Apple will become a trillion-dollar company based not on iPads and Apple TV, but payments.
Imagine taking out your iPhone and instead of buying Angry Birds you bought the latest Groupon.
Or one-click bought the latest object d'art at OneKingsLane or Fab on your iPad seconds after downloading and launching their app.
Or you took out the awesome Hotel Tonight and without ever having signed up for the service you booked a room -- and paid for it without typing in your credit card number.
[ Cloudability founders Jon Frisby, Mat Ellis and J.R. Storment at the TechStars Cloud office in San Antonio. Photo courtesy of Cloudability. ]
From startups to Fortune 500 behemoths, everybody is using cloud-based services like Google Apps and Dropbox, Amazon Web Services and Rackspace.
But does any organization actually know how much it spends on the cloud across the board (since employees often sign up for services and expense them) and how to keep costs under control?
Manually entering data into a spreadsheet is one less-than-attractive option for avoiding a "who forgot to turn off the extra servers before the weekend" situation. Or you could sign up with -- what else -- a freemium SaaS company like Portland, Oregon-based Cloudability, which bills itself
It's been exactly a month since the LAUNCH Festival and I've finally recovered.
These events literally take the life out of you, and I mean that in the best of ways. It reminds me of the feeling after I used to run the New York City Marathon: a combination of depression that the magic was over and never-ending flashbacks of the exhilaration of the mission being completed. I'm guessing some moms out there can relate. :)
It turns out that not only did we close well over $1M in investing on stage, but I've found out since that over $500k in additional commitments were made. So, when the final tally is done, the event will have resulted in about $2M for the startups that were present.
Five years of LAUNCHing great startups from Dropbox to Mint to Yammer and now Space Monkey and Alltuition (among many others). You can watch the LAUNCH 2012 awards ceremony here.
In between our yearly event we plan to host some smaller one- and two-day vertical events. I've been pushing my own startup Mahalo.com hard into education after being inspired by folks like Khan Academy and, of course, Steve Jobs and Apple.
Education is one of three verticals we believe is going to be radically disrupted over the next five years.
So, on June 12th and 13th we're hosting LAUNCH Education & Kids.
[ Image via creative commons license from flickingerbrad .]
Here at LAUNCH we follow innovation like hawks, and we've seen a lot of activity from founders working on education and 'edutainment,' both for kids and adults. So, we're going to have an intimate 250-person event for folks trying to disrupt the space on June 12th and 13th in Silicon Valley (Mountain View to be exact). More details at our official site: http://www.launchedu.co
The 5th annual LAUNCH Festival March 7 & 8 in San Francisco exceeded our expectations: 42 amazing startups launched or launched new products and competed for investment money that topped $1.4M by the time we announced the winners.
We had 195 companies in the Demo Pit -- 11 of which got to present on stage -- and 1,700+ people (including top entrepreneurs and investors) attended the show over the two days. Our Office Hours stage attracted standing-room-only crowds as folks like Tony Hsieh of Zappos, David Cohen of TechStars and Dave McClure of 500 Startups answered entrepreneurs' questions.
The Grand Jury gave out 12 awards in all, naming Dropbox rival Space Monkey Best Overall in the 1.0 competition, TurboTax for financial aid Alltuition Best Overall in the 2.0 competition and Scoot Networks Best Demo Pit. Space Monkey and Alltuition snapped up $376k in investments, while Best Design 1.0 winner Minbox secured the TechStars slot plus $200k in investments.
11:39 AM PDT Fri, Apr 13, 2012 
