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Tuesday, 5 November 2013
Los Angeles moves forward with proposal for free citywide WiFi
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Y así terminó la misión del carguero Albert Einstein de la ESA
Restos del Albert Einstein durante la reentrada
Los Vehículos de Transferencia Automatizados de la Agencia Espacial Europea están pensados para terminar su misión mediante una reentrada controlada en la atmósfera en la que no solo se destruye la nave sino la carga de materiales ya no necesarios a bordo de la Estación Espacial Internacional que lleva dentro.
El ATV-4 a su partida de la EEI
En el caso del ATV-4 Albert Einstein la reentrada se programó para que ocurriera justo debajo de la posición de la Estación para que sus tripulantes pudieran fotografiarla.
En ATV-4 reentry están todas estas fotos de los momentos finales de este carguero.
via Microsiervos http://www.microsiervos.com/archivo/ciencia/y-asi-termino-la-mision-del-carguero-albert-einstein-de-la-esa.html
Top 10 reasons to come to Expand New York
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Founder Stories: 10gen's Dwight Merriman On His Own Style Of Serial Entrepreneurship
There are founders, and then there are founders. Dwight Merriman is a rare breed of founder. A serial entrepreneur who has helped co-found and lead companies such as DoubleClick, BusinessInsider, Gilt Groupe, and Panther Express. And, as if that weren't enough, his latest endeavor could be just as big, if not bigger, than the ones before it.
Merriman is one of the main brains behind MongoDB and is a CEO of 10gen, focused on creating a new generation of database technology using NoSQL. The goal is to reinvent online databases, and the insights were derived from the technical challenges he faces while building and scaling a previous company. At DoubleClick, the site could never be down, and that was during a time when computers were slower, it was harder to find load balance, and there were daily challenges with processing, storing, and scaling data, so much so they had to write their own software to handle their specific problems.
It was in these trenches that Merriman had the insight for MongoDB. He asked, simply: “What did I wish I had while at DoubleClick?” A simple question, a simple answer, and a big, big company. The goal with 10gen at inception was to harness the power of the cloud for more efficiency, to scale horizontally, and to make operations easier for scale at development. We talk about all of this, plus how to hire sales teams vs building engineering teams, and what Merriman believes the true essence of entrepreneurship is.
If you're a technical leader with ambition, there aren't many people like Merriman to look up to - he's well worth the time to listen closely to.
Editor's Note: Michael Abbott is a general partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, previously Twitter's VP of Engineering, and a founder himself. Mike also writes a blog called uncapitalized. You can follow him on Twitter @mabb0tt.
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Digg Video curation takes on the viral competition
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Nexus 5 review: the best phone $350 can buy
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Apple says US law enforcement agencies have made thousands of requests for user info
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India launches its first Mars mission, joins the interplanetary space race
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El eclipse solar de noviembre de 2013 visto desde el espacio
Situado en una órbita geoestacionaria a 35.786 sobre África el Meteosat-10 estaba en una posición ideal para capturar el eclipse híbrido de Sol del 3 de noviembre de 2013 desde el espacio, tal y como se ve en Solar Eclipse - October 2013 , un vídeo que por supuesto hay que ver a pantalla completa.
Cobertura del Meteosta-10
Las imágenes fueron capturadas por el instrumento SEVIRI, que es como una cámara capaz de obtener una imagen completa del globo terrestre cada 15 minutos en 12 bandas distintas, incluyendo el espectro visible, el infrarrojo, y del vapor de agua presente en la atmósfera. La resolución en la banda visible es de un kilómetro y de tres en el infrarrojo.
El SEVIRI durante su preparación para el lanzamiento - Matra/Marconi
Y sí, el título del vídeo, en efecto, está mal.
Otro satélite que pudo ver el eclipse fue el Elektro-L ruso, aunque como está más al este sólo pudo captar la fase final de este:
- Algunas imágenes del eclipse híbrido de Sol de noviembre de 2013, sin desperdicio.
- Las cuatro estaciones vistas desde el espacio en un vídeo, también por cortesía del Elektro-L.
via Microsiervos http://www.microsiervos.com/archivo/ciencia/eclipse-solar-noviembre-2013-visto-desde-el-espacio.html
Samsung Galaxy Gear Is an Oprah 'Favorite' Despite Mixed Reviews
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This is how the PlayStation 4 and Vita hook up via Remote Play
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iPad Air or Retina iPad Mini: Which New iPad Is for You?
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DropBox buys selling app Sold, generates linguistically nightmarish headlines
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MetroPCS to reach 15 more cities starting on November 21st
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NJIT Scientists invent new flexible battery: bend it, shape it, anyway you want it
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Peripheral Vision 010: RJD2 on the power of uncertainty
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Lavabit hopes to kickstart Dark Mail protocol by raising $200,000
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Everpix, The Cloud-Based Photo Startup, Is Shutting Down
When it comes to photo-oriented web services, for every slam-dunk success like Instagram, there seem to be quite a few Color-esque shutdowns. And today, another photo startup is hitting the deadpool.
Everpix, the San Francisco startup that launched its cloud-oriented photo storage and sharing platform at SF Disrupt in 2011, announced today it is shutting down. Starting now, new sign-ups and subscriptions are not available, and Everpix apps will switch to read-only mode. Operations will cease completely on December 15th, 2013. Everpix says that it will email its users with full details regarding exporting their photos and obtaining refunds.
The company, which had raised $1.8 million from investors including Index Ventures and 500 Startups, has six staff listed on LinkedIn. In a post on Everpix's official blog today entitled “We Gave It Our All…”, the company said that the shutdown comes as a result of failing to secure more capital or find an aquirer:
“It is with a heavy heart we announce that Everpix will be shutting down in the coming weeks.
…It's frustrating (to say the least) that we cannot continue to work on Everpix. We were unable to secure sufficient funding in order to properly scale the business, and our endeavors to find a new home for Everpix did not come to pass. At this point, we have no other options but to discontinue the service.”
Casey Newton wrote a great post-mortem of Everpix for The Verge today, which you can read here. I've reached out to Everpix's CEO Pierre-Olivier Latour for additional comment on the shutdown, and will update this post with any response.
Everpix really had created a beautiful app - you can see a demo of one of the most recent versions in this video interview from this past March - but it seems it just wasn't enough to keep things alive. Kudos to the Everpix team for being honest about its shutdown story and the difficulties the company faced in its final days.
via TechCrunch » Startups http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/techcrunch/startups/~3/lICbA9B9GwE/
Canadian government blocked potential Lenovo bid for BlackBerry over security concerns
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T-Mobile clarifies just when its monthly tablet data is truly free
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Rocket Internet's Linio Picks Up $50M To Further Build Out Its Latin American Amazon-style Marketplace
Linio, the Rocket Internet-incubated e-commerce portal that has aspirations to be the Amazon of Latin America, is today announcing a round of funding that brings on board the startup's first large, strategic local investor. Latin Idea, a Mexico based private-equity fund, is leading a $50 million round in the company, with participation from existing investors and Rocket regulars JP Morgan Asset Management, Investment AB Kinnevik, the Tengelmann Group, Summit Partners, and Rocket Internet itself.
This comes on the back of what appears to be two previous rounds in Linio: $26.5 million from Summit Partners in February 2013, and what is believed to be between $20 million and $26.5 million from Tengelmann in the same month. If these figures are accurate, that means over $100 million already for the company this year, after Linio was founded in 2012.
We've asked Rocket Internet and the company declines to disclose the total amount raised by Linio to date, or any figures on sales, run rate or other financials. (It does offer some fairly wooly ones, though: 20 million site hits; 2 million Facebook fans; 35,000 followers on Twitter.)
So what does Linio plan to do with the funding? A spokesperson confirms that it will not be to expand into new markets beyond existing operations in Mexico, Colombia, Peru and Venezuela - not yet, at least. This is somewhat surprising. In the e-commerce marketplace business model espoused by the likes of Amazon and eBay, economies of scale are of the utmost importance because margins on products are too low to make a business viable as a small operation.
For Linio, there will be scaling, but in its existing operations rather than into new countries. “We are delighted to have secured this new round of funding, which will allow us to continue our growth trajectory in existing markets, scale our operations, and continue to improve our service,” said Andreas Mjelde, CEO of Linio, in a statement. “Due to their great experience in supporting businesses in this region, Latin Idea is the perfect partner for us on our path to become the leader in all markets in which we operate. It is our aim to use this funding to increase our market share and market leadership in Mexico, Colombia, Peru and Venezuela.”
Latin America, and these countries specifically, are already home to a number of other Rocket Internet operations, and likely more in the future. What the company does is centralize logistics and other back-office functions for various businesses in order to cut down on operational costs.
To date, Linio has built its business offering products to consumers across some seven categories - technology, home, fashion, health and beauty, kids, books and magazines, and sports, with some 150,000 items in inventory.
Linio follows a larger trajectory at Rocket Internet that has seen the Berlin-based incubator move deeper into building out e-commerce businesses emerging markets in the last few years, after originally focusing on building businesses in Europe.
The earlier European strategy has seen Rocket sell operations to the likes of Groupon (CityDeal for around $100 million) and eBay (Alando for $54 million). The logic for the buyers is that buying Rocket Internet-created lookalikes is a quick way to enter new markets with an already-established presence.
With Europe much more saturated these days, the focus has shifted to markets where these U.S.-based giants have yet to make significant moves, and this is where services like Linio come in, with a large amount to capital to build out the operation. But as I pointed out in July, when Rocket Internet announced a new $500 million fund, the company may find it harder to find buyers to pay up for the kinds of valuations that such highly capitalized portfolio companies are getting. So it may be that what Rocket Internet is doing is building out businesses for the long run instead. This seems to be what is on the minds of Rocket Internet's founders, too:
“We have been building companies for the last 15 years in the internet space. We have long-term investors like JP Morgan and Summit and Kinnevik,” Rocket Internet co-founder Oliver Samwer told me in an interview at the time. “What they all share are two things: They are very long term oriented, and they are very international. They have a global perspective. The one benefit that we have is that we feel and think very much the same way they do. We start from scratch, and we have created sustainable companies, long-term investments where it is up to us to choose the route to liquidity.
“Our biggest mistake we made in the first 10 years was to not build the biggest business, but to sell businesses too early," he continued. "We sold a company for only $54 million [Alando] that until recently [see: Europe recession, and the ineluctable rise of PayPal] was eBay's best acquisition ever. It was our mistake to exit too early… And back then we needed to create a track record to be able to do what we can do today. We have grown up.”
The key will be to see whether Linio becomes a strong independent player in this new-look Rocket Internet - or at the least be a strong contender for a Rocket Internet liquidity event of old.
via TechCrunch » Startups http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/techcrunch/startups/~3/JK1ZEZVDEqo/
Albumatic Becomes Koa.la, Aims To Build Hit Apps For Kik And Other Messengers
Photo-sharing startup Albumatic is announcing a new direction today, and a new name to match - it's now calling itself Koa.la.
Back in August, when I last wrote about Albumatic, the company was already pivoting away from being an event-focused photo app and towards a focus on sharing and collaborating on photo albums with friends, regardless of where they are and whether they're at the same event.
However, co-founder Adam Ludwin (who previously led RRE Ventures' investment in social video app Vine) told me that even then, the team was aware that there were plenty of “headwinds” that would make it difficult for a photo app to become a huge hit. In the week while they were waiting for Apple to approve the app, they decided to “hedge” by working on something new - a photo app that integrated with messaging company Kik, which recently launched a platform for “Cards” that integrate with its app.
Now Albumatic/Koa.la is shifting its entire focus to Kik, with the goal of building apps for other messaging platforms down the road. Ludwin said his team has already built three apps/Cards, the most popular of which is Costume Party, a game for sharing drawn-over photos within Kik. Costume Party apparently saw 1 million players in its first 22 hours, is now approaching 4 million players, and could grow to 10 million players by the end of the year, Ludwin said.
Basically, it sounds like the Koa.la team is hoping that messaging will become the next big social platform. He noted that Kik is already approaching 100 million users, so he argued, “If we ever run out of Kik users, we have bigger, more exciting problems.” He also argued that other messaging apps will have to follow Kik's lead and become a platform if they “want to be more than a feature-based service.”
Meanwhile, Ludwin's company will continue to support the Albumatic photo-sharing app, but the team will no longer be actively developing it.
“The Albumatic app is doing fine in terms of numbers,” he said. “The truth that everyone knows and no one wants to say is that if you're a mobile app, you're either growing very, very fast and you're one of the three that matter, or you're one of everyone else. Why overexert ourselves in such a highly saturated market when we had this wide open opportunity that we could really execute on?”
Behind the scenes, Ludwin said the Koa.la team (including new CTO Ryan Smith) has built a platform that will allow it to rapidly build a number of Kik apps and experiment with different approaches.
“We're not trying to build Clash of Clans,” he added. “We're not going to build really massive games because I don't think that's actually appropriate for a messaging concept. … They are much lighter by default than a native app.”
via TechCrunch » Startups http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/techcrunch/startups/~3/wDupe9_FP0Y/
MessageMe Adds A Web Client, Streamlines Its ID System
MessageMe, which is dueling in the hyper-competitive messaging app war with backing from Greylock Partners and other top VCs, is adding a web client and overhauling its ID system in a bid to boost user engagement.
The app, which has 8 million registered users, is adding a way for web users to constantly stay in touch with friends on mobile devices. It's a web-based client that should help it keep up with the stickiness of competitors like Facebook and its standalone Facebook Messenger.
As you would expect, the web-based app synchronizes chats across mobile devices and web.
It also - like the MessageMe mobile app - makes it easy to drag and drop photos in, send YouTube videos and play animated GIFs. (But GIFs unfortunately don't play in the mobile app, although it's a much requested feature.) The popular doodling feature is also incorporated in.
They're also overhauling the ID feature, which used to mimic Blackberry's old messenger system where users got ID numbers. Instead, they're adding basic usernames, like what you'd see on other chat apps like Tencent's WeChat or on Facebook, which went on to offer vanity usernames.
“We're making it easier for people to claim their usernames, search for and identify one another with understandable IDs,” said COO Ali Rosenthal.
The changes come as MessageMe faces a plethora of well-funded challengers across the globe like Japan's Line, Tencent's WeChat, the venerable WhatsApp and Facebook. MessageMe's reach is strongest in countries like Russia, the U.S. and the Middle East. They see more than 2 million photos and stickers sent per day in the U.S.
“We're not first movers in this market. It's very competitive and crowded,” Rosenthal said. “There are so many players and there's a willingness on part of the average consumer to try different experiences, especially if the ones they're having aren't sticky enough.”
She said that one area MessageMe will be moving in is toward better group messaging, since that seems to be something that users really actively engage in and could differentiate the product more. MessageMe has about half a million active groups with an average of 15 per each group.
via TechCrunch » Startups http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/techcrunch/startups/~3/KRKRniuSkus/
Switzerland's BugBuster Secures $1 Million Series A For Its Cloud-Based Bug Detection Software
You say Seed round, we say Series A.
BugBuster, a startup spun out of the Operating Systems Laboratory at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL), has raised just over $1 million in what's being described as a Series A round - such is the state of available funding in some parts of Europe. This adds to the $1 million previously raised by the company since it was founded in 2011.
The investment, from a consortium of angels (BAS and Go Beyond), and previous backers Polytech Ventures, and Hasler Foundation, will be used by BugBuster to bring its cloud-based automated bug detection software for Web apps to market following the completion of Beta testing this month, and for further development.
Competing with the likes of Selenium and WebDriver, the Lausanne, Switzerland-based startup offers developers a cloud-based solution for automated testing of the front-end code driving their Web apps - currently supporting HTML5 and Javascript.
Because it's cloud-based, at its most basic, you enter the URL of your Web app, from which BugBuster will automatically explore your app and execute its code, find and report any bugs, along with screenshots and precise debugging information.
In addition, the SaaS offers an API so that you can specify the business rules of your application and direct BugBuster, giving you control of where and how your application is tested. This includes the ability to track “goals” to ensure your application does what it's supposed to do, and “watchers” to monitor the state of your application and react accordingly.
I'm told that the service has been in Beta since June and has around 400 companies currently testing it. During this period, BugBuster says that bugs were detected in 89% of all applications tested. Now if only somebody could write an app to automatically fix them, too.
via TechCrunch » Startups http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/techcrunch/startups/~3/W7kW4xesskk/
Verizon's budget-minded Ellipsis 7 tablet ships November 7th for $250
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Amped Wireless gets into the streaming audio market with BTSA1 Bluetooth adapter (video)
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Google Now updated for iOS, brings notifications, reminders, new cards and hands-free voice controls
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