Cecilia Aronsson
Recent Posts
World’s first standard hybrid yacht launches — but may be more style than substance
On a fast cruise under the Golden Gate Bridge, Austrian boat manufacturer Frauscher just launched the world’s first luxury motor yacht with a hybrid engine, developed together with Austrian engine manufacturer Steyr Motors.
Hybrid cars have already established themselves as the modern fuel-efficient alternative to petrol cars. But on a warm day, many people will leave their car behind for a much less efficient vessel on the water: Most boats today are powered... Continue Reading
Top 10 tech trends: Smart phones, alternative energies, Boomer technologies
Where is technology headed?
The Churchill Club of Silicon Valley just wrapped up one of its most anticipated events: the Annual Top Ten Tech Trends Debate. Five well-known and opinionated venture capitalists weighed in on what trends will take flight and what trends will fizzle out in the months ahead.
(The VCs are pictured, from left to right: Steve Jurvetson, Vinod Khosla, Josh Kopelman, Roger McNamee, Joe Schoendorf.)
The audience of around 300 people... Continue Reading
How does journalism work, now that old media is in disarray?
Come and find out about the future of journalism at the Fifth conference on Innovation Journalism at Stanford University on May 21-23. The conference focuses on both the “journalism driving innovation” and the “innovation driving journalism.”
Participants include Matt Marshall, founder of VentureBeat, who will present VentureBeat’s journalism model on Thursday, May 22. He’ll also participate on a panel about the news industry’s challenges in the innovation economy. Read the full... Continue Reading
Sulekha merges Facebook and Craigslist in India
A merger between Facebook and Craigslist may seem like a pipe dream — but in India it’s already happening. The web community Sulekha has quickly grown to become India’s largest user-generated content site with 6 million users, a number set to double this year. Social networking features and classified ads take up equally big parts of the site.
The site targets Indians worldwide. India holds 60 percent of... Continue Reading
Travel startup UpTake set to launch opinions super-site
With so many online travel sites crowding the market, you’d think we were nearing a Web 2.0 travel bubble. But according to travel information search engine UpTake, which is launching May 14, there’s still an untapped niche in the market: a travel-opinions supersite.
The market is extremely fragmented with thousands of micro-sites for individual hotels, beaches, airlines and leisure activities. UpTake’s goal is to gather opinions from all of those... Continue Reading
Boom for travel sites — Can they make money?
Travel sites are in fashion this spring, with new sites adding at a steady pace. Finnish travel site TripSay is just the latest to emerge, for example, with ways to share tips about travel. It’s still in closed testing, but it plans to open to the public in a few months.
With hundreds of travel sites now existing — ranging from the big ones like Expedia to the small, single-author blogs dedicated... Continue Reading
Web 2.0 — The ultimate party
The most interesting conversations in a conference can kick off in the bars at night. When the Web 2.0 Expo starts Monday, there are plenty of events every night, so you might have a hard time deciding where to go. However, a Finnish web service called XIHA Life might be able to help you out.
XIHA was founded in September 2007 and is based in Helsinki. It targets people who are on the... Continue Reading
Britain’s best and brightest startups hit Silicon Valley next week for funding
If you’ve never heard of Dragon’s Den, it’s a popular British TV reality series, where entrepreneurs pitch their ideas to get funding from business experts — the “Dragons”. One of those Dragons, Doug Richard, a UK-based Californian and founder of investment research firm Library House got a name for himself as a particularly fastidious investor on the show. And now he’s selected 20 of the UK’s most promising web application start-ups to... Continue Reading
The iPhone in Europe: A patchy success
Cecilia Aronsson, a Swedish business reporter, is a fellow at the Innovation Journalism Program at Stanford University. Through July, she’ll write columns for VentureBeat.com about her experiences in Silicon Valley. Here’s her first column.
The European business press is speculating that the next market Apple plans to target with its iPhone is Sweden, a hotbed of mobile innovation and the home of rival mobile phone maker Ericsson. But I was tagging along with... Continue Reading