Wednesday, 19 June 2013
Slickdeals' best in tech for June 19th: Canon Rebel T3i bundle and 24-inch ASUS display
Rockmelt comes to Android with thumb-friendly navigation
Feedly launches cloud platform and new web interface ahead of Google Reader shutdown
Entelo, The Big Data Recruitment Platform Used By Box, Yelp And Square, Lands $3.5M From Battery And Menlo
In today’s tech industry, if you ask a startup founder to describe the biggest hurdles that stand between them and total world domination (or at least market penetration), it won’t be long before they begin grumbling about recruiting and the challenging process of hiring top-tier technical talent.
The demand is there, and it’s transparent. Every company is looking for great talent, job boards are littered with their listings. But, in recruiting, the supply side of the equation remains opaque. Recruiters still really have no idea whether or not someone is looking for a job — which may potentially explain the recruiting spam in your inbox. With so many companies having experienced this problem first hand, serial entrepreneur Jon Bischke and Squirl co-founder John McGrath co-founded Entelo to help mitigate your recruiting pains.
Launched in October last year, Entelo aims to assist companies of all sizes recruit technical talent by way of software that enables HR departments, recruiters and the like to leverage social data to search for and identify great candidates, even if they’re “passive,” meaning they have jobs but just may be looking for new opportunities.
Since October, Bischke tells us, the startup has seen more than 80 corporate customers adopt its recruiting software, including familiar names like Box, Groupon, Square and Yelp. To meet this demand, expand its team and expand its predictive analytics engine, Entelo is announcing today that it’s raised $3.5 million in a Series A financing round led by Battery Ventures and with participation from Menlo Ventures.
Entelo’s pitch to customers begins, of course, with the fact that it’s a card-carrying member of a new generation of startups hopping on the sexy bandwagon that is Big Data and data mining (“sexy” being a relative term, mind you). Who isn’t mining Big Data these days? All the cool kids are doing it: Waze, Google, Foursquare, Amazon, Yelp, Square, and so on.
Bischke and McGrath want to put a new spin on TalentBin and Gild and the like by allowing companies to join it in mining the Internetwebs for the best prospective talent. Said another way: Entelo has built a database of 10 million-plus potential job candidates, tracking the activity and status of each, like, say, their contributions to Github and StackOverflow, their location on Twitter or tweaks to their LinkedIn profile.
What differentiates Entelo, according to the co-founders, is that it’s essentially creating a more complete or robust resume than one would typically find on LinkedIn or Facebook. The data on our skills, job titles, achievements and projects is fragmented across a handful of sites, platforms and profiles. By pulling from those that are most relevant to highly-regarded technical talent, Entelo is betting that the resulting profile will hold more value to recruiters than the alternative.
Not only that, but the deeper its Big Data goes and the more it hones its predictive analytics, the more it understands the signals and footprints that developers who have just changed jobs or are clearly looking for jobs leave on the Web. And, as it goes, the more it understands those signals, the better it can predict which of those top-tier Facebook engineers are getting antsy.
Entelo not only wants to help companies identify passive candidates, but passive candidates that are more likely to be (actually) receptive to their recruiting efforts. The other potential use case Bischke says he’d like to see Entelo applied is in the huge back-log of resumes and applications companies keep on past candidates. While some of them were declined for a good reason, a number of them were probably great candidates, they just didn’t fit the bill for whatever reason.
Maybe that’s because they didn’t have enough experience. But, two years later, Bischke wants Entelo to be able to tell companies, “hey, you’d be an idiot if you didn’t take a second look at this woman.” Well, it probably won’t call them an idiot, but you get what I’m saying.
For more, find Entelo at home here.
via TechCrunch » Startups http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/techcrunch/startups/~3/aslXKTwdRNU/
La Maker Faire llega a España
Si eres de los que siempre ha querido pasarse por alguna de las Maker Faire que organiza la revista Make, esta llega ahora a España en su versión Mini Maker Faire, que es la marca bajo la que estas ferias se han extendido por fuera de los Estados Unidos.
El 29 de junio en Barcelona y el 13 y 14 de julio en Bilbao son tu oportunidad de ver a gente inquieta construyendo, creando, hackeando, jugando, y haciendo cosas.
via Microsiervos http://www.microsiervos.com/archivo/tecnologia/maker-faire-llega-a-espana.html
Redray 4K projector now shipping, UHDTV not included
15 Hilarious Technology Ads From the 1980s
Apple TV adds HBO GO and WatchESPN to its ranks
iOS 7 May Get Deep LinkedIn Integration
With $1M In Funding, Bunch Aims To Be The Center Of Your In-Depth, Topic-Based Discussions
The Internet isn’t lacking for sites and services where people can post their comments and thoughts, but Andrew Sider, co-founder and CEO of a startup called Bunch, argues that there’s still something missing: “How do we connect with people, not around friends, not around social networks, but around a topic that they care about deeply?”
After all, Sider said that many of your Facebook friends and Twitter followers probably aren’t passionate about the same things that you are. He acknowledged that online forums have filled this role in the past, but he said those forums forums are now intimidating to casual users and also kind of uncool. (Other attempts at reinventing the forum include a new startup called Discourse.)
“The new reality is, I don’t believe in 20 years our generation will use forums,” Sider said.
So Bunch tries to have to combine the accessibility of a social network with a commitment to depth and topic-based groups. When you first sign up, you have to sign in with your Facebook account, so your comments are tied to your real identity. Then you can join the communities that interest you — but you can only join three. After joining, you can view and participate in a stream of conversations around that a given topic.
Sider said these features should encourage people to only join the communities that they really care about and to post substantive, civil comments there. He added that Bunch is experimenting with other features that encourage depth, such as a bigger comment box and a minimum number of characters in each comment.
I liked what I saw in the brief demo that Sider gave me, but I pointed out that it could be a big challenge to recruit a user base that comes from a number of disparate online communities. Sider said his initial strategy is integrating with other social networks — for example, users can post cross-post their content between Tumblr and Bunch. (Apparently some of the early beta testers like the quality of conversation on Bunch enough that they’ve started to treat it as their default blogging platform.) Plus, users get a journal page showing their activity across different communities, and it’s visible to non-Bunch members, so you can promote it on other social networks. After all, Sider said that if you’ve got a good conversation going, you want to get other people involved too.
After a closed beta test of about 20,000 users (who have created more than 50 communities), Bunch is opening to the public today. It’s also releasing its iPhone app and announcing that it has raised $1 million in funding from Real Ventures, 500 Startups, BDC Venture Capital, Round 13 Capital, and undisclosed angel investors.
via TechCrunch » Startups http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/techcrunch/startups/~3/mhwG8awgb90/
BT CEO Ian Livingston to leave in September, accept government role
Nestio Launches A New Initiative For Landlords And Brokers To Make Rental Listings More Accurate
Today Nestio, the same service that helps you sort through and organize rental listings in the hunt for a new apartment, has today announced a brand new initiative to help improve the accuracy of listings across all of the web by offering a comprehensive service for brokers, landlords, and the end-user.
In the rough, and quite crowded world of NYC rental listings, TechStars-backed Nestio made a name for itself by taking all the various rental listing services on the web and compiling them in one place. But the service has been quiet of late, working on solving yet another problem for its users.
Despite the fact that Nestio offers a huge volume of listings, the service had little to no control over the accuracy of those listings. But to fix it, the company had to start all the way at the bottom of the food chain, with the landlords.
See, landlords are currently using a number of outdated systems to update their various touchpoints, including leasing teams, brokers, and their own company website. They use a combination of phone calls, whiteboards, spreadsheets, word docs, and even fax machines to update the world on a various space or unit that’s just become available, or rented.
That said, Nestio went quiet for nine months to build out a system to help everyone involved. It’s a web-based tool (optimized for mobile) that lets landlords, brokers and renters update and communicate rental listings in real-time. It looks a little like this:
A landlord learns that one of his newly listed apartments has been rented. He updates once on the Nestio platform that Unit 4B has gone off the market, and the leasing team, brokers, and end-users all see the change in real time. Right now, the platform is only ready for the landlord side of the system, but broker functionality (wherein brokers can make their own updates in real time) will be available soon.
Nestio has been evangelizing the new product for about six months, and has already landed 15 percent of the NYC landlord market. In the meantime, the team is reaching out to brokers with email blasts promoting the new system, and the open rate is about 76 percent.
The new service is available to landlords today, with broker functionality coming soon. Check it out here.
via TechCrunch » Startups http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/techcrunch/startups/~3/DQze7gK6aJs/
Blackberry Q5 to make early debut in the UAE tomorrow
Researchers create micro-battery with 3D printer (video)
These specs preserve your privacy in a world of cameras (video)
A Board Room Fall Out? MobiCart's Founder And CEO Resigns From M-Commerce Startup
It’s a given that startup life will often consist of putting out fires, but as a founder you least expect one to be started in the board room. That appears to be what’s happened in the case of mobile commerce startup MobiCart. In a Tweet earlier today the UK-based company’s founder Wladimir Baranoff-Rossine announced his resignation as CEO and with it his seat on the board.
When contacted for comment, however, Baranoff-Rossine wouldn’t be drawn on the reasons why, except to issue the following statement:
It is with deep regret that I must announce my resignation from MobiCart. It’s been an incredible journey but one I feel I can no longer be part of.
I wanted to personally thank all my customers, partners, suppliers and friends for all your support over the years. It means everything to me and I couldn’t have done this without you.
As for me, I’ll be taking a well overdue holiday before looking at starting my next venture.
However, TechCrunch understands that Baranoff-Rossine’s resignation was the result of an intense and long running board-level dispute over company strategy and the day-to-day operations of MobiCart — a dispute that has finally taken its toll on the company’s founder.
That would also explain the rather odd timing. On the outside at least, MobiCart is doing reasonably well, despite a bump in the road when its original CTO left last year. It claims 14,000 users of its mobile store-front builder for iOS, Android and HTML5, although a much smaller pool of these are paying users.
In addition to providing the storefront builder tools, free or charged as a monthly subscription depending on needs (e.g. number of items in the store), MobiCart has an additional revenue stream by offering to handle the relevant app store submission process, borrowing from the open source playbook.
Despite raising almost $1 million from Northstar Ventures-managed Finance for Business North East Proof of Concept Fund, and the Yorkshire Association of Business Angels, under Baranoff-Rossine’s stewardship, the startup was being run fairly lean, relying on two full-time staff and a pool of contract developers for its apps.
I also understand that Baranoff-Rossine, who remains a minority shareholder, invested quite a lot of his own money into MobiCart to found the company in 2010, money that he made from selling his previous web design business. So, again, the decision to walk away — if voluntarily — can’t have been an easy one.
Startup life really does take no prisoners, even if that’s a part of the story that isn’t always so readily told.
via TechCrunch » Startups http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/techcrunch/startups/~3/WaNBtyOqPzY/
8 Places to Score Free Fonts Online
Una detonación nuclear filmada desde las alturas (1951)
Esta demostración de fuerza de 31 kilotones (algo más que en el caso de las bombas atómicas de Hiroshima y Nagasaki) está grabada desde las alturas y no tiene sonido. Fue parte de la operación Buster-Jangle de seis pruebas similares en 1951, sobre el desierto de Nevada. En Archive.org hay más material de estas pruebas.
Una toma sin duda especial por cómo está grabada; la ausencia de sonido ambiente le da un toque irreal e inquietante. Hoy en día sería fácil simular el mismo efecto con imágenes generadas por ordenador como en el cine y las series de televisión; en aquella época había que filmarlo con película analógica quedándose más o menos cerca de la explosión recién provocada.
(Vía A Cool Link + Atom Central.)
via Microsiervos http://www.microsiervos.com/archivo/mundoreal/detonacion-nuclear-1951-altura.html
8 Unbelievable Technologies That Replace Super Powers
LG launches TV set and all-in-one PC with 29-inch 21:9 ultra-widescreen
De la cámara del móvil a la impresora 3D
La cámara para móviles de Pelican Imaging no dispone de una lente como sucede con las cámaras convencionales, sino de una matriz compuesta por 16 pequeñas lentes (4x4) que forman una cámara polidióptrica, esto es, una cámara que cáptura en este caso 16 imágenes de la misma escena, sumando todas las posibilidades de enfoque.
Tanto es así que en un doble salto con tirabuzón el vídeo de Pelican Imaging muestra cierta posibilidad de que su cámara sirva como escáner 3D, de modo que a partir de un vídeo del modelo u objeto —que debe grabarse desde varios ángulos— se pueda recrear físicamente en una impresora 3D.
Vía Engadget.
via Microsiervos http://www.microsiervos.com/archivo/gadgets/de-la-camara-del-movil-a-la-impresora-3d.html
Esta luz para bicis tiene un sensor de movimiento y se enciende al frenar
La luz para bicicletas Smart Bicycle Light de Velodroom dispone de una serie de sensores que automatizan su funcionamiento de tal modo que se encidente automáticamente cuando la bicicleta se está utilizando, y se apaga cuando está parada. Además es capaz de emitir una luz más o menos intensa según la luz ambiente, por ejemplo si es de día o de noche.
También, al incorporar un acelerómetro, detecta cuándo se produce una deceleración —si el ciclista está utilizando el freno o reduciendo bruscamente la velocidad— y se enciende con toda su intensidad a modo de luz de freno.
Vía Gizmag.
via Microsiervos http://www.microsiervos.com/archivo/gadgets/luz-bicis-sensor-movimiento-enciende-al-frenar.html
Researchers able to predict iOS-generated hotspot passwords, takes under a minute
No lo parece pero este barco está dibujado a lápiz en papel
While sailing through my 3d imagination de Ramon Bruin / JJK Airbrush.
Es verdad que me repito, pero estos dibujos en papel que parecen tridimensionales son muy chulos. Vía Colossal.
via Microsiervos http://www.microsiervos.com/archivo/arte-y-diseno/aunque-no-parezca-barco-esta-dibujado-lapiz-en-papel.html