Monday, November 23, 2009

BusinessWeek Report on Startup Ventures

Interesting feature in the Nov 23 BusinessWeek issue.



Titled "World's Most Intriguing Startups", it details some of the companies that are poised for success during this downturn in business. Some of the startups contained within are Hunch... a "website that used the experiences of others to help people make decisions." The venture was started by Flickr founder Caterina Fake and is written about in the opening story from this BW report.

Another interesting startup report was "Augmenting Reality" on the Dutch startup Layar. Augmented reality is a very cool field in that it's about the overlay of digital data on a physical world... an example of which would be pointing your iPhone (via a now available free app) at something and pressing a button to then have information about that appear on the screen... example of which can be seen below:



Not part of the Startups Report, but also of interest from this issue was "Buddy, Can You E-Mail Me 100 Bucks?" about mobile to mobile phone transfers of money. Seems closely related to the topics in the blog post I did earlier this month on apps and m-commerce enabled websites.

Finally... neither part of the Startups Report nor this BW issue, "Gunning for an Elephant in Silicon Valley" was an interesting piece from the Oct 19 BusinessWeek on networking company, and Cisco rival, Arista. Founded by Silicon Valley pioneer Andreas Bechtolsheim, the venture appears to very much below in this post on hot new startups.