Being the tech tire-kicker I am, when Google+ launched I was curious. Would the web giant get it right this time, or stumble through another missed opportunity a la Buzz? There was also a certain sense of fatigue that crept over me. I immediately felt compelled to tee up my best app configuration and social sharing skills for yet another destination on the web. So what gives after a few months with Google+? Can It [...]
If you’ve not been to one of our previous Dachis Group happy hours, you definitely need to swing by, say hello, and have a drink on us. We’ve got a bunch of people in town from other offices around the world, so it’s a great opportunity to share some ideas about what is going on in the world of social business. The event is Tuesday (tomorrow) at the Hangar Lounge downtown. That’s at 5th and [...]
mobileTech Tuesday by Steve Guengerich As the supremacy of the freemium app and appcommerce business models over the fee-based, paid apps becomes more evident every month, deals have become among the most hotly contested mobile app categories. Given the heat of competition and that one of the hotter Austin-headquartered ventures WhaleShark Media is a deals-oriented consolidation of a fragmented market (not unlike Homeaway is, in the travel sector), I thought deals apps were worth a [...]
MinorMonitor went live today as a unique, free, web-based tool for monitoring children on Facebook. Built just for parents to enable a quick, dashboard-view into their child(ren)’s Facebook activities and friends, MinorMonitor was created by Infoglide, a government-grade technology company that has been delivering anti-fraud software solutions to federal and state governments and commercial organizations for over 15 years. The free, web-based tool is open for sign up. According to a recently released survey by [...]
mobileTech Tuesday, by Steve Guengerich In a post on TechCrunch over the holidays, entrepreneur and author Stephen Martin wrote about the premise of his new book, The Enterprise of One. In the post, Martin writes about how we have arrived at a new milestone he calls “the democratization of opportunity.” He goes on to write a key passage about the potential for individuals: Today, a person’s professional identity is more important than ever. Individual skills, expertise, [...]
mobileTech Tuesday, by Steve Guengerich Last week, I presented an initial map of Austin’s mobile scene and wrote about how mobile tech has fast become the hottest area in the industry. The Christmas holidays have given additional think-time for others to further highlight this trend, much better frankly than I could do. One of the best posts from among the more widely read publications was one by Seth Weintraub in Fortune. In his post, Weintraub [...]
This week Austin welcomes a small Facebook team to town.
As Governor Perry wrote in (wink wink) a Facebook note on February 25, Austin will be giving Facebook $1.4 million in tax incentives to establish an office in Austin. According to their career listings, the new office is expected to house 200 employees in sales, operations, and development.
On March 12th, Infochimps, a startup data marketplace here in Austin, entered into a revenue sharing agreement with MySpace allowing the social network’s data to be available for sale on the Infochimps site.
A week later, after ReadWriteWeb wrote about the deal, a number of negative comments and ensuing articles were written, most notably a conversation thread on Slashdot.
What happened here, and what can this tell us about the possible futures for data privacy?
Gov. Rick Perry today announced on the Governor’s Office Facebook page (http://www.facebook.com/TexasGovernor) that the state will invest $1.4 million through the Texas Enterprise Fund (TEF) for Facebook to create a sales and operations office in Austin. This investment will create 200 jobs and more than $3.1 million in capital investment. The TEF funding is conditioned upon the finalization of a local incentive agreement with the City of Austin. “The TEF continues to be a critical, deal [...]
