What Is the Role of a Non-Technical Startup Founder?
Non-technical startup founders often get a bad rap in the tech world. This is partly because there’s simply a scarcity of quality technical talent — and partly because many non-technical founders try to jump to the top of the ladder without proving their value. Take a look at Hacker News, Quora, Reddit, Medium, or anywhere […]
New Film Explores the Cultural Effects of Mobile Technology
Mobile is entering adulthood. More than 60% of US adults own smartphones, and virtually everyone connects to the Internet daily. iPhone app developers launch around 1,000 apps every day. Everyone from grandmothers to children use smartphones to communicate and network. So, it’s a fitting time for a film by renowned documentary filmmaker Werner Herzog to […]
How to Guess Startup Success Without Knowing What They Do
Yahoo’s $4.8 billion sale to Verizon in recent months has drawn the eyes of the tech community. Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer is bearing the brunt of that attention, but you’d never know it from a recent Bloomberg Businessweek interview. In conversation, Mayer seemed confident and relaxed about the huge changes to the company, and the […]
Mobile Tech for Elderly Users Is a Huge Startup Opportunity
If you’ve ever tried to walk your grandparents through the basics of using an iPad or iPhone, then you know getting elderly users is an uphill battle. Smartphones are simple to those of us who started using them as young people, but the basics of mobile app usage are as mysterious to older users as […]
Outsourcing App Development: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
“Go ahead and outsource.” People are always surprised when we tell them this. We get dozens of questions about offshoring every week, and the people asking always expect us to steer them away from it. After all, we’re an LA-based app development company — why would we encourage someone not to work with us? The […]
Will the Erosion of Online Advertising Hurt Apple & Google?
Apple and Google couldn’t be more different. On the one side, premium hardware with an emphasis on encryption, security, and brand quality. On the other, cloud services, budget hardware, and a suite of free services that rely on data marketing. Most of us, and certainly most iPhone and Android app developers, use a combination of […]
Asian Chat Apps Suggest Mobile Environments Trump Interfaces
Line, a massively popular mobile messaging app from Japan, went public last week, jumping over 50% in it’s first day on the market. Mobile app developers are looking at the Asian messaging titans (Line and WeChat) with renewed curiosity and many questions. Are immersive, all-encompassing social messaging apps the future? In five years, will apps […]
Startups Increasingly Tackling Policy and Social Issues
Sidewalk labs (an Alphabet subsidiary) is proposing to build Columbus, Ohio’s public transportation from scratch. Y Combinator is researching what it’ll take to build a city from a blank slate. Artificial islands, far from futurist fantasies, are very real undertakings being pursued by billionaires of the tech industry to create “havens” for innovation. What3Words is […]
Uber Rushes to Claim the “Uber for X” Startup Market
Uber just made UberRush available publicly to mobile app developers, allowing anyone to build on-demand services on top of Uber’s existing driver and delivery network. The result? A much shorter runway for small startups looking to become “Uber for X.” Rather than sourcing and maintaining their own fleet of drivers or delivery people, developers can pay […]
Uber Trying to Win Back Their Most Valued Resource: Drivers
Uber, like any sharing-economy mobile app developer, has two main resources: workers and customers. This may sound simplistic, but it’s actually a tricky and unique balance in the on-demand startup industry, compared with worker and consumer relations in more traditional companies. When a mobile app becomes the interface between employer and employee, efficiency increases — […]