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Tuesday, 2 April 2013
Tesla Model S now eligible for non-traditional lease with resale guarantee
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Lagoa Debuts ‘Industry First' Cloud Based 3D Design Platform, Raises $1.6M Round From 500 Startups, Atlas And More
From physical to digital rendering, 3D is being celebrated by many as the future, and today, Lagoa, one of software startups in this space, is unveiling a new product, called Lagoa, that’s helping it enter a new dimension: a full 3D rendering and collaboration platform based entirely in the cloud. To mark the launch, Lagoa is also announcing a $1.6 million round of seed funding from a strong list of backers: 500 Startups, Atlas Venture, Real Ventures and RHO Ventures, as well as a number of angels.
Lagoa claims that this an industry first for the computer-aided design industry. Up to now, 3D has has been too data-intensive to run as a cloud-based service, relying instead on offline, hardware-based software instead.
In contrast, the Lagoa service works via your average web browser, and comes with the kind of attractive pricing that has been a hallmark of so many cloud-based, disruptive services. There are four tiers of set pricing, starting with a free service covering 5 rendering hours, 1 gigabyte of cloud storage and unlimited viewing of public projects; through to a “powerhouse” level at $123 per month, 250GB of storage, 375 hours of rendering, and 25 private projects. Higher usage levels are priced on an ad-hoc basis.
Fred Destin, a partner at Atlas and one of the investors in Lagoa, notes that this changes the game completely for design companies, manufacturers and others that work in the business of creating objects in one place, sourcing materials in another, manufacturing them somewhere else, and selling them in yet more locations:
“Think of a luxury goods company making designer bags,” he explained in an interview. “A company like that can render at very high speed a number of variations in design. They will want to test hundreds of types of leather for a design,” he said. “This lets creative teams to look at them all rapidly, and for buyers to do the same before ordering, or manufacturers before making the bags. Processes like this can happen quickly and easily now rather than needing to wait hours or days before making sure everyone is happy.”
Thiago Costa is, in Destin’s words, a “whiz kid” from Brazil who moved to Montreal and found himself surrounded by the gaming community there. The gradual move to the cloud for gaming, by way of distributed computing, had a massive influence on Costa’s approach to the new 3D engine, created out of his earlier work on Lagoa MultiPhysics, a desktop-based physics engine (which John Biggs covered here in 2010).
Costa’s work on the new cloud solution came out of what he admits are limitations for even his own desktop product: “People don’t want to pay for software,” he said in a statement. And the other is the basic necessity of collaboration: “I kept asking myself: Why do they [CAD software designers, that is] make all the tools as if we work in isolation?”
Long-distance collaboration, you could say, is part and parcel of Lagoa’s DNA.
Costa’s co-founder Arno Zinke is a PHD in physically-based rendering technologies, and he is based in Bonn, Germany, where he is focused on “research and development of accurate physically-based materials and techniques for simulating optically accurate materials.” His early work, Destin points out, was on accurate digital rendering of hair. On the other hand, we understand a lot of early users are in the luxury goods industry. These bookends point to a range of enterprise and industrial verticals where Lagoa’s cloud service might come into play.
Lagoa’s work fits into a bigger trend for advances in CAD technologies. They include Belmont Technology, which has raised some $9 million also for cloud-based CAD technology (it’s founded by the people behind SolidWorks, which sold to Dassaut for $316 million back in 1997); GrabCAD, which in October 2012 raised just over $8 million from Charles River Ventures and others for the “GitHub for mechanical engineers.”
TC Disrupt alum Sunglass.io, with its own online collaboration platform for 3D imaging, is a potential competitor here as well. Lagoa says it has patent-pending technology for optimizing speeds on its platform, whereas Sunglass is an add-on to other software like Autodesk and SolidWorks. On Lagoa you can also import from other software and from what I understand there will be the ability to actually create the design on the site as well.
“They are all coming from different angles attacking the same market,” says Destin — a nice image for a business that’s all about improving the quality of work in three dimensions.
via TechCrunch » Startups http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/techcrunch/startups/~3/h6uNg0Dy2Fw/
Skype Competitor Viber Launches On Windows Phone 8
Viber has made multi-platform expansion its number one priority. It makes sense, given that Viber’s main task is providing free, seamless communication to anyone in the world, regardless of which platform they use.
Today, that expansion includes Windows Phone 8, with a new native Viber app that has been especially tailored to the WP8 UI.
Just like the many Viber apps that have come before it, the new WP8 version includes free text and photo messaging, free VoIP HD calling, group chat with room for 40 of your closest friends, and location sharing. The app supports up to 30 different languages to comply with Viber’s global user base.
In terms of special tailoring for Windows Phone, the new Viber app allows users to pin their favorite conversations to the home screen in the form of a live tile. Of course, users will also get lock screen notifications for conversations that remain unpinned.
Here’s what Talmon Marco, Viber CEO, had to say about the launch:
One of our most important goals is supporting multiple platforms, ensuring our users can reach all of their friends and contacts no matter what mobile OS they use. Supporting Windows Phone 8 is a critical part of this strategy and we are thrilled that Viber will now be available on the growing list of Windows 8 devices.
As it stands now, Viber has hit most of the available platforms out there, including BlackBerry (not BB10), Bada, S40, Symbian, iOS, Android and has had Windows Phone beta apps available for quite a while. But this launch closes the loop in a big way, as Windows Phone is predicted to grow in the coming months and years.
Still, WP isn’t a significantly strong market for Viber. According to activation figures from the last 30 days, only two percent came from Windows Phone. To be fair, those were beta downloads, and no one is ever as excited about a beta as they are the real thing. But that two percent can’t really hold a candle to iOS’s 35 percent or Android’s whopping 58 percent share from the past month’s activations.
In any case, the Skype competitor continues to blossom, with 175 million registered users as of February.
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Amped Wireless REC10 WiFi range extender is available from today for $80
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The Best iPad App for Google Reader Is Now Free
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Tokyo Metro finishes rolling out WiFi at its train stations
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10 College Courses for High-Tech Job Prep
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Sprint to begin selling HTC One on April 19th for $200, pre-orders begin April 5th
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EE launches free 4G WiFi service in (some) London black cabs
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Sony patent claims touch force detection via microphone
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As ZocDoc Readies To Cross The Pond, Toothpick Quietly Exits Beta And Expands Beyond The UK
Flying somewhat under the tech press radar, Toothpick — an ‘OpenTable for dentists’ — has quietly exited Beta, as well as expanding beyond its native UK to the Netherlands, Australia and New Zealand. The London-based startup is backed by Passion Capital and various angels, including the founders of AdJug.
Interestingly, it comes at a time when U.S.-based ZocDoc, which targets both doctor and dentist appointments, and is backed by the likes of DST and Goldman Sachs, looks to be recruiting a UK General Manager as it readies a launch across the pond.
Meanwhile, another Toothpick competitor has emerged in the UK in the form of Zesty, albeit yet to launch. There’s also Poland-based DocPlanner, which appears to be (wisely) focusing on Eastern Europe. Either way, the space looks set to heat up.
And perhaps it shoudn’t be a surprise. By some estimates, there’s a $6 billion dental industry to be disrupted in the UK alone, with 120 million dental appointments per year, which should make the online booking part a decent business to be in.
Founded in late 2011 by Dr. Sandeep Senghera (a practicing dentist) and Jozef Wallis, Toothpick operates an online directory of dentists, allowing customers to find local practitioners, compare prices and service, and to book online. In the UK, users can also specify NHS or private provision when searching.
The company charges dentists a low monthly fee to be featured on the site, with the draw being that it gives dentists access to new patients and can help them to fill empty capability, especially via late notice and emergency appointments. It also has an up-selling patnership with NASDAQ-listed Henry Schein, Inc., whose software is used by more than 10,000 dentists in the UK, meaning that the Henry Schein salesforce are tasked with selling Toothpick’s offering alongside its own products.
To that end, after quietly launching earlier this year, Toothpick offers appointments at nearly 2,000 dental practices in the UK, with customers booking more than 1,000 appointments per week, says the company.
Late last year, it closed a funding round from Passion Capital, and angel investors Pradeep Menon, Paul Edwards, Satish Jayakumar and Michael Stephanblome. In typically boring European (and overly defensive) fashion, the amount remains undisclosed, despite my asking nicely through gritted teeth.
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Epix hits PlayStation 3 today, arriving on Vita in coming weeks
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Hands-on with the smaller, less expensive 7-inch Wikipad (video)
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BionicOpter es un robot que vuela como las libélulas de verdad
Aunque el BionicOpter es bastante más grande que una libélula de verdad su aspecto y su forma de volar se asemeja bastante a los anisópteros. Igual que éstos puedes volar en todas direcciones: hacia adelante y hacia atrás y de lado. También puede mantener el vuelo suspendido y planear.
Según su desarrollador, Festo, su particular capacidad para el vuelo se debe muy en parte a su extrema ligereza, a pesar de incorporar numerosos componentes y mecanismos.
El BionicOpter combina el uso de sensores del entorno y de posición y movimiento y el control remoto. Ambos sistemas se mantienen en constante comunicación en tiempo real para controlar el vuelo.
Vía SlashGear.
via Microsiervos http://www.microsiervos.com/archivo/tecnologia/bionicopter-robot-vuela-libelulas-verdad.html
ElectNext Raises $1.3M To Provide Contextual Political Data To News Sites
If knowledge is a door to information, data is the key. When you’re talking about politics and government, information is extremely important to those who are making decisions on who to vote for and what legislation to get behind or block. Today, a company called ElectNext has raised a seed round of $1.3M led by Brooklyn Bridge Ventures along with other strategic investors like Liberty City Ventures, Comcast Ventures, Digital News Ventures, Gabriel Investments, The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation and Investor’s Circle.
When I spoke with ElectNext’s founder and CEO, Keya Dannenbaum, she explained ElectNext as something similar to our own CrunchBase, providing widgets full of data for publications to embed: “We have a comprehensive underlying database (on politicians on our case as opposed to companies in the CrunchBase analogy) from which we create data-driven content that lives inside, and gives relevant context to, political news.”
Dannenbaum knows politics, as she’s worked on 18 political campaigns, including Hillary Clinton’s. ElectNext’s product, which pulls together political data from multiple sources and packages them together for news sites to embed, is something that Dannenbaum thinks is important for both voters and journalists. Most political data is stored in formats that aren’t accessible online, so ElectNext is working with national and state partners like The Sunlight Foundation, GovTrack and Follow The Money as well as open data-friendly cities to convert all of it. One of the cities, my hometown of Philadelphia, is a close partner.
Embedded profiles will start appearing today on PBS NewsHour, The Philadelphia Inquirer, NBC Politics and a few others. The six launch partners represent 15M monthly unique visitors, Dannenbaum tell us. That’s not a bad start.
I talked to Dannenbaum about how her experience makes ElectNext unique and how important this information is to unlock for constituents:
TC: What did you learn during your years working on campaigns that led you to working ElectNext?
Dannenbaum: Through my campaign experience, first in the 2008 Presidential and then at the hyper-local level, I got to observe firsthand how sharply levels of political knowledge and participation decline from the national to the neighborhood levels. Yet it’s our local representatives who make most of the decisions that affect our daily lives. So we’re all checking out precisely where it matters most, and I wanted to change that.
TC: How does data help shape political campaigns and inform voters?
Dannenbaum: In the 2012 presidential election, the Obama campaign most clearly demonstrated the power of big data. Their operation consolidated several previously disparate databases of consumer and citizen information (purchase history, tax records), social data (your facebook friends, likes), contact information (home, email and IP addresses), and internal campaign data (donor database, field notes), and mashed that up with the voter file (your political party, vote history) to build an unprecedented micro targeting machine that could deliver personalized marketing messages to the right people via the right mediums at precisely the right times.
ElectNext is looking to shift the paradigm and similarly harness the power of big data to empower citizens with relevant information on our politicians delivered in the precise moment we most need it. So what we do is consolidate several previously disparate databases, though in our case it is political data on them: campaign finance records, legislation, roll call votes, press releases/debates/other public speech, and we use that data to create simple profiles that describe who these guys and gals running our country really are. We know how they talk about issues vs. on what they actually spend their time legislating and how that compares to their sources of funding. And, best of all, we put those profiles directly in your news, do you can access it in the precise moment you’re already reading about a political person, or issue, you care about, when you need it most.
TC: How do these investors, who seem strategic, help you reach your goals as a company other than the funding?
Dannenbaum: We take a lot of care choosing who to work with and you’re right to notice that we have several media funds on board who absolutely bring more to the table than just funding. Our model hinges on publisher distribution, our backers can open those doors and advise from an insider’s perspective, and we’re so glad to roll up our sleeves together and work them as team members on the same side of the table.
———
ElectNext was a great resource during the last Presidential election, providing a wizard to match your political preferences to the right candidate. Matching up news articles with actual facts and historical data provides a really immersive experience for readers, who can then dig through the data to form their own opinions.
Information should be free, and with companies like ElectNext, those old files, surveys and census data won’t stay locked up for long. With former U.S. Senator Bill Bradley and former Florida Governor Jeb Bush already interested in what the company is doing, I’d say that becoming the “CrunchBase for Politics” is pretty much a guarantee at this point. The company is currently accepting submissions for more publication partners.
[Photo credit: Flickr and Flickr]
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Netflix's House of Cards comes to Blu-ray in June; second screen feature tweaked on Android
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Rosetta Stone Buys Up Online Language Learning Community Livemocha For $8.3M In Cash
Rosetta Stone has just acquired Seattle-based online language-learning community Livemocha for $8.5 million in cash. Livemocha has one of the largest online language-learning communities in the world, boasting over 16 million members from over 195 different countries.
Rosetta Stone will likely use Livemocha’s cloud platform to offer its language packages online — they were once only available via disc set, with a complimentary iPad app.
Here’s what Rosetta Stone CEO and President Steve Swad had to say about it:
We are in the process of transforming Rosetta Stone to be the most dynamic and ubiquitous technology-based learning platform in the world. Our acquisition of Livemocha will help accelerate that transformation. With Livemocha and its vibrant online community on our side, Rosetta Stone will reach more people and change more lives than ever before.
Livemocha will remain in its Seattle-based offices, adding yet another arm to Rosetta Stone’s US presence which currently includes offices in Austin, TX and San Francisco.
According to the release, this acquisition will allow Rosetta Stone to “quickly migrate legacy products to a future-proof technology stack witha modern, cloud-based architecture and contemporary means of distribution.” That could very well mean low-cost or “even free” alternatives to the usually expensive Rosetta Stone packages.
Rosetta Stone also expects the Livemocha acquisition to help accelerate geographic expansion, as Livemocha’s community is quite global and has a high concentration of users in China, Russia and South America.
It’s worth noting that Livemocha has raised a total of $14 million over the course of its existence the past six years. While an acquisition is almost always good news, the company clearly exited for less than it accrued from institutional investors the past six years — and even less than the expected valuation from previous funding rounds.
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Warner Archive Instant launches, offers subscription to stream classic movies and TV shows
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Madefire Partners with deviantART To Bring Its ‘Motion Books' To The Web (And Start Charging For Them)
Madefire, the True Ventures-backed startup building a new kind of digital comics, just announced that it’s partnering with deviantART.
Madefire offers a platform for creating comics with additional animation, music, and sound effects — it’d make sense to call the format “motion comics,” except that word is already being used for comics that have been transformed into fully animated content, so the company calls its titles “motion books” instead.
Until now, the startup’s motion books have been available on iPad, iPhone, and iPod Touch. Co-founder Ben Wolstenholme said the new partnership is a way for his team to bring the comics to web browsers, and to reach a broad audience (deviantART has 28 million registered members) at the same time. deviantART co-founder and CEO Angelo Sotira, meanwhile, said he had been trying to find new storytelling tools for his community, and it was one of those situations where “you go to Comic Con and run into exactly what you’re looking for.”
Why did he embrace Madefire in particular? Sotira said that most other digital comics are just bringing print comics and making them work in digital: “To me, it’s just kind of lame.” Madefire, on the other hand, had “cracked the problem” of transforming comics into a new experience. Plus, with deviantART’s emphasis on creators, Sotira said he was attracted by the fact that Wolstenholme is a comics creator himself.
Through the partnership, a new Motion Books section will appear on the deviantART site, where you can find all of Madefire’s initial titles. It sounds like this is also the beginning of Madefire’s monetization — while the motion books were available for free on iOS, deviantART is charging 10 cents each for them initially, payable in the site’s virtual currency. (And the books will continue be free in iOS for only “a limited time.”)
The titles will also be available on the Madefire website, but Wolstenholme made it sound like deviantART is going to be Madefire’s main web storefront, “while we keep doing iOS alongside.” After all, he pointed out that almost all of Madefire’s artists, and some of the writers too, already have a presence on deviantART.
Madefire’s motion comics creation tools are also going to be promoted to the deviantART community and integrated with the site’s services like cloud storage.
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Wacom unveils crayon-esque Bamboo Stylus mini for tablets and smartphones
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Minube's Trip Planning Feature Just Got A Lot More Social, iOS App Gets Real-Time Messaging
Minube, the social travel startup that focuses on inspiration for would-be travellers, has rolled out a nice update to the trip planning feature of its iOS app.
After creating and sharing a list of things to do and see or where to stay or eat — which works like a draft itinerary — any friends or co-travelers who can been granted access to that list can now message each other in real-time, making it a lot easier to communicate with the group, especially when plans typically change.
In this context, Minube’s travel list making feature has the potential to become a hub of activity not just at the planning stage of a trip, but also during the trip itself.
Despite users creating 65,000 travel lists last year, either for personal use or to share with friends or the wider Minube community, after receiving feedback the company realised there was something missing. Because plans change, lists on Minube needed to be more dynamic, and that meant giving travellers the ability to communicate before and during a trip. In other words, the social travel app wasn’t social enough.
“This way, people on a group trip can keep up-to-date about new developments, like a change in the meeting time, a new restaurant to check out, or simply plan the next day’s activities, without having to leave the list which contains all the places they plan to check out,” explains Minube’s Chris Pearrow.
The new real-time messaging feature works as follows: Users create a list by searching and browsing the app’s travel guides and user-generated recommendations and content, and saving their favorite places. They then invite friends and co-travellers into the list, from which they can access the new real-time chat features.
The new feature builds on Minube’s goal to cover all parts of the travel experience and customer journey — from inspiration, planning, comparison, booking, travelling and sharing travel experiences upon return — though it tries to differentiate its offering from others in the space by starting from the point of inspiration.
The visual app enables users to explore new destinations and discover new sights, restaurants, shops, and hotels, based on various criteria like mood, distance from home, type of trip, and length of trip (and even favorite color). The source of this content is recommendations from Minube’s community who have shared their personal experiences, including uploading videos, and photos, from their travels or local area.
Minube says it plans to bring the real-time messaging feature to the company’s Android app, though, perhaps tellingly, isn’t able to confirm that it will reach its Windows Phone offering.
Also new to Minube’s iOS app is support for Instagram, Flickr, and 500px, so that users can access all their travel photos from within the service. To date, the company claims 600,000 registered users who have shared over 900,000 photos, 11,000 videos, and recommended over 500,000 places.
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Adafruit debuts Circuit Playground: a show teaching kids about electronics (video)
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$25 Raspberry Pi Comes to U.S., Sells Out in Hours
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First ARM Cortex-A57 processor taped out by TSMC, ready for fab
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Apple Brazil makes substantial price cuts on iPhone 4 and iPhone 4S
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TuneIn Live update comes to Android, offers category curated content discovery
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Microsoft Warns Against Scam Promising 'Free Xbox Points'
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Samsung Galaxy S 4 isn't even out yet, but it's been rooted
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Blasones, lemas y casas de un «Juego de tronos» versión Internet
En este peculiar Juego de tronos que es Internet lo que se acerca no es el invierno sino la fibra y los Salvajes de más allá del Muro son más bien los trolls. Así que la gente de College Humour se entretuvo en crear un montón de emblemas estilo Juego de tronos : blasones y lemas para cada una de las «casas» de Internet, con gran acierto y buen humor.
(Vía Taxi
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Pandora for Android loaded with lock screen controls
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XYZbot's Fritz offers a cheaper robot head, free trips to the uncanny valley (video)
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