Innovation

Juraj Vaculik, from AeroMobil “Mark my word: A combination of an airplane and motorcar is coming. You may smile. But it will come…” [Henry Ford, 1940] Flying cars are not something new. The idea has been going around since the 19th century, even before the very first flight by Santos-Dumont (or Wright Brothers, depending on your bias). But it was The Jetsons who first brought the concept of flying cars to the masses. We grew up dreaming that one day we’d be able to get in our cars and fly straight to our destination - fast, safely, and traffic-free. ...

This is a prototype presented by a British startup, Novalia during the McDonald’s Startup Pitch session, as a way to re-engage consumers within their restaurants. We played with it for a few minutes, and the experience is pretty amazing. There’s no glass, buttons or anything to distract you. Just a set of small batteries on the back, and plain paper interface. ...

With SXSW starting today, and with many friends attending for the first time this year, I thought it’d be interesting to compile my top 10 tips I learned the hard way over the years. Keep in mind I’m looking at this from the perspective of a hacker/maker/developer/digital marketing, so YMMV. Plan ahead, but not too much. With 800+ sessions this year, it’s easy to get overwhelmed. But get over your FOMO, and enjoy the serendipity. You will miss many good sessions, and that’s OK. The best talk will be that one you didn’t plan, and just entered because your first option was full. ...

Last month I went to the excellent Eyeo Festival, in Minneapolis. I’m still digesting the content, and some ideas are still ricocheting inside my head. I’ll write a post soon.

This is the 6th year of SXSW Accelerator. The event has seen a long list of startups over the years, including Sifteo, Hipmunk, Foodspooting, and Siri (yeah, the one acquired by the fruit company). Past startups raised more than $600 million in VC funding, which means that being a finalist here is a good indicator of market potential. I just watched the three finalists in the Social Technologies category. This includes technologies that enable personal connections, and how we share our lives with others. All three have nice products, worth checking out. Here’s the list: ...

You have to check out Patreon. Do it now. I’ll wait. It’s such a simple and clever concept. It gets the best of Kickstarter, but eliminates the burden of creating a project. Kickstarter works well for large and well defined projects - a game, a movie, a new gadget. But it doesn’t work for small, frequent, content-based efforts. This includes the work done by musicians, writers, photographers, bloggers, youtubers, and artists in general. ...

Glitch, the beautiful massive multiplayer game with a pixel-perfect design, announced that they’ll be closing doors soon. It’s sad to see so much work and love going nowhere. At least they were classy and wrote a candid and honest shutting-down post, and they’re even refunding users (!). That’s a level of integrity that you don’t see everyday in the startup world. If you’ve never played Glitch, it’s now too late. The game world is now restricted to existing users, and everything will shut down on December 9th 2012. Here’s some videos to give you an idea of what you missed. ...

My last session of SXSW Day 2 was with Andrea Vaccari, the CEO of the trendy location-based discovery startup Glancee. If you’re not one of the 12,000 people already using the service (that’s the number Andrea gave during the talk), well… you should give it a try, because everyone is talking about it. Yeah, I live in the echo chamber, I know. Glancee, like its competitors Highlight, Sonar, Banjo, are all exploring the new niche of location social discovery - some sort of Match.com-meets-LinkedIn. Unproven territory, but sounds promising (albeit somewhat dystopian) to me. Andrea spoke about the current status of social discovery apps and the different approaches taken by each player. He also mentioned the incredible growth (hard to see 12,000 as incredible, but startup founders have to drink their own Kool-Aid), particularly with all the buzz around SXSW. ...

s Over the past years Google has been trying to go beyond search, diversifying their revenue sources. But despite recent progress with Content Network and YouTube, the marketing community still see the search giant as a way to drive conversion at the bottom of the funnel. In order to move to the next level, Google has to prove they can create emotional connections with consumers. Enter Project Re:Brief, just announced during SXSW. ...