A decade of work at digital marketing agencies in Los Angeles lent Blake Callens a career-altering insight.
That someday, there had to be another option besides Wordpress and Drupal.
Little did he know that he and now co-founder Brian Hyder would be the ones building it. Today, they launch the public beta of PencilBlue, a software they hope will become the leading online publishing platform for at least the next decade. Read Callens's blog post about it here.
It's a tall task for the two-man startup in Raleigh—more than 74 million sites around the world were built on Wordpress and it offers at least 29,000 plugins allowing virtually unlimited customization. Drupal is a popular open-source option for enterprises, with about a million sites. But the developer and publisher community appears to be ready for something new—simple site or blog-builders like Squarespace and Weebly are growing in popularity. Nationally-known blogger and software development guru Jeff Atwoodfirst complained about Wordpress since 2008.
Callens calls Wordpress “a 10-year-old blogging platform that has been shoehorned into any genre imaginable and doesn't do any of them exceptionally well” and Drupal, he says, “is built by developers for developers and is a nightmare for the end user. Nine of 10 people don't need something so intense.” --Read On
Automated Insights' storytelling robots got more legit today with a freshly-inked deal with the Associated Press and $5.5 million in new funding from all sorts of intriguing new investors.
Its enough to add at least a half dozen new jobs in Durham in the next few weeks, and to scale up partnerships with device manufacturer Samsung and the global news organization, AP. In July, Automated Insights will translate the data from 4,400 quarterly earnings reports into stories about the successes and failures of the nation's public companies. The AP's managing editor blogged about the move this morning.
According to founder Robbie Allen (pictured left), the deal cements Automated Insights as the world's leader in using data to tell stories about sports, finance, marketing and more. It already, "has achieved a scale that nobody else has even come close to," he says. The company's software will write a billion stories this year, up from 300 million in 2013.
“We think it's a true testament to what our technology can do,” Allen says. “It's not about replacing people—we can help people focus on more value-added reporting. We really think the AP's willingness to get aggressive in the space is validation for the technology.”
Besides the AP, new investors include the Seoul investment arm of Samsung and AOL co-founder Steve Case, who doled out $100K to Automated Insights and the nine other startups pitching at April's Google Demo Day. (According to Allen, the round was already raised by this time.) --Read On
Jay Bigelow's column is part of a weekly series. Why Jay? Because he's charged with meeting and learning the needs of entrepreneurs all over this region and connecting them with the resources and people to help achieve their goals.
One of the biggest challenges any new or emerging venture faces is getting noticed—whether it is by potential customers, investors, partners or employees. Often, the challenge is compounded because the venture lacks funding to pay for a lot of exposure.
Sound familiar?
New tech ventures need to take advantage of pitch openings, competitions and showcases to help raise their profiles and gain critical exposure. Learning to pitch your company and doing it well is one of the most important skills a founder/CEO must develop if his/her company is to succeed. For example, The Startup Factory (by the way, TSF's deadline for the next cohort is today) requires founders to stand up in front of fellow entrepreneurs and pitch every week for 12 weeks before they allow can pitch to outside investors. --Read On
I'm not a biology person, but I'm fascinated by this video and the Duke University science experiment starring in it.
Turns out that the tiny aquatic fern called Azolla that millions of years ago helped cool the Earth so we could inhabit it has the potential of transforming the way we fertilize and grow food and fuel our homes, devices, businesses and vehicles. Scientists say Azolla holds the world record for speed of biomass production, meaning it can help grow plants or produce fuel in a cheaper, faster and more environmentally friendly way than any other method used today.
A Duke University research team is trying to unlock this powerful plant's potential by sequencing its genome. To fund the project, the researchers have launched a campaign on the scientific research crowdfunding site, Experiment. The team already surpassed its initial $20,000 goal and yesterday, announced a new partnership with the prestigious Beijing Genomics Institute.
The video explains it all, and is bound to get you excited about this mysterious plant that just might power our future:
Denver Nuggets Point Guard Ty Lawson revisited his Carolina roots Tuesday to announce his new T3L clothing line and an investment in Thrill City, an apparel company targeting avid Carolina basketball fans and people around the nation who like streetwear. (Culturally-influenced, statement-based clothing, Thrill City calls it).
Lawson caused some buzz online and in Chapel Hill Tuesday when he showed up at Thrill City's Franklin Street store to pose for picture and sign autographs for at least 200 fans.
The new business deal is catapulting Thrill City into the national sphere and helping it become a well-known brand in time for the beginning of basketball season. Founder Ryan Cocca hopes the brand will create a streetwear renaissance in North Carolina
"Now, with his (Lawson's) presence, a number of things become more accessible so I expect to put Thrill City in more stores, as well as increase our product offerings," Cocca says. "We're not seeking to be mainstream by any stretch though. The things I design tend to engage a certain audience—it isn't supposed to be understood by necessarily everyone."
But Lawson's involvement (and that of his manager Marc Campbell, who also invested in Thrill City) certainly legitimizes what Cocca had only planned to be a hobby three years ago. --Read On
Regardless of what you think about the rise, fall, and (perhaps) resurrection of messaging app Yo, its story illustrates something very clearly—technology companies make experiences, not products.
There's important insight in this tale that applies to businesses of any size and stage. In fact, some of my favorite local startups like Adzerk, ReverbNation and Shoeboxed all demonstrate this clearly: the experiences they deliver are central to their company's message and mission.
YO! YO?
Yo!, if you haven't read about it, is an app that does only one thing—sends a message containing the text 'Yo!' to your contacts in the app. Yes, that's right, it deliberately won't do anything else.
It's easy to point and call this ridiculous or a sign of the end times. And many people have been. But why not use it as an opportunity to learn something about why people use technology? --Read On
Two years might sound like a long time to build an Android app, but Durham-based Juan Porras and his team at Rheti are determined theirs will be the first to allow native Android apps to be built using only a mobile device.
This week, in coordination with the Google I/O conference in San Francisco, the app called Rheti hits the Google Play store. Porras calls the release "a public beta"—there are still kinks to work out. But the app features a marketplace of more than 75 plugins and a completely customizable experience for the most elementary of technology users. At full launch later this year, Rheti will open the marketplace for contributions by third-party developers, providing a new way for developers to monetize their work.
The big vision is to enable a truly unique app to be built as soon as someone has an idea, any where in the world, and without hiring a developer, a concept Porras believes “can change the world.”
He's already operating all around it. Through a private beta, professors in Spain are promoting Rheti to their students. Two Central American corporations have begun pilot projects, building internal applications for their employees (a key potential revenue stream for the business). Early users around the globe have built a copycat Snapchat, a Facebook page builder, phone dialer, an app that talks to a robot, another for gym workouts. --Read On
Please take note of the following and realize that I'm not alone in these sentiments...
I hate your banner ads. Targeted, untargeted, personalized, timely, generic—it doesn't matter. This is all garbage spam that I only click on by accident and immediately close the tab in the event that I do.
I hate your emails—daily, weekly and monthly newsletters; surveys, deals, offers; spam related to my past purchases or items in an abandoned shopping cart. Leave me alone. You are not winning my loyalty by deluging me with messages. Rather, you are actually making me regret having shopped on your site in the first place.
Related: when I click the link to unsubscribe, don't make me verify my email address, uncheck a bunch of boxes, or do anything else. Just unsubscribe me – you know, like sites with a shred of decency do. --Read On
Some may have been doubted whether a pair of Raleigh entrepreneurs could pull off a national-in-scope bitcoin event, but this morning's announcement that Edmund Moy, former director of the U.S. Mint and a vocal supporter of the currency globally, will headline the August 15-16 conference should put to rest any skepticism.
The Triangle is about to get some pretty major national and global attention.
Moy is one of the highest profile economic leaders to express support and hope for the currency, and this will be his first public speaking engagement on the topic. In a December 2013 blog post published on Money News, he wrote that digital currency promises a cheaper, more secure and efficient way to transact money. That means no more currency wars, exchange rate challenges and arbitrage.
“There could be less friction and more transparency for every transaction,” he wrote. --Read On
A decade of work at digital marketing agencies in Los Angeles lent Blake Callens a career-altering insight.
Jay Bigelow's column is part of a weekly series. Why Jay? Because he's charged with meeting and learning the needs of entrepreneurs all over this region and connecting them with the resources and people to help achieve their goals.
Denver Nuggets Point Guard Ty Lawson revisited his Carolina roots Tuesday to announce his new T3L clothing line and an investment in 
Regardless of what you think about the 
Two years might sound like a long time to build an Android app, but Durham-based Juan Porras and his team at 
Dear Retailers and Marketers,
Some may have been doubted whether a pair of Raleigh entrepreneurs