A haven for entrepreneurial Superheroes
Twitscoop remains a supercool tool for watching realtime buzz trends in the Twitter community. Many sites are focusing on capturing twitter realtime buzz, (like the earthquake today). However, Twitscoop has a live-action tag cloud that moves in realtime. You can actually watch as a word is trending, pretty wild stuff with amazing implications of where twitter aggregation is going.
Spark Capital has launched a seed program for entrepreneurs called Start at Spark and will fund a convertible loan up to $250,000 bucks (converted to equity at a 20% discount in the second round of funding).
This is very similar to the CRV start program at Charles River I touched on a couple years ago. It’s great to see quality Venture Capital going after early stage startups especially in these economic times. Spark Capital is headed by Todd Dagres somone I’ve always admired and spoke to from time to time when I was a producer at Scout in Boston. Thefunded has rated Spark a 3.3 out of 5 with most entrepreneurs generally pleased with the pitching process and the associates there.
So what are you waiting for…get your apps in to Start@Spark
Do you want to develop games with someone’s code and market to 100 million players? Enter PushButton Game Engine.
The PushButton Engine is an open-source game engine and framework that’s designed for a new generation of games. This game engine helps you spend less time with code conventions and more time designing fun experiences.
According to Wagner James Au over at GigaOm the PushButton Engine is being distributed through the MIT open source license and is developed by Push Button Labs, a new startup led by Jeff Tunnell, founder of Dynamix and co-founder of GarageGames.
The innovative part of the business model is PushButton will sell premier code and game components to integrate with other flash game developers code to help a game startup scale faster. In addition, third-party developers of the PushButton Game Engine can sell their code components and get a 70% cut in the developer marketplace. Keep an eye on this space for scale….PushButton labs has identified a huge in-place audience and the business model to monetize it.
Twitter continues to be Silicon Valley’s microblogging platform of choice. As Twitter turns 3 years old (a teenager in Internet years) a very mature ecosystem is emerging and is becoming more of a disruptive technology rather than a novel add-on widget for traditional blogging sites and social networks.
A tell tale sign you’re dealing with a heavy weight startup contender is when FM throws a right hook with @exectweets and rumors swirl of a Facebook killer or Google acquisition. As history has taught us before, Twitter will continue to morph into the most simple and effective form before the content can be monetized and the dollars roll in. It’s never easy to predict but always fun to watch.
Check out the usual suspects for more deets.
VentureBeat
Mashable
Battelle
The United States national debt has reached nearly 11 trillion dollars and counting. I have been tracking the government’s mindless intervention into the private markets like most of you.
What is truly astounding is how trivial a trillion dollars has become in reference to a normal denomination. A trillion is the new billion in terms of throwing numbers around in conversation. Just to put it in perspective…if you started counting to a trillion dollars when you were an infant, it would take 4 generations to count to a trillion.
It’s easy to print money today, it’s not so easy to pay it back tomorrow.
I’m waiting for a flight and figured I would plug the value of the CCIM program for real estate professionals. I just completed the CI 101 financial analysis course this past week in Fort Myers and was extremely pleased with the course material, networking opportunities with colleagues and the instructors of the course. CCIM stands for Certified Commercial Investment Professional and a prestigious designation that only 5% of all licensed real estate professionals carry. It is a grueling program covering Financial, Market, User and Investment analysis as it relates to Industrial, Office, Retail, and Multi-family sectors (the 4 food groups of commercial real estate).
If you are thinking about heading into commercial real estate now may be the time to go for your CCIM designation by joining the candidate program. You will need a substantial portfolio of completed transactions and the financial chops to endure, but the reward could be significant. The commercial real estate market is just starting the decline residential has experienced, so don’t dilly-dally.
