Free snacks, yoga class, bottomless drinks, and a back massage may sound like a night at an all-inclusive luxury resort, but for employees at Pinterest it’s just another day at the office.

Tech companies desperate for talent are engaged in an all out free perks arms race, which has lead to the creation of a new job category, Rachel Feintzeig at the Wall Street Journal reports.

The startup director of workplace manages all aspects of worker happiness from free catering to exercise classes, team beer nights, and a slew of other benefits. 

Pinterest’s senior director of workplace oversees nine aim-to-please employees. Her team organizes everything from company-only classes in muay thai to a Japanese-themed lunch and Jell-O shot-making “studio night.”

They distribute dried mango and fresh towels throughout Pinterest's San Francisco-based office, and ensure the zen meditation room, library, and a shared desk custom-built from a vintage Ford Mustang are up to snuff.

“We are just providing basic standards,” says Ms. Nguyen.

But these basic standards come with a price. Pinterest shells out around $1,250 for bi-weekly happy hours, and has a $14,000 budget for events such as wine tastings and terrarium-building classes, on top of the cost of free lunches, dinners and snacks. 

And Pinterest is not alone. Software company Asana, which only recently hired its first employees solely focused on perks, already distributes a $10,000-per-person allowance for computers and desk décor. 

The company’s chief operating officer Kenny Van Zant says these benefits simply allow workers to focus on their jobs. Free gym memberships and catered lunches eliminate the hassle of running out to the gym during lunch or scrambling to order food between tasks.

Critics however, claim that the strategy is short sighted. Workers can become frustrated if freebies are doled out more frequently than raises, and if a company’s business goes south, workers will become angry when benefits are cut.

Some workers also don’t recognize limits, and the barrage of perks can lead to outlandish demands and a sense of entitlement.

But Nuha Masri, a 25-year-old former Google employee, tells the The Wall Street Journal that she can’t imagine working at a company without generous perks. 

"I obviously have options," she says in the midst of juggling lines of computer code and a board game. "I can be anywhere I want to be." 

Read more at the Wall Street Journal >

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San Francisco is being flooded with startup funding. Rents are sky high, newly-formed companies are offering lavish perks, and storefronts across the city are transforming. 

Zillabyte software engineer Nikhil Karnik decided to analyze exactly how this growth has changed the city, as well as several other startup hotbeds such as New York and Austin, in a series of interactive maps.

Using Zillabyte, a framework for high-end data analysis, and the Crunchbase API, he created time-lapse visualizations of venture funding rounds for each city. The results are captivating.

Bubble sizes correspond to the total amount of funding raised, and the sample size for each city is limited to 1000 companies. Here's San Francisco:

It's clear that San Francisco has been flooded with venture capital, but Karnik’s maps show exactly where the big venture-funded startups are taking root.

For instance, you can see why rent in SOMA — the upper-right hand corner of the map — is so expensive.

Next, check out New York:

Karnik’s timelapse of funding rounds in New York City is limited to Manhattan, but you can see that startup growth since 2009 has been relatively steady compared to San Francisco’s relative explosion.

Startups seem to prefer hip downtown neighborhoods such as SoHo or the Flatiron, as opposed to more traditional midtown.

Finally, let's take a look at Austin:

Austin’s growth appears to be scattered across city limits, though many startups do line major roads and freeways.

Karnik notes that his methodology isn’t perfect. Cities have very different histories and social dynamics that can either foster or stifle entrepreneurship, and he would like to look at population growth and development versus the rate of venture funding to gain further insights.

He's curious how much changing demographics in large urban areas correlate with the latest tech boom and if it's possible to pinpoint "up and coming" startup hubs using this type of analysis. 

In the meantime, for more maps and a technical explanation of his methodology, check out Karnik's full blog post.

SEE ALSO: Look How Much San Francisco Has Changed In 3 Years

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Clinkle, a mobile payment startup that was showered with $30 million in funding last year, is now distributing some of that cash in the form of a vending machine, Valleywag reports.

University of California, Berkeley students have been tweeting selfies from the company’s "Treat Bot" stationed outside a campus dining hall as they collect free $20 bills for signing up for the service.

The service itself is a bit confusing.

It's basically a version of Venmo, but with a complimentary black debit card that can earn perks.

“Use the card, and you get treats. Send treats to another member, and their next purchase could be free,” Rob Ryan, Clinkle's director of design, wrote on ProductHunt in September.

"Sure, it's Venmo," Ryan continued, "but its mostly about giving and getting Treats. A campus with Treats flying around is a bundle of surprise and joy."

After a tumultuous 17 months of layoffs and executive turnover, the Clinkle app has only just launched on select college campuses. 

This also isn’t the first time Clinkle has tried paying users to use its service. In June, the company paid beta testers $10 when they swiped their card for a fifth time.

SEE ALSO: These Mesmerizing Time-Lapse Maps Show How Startups Are Transforming Major Cities

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Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and investors often say they're building world-changing companies. And companies like Facebook, Google, Apple and Uber are actually doing that.

But, would any of those companies stand a chance, if say, a massive solar flare struck the earth and hundreds of millions of people suddenly found themselves without electricity?

(That could happen, by the way. The White House released a report in 2013 which discussed the ramifications of a large flare from the sun: A worst-case solar storm could result in months without electricity for 130 million Americans — or millions of people wherever it strikes in the world.)

There's an image going around Twitter that's meant to be funny, but there's some truth to it. Tech companies that are "changing the world" are nothing without serious inventions like Internet and electricity.

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Whether it's rain, snow, or ice, winter weather can really wreak havoc on your dress shoes. 

Jack Erwinis a startup that makes a high-quality, classic shoe that won't go out of style or break the bank. The shoes are all made out of Italian leather and priced between $95 and $220.

We asked Jack Erwin cofounders Lane Gerson and Ariel Nelson to share their tips for protecting your shoes during the bleak winter months.

How do I save wet leather shoes?

Though it may be tempting to stick the soaked shoes in front of a direct heat source, like a radiator or fireplace, Nelson and Gerson advise against doing so.

"Stuff your shoes with newspaper to absorb the moisture, then replace with cedar shoe trees," they said. "If you have leather soles, let them dry too." 

What if my shoes start to smell bad?

Funky-smelling shoes are usually caused by bacterial or fungal build-up. 

"There are a variety of fixes, including applying antibacterial sprays or a light layer of baking soda," they said.

You could also try inserting an odor-controlling insole or even dryer sheets.

Salt stained my shoes — now what?

First, Nelson and Gerson recommend using saddle soap or a specialty salt stain remover to get rid of the stain itself. Then, stuff the shoes with newspaper and leave them out to dry, away from a direct heat source. 

"Last, apply leather conditioner or natural oils to replenish the leather and return it to its original luster," they said.

What are the best kinds of shoes to wear?

"Synthetic materials created specifically for inclement weather such as Gore Tex and rubber are fitting materials for the worst of the winter," they said. "When cared for and treated properly, full-grain leather is a naturally resilient material that can also withstand the elements." 

They recommend using natural oils, like mink oil, to make leather even stronger in the winter. 

What styles of boots are fashionable this winter? 

"The Chelsea boot continues to be a winter staple," they said. "This season the combat boot and dress chukka, both classic styles, are seeing a variety of new interpretations."

Jack Erwin's Carter boot, a twist on the combat boot, continues to be one of the brand's bestselling styles. 

What products are best for regular shoe maintenance?

"Shoe horns are always recommended as they help to preserve the back counter and overall structure of your shoe," they said. 

You should also be conditioning and polishing your shoes on a regular basis, which will keep the leather supple and moisturized. 

SEE ALSO: This Company Wants To Revolutionize The Way Men Buy Dress Shoes

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You've heard of the "internet of things." Get ready for the "internet of moving things."

That's how a start-up called Veniam describes its mission to transform all the cars, trucks, and buses on city streets into a mobile WiFi network connecting anything and anyone around it.

Veniam has already brought a version of this free public network to Porto, Portugal, where it's using some 600 vehicles to test the technology in a "living lab."

Today the company announced that it's received $4.9 million in venture funding to expand operations into U.S. cities from a Silicon Valley headquarters.

Veniam leverages short-range vehicle-to-vehicle communication systems to create a "mesh" network of wireless hotspots. That process may sound complicated, but the outcome is simple: city residents can stay connected to WiFi everywhere they go, even in a moving vehicle, without losing service or being pushed onto more expensive cellular networks.

Company co-founder Robin Chase says that means less network congestion and near-constant connectivity across a city.

"Just thinking about your cell phone—when it doesn't connect, we just kind of shrug and wait," says Chase, who previously founded Zipcar (and has contributed to CityLab). "But if you're doing things that are important, or you're in a fixed place with no service, that doesn't work. Veniam technology gets around that."

In Porto, Veniam has equipped some 400 public buses, 150 taxis, and more than 30 city garbage trucks with its technology to form a wireless network across the city. Bus riders, for instance, can simply click on the free STCP WiFi network through their smartphone and stay connected throughout the trip.

CEO João Barros, an engineering scholar at the University of Porto, has said that in addition to acting as mobile WiFi hotspots, the connected fleet also sends "terabytes" of real-time data from the physical world to the cloud, helping cities respond to local challenges.

Take garbage collection. In Europe, says Chase, many sidewalk trashcans have sensors under their lids that are continually sending out information about the receptacle's volume. Veniam's mobile mesh network can monitor those sensors and, when a can is full, tell the connected garbage trucks that it's time for a pick-up. Chase says that could reduce garbage trips by 30 percent, alleviating some traffic congestion and saving taxpayer money.

"If we think about smart cities, what's always been an issue for me is, how does that data get to the Internet?" she says. "Vehicles are the way to do it."

Veniam's technology should be especially beneficial to urban transportation systems. The mobile mesh network can read parking meters, measure traffic patterns, act as a backup traffic light system, and administer road pricing, among other uses.

Barros's own research has shown it can optimize freight movement in ports; in a field test at the Port of Leixões, in Portugal, equipped vehicles were less than a minute away from mesh network connection about 70 percent of the time, and less than 5 minutes away 95 percent of the time (below).

The technology could make roads safer, too. The U.S. Department of Transportation believes an "internet of cars" will have "overwhelming safety benefits," and earlier this year, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration announced that it would soon make it mandatory for car-makers to include vehicle-to-vehicle technology in future models.

But using a network like Veniam's, which can be installed in any vehicle, could achieve this connectivity much more quickly than waiting for every American to buy a new car.

In response to the privacy concerns often associated with big data, Chase says no personal information is broadcast over the mobile network. For now, Veniam provides network service to vehicle fleets run by private organizations or public institutions for a monthly fee; the start-up can also partner with telecommunication companies, who pay to offload data from cellular networks onto wireless ones. 

Ultimately, says Chase, Veniam may offer network access directly to general consumers through "some very low-cost data plan."

"One reason the 'internet of things' hasn't happened for so many years is there's been a lack of very low-cost data that's leveraging existing devices and existing vehicles and existing communication networks," she says. "That's all the stuff Veniam does."

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There's no shortage of hot startups.

To stand out, startup CEOs are getting creative by launching innovative products and raising tons of money — and they've got the world talking.

We've found the hottest startup CEOs in the US. We ranked the CEOs by buzz, accounting for how much money their company raised and how much they've been in the news this year.

For the purpose of this list, we defined a startup as a private tech company that's less than five years old. With one exception, we included only US-based startups that have taken venture-capital funding and have not yet IPO'd or been acquired.

Did we miss a buzzy startup CEO? Let us know in the comments.

32. David Arabov

Company: Elite Daily

Arabov created the news website Elite Daily because he and the site's other two cofounders wanted to make a news site that was The Huffington Post for millennials. "Gen Y is where our biggest source of traffic comes from. The average reader is between 18 to 26 years old, and it's split between male and female," Arabov told Business Insider.

Founded in 2012, the startup just received its first funding in June, $1.5 million from Social Starts, Vast Ventures, Red Sea Ventures, and Greycroft Partners.

31. Or Arbel

Company: Yo

The Yo app is incredibly simple. You just tap a friend's name and the app sends that person a notification saying "Yo!" in a robotic voice, which is actually the voice of Arbel.

Yo, which came about when a friend enlisted Arbel to make an app that notified his personal assistant, has 1 million users.

In one round of fundraising, the app received $1.5 million. We wait to see which direction Arbel will go from here. 

30. Paul Budnitz

Company: Ello

Ello is an invite-only ad-free social network that allows users to customize profiles with creative layouts. "When a network is very simple," Budnitz says, "people want specific features, and they’re willing to pay for those features."

The social network has raised $5.9 million in two rounds of fundraising from the Foundry Group, Bullet Time Ventures, and FreshTracks Capital.

App Annie, an analytics firm that specializes in app market data, has announced a new product for understanding user demographics.

It's called Audience Intelligence, and it's an expansion to the App Annie Intelligence platform that launched three years ago.

For an annual contract fee, Audience Intelligence will allow publishers, startups, and financial analysts to learn more about the habits and background of app users, with the ability to look at metrics such as gender, age, and income.

For example, here you can see the demographic breakdown of the Deal or No Deal app for iOS, which shows the app has more female users but also sees users from all age groups.

Audience Intelligence also offers a demographic breakdown of users by app, country, month, and specific app store they use, along with the ability to track trends for a specific app across mobile platforms like iOS or Android.

Aside from demographic information, there's also a "Related Apps" section of Audience Intelligence that shows the connection between apps, highlighting which apps share common users.

Here you can see the Related Apps breakdown for messaging app Yo, whose users are also likely to use other social networking apps like Path, Secret, and Yik Yak.

App Annie is hoping the new service will enable app publishers and startups to better understand their own user base as well as keep an eye on and benchmark their competition.

Audience Intelligence is available starting today for an annual contract fee that starts around $1,000 per month, but App Annie is running a promotion that will allow customers to buy or upgrade an App Annie Store Intelligence account to include Audience Intelligence at a discount.

To see a preview of Audience Intelligence in action or to learn more details on how to purchase, click here.

SEE ALSO: The 12 Best New Apps You May Have Missed

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Whisper is app used to send and receive anonymous messages that has raised $60 million from investors. Its last round valued the startup at about $200 million. 

At Business Insider's annual IGNITION conference, we asked Whisper CEO Michael Heyward how much of that $60 million he's been able to keep for himself. 

His answer: $0. Excluding salary and stock options, of course.

When a startup's funding round is particularly hot, sometimes founders ask investors if they can keep a few million dollars for themselves. If they're first-time founders, they may want to buy houses, support families, and take some risk out of running a startup.

Investors allow founders to do this when it aligns with their interests. Sometimes, investors are so desperate to put money into a company that they'll cave to a founder's demands. Other times, offering founders a few million dollars can be a smart way to keep them incentivized. A founder will be less likely to accept an acquisition offer if he or she is already financially stable, and an investor's goal is to back startups that will grow as large as possible, independently.

For example, Snapchat co-founders Evan Spiegel and Bobby Murphy were allowed to take a few million dollars off the table when they raised a round of financing at a $7 billion valuation. The first-time founders rejected a ~$3 billion offer from Facebook, and now the company is worth ~$10 billion. Spiegel and Murphy recently purchased their first homes with some of the cash (Spiegel had been living at his father's house).

Whisper is smaller than Snapchat, which likely has more than 100 million active users. Tens of millions of people use Whisper every month. But a much smaller Whisper competitor, Secret, was able to take $6 million off the table during a $25 million fundraising round that valued the startup at about $100 million. It's unclear why investors let the founders do that — they had only been running the company for a few months, and the buzz around Secret has died down since.

Michael Heyward, CEO and founder of Whisper, says he has no need for millions of dollars right now. He doesn't have a family to support or loans to pay. He also says he believes in his product so he doesn't want to swap equity for cash. It wouldn't be smart since he believes his company will be worth much more in the future.

Heyward's first institutional investor, Lightspeed's Jeremy Liew, says it's rare for founders to take money off the table. If an established entrepreneur is asking to pocket millions of dollars, it can be a warning sign to investors that the founder isn't serious enough about building a big business.

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Over the past several years, New York has transformed into startup hotbed.

It's home to exciting early-stage companies like Airhelp, Abacus, Glamsquad, and Classpass. 

We compiled our list of 25 Hottest NY Startups by talking to investors, employees, fellow journalists, and active members of the tech scene in New York. 

Though there are some big names out there already, this list includes young startups, some of which you may not have heard of yet. All have only raised Series A funding or below and are based in New York City. 

Bowery allows developers to set up coding environments in 30 seconds flat

What it is:

Programmers waste countless hours setting up redundant coding environments. In order to begin coding a new program, developers need to manually install complicated sets of paramaters. This allows developers to test their products and make sure they work on different types of devices and screens. 

Bowery's cloud-based system removes the pain from the process and lets developers share their environment with co-workers in real time. The three young founders have attracted attention from big name investors such as Google Ventures and First Round Capital.

Founders:

Zachary Hamed, David Byrd, Steve Kaliski

Funding:

Betaworks, Bloomberg Beta, BOLDstart Ventures, Deep Fork Capital, Google Ventures, Homebrew, Magnet Agency, RRE and SV Angel. General Catalyst’s Rough Draft Ventures, First Round Capital’s Dorm Room Fund

Website: 

http://bowery.io

Oscar is a health insurance company for the 21st century

What it is:

Oscar brings simplicity and good design to the archaic world of health insurance. The company launched in October 2013 right as the Affordable Care Act began to allow consumers to pick and choose their own plans, and since then Oscar has enrolled thousands while raking in tens of millions of dollars in annualized revenue. They have raised $175 million in funding and are working toward their long-term goal of expanding out of the state of New York.

Founders:

Josh Kushner, Kevin Nazemi, Mario Schlosser

Funding:

Thrive Capital, Khosla Ventures, General Catalyst Partners, Founders Fund, Stanley Druckenmiller, Jim Breyer

Website:

http://hioscar.com

Niche is a talent agency for social media stars

What it is:

Niche works with prominent creators on social media platforms like Vine, Instagram and Tumblr and connects them with brands and marketers looking to beef up their social presence. Though barely more than a year old, Niche has already raked in close to $9 million in revenue and shows no sign of slowing down.

Founders:

Rob Fishman, Darren Lachtman

Funding:

David Tisch, Slow Ventures, BoxGroup, Gary Vaynerchuk, Kevin Colleran, WME Advancit Capital, SV Angel, Lerer Hippeau Ventures

Website:

http://niche.co

Years of working at a sedentary office job with long hours and stressful deadlines can take a pretty significant toll on your body.

Sitting for more than eight hours per day, for example, can put you at a higher risk for muscular skeletal disease. Slouching all day can also lead to long term illness, including breathing problems.

One startup, however, hopes its gadget will help combat some of the long term health problems that may plague 9-to-5 office workers.

The $150 Prana, which launches at the end of January, is a tiny device you can clip to your clothing at your waistline.

It alerts you when your posture is poor or when you're not breathing from your diaphragm.

"One very common symptom is during times of stress, our breathing will switch from natural diaphragmic breathing in the belly to chest breathing," Andre Persidsky, CEO of Prana, told Business Insider.

Diaphragmic breathing is important because if you only breathe from your chest, the lower portion of your lungs never get a full share of oxygenated air, according to a report from Harvard Medical School. This can make you feel anxious and short of breath.

Here's a rendering of what the Prana looks like. It resembles a circular badge or button. 

Prana's device is designed to make you aware of these times when you're not breathing through your diaphragm. The gadget itself sits at your waistline to monitor your breathing patterns and alerts you with a small buzz or smartphone notification when you need to adjust your breathing.

The accompanying app comes with a library of various breathing techniques that are catered to different  goals. For example, if you want to feel more energized, you might try one technique, while another may be more ideal for helping you sleep better.

Persidsky also said the app will come with a casual game aimed at helping you maintain control of your breath. You would control the "Flappy Bird"-like game, which consists of navigating a bird flying through a garden, with your breathing pattern while wearing the device. Here's what it looks like:

The Prana isn't the only wearable device to tackle the issues of posture and breathing properly, but it claims to be one of the first that can monitor both. The Lumo Lift, for example, is a similar clip-on gadget that help you fix your posture throughout the day. But it doesn't include comprehensive breathing exercises like the Prana does.

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Six months before a startup dies, founders tend to be delusional. Y Combinator co-founder Paul Graham has coined this phase the "fatal pinch."

During the fatal pinch, growth slows while expenses increase. Founders find themselves with six months left of operating capital, after which their startup dies. But instead of making a change or throwing in the towel early, they wrongly assume investors will bail them out. 

"There may be nothing founders are so prone to delude themselves about as how interested investors will be in giving them additional funding," Graham writes. 

Investors won't give these pinched founders cash for a few reasons: They have higher standards for startups seeking a second round of financing rather than a first, and if a startup appears to be failing, what investor wants to sink additional capital into that?

Graham's advice: avoid the pinch. Don't spend the first round you raise frivolously; prioritize growth and reaching profitability instead.

If you're already in the pinch?

Find a way to grow and monetize while minimizing costs, or shut down the company (a.k.a., the founder gives up). That means you might have to fire great people or pivot to sell and offer another product to customers.

"The good news is, plenty of successful startups have passed through near-death experiences and gone on to flourish," Graham writes. "You just have to realize in time that you're near death."

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What's the number-one reason startups fail?

Some studies find it's a lack of product fit. Others say it's because companies run out of cash.

But a common reason startups fail is because the founder doesn't want to run it any more, and he or she decides to quit.

Bryan Goldberg cofounded Bleacher Report and sold it for more than $200 million to Turner. He now runs Bustle, a media site that targets women and earned 11 million monthly readers within its first year. Goldberg's recipe for startup success is pretty intuitive: Just stay alive. 

If you keep your startup alive long enough, you may break through a traffic barrier, earn traction, or outlast a competitor and gain industry recognition.

"Winning in startups, and in media specifically, is very much about refusing to give up. Resilience matters," Goldberg told Business Insider in an email. "It takes a long time for a media publication to gain mindshare with the general public — in the case of Bleacher Report, it took five years until people at parties or networking events told me, 'Yeah, I know you guys.' That's a long time for a startup, especially when each day brings growing pains, financial complexities, and potential fire drills. But you have to stay alive...Tough, nimble, spirited media startups are going to thrive, so long as they stay focused on their mission and have the patience to endure."

Paul Graham, the cofounder of startup incubator Y Combinator, calls this refusing-t0-die mentality being a cockroach.

In 2008, when he let Airbnb into Y Combinator, he told the cofounders that he appreciated their hustle (Airbnb used to sell boxes of cereal to fund itself when no investors wanted to give it cash.) 

"[Paul] was basically looking for cockroaches," Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky said at a South by Southwest talk. "He said we were cockroaches and that's why he funded us." Now Airbnb is valued at about $10 billion.

Graham believes failure is often a founder's choice. They could choose to keep their startups alive — they just don't want to.

"You should shut down the company if you're certain it will fail no matter what you do. Then at least you can give back the money you have left, and save yourself however many months you would have spent riding it down,"Graham wrote in a recent blog post. "Companies rarely have to fail though. What I'm really doing here is giving you the option of admitting you've already given up."

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2014 was a great year for consumer tech, so we decided to take a look at the best startups that launched this year.

When looking at the best startups, we took into account factors like funding, revenue, growth, and investor interest.

Did we miss a great startup that launched this year? Let us know in the comments!

GLAMSQUAD brings hair salon-quality blowouts to your apartment.

What it is: GLAMSQUAD co-founder Victoria Eisner got the idea for her startup on New Year's Eve one year. Despite using on-demand services to plan the rest of her evening — Uber to go to her event and Rent The Runway for her dress — but she couldn't find a startup that would bring a blow-out appointment and beauty styling to her door. With GLAMSQUAD's app, you press a button and a stylist will show up at your home to blow dry your hair ($50) or do your makeup ($75). A few months ago, GLAMSQUAD hired Gilt Groupe co-founder Alexandra Wilkis Wilson as its CEO. 

Launch date: GLAMSQUAD launched in New York City in January, and also recently launched in Los Angeles.

Funding: GLAMSQUAD raised $2 million in seed funding in January, and in October, the startup raised another $7 million from Softbank Capital, Lerer Hippeau Ventures, BBG Ventures, and Montage Ventures.

Website: www.glamsquad.com

Spring is the Instagram for shopping.

What it is: Angel investor David Tisch has funded startups like Harry's, Kitchensurfing, and Flatiron Health, but he took a stab at cofounding a startup this year with Spring. Spring is sort of like the Instagram for shopping: you swipe through lifestyle pictures, not just flat pictures of products, and you can purchase anything you see in the app with a few taps. Apple just named Spring one of the best apps of 2014.

Launch date: Spring launched in August.

Funding: Spring raised a $7.5 million Series A round in July. The round was led by Thrive Capital, Groupe Arnault and Box Group. Other investors include Founder Collective, Google Ventures, SV Angel, and Lerer Hippeau Ventures.

Website: shopspring.com

DWNLD makes apps easy to make, customize and get published in the App Store.

What it is: DWNLD is to apps what Wordpress is to websites: it's a startup that lets anyone create an app quickly and cheaply and put it in the App Store. DWNLD was founded by angel investor Fritz Lanman and Alexandra Keating. DWNLD's service costs $15 a month, and lets its users customize apps with easy design tools. Publishers also have the option of turning on iAds to monetize their apps. 

Launch date: DWNLD launched in September.

Funding: DWNLD has quietly raised $2 million in seed funding from WME, Michael Arrington’s CrunchFund, The Chernin Group, Gordon Crawford, and other media executives.

Website: dwnld.me

The London-based document collaboration startup Huddle is announcing a monster round of funding, bringing in $51 million.

Huddle is an enterprise software product used by governments and big businesses to coordinate work on documents.

The valuation of the company is undisclosed. However, similar companies have previously seen valuations at about seven times the price of the latest investment round, implying that Huddle might be worth $350 million. For a UK company, a $50 million-plus funding round is a massive sum.

Companies like Beats by Dre use Huddle to share sensitive design documents with their suppliers. Groups of employees can work on files, and the software controls who can access which files while keeping logs of edits.

The new funding is Huddle's series D round. It previously raised about $40 million from venture capital funds and angel investors. The new investment was led by Zouk Capital with participation from the Hermes GPE Environmental Innovation Fund.

Huddle says it will use the funding to expand across Europe and the US, as well as to double the size of its product team. 

The company has an impressive list of customers. Eighty percent of central government departments in the UK use Huddle, while US government agencies like NASA and the office of the Secretary of Defense are also using the software. It's not just governments that use the software, though. Huddle says that 80% of Fortune 500 companies are customers.

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Mark Cuban, the outspoken entrepreneur, Dallas Mavericks owner, and "Shark Tank" investor, tells Business Insider that a young company should almost never hire a public relations firm. 

That's because the main job of PR professionals — wrangling members of the press — isn't impossible for an entrepreneur to do themselves.

"Whatever industry your company is in, you probably already know who the key writers are, and if you don't, you need to do the work to learn," Cuban says. "Then reach out to them."

Between blogs, Twitter, and other social media platforms, reaching a reporter isn't difficult, he says, and many have their contact information posted on whatever publication they write for. 

What's more, you know your business much better than any PR person you'd hire. 

"It's better to develop relationships with those folks directly than try to train a PR person to learn your business and figure it all out," Cuban says. 

Plus, the relationships you develop early will become more important down the line, since the prominence of the journalists you're working with will increase as your company grows.

"The relationships will have long-term value to you, and the money you save can be the difference between living or dying as a company," Cuban says.

Of course, "there are always exceptions, but for the most part, do it yourself."

SEE ALSO: 9 Legendary Entrepreneurs Who Started When They Were Kids

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Years before Napster, MySpace, and SoundCloud, there was another place on the web where independent musicians uploaded their music for all to hear.

It was called the Internet Underground Music Archive, or IUMA, and it was kind of a big deal in musician circles in the early 1990s, especially in Northern California. It was founded in Santa Cruz in 1993, before web browsers were even a mainstream thing and uploading a single song took forever.

Writer Caleb Garling went back and interviewed one of the founders, Jeff Patterson, and talked to some of the musicians who used the early service. There were some successes, like punk-ska band Sublime, which used the action it was getting on IUMA to get a label deal.

But it's a bittersweet story because the technology was so far ahead of its time — with much faster download speeds available today, Soundcloud gets more than 12 hours of new music posted every single minute. 

But back then, not enough people were willing to suffer through slow upload and download times to share their music. Then, as Napster took off, the business case for IUMA disappeared — nobody wanted to invest in a company that made it so easy to share music. It limped along for a few years, got sold twice, and finally shut down for good in 2006.

It's a great story of the early days of the Internet, and a reminder that new startup ideas rely as much on timing and luck as on vision.

Read the whole story here>>

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After launching in 2006, UK tech company Huddle just raised $51 million.

Huddle is a file sharing cloud service, like Dropbox or Box, but it focuses on enterprises like big companies rather than individual consumers. Huddle enables large agencies to share, save, and collaborate on documents online. More importantly, Huddle users can control who has access to which files, so it's more secure.

That extra layer of security is crucial in lieu of the recent Sony hack and Edward Snowden's trove of NSA documents. 

Huddle isn't really competing against Dropbox and Box, although it does gain business from them. Instead, its main competitor is legacy enterprise software such as Microsoft SharePoint, which companies have often been using for years. 

The company's client list is impressive. It works with Apple-owned headphones manufacturer Beats by Dre, international accounting firm KPMG, a host of US government agencies including the office of the Secretary of Defence, and around 80% of the UK's central government agencies.

The company announced on Thursday that it had completed its series D fundraising round, bringing in $51 million in new investment. That's a giant sum for a UK tech company.

Business Insider met with Alastair Mitchell, Huddle's cofounder and CEO, in the company's London office to talk about its rapid growth, and the challenges of building software secure enough to be used on classified government data.

Business Insider: Why is Huddle's office in a different part of London as opposed to the famed "Silicon Roundabout" tech cluster near Old Street.

Alastair Mitchell: We [used to be] right on the roundabout there, so we were literally, as you came out of the Tube, you’d see big Huddle offices with big windows and our names across them. But what’s great about that area is that it’s full of small, low-cost offices. But they’re small, right? So when you get to our size and you’re growing up and you need hundreds of people in an office, there just isn’t space enough. They’re all small offices, so you have to move down to towards the City, which is hilarious. 25% of all the new space in the City taken last year was actually tech firms, which is amazing.

BI: You were one of the very first tech companies to become part of the city's startup scene. What was that like?

AM: When we started, seven years ago, there was really very little. The tech scene was very disparate, there was a bit going up in Cambridge, traditionally the kind of 1.0 stuff: Chips, hardware, and so on. But there was very little going on in London. There was a lot of media, as you know, a tonne of media, some fintech, but there was no real industry. And so we were one of the first to start going, and then there was a small group of us and the first generation of guys and a bunch of really great companies there who are starting to do really well on a global stage, which is great.

We got together, we spent a lot of time together, and gradually together we helped to build a bit of a scene, and then it has really accelerated from there. We’re very proud to be at the start of it, but we know it’s not because of us, it’s just everyone helped. There were many people trying to do the same thing. What’s great now is it’s proper, it’s real, it’s big.

BI: Does being a British company work against you when you go to win business in the US?

AM: There is no favouritism, there is no discretion against US or UK companies, the world is a much better place than that. But there are local favourites that are growing up with lots of VCs in their network investing in them. So you have to bust through that, and we’re doing that just like Box are trying to bust through that over in Europe with us.

BI: How do you differentiate yourself from companies like Box and Dropbox who are creating similar storage tools for companies?

AM: The first thing is that we do something different. Huddle is all about collaboration, and it’s all about security, and it’s all about large organisations and enterprises. The first thing is communicating that, and what’s nice about that is that this whole content collaboration space, sync and share, storage is huge, and it’s exploding. It’s a massive great market, and what’s happening is that it’s starting to mature, so you’ve got all the consumer guys who are getting great scale, but now being commoditised to hell: Amazon, Google, Microsoft.

BI: You mention security as one of your selling points there. How secure is Huddle?

AM: Control is actually what we care about as a consumer. So in iCloud I want to know...the thing that frustrates me about iCloud, and I’ve had it, is you take a photo, you delete it on one device, and you think it’s then deleted on all devices. It isn’t, you look at your iPad and it’s still sitting there as one of the things to be deleted. I’m like ‘I got rid of that photo!’

So it’s control that people want, so that is the same in enterprise. That doesn’t just mean IT, big bad IT, it actually means me as a corporate lawyer or as someone working on Apple’s supply chain. They care very much about not just security, which is becoming ubiquitous, but really who exactly can see my information as I transmit it.

Beats by Dre are a huge customer of Huddle and they have very similar issues around supply chain, new products coming out, they work with huge manufacturing centres in China, and they’re working on these for a year before they get released, and no-one must know about the new products.

So how do they ensure that the information that they’re sharing doesn’t get leaked? And that’s much more than just the security in the system, it’s about who has access to it, being able to say exactly the audit trail and the version control, knowing that if you look at a design on your mobile device, I know exactly that you did do that. And if you lose that mobile device, knowing immediately that it should be wiped from the device and no-one can see it. And if you leave the company that I’m working with, knowing immediately that you no longer have access. Literally the minute you walk out the door. Even knowing, and this is how extreme we get, which way your developers face. Do they face to the window or not? We work with a lot of government data, and guess what, who’s looking in through the window?

This is the lengths of extremes that big enterprise companies that really care about collaboration and security go to. And that’s why enterprises who are working with governments, but also work with people’s personal and corporate tax data, the most sensitive information, rely on Huddle. That’s real security, and that’s boring, right? It’s why, when you walk in the door, even though as a startup, a small, nimble, agile company, the security levels you’re going through to get into this office are pretty high.

BI: So if I'm an unhappy Beats by Dre supply chain worker in China and I want to steal some documents and leave, would I be able to do that if the company is using Huddle?

AM: No, that’s the point. Huddle will stop you doing that. And if you did manage to get anything, we would know what you’ve got.

BI: That kind of control must be attractive to governments as well?

AM: It’s very attractive to governments, it’s very attractive to large corporates, it’s very attractive to anyone who cares about their information.

So here’s the interesting paradox about security: Everyone is now more comfortable with the general security of systems. Do you remember back in the day when you first started using e-commerce? You would go in through some crazy banking system and then get redirected back. Then there was the ‘secured by’ the different finance organisations. Now you just have a little padlock, and no-one even bothers looking, you just assume that the payment site you’re going on is secure.

So the same thing is happening with security, everyone’s getting more comfortable with putting their stuff in the cloud, but, at the same time, everyone is getting much more paranoid about the control of that information once it gets into the cloud.

BI: If I'm a company in France and someone in the US views one of my documents, will I get an alert?

AM: Yes, you can do that, absolutely. Well you can control if you decide not, you can control that they can’t. So you can lock down access by IP, domain, by geographic location, by the data centre they’ve been invited into.

The idea of a huddle is that if you’re in the huddle, you can work with me, you can share my information. If you’re not in a huddle, you can’t. Now that’s huge because 99% of all the other systems out there, including our great competitors Box and people like that, are open systems. So in other words, if I create a folder, anyone can access my folder and get to it via a link unless I shut it down. It’s the reverse, it’s open by default, closed by permission. Huddle is closed by default, open by permission. If you Google enough, you can find Box and Dropbox links available on the web of amazing amounts of information from corporates because they haven’t locked it down, it’s insane. It’s terrifying.

BI: Do you do that when you go into companies and pitch?

AM: Yeah, and often we don’t have to because companies have done that themselves. Often the journey goes ‘we bought Dropbox because it’s great, and Dropbox is great, it’s a great system. Lots of people are using but we’re scared of security, just general vague security. So we bought Box because it’s supposed to be a slightly more secure version of Dropbox.' And Box is great as well, they’re amazing guys, love ‘em. But then they Google, and they look out on the web, and actually all these links are available out there in Box. And they’re like ‘Holy crap,’ you know. And it’s just a storage tool, so now we want to go to next level and they buy Huddle. So that’s a really common journey, and we pick up a tonne of customers on that journey.

BI: How do you change the software for use in government?

AM: Well the answer is that you don’t. That’s the reason why we’re so popular in government, it’s about 30% of our business so we’re not dominant, but it’s a big chunk of our business.

I was just at an event for the UK government with Francis Maude, who’s the cabinet minister, and Liam Maxwell who is the CTO for the UK government, and Vivek Kundra who is the ex CTO of the US government. So the great and the good. And we were one of only three people who they asked to present to the whole of this group. But the reason we’re there is because we’re not doing anything different for government. We are providing a system that is secure and useful enough for governments to use. Number two is it solves a real problem because government is very collaborative. It turns out they’re the most collaborative organisation you can find because they create policy. But thirdly, they don’t want bad software, no-one wants bad software and it just because you work in government doesn’t mean you want it. So what you do is you provide a great bit of software that works great, that is just as good as anything you’ve used at home, but that is available to a government user, solves a problem for them and, importantly, it’s secure enough for them. And that’s actually the difference.

Really, what we do is we spend our time getting all the security and accreditation so that they can use it. But it’s the same software. And that’s really important. The great thing is that by doing all this work on security and accreditation for government, everyone else benefits. So that’s why KPMG come and use us. They think ‘Well, hang on, if you’ve gone through all this work, that’s the best of the best, so we get that benefit as well.’ But that’s the great thing about the cloud: Once you’ve done it for one client, you’ve done it for everyone.

BI: Would a military ever use Huddle?

AM: Again, it depends on what you’re trying to share. So, no, we don’t have [them]. They tend to work at levels of security that are way higher and work on very small, very discreet networks, to the point where you literally have to be in a room in a building in Langley. It’s that level of encryption. So no, we don’t work with that, but we do have the office of the Secretary of Defence working with Huddle, but it’s not for military purposes. It’s relatively, for the government, unclassified information, and it’s all about families and people working together and so on.

BI: So the US government has around six different levels of classified information, and that sounds like, I believe, levels one to two. Which levels of classification does Huddle work with?

AM: We’re up to about the middle of that, about three. We can offer for it for zero to three.

BI: So Amazon does levels three to four?

AM: They have their own data centre that is designed for the Department of Defence that is three to four. No-one really does it at scale above that. Most of the information that governments work on are nought to three. Some cases up to four.

BI: How is working with the US government different to working with the UK government?

AM: It’s very similar, except, and here’s where I would big up my home country, the UK government is doing some amazing things, actually.

The US government lead the way. Vivek Kundra, who worked for Obama, came in and said there should be a cloud-first policy in US government. We run thousands of data centres, we’re spending hundreds of millions of dollars a year in one department on things like Sharepoint legacy technology, that should stop. We should move to the cloud. They lead the way, which is amazing, but the UK government has really accelerated it and what they’re doing, which is very interesting, is creating platforms, they created a whole G-Cloud procurement framework so small businesses can sell to government more easily, they’re on a real push to really be much more agile, develop their own services, break up huge SI contracts. They’re actually very similar, they’re trying to solve the same problems, cost is important, value, delivering real news technologies, but the UK government is actually one of the most leading, if not the most leading government globally at this stuff. It’s phenomenal.

Believe it or not, the other one that’s amazing globally is Estonia. And if you ranked them it would be Estonia and the UK first, then you’ve got people like South Korea, New Zealand is very very advanced, then the US and a whole bunch of others.

BI: The Estonian government is easier to work with than the US government?

AM: They are revolutionary, the way the Estonian government works. It’s a small country, about a hundred million people, so it’s easier. For instance, they’re launching a completely open ID system which allows you as an Estonian citizen to access all your systems online, which now the UK government is doing. It’s brilliant, really really revolutionary. The US government lead the way, though. They just have huge scale, so we’re delighted to work with them, and we work with four of the biggest agencies now in the US government.

BI: So how long will it be until a Huddle IPO?

AM: We’re probably a few years away from it still. But who knows, we’re growing really fast. It's an extraordinarily rapid rate at the moment, which is very exciting. There's lots of of news to announce in a while. Lots of things to do. Honestly, we’re just focusing on building a big business fast. Really fast.

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In 2012, Chris Anderson left Wired, where he had been editor-in-chief for a decade to run a startup.

He had met someone online to help him run his company: Jordi Muñoz, a teenager in Tijuana, Mexico.

They unlikely pair met through a drone enthusiast blog Anderson started, called DIY Drones. Since Anderson's first private message to Munoz a few years prior, they had been building flying contraptions together. The devices were a hit: their side project generated $5 million by the time Anderson was ready to leave Wired.

The concept was proven, and it was time to form a venture-backed business, 3D Robotics. 

"From the outside perspective, it seems insane that an editor would start a robotics company with a Tijuana teenager," Anderson says. "But it’s exactly the right person to start a company with."

Here's how they found each other and created one of the top drone companies in just two years.

Muñoz was born in Mexico, about an hour south of the California border. When he was four, he moved to Tijuana. He describes himself as a normal but geeky kid who loved playing with LEGOs and dreamt of being a pilot. 

As a teenager, he'd often rip apart computers and put them back together. He became known in his neighborhood as the repairman, helping fix tech issues for friends and family members.

By the time he was 18, Muñoz had learned to program and hoped to study aeronautical engineering at the National Polytechnic Institute in Mexico City. He was rejected twice, and his parents couldn't afford his pilot aspirations anyway. So he returned to Tijuana and studied computer engineering at a university in town. 

After just two semesters, Muñoz dropped out of school and moved the United States with his girlfriend, who would later become his wife. Then 21, Muñoz spent seven months waiting for his green card. In his spare time, he built miniature aircrafts, combining his technical background and his passion for flying.

It was around this time, in 2007, that Muñoz first appeared on Chris Anderson's radar. Anderson had fallen in love with a new kind of hardware, drones, which were taking over the robotics industry. One perk of working for Wired was all the cool gadgets strewn around the office. If editors promised to write reviews of the gizmos, they were allowed to take them home and test them.

Anderson began bringing home robots to build and test with his five children. The robots would roll around and run into walls, which was sort of cool, but it occurred to Anderson that a cooler contraption would be a robot that could fly.

The then-editor-in-chief began to Google "flying robots" and found do-it-yourself (DIY) models. He purchased a LEGO one and built it with his kids. His wife filmed their early test flights. When their drone actually took off, Anderson got chills.

"I don't get chills very often," Anderson says. "I got chills when I saw the first web browser in '92 or '93. I probably got chills the first time I used a mobile phone. I get them every 20 years or so. I don't really get like that unless I'm in the presence of something freaky and new, and this was just one of those moments."

Anderson realized there were a lot of other people online who had interacted with similar drones and were passionate about them. He created a message board for the enthusiasts, DIY Drones, and the community grew to 60,000 registered users. One of those users was Muñoz.

Muñoz estimates he was the seventh user on the site. He'd frequently post photos and videos of drones he was building and share his code with others.

"He was just ahead of us all," Anderson recalls. "Nobody had grokked the whole picture the way he had."

As the DIY Drone community grew, Anderson realized a lot of people wanted to learn to make the flying devices. He built a starter kit and used his children as the first assembly line, packing LEGO parts into pizza boxes and shipping them out to buyers. The first 40 starter kits sold out in 10 minutes.

Anderson's children refused to be a permanent assembly-line solution, so he reached out to the smartest drone advocate he knew, Muñoz. Anderson sent him a private message on DIY Drones.

Muñoz was familiar with the drone-building process. He had spent years building models that failed to take flight, refining his methods and Googling answers until he finally had a working prototype. He estimates he had 500 failed attempts before a drone successfully took flight and landed. 

"I was very good in physics and math and all that," says Muñoz. "The rest was Google...I would change the code, load the code, fly, fly, fly. Then land, change the code, return home and rethink a new approach."

Muñoz was unfamiliar with Anderson's high-powered gig at Conde Nast Publications. "I thought he was a really nice, random guy who wanted to coach and help me," Muñoz recalls. "I thought he was just one of a few hundred random writers at Wired. And I never knew about the books [he had written]."

Anderson sent Muñoz a check to begin collecting drone parts, and Muñoz began building kits in his garage. He purchased an expensive piece of machinery on eBay that could robotically assemble the drones. Muñoz then set up a factory in his home town, Tijuana. 

The drones continued to sell quickly. "I was like, 'OK, I have extra money. I was making like, 90% profit," Muñoz recalls. He says 3D Robotics is still a high-margin business, although it isn't keeping 90% of sales anymore. That year, Muñoz and Anderson generated about $5 million.

Finally, after years of corresponding online, Muñoz and Anderson finally met in person. They greeted each other at a fancy restaurant in Los Angeles; Anderson was in town for a conference and Muñoz drove in from San Diego. Munoz remembers Anderson being confident but nice. Anderson remembers Muñoz being taller than expected.

Anderson can't remember if he and Muñoz split equity in 3D Robotics before or after that first in-person meeting. He doesn't really think it matters — Anderson believes people are most like their true selves online anyhow.

"Engineers are extremely effective at online personas," says Anderson. "Once you’ve been dealing with them online, you learn they have strong opinions, they're articulate and outgoing. Then sometimes you meet them face to face and they’re incredibly shy and awkward. I think, 'OK I’m not going to judge that [in person is] obviously not their best side.' I kind of pretend it’s not them [when I meet them]. Their body is just the vessel they transport themselves in."

So far, the partnership has worked.

Muñoz, who is now 28, and Anderson still manage teams in separate cities. They've played tennis a few times and gone to a few dinners. But largely, they handle business matters online. They now employ about 220 people and 3D Robotics has raised $35 million from venture capitalists. 3D Robotics has sold tens of thousands of drones.

"He's in Berkeley and I'm in San Diego," says Muñoz. "There's not really much time [to spend together], but I still feel very lucky. People would die to talk with Chris Anderson!"

"Muñoz is exactly the right person to start a company with," says Anderson. "He had seen the web generation and completely understood tech on a first-language basis. This is all second-nature to him. The second thing is, because of where he's from, he knew exactly how to build out a factory and all about manufacturing...Also, he was absolutely fearless. He didn't know what he didn't know... He thought, 'I can learn this [drone] stuff. It's all on eBay. It's all one click away." 

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Pinterest is the new Craigslist. That's what Kevin Ryan, a serial entrepreneur believes.

Ryan co-founded multiple startups, including Gilt Groupe, wedding site Zola, MongoDB and Business Insider.

He's eying new companies to start and turning to Pinterest for ideas. Ryan's statement that Pinterest is the new Craigslist comes from a chart that was made four years ago by by Spark Capital investor Andrew Parker.

The chart is a screengrab of Craigslist's homepage and it includes valuable startups that attack specific functionalities within Craigslist. For example, job site Indeed was acquired for about $1 billion and it is competitive with Craigslist's Jobs section. Etsy is a $1 billion-plus company that competes with Craigslist's For Sale category.

"Some of [the startups] have IPO’d," Parker says. "Others are out of business. If you could have made investments in all of these companies back in 2010, you’d have a portfolio of 34 companies with roughly 6-8 billion dollar outcomes, which would likely be one of the best venture funds of the decade."

Here's the Craigslist chart:

And here's some opportunities Pinterest is presenting. Mobile, photo-heavy companies in the following categories could soon explode, particularly if they're tied to e-commerce.

• Weddings (Companies in the space: Zola, Loverly, The Knot)
• Travel (popular category on Instagram)
• Animals (Buzzfeed, Barkbox, Petflow, Dodo)
• Cooking/Recipes
• DIY (Brit+Co)
• Home and Office Decor (Houzz, Wish, Fab)
• Photography (Instagram)
• Beauty (Birchbox)
• Fitness/Health
• Fashion (NastyGal, BaubleBar, Chloe+Isabel, Gilt Groupe)

Hurry up and grab them, they might just become billion-dollar ideas.

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