as a student. “And I got thinking about ‘what can you really do beyond this?’ there is something about the linearity of physics and the non-linearity of physics. most people are familiar with the linear version, which is the common sense version, where two apples are twice the weight of one, for instance.”


“In wave theory and electromagnetic systems, you don’t get linearities everywhere,” he added, describing the science behind Cota. “There are situations where double could mean for more, like double could mean square, or 3 plus 3 apples could result in a net total of 9 apples, so to speak. When you move from the linear version to the power version, things happen that were quite surprising.”


I was always thinking, “What’s the catch?”


Zeine started doing computer simulations to figure out what he was on to, but says unlike Thomas Edison, for example, who started with a problem and tried to solve it but came up with many failures before success, he started out with a solution and found many problems that it does solve, including questions around health, safety, interference with other wireless signals, delivering power to multiple devices, non-line of site, around and behind walls and more. “I was always thinking ‘What’s the catch?’,” he said, “But sometimes an invention just solves the problem and goes all the way. This was one of them, we had something here that was much, much different than what people expect.”


When Zeine then decided to turn Cota’s wireless charging into a company, he faced understandable and considerable skepticism. Naysayers suggested he couldn’t deliver wireless power safely, or with adequate efficiency to be useful, or consistently, or any number of objections you yourself are probably cycling through at this moment. Skepticism aside, Zeine stuck to his guns and set about commercializing his discovery. In 2007, Zeine filed his first patent for the tech, formed Ossia in 2008 and continued to file patents, and he says now the company has a much deeper understanding of how it works. They’ve built the prototype they’re demoing on stage, and have another in the works to debut later this year.


“What we’re doing uses the same frequencies as Wi-Fi,” he explained. “It’s the unlicensed spectrum that’s used by Wi-Fi, and many phones, Bluetooth and Zigbee devices and so on in our lives. The nice thing about this frequency is that it’s just the sweet spot for our technology for distance, safety, for the size of the antennas and the hardware that we use, it’s just a perfect level. Also it’s well understood, since people have had Wi-Fi in their homes for a long time now.”


Obviously health and safety is going to be a foreground concern when it comes to new wireless tech of any kind, but something that’s designed to be able to provide enough energy to power up devices will definitely raise eyebrows. Aside from being at a late stage in terms of gaining FCC clearance, Zeine says Ossia also benefits from using the same kind of spectrum that Wi-Fi broadcasts at, and says Cota offers the same kind of health risks that Wi-Fi in-home does. Academic research on how much that actually is may differ, but consumers definitely seem willing to accept the risks associated with Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and other similar specifications.


“Cota is the only wireless power technology that can deliver one watt of power at a distance of 30 ft safely,” Zeine said on stage today at Disrupt, highlighting range as well as health and safety. During his presentation, Zeine showed an iPhone 5 being charged remotely from his version one prototype wireless power transmitter, which was greeted by plenty of applause from those in attendance.



The next step for Cota is delivering a commercial-grade product capable of replacing the numerous wired power connections for sensors and monitors in sensitive facilities like oil and gas refineries with wirelessly powered devices, which decreases risk by minimizing the number of potential opportunities there are for generating sparks, since there are fewer live cables lying around. Commercialized versions should be ready to ship in the next couple of months, Zeine says, with consumerized versions following in 2015. Neither would’ve been possible in terms of cost alone 20 years ago, he adds, but advances in the tech of Cota system components have made it possible to do with thousands what would once have cost millions.


Long-term, the vision of Zeine and Ossia is one where you’re never out of wireless charging range – charging networks spanning home, public spaces and offices would make it possible to build devices like phones and remotes with only small batteries, that are constantly topped off and that never need to be plugged in. He says the aim is not just to disrupt the battery, but eventually even to eliminate the concept of “charging” as a conscious act altogether.


Question & Answer from Disrupt judges


1. Do you want to license your tech to OEMs?


A: Cota will provide licensing of patents, hardware designs, and also its own hardware and patent licensing.


2. What is the cost of this for consumers, and size of household device?


A: The Cota will be over $100, and be about the size of a large tower PC once consumerized.


3. Can the transmitter be smaller?


A: The size of the current device is due to using off-the-shelf parts, so it can be reduced tremendously using custom parts.


4. Does it require line-of-sight?


A: No, it can go around walls and through walls just like a Wi-Fi signal.


5. Is there some sort of identification, can a device take power from a system unauthorized?


A: You can configure the system to recognize only a specific set of devices, or open if you want to power all Cota-tech enabled devices.








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Google+ adds embedded posts and expands authorship in search results



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Foursquare adds menu search to dining spots, eases quest for ramen and dumplings



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El cubo flotante que no estaba allí


Me he encontrado esta impresionante ilusión óptica –que demuestra una vez más lo fáciles que somos de engañar– gracias a Phil Plait, que en Is This Asteroid Apocalypse Viral TV Ad Fact or Fake? analiza si lo de la entrevista de trabajo con susto por asteroide incluido puede ser cierto o no.


Dejando aparte que los asustados sean actores o no, su análisis va por el lado de si un televisor 4K podría pasar por una ventana teniendo en cuenta las limitaciones de nuestros ojos, y su conclusión es que sí.


Igual eso tiene más sentido que el 3D que se iba a comer el mundo y que vino a cosechar un éxito similar al de Madrid 2020.


# Enlace Permanente







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Following outcry, Microsoft gives developers early access to finished Windows 8.1 builds



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Is Nintendo Getting Pushed Out of the 12-and-Under Market?



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Google Glass update adds 'vignettes,' sound search and more



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Amazon: No Plans for a Free Smartphone



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Snapchat Micro will bring disappearing messages to Samsung's Galaxy Gear



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Gotas de agua, efecto Leidenfrost, y movimientos casi escherianos


Aunque no sepamos como se llama, casi todos hemos visto el efecto Leidenfrost en acción.


Es el que se produce cuando una o varias gotas, normalmente de agua pero puede ser cualquier líquido volátil, caen sobre una superficie caliente, normalmente una sartén cuando vemos esto en casa.


Si la superficie en cuestión está a la temperatura adecuada –unos 190 ó 200 grados– las gotas, en lugar de evaporarse rápidamente, bailan como locas sobre esta.


Esto sucede porque se forma una capa de vapor en el punto en el que la gota entra en contacto con la superficie caliente, capa que actúa como aislante, ya que conduce el calor peor que el agua.


Pero si la superficie sobre la que caen las gotas tiene una textura como de dientes de sierra las gotas no se mueven por ella al azar, sino que siguen una dirección concreta, tal y como se puede leer en Water droplets make for an aMazing film .


Esto fue utilizado por Carmen Cheng y Matthew Guy, de la Universidad de Bradford, para crear el laberinto que se ve arriba con piezas de aluminio convenientemente estriadas para dirigir el movimiento de las gotas de agua que dejan caer en él.


Según dicen lo han usado en numerosos colegios y otros actos de promoción de la ciencia, dejando siempre al público asombrado, y no es para menos, ya que por la forma del laberinto las gotas parecen seguir una especie de movimiento escheriano curiosamente hipnótico.


(Vía Ciencia en Directo | Materia).


# Enlace Permanente







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Anti-Surveillance Dresses Shield Wearer at First Sight of Cameras



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The Best Cookbook Apps to Make Yourself a 21st Century Julia Child

Moto X now available to T-Mobile customers, but only from Motorola



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Breaking down the PS Vita TV: Why Sony's $100 set-top box is more than a consolation prize



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Evan Spiegel: I Hope Snapchat Will Generate Revenue Before Our Next Funding Round

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Today at Disrupt SF, Snapchat co-founder and CEO Evan Spiegel hinted at the company’s monetization moves. “The way that we think about monetization has changed substantially,” Spiegel said. Most of the conversation was around native advertising instead of in-app purchases. Yet, the ephemeral photo messaging application is one of the only social app that doesn’t have a feed. Many social startups put native ads within a feed of some sort.


“The feed was probably the biggest innovation in social media of late,” Spiegel said. “But the interesting thing about a feed is that the more content you consume, the farther in time you go,” he continued.


Snapchat users could expect potential product updates with a new feed. For the company, it could unleash a world of possibilities for advertising. When asked directly about monetization and the experiments around the feed, Spiegel said that Chinese company Tencent was a role model.


Then, the conversation moved to other topics, including Snapchat’s $60 million round. When asked whether the company will generate revenue before the next funding round, his answer was “it’s hard to say but I hope so.”



Back in June, Spiegel said that the first step toward monetizing the service was to provide in-app purchases to unlock new customization features. Yet, after today’s interview, the company seems to be going into another direction: native advertising. It was Snapchat’s original monetization idea.


“In the future, we’d like to support upcoming artists, people that are trying to be actors,” Spiegel said. “The social marketing teams of big companies will always figure out a way to advertise on Snapchat. I’d like to create a space for people who have a lot of talent but not a lot of reach,” he continued.


Since May, Taco Bell has been running an experiment. It sends advertising snaps to its Snapchat friends. It’s an example of the way big brands are already using Snapchat without the help of the company.








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Foursquare Now Lets You Search for Individual Menu Items



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Tizen 3.0 UI allegedly spotted running on a Galaxy S 4



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Udacity launches Open Education Alliance to help modernize university curriculums



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IRL: Mad Catz's Rat M portable gaming mouse



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Mobile Dating App Swoon Puts Ladies First



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Sprng EarPod Clip Review: One of Apple's Biggest Design Flaws, Fixed

Sprint to start LG G2 pre-orders on October 11th



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Yahoo launches Screen video app for iOS with emphasis on comedy clips



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Google, Facebook and Yahoo petition court to disclose government data requests



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As Class Tensions Surface, San Francisco Adds More Than 45,000 Tech Jobs, Mayor Lee Says

sf-citi-tc-disrupt

As Google and Facebook buses continue rolling through San Francisco neighborhoods and as storefronts give way to sleek coffee shops and bean-to-bar chocolatiers, an undercurrent of class angst has bubbled through the city for the last year.


The concern is how much the influx of tech workers and wealth are changing the fabric of the city — for better and for worse.


Today at TechCrunch Disrupt, San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee gave some numbers that quantify the impact of the industry’s growth on the city.


He said that there are 1,892 tech companies within San Francisco, up 3.6 percent from a year ago and that the city has added about 45,493 tech jobs.


For a city of a little more than 800,000 people, this is a lot to stomach. San Francisco rents rose the most out of any other U.S. urban area in the second quarter of this year, growing by an average of 7.8 percent, according to MPF research.


TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington pressed Lee on what he was doing to manage the change for middle- and lower-income San Francisco residents.


Lee said that the city has done what it can to plan around the industry’s growth by setting aside a $1.2 billion housing trust fund to support more affordable housing units.


“Our job is to accommodate 100% of everybody who wants to be here,” he said. “We are trying to protect as many of the rent-controlled housing as we can.”


They’ve also been trying to address the transportation issue by adding a bike-sharing program.








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Livefyre Acquires Storify, Says The Social Curation Service Will Still Operate As Standalone Product

livefyre logo

Livefyre, a commenting platform used by TechCrunch and other websites, is announcing that it has acquired social curation startup Storify.


The financial terms of the deal were not disclosed, but Livefyre says the entire five-person Storify team will be joining the company, bringing its headcount to 91. Livefyre founder and CEO Jordan Kretchmer also told me via email that Storify, which allows users to bring social media comments together into a single conversation, will continue to operate as a standalone service.


“Not only will we be keeping the great Storify product and brand completely intact, we will be investing in both moving forward,” Kretchmer said. “That means that there will always be a free version of Storify as we work to continue to grow the Storify community, just as there has always been a free version of Livefyre.”


At the same time, Storify co-founder Burt Herman said that the media companies using Storify have already been asking about ways the two services can be used together. Both he and Kretchmer pointed to Livefyre’s StreamHub product (which allows publications to automatically add social media content to their site) as a natural point of integration. By bringing in Storify’s more hands-on approach to curation, Kretchmer said StreamHub will become “the only real-time platform that enables both editorially created and automated curation of social content.”


Storify was originally launched as a tool for journalists and probably remains best-known in that context, the company has been adding more tools for brands and agencies (who probably have more money to spend than news organizations). Herman said the caquisition will accelerate that shift and help Storify “bring it all together,” allowing brands using Storify to run native ads with the company’s publishers. (Livefyre recently launched its own ad products.)


Livefyre raised a $15 million round in February, bringing its total funding to more than $20 million. Storify, meanwhile, raised around $2 million from Khosla Ventures, Promus Ventures, and others.


Following the acquisition, Herman (a former journalist himself) said he will continue working with publishers and journalists, while co-founder and CEO Xavier Damman will continue to run Storify product development.








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Apple's iPhone event is tomorrow -- get your liveblog here!



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Microsoft Sends Invites to Sept. 23 Surface 2 Event



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Snapchat Releases Snapchat Micro, An App For The Galaxy Gear Smartwatch

Screen Shot 2013-09-09 at 9.48.31 AM

Remember the Samsung Galaxy Gear smartwatch unveiled a week ago?


Snapchat certainly does, and the ephemeral messaging app has released an app specifically for the wrist-worn gadget. Called Snapchat Micro, the app lets users send snaps directly from their wrists.


Users can take a picture with the Galaxy Gear’s 1.4-megapixel camera, which is capable of taking 10-second 720p videos. Perfect for Snapchat’s 10-second video limit, AMIRITE?


Within the Snapchat Micro app, users can take a picture, choose a time limit, and decide which friends to send the image to. If you’d like to add a drawing or a caption, the snap will automatically be open on your Galaxy Note phone waiting for your creative additions.


“Our team is constantly looking at ways to reduce the time between our experience of a moment and our ability to share it,” said Snapchat founder Evan Spiegel. “The Snapchat Micro app is an experiment we’re really excited about.”


Snapchat is one of around 70 apps that will be available on the Galaxy Gear smartwatch at launch.








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Ron Conway: There Needs To Be More Silicon Valley Debate About NSA, But I'm Not The Guy Who Will Lead It

ron conway with michael arrington

Ron Conway, one of the more powerful investors in Silicon Valley, today defended his position of not getting involved in issues around national security and consumer privacy, saying that he was already busy with too many other causes like gun control and immigration reform, while also trying to hold down his “day job” helping to run SV Angel, his VC firm.


Asked by Michael Arrington for his opinion on what is going on with the NSA and its role in tapping into private data in the name of national security, and subsequent the lack of engagement from Silicon Valley on trying to push back against it, Conway had this to say:


“I believe that we have to balance national security but there was this thing called 9/11.. you have to balance that with transparency,” he told the audience today at TC Disrupt in San Francisco. “For me personally it would depend on how they digest data and how long they keep the data. From my involvement I’ve picked three issues in the last year, gun safety, immigration reform and civic engagement… We’ve done a lot to get tech involved in the local community.” He then turned the challenge on to Arrington: “If this is an issue you’re passionate about you should do something.”


[More specifically, Arrington's questions were more confrontational: "Why have you sat by and not done one thing?" he asked. "We're talking about the end of civilization and the end of privacy in your life."]


The statements come at the same time that Facebook, Google and Yahoo all stepped up their demands to the U.S. government that they be allowed to release more information about national security requests.


It’s not that Conway doesn’t have an opinion, but in a way his lack of fighting back seems to speak to a kind of inability of how best for VCs or smaller startups to respond to the story. “The events of the last 60 days indicate there needs to be a balance between transparency and national security… but I’m spending the rest of this year working on immigration reform. I’m not a bullshitter and tell people I’m going to do the same with NSA reform. Right now to me immigration reform is more important…You sound like the perfect leader.”


Earlier in the morning, San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee also weighed in on the subject. “We need more people discussing this issue… we don’t know where this debate is going to go. At the same time there is an objective here that a lot of people are talking about the balance we have to have. I don’t like personal information being used in egregious ways.” He pointed out that San Francisco got to a “balance” with street cameras, for example, where the city decided with street cameras] that we would turn them off during protests but othertise keep them on for street criminals.


Mike Arrington (TechCrunch founder) earlier today laid out his intention to hit hard on questions around NSA and security and information, and what part Silicon Valley plays in this story. His belief is that Silicon Valley companies, big and small, have not done enough to push back against the wave of information requests and whatever else that government bodies have done in the name of national security.


“I’m scared of our government and I’m disgusted by what little Silicon Valley has done to fight it,” he wrote earlier today.


On Ron Conway specifically, he noted, “I am going to ask Ron Conway, who has pushed for gun control via his Sandy Hook Promise for nearly a year now, hasn’t said a word about Silicon Valley’s role in the wholesale destruction of our human rights by the United States government. He could do so much by leading an effort at real transparency, and a real pushback against the government. But he hasn’t lifted a finger. I want to know why.”


Sandy Hook Promise was launched March 2013 and is a partnership of investors who have committed to invest in startups that reduce or eliminate firearm violence. Arrington today called the effort “nebulous”.


See the full video of Arrington’s talk with Ed Lee and Ron Conway, and later with SV Angel’s managing partners, below. We’ll update with the SV Angel talk shortly.








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Engadget Partycast: IFA 2013 - 09.09.13



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Surface 2 rumors point to 1080p screen, Tegra 4 chip and two-stage kickstand



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