3 posts and columns on Launch Pad

Meet the Two Grad Students Who Freaked Out the NYT–The Pulse iPad App Creators Speak!

in News on June 8, 2010 at 6:17 pm PT

The first thing to strike you about the pair of Stanford University graduate students who made the banned and then unbanned news-reading iPad app, Pulse News Reader, is how they look like an advertisement for all that is good about entrepreneurship. Sweet-natured, slightly naive, energetic and very product focused, they are the last techies you’d choose to be the ones who got the New York Times in enough of a tizzy to force Apple to pull the news aggregator from its App Store. See for yourself in this video.

Pulse iPad App Gets Steve Jobs's Praise in Morning…Then Booted From App Store Hours Later After NYT Complains

in News on June 8, 2010 at 12:53 am PT

Yesterday morning, the pair of Stanford University graduate students who made the hot news-reading iPad app, Pulse News Reader, were ecstatic to be mentioned first–for being among the most promising developers for the new tablet device–by Apple CEO Steve Jobs in his keynote address to the Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco. But by afternoon, that flush of entrepreneurial success had turned sour, when Apple informed the two that Pulse was being pulled from the App Store after it received a written notice from the New York Times Company declaring that “The New York Times Company believes your application named ‘Pulse News Reader’ infringes The New York Times Company’s rights.” Pulse was down completely by 6:30 pm PT last night.

Voices

Web 2.0 Expo: An “American Idol” for Start-Ups

in News on April 3, 2009 at 5:13 pm PT

During the “Launch Pad” session, five start-ups took a grilling from developers, journalists and venture capitalists, then faced a crowd vote at the Web 2.0 Expo’s version of “American Idol.” As attendees texted their votes, moderator John Battelle, founder of Federated Media Publishing, jokingly asked: “Want to have a dance-off?” None were necessary. The techies in attendance were starry-eyed for all things mobile, picking Nitobi’s PhoneGap, an open-source tool for building mobile apps, as the People’s Choice winner. Life-tracking site zeaLOG was a close second.