After leaving the accelerator world, Mikko Järvenpää decided to ask entrepreneurs what they really thought about their experiences inside the startup factories. After talking to more than 150 graduates he discovered that acceleration can work well, but programs don’t always provide the help startups really need.
All over the world, startup accelerator programs have exploded over the last few years – but that growth has been accompanied by diminishing returns for those taking part. How can this improve? Mikko Järvenpää, former staffer at Europe’s HackFwd program, has a few ideas.
Doo’s free service collects and catalogues all sorts of digital and physical documents, but the small-business crowd that could be a key customer base will have to already be using Windows 8 to take advantage. Does that make sense?
Latvian startup Infogr.am has launched its suite of online tools for building beautiful — and shareable — infographics on the web. Can it cash in on a growing trend for easy data visualization, or not?
Location-based photo sharing app Color famously flamed out after raising millions of dollars in funding. Now, with them out of the picture, French service Sharypic wants to step into the gap and provide photo sharing for events. Can it compete in a crowded market?
Berlin is the most un-German of German cities. It is relatively new in its latest & post-unification incarnation. It is cheap and it has no major industry – for now. But that could soon change. My impression from a visit to what could become Europe’s biggest tech-hub.
British social shopping game Fantasy Shopper, which launched last month, has become the first non-American company to win the top prize Amazon Web Services Start-Up Challenge.
Any seasoned fashionista knows that shopping is serious business, but that doesn’t explain why most retail sites are so boring. New service Fantasy Shopper wants to inject more fun into buying online by turning it into a social game. Can it succeed?
Raindance is Britain’s largest independent film festival, becoming an institution for cinephiles over the past 20 years. This year it’s decided to partner with a little-known film website run out of Poland. So what does Filmaster offer that others don’t?
Lars Hinrichs, who founded the European social network Xing, has launched a new startup fund/incubator called HackFwd, which calls itself a “pre-seed investment company.” But some say the fund’s asking price is too high: 27 percent of a startup’s equity in return for an initial investment.