Unison Kills It At Finovate 2017 San Jose

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Reading Time: < 1 minuteFlawless presentation of their fundamental financial technology innovation. Practice makes perfect. Are home ownership investments fintech? What is technology? To medieval merchants, the invention of gold certificates was financial technology. Today, people first think of user interfaces and data systems when they think of fintech.  Fundamental paradigms shifts like Unison’s are hard to recognize as being technological … Read more

Finovate San Jose: Cool Fintech

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Reading Time: 2 minutesQuantiacs: Provides a toolset for traders to create and back test algorithmic trading strategies based on market signals. Traders can create algorithms, back test them on historical data from the last 27 years, and then incubate the algorithm for 6 months to see if it works. The company then connects successful algorithms with investors. The … Read more

Panaderia Branding – La Victoria

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Reading Time: < 1 minuteLa Victoria Bakery, a 60-year-old Mexican bakery on 24th Street was a pillar of the community, one of the first Mexican businesses bustling Irish-Italian neighborhood. But just as the Latino family community lent its culture to the old neighborhood, the area was changing again with influx of new tech workers who were looking for something … Read more

SF Bike to Work Day May 9

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Reading Time: < 1 minuteRide your bike to work and come by to the Ferry building 7:30 – 9:30 AM on May 9th to see me and pick up your schwag bag.  If you join SF Bicycle Coalition, you get the super deluxe bag.

Cold Running

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Reading Time: 2 minutesUnfortunately I have had my training for a marathon derailed for 2 weeks.  A nasty cold turned into a lung infection which just lingered with all this darn rain.  So I am wondering now how I get back up into the groove where I am pushing for 20 mile runs to get ready for a … Read more

Pinterest Snark

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Reading Time: < 1 minuteI think it is only a matter of time until we see more Pinterest snark.  The form has already been cast by sites like authors of catalog living and unhappyhipsters.com. Pinterest should be the great canvas where this mode of unadulterated snark might find it purest expression. I tried it.  It’s hard.  These two are … Read more

Categories Art

Mobile Health Cynic

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Reading Time: 4 minutes  Lily Tomlin said, “No matter how cynical you become, its never enough to keep up.”   The more I dig into this mobile wellness space, the more that comment resonates with me. I am pretty excited about mobile fitness trackers.  I get excited about the challenges of acquiring users and monetizing them in this space.  … Read more

Nike Fuel on Fire

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Reading Time: < 1 minuteLast week, I wrote about Nike Fuel and the FuelBand that is being launched this month.  I took a spin over to the Nike channel on youtube and can see how the marketing is shaping up.  This is going to be a hit.  Nike has managed to wrap up the idea of “Just Do it” … Read more

fitbit

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Reading Time: 2 minutesHot on the heels of my endomondo review from last week, comes news about fitbit.  The company closed a round of $12 million in series C funding.  The money ostensibly is to launch and gain market traction for their new product, the Aria, a wirelessly connected scale and body fat percentage sensor.  I thought I … Read more

Withings – Bad Name for a Scale

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Reading Time: < 1 minuteFitbit’s new Aria isn’t the first wireless scale. A French company called Withings has had a wireless scale on the market since at least 2009.  I believe Withings is going to fail.  The products look cool in an international space-age plastic frog design kind-of-way, but the name is poison.  I don’t know what it sounds … Read more