One of Tumblr's earliest investors, venture capitalist Fred Wilson, says the Yahoo deal will lead to an influx of advertising on the platform and bring it to the level of Facebook and Yahoo in advertisers' minds."Tumblr has been pushing their native advertising system into the marketplace for the past year," Wilson told interviewer John Battelle Tuesday at the CM Summit in New York. "It's a beautiful system. They say to a marketer, 'Create a Tumblog. Post what you want to the Tumblog and that could be imagery, it could be video it could be GIFs, it could be anything and then we will allow you ... Read similar

On the same day that Cody Wilson of Defense Distributed got a notice from the State Department about ripping his 3D printing handgun schematics from the web, the U.S. Government launched a $200 million initiative, $30 million of which went to Defense Department's "additive manufacturing" pilot program. Additive manufacturing is another way of saying 3D printing; and it's unlikely the DoD is going to be printing off a bunch of tables and chairs.  They're going to be printing weapons parts. More specifically, the Department of Defense envisions customizing parts "on site" for... Read similar

If your CEO loses the faith of the team, it's time for him or her to go.  That's one thing a board cannot tolerate, Union Square Ventures VC Fred Wilson writes on his personal blog, A VC. It's also the most common reason for Wilson deciding to remove a CEO from a startup. Wilson writes: If I think about the times I have had to remove a CEO, by far the most common reason was the loss of confidence of the team in the CEO. You get the call from one of the senior team members. They tell you that they are going to leave and so is everyone else on the senior team unless you do something about t... Read similar

The apps people place on their smartphone home screens can say a lot about someone. Phones, whether we want to admit it or not, have become the hub of our lives. For app developers, if your app makes it on a user's home screen, you could say you've "made it." A couple of days ago, highly-esteemed New York venture capitalist Fred Wilson was frustrated that he couldn't seem to replace the Google search widget on his Android home screen with one from search startup DuckDuckGo. DuckDuckGo founder and CEO Gabriel Weinberg told Wilson about the Nova Launcher, an Android app that lets Android users f... Read similar

Return and ridicule are highly correlated, prominent New York venture capitalist Fred Wilson recently wrote on his blog.  "When I see people laughing at ideas and companies we have backed, I smile," Wilson writes. "It means we are going to make a lot of money on that investment." Wilson says that his firm, Union Square Ventures, has made more money on startups that were highly ridiculed than on those that were not. He has backed Twitter, Tumblr, Foursquare, and Zynga. Many people in the venture capital business simply follow the herd, Wilson says. But "momentum investing" doesn't wor... Read similar

Venture capitalist Fred Wilson, famous for keeping an active blog and investing early in Twitter, is in love. He's in love with a smartphone Google put on the market yesterday. It's a Samsung Galaxy S4, stripped of all the junky software layered on top of Android. On his blog today, Wilson writes: Google announced so many things yesterday that it makes my head spin. Goodness all around in Google land. But there is one thing that really caught my eye. Google will start selling a Galaxy S4 running "stock android" in the Play store on June 26th. When folks ask me what Android phone to buy, I... Read similar

We’ve heard plenty of stories about 3D-printed guns in the past, but a 25-year-old law student has just created what is the world’s first fully 3D-printed gun. It’s certainly nothing fantastic to look at (it looks like a squirt gun), but the creator of the gun, Cody Wilson, calls it “the Liberator,” so it must Read The Full StoryRead similar

By now, you have probably heard about the Liberator, a 3D printed plastic gun designed, assembled, and test-fired by Cody Wilson of Defense Distributed. Is it legal?Read similar

When Cody Wilson, the world's most well-known 3D-printing gunsmith, unveiled his coveted, entirely 3D-printed handgun Monday, he didn't — unlike a careful magician — keep his tricks to himselfThat has never been his intention or his goal. His goal has always been to share his disruptive achievements with the world. That's why he uploaded the designs and blueprints for his handgun to the Internet. Now, anybody can download them, with just a click. And, with the aid of a 3D printer, anybody is, in theory, able to reproduce Wilson's handgunBut before anybody clicks, downloads and prin... Read similar

Just a couple of weeks after Cody Wilson and Defense Distributed released the files for the world's first 3D-printed handgun, imitators have already replicated and improved upon it. Two gunsmiths from Wisconsin successfully fired their own Liberator nine times, without the gun showing any damage.As first reported by Forbes, two engineers, Michael Guslick and a man who refers to himself as "Joe" — he didn't want to reveal his name — printed their version of the Liberator on a relatively cheap and unsophisticated 3D printer. Unlike Wilson, who used a $8,000 Stratasys, the Wisconsin d... Read similar