Startups

Report: 3D-printed handgun project faces setback with revoked printer lease

When I last spoke with Cody Wilson, Defense Distributed had just met its $20,000 funding goal, and he had taken delivery of his Stratasys uPrint SE 3D printer. Fast forward nine days and the outlook for his 3D printed firearm project looks less positive.

As reported here in September, Defense Distributed, a group headed by University of Texas graduate student Wilson, began navigating the uncharted material and regulatory waters around designing a gun to be printed from common plastic on a relatively low-cost 3D printer like the MakerBot Replicator.

Now, Wired's Robert Beckhusen reports that Stratasys has voided … Read more

Popular Mechanics honors breakthrough innovations

What do Elon Musk, Leap Motion, Microsoft Surface and Windows 8, Autodesk 123D, and Dow Solar's PowerHouse Solar Shingles have in common?

They are all among the winners of Popular Mechanics magazine's eighth Breakthrough Awards. Awarded each year by a panel of the magazine's editors, the honors go to people and products that are seen to be leading the world of science and commerce forward.

This year's product winners are: The North Face Powder Guide ABS Vest and Backpack; the Lytro camera; Autodesk 123D; Microsoft Surface and Windows 8; Ford's 1-liter EcoBoost engine; Dow PowerHouse … Read more

Pulling back from open source hardware, MakerBot angers some adherents

You likely know MakerBot Industries as the poster child for the new era of 3D-printing. You might not know that, until last week, the company and its CEO, Bre Pettis, were considered shining lights in the open-source hardware movement.

Think of open-source hardware, OSHW, as the physical equivalent of open source software. The Open Source Hardware Association, founded just this past March, offers an extended definition for OSHW. Its Statement of Principles sums things up thusly:

Open source hardware is hardware whose design is made publicly available so that anyone can study, modify, distribute, make, and sell the design or … Read more

AOL squatter launches his company -- no hiding out required

If ever there was someone with an entrepreneurial spirit, it's Eric Simons, known to many as the AOL squatter.

As CNET was first to report, Simons spent two months last year living surreptitiously at AOL's Palo Alto, Calif., offices, surviving on the company's kitchen fare, using its gym and locker room, and sleeping on its couches. All while working long days building a startup as part of an education-based incubator that had its offices in AOL's building. Until he was caught by AOL security and thrown out of the building, that is.

At the time, Simons' … Read more

Internet radio, Fuzz style: Where humans upstage the algorithms

Any entrepreneur taking a crack at a digital music startup must either be super determined, completely crazy, or a both. The chances of legal run-ins with the labels are high. And even when you play by the rules, the rights payments are so steep that making a profitable business is all but impossible.

Yet this isn't deterring Jeff Yasuda, a 40-year-old venture capitalist turned entrepreneur who's been doggedly running music startups since 2006. His latest, Fuzz (the same name as his first startup), comes out of stealth mode today after a year of building a team -- one … Read more

Help wanted: $183K plus. Tool gives lowdown on tech salaries

Anyone who works in tech is going to like this. Wealthfront, an online financial adviser based in Palo Alto, Calif., today rolled out an interactive tool (see below) that let's you see what tech jobs pay among private firms across the country.

You'll learn, for instance, that software architects make more than managers -- a mean of $183,000 a year plus equity compared with $163,000 plus stock -- and that cash compensation across all tech companies is $112,000. Another curious finding: Despite the huge demand for engineers in Silicon Valley, jobs in the northeast pay … Read more

Shimi: Your personal robotic DJ

Tovbot, a startup that wants a future full of personal robotic assistants, has launched a Kickstarter campaign for Shimi, which is auditioning to be your own personal robotic DJ.

The robot -- created by roboticists from Georgia Tech, MIT, and IDC -- takes advantage of smartphone technology to play music and pick songs based on your taste or mood.

It's essentially a cute, shiny dancing robot that performs a Pandora-like service and costs $199 (unless you help fund it through Kickstarter -- it's going for as low as $129 there).

"We want it to be your little musical companion," co-founder Gil Weinberg said at TechCrunch Disrupt today during the conference's startup battlefield segment. … Read more

Square's Jack Dorsey to tech founders: Question everything

SAN FRANCISCO -- Square and Twitter founder Jack Dorsey said today that founders must be willing to accept new ideas -- which can come from anywhere -- if they want their companies to evolve and to keep disrupting existing industries.

Opening his keynote address at TechCrunch Disrupt here today, Dorsey noted that he didn't grow up wanting to be an entrepreneur. Now that he's helped start two of the most important companies in Silicon Valley, though, Dorsey said he wanted to share some of the lessons he's learned during his career, ideas that he clearly thinks can … Read more

Ben Horowitz: I feel your IPO pain, Facebook

SAN FRANCISCO -- Venture Capitalist Ben Horowitz, half of the powerful Andreessen Horowitz duo, talked about how a lousy performing IPO -- are you listening, Mark Zuckerberg? -- can be a wrenching experience.

"The biggest pressure is on the employees who go home and someone in their family says, 'I read in the paper that you guys are bunch of idiots'," said Horowitz, who was interviewed at Techcrunch Disrupt by Silicon Valley veteran Bill Campbell. "It's a really hard thing to take."

Horowitz was talking about his experience as CEO of LoudCloud, a 1990s-era company … Read more

Technology vs. traction: The two types of startups

One of the most important qualities investors look for in a startup is defensibility. Can a startup's product quickly be copied? Does it have technology or patents no company has had before? Are users flocking to its product like locusts?

At the seed stage, when startups are in their infancy, I believe there are two type of startups. The first is the technology startup -- it's a company that is defensible because it has built unique technology nobody else has. The second type of start is the traction startup -- unlike technology startups, the traction startup is defensible … Read more