Author Archive: Kyle Ellicott

TechZulu is teaming up with Los Angeles based companies Earbits and Grubwithus, to bring you a one-of-a-kind hackathon event. Instead of the traditional hackathon, let’s roll back the clock to childhood. Remember how great it was to wake up Saturday and watch the week’s best cartoons? Now hold that memory and think about your passion for coding. That’s Hacktoons. On January 12th, 2013 Hacktoons brings you all the cartoons, cereal, community, and coding you can take.

During the past twelve months we’ve seen (and heard) a great deal of conservation around crowdfunding and what it has brought to an exploding entrepreneurship community. As it’s brought life to numerous new projects while offering entrepreneurs an additional outlet for receiving funding.

If you ever have the opportunity in life to check out the Mall of America, a United States icon, I highly recommend it. Heir to the largest mall in America, and an empire started by his grandfather that now includes banks and manufacturing companies, Mark Ghermezian joined the family business but left the family empire last year to jump on the tech startup bandwagon.

Exciting news for the Los Angeles Tech scene last week as Apptopia closed a $1 million dollar round of funding. The Santa Monica and Boston based online marketplace for mobile apps had their recent round led by none other than Mark Cuban. Of the one million raised Cuban himself both in $500,000 showing his excitement and belief in the booming company.

One of the largest time sucks of the internet is the vast amount of information available to us at any time right at our finger tips. Rarely do we come upon a website or web applcaitions that truly sifts through all the junk and curates the most influential and authoritative source to give to useful and value content…not spam. Enter PickDeck.

As we continue this monumental year in the startup realm, we welcome a newcomer – Boston Startup School. Last week Boston Startup School officially launched and began with their inaugural class. The school aims to prepare recent college graduates for life working at a startup; and more specifically how to deliver and make progress in an environment filled with unknowns and various resource constraints.

We’re driven by challenges and the desire to win. It’s in our blood as humans, some more than others. Gamification fuels that drive and brings the competition to technology. We see it in web applications, mobile apps, project management tools, etc. But if you’re a company looking to motivate your employees or engage with customers where do you start?

For those companies looking to venture into the mobile space, there are multiple platforms in market to help accomplish the move. However not all those platforms can provide companies with all tools needed. Appcelerator’s Titanium is the only mobile cloud platform to enable fully native-cross platform, mobile app, hybrid and HTML5 web development, from a single codebase.

In the fall of 2011 Apple introduced the world Siri your personal virtual assistant (PVA). Now for those with a iPhone 4S, Siri was an exciting new tool. You could talk to her, ask her questions, get your schedule, and even ask her for a joke if you were having a bad day. But what if you were on a phone other than the iPhone 4S? Well…you had to find your own jokes on that bad day.

Sometimes a picture just isn’t enough. Times when you just want to see something from all angles. With the growth of mobile apps and high-res cameras, people are out to change that experience. YouSpin is in on the forefront of that change.