We need an independent invention defense to minimize the damage of aggressive patent trolls
Almost a third of our portfolio is under attack by patent trolls. Is it possible that one third of the engineering teams in our portfolio unethically misappropriated technology from someone else and then made that the basis of their web services? No! That's not what is happening. Our companies are driven by imaginative and innovative engineering teams that are focused on creating social value by bringing innovative new services to market. Our companies are being attacked by companies that were not even in the same market, very often by companies they did not even know existed. The problem is...
ContinueIntroducing Tracked.com
At Union Square Ventures, we seldom invest in a company before it launches publicly. The exception is when we have the opportunity to back an experienced entrepreneur with a strong team and a strong product vision. That is exactly what happened with Tracked.com. So we now find ourselves in the unusual position of announcing the public launch of an investment we made some time ago.
A year ago, Mike Yavonditte, a web veteran based in New York who had worked at Ziff-Davis, Juno, Alta Vista and Interactive Corporation, and who had most recently gone wire to wire as the CEO of Quigo, began assembling a team to build a new kind of financial information service.
ContinueFoursquare
We recently wrote about our search for native mobile applications, which we defined as applications that simply were not possible previously (as opposed to making something that already exists online accessible via mobile). We have also long been interested in gameplay (Zynga and Heyzap) and in local information (outside.in). We were therefore thrilled to find an opportunity that combines all three and are pleased to announce our investment in Foursquare.
Foursquare allows you to "check in" at a venue (via the iphone app, the mobile site, or SMS). Your check in is broadcast to your friends, which is a great way to let them know where you are. For most people, a conscious act of sharing is a lot less worrisome than an ongoing broadcast of location.
ContinueChris and Malcolm are both wrong
Many of you are familiar with dust up between Chris Anderson and Malcolm Gladwell that was touched off by Malcolm's review of Chris's new book, Free: The Future of Radical Price. [UPDATE: Free is no longer free. The link to Chris's book has been retired. You can find Chris's book on Amazon.]
Anderson's book points out that the cost of providing web services is declining as a result of open source software, commodity hardware, and cheap bandwidth. Gladwell agrees with the trend but notes that it is very expensive for YouTube to host video.
ContinueThe Mobile Challenge
We are fascinated by the disruption underway in mobile applications. Carriers seem to have lost their role as gatekeepers for applications as smartphone sales are rapidly ramping and "app stores" or direct downloads are the new distribution models. This is exciting as it opens up a whole new arena for startups to compete in. Here is some of our early thinking about this with the goal of getting a discussion going.
The challenge for startups (and investors!) has been identifying opportunities that are "native" to the new platforms. By "native" we mean opportunities that simply did not exist previously and cannot exist without the phone. For instance, we would not consider delivering breaking news to a mobile a native opportunity, as a startup rarely has a better chance of being "CNN for mobile" than CNN does.
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