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Saturday, 27 July 2013
Alt-week 7.27.13: The blind pixel-painter, redirecting the sun and Saturn's view of Earth
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Xbox One Wireless Controller, Play and Charge Kit and Chat Headset available for pre-order
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Boomerang gets pushy with Gmail notifications, multi-message selection
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Don't Miss These 25 Digital Media Resources and Tips
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Free Software Foundation drives fundraising effort for 'fully free' Replicant Android fork
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Take a Look at Space Suits of the Future
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Watch People Use Leap Motion's Gesture Controller for the First Time
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Moto X reportedly comes with Magic Glass, laminated aluminum structure
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Sett Is A New Blogging Platform That Has Community At Its Heart
Although blogging is nearly as old as the Internet, it still feels like something is amiss.
From Dustin Curtis’ Svbtle to Ev Williams’ Medium, there is a feeling afoot that existing platforms for blogs and long-form content still need a lot of improvement. Five years ago, early platforms like Blogger gave way for micro-blogging and networks like Tumblr.
Now we’re seeing the pendulum swing back with platforms for longer-form stories and media.
Sett is a blogging platform that’s looking to emphasize community, so that new users can find a right audience immediately and long-time bloggers can interact with higher-quality commenters and contributors.
Aside from features that are now standard these days like a news feed of content and WYSIWIG editing, SETT has a top bar where it’s easy for bloggers to track comments or even private messages from others in the SETT community.
From the start, when new users sign up for an account, SETT refers readers to your site. Sett has a word-matching system internally that compares posts to one another. If a reader happens to like a post about one topic, the platform will recommend other similar ones to them.
The site is the brainchild of a long-time blogger named Tynan (who declines to use his last name online ever) and Todd Iceton, a developer who worked for Nutshell Mail, the company that was acquired by e-mail marketing giant Constant Contact.
Tynan has been actively blogging for six years but found that it was a bit of a slog for any new user.
“For people who are just starting out, they’re biggest hurdle is just getting that community first,” he said.
There are other features meant to enhance a readers’ relationship with a blogger like a simple, one-click e-mail subscription system. Subscribers get notified of new posts and new comments on posts they’ve decided to individual follow.
Readers can also start their own independent discussions about posts in a community section, where they can see who is online and which posts are being actively read by a lot of users.
The site has had about 100 or so active blogs in beta form, but they’ve opened it up since. Some of the more popular voices on the platform are entrepreneurs like Dick Talens, who co-founded 500 Startups-backed Fitocracy and blogs about how to stay in shape.
The bootstrapped startup earns revenue through premium or subscription accounts that range from $12 to $99 per month in cost. At the higher-end of the range, users get more image hosting space, subscribers and customer support.
As for the competition, Tynan and his co-founder Todd Iceton say that while they have respect for the other platforms, Svbtle doesn’t encourage commenting. In any case, they agree that something needs to be done to update outdated blogging formats — even if starting a web-first blogging platform in 2013 seems a bit anachronistic.
“Both are expressing frustration with the standard format. The WordPress model hasn’t changed in ten to 12 years,” Tynan said. “Their model is kind of broken.”
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Segundo tráiler de Gravity
Ya tenemos el segundo trailer de Gravity , la pelÃcula sobre algún tipo de desastre espacial muy desastroso. Titulado Detached, «acongoja» casi más que el primero.
Eso sÃ, a ver qué se han inventado Alfonso y Jonás Cuarón para meter en la misma trama al Hubble y a la Estación Espacial Internacional, pues ocupan órbitas bien distintas, aunque en el primer trailer se ve una Soyuz que igual tiene algo que ver en el tema.
En los cines a partir del 4 de octubre de 2013.
(io9 vÃa Bad Astronomy).
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MediaTek confirms true octa-core processor in the works
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Dell's Project Ophelia now shipping to testers, everyone else this fall
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Laberintos matemáticos
Los laberintos matemáticos de JoeDev se resuelven moviendo con las flechas del cursor el «número protagonista», que debe ir cambiando según las operaciones (rojo/azul) para poder atravesar las puertas (verde) hastas llegar a la salida.
A medida que se suben niveles la cosa se complica bastante, asà que sirve tanto para niños que empiezan a manejarse con las matemáticas los números como para mayores que quieran convertirlo en un reto.
(VÃa MathPuzzle.)
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Samsung develops 'world's fastest' embedded memory, first with eMMC 5.0
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Musical Poster Plays Drum Beats When Touched
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Second-generation Nexus 7 gets the iFixit teardown treatment
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Google updates Hangouts with more emoji and a touch of Project Butter
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Engadget Podcast 353 - 07.26.13
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Zenefits Lands $2.1M From Venrock, Maverick, Aaron Levie, Charlie Cheever And More To Automate Startup HR
For small businesses, managing health insurance and payroll services can be a huge pain and time-sink. They probably don’t have someone on staff dedicated to these issues, and they themselves would rather be dedicating that energy to building a company. Zenefits launched out of Y Combinator this winter to remove the friction of setting up and managing group health coverage and payroll by automating the process and bringing it online — for free.
As a testament to how much demand there is among startups and small businesses, since expanding its service at TechCrunch Disrupt NYC in April, Zenefits co-founder Parker Conrad tells us that the company has signed on over 110 clients (ranging from 2 employees to over 100) and is now bringing on an average of 10 customers each week. Today, as it looks to continue expanding operations beyond California, Zenefits is announcing that it has raised $2.1 million in seed capital from an impressive roster of venture firms and angel investors.
The new round, which includes the initial $372K chunk of capital the startup raised out of Y Combinator from Andreessen Horowitz, Yuri Milner, General Catalyst, Garry Tan, Justin Kan and Alexis Ohanian, was led by Venrock and Maverick Capital. A big reason why Zenefits was keen to bring these two investors on board in particular, Conrad tells us, was that Bob Kocher, who led Venrock’s investment, was a key player in helping to write the Affordable Care Act (a.k.a. Obamacare) when he worked at the White House.
As Greg explained in April, at its core, Zenefits is essentially a digital insurance broker, meaning that they help startups automate insurance, benefits and payroll but they also get paid a commission by insurance companies each time a company opens a new plan through its system. Over the next two years, as Obamacare goes into effect, the new regulations and provisions mean big changes for health insurance companies and brokers.
These health players are not only being forced to move operations online but will also see the amount of commissions they can take drop — among other things. Many health insurance brokers are going to drop their small-group clients to focus on bigger-ticket customers as a result — and, as premiums could go up for businesses — Zenefits could stand to benefit big-time by offering their services for free. Plus, having someone who’s intimately familiar with the complex and nuanced provisions and regulations in Obamacare (because he helped write them) is huge.
Maverick Capital is also familiar with the healthcare and health insurance industries itself, having backed some of the bigger startups and players in the market, like OneMedical, Castlight Health and SeaChange Health, for example. On top of its lead investors and the Y Combinator partners (like Sam Altman, Garry Tan, Harj Taggar, Alexis Ohanian, Paul Bucheit and Justin Tan — who all invested personally), Zenefits also saw a number of recognizable names contribute as angels, including Box co-founder and CEO, Aaron Levie, Quora co-founder Charlie Cheever, Elad Gil, Ben Ling, Matt Cutts and Inkling co-founder and CEO, Matt MacInnis.
With the new capital under its belt, Zenefits has expanded its team to 12 and will look to add more in the coming year. Because the company is considered a broker, it is paid a commission from insurance companies for each new employee and employee added (every month), which is great for its bottom line. But this also requires that it be approved by the government on a state-to-state basis. Currently, regulations limit it (and others like it) to a few states.
But with the changes Obamacare will bring, Conrad expects that digital insurance brokers of its ilk will be allowed to expand to more states beginning in January, at which point, Zenefits will look to move quickly beyond California and New York.
In the meantime, Conrad tells us that, according to BenefitMail, the company has already vaulted into the top 5 percent of insurance brokers (in terms of number of clients) in California, primarily as a result of new company submissions to Blue Cross — not bad for a startup five months from launch.
For those unfamiliar, Zenefits has been growing fast in California by turning a paper-heavy process into a digital one, allowing users to create new plans, while serving up quotes for group coverage across health, dental and vision insurance. The company’s system makes it easier for companies hiring new employees to add coverage for each employee, or, if a company fires someone (or they leave), they can click a button to remove their coverage and take them off the payroll, while starting them on COBRA coverage.
It works for companies regardless of whether they don’t have existing coverage or already are set up, syncing employee coverage data and taking over as your insurance broker for those in the latter camp. The company also recently added payroll services, so that startups and small businesses can just tell Zenefits about a new hire and give them the employee’s information, at which point Zenefits will take care of generating offer letters, IP agreements, onboarding details and then add them to its payroll system. They can also do the same for that employee’s benefits.
As part of its payroll services, Zenefits also sets up deductions employees pay for health insurance and other benefits, which employers would usually have to set up themselves. This is a pain, because salary and pricing can be different for each employee and whenever deductions change (which happens a lot when employees move, get married and so on), the price changes. Traditionally, the price of deductions change every 10 years, but with Obamacare, this will happen every year. This could be a huge boon for Zenefits, as it takes care of this stuff for startups and small businesses, who would be seeing a lot more paperwork as a result.
Furthermore, while services like Zenefits may seem familiar or not particularly disruptive to some, it’s hard to over-state just how old-school (and offline) most of the big, old school health insurance brokers are in the U.S. Some of them are multi-billion-dollar market cap companies, but may have little or no software or online-based solutions for their customers. So many startups and founder say “we’re disrupting and old offline industry” to get you excited about your company, and in a lot of cases that’s only half-true.
Health insurance brokerage is definitely one of those industries that qualifies as ripe for disruption thanks to its archaic procedures, practices and infrastructure. Many are aware of the changes that are coming, but they’re limited in how quickly they can react by responsibilities to shareholders, quarterly earnings and so on. Easier to preserve and protect the current state of things than re-build from the ground up. Zenefits won’t be the only one to benefit — many new companies are going to spring up in this space — but it’s definitely off to a good start.
As Inkling CEO Matt MacInniss (who personally invested in this round) told us:
Zenefits has identified a huge opportunity in the shifting landscape of benefits and healthcare among growing companies. Incumbents aren’t going to move as quickly as smaller, nimble companies — and they’re not technologists — so I think there’s a huge opportunity for new digital health insurance brokers to quickly move out front to take the pole position in what’s essentially a new category
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Ford engineer builds vibrating shift knob using 3D printer and an Xbox 360 controller (video)
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The Daily Roundup for 07.26.2013
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Y Combinator Backed DoorDash Delivers Food Quickly In South Bay, Hopes To Expand Beyond Food
DoorDash, a Y Combinator summer ‘13 company, delivers food from restaurants in Palo Alto and Mountain View in an average time of 45 minutes.
Sound familiar?
It’s a crowded space, but while competitors like Seamless and Grubhub offer users an app to order food from any restaurant that has its own drivers and delivery system setup, DoorDash hires and manages its own drivers, so it can bring you food from restaurants that don’t have their own delivery drivers.
That may not seem like a big difference, but for the suburbs and college campuses, it’s a welcome change from having just pizza and Chinese food places offering delivery.
DoorDash charges $6 per delivery with no minimum order size, and currently delivers lunch (11:45 am-1:30 pm) and dinner (5:30pm – 9:00pm) every day. The company currently delivers to Palo Alto, Stanford, Menlo Park, Los Altos, Los Altos Hills, and Mountain View from 50 restaurants in the area.
Fluc, another startup we recently covered, is doing something fairly similar, but is more expensive–Fluc charges $5.95 per order and inflates menu prices a bit, whereas DoorDash charges $6 per order and doesn’t inflate menu prices. DoorDash partners with the restaurants they deliver from, so they take a cut from the restaurant’s side of things, not from the consumer.
DoorDash was founded by four Stanford students: Evan Charles Moore worked on the founding team of Vevo, Tony Xu was at Square and Red Laser/eBay, and Andy Fang and Stanley Tang spent a summer together at Facebook, Moore and Xu were friends in Stanford’s business school, and Fang and Tang are undergrads. Moore and Tang had worked on a project together in a class in the spring of 2012, and later decided to work together on DoorDash, bringing in the other two.
In February, they built a prototype, Palo Alto Delivery, in one day to gauge demand. Half an hour later, they had their first order and soon they were delivering food everyday around campus. The four of them did the first 200 deliveries by themselves; they say they learned so much as drivers that they have new team members start as a driver.
I used DoorDash (then called Palo Alto Delivery) several times in the spring and really liked it. On campus at Stanford there aren’t a ton of options for delivery, so I was very willing to pay $6 to get better food delivered every once in awhile.
One of the new features I’m most excited for is Group Order, in which you can split the bill with a group of friends through DoorDash but still have all the food come in one order.
“Our ultimate goal is to enable merchants to deliver locally,” Tang says. He notes that restaurants are a good place to start, as the company has been able to grow really quickly (they dobuled total deliveries in the past two weeks), and hopes to grow both geographically and, eventually, beyond just food delivery.
Disclosure: I’m a rising senior at Stanford. Fang and Tang are the same year as me. I’ve meet Fang a couple times, and I haven’t met any of the other co-founders at DoorDash. This doesn’t affect my ability to report on DoorDash.
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