JoyTunes Wants To Teach You To Play Real Instruments With Interactive Video Games Today at the LAUNCH Education Conference in Mountain View, an Israeli startup named JoyTunes showed off the work its been doing in an exciting and active space: Instrument-activated video games. Co-founder Yuval Kaminka tells us that 85 percent of the population wishes it had learned to play an instrument but never m

It’s simple really. The new MacBook Pro with the “Retina” display is something you have to see to believe. Perhaps you were watching the live coverage of the keynote today and thinking it’s not a big deal. It’s a very big deal. Once you see this screen, you will forever be ruined. You will not be able to use another screen. The effect is similar to the one we first saw with the iPhone 4 and later

The Art of Raising Seed: You’re Either Hot, Or You Make Your Own Heat Editor’s note: This post is written by guest author Darius “Bubs” Monsef, who is founder & CEO of the new design marketplace CreativeMarket. He is also the founder of the popular creative community COLOURlovers and is a mentor with 500Startups & PIEPDX. Bubs blogs at HelloBubs. I’d started raising 3 rounds. One fell apart and th

Startups Everything You Ever Wanted To Know About Convertible Note Seed Financings (But Were Afraid To Ask) Editor’s note: Scott Edward Walker is the founder and CEO of Walker Corporate Law Group, a boutique corporate law firm specializing in the representation of entrepreneurs. Check out his blog or follow him on Twitter as @ScottEdWalker. We are in the golden age of seed financing. Venture capit

Pathwright Launches Platform To Let Anyone Create, Sell Branded Online Courses Online education has been around for years, but they were largely viewed as experiments. Over the last year, things have changed. Elite universities are not only taking online education seriously, they’re building it into their 10-year plans. Harvard and MIT’s EdX is one example, Coursera another, while startups like Co

New Start Up CodeNow.Com Lets You Build And Test Code In Real Time, In Your Browser Trying new APIs is tricky. You can spend hours setting things up, gaining permissions, and learning syntax before you even get to write one line of code. That’s why CodeNow.com is cool. In short, it allows you to try APIs before you invest too much time into them and, as an added bonus, it acts as a code repository

As It Graduates From Network To Platform, Edmodo Now Serving 7M Users, 80K Schools Edmodo is one of the startups whose name pops up a lot when you talk about “edtech.” Founded in 2007, the company is almost old school, yet, in spite of the influx of new education-focused startups, Edmodo continues to press forward. This is largely due to its appeal as a social learning platform for K-12 education

I’ve published eight books in the past seven years, five with traditional publishers (Wiley, Penguin, HarperCollins), one comic book,  and the last two I’ve self-published. In this post I give the specific details of all of my sales numbers and advances with the traditional publishers. Although the jury is still out on my self-published books, “How to be the Luckiest Man Alive” and “I Was Blind Bu

Traditional whiteboards are great for nearly everything but portability. Scribbling down physics problems? Sure. Impromptu game of tic-tac-toe? Of course. Folding up and putting it in your pocket? Not really possible with a normal whiteboard. But the Noteboard isn’t a normal whiteboard. It’s a dual-side, foldable whiteboard that might just change the world (but probably not). When unfolded the Not

Editor’s note: Dick Talens is one of the founders of Fitocracy and an amateur competitive bodybuilder. Follow him on Twitter @DickTalens. Little sleep, lots of stress, free food at all hours, and Paul Singh constantly try to booze you under the table. Sounds like the old college days when you tried to rush for Sigma Chi, doesn’t it? But nope. That describes life at 500 Startups. For a former fat k

Editor’s Note: Alexey Komissarouk is a CS senior at the University of Pennsylvania and founder of the PennApps Hackathon. This article is based on an earlier talk to the Wharton MBA Entrepreneurship Club. “How many of you want to start a company?” David Tisch asked. All hundred hands went up. That’s why we were there, crowded into a Wharton classroom to seek startup advice from an industry luminar

StraighterLine Nabs $10M To Make College More Affordable Through Online Education A year ago, Peter Thiel called it a bubble. Whatever you call it, the cost of attaining a college degree has skyrocketed to the point of absurdity — to the point of one trillion red flags. Student debt in the U.S. recently pushed over $1 trillion, and the average debt per student now stands at more than $25K. (And 30

How Social Currency Is Driving Identity, Trust and New Industries Editor’s Note: Markus Barnikel joined carpooling.com as CEO in 2011, in order to expand into new countries and make carpooling a convenient transportation option for all. Barnikel has also held various leadership positions at Yahoo, including as Chief Sales Officer in Australia and Global Director of Sales in the U.S. As our lives i

Editor’s Note: This guest post is written by Derek Andersen, who is the founder of StartupGrind and Vaporware Labs, and is a former entertainment development manager at Electronic Arts. While secretly wanting to be an entrepreneur but working at Electronic Arts, I would sometimes sneak out early and jet to Stanford campus to crash Steve Blank’s entrepreneurial lecture series. Steve literally wrote