Is Your App Next? Major Airline Sued For Mobile Privacy Violations - Cover Your Apps Today!
Online and mobile privacy. If you haven’t been paying attention, its time to take notice. Regulators certainly have, and even the biggest players are being hit – Delta Airlines was just sued by the California Attorney General for having an app without an appropriate privacy policy. This is only the beginning; more enforcement is likely to follow.
Happy Holidays from ff Venture Capital - 2012
We would like to wish you Happy Holidays from ff Venture Capital!
Using Data to Track Hiring Success
Less than a year ago, Klout was spending north of $64,000 per new hire. Our processes were disorganized and inefficient. We were outsourcing most of our recruiting and making hiring decisions based on unstructured conversations. We had no unified applicant tracking system. Since then, however, we've increased candidate flow by ...
Online dating moves offline with HowAboutWe
The rapid proliferation of online dating sites -- there are thousands of them in the US alone -- speaks to how far the most recent technological revolution has reached, seeping into practically every corner of our lives, including one of our most personal: how we find and connect with romantic ...
Best Practices for Digital Democracy
Digital democracy is not a utopia. It is merely a more perfect organization of citizens within the field of new media. In its first meaning, digital democracy references the actual practice of democratic politics in digital spaces, for example, discussions of Presidential debates on Twitter. In its second, digital democracy references the democratization of content production and distribution. The first, political meaning points to what is said, the second, to how it is said.
Thankful for a Strong Community
Much has been written about the growing tech presence in New York City over the last two years. Depending on what you read, the scene is “infectious”, “heating up” or it’s just flat out “exploded.” There is certainly an air of optimism here that is unlike many other cities, and a level of innovation that is ushering in a new era of digital media and online interaction. All of this is good news.
John on CNBC Squawk Box
ffVC Partner John Frankel appeared on CNBC's Squawk Box this morning to discuss InteraXon's new headset, Muse, as well as how disruptors in the portfolio are carrying forward the content revolution. He used GameSalad (a platform for designing video games by dragging and dropping objects rather than writing code) and ...
Crowdfunding Lightning Fast after Hurricane
In the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, it’s once again apparent how ill-prepared we can be in the face of nature’s violent (and rapidly changing) powers. Even New York, one of the world’s greatest cities, was brought to its knees in just a matter of hours.
Our increasing lack of ability to predict and prepare for earth’s bizarre weather has also accelerated the speed with which we must react to its devastating ...
NYTechResponds Sandy Benefit Weekend - THIS WEEKEND
Over the last few years, the NY technology sector has blossomed and flourished. Now Hurricane Sandy has delivered a serious blow to our home city - the city where we've chosen to build, code, and grow our businesses. The NY Tech community has stepped up and collaborated across different organizations ...
Should You Base Your Hiring Decisions on Accomplishments or Potential?
"Potential" is a word recruiting analysts use to describe job candidates who have the talent to become top performers but who aren't guaranteed to make full use of their abilities. So what does a company do? Hire an unproven talent who might be the next Steve Jobs, or select an ...
Is “Big Data” the Wrong Term?
It’s likely that, like myself, you have heard again and again about “big data“, its 3 V’s, and the Hadoop brand. Yes, volume, velocity, and variety of data are making it difficult to use traditional data solutions like BI cubes, relational databases, and bespoke data pipelines. The world needs new superheroes like Hadoop, NoSQL, NewSQL, DevOps, etc. to solve our woes.
Contextual Learning: Make it relevant to your users
From the start, Voxy’s goal has been to make learning another language as effective and engaging as possible, using empirically established principles of instructed language acquisition and distance learning. Over the past two years, we’ve continued to learn what makes for great content and activities, and we’ve iterated on our product over and over again to continually improve the user experience. We offer our learners actual news articles and popular music, and ...
Opportunities for Students to Work with ff (Graduate and Undergrad)
ffVC frequently works with students as a research sponsor or startup matchmaker. We are currently also seeking a team to develop two domain names we own or have an interest in, patents.com and alerts.com. If you’d like to work with us, please apply via ffvc.com/careers.
How Institutional Limited Partners Can Avoid Limited Returns
Having spoken with many limited partners, it is clear that there is a lack of access to the research out there that compares return generation from different venture classes and, in particular, compares angel returns with those of venture funds. I finally have had the time to collate the research we have found, and am happy to share it. This post is quite technical, but the bottom line is simple: angel-stage funds outperform.
Crowdfunding: A Perfect Time To Practice Customer Service
In October, our team at InteraXon was thrilled to launch an IndieGoGo campaign for our new headband Muse. Muse is a flexible 4-sensor brainwave sensing headband that will allow you to do more with your mind than ever thought possible. Along with Muse, we've built useful applications and personalized exercises ...
Why Moveline Chose ffVC to Lead Our Round
It was my pleasure today to announce that Moveline raised a $1.5M investment round, led by ffVC. As part of the investment, we are excited to add John Frankel to our board of directors. When Kelly and I founded Moveline last December, we were very realistic about the scope of ...
NY Tech Volunteers Needed - Help Out!
Hurricane Sandy has done some significantly damage in NYC, and ff Venture Capital is looking for ways to help out. New York has been an encouraging home for many tech start-ups. Lets give back to the City that helped us grow. We currently have extra desks in our midtown office, ...
A call to Women CEOs: Participate!
As the CEO of a 3 1/2; year-old startup and the mother of a tween daughter, free time is something I only dream about. But aside from running VolunteerSpot and juggling family, I have a third responsibility: helping women see that there's a place for them in the startup world. ...
Nigerian Foundation Teaches Kids Through the Power of GameSalad
One of GameSalad's strengths is its unparalleled ease of use. This has proven to be a tremendous asset in the classroom for teachers and students alike as classes adopt and utilize GameSalad as part of their curriculum. It has also sparked many learning initiatives by organizations and foundations the world ...
Muse – See how your brain is performing in real time!
InteraXon, a leader in thought controlled computing and ffVC portfolio company, launched an Indiegogo campaign on October 20 to support production of Muse, a multi-sensor brainwave measuring headband. For the last year, InteraXon has been deep in development of Muse, which will allow users to see how their ...
ffVC invests in AppyCouple
ffVC is excited to announce its investment in Appy Life, a technologically-enabled and fashion-oriented company with some big ideas. Appy Life's first product, Appy Couple, is currently in Beta. Appy Couple allows future brides and grooms to plan and coordinate their wedding-from start to finish-through a simple and stylish app. ...
ff Silver Off to a Great Start with ThinkNear Acquisition
Eli Portnoy founded ThinkNear. ffVC portfolio company ThinkNear has been acquired by Telenav, a leading provider of mobile location-based services, for $22.5 million ($18.5 million in cash and $4 million in restricted stock and assumed options). Telenav specializes in personalized navigation, and will be launching "Scout Advertising" with the ThinkNear ...
What’s a Good Conversion rate for a consumer web-site?
Contrbuted by Alan Samuels, CEO of Clearpath Conversion rates are one of the most popular ways to evaluate the marketing success of any company. But what is a good conversion rate? Is there an absolute benchmark? In traditional retail stores, conversion rates are calculated with a simple formula: the ...
Alex Katz Speaking at MIT Enterprise Forum
ffVC Partner and CFO Alex Katz will be a panelist speaker at the MIT Enterprise Forum of NYC Roundtable on October 18. He will be joined by Aron Grossman, the CFO and VP of Corporate Development at Voxy (an ffVC portfolio company), and Beth Brinkman, Director of U.S. Professional Services ...
Why We Chose ffVC
Contributed by Nova Spivack, CEO and Founder of Bottlenose. I am very pleased to announce that Bottlenose has received funding from ff Venture Capital, led by John Frankel. John has been advising Bottlenose since December of 2011 and prior to our launch. This brings our total angel funding to ...
Beyond Engineering: the Silicon Valley "Ops Team"
Contributed by Joe Lonsdale, Founder of Addepar and Palantir/ Partner, Formation 8 In Silicon Valley we build and invest in elite technology cultures to transform global industries. Whether or not they define it explicitly, the great engineers here know what it means to be part of a great technology ...
Social Fortress publicly launches at TechCrunch Disrupt
Adam Ghetti, founder of our portfolio company Social Fortress and an expert in security, publicly presented Social Fortress for the first time at this week's TechCrunch Disrupt Conference. I met Adam and Social Fortress at the first Flashpoint Demo Day in New York earlier this year; ff became the only ...
Allocating Startup Equity by the Hour
Contributed by Alon Cohen, EVP/CTO at Phone.com. How do you move from a few friends brainstorming on a new startup concept, to actually getting the group to sit down and start working to build a company? How do you deal with situations in which one team member already has a job ...
Free Webinar 9/13: How to Hack Your MBA and Get the Most Out of Your Degree
On 9/13, David Teten, partner at ffVC, will be delivering a free, one-hour webinar on How to Hack Your MBA and Get the Most Out of Your Degree. This webinar will have an estimated 300 attendees from most of the major business schools in Europe and the US. It's hosted ...
The Fall 2012 ffVC Interns
Yong Kwon is currently pursuing a MBA with a focus on Entrepreneurship at the Columbia Business School. Previously, he was an Associate at Performance Equity Management, a global private equity firm, where he worked on buyout, VC and debt investments across multiple sectors and geographies. Yong received a B.S. in ...
Interning at a Venture Capital Fund vs. a Startup
Contributed by Joan Xie, Summer Associate at Centzy -- former ffVC Fellow As a recent college graduate (Georgetown Dec. 2011) with nine months to spare before starting a full-time strategy consulting position in October, I decided to pursue two internships: one at a VC, and one at a seed-stage ...
Flashpoint Demo Day, September 13, at Union Square Ventures
HBS Alumni Angels of New York and ff Venture Capital are happy to be co-sponsors of Flashpoint's upcoming New York Demo Day, September 13, 2:30 PM to 6:00 PM, held at Union Square Ventures. Space is limited. Flashpoint is a startup accelerator program at Georgia Tech. Fourteen Teams will ...
The Data Era – Moving from 1.0 to 2.0
Contributed by Jim Kaskade, CEO at Infochimps Do you think they truly under stood just how fast the data infrastructure marketplace was going to change? That is the question that comes to mind when I think about Donald Feinberg and Mark Beyer at Gartner who, last year, wrote about how the data warehouse market ...
5 easy ways to jump start your photographer presence online
Contributed by Evgeny Tchebotarev, COO at 500px In the past few years photography's popularity has exploded. Does this mean getting noticed today is harder than ever? Not necessarily. With a little initial effort, you can automate and maximize your online presence, allowing you to spend more time shooting. Here are five ...
Low Cost Disaster Recovery in the VOIP world
Contriubted by Alon Cohen, EVP/CTO at Phone.com Many businesses today have begun to switch to Internet-based telephony, or VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol). Many benefit from the vast operating cost savings and flexibility of hosted cloud based VoIP solutions where there are no capital expenses involved in the installation of ...
The Importance of Being Relevant
Contributed by Jordan Cohen, Vice President of Marketing at Movable Ink. A new ClickZ column penned by veteran email marketing industry analyst David Daniels puts the spotlight on the importance of relevancy in email, especially in an age of extreme media fragmentation and corresponding digital ADD. Given ...
Volunteerism | Summer of Service
Contributed by Jessica Young, Community Manager at VolunteerSpot. More than 63 million Americans volunteer each year, and they come from all walks of life with the common purpose of giving back and making a difference. At VolunteerSpot, we simplify the volunteer experience, and every summer we run a popular ...
3 Awesome Examples of Job Descriptions
Contributed by Eric Gaydos, Buzz Marketing Manager at The Resumator If your company is struggling to find new talent, is it possible that your job descriptions could be to blame? It's a question worth asking, because your now hiring advertisements determine, in part, just who applies for your position. ...
Indiegogo: Drawing A Crowd For Your Business
Contributed by Andrew Nunnelly, Marketing Associate at Indiegogo The ubiquity of the internet allows information and change to move faster than ever before. In a matter of minutes, millions of people around the world can mobilize behind an idea. something that would have taken days, if not months, to ...
The Difficulties of a Distributed Team
Contributed by Jason Bell, Business Intern at Parse.ly In May, Parse.ly's co-founder and CTO, Andrew Montalenti, wrote a blog post titled Fully Distributed Teams: Are They Viable? Montalenti grouped team distributions into three categories: 1) Vertically Scaled: the entire team is located in one office space; 2) Horizontally Scaled: team ...
From Paper Prototypes to the #1 Education App: Paul Gollash Shares Challenges, Advice at Lean Startup Event
Contributed by Jessica Weeg, Public Relations Associate at Voxy Paul Gollash, the Founder/CEO of mobile and web-based language learning technology Voxy, spoke at a Lean Startup Meetup event last night in Soho. Along with SideTour's Co-Founder Mark Webster, the two entrepreneurs shared personal stories, challenges, and advice for aspiring entrepreneurs ...
John Frankel Speaking at the NYC Tech Media Meetup
This Wednesday, July 25th, John Frankel will be speaking NYC Tech Startup Journalism, Media, and Public Relations's inaugural meetup, which will be hosted in the ffVC fitness office. The NYC Tech Media Meetup group is currently in its infancy, conceived by founder Michael Fishbein as a forum to bring together journalists, media professionals ...
John Frankel at Dreamit Ventures Panel
Last Friday, July 20th, John Frankel spoke to a panel of young Israeli Entrepreneurs as part of the Dreamit Ventures Israel program. As an experienced early stage investor, John gave advice and perspective to the eager team members participating in this highly selective program. Dreamit Israel gives a group of ...
Patents.com Domain Up for Auction
ICAP Brokerage is managing the auction of the domain name, Patents.com. The minimum bid is $2.5 million, and will be auctioned at the upcoming 16th ICAP Ocean Tomo IP Auction on July 26, 2012, at the Julia Morgan Ballroom in San Francisco, California. Premium domain names like Patents.com have becoming ...
Internship Opportunities at ffVC
**ff Venture Capital is looking for an intern to finish out the Summer and transition into the Fall.** If you're interested in learning more about venture capital, or our fast-growing portfolio of tech startups, consider applying to an internship at ff Venture Capital. During the internship, you'll have the opportunity ...
The Summer 2012 ffVC Interns
Yuni Sameshima is a rising senior at Colgate University, double majoring in Economics and Molecular Biology. Passionate about learning how things work, Yuni tackled the challenge of majoring in two completely different majors. He spent one summer as an analyst at Brean Murray Carret co, a small investment bank ...
ff Venture Capital profiled in Creative Workspaces Magazine
ff Venture Capital was recently profiled in The Roger, an online magazine that profiles creative workspaces. The feature, titled Fitness Financed: Motion, Margin, Risk, and Reward; offers an inside look into ff VC's 5,000 square-foot fitness office. The twelve-page spread has beautiful photos of some of our healthy office practices, including Pilates ...
John Frankel Named NJTC Financier of the Year
Congratulations to John Frankel, who was recently awarded Financier of the Year during a breakfast held by the New Jersey Technology Council (www.njtc.org) on June 8, 2012. The award is presented annually to a venture capitalist, investment merchant, or commercial banker who has contributed to the economic development of New ...
Sorry!
Beside Forever by Suradej Chuephanich I am going on vacation in two days - the first time with my wife for quite some time, and with 200+ incoming emails each day I am concerned that I will come back to an unmanangeable inbox with unmanageable expectations. I have always tried ...
GameSalad Moves East Through Partnership with Leading Chinese Internet Company
The Chinese economy may have slowed with the recent financial recession, but, according to John Radoff's blog, the Chinese online game market represents an increasingly attractive opportunity; there are more Internet users in China than the entire population of the U.S., and two-thirds of those users play some sort ...
Portfolio Company Spotlight: Betterworks
BetterWorks' company mission is to help small and medium-sized businesses recognize, reward and retain employees by Making Work Rewarding. Betterworks was founded in 2010 by Paige Craig, Sizhao Yang, and George Ishii in order to help the country's six million small and medium sized businesses create better work environments. Since ...
More Cash for Entrepreneurs, Crowdfunding, and Indiegogo
As Steve Case has said, it's ridiculous that anyone can gamble and be guaranteed to lose money, but there are strict regulations around who can invest in early-stage private companies and earn (in some cases) a 27% IRR on their capital. * The Entrepreneurs Access to Capital Act helps to ...
Personal Training in Your Hallways
Personal trainer Jake Koenig reached out to us to request to run a minimum viable product trial of his in-office fitness training service. We're always glad to help entrepreneurs, and we are a bit obsessed with making our fitness office even more effective, so more than half of our office ...
Developers of NYC Startup Tour to Visit ff Venture Capital
After work on April 18, thirty-five curious developers will visit the ff Venture Capital offices to learn about our fund and listen to technical talks by the founders and technical experts of Parsely and Movable Ink. If you'd like to join them, contact Skillfer ASAP; there may still be some ...
Seeking CEO+Cofounders for Spinoff of VC-Backed Startup, W. 36th St.
- Do you have a great team but your product just isn't working? - Are you thinking of applying to Y Combinator without an idea? - Does your team want to quit your day jobs and really kick-off a company? - Would you like to have a salary from day ...
Technology Hiring & Employment Outlook
I recently attended the "Technology Hiring Employment Outlook" hosted by the New York Technology Council on Monday March 19, 2012. The panel featured speakers: Tom Silver, Sr. VP for Dice.com; Manish Chowdhary, Founder; CEO of GoECart; Jay Colan, Sr. VP of Lee Hecht Harrison; and Scott Sperling, Senior ...
Reinventing the Office: How to Lose Fat and Increase Productivity at Work
Fitness/life guru Tim Ferriss just posted my guest article on ff Venture Capital's approach to building a fitness office. (Thanks Tim!) I've attached below my original, much more detailed blog post about the details of how we've designed our office to help people stay healthy and be as productive as ...
ff Venture Capital raises $27 million fund
We are excited to announce that as of November 30, ff Venture Capital closed on a $27 million fund, ff Silver. TechCrunch broke the news and Betabeat also covered it. Our investment philosophy--part of what makes us successful--is our search for sustainable long-term growth areas. Our ...
Meet the Spring 2012 Interns
Joan Xie is a recent graduate of Georgetown University, having majored in International Economics. She spent two summers working for J.P. Morgan in their investment bank, and is planning on joining Bain and Co in the fall. She enjoys learning about businesses from a wide variety of perspectives, and is ...
Lessons from Facebook on Recruiting Elite Engineers
Following is a guest post from ff Venture Capital winter intern Max Segan, a Colgate senior majoring in computer science, who is starting at Facebook this summer as a software engineer. From our perspective, Facebook is both our friend (training hundreds of talented future entrepreneurs) and enemy (competing with our ...
flashpoint Demo Day - January 18, 2012
ff Venture Capital and HBS Angels of New York are happy to be co-sponsors of Flashpoint's upcoming New York Demo Day, Wednesday, January 18, 2012, 2:30 PM to 6:00 PM, held at Union Square Ventures. Flashpoint is a startup accelerator program at Georgia Tech. Some of their portfolio companies ...
