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Saturday, 28 September 2013
Engadget Podcast 362 - 09.28.13
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NYT: NSA moniters, graphs some US Citizens' social activity with collected metadata
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Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer Bids Tearful Farewell
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The FTC wants your thoughts on proposed patent troll investigation
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Palo Alto to require wiring for fast EV chargers in new homes
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Microsoft Goes After Old iPhone Owners with New Trade-In Deal
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Apple Will Pay Some iPad Owners Cash in Legal Settlement
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Red Tails
Pero he de decir que me defraudó bastante, ya que apenas cuenta nada de la historia de la unidad, que tuvo un servicio extremadamente distinguido durante la segunda guerra mundial; en lugar de eso no deja de ser una película de guerra más con la peculiaridad de que todos los protagonistas son negros.
Así, tenemos al jefe de escuadrilla atormentado por las decisiones que tiene que tomar y que suponen la vida o la muerte de los hombres a su mando, el novato al que todos vacilan que ya sabes que luego se va a convertir en un tipo extremadamente apreciado, el que sabes desde el minuto cero que va a morir, etc.
Y eso por no hablar de los agujeros del guión por los que cabría un portaaviones nuclear de lado como por ejemplo cuando un piloto alemán lleva su caza tocado hasta su base aún a sabiendas de que le siguen cuatro cazas enemigos; me cuesta también creerme que con un P-40 se pueda derribar un Me 109, aunque puedo intentar pensar que los pilotos de la Luftwaffe de 1944 distaban mucho de ser los mismos que al principio de la guerra.
Sin embargo salen aviones, muchos aviones, lo que hace que sea más llevadera para un aerotrastornado como yo.
Lo que no tengo nada claro es si a alguien a quien no le apasionen los aviones la película le dirá mucho.
Una lástima, porque la historia de los los «Colas Rojas», llamados así por el color de las derivas de sus P-51 Mustang, da para mucho más,
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Steam Controller in use: game developers sound off on the beta version's highs and lows, how it feels
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Philips Fidelio Soundbar: Pain-Free Surround Sound
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Adiós a la sonda Deep Impact
El cometa al cometa 9P/Tempel un minuto después del impacto de la Deep Impact
He publicado en RTVE.es un artículo acerca de como ocho años, ocho meses, una semana y un día después de ser lanzada, y tras haber desempeñado dos misiones más de aquella que se le había encomendado originalmente La NASA da por terminada la misión Deep Impact, la primera en tomar contacto con un cometa .
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Microsoft outlines 66,539 account requests from law enforcement during first half of 2013
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Linquet Ensures You'll Never Lose Your Phone or Wallet Again
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Bizness Apps Launches DIY Website Builder, Looks To Become A Full-Service Digital Marketing Suite For SMBs
Once upon a time, if you wanted your own website, you either had to speak fluent Internet, or write a large check to someone who did. However, thanks to the laundry list of companies and services that have sprouted over the last five years — like Weebly, Wix and Squarespace, to name a few — the barriers to building a snappy website have vanished. Today, website creators are free, and the only technical skill required is the ability to locate the Internet.
Today, as smartphones flood the market, a similar story is unfolding in app development. With their customers going mobile, businesses are eager to do the same. A bevy of services emerged to meet the growing demand, offering businesses a quick and easy way to create their apps for iOS, Android and beyond. Bizness Apps launched in 2010 to do just that, providing companies with a low-cost way to build their own mobile apps and website without needing to know how to code.
But with so many options for DIY site builders, both mobile and desktop, these services have to differentiate themselves from the competition if they’re going to stand out — and survive. As a result, many choose to specialize, offering the same basic features as everyone else, while focusing on adding more features and value around, say, social networking, flier creation or shopping.
Like SnapPages, to differentiate itself in this crowded market, Bizness Apps developed a white-label program to allow both companies and businesses to build mobile apps for their existing clients or SMBs in their local area. Shortly thereafter, the startup added a CRM platform to help its white-label resellers sell apps and websites to startups and other SMBs, and today Bizness Apps is adding the last piece of the puzzle.
In a platform play that aims to round out its self-service development suite and sees it moving into the realm of the Weeblys, Wixes and Squarespaces of the world, the startup is today launching its own drag-and-drop, DIY website builder, called Bizness Web.
The website creation service will allow SMBs to quickly design and publish a fully-functional website for desktop, smartphones and tablets in under 10 minutes, says founder and CEO Andrew Gazdecki — regardless of technical skill. In an effort to provide businesses with a feature set that’s comparable to its competitors, the website builder will offer a library of hundreds of templates, designed to make it easy to get started, along with SEO tools, post-publish editing capabilities, social media integration, custom contact and lead form creation and analytics.
The new product intends takes a similar strategy and focus to its white label reseller program, which provides companies and individuals with the ability to launch their own mobile marketing businesses and develop mobile apps and mobile websites that can be customized and branded according to their client’s preferences. The white-label resale tool allows these pop-up app development businesses to set their own prices and provide services developing apps for their local small business market.
The reseller program has also been the company’s most lucrative product, driving the majority of its revenue, the CEO tells us. The startup raised a small, $100K round of seed funding after launch, but has been bootstrapped since and is now profitable thanks to a reseller-driven $8 million annual run rate, which the company expects to hit $9 million by the end of the year.
But what makes the CEO think that its new DIY website builder will find an audience and can compete with the most popular services, which today dominate most of the mindshare in the market? Gazdecki says that he sees the small business market existing in two segments, one of which is willing to use DIY marketing tools, and other, which would rather pay a premium to essentially, “hire a pro,” as they say.
While Weebly and Wix are mostly focused on the former, the CEO says that Bizness Apps wants to leverage its existing reseller network to provide a more hands-on approach to mobile and website development — even if that requires charging a higher price, and therefore the risk of losing looking for free DIY options. Furthermore, even though the company is playing in an “extremely crowded market,” he says, 58 percent of small businesses still don’t have a website and the chief reason for this is that they lack the confidence to build their own.
At its core, Bizness Apps’ mission is to allow anyone to start their own local marketing company and help local businesses get online, go mobile and manage customers through its three main products. “In the end, we’ve found that small businesses would rather have marketing services built into this kind of platform,” the CEO tells us, “even if it means paying an extra fee.”
Today, the company has 5,000 active resellers around the globe, hailing from over 50 countries and offering services in dozens of languages. Just as its reseller program aims to solve related pain points by giving clients the ability to learn how to market their business and how to approach and sell to small businesses — beyond offering branded apps and websites — looking forward, Gazdecki wants to include more features that help customers get more value out of the platform.
Its resellers often add custom features depending on the market and the client, like a mobile food ordering system, payment gateway and menu integrations for restaurants — so that they don’t have to fumble with receipt printer integrations, among other things. Down the road, the CEO says he wants the new website builder to incorporate features like online food ordering, reservations and eCommerce tools.
The company offers its original DIY app product for $59/month for each platform, which includes a native iPhone app, Android app, iPad app, Android tablet app and mobile website, and will be selling its website builder under a three-tier pricing scheme, starting at $10/month under its “small business” option. Its business tier will run $100/month, and includes 10 websites, marketing materials, sales training and a free Bizness CEM account, whereas its “White Label Reseller” plan includes all of the previous options, with the ability to create an unlimited number of websites.
For more on Bizness Web, find it here.
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The Xbox One hits the road on an international magical mystery tour
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Kaleidescape's digital store adds $2 Blu-ray-to-digital copy upgrades
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Sudanese protesters use crowdmapping to get around internet shutdowns
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Software For Auto Repair: With New Funding In Tow, Estify Sees Big Opportunity In An Unsexy Market
The collision industry probably doesn’t rank at the top of the “Sexy Markets” list for startups, but sometimes the most obscure, fragmented and pulchritudinously challenged industries can offer the most opportunity to those willing to grit their teeth and immerse themselves in the mess. Estify, a graduate of Amplify LA’s business accelerator, is doing just that. Co-founders Jordan Furniss, Derek Carr and Taylor Moss went looking for the most unsexy market they could find, with bonus points awarded for both size and level of inefficiency. They quickly found their Shangri-La: The collision and auto repair market.
But the co-founders are web developers and designers by trade, and, knowing that this put them at a disadvantage in an industry where engineers are scarce and trust is crucial, they immersed themselves. After months of talking to shops, owners, mechanics, parts providers and insurers and identifying the biggest pain points, they began developing Estify.
Sure, the startup may not become a billion-dollar company, but this is a great, quick lesson for entrepreneurs: It’s impossible to avoid failure, but before you start building an app or product, take time to understand the market you’re tackling, what it’s problems are and how its businesses work. Go be an apprentice if you have to; it’s the least you can do, and a step that points you in the right direction.
While the auto repair industry may be unsexy, Furniss tells us, it’s also probably likely that the town or city you live in has at least one auto repair shop. In fact, there are about 45,000 in the U.S. today, the co-founder says, and most of them are using the same tools for inventory, interfacing with insurance companies and data entry they have for years.
The company is also expanding its potential addressable market by not only going after the 45,000 repair shops, but by offering its service to the whole pipeline, Estify wants to reach the 200,000 shops, insurance companies, independent appraisers and parts providers out there. To do that, the startup has built a suite of cloud-based services that aim to help make shops, and related service providers a way to increase efficiency and save money.
By helping collision repair shops automate the data entry process, among other things, Furniss claims that the company’s SaaS product can save these businesses up to two hours on every estimate they process — something repair shops have traditionally done manually. The startup recently emerged from limited beta, and had been testing the product with a handful of early customers, so it doesn’t have many paying customers yet.
However, Furniss says that the company spent its long beta period attempting to validate its pricing model and functionality and has been encouraged by the feedback. In one weekend, he says, the founders received emails from over 100 different shops that wanted to use the product, with a handful of them offering to pay for a full year in advance.
To help it push forward with a full-scale launch, add to its current team of six and start selling more broadly to repair shops, insurance providers and parts dealers, Estify recently closed on a $800K round of seed capital, led by ff Venture Capital, with participation from Romulus Capital, REES Capital and Amplify.LA.
As to what Estify actually does? At launch, the startup will be offering a suite of web services containing three main products, which can all be managed and viewed through its web-based dashboard. The first tackles what Furniss says is one of the biggest problems faced by repair shops — called “rekeying.” Essentially, rekeying is the process of duplicating the estimate that the insurance company originally wrote into the collision shop’s own estimation processes.
“It’s almost hard to fathom for those with tech backgrounds,” he says, “but these two systems don’t communicate and there’s no data bridge between them, whatsoever.” The process can add up to two hours to the estimate writing process, so Estify tries to solve this by allowing shops to bridge the gap and eliminate the redundant work of “rekeying.” The second product, Reconcile, tackles a similar pain point, in that it helps repair shops be more efficient about how they deal with estimates and the interface with insurance companies.
Virtually every collision shop has to work with insurance company, Furniss says, since they are typically the ones paying for the work. Of course, insurance companies want to spend the least amount money on each repair as possible, while the shop generally wants to be as thorough as possible and get paid for the parts and work.
“There’s a whole negotiation process that takes place with every repair and then what the insurance company says and what the shop says,” the co-founder explains, “need to be reconciled down to the penny.” This is a tedious process and shops spend hours on it with each repair, because if they don’t, they stand to lose $1,000 per repair, on average. So, the startup gives shops software to reduce this process to something that can happen in seconds, allowing them to make more money per repair while saving time — at least that’s the idea.
The third area Estify attempts to help shops increase efficiency has to do with parts. When a car is being repaired, a shop gets its parts from various providers in the area, often dealerships, which usually happens via phone and fax. Naturally, faxing the list of parts a shop needs to dealers until finding the right part is, well, time consuming, slow and inefficient.
To help speed the process up, Estify’s service automatically pulls the list of parts from shops and sends them out to a network of part providers, geographically targeting the proximate dealers. Instead of calling or faxing, dealers can just respond online, saying they have the part and can send it by such and such a time. Besides helping repair shops get better answers more quickly, Furniss says, the idea is also to create new opportunities for parts providers.
To monetize, the startup has opted for a monthly subscription model, allowing shops, dealers and insurers to use any combination of the three, paying for what they use, with the monthly rate falling somewhere between $99 and $500. By the industry standards, Furniss says, “we’ll be able to do fairly well revenue-wise if can get a couple thousands customers on board — at least that’s where we want to start.”
It may be obscure and it may not be sexy, but as long as Estify continues to apply the K.I.S.S. principle to its software and product development, it could turn out to be a fairly attractive business. By removing some serious pain and friction from critical processes and operations these businesses deal with on a daily basis and doing that with a web-based solution, Estify can be scalable and potentially tap into some decent margins.
As it rounds out its feature set and adds more features that have wider application beyond repair shops — and builds out mobile offerings — it can expand its functionality and potentially reach a wider audience and bigger market. And one that isn’t exactly saturated with competitors. At which point the collision repair and parts industry doesn’t sound so bad after all.
Estify at home here.
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MLB to use iOS 7's iBeacon for pointing out sights (and seats) in stadiums
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Chasefuture's Platform Coaches Mainland Chinese Students On University Admissions
The allure of top-tier Western universities isn’t lessening anytime soon for the hundreds of thousands of Chinese high school graduates emerging out of the country’s best schools.
That’s why a host of different startups helping mainland high school students with admissions like InitialView have cropped up in the last year or two.
Chasefuture, a one-year-old startup from serial entrepreneur Greg Nance and Han Shao, is looking to be the go-to place for students across mainland China to study abroad in the U.S. or Europe. They are a platform that connects alums and admissions officers from top-tier Western universities to serve as mentors for students across China.
“We basically bootstrapped our way to a top position in the study abroad consultation market,” said Nance, who moved to Shanghai a year ago after finishing up at Cambridge University’s business school.
Chasefuture, which has 450 paid clients, is aiming to 10X that year to more than 4,000. They connect applying high school students to real admissions experts and mentors who are alums of their desired schools.
Two-thirds of the company’s clients are in China, while the rest are mainly international students in the U.S. aiming for masters or Ph.D’s.
So far, they’re sending 17 students to USC, 16 to Columbia University, 16 to Imperial College in the U.K., 11 to the London School of Economics, three to Cambridge’s business school for a master of finance.
They have basic products that help with admissions essays and choosing schools, then higher-tier packages that can cost several thousand dollars depending on how much hands-on help a client wants.
But they’re also particularly picky about who gets to join the program, with a 10 percent acceptance rate. (One could argue, of course, that they’re cherry-picking the candidates with the best chances anyway.)
Nance says the company’s addressable market in China is maybe a quarter million students, who are looking to study abroad. To attract mentors, they look for alums or existing admissions experts who they pay about $40 an hour as a base. Nance says this is more than double what other competing platforms pay. If they are able to refer other quality mentors, they get a bonus as well.
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Ask an Android Dev: What Languages Should I Learn?
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NuWave Glasses Help the Hearing Impaired by Connecting to Smartphones
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Evernote gets physical: Why a software maker's turning to tangible goods
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7 Stats Proving Google's Global Internet Domination
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iMotion 3D controller launches on Kickstarter with dreams of replacing your mouse, we go hands-on (video)
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3 Groundbreaking Apps: Evernote's 2013 Devcup Winners
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Daily Roundup: Distro Issue 109, Valve's Steam Controller, CyanogenMod creator Steve Kondik and more!
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