*** For Founders Co-op Events, visit The Easy Events Calendar ***
PC Magazine quoting Crashdev on Amazon's smarphone plans
More Amazon Smartphone Rumors Emerge
Chris DeVore, a general partner at Seattle's Founders Co-Op, argued in a blog post that Amazon wants to control "100 percent share of consumer wallet - whether you're buying books, or clothing, or digital goods, or even local services, they want you to make Amazon your shopping platform of record."
Thinkfuse acquired by Salesforce
Salesforce Acquires TechStars And TechCrunch Disrupt Alum Thinkfuse
Thinkfuse, a Seattle-based startup that allows companies to send regular progress reports to managers, executives and other stakeholders, just announced that it has been acquired by Salesforce.com.
Chris in GeekWire on Seattle's Angel scene
Angel mind meld: What early-stage investors really want
"There has never been a better time to be a software entrepreneur…. It is an incredibly exciting time for anybody who does what I do because the amount of talent that’s leaking out of big companies to do it has never been stronger. So, super fun times.”
AppStoreHQ + App Store Optimization in TechCrunch
ASO (App Store Optimization) Is The New SEO, And Here’s A Tool To Do It
What’s the hardest thing about building a successful mobile app? If you answered “building a mobile app,” you’re wrong. It’s getting your app found. With over 600,000+ iOS applications, and now some 450,000 on Android, the real challenge for developers is having their app surfaced higher than hundreds of other competitors in the app store search results. Doing this correctly involves ASO, or app store optimization.
GroupTalent expands reach
TinyProj Shuts Down, Users Sent To TechStars Grad GroupTalent Instead
TinyProj, a project marketplace started by Forrst founder Kyle Bragger is shutting down. All 8,300 of the service’s registered developers and designers who used the site to find project-based work will now be transitioned over to GroupTalent, a recent TechStars grad.
TechCrunch notices that Urban Airship is killing it
On The Heels Of Hiring Skype’s Former Strategy Boss, Urban Airship Hits 10 Billion Notifications Pushed
Urban Airship has been working pretty hard of late to plant itself firmly on the “Startups to Watch” list. The Portland and San Francisco-based startup, a platform provider that gives developers a simple way to build in-app purchases and push notifications into their mobile apps, grabbed some media attention when it acquiredSimpleGeo back in October for $3 million.
FC II Raise Covered in Xconomy
Founder’s Co-Op Closes $8M Second Fund
Founder’s Co-op, the Seattle-based early stage investment group headed by Andy Sack and Chris DeVore, has closed its second fund at just under $8 million. That’s a significant step up from the first Founder’s Co-op fund, which DeVore says was about $2.5 million—a shift that reflects both the growth of Seattle’s startup scene, and a decision have more reserve capital on hand for follow-on investments.
Founders Co-op II raise hits GeekWire
Founder’s Co-op raises $8M angel fund, looks to become a ‘catalyst’ for the NW startup community
Founder’s Co-op, the angel investment fund led by Andy Sack and Chris DeVore, has raised a new $8 million fund from some of the top names in the Seattle technology community.
Managing partner Chris DeVore tells GeekWire that the new fund — raised over the past 12 months — will be used to bankroll as many as 20 new startup companies in the Pacific Northwest. It plans to invest between $100,000 and $750,000 in early-stage startups.
Hack Education names Highlighter a Top 10 Ed-Tech Startup for 2011
Top 10 Ed-Tech Startups of 2011
I remember the very first time a teacher gave me permission to write in a book. Highlight important passages, she said. Make notes in the margins. No way, I thought. You can write in books?!
Since then, I've read every book with a pencil in hand -- underlining and annotating. That's something that makes the move to digital books both terrifying and wonderful. It's terrifying if indeed it means the end of marginalia. And it's wonderful if someone can build a tool that integrates marginalia with the Web, and makes our notes and highlights sharable and social.
GigaOm selects AppFog as "cloud startup to watch"
10 cloud startups to watch in 2012
AppFog is one of a handful of Platform-as-a-Service startups to launch in 2011, but AppFog is unique because it leverages the open-source Cloud Foundry code as its core. The switch to a Cloud Foundry foundation over the summer resulted in a name change from PHP Fog, as the company was immediately able to support numerous new programming languages. Going forward, AppFog can ride Cloud Foundry’s development wave, while focusing its own efforts on building the best user experience.
TechCrunch on GroupTalent
GroupTalent’s Hiring Marketplace Now Automatically Matches People With Jobs
Talent drain? That’s what they’re saying. The explosion of early stage startups has made it harder for companies to find the best engineers and designers because everyone’s trying to do their own startup. GroupTalent (a startup, of course) wants to be the solution for that.
GeekWire on Unbounce
Founder’s Co-op heads north of the border, backs B.C. startup Unbounce
Founder’s Co-op is among the new backers of Unbounce, a Vancouver, B.C.-based company that today announced an $850,000 investment from a large syndicate of investors.
Unbounce has developed a new hosted service that allows marketers to easily create, publish and test specific landing pages, analyzing which ones perform best.
Intel Joins Urban Airship Series C
Intel Gets Serious About Mobile With Its Own App Fund and Urban Airship Partnership
Vice President of Intel Capital, Lisa Lambert, had this to say:
The top app companies look to Urban Airship for help shaping the most engaging user experience on mobile. We are well aligned with Urban and they help us bring even more value to developers creating apps for the users of millions of Intel Atom processor-based devices.
Array Health selected for Highmark Private Health Exchange
Highmark Plans Private Exchange with Array Health Technology
Pittsburgh-based health insurer Highmark, an independent Blue Cross Blue Shield plan, has partnered with Seattle-based Array Health to use the latter's health insurance exchange technology in a private exchange aimed at small businesses.
A full implementation of the plan will work with small businesses offering their employees a defined contribution, then those employees going to a Highmark online store, powered by Array, to select from seven health plans, two dental plans and two vision plans depending on their needs.
Apsalar reviewed on Read/Write Web
Apsalar Taking a Holistic and Integrated Approach to Mobile Analytics
App developers are looking for ways to gain users and keep them in thefold through actionable data. There are a variety of ways to do this and several startups have popped up in the last couple of years to focus on particular elements of analytics, advertising, marketing and engagement layers. To this point most of these startups are focusing only on one or two of these problems.
Analytics and engagement startup Apsalar wants to change that.