Kinetix Academy taps power of Kinect to help kids with autism

Kinetix Academy1Startup Team

One of the core ideas behind Startup Weekend is that smart people from various backgrounds and professions can do great things if given the time to work together. Perhaps no effort better exemplifies that concept than Kinetix Academy, the winning team at Seattle Startup Weekend. Comprised of pediatric physical therapist Mari Therrien; speech language pathologist… Read More…

Sidecar: A mobile app that’s trying to reinvent the phone call

Rob Glaser

RealNetworks founder Rob Glaser, who helped usher in the era of online video and audio, now wants to reinvent the phone call as we know it. “Basically, if you think about the phone call, it has been the same thing for 50 years,” said Glaser, noting that the first preview of the touch-tone phone was… Read More…

Startup Spotlight: Founder of Personify looks to make the world a better place

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Chuks Onwuneme’s path to Seattle is a long and inspiring one. At the age of 16, he walked the streets of Lagos, Nigeria to raise funds to study computer science, later earning an engineering scholarship to the University of Texas at Arlington. After graduate school, he landed a gig at Nokia in Dallas, working there for a… Read More…

Meet the 6-year-old entrepreneur who just wowed Startup Weekend

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While checking out the action at Seattle Startup Weekend’s closing event Sunday, I stole a moment to sit down with the weekend’s youngest presenter Ashwin Gowland (also known as “Gap Tooth Kid”). Ashwin, just six-years old, presented his idea for washable stickers complete with slide deck and an easy confidence that won him the coveted… Read More…

Mobile data security startup Datacastle locks in $2.4M

datacastle

Fast-growing Datacastle has reeled in $2.4 million in fresh financing, and is on the prowl for more as the Seattle startup looks to catapult even deeper into the hot market of mobile data protection. The new funding was provided by existing investors CM Capital and Haag Investments, both of Australia. Founder and Chief Technology Officer… Read More…

AdReady shakes up exec staff as it aims for profitability

adready

AdReady, the Seattle online advertising startup, has eliminated three of its top executives and laid off other high-level staffers as it makes a bid to become profitable. Stepping down are CEO Karl Siebrecht; Senior Vice President of Sales, Service and Marketing Randy Wootton; and Senior Vice President of Product and Business Development Matt Carr. Carr… Read More…

Inside the Kinect Accelerator: Startups camp out at Microsoft in pursuit of next big thing

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It’s a familiar scene in the startup world — an open floor plan, buzzing with activity, filled with startups cranking away on their next big ideas. But this is a Microsoft building in Seattle’s South Lake Union neighborhood, and every one of these fledgling companies is building its business around the Redmond company’s Kinect motion… Read More…

For sale: Lendle e-book lending service for Amazon Kindle

lendle

The creators of the Lendle e-book lending service for Amazon Kindle put up a “for sale” sign this afternoon in the form of a blog post announcing their intention to find a buyer who can build upon what they’ve created. “Lendle has always been a huge undertaking, and as our community has grown, so too… Read More…

Let the good times roll: Optimistic entrepreneurs plan to boost hiring

Half-full glass (Kurt Schlosser photo)

Entrepreneurs, by their very nature, are optimists. This shouldn’t come as a big surprise. You’ve got to be a bit positive if you want to take the startup plunge. That optimism is on full display in a report being released today by Silicon Valley Bank, which surveyed more than 270 U.S. software, life science, clean… Read More…

Where ‘Where are you?’ is: The future of location and discovery

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“There’s a graveyard of geo experiments,” says Amber Case. She’s the CEO and co-founder of Geoloqi, a company that helps mobile developers integrate, track and measure their users’ location data, and she was a panelist at the Location & Discovery discussion at the Privacy Identity Information conference (pii) in Seattle. And she’s right. As smartphone market… Read More…