Tag Archives: startups

Adafruit Industries, Unique & fun DIY electronics and kits

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Adafruit was founded in 2005 by MIT engineer, Limor “Ladyada” Fried. Her goal was to create the best place online for learning electronics and making the best designed products for makers of all ages and skill levels. Since then Adafruit has grown to over 35 employees in the heart of NYC. We’ve expanded our offerings to include tools, equipment and electronics that Limor personally selects, tests and approves before going in to the Adafruit store. We pride ourselves on having great prices, the best customer service, technical support and fast shipping. We hope we can assist you on your journey of learning! Want to learn more? See what others are saying on the Adafruit press page!

via Adafruit Industries, Unique & fun DIY electronics and kits.

From: Entrepreneur of 2012: Limor Fried

In October Fried moved her 35 employees from a 2,000-square-foot loft near Wall Street to a 12,000-square-foot industrial space in SoHo, then hired 15 more people. Just a week after the move, Fried was bubbling with excitement, obvious even over the din of 500 packages being prepped for the daily UPS shipment. “It’s a new chapter in the business,” she exclaims. “I think we can quadruple our current size.” No mean feat, considering Adafruit has shipped more than half a million kits in the last seven years, and revenue has doubled every year for the past three.

Here’s a comment from slashdot…

I’m near retirement and have worked in embedded software for four different companies. In all my years of experience, the best engineers I have encountered were those educated at MIT. Limor Fried is not only from MIT, but she did a stint at the MIT media laboratory. I’ve bought lots of products from her and the quality is first rate, her circuit boards are works of art with tin plating on the solder pads (compare that to a Velleman board) and legible annotation.

Plexxi’s SDN Really Flattens the Data Center

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It’s all run by a controller that’s centralized but also includes a federated piece distributed to each switch. The setup is similar to the way OpenFlow gets deployed, but the inner workings are very different (and no, OpenFlow itself isn’t supported yet). Plexxi uses algorithms and a global view of the network to decide how to configure the network.

In other words, rather than programming route tables, the controller looks at the needs of the workloads and calculates how the network ought to be getting used. Some of this can even happen automatically.

via Plexxi’s SDN Really Flattens the Data Center – Mobile Backhaul – Telecom News Analysis – Light Reading.

Former JDSU Exec Rediscovers His Optical Drive

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According to Lumish and his CTO, Pilot founder Frank Smyth, these products, available from October, are needed in the development of optical transport systems beyond 100Gbit/s. The lasers enable a lot more data to be sent down a fiber by cutting down the space between the wavelengths so that more can be packed into the space currently taken up by a single wavelength. Smyth points out that the spacing is fixed between the multiple wavelengths emitted by Pilot’s optical comb sources and this allows the channels effectively to be transmitted right up against each other.

via Light Reading Europe – Optical Networking – Former JDSU Exec Rediscovers His Optical Drive – Telecom News Analysis.

Startups and Patent Trolls by Colleen Chien

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I find that although large companies tend to dominate patent headlines, most unique defendants to troll suits are small. Companies with less than $100M annual revenue represent at least 66% of unique defendants and 55% of unique defendants in PAE suits make under $10M per year. Suing small companies appears distinguish PAEs from operating companies, who sued companies with less than $10M per year of revenue only 16% of the time, based on unique defendants. Based on survey responses, the smaller the company, the more likely it was to report a significant operational impact. A large percentage of responders reported a “significant operational impact”: delayed hiring or achievement of another milestone, change in the product, a pivot in business strategy, shutting down a business line or the entire business, and/or lost valuation. To the extent patent demands tax innovation, then, they appear to do so regressively, with small companies targeted more as unique defendants , and paying more in time, money and operational impact, relative to their size, than large firms.

via Startups and Patent Trolls by Colleen Chien :: SSRN.

App.net’s crowdfunders: Taken for a ride?

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App.net currently embodies a hierarchical vision, where a single top-level provider delivers the infrastructure everyone shares. This is quite unlike StatusNet, which embodies a federated vision of social data networking. If you want to run your own private instance of StatusNet you can — it’s open source, after all. Then if you want to join up with the rest of the planet, you can federate with other instances, creating a meshed data bus with many connection pathways. By contrast, App.net appears to want to maintain a commercial control point on the market it hopes to create.

via App.net’s crowdfunders: Taken for a ride? | Open Source Software – InfoWorld.

So what does App.net have going for it? A proof-of-concept Twitter clone, for sure. A torrent of great ideas, certainly. And $500,000 that’s been given as a gift? Definitely. But its main asset is 10,000 people who want an open infrastructure for digital CB enough to risk $50 to see if it works out. That initial user base is worth at least as much as the money and will be a hard taskmaster.

And then there’s this.

Inteliquent

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Established in 2003, Inteliquent, F/K/A Neutral Tandem, Inc. and Tinet SpA, provides voice, IP Transit, Ethernet and hosted service solutions to carriers, service providers, and content management firms based in over 80 countries and six continents. Headquartered in Chicago, Inteliquent is a public company and traded on the NASDAQ under the symbol IQNT.[1]

via Inteliquent – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

SmartDeco

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SmartDeco was founded in 2011 and is based in LA with manufacturing in Northern California. We believe in making supreme & eco-friendly products right here in the USA. When you open a box of SmartDeco, you’ll find handsome furniture that is refreshingly easy to assemble and 100% recyclable. No tools and no stress, just smart furniture for smart living.

via SmartDeco.

I find this idea fascinating.  It’s a new way to sell boxes and I think for people who move a lot it’s  just throw everything in the recycling — keep the move short and simple.

I do find their prices kind of steep.  $63 for a desk?  I think I paid  less than that for some particle board piece of junk on sale from Office Depot a bunch of years ago.  That this is just a fancy box if this idea takes off I’m sure people could make money selling desks for, say $20?  $10?   What does a cardboard box cost to make and fold?   Also, most office furniture sold at office big box stores are made of particle board which isn’t long lasting either.

File cabinets are absolutely perfect for this concept.  No need to box up the filing cabinet because the filing cabinet is a box.  🙂

Square Payment Pace Rises 25% in Niche Coveted by EBay

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Square Inc., maker of credit-card readers for smartphones and tablets, has increased its payment volume 25 percent since March, when EBay Inc. EBAY’s PayPal showed off a new mobile scanner and underscored growth in the field.

Square, founded in 2009, is processing transactions at an annualized rate of $5 billion, up from $4 billion a month ago, as more consumers embrace mobile payments, Chief Operating Officer Keith Rabois said in an interview. The San Francisco company is making cash from sales before 5 p.m. on any day available in merchants’ accounts on the next business day, compared with as many as five days out for other processors.

via Square Payment Pace Rises 25% in Niche Coveted by EBay – Bloomberg.

Tinychat Now Has 20 Million Registered Users, Hits Profitability

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Tinychat, the web-based video chat service, just surpassed 20 million users. Founded in 2009, the company has been on a roll lately and is showing some impressive momentum. Just about a year and a half ago, after all, Tinychat only had about one million users. The company’s co-founder Dan Blake also tells us that the site currently sees about 400,000 daily users and signs up about 50,000 new users every day. The average user now spends a good 22 minutes on the site per session.

via Tinychat Now Has 20 Million Registered Users, Hits Profitability | TechCrunch.

The New Grabio Lets You Grab Classified Deals On The Go

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Essentially it’s a mobile Craigslist with notifications and location-based searches for classified listings. You can enter any neighborhood, do a quick search, and pick up a broken girls bicycle seat or a gently used full body cast for a few bucks

via The New Grabio Lets You Grab Classified Deals On The Go | TechCrunch.

There are a few similar services out there, most notably EggDrop and Zaarly, but Grabio uses a location aware API notifies you when you’re near deals.