VatorNews - Vator contributor stories

Slide's Levchin on self-expression 2.0

by Bambi Francisco Roizen, April 28, 2008 | Comments (2)

App founder talks about how to keep consumer constantly engaged

We’ve come a long way from scribbled x’s and o’s and characters that form little smiley faces. We’re even eons beyond e-cards from Blue Mountain, and yellow-faced emoticons. The current lingua franca of self-expression and communication is poking, nudging and winking. Slide is adding to this vocabulary with kicking, slapping, proposing, and throwing sheep - aka Superpoking. As Max Levchin, ...

Vator Box opens the kimono (Zivity, 23andMe)

by Bambi Francisco Roizen, April 27, 2008 | Comments

This week, the theme on Vator Box is transparency. We look at two women-started social networking sites that reveal who we are at some core level. The first one is Zivity, a $7-million-funded company that founder Cyan Banister describes in her video pitch as a beauty site that "sits at the intersection of MySpace, Playboy and American Idol and Playboy." This is not your mother's iVillage. We also looked at 23andMe, a personal genomics company with $10 million in funding ...

Lessons Learned: Buzzd CEO Nihal Mehta

by Bambi Francisco Roizen, April 25, 2008 | Comments

Nihal Mehta, co-founder and CEO of Buzzd, the real-time mobile search service, says part of being passionate about your idea is being a user of the product or service you're trying to create. Buzzd is his third startup, but the first for which he's taken venture capital investment. The company just closed its Series A round, which he talked about in this earlier interview. Mehta says that since funding for good ideas is "a commodity" he chose his investors based on ...

Velocity's Levinsohn: 'Exits' will be tough

by Bambi Francisco Roizen, April 24, 2008 | Comments

I just came back from Santa Monica where I caught up with one of our (Vator) investors, Richard Rosenblatt of Demand Media. While I was there, I saw Ross Levinsohn, one of the founding partners of venture capital firm Velocity Interactive Group. According to Ross (who is wearing the sunglasses in this video), Velocity has already done some 15 investments. I'll post that interview, as well as the latest one with Richard next week. In this interview, Ross shares his ...

Lessons Learned: Love and healthy balance sheets

by Bambi Francisco Roizen, April 24, 2008 | Comments

Chris MacAskill, co-founder of photo-sharing site SmugMug, says the No. 1 reason his company is doing well is because he and his son - who also co-founded SmugMug -- love what they're doing. "Find out what you love," said Chris, who's been an entrepreneur three times over. We first met when he brought one of his companies - Fatbrain.com - public back in the Internet heyday. Back then, MacAskill took VC funds and on their advice and encouragement brought the ...

Trusted Opinion's Greene on familiarity

by Bambi Francisco Roizen, April 23, 2008 | Comments

	Trusted Opinion co-founder and COO Todd Greene talks about the social recommendation site and why more Internet users are looking for opinions from people that are either similar or familiar to them. Trusted Opinion is one of the companies in the emerging category called recommendation or discovery. Companies in this category include Aggregate Knowledge and Wize.
	Read more »

Max Levchin's lessons from PayPal to Slide

by Bambi Francisco Roizen, April 22, 2008 | Comments

Change was the key to Slide's success as it moved from the desktop to the browser

Slide founder and CEO Max Levchin says "the trick to succeeding in a startup is to figure out what doesn't work... and change... The key thing for Slide was figuring out that the desktop was not outside the browser, but inside the browser."The company itself has to change, as well as the people within it, says Levchin, one of the ...

Mobile social network Buzzd raises A round

by Bambi Francisco Roizen, April 20, 2008 | Comments

Buzzd - an emerging, location-based mobile entertainment company - has raised its Series A round. An announcement is forthcoming, the founders Nihal Mehta and Deepen Shah tell me in this interview when they recently stopped by the Vator studios to talk about the young site. Buzzd - which was a finalist at the Nokia's Mobile Rules '08 competition (where I was a judge) - lets anyone locate where their friends are and inform them of what's going on around them. ...

Vator Box on idea futures and social shopping

by Bambi Francisco Roizen, April 20, 2008 | Comments (2)

Do crowds get dumber the larger they get? That’s what Drew Curtis, founder of Fark.com and a previous guest host on Vator Box, said about predictive markets. Because NewsFutures CEO Emile Servan-Schreiber called Drew “clueless,” we decided to take another crack at services that tap into the wisdom of crowds. This time, we set our sites on Emile’s company NewsFutures, a place where you can buy and sell predictions with virtual currency, but win actual cash prizes. Given our focus ...

E-Trade exec's social network for pro-sumers

by Bambi Francisco Roizen, April 18, 2008 | Comments

By now, many people have heard of former E-Trade CEO Christos Costakos' new social network called Moli, which was seeded with $20 million in friends and family money as well as a $29.6 million investment from a group of investors in January. After the company's launch at Demo in that month, Judy Balint, Moli's president, said Moli's unique visitors (not pageviews mind you, but uniques) soared to 15.9 million in March. That's quite a surge from the couple hundred thousand ...

PageFlakes snapped up by LiveUniverse

by Bambi Francisco Roizen, April 18, 2008 | Comments

The field of upstarts taking on the giants in the personalized home page market shrank by half today when PageFlakes said it was being acquired by Brad Greenspan's LiveUniverse. Terms weren't disclosed. The San Francisco-based company had raised around $4 million in equity and debt.Although it was roundly praised for its easy-to-use interface, PageFlakes never attracted an audience nearly the size of its main startup competitor, netVibes, and neither of them comes close to the millions of users of the customized ...

23andMe ushers in social 'DNA' networks

by Bambi Francisco Roizen, April 17, 2008 | Comments

Relationships are typically formed around commonalities. In the old days, people came together because they went to the same school, grew up in the same town, or shared the same worldview, etc. Today, connections are formed through shared interests around movies you like on Flixster, the same widgets you like on Facebook, and in the future connections might be made based on the haplotype you share. “What’s your haplogroup?” may become as frequently asked as “What’s your sign?,” said Linda ...

Navigenics drives consumer genomics revolution

by Bambi Francisco Roizen, April 16, 2008 | Comments

For a person who rarely goes to the doctor and rarely takes medicine, it was an honor to moderate a panel on personalized medicine at MIT-Stanford Venture Lab, held at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. It was the first panel at VLab with all female panelists, I was told. The discussion - held last night - was about consumer genomics, and specifically 23andMe, and what the market opportunities as well as the challenges are for this emerging sector. The ...

Lessons Learned: Martino says 'Hire former co-workers'

by Bambi Francisco Roizen, April 15, 2008 | Comments

2720_agregate-knowledge-lesson-08-7.flv_lthumb

Paul Martino, CEO and co-founder of Aggregate Knowledge, is a four-time entrepreneur who says he always makes mistakes but that the main goal is not to keep making the same ones. Some of the lessons he shares with Vator.tv's Bambi Francisco include hiring former co-workers, getting a good advisory board and "start a big company.""It's just as hard to start a small company as it is to start a big company," says Martino, whose previous startup, Tribe Network, was acquired ...

Slide's Levchin on making money in social media

by Bambi Francisco Roizen, April 14, 2008 | Comments (1)

Social networking is undoubtedly a ubiquitous feature of our online lives. But whether these platforms can make a lot of money is a big question. To this end, the business models of widgets - Slide, Flixster, iLike, RockYou - built atop of these “social graphs” seem somewhat tenuous. Max Levchin knows this all too well. He recently raised $50 million for what many consider to be a widget company. That company – Slide – now has a market valuation of ...

« First ‹ Previous 1 2 … 73 74 75 76 77 … 84 85 Next › Last »

Bambi Francisco Roizen
CEO and Founder
Vator (Owner)

Bambi's feed

Other contributor channels

99 Desk	Abrar Ahmad
Adam Hoeksema	Adam Sachs
Alain Chuard	Albin Serviant
Alex Kutsishin	Alex Mermod
Alexa Lee	Alia Knight
Anannya Debnath	Andy Freeberg
Andy Parng	Ane Howard
Angelica Davis	Anne Frisbie
Antonio Saillant	Auren Hoffman
Awais Khan	Aylon Steinhart
Banckle Collaborative & Social	Barry Graubart
Ben Casnocha	Ben Elowitz
Bethany Wesch	Bjoern Herrmann
Brad Feld	Braden Kelley
Bradly Couch	Brian Prows
Brian Rayve	Brian Solis
Brittany Laughlin	Bryan McClain
CandleStick Advisors	Carey Ransom
Carl Brown	Carloans Forall
Charlene Li	Chris Arsenault
Chris Caceres	Chris Cunningham
Chris Petrovic	Christine Herron
Cole Flournoy	Constance Hammond
Dan Edwards	Dan Verhaeghe
Danah Boyd	Daniel Ketter
Daniel Sontag	Dave Lavinsky
David Hornik	David Howard
David Jakubowski	David James
David McGee	David Saad
Deborah Deragon	Demian Entrekin
Dennis Drake	Dominic Marc
Dominique Molina	Don Dodge
Doron Jampolsky	Douglas Zanger
Dr. Steven Pouls	Duncan Davidson
easy unlock	EchoChief.com Editor
Eddie Kim	Eldad Matityahu
Eray S	Eric Manlunas
Eric Mieras	Eric Remer
Eric Ries	Eric Yang
Erin Håkansson	Ethan Kurzweil
Eze Vidra	Ezra Roizen
Faith Merino	Focus.com .
Forrest Kolb	Fred Wilson
G S	Gagan Biyani
Gary Silver	Gerard Szatvanyi
Gerhard Gschwandtner	giles richardson
Glenn Pingul	Gregory Ness
Gregory Pleshaw	Hannah Young
Hans Peter Brondmo	Howard Fried
Immad Akhund	J.D. Rucker
Janine Popick	Jasmine Powers
Jason Carbin	Jason Nazar
Jason Ng	Jayasri Gill
Jean Blaise	Jeffrey Bussgang
jenifer smith	Jeremy Beck
Jeremy Liew	Jessica Altieri
Jessica Miller	Jessica Washington
Jessica Laine Simmons	Jill Asher
Joe Gagliano	Joe Peacock
Joel Passen	Joey Tamer
John Bautista	John Greathouse
John Im	John Mcbill
John Shinal	jonathan bergstein
Josh Chandler	Julie Trade Levitch
Kanya Goldman	Katie Gatto
Kedric Van de Carr	Kevin Cimring
Kevin Hsu	Koby Biller
Konstantin Tovstiadi	Krista Paul
Kristin Karaoglu	Krystal Peak
L.B. Higginbotham	Larry Chiang
Larry Irons	Larry Kless
Larry Kramer	Larry Lisser
Lars Hard	Lauren Perkins
Lis Hubert	Lisa Anderson
Lisa Constance	Live Octane
Lorenzo Carver	Louis Gray
Luara Simpson	Marc Dangeard
Maria Victoria Beltran	Mark Cuban
Mark Evans	Mark MacLeod
Martin Zwilling	Matt Bowman
Matt Curcio	Melih Oztalay
Meliza Solan Surdi	Merrin Muxlow
Mia Saini	Michael Blend
Michael Bowers	Michael Burke
Michael Harries	Michael Kriz
Michael Ostendorff	Michael Stocker
Mike Cuesta	Mike Fruchter
Mike Rehan	Mikita Tseplavukhau
Mitos Suson	Nabeel Ahmed
Nagy Erzsebet	Nathan Lands
Nathan Pensky	Nelson Tan
Nick Such	Nikko Marasigan
Nir Eyal	Niraj Patkar
Norm Strassner	NuNet *
Olya Shabanova	Pascal Bensoussan
Patrick Haynes	Paul Schwartz
Peak Adventure	Per Håkansson
Pierre Coupet	Projector 123
Rachel Barge	Rakesh Verma
Raksh Martin	Ray Grieselhuber
Rebecca Fannin	Rebecca Weeks Watson
Reena A Jadhav	Research Mindz
Resource Nation	Rich Reader
Richard Kastelein	Roger Royse
Ron Levi	Ronny Kerr
Roy Stewart	Russ Whitman
Ryan Bagueros	Ryan Downs
Ryan Roberts	Samantha Spuckler
Samir Soriano	Sean Anderson
Seth Godin	Seth Lieberman
Sharad Saxena	Shavkat Karimov
Shiva Badruswamy	siraj deen
Sponsored Story	Steffen Heringhaus
Stephen G. Barr	Steve Anderson
Steve Blank	Steve Patrizi
Steve Ragan	Steve Rosenbaum
Steve Slepcevic	Steven Loeb
Subhash Kandpal	Susan Payton
susan solovic	Sutapa Kasibhatla
Sylvie Leotin	Tara Hornor
Taylor Buley	Tech Startups 3.0
Ted Hollifield	Ted Rheingold
The Editor GreatStartups.com	Theresa Johnson
Thom Calandra	Thomas Korte
Thomas Rigler	Tim Flannagan
Tim Marman	TJ Marsh
Tom Patterson	Tony Dillistone
Tony Shaw	Vahid Dejwakh
Victor Hanna	Winson Ng
Xtreme Labs	Yield Software
Zahra Siddique	Zamic Michael