My daily startup fix || Samuel Jeanblanc

"Whether you think you can, or you think you can’t — you’re right." -- Henry Ford

[brycedotvc]

[writingsfromthewall]

I don’t care who you were. I want to know what you are going to be.

writingsfromthewall (via naturesanchor)

[maddierose]

[observando]

It is better to live one day as a lion, than a thousand days as a lamb.

Roman Proverb (via quitecontinental)

[istartups]

It's never too late. {And hey I'm 24 and don't feel like I'm having a quarter-life crisis at all!}

[istartups]

Interaction, canvases and ecosystems

Thoughts on messaging apps, by Benedict Evans

[jaicovery]

You must go on adventures to find out where you belong.

[istartups]

SoloShot, by FastCompany

[istartups]

"If humanism were right in declaring that man is born only to be happy, he would not be born to die. Since his body is doomed to die, his task on earth evidently must be of a more spiritual nature. It cannot be unrestrained enjoyment of everyday life. It cannot be the search for the best ways to obtain material goods and then cheerfully get the most of them. It has to be the fulfillment of a permanent, earnest duty so that one's life journey may become an experience of moral growth, so that one may leave life a better human being than one started it."

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

the Russian dissident in his famous 1978 Harvard commencement address

[istartups]

Downward Facing Alpha Dogs: The Mindful Rise Of The New Tech Humanists

IN THIS TIME OF INNER-PEACE-SEEKING, MEDITATING, CHIA-SEED-CHOMPING CEOS, THERE IS A NEW MOVEMENT OF TECH HUMANISTS EMERGING. CAN THEY BRING A SENSE OF CALM TO THE DIGITAL CHAOS--AND WIN BACK FANS IN THE PROCESS?

[istartups]

BillGuard

[istartups]

[istartups]

Bunkr

Bunkr.

PowerPoints are productivity-killers. The product has become so complex and time-consuming that you actually spend more time arranging your slides without any good result than thinking about strategy and content.

Bunkr is trying to tap on this market, with some key assets:

- scroll the web for content and save it directly to your Bunkr files with a click

- everything is cloud-based, so don't worry about finding back that information you left on your hard drive (are you really still doing this by the way?)

- you can export your pres in html5 and it will responsively adapt to any device

- no software to install, this is a web app

- multiple people can work on a presentation at the same time, with real-time saving

- your first 3 presentations are free, then there's a 2.50€ monthly subscription

That's a long list.

One can argue that Google Apps is already doing this, but the main takeaway here is beyond that. For years Microsoft has dominated the software industry with its Windows and Office suites. Microsoft has been iterating those products (Windows...8) for ages, and now it has become sloppy. There's no secret: once a lean startup like Bunkr is going after a T-Rex like Microsoft with some simple though very clever and useful product innovations, it's definitely that something is going on.

Don't expect Microsoft to collapse in the near future, but at least let's hope that they're hearing the wake-up call.

[istartups]

[istartups]

BillGuard

BillGuard.

This is serious. If you want an app that will thoroughly investigate your bank details to save you money, install BillGuard.

BillGuard first started in 2011 as a startup that would track down any unwanted, fraudulent or error charges on your credit and debit cards. It then went after another problem called "grey charges", subscriptions that users unknowingly signed up for or forgot about. Total estimated grey charges in the US: $14.3 billion per year...

Now BillGuard is going after another area of personal finance: savings and spend control. Some of you have probably heard of Mint, the big player when it comes to personal finance apps. But while Mint is helping you to fix targets of savings per day/week/month/year, BillGuard is rather here to help you categorize your spendings to see where your money is actually going and to help you compare your current spends versus a previous period.

BillGuard is also introducing another feature called Smart Savings which will warn users that are likely to buy a product if there are some coupons or discounts available that they can redeem. Depending on how relevant the discounts are, users can also reject them and the app will take that info into account for future suggestions.

That's a nice chunk of features, and since the app is free, it's worth seeing how much money it can actually help you save.

[creativesomething]

[istartups]

Medium

Medium.

The Obvious Corporation. What's that? It's a team of talented entrepreneurs which includes Evan Williams and Biz Stone, co-founders of Twitter. The Obvious Corp is behind projects like Twitter, Jelly... and Medium.

Medium is a blogging platform launched in 2012 that basically lies on the opposite side of Twitter on the blogging spectrum: high quality, selected, lengthy content.

Medium is beautiful, design, simple and has slowly been rolling down a quality content strategy. At first, only paid and recognized bloggers could actually post anything, and since then Medium has gradually been releasing control over who can use Medium to create a "prime content" feel. In the meantime, it keeps on paying some bloggers to write stuff, but readers will never know who is working for Medium and who is working on Medium.

At the end of the day, the look and feel is pretty premium, even though I'm still skeptical on who actually reads all those blog entries.

Anyway, Medium has raised $25 million two weeks ago to fuel its growth. Let's see if it goes down the same path that Twitter took.