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Thursday, 5 December 2013
Engadget's Holiday Gift Guide 2013: Audio
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Engadget Podcast 371 - 12.4.13
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Swapbox Lands $800K To Take On Google’s BufferBox And Amazon’s Lockers
San Francisco-based startup and Y Combinator Winter 2013 class member Swapbox has raised $800,000 in seed funding, led by Tony Hsieh’s Vegas Tech Fund investment vehicle and including Fuel Capital, YC founder Trevor Blackwell, Base Ventures and Ace & Company. The startup is hoping to cash in on the rise of ecommerce and home delivery, with shared, centrally located delivery lockers so people never miss a package again.
Swapbox isn’t alone with that aim, and it’s pitting itself against some heavy hitters; both Google and Amazon already have delivery pick-up initiatives in place, Amazon via its Lockers programs in select cities, and Google through BufferBox, a Waterloo-based startup it acquired last year. BufferBox recently went live in San Francisco, where it has packages accepted by local businesses. Swapbox co-founder and CEO Neel Murthy thinks there’s still room for a startup in the space, however.
“We accept any packages from anywhere. Shop online, we give you a new address and you just ship to that address,” he said in an interview. “It’s an independent platform that works for all the other ecommerce players.”
The service is piloting in SF, where it has 15 locations currently. Each consists of heavily modified gym lockers located at businesses around the city, and Murthy says they’ve paid special attention to industrial design with their physical hardware, in order to help with branding. The plan is to expand to surrounding areas near SF within the next year, and then look further afield soon after. Swapbox has different arrangements with its location partners, but most involve some kind of rev share of the service fee paid for by its users.
The business as it stands looks like a prime target for some other online retailer hoping to keep up with Amazon and Google to gobble up, but Murthy says they’ve built Swapbox as a long-term play. There’s plenty they’re planning to add later on, and the intent is to hopefully move the burden of cost from the consumer to the ecommerce players once they get enough scale. There’s also a plan to use Swapbox’s capabilities to essentially build in a type of escro for small merchants and private sale deals, Murthy says.
That would work by allowing sellers, on Craigslist for example, to use the Swapbox locations to exchange goods, with a seller controlling access for a buyer based on when payment clears. It takes out any of the uncertainty around meeting a total stranger online with a wad of cash or expensive gadget in their pocket. The escrow play could extend beyond just the private exchange scenario in theory, too.
Swapbox chose its investors mostly for their value as strategic partners, according to Murthy, and Zappos founder Tony Hsieh is a very strategic one indeed for a company this tied to online commerce. Google and Amazon may have a head start on automated delivery, but there’s definitely room for an open platform to serve everyone else, and Swapbox could be the one to step up in that role.
via TechCrunch » Startups http://techcrunch.com/2013/12/05/swapbox-automated-delivery-seed-funding/
Foursquare redesign for iOS brings you more location info at a glance
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Bing Maps Preview showcases new mapping experience 'built from the ground up' for Windows 8.1
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MSI reveals two GT60 laptops with 3K displays
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New York Times' Today's Paper web app brings print-like design, offline reading to browsers
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After 12M Downloads, Houzz Launches Redesigned iOS App With Full Screen Images, Easier Navigation
Houzz, the popular online platform for home remodeling and design, is launching a completely redesigned iOS app for iPhone and iPad today. The new version features an updated look and feel in line with Apple’s iOS 7 design guidelines, but also improved navigation, support for AirDrop and an emphasis on full screen photos.
As Alon Cohen, Houzz‘ president and co-founder, told me, the team considered to quickly release a new version after the launch of iOS 7. In the end, however, Houzz decided to hold back and use the switch to the new flat design language on iOS to give the app more than just a facelift.
“iOS 7 came along and we had the option to either just do a quick update, or use this opportunity to overhaul the UI completely and support some of the iOS 7 specific features,” he told me. This means the app now features many of the new graphical effects iOS 7 introduced, for example, and makes use of dynamic type and the new, and relatively little utilized, AirDrop capability in the updated OS.
Cohen was especially excited about the AirDrop functionality. This now allows somebody in a tile showroom, for example, to quickly share an image (or anything else) from Houzz with a designer there, something that was previously a bit more cumbersome.
As he stressed, though, an app that’s as popular as Houzz, which has reached over 12 million downloads now and streams over 600 terabytes of data every month, always has to ensure that it doesn’t alienate its users with an update that’s too radical. “We’ve seen incredible adoption of our mobile apps with 55 percent of users remodeling their homes with Houzz from a mobile device,” Cohen said and the team obviously doesn’t want to upset these users with a bad redesign. The new version definitely streamlines the navigation, though, and with the addition of full screen images, it also often hides it almost completely when necessary.
The team made another major change, though. In the new app, Cohen told me, the focus of the navigation has changed. Now the team has tried to put the content before the navigation. This means you don’t have to select a room first when you are browsing the app, for example. Instead you see the images first and then narrow your selection by room, style and location.
Cohen also noted that finding reviews of contractors, designers, landscapers and other professionals is now easier in the new design. The service currently features over 300,000 professionals on the site and they have uploaded over 2.4 million photos. For Houzz, this is also a major source of income, as many of these pros sign up for its paid Pro+ service to highlight their work for users in a specific area.
via TechCrunch » Startups http://techcrunch.com/2013/12/05/after-12m-downloads-houzz-launches-redesigned-ios-app-with-full-screen-images-easier-navigation/
Google now lets you download your Gmail and Calendar data
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Quip's mobile-native word processing comes to Android
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Bluetooth Devices Are About to Get a Lot Smarter
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Redesigned Ford Mustang Takes You Back to 1969
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Amazon’s Grocery Delivery Service, AmazonFresh, May Launch In SF Next Week
What’s better than drones delivering your stuff?
Drones delivering your food*.
According to ATD, Amazon may be ready to announce the San Francisco launch of AmazonFresh, the online retailer’s grocery delivery service, on December 10.
As it stands now, Amazon is already running the AmazonFresh program in Seattle (the company’s home base) and Los Angeles. Alongside ATD’s unnamed sources, there is additional evidence pointing toward the forthcoming SF launch.
SF folks have spotted AmazonFresh trucks in the wild, and we’ve even come across a job posting.
Users are already enjoying buying non-fresh grocery items on Amazon, and some even get two-day delivery with an Amazon Prime membership. AmazonFresh, on the other hand, will offer users fresh items like produce, meats, milk, etc. with either same- or next-day delivery. Pretty sweet, huh?
For existing members of the AmazonFresh program, the service costs $299/year.
Amazon may not make amazing margins in grocery delivery, but the move makes sense considering that Amazon wants to own the entire shopping experience, from electronics to clothes to household essentials and back again.
The more users Amazon can wrangle into a membership, such as Prime or AmazonFresh, the more opportunities Amazon has to sell those members items they wouldn’t normally get. If you pay a relatively high yearly fee for free delivery from a retailer, you’ll make sure to use that retailer for as much as possible. Gotta get your money’s worth.
Groceries are a great factor in this strategy as… well, a girl’s gotta eat.
*And, to be clear, AmazonFresh in San Francisco will not come with drone delivery.
via TechCrunch » Startups http://techcrunch.com/2013/12/05/amazons-grocery-delivery-service-amazonfresh-may-launch-in-sf-next-week/
Double Dragon Trilogy punches its way to Android and iOS (video)
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China warns banks against using Bitcoin
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GameStick lands first major publisher deal with Ubisoft
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Fleksy predictive keyboard for Android exits beta, multilingual support and iOS integration in the pipeline
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Homejoy Raises $38M As It Looks To Expand Beyond Home Cleaning
Homejoy, a startup that makes it easy and relatively affordable ($20 an hour) to sign up for a home cleaning, is announcing that it has raised $38 million in new funding.
The money was actually raised across two rounds — a Series A led by Google Ventures and a Series B led by Redpoint Ventures. The rounds were raised within “a couple months of each other,” said co-founder and CEO Adora Cheung, which is why they’re being announced at the same time.
Max Levchin, First Round Capital, Oliver Jung, and Mike Hirshland (most of whom had invested previously) also participated. Altogether, Homejoy says it has now raised a total of $40 million.
The Y Combinator-incubated startup first launched its service under the name Pathjoy last year. It says it’s now available in 30 markets in the United States and Canada and employs more than 100 people who work with “thousands of professional service providers” (i.e., cleaners). Cheung told me that the company’s revenue and other metrics have been growing by double digits every month.
Homejoy also recently established a foundation to support veterans and military families in need.
Moving forward, Cheung said her biggest worry is “scaling with quality”: “It’s great to grow fast, but you also want to grow fast and maintain that quality.” (For what it’s worth, I’ve been a pretty regular Homejoy customer since I first wrote about the company, and I’m usually happy with the service — my only complaint has been the fact that the wait for a cleaning can sometimes be several weeks.) Behind the scenes, the company says it has built a fairly sophisticated technical infrastructure to manage its workforce.
Beyond funding overall growth, Cheung said the money could also help Homejoy expand into areas beyond cleaning that are also related to home services and tie into the company’s goal of “making happier homes.”
“We’re definitely thinking about it,” she said. “Honestly, there’s no timeline for us right now. We don’t have any hard set dates, but you’ll see something in 2014.”
It’s interesting to compare Homejoy, which has been focused on cleaning since its public launch, with more generalized on-demand task services like Exec and TaskRabbit. Exec has since shut down its errand service to focus on cleaning (and lowered its prices as well) while TaskRabbit also “realigned” (with some layoffs) to focus on its enterprise and mobile offerings.
via TechCrunch » Startups http://techcrunch.com/2013/12/05/homejoy-38-m/
ClearDATA Lands $14M To Give The Healthcare Industry A HIPAA-Compliant Cloud Alternative To AWS And Rackspace
As Big Data and analytics are take hold in nearly every industry, a whole new set of demands and problems face IT teams within organizations. This is especially true among healthcare companies, which are now struggling in masse to upgrade archaic infrastructure and technology and reduce costs both for the sake of their businesses and for their customers.
While moving to the cloud can help reduce costs and increase agility, given the sensitivity of health data, healthcare clouds need to be HIPAA-compliant — in other words, the security of health data and applications is paramount.
Companies like Box are rising to fill the gap, as the enterprise storage and collaboration giant has begun to serve healthcare providers, and recently secured HIPAA-compliance for its new platform. While newcomers like Box are bringing more attention to the problem, startups like ClearDATA are growing fast thanks to clouds built exclusively for the healthcare industry.
Now serving over 300,000 healthcare professionals and hosting data and apps (including tens of millions of health records) for a litany of healthcare providers, ClearData has raised $14 million in Series B funding as it looks to expand its platform and move into new geographies. Investors in the startup’s latest round include Merck Global Health Innovation Fund, Excel Venture Management and Norwest Venture Partners.
The round includes the $7 million ClearDATA announced in August, explaining that it decided to hold a second closing of its Series B round to allow the participation of its newest strategic investor, Merck Global.
As Alex explained at the time, ClearDATA’s appeal lies in its healthcare-centric approach to data, offering healthcare customers an end-to-end service designed to make it easy to move their apps and data to the cloud, while accessing that data over a private Internet connection. It also uses a data storage model that makes it easy for companies to locate its data to allow the kind of auditing required by healthcare privacy requirements and HIPAA.
In this sense, ClearDATA differs from AWS, Azure or Rackspace in that its storage equipment is custom-designed for health data and images. This allows the company to compete with the massive footprints of cloud providers like Amazon, for example, which offers a more general-purpose cloud and a growing set of storage services and analytics tools.
Today, the healthcare information technology market is growing at a breakneck speed thanks to the demands of thousands of healthcare providers looking to go digital, transfer health records to the cloud and maintain huge amounts of critical (and sensitive) data.
These companies often lack the resources and capacity to design, deploy and manage their applications, and they’re looking for rentable, on-demand infrastructure as a result. Plus, none of the commercial clouds can meet the particular requirements of healthcare’s migration to the cloud line-for-line, so that’s where ClearDATA wants to help.
By customizing its cloud to meet these unique demands, it now works with customers that range from small organizations and practices to hospitals and large clinics, and extending to client-server and SaaS-based healthcare software providers.
For more, find ClearDATA at home here.
via TechCrunch » Startups http://techcrunch.com/2013/12/05/cleardata-lands-14m-to-give-the-healthcare-industry-a-hipaa-compliant-cloud-alternative-to-aws-and-rackspace/
Fleksy’s Android Keyboard Gets First Stable Release, Adds Multiple Languages To Beta
San Francisco-based Fleksy offers predictive text typing that’s so intuitive it can be used without even a glance at a screen, and now the app is finally exiting beta on Android. Fleksy works by analyzing a user’s typing pattern, no matter how sloppy, and making predictions about what keys they’re trying to hit, and it does this so well it enables even users with impaired or no vision to use a touchscreen keyboard.
Fleksy founders Kosta Eleftheriou and Ioannis Verdelis have been building Fleksy and refining it for years now, and Eleftheriou previously built an app called BlindType that offered similar functionality, which he later sold to Google in 2010. Fleksy exiting beta is a big milestone for the startup, and the company is also introducing multiple language support to the beta version of Fleksy, which will exist alongside the $3.99 full version.
“We have adjusted a lot of the gestures, user interface, tutorial, menus, as well as the algorithms themselves based on user feedback,” Verdelis explained in an interview, when asked what’s changed between when Fleksy first launched in beta and now. “We have a very active community of about 35,000 members and we engage them regularly.”
As for the multi-lingual support, that’s a key differentiator for any kind of software replacement keyboard, and Verdelis says that Fleksy can add new ones quickly and with improved accuracy versus their competitors.
“Due to our unique approach to the task of typing, we can roll out languages much quicker than others have expanded,” he said. “We will be launching four new languages in the beta program simultaneously with the Google play launch, but we have 25 languages under development in total, including Asian languages, right now.”
Aside from the Android launch and beta improvements, Fleksy is also getting closer to officially launching its iOS SDK with partners who have incorporated the software. The SDK, which we covered previously, will allow devs on Apple’s mobile platform to build Fleksy into their apps as a replacement for Apple’s own native keyboard. It’s not quite as convenient as letting the user replace their keyboard system-wide, but Apple doesn’t allow that kind of access for third-party devs, and so this workaround is the best possible solution, akin to what Google has done with Chrome on iOS.
Verdelis says that we’ll hear more about iOS and the first apps to use the SDK “soon,” so it’ll be interesting to see who they’ve signed up. The company has come a long way on the back of its existing funding of just under $4 million, and looks poised to continue its product growth quickly now that it’s out of closed beta.
via TechCrunch » Startups http://techcrunch.com/2013/12/05/fleksy-android-keyboard-exits-beta/
Asà se ve el mundo desde un Mig-31 en vuelo
Artur Sarkisyan fue piloto de la Fuerza Aérea Soviética y cuando dejó esto siguió vinculado al mundo de la aviación, trabajando como fotógrafo con equipos acrobáticos como los Russian Knights, los Swifts, o los Russ.
Por eso igual no le costó demasiado convencer a los jerifaltes correspondientes de que le dejaran montar unas GoPro en un Mig-31 con unos soportes especiales diseñados a tal efecto.
El resultado es MiG31 ASvideo , con unos puntos de vista muy poco habituales; en este making of hay unas cuantas fotos y un poco de texto sobre el asunto.
(Lo vio pasar Hugo por Sploid, donde a su vez lo habÃan visto en The Aviationist).
via Microsiervos http://www.microsiervos.com/archivo/aerotrastorno/asi-se-ve-el-mundo-desde-un-mig-31-en-vuelo.html
Spotify Backer Northzone Raising New $272M Fund For Startups With “Nordic DNA”, $204M Secured So Far
Northzone, the Scandinavian VC that was an early backer of music streaming service Spotify and other notable startups out of the region, today announced that it is raising a new, €200 million ($272 million) fund, which it will use to invest in more startups with “Nordic DNA”. It says that €150 million ($204 million) has been secured so far.
Northzone VII is the VC’s biggest yet. That is a measure not just of Northzone’s own track record, but also of the growing interest among investors to tap into more startups outside of their traditional heartland of Silicon Valley, which is overcrowded not just with companies but also sharp-elbowed VCs jockeying for pole position to fund them.
In many cases, that will mean Northzone will be focusing on founders building companies in countries like Sweden, Norway, Finland and Denmark; but it can also mean startups in cities like London that have been established by people who cut their teeth working with Nordic-influenced startups. (For example, one of the Northzone’s recent investments is London-based SpaceApe Games, co-founded by the ex-head of product for Playfish, and former head of monetization for Skype in its more formative years).
The unifying themes of these companies also extend into a distinct set of characteristics, Northzone says. “Three key components stick out when it comes to companies from this region: they think global from day one, they’re lean, and they put a user-friendly design at the forefront of their agenda. This makes the products and businesses scalable from very early on,” the VC writes.
“Over the past eighteen years, we have been fortunate to be involved in the growth of companies such as Spotify, Avito, Tobii, Pricerunner, iZettle and many more,” said partner Pär-Jörgen Pärson in a statement. “We see many attractive investment opportunities driven by an increasing rate of innovation and a large and growing pool of dedicated and talented entrepreneurs coming out of the Nordic region. Thanks to the commitment of new and longstanding limited partners, we will continue to play a key role in this development.”
Northzone says that existing investors have participated in the fund, alongside a few notable new additions, SEB Pension Fund and AP6.
via TechCrunch » Startups http://techcrunch.com/2013/12/05/spotify-backer-northzone-raising-new-272m-fund-for-startups-with-nordic-dna-204m-secured-so-far/
Hoping To Find Space Between WordPress And Tumblr, Journal App Narrato Adds Web Publishing
As tempting as it is to call this a pivot of sorts, in many ways Narrato is returning to its roots. The journal app for iOS can still be used for private lifelogging, pulling in and curating various content such as Tweets, Foursquare checkins, and Quantified Self data. However, hoping to occupy the space left between WordPress and Tumblr — if such a space exists — the UK startup is beefing up the journaling side of Narrato with the introduction of Web publishing. Specific journals can now be made fully public, appearing in a new Web directory, or sharable via a private URL.
The move, says Narrato co-founder Ramy Khuffash, came about after lessons learned from observing how the app’s 50,000 users (~44% of which are active monthly) currently use the app. Top of that list is way people mash up different kinds of ‘lifelogging’ data. In particular, Quantified Selfers, thus far, tend to only be those who are interested in fitness-related data, which obviously narrows down the appeal of Narrato as it was conceived. That said, the startup is still intending on opening up its platform to developers who could come up with ways to make the data proposition stick.
But what has garnered wider appeal is the app’s simple journaling features, such as the ability for a user to create different kinds of journals for different parts of their lives, whether that be original journal entries or curating timely or topic-related content pulled in from their Narrato Life Stream. It’s a use-case that was crying out for a way of publishing those journals on the Web.
“We launched Narrato as a lifelogging service that lets you import your content from services you already use. Our intention was to help people learn more about themselves by highlighting trends and correlations in their data,” explains Khuffash. “The problem was that most people interested in the Quantified Self were only interested in specific aspects, mainly fitness. The few who track more parts of life see the value in aggregating their data and looking for deeper insights, but not enough to want to pay for it.”
Instead, Khuffash says its users “love how easy lifelogging is with Narrato” and enjoy organising their content into journals based on topics and events. “We decided to focus our efforts on what was working”.
Furthermore, not all users want to keep all of their journals private, all of the time. A requested feature, says Khuffash, was the option to have controlled, per-journal sharing. “You can continue recording your life unfiltered with Narrato because it’s private by default, but you now have the option of making journals private, unlisted, or public. Only the people with access to your unique link can see your unlisted journal, and public journals are searchable for anyone to enjoy.”
This means that you can have a private journal for your most private thoughts and data, while, for example, you could also create a holiday journal (see example) that you share with friends, or a parenting journal only given out to close family members.
“There’s no shortage of online publishing options, but none make it as easy to record and organise life privately, with the option of controlled sharing, which is what we’re seeing clear demand for.”
via TechCrunch » Startups http://techcrunch.com/2013/12/05/no-lolcats-here/
ASUS's PadFone Mini edges closer to release following global certification
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Medium brings design and photo improvements to its social publishing platform
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Este buque es más largo que un dÃa sin pan. Y que cualquier otro buque
El buque Prelude FLNG tiene 488 metros de largo y supera la longitud del enorme petrolero Knock Nevis. Puesto de pie, en vertical, el Prelude serÃa más alto que las Torres Petronas (452 metros).
Construido con unas 260 000 toneladas de acero el Prelude puede desplazar hasta 600 000 toneladas cuando está cargado a su máxima capacidad: esto son tres o cuatro veces más la capacidad de desplazamiento del impresionante pero a su lado pequeño portacontenedores Triple-E de 400 metros de longitud.
De modo que por ahora el Prelude es claramente el navÃo más grande que se ha construido. Pero resulta que es una suerte de planta flotante para procesar gas, asà que al parecer es más correcto referirse al Prelude como la instalación flotante más grande que se ha construido hasta ahora.
via Microsiervos http://www.microsiervos.com/archivo/mundoreal/este-buque-es-mas-largo-que-un-dia-sin-pan-y-que-cualquier-otro-buque.html
UK giveaway: Win a Cube 3D printer courtesy of Cartridgediscount.co.uk
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UK government scraps the paper car tax disc after more than 90 years
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«Estás usando el móvil mientras caminas y es peligroso. Por favor, para»
Algo asà es lo que se supone que pone en la pantalla del móvil de la imagen de arriba. El peatón está a punto de morir arrollado por un tren por ir leyendo la pantalla del teléfono, riesgo del que precisamente está siendo advertido desde el teléfono.
Es lo que hace el servicio de la compañÃa japonesa Docomo. La operadora móvil ha habilitado un servicio voluntario y gratuito por el que el teléfono alerta al usuario si lo utiliza a la vez que está caminando.
El mensaje de aviso permanece en pantalla imposibilitando el uso del teléfono; para quitarlo hay que detenerse y hacer cosas de quitar mensajes, como sea. Desde Google puedes traducir la nota de prensa original en japonés por si tampoco das crédito del nivel de lerdez al que estamos llegando.
via Microsiervos http://www.microsiervos.com/archivo/gadgets/mensaje-peligro-usar-movil-caminando-operadora-japones.html
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