FUNKY GREEN: 06/24/13

Monday, 24 June 2013

Google Play for Education now accepting developer submissions

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Leap Motion Launches Its Motion-Controlled App Store

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Show Us Your Photos of Last Night's Giant Supermoon

10 Bar Bets You'll Never Lose (But Might Get You Punched in the Face)

Wells Fargo offering text message receipts at its ATMs starting today

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Leap Motion Controller Hands-On: The Future Is Magic

Edward Snowden tells South China Morning Post he took Booz Allen job to collect NSA information

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Leap Motion starts expanded beta, opens dev portal to the public, shows off Airspace app store (hands-on)

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IRL: BlackBerry Q10 and the Chevy Volt

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Samsung launches Magna Carta app, users will get Jay-Z album early and for free on July 4th

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Africa-Focused Savannah Fund Graduates Its First Batch of Startups

Even though it’s still nascent, Sub-Saharan Africa continues to grow pools of capital and entrepreneurial know-how in hubs like Nairobi, Kenya.

Today, the Nairobi-based Savannah Fund, which is raising up to $10 million for startups in the region, just graduated its first batch of companies at PivotEast, a Disrupt-like competition for African mobile startups. They include a Ghanaian e-commerce startup that sells electronics called Ahonya, a Ugandan mobile game developer called Kola Studios that’s popularized a local card game and SafariDesk, a site that helps travelers find off-the-beat experiences and places for luxury camping.

Mbwana Alliy, who returned to East Africa after business school at Stanford University, said he picked these companies out of about 170 applicants across the continent. He then puts them through a three-month accelerator in Nairobi, Kenya, where he’s arranged sessions with mentors like Aardvark’s Max Ventilla or other Silicon Valley-based or foreign entrepreneurs who come through the region.

They take about a 15 percent equity stake for about $25,000, which does sound steep. But Alliy says he’s seen a fair amount of deals where other angels might have taken 40 percent of a company for as little as $10,000.

The reality is, with a much lower per capita GDP, the economics of founding a company in Kenya or Nigeria are very different than they are in the Valley.

Alliy says the whole process of setting up the fund, for which he’s still raising funding, has been a big learning experience. When he announced the fund last year, he set it up with i/o Ventures managing director Paul Bragiel and Erik Hersman, who co-founded Ushahidi, a mobile platform that’s been used to crowdsource information during disasters and elections.

“When I started, people asked me, ‘Mbwana, are you going to copy and paste i/o onto Africa?’ And I was well aware that it couldn’t be like that.”

Certain things have gone well. “The biggest thing I was surprised by was that we put together quite a few solid mentor sessions over the past three to four months,” he said, noting that big names in tech like Eric Schmidt have passed through Nairobi on visits to the local iHub. “A lot of global talent shows up here.”

Schmidt’s Tomorrow Ventures followed on with an early Savannah investment in biNu, a platform that optimizes app use on basic feature phones.

He’s also taken initial funding from angels like Yelp’s Russ Simmons and venture capitalist Tim Draper, over going for institutional investors like other more established venture firms.

But investing in the region is also naturally more risky and takes more gut-checking. Two-thirds of Savannah’s companies originally weren’t even incorporated at all and Alliy had to get the proper paperwork established.

“To be honest, we take risks. I kind of laugh when I think about what Valley VCs are doing,” he said. “All entrepreneurs there are so educated. They can read about what to do on VentureHacks. Everyone is so knowledgeable about everything. It feels so easy compared to Africa,” he said. “So I guess the thing is, we take more risks and we’re much more comfortable taking a bet.”

When they flew in the Ghana-based team from Ahonya, they went on Skype interviews and pure online vetting. The company has so far sold about 600 products online in about nine months, with an average transaction size of $350 (which is pretty big for Sub-Saharan Africa).

“We got a good feeling from them,” Alliy said. “We liked their traits. They were doing growth hacking in Ghana without even knowing what the term means.”

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Peloton's Android-powered static bike lets you spin from home (video)

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Inside Under Armour's Bra Shoe

Huawei unveils mid-range MediaPad 7 Vogue tablet that can place calls

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There'll Be Nowhere to Hide When These Robot Apes Take to the Trees

Explore World's Tallest Building With Google Street View

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Leaked iPhone 5S Prototype Is Everything You'd Expect

Australia takes the hint, postpones plans for PRISM-style snooping

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My1login Raises Further $500K To Help Businesses Get Security-Savvy With Its Cloud-Based Password Manager

Most of us employ weak passwords and should know better. Blah blah blah. But actually, as boring as the topic of password security is, get found wanting and the repercussions can be anything but dull (and extremely costly). Just ask the Associated Press.

Aiming to help users double-down on their password security is 1mylogin, which offers a cloud-based password manager. Today the UK startup has announced that its raised a further $500,000 or so in funding, capital it will use to market its relatively new business offering soft-launched last month.

This brings the total raised by my1login to approximately $1.5m via a mixture of grants and equity financing. This latest seed round comes from previous backers Scottish Investment Bank, the investment arm of Scottish Enterprise, and TRI Capital and Equity Gap, in addition to a number of unnamed angel investors.

Launched early last year, my1login’s freemium-based consumer product offers 1-click login for a user’s various online accounts by storing and making accessible all passwords via the cloud, encrypted with banking-grade security. Like other password managers, the idea is that you have a master password that unlocks access to your other passwords. That master password should (obviously) be strong and unique, but then so can the others since you won’t need to remember them.

Taking that proposition and dialling up the security notch further, my1login’s business product adds features such as 2-factor authentication (key phrase-based), a central admin panel for managing access to passwords across an organisation, and analytics to help a business keep tabs on its various passwords and their usage. Thus my1login is setting out to help businesses prevent the use of weak passwords and what it calls weak password practices, where employees use the same password across multiple websites. Blah blah blah.

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Custom-built Katamari controller is made from yoga ball, DualShock 2 pad, power of the cosmos (video)

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Snapchat Introduces SnapKidz For Users Under 13

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AOL Reader Launches as Google Reader Checks Out

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Microsoft's 'Project Mountain' puts $700 million into data center powering Xbox One and Office 365 cloud

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Presentado el informe eEspaña 2013

Evolución del número de hogares con conexión a Internet de banda ancha en España y Europa

700.000 ciudadanos más que se han incorporado a uso de Internet en 2012 ponen ya a casi el 70% de la población española como usuario habitual de Internet, aunque seguimos por debajo de la media de la Unión Europea en cuanto al uso del comercio electrónico.

También estamos por debajo de la media en cuanto al porcentaje de hogares conectados, que se sitúa en un 67% frente al 73 de la UE, aunque ganamos con un 98% frente al 96 de media de la Unión en lo que se refiere al porcentaje de hogares conectados que lo hacen mediante banda ancha.

Todo esto, y mucho más sobre economía TIC, contenidos digitales, avances –o no– en inclusión en el uso de las nuevas tecnologías, administración electrónica y un montón de datos en el Informe eEspaña 2013 .

Con este ya son 13 informes que desde 2001 llevan pintando un panorama de la realidad de nuestro país en cuanto se refiere al uso de Internet y las nuevas tecnologías, panorama que afortunadamente va mejorando año tras año, aunque muchas veces nos gustaría que las cosas fueran un poco más rápido.

# Enlace Permanente

via Microsiervos http://www.microsiervos.com/archivo/internet/presentado-informe-eespana-2013.html

The Daily Muse Expands From A Community For Professional Women To "The Muse," A Career Destination For Everyone

The Daily Muse is rebranding today to serve a wider audience. The company has expanded and is going under the name The Muse now, which includes job listings, company profiles, and a career advice publication under the old name, The Daily Muse. The Daily Muse originally targeted women in their twenties and thirties, but The Muse will now offer content for all professionals.

“As we grew, we began to notice something we didn’t expect: People we didn’t intend to find us, who we didn’t think would need or use our resources, came in droves,” the company wrote in a blog post today. “They were seeking the same thing we were: An answer to the question, “What do you want to do with your life?”

The site, founded by ex-McKinsey analysts Kathryn Minshew, Alexandra Cavoulacos and Melissa McCreery, launched in September 2011. The company was a member of the Winter 2012 Y Combinator class, and launched the visual job search product Company Muse in February 2012.

Minshew tells me that the company heard from men, professionals in their fifties and sixties who were looking to re-enter the workforce or switch careers, military service men and women looking to enter civilian careers, and others who identified with their content and asked them to open things up to a broader group.

Minshew says one reader said he used the site every day for a month or so before realizing that it was targeted at women; he likened the experience to going to the bathroom and realizing there aren’t any urinals there. The team chuckled over the metaphor, but realized that they could reach a broader audience while still sticking to their core mission.

“We still want to empower women to kick ass at their jobs,” the post said. “And we want to empower men, too. We don’t want to—and we won’t—ignore the issues that women still face in the workplace, but we want this to be a broader conversation, and as we continue it, we want to bring everyone to the table.”

“We don’t want to say we’re not for women anymore, because thats still our core demographic,” Minshew explain. “But we also want to acknowledge that the conversation about women in the workplace is more effective when it’s not in a vacuum.”

The company redid the site’s navigation, focusing more on careers and job search, and condensing the peripheral content, on topics like food and travel, into a smaller space on the front page. The editorial staff will be introducing more male voices and more perspectives from professionals over 40.

Minshew tells me the site now has over one million monthly visitors and the staff plans to expand it internationally by the end of the year. She also says the team is growing, and will be at 14 full-time staffers and two interns next month.

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Rocket Internet Revs Up Easy Taxi, Its Latin American Hailo, With $15M In Funding

Rocket Internet, the Samwer Brothers’ Berlin-based e-commerce startup incubator, is taking its Latin American ambitions up to the next gear. Easy Taxi, a Hailo-like app for calling up taxicabs, is today announcing a $15 million round of investment from Latin America Internet Holding (LIH). LIH is Rocket Internet’s holding company in the region, and it is part-owned by Millicom, an emerging markets service provider that also invests in Rocket startups in Africa. Easy Taxi will be using the funding both to continue to build out its operations in Latin Amercia, but also to gear up for “global” expansion.

That could pit it closer to competing against Hailo, the taxi app that seems to have inspired both the Easy Taxi service as well as perhaps an element of its logo (seen here to the right). Both apps (like Uber and others as well) use a mobile app-based system to link up drivers with passengers. Passengers can track where the nearest cars are on in-app maps, and similarly drivers can use the app to track passengers. (And following with logo similarity, the apps have lookalike icons for doing this.) The difference between Uber and Hailo/Easy Taxi is that the latter apps rely more on the wider cab service, while others like Uber have cultivated their own fleets of non-yellow-cab drivers.

For now, Easy Taxi operates in Rio de Janeiro, Sao Paulo and other Brazilian cities (where it first started, in 2011), as well as Botoa, Salvador, Lima and Venezuela. Further afield it looks like Asia is coming next, with outposts already in Seoul and Kuala Lumpur, but also plans to add Manila, Hong Kong and Bangkok to the mix.

Hailo, meanwhile, is active in London, Cork, Dublin, Barcelona and Madrid in Europe; Boston, Chicago, New York, Toronto and Washington in North America; and Tokyo in Asia and also has its eye on international growth, fuelled by some $50 million in VC funding, including a $30 million round announced in December 2012.

A spokesperson for Rocket Internet would not say how much Easy Taxi has raised to date, although a $4.9 million round, also from Rocket itself, was disclosed in October 2012. This round in Easy Taxi, relatively speaking, is early-stage and small in the wider scheme of Rocket Internet companies, which go on to pick up funding in the hundreds of millions of dollars as they ramp up to compete against local and potential international rivals. Recent rounds have included $100 million for Lazada in Asia; $120 million for Lamoda in Russia; and $100 million for Zalora, another Asian fashion e-commerce effort.

“When we started the company in 2011, we had only one goal: To connect taxi drivers and passengers the smoothest, easiest and safest way possible,” notes Dennis Wang, Head of International Expansion of Easy Taxi. He says the company now has more than 30,000 taxi drivers in its network with almost 1,000,000 downloads of the app itself. “With the recent round of funding, we want to reinforce our position as market leader and continue our global expansion.”

The company does not disclose how many active users or turnover to date.

Like many e-commerce companies, and those like Uber and Hailo working in the livery service specifically, the key to success in these businesses is to nail the logistics part of the equation. This not only makes the running of the service itself more efficient, but it also lays the groundwork for growing it out, and potentially adding further services around it — these could include courier work or other kinds of delivery. For a company like Rocket Internet, with holdings spanning food delivery and the sale of goods online, you can see how something like Easy Taxi could easily plug into that infrastructure to help bolster those other businesses. That can be used both during downtime on the taxi service itself, or just to help diversify revenue streams. Easy Taxi already names Payleven, the Rocket Internet-backed mobile payment service (“Square clone” if want the quick description), as a partner, to help some drivers take payments more easily on the fly.

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