LAUNCH Blog

LAUNCH Blog

The Unbearable Wearable: Google Glass is Brilliant, Loathsome and Not Inevitable (or "Take Those off before I Punch You in the Face!")

@Scobleizer's infamous Google Glass photo, which his wife took at their home.

I’ve run into several friends wearing Google Glass in the past three months, and I have three words of advice for them:

Take. Them. Off.

First, you look like an idiot.

Second, you’re killing the party.

Third, are you recording me right now?!?

First Encounter: “Are You Recording Right Now?”

The first time I ran into these magical devices in the wild was at a conference. A fairly notable person walked up to me wearing them.

I asked, “How do I know if you’re recording me?”

“You don’t!” he replied before correcting himself. “Well, I wouldn’t do that without telling you.”

“But how do I know? I’m not really comfortable with trusting folks to be recording me or not. I mean, how do we have a real, honest discussion if I don’t know if you’re recording it?” I offered.

“Well, you might be able to see me turn the camera on... See, you have to click to record,” he replied.

So I’m supposed to just trust every person wearing these that they’re not recording me.

LAUNCH Education & Kids 2013: Winners, Videos, All Presenting Companies Are Here

[ LAUNCH founder Jason Calacanis's fireside chat with entrepreneur/investor Mitch Kapor before a packed house. Photo by Philip Szeto. ]

We were awed and inspired by the 500+ educators, entrepreneurs and developers who joined us for our 2nd annual LAUNCH Education & Kids event at Microsoft's Mountain View campus June 26-27.

You'll find the startup demos and investor panels on our YouTube channel here.
[ Fireside chats with entrepreneur/investor Mitch Kapor, Lynda Weinman of lynda.com and Daphne Koller of Coursera coming this summer as episodes of "This Week in Startups." ]

All 20 companies (with contact info) are in this spreadsheet. The 2013 agenda is here.

@Jason announced that the new LAUNCH Fund will seek to invest in three startups from this event (pending due diligence): LocoMotive Labs, STEAM Carnival & Kidaptive.

The 2013 LAUNCH Education & Kids Winners:
- Best in Show (Overall Winner): Kidaptive (entertaining and adaptive content that helps children learn)
- Most Impactful: CK-12 Foundation (free, high-quality open content in the STEM subjects)
- Best Presentation: STEAM Carnival (re-imagining the carnival with robots, fire and lasers)
- Best Hardware [ tie ]: Roominate (wired dollhouse building kit for girls ages 6+) and Linkbots (modular robotic, brings project from idea to working prototype)
- Best Technology: GuitarBots (makes guitar learning fun and motivating)
- Best Design: LocoMotive Labs (apps to empower kids with special needs)
- Audience Favorite: STEAM Carnival

Big thanks to this year's LAUNCH Education & Kids lead sponsor Pearson as well as sponsors Mandrill, StudyMode, LittleBits and UCSF.

HackADay Looking for a New Home

HackADay.com, an awesome maker community, is looking for a new home
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tl;dr: HackADay is a passionate community of hackers doing awesome stuff. It deserves more attention than I can give it right now, as I’m ultra-focused on the launch of Inside.com. So, we’re looking for a caring new owner with a stellar track record of not f@#$ing up brands to take it over.

--------

We created HackADay back in 2004 because one of Engadget’s awesome bloggers, Phil Torrone, wanted to do super-geeky projects every day and the Engadget audience wasn’t exactly into that frequency.

In a phone call with PT I said, “So you want to do a hack a day?”

He was like, “Yeah, a hack a day.”

And I was like, “OK, let’s do hackaday.com.”

When we sold Weblogs Inc. to AOL, we took HackADay out of the deal because it was doing stuff that a corporate parent’s legal arm might not feel comfortable with (e.g., hacking cable boxes!).

So, I bought it and kept it safe and warm inside of Mahalo.com for the past couple of years. However, since I’m super focused on the Inside.com launch, I need to find a new home for it.

WLITF: Private Jets for the Masses -- A Surf Air Review

Surf Air uses the Swiss-made Pilatus PC-12 for its flights [ photo courtesy of Pilatus Aircraft ].

As part of my ‘we live in the future’ series, here’s a review of an unlimited private jet service for everyone.*

*And by jet I mean turboprop, and by everyone I mean upper-middle-class people.

Also, I talk about the 'instant economy' and the concept of 'implied odds' (from poker) as it relates to taking on big challenges like Surf Air is doing (the 'what if it works' section).

-----------
Took a Surf Air flight today (gratis), as I'm considering a membership to the 'all you can fly' service.

It's day 16 of Surf Air's 'beta.' I’m writing this on my Blackberry Q10. Yeah, the new Blackberry with the keyboard. It’s awesome. Not kidding, I love having a keyboard.

Surf Air currently operates between the tiny San Carlos airport in the Bay Area and Burbank in the Los Angeles area. They're going to add a bunch of cities to the membership including Santa Barbara (July 10), San Diego and Lake Tahoe.

It's $1,650 a month for unlimited travel between their cities, plus a $500 one-time initiation fee.

My four to six monthly Southwest flights to the Valley make it almost a 'push' for me, as I pay $199 to $250 each way on average. If I do five flights, 2.5 round trips, I would nearly break even.

Now, as a disclaimer, I don't like small planes. I can handle a small jet, but puddle jumpers and turboprop/regional airlines are not my thing.

The 20 Companies You'll See at LAUNCH Education & Kids June 26-27, 2013

[ JoyTunes delights the judges at LAUNCH Education & Kids in June 2012. ]

We’re proud to announce the 20 companies that take the stage at LAUNCH Education & Kids this week. Tune in for Jason's fireside chat with Mitch Kapor at 1pm PT on Wednesday, June 26 followed by demos at launch.co/live (and again at 9am PT on June 27, when we kick off with Lynda Weinman of Lynda.com). Our full agenda is here.

CK-12
http://www.ck12.org/student/
https://twitter.com/CK12Foundation
https://angel.co/ck-12-foundation

CK-12 Foundation is a non-profit organization that increases access to high quality educational materials for K-12 students all over the world. They offer free high-quality, standards-aligned, open content in the STEM subjects.

CollegeSnapps
http://mat88.wix.com/snapps2
https://twitter.com/CollegeSnapps
https://angel.co/collegesnapps-1

CollegeSnapps™ is a mobile application that connects students to their academic advisors. Through a series of live and prescribed interactions, it fosters engagement by allowing advisors to monitor a student’s progress and help the student succeed throughout college.

Crowdmark
https://crowdmark.com/
https://twitter.com/Crowdmark
https://angel.co/crowdmark

Crowdmark is a web application, with a paper-to-cloud bridge and a marking workflow that streamlines document assessment on a massive scale. Crowdmark helps teachers grade better.

A YouTube Creators' Bill of Rights (Or 'A Roadmap for Building a Better YouTube')

In my last piece I explained why I didn’t want to work on YouTube’s farm no more. As promised, in this piece I will follow up on one of the two parts I couldn’t get to in the first piece: 'How Twitter, Hulu, MSN, Yahoo and Facebook -- or a next-gen YouTube startup -- could each take on YouTube effectively.'

My explanation takes the form of a 'YouTube Creators' Bill of Rights,' which can be used as a roadmap for YouTube to build sustainable bridges with their current partners -- or as a roadmap for a competitor to crush YouTube. :-)

In other words, these are the five killer features that could kill YouTube.

If you built a service around these five features, and you had some level of traffic and sales support (think Yahoo, Microsoft, AOL, Facebook or my favorite Twitter), you could instantly take the top 500 channels out from under YouTube.

I ain't gonna work on YouTube's farm no more

Editor's note: Read Jason's followup to this piece, 'A YouTube Creators' Bill of Rights,' here.

Summary: I spent the last year as a funded YouTube partner and was one of the top ~10% of content creators who had their deals renewed in ‘cycle two’ -- and I turned down their money.

In this editorial I explain:

a) Why YouTube is an amazing platform
b) The five reasons I turned down YouTube’s funding
c) Why content owners investing solely in YouTube are investing in their own demise
d) How you can outgame YouTube and suck massive value from the ecosystem
e) Exactly how Twitter, Hulu, MSN, Yahoo and Facebook -- or a next-gen YouTube -- could each take on YouTube

Background
=================
Just over a year ago, YouTube asked me to pitch them on making shows that would take their service from a UGC (user generated content) juggernaut to a more advertiser-friendly platform.

They needed better-looking content, produced regularly, to get the big advertisers.

Also, to be frank, they needed reliable and appropriate content. Much of YouTube is comedy, and a lot of it isn’t exactly ‘sponsor friendly’ (see Shane Dawson).

They needed folks with experience in this space, so they reached out to people like me who had a track record in web content.

The deal was simple (according to public reports): we give you seven figures to make great shows, we sell the ads, we promote your content and then we split the revenue.

Great deal! What could go wrong, right?

I Started a Co-working Space in LA

I'm thrilled to announce that I’ve started a co-working space here in Los Angeles. Being an entrepreneur is sometimes lonely work, and having a bunch of founders around you makes it a lot easier.

We’re calling it LAUNCH Co-work, and it’s a 10,000+ square-foot, 30-foot ceiling space in Culver City with room for a dozen startups.

We’re looking for awesome collaborators to learn, share and generally change the world with. I might angel invest in some of the startups, have them on “This Week in Startups” or just talk shop in the kitchen.

Lynda Weinman Is Our Third Fireside Chat for LAUNCH Education & Kids June 26-27

Lynda.com -- with 2.5M members and nearly 100k videos across almost 2k courses -- has more than proven the market for learning software, business and creative skills online. Co-founder and executive chair Lynda Weinman will talk with LAUNCH founder Jason Calacanis in her fireside chat at LAUNCH Education & Kids June 26-27.

But this is not an overnight-success story. Lynda, a special effects animator and faculty member at the Art Center College of Design, founded the company with her husband Bruce Heavin in 1995 (see her full bio here).

Yahoo + Tumblr = Big Win, But Zuck + Tumblr = Bigger Win

Yahoo is going to buy Tumblr for $1B on Monday according to reports.

I will explain to you why the media is freaking out, why big companies need to make more bets like this, why Yahoo is the perfect home and why Zuckerberg should offer $2B.

Media... Freak Out!

Over 20 years in the industry I’ve learned that when something gets bought for $1B or more, people tend to freak out.

People can comprehend millions of dollars, because we all know folks who have a million or more dollars (or homes worth that). When you start talking about 100s or 1,000s of millions, people get emotional and some start lashing out.

Journalists are one of the first groups to lash out. Why? Because they have no chance of making big money in their jobs, and they have to fight for $5k raises while their pensions are replaced with 401ks. Also, they tend to have covered startups like Tumblr from year one and they can’t reconcile how something that didn’t exist five years ago is now worth $1B -- and that they don’t have to balls to create something.

F@#4k it, Yahoo Should Buy 10 Tumblrs

Here’s the truth: a billion dollars is nothing to a company like Yahoo or Google or Facebook or Apple or Microsoft.

If there were 10 startups like Tumblr, with 100M+ users and $50M-$100M in revenue potential a year, it would actually make sense for Google, Yahoo or Facebook to buy all 10.

At once.

Roll the dice.

Why?

Because those companies have tens to hundreds of billions of dollars in market cap and cash, and if one in 10 of those startups turn into YouTube, it’s worth it.

Read the complete editorial on LinkedIn here.

Sign up for jason’s email list at http://jasonnation.com/

Fireside Chat with Daphne Koller of Coursera at LAUNCH Education & Kids on June 27

If you're talking about technology's impact on education, the conversation always includes MOOCs -- massive open online courses. That's why we're excited Coursera co-founder and Stanford computer science professor Daphne Koller will join LAUNCH founder Jason Calacanis for a fireside chat at LAUNCH Education & Kids June 26-27.

Coursera, which aims to make the best education accessible online to everyone for free, has more than 3.5M students, 370 courses and 69 institutional partners -- a 5x increase in students and 25x in courses since last summer.

Partners include top US schools like Stanford and Princeton, plus foreign institutions like the University of Tokyo and École Polytechnique. The company raised $22M total from Kleiner Perkins and NEA in mid-2012, less than a year after Daphne and co-founder Andrew Ng developed Stanford's first online education platform.

Killer Startup Tools: Fast, Cheap and in Control

by @Jason

When I started building companies in the '90s, the only tools designed to help startups grow were "productivity apps" like Microsoft Office and Quickbooks. They were helpful, but they only solved very basic problems like math, bookkeeping and letter writing.

They didn’t address high-level stuff like ideation, analytics, hiring, CRM (customer relationship management), time tracking, project management, customer feedback and—gulp!—employee motivation and feedback. If you wanted software to do those things, you needed to hire three or four people and customize software packages, which typically started in the six-figure-and-up range.

Today? Today you can have all eight of those functions for—wait for it—under $1,000 a month. Most importantly, they can each be set up and learned in under a day, and managed by existing team members—without dedicated staff—in a couple of hours a month.

Insane!

Mitch Kapor Fireside Chat Set for LAUNCH Education & Kids, June 26 & 27 at Microsoft's SV Campus

We love bringing living legends to our stage, which is why we are thrilled and honored that Mitch Kapor will join LAUNCH founder Jason Calacanis for a fireside chat at LAUNCH Education & Kids. The event, where 20 companies will debut or demo new products, takes place June 26 & 27 at Microsoft's campus in Mountain View.

Mitch is best known as the founder of Lotus Development Corporation and designer of Lotus 1-2-3. Through Kapor Capital, he is active as a seed-stage investor focused on social impact startups, especially in education, healthcare and consumer finance. Mitch is also a director and major funder of the Level Playing Field Institute, which works to increase fairness in education and the workplace by closing the opportunity gap and removing barriers to success (the full bio is here).

Looking Back at #launch2013: 21k Mentions in Three Days, 6k Attendees

We planned on making the 2013 LAUNCH Festival our biggest, best event ever -- and judging by the crowds, the energy and the awesome demos, panels and firesides, we're pretty sure we did just that.

We asked our friends at Lewis PR to run some numbers on our social presence and package them with some of our other stats -- such as 6k attendees, 500 Hackathon participants -- into one tidy infographic.

Turns out #launch2013 was used nearly 21k times during the event and Twitter-ing folks mentioned @LAUNCH more than 4k times (thanks to @hkwong for tweeting more than us!). Plus, attendees using our crowdfunding app committed more than $12.5M in LAUNCH dollars to the 50 startups that launched on stage.

Google's Fiber Takeover Plan Expands: Will Kill Cable & Carriers

Last year, on August 1st, I emailed you guys my thoughts about Google Fiber:

Google's Fiber "Proof of Concept" Is Anything But
http://blog.launch.co/blog/googles-fiber-proof-of-concept-is-anything-but.html

In that piece I wrote, “Mark my words: Google Fiber is not a test, it's a takeover plan.”

Last week, Google announced its second Fiber city: Austin. Yes, the nerd/hipster home of SXSW will get fiber in a move clearly designed to blow every techie's mind at SXSW 2014.

This week, Google announced that it had bought fiber provider iProvo to launch a third city: Provo, UT.

They just tripled their cities in 10 days.

‘Noogle’ -- the new Google since Larry Page took over as CEO -- is all about moonshots. Google can’t shut up about moonshots in fact, with Steven Levy winning an interview with Larry for WIRED with the title 'Why moonshots matter.'

In 10 short months, 30k+ tech, film and music nerds could be walking around Austin hearing locals brag about their free 5-megabit download connections (and 1 gigabit up/down connections that cost $70 a month.)

More importantly, every Google Fiber home will have a public wifi component. In order to get Google Fiber, you’re going to have to agree to put a router in that lets anyone use a portion of your bandwidth.

That’s not announced, but it’s gonna happen.

WLITF: Speculation, Investigation & Hacktivism

This Vine video of TV coverage of the Boston Marathon has been tweeted over 40k times.

[ WLITF = We Live in the Future ]

Checking Twitter is a mixed bag.

One day you open it to find out Kobe’s season is over or that your favorite TV show got picked up by Netflix. Another day a startup you love was either sold or shut down. Sadly, like many of us, you might check your stream and find out that an old friend killed himself.

Yesterday was the worst of these experiences: a terrorist attack at the Boston Marathon.

Or was it a terrorist attack?

Perhaps it was a gas explosion?

Or maybe two gas explosions?

Is that possible to have two gas lines explode? Wait, could this be another 9/11 or 7/7?

If it is, who is responsible?

The speculation starts in our minds the moment the shock fades -- and boy does our shock fade quickly these days. As a society, we process instantly, be it terrorist attacks or viral videos.

We move from ‘shock and retweet’ to ‘reply and incendiary post’ in minutes or hours, and then we get meta: with one side telling the other to shut up and that reactions are not right, not wanted or somehow inappropriate.

'Now is not the time to speculate!' is the rallying cry.

We all process so fast: one minute we’re in shock and the next we are criticizing each other’s reactions to shocking events.

Perhaps we should be more forgiving of news anchors and to each other in moments of stress, fear and outrage?

No one can put their foot in their mouth when it’s closed, but the quickest path to resolution is our words.

Should we speak or shut up?

How to Raise Money in 2013

by @Jason Calacanis

Every few years—at least for the past 20 that I’ve been in the technology space—I’ve witnessed a change in how startups go about getting funding from investors.

In the mid ’90s, the best way to build a pitch was to collect a couple of MBAs and build a kick-ass business plan, a slick PowerPoint deck and, of course, a killer business model in Excel. (Back then, people spent more time building their business plans than founders spend on the first versions of companies I see on today’s AngelList!)

Ten years ago, the best practice was finding an emerging market and building the category killer in it. Basically, you paired a large vertical (healthcare, sports, kids, plastics) with a buzzword (blogging, photo sharing, social, e-commerce) and put a “for” between them. For example: “blogging for sports,” “photo sharing for kids,” or “social for healthcare.”

Today? People are obsessed with the “lean startup” genre of businesses that reinvent—basically optimize—traditional activities like hailing a taxi or booking a hotel room.

If you came into a room with a VC 10 years ago and said you were building any of the following businesses, you probably would have been quickly dismissed:

1. Hail a taxi

2. Back up your files

3. A message board for employees

Yet those businesses—Uber, Dropbox and Yammer—are three of the hottest startups. (Full disclosure: I’m an investor in Uber, and while I didn’t invest in Dropbox and Yammer, they did debut at my conference.)

So, how does one get an investment for an idea that seems obvious? Very simple: Understand what angel investors and VCs are looking for and give it to them. Investors have pattern recognition, and they are driven by four Fs: fortune, fame, fear and fun.

Should You Pay $250k to Go to College?

I was talking with my brother recently about higher education. We both struggled our way through school, barely able to afford our approximate $40k in tuition and expenses over the four years (he at a state school, me at Fordham University).

Now his son has been accepted to a bunch of amazing schools, and we discussed a $250k four-year bill. Yep, 20 years after we graduated, the same set of schools cost 6x+ as much.

Which leads to the question parents are faced with today:

Is college worth the money?

The answer?
===================
No, it’s not enough value for the money.

In my estimation college is worth it if you have a ton of money and don’t care about ROI, or if you can pay less than $50k-$75k and get a job with starting pay of $50k or more (generally technical, trade or finance work).

At $100k-$250k, it’s simply foolish.

All LAUNCH Festival 2013 Winners and Investment Prizes

Everything you need to know to catch up on LAUNCH Festival 2013 is here.

Something we need to add? Email team@launch.co

LAUNCH Festival 2013 Overall Winners

Best Overall 1.0 - Boxbee
Best Enterprise 2.0 - Zillabyte
Best Consumer 2.0 - Jawfish
LAUNCH Alpha (aka Hackathon winner) - WizzyWig

Additional Winners

Best Demo Pit - NanoSatisfi
Diamond in the Rough - Addicaid
Best Hardware - CubeSensors
Best International - Instabridge
Best Enterprise 1.0 - Synata
Best Presentation 1.0 - Knowyo
Best Business Model 1.0 - AdStage
Best Design 1.0 - Triptease
Best Technology 1.0 - Navisens

Investment Prizes**
We had a number of folks promise to put up investment prizes. And they are coming through on their promises!

Brad Gerstner (Room77) - $150k offer: AdStage & Instabridge
David Cohen (TechStars) - $100k offer: Boxbee
Jay Levy (Zelkova) - $50k+ offer: AdStage
Gigi Brisson & Harvey Allison (Attractor Ventures) - $50k offer: AdStage
Steve Chen (Screendate) - $25k offer: Jawfish
Marc Meyer (Persefon) - $20k offer: Boxbee
Marc Meyer (Persefon) - $15k offer: AdStage

Did we miss you on this list? Email team@launch.co.

** All investment prizes are still pending due diligence.

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