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Thursday, 16 January 2014
Los efectos colaterales de la compra de Nest Labs por parte de Google
Subidón de valor de las acciones de NEST
Hace unos días Google anunciaba la compra de Nest Labs, la empresa fundada por Tony Fadell y Matt Rogers, dos antiguos empleados de Apple, que fabrica un termostato revolucionario.
Con esto una pequeña empresa que fabrica equipos de control de tráfico se encontró con que sus acciones subían de repente hasta un 4.900 por ciento.
Y todo porque Nestor Inc. cotiza en bolsa como NEST, mientras que por su parte Nest Labs, la empresa de los termostatos comprada por Google, no cotiza en bolsa.
Como dicen en Gurusblog, la compra de Nest Labs por parte de Google ha servido para dejar claro que El mercado es perfectamente idiota .
Aunque también cabe pensar que igual unos cuantos listos, oliéndose la tostada, hayan podido comprar NEST pronto, esperando a que subiera, para sacarle un dinerillo vendiéndoselo a los incautos que vinieran detrás.
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Music Social Media Aggregator Rouse Enters Sports Scene To Kill App-Hopping
While creating a new breakthrough social network has proved difficult, the battle for shaping the first breakthrough aggregator of social network feeds – the gateway to our online lives – is still ongoing. So is the battle for becoming the big aggregator of others’ online lives, such as celebrities, musicians and sports stars – some extremely reliant on their social media buzz – and that is where the Roslyn, New York-based Rouse Social is trying to break into the market.
The app, which launched last summer and so far has racked up 45,000 users, gathers, social media, news stories and events in a real-time feed, with individual artist pages featuring bios and some access to songs. It also aggregates all social buzz around big concerts and festivals through hashtags, and has a ‘Get Discovered’ section where aspiring artists and bands can submit songs for Rouse users to access.
“It’s the next evolution of social media,” Siegelman said. “There’s no need to app-hop anymore.”
The sports version, Sport Street, launched this month, conveniently right in time for the NFL playoffs. Like Rouse, it aims to be more inclusive than its predecessors by including not only the posts by athletes or teams, but also to draw content from relevant beat writers and team reporters.
While promising to kill the need to hop between half a dozen or so social media platforms to stay on top of what your favorite artists or sports figures are doing, Rouse, somewhat ironically, started out as just that – another social network.
Created for avid sports fans, the site’s aggregation all social feeds from teams and players quickly emerged as its most popular feature, leading the co-founders Daniel Smith and Max Siegelman to more or less drop the network aspect and focus on the aggregation. Possibly driven by many sports’ seasonality, the duo chose to break into the more continuous social media scene of artists and bands.
Behind the app are Smith, who brings experience from SMS advertising network 4Info and previously designed a mobile app for Paris Hilton, and Siegelman, a Roslyn native who was the goalie for State University of New York-Oneonta’s soccer team.
The duo has so far received $1.5 million in funding.
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Starbucks plans to secure user information with updated iOS app
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NetZero's mobile broadband now works wherever Sprint has 3G
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Latest LG phone leak keeps hope alive for keyboard lovers
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Skype update for iOS brings two-way HD video chat to newer Apple devices
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Moto G Google Play edition hands-on (video)
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Facebook adds Trending topics so you always know what's hot in your corner of the social universe
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Education Giant Blackboard Buys MyEdu To Help Refresh Its Brand And Reanimate Its User Experience
Over the years, Blackboard has become one of the most familiar brands in the world of education. Today, Blackboard’s learning management system (LMS) and educational tools are used in 75 percent of colleges and universities and more than half of K-12 districts in the U.S. With more than 20 million users across 20,000 organizations, the 16-year-old company remains the dominant player in the market, serving both professional and academic sectors.
However, in spite of its long-standing dominance, Blackboard hasn’t always inspired songs of praise. Designed to be a utility in the ilk of productivity software, the learning management system focused on efficiency and solving workflow and organizational headaches for administrators and teachers. But for college students, Blackboard’s user experience and unwieldy interface became infamous as a part of academic life that was to be endured, not enjoyed.
After years of ups and downs, the departure of its founders, declining brand image and the move from private company to public company back to private, the company is showing signs that its ready for a revamp, particularly of its core product: The LMS. That begins with the news this week that it has acquired MyEdu, a three-year-old startup and maker of a platform that aims to help students reduce the cost of a college education, plan their degree and find a job.
The terms of the deal were not disclosed, though we do know that, as MyEdu and its team of 20 employees join Blackboard’s ranks, the startup will continue to work out of its headquarters in Austin. In terms of the acquisition’s effect on the end user? According to MyEdu Chief Project Officer Frank Lyman, aside from the gradual expansion of its career platform, the effects on current users will be minimal, and the platform will remain free for anyone to sign up.
Since its founding in 2009, MyEdu has developed its platform to provide value to students in three key areas, all of which revolve around the core goal of helping young people to manage their academic careers in a way that improves their chances of getting a job.
From the beginning, MyEdu has methodically hoovered up student and university data in an effort to identify patterns that lead to higher costs. Not only does it offer grading information and aggregate professor reviews, but it has worked to collect detailed public course data in an effort to make it easier for students to know which professor teaches which classes and which classroom those courses are offered in.
On top of that, MyEdu offers tools that allow students to create online portfolios, not unlike a student-centric LinkedIn, where they can showcase their skills, displaying coursework and professor recommendations and so on. Backing its degree planning resources are its career tools, MyEdu’s third key area of focus, which aim to help students find internships and make it easier for employers to connect with students and recruit top talent.
Today, with the help of nearly $20 million in outside funding, MyEdu’s platform now offers data from over 800 institutions across the country and over one million students have used MyEdu to help manage their college experience and connect with employers — with 660,000 of those students having created accounts in the last 14 months. In turn, Lyman says that more than 200,000 students have made their profiles public on the platform, which he sees as validation of the demand among students for a college-centric digital portfolio and resume platform.
It is here that Blackboard stands to benefit most from its acquisition of MyEdu’s degree management and career planning platform. Education platforms and learning management technology in particular are being rapidly transformed by the consumerization of user experiences and are increasingly beginning to view the student as the consumer when it comes to product development.
Through its acquisition of MyEdu, Blackboard now has access to a network of student profiles, where users are encouraged to write “endorsements” a la LinkedIn rather than simply rating each other, along with career planning features, which together help the company strengthen the bridge between school and life outside. Traditionally, Blackboard has struggled with the discrepancy between the two and with effectively integrating new technologies across its own product portfolio.
MyEdu will be the first big test for Blackboard. The company desperately needs to improve its user experience and increase continuity between its products and between its interface and experience. To that end, as Blackboard looks to renew its focus on product design going forward, it seems that one of MyEdu’s key selling points was its user-friendly design and UX.
In an interview with Inside Higher Ed, the Blackboard CEO said that “in the context of design, MyEdu is one of the better ones I’ve seen. You can’t quantify cool, but it’s a very cool product.”
With an increasingly digitally savvy student population that has grown up with Facebook and social networking, the LMS is changing — both in the “consumerization” of its product and as a utility that focuses not only on better sharing, but better connecting the college campus with life outside. Blackboard may have the users and the bulk of marketshare, but what it does not have is a “cool” product. With any luck, the acquisition of MyEdu augurs baby steps in that direction. After all, if you can’t manufacture cool from within, and you have the money, why not buy some?
For more, find Blackboard’s announcement here.
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LG G Flex coming to Sprint January 31st for $300, preorders begin today
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Hershey and 3D Systems join forces to create printable confections
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Sharp's latest high-res Windows tablet is an Ultrabook minus the keyboard
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CBS schedules premieres for Extant and Under the Dome, Amazon gets them days later
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Xbox multimedia exec steps down, cites Microsoft's new 'direction'
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Google Now comes to Chrome on the desktop in experimental form
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From A Failing Product To A Successful Video-Sharing App, Mindie Raises $1.2 Million
Mindie’s story is a great tale for every aspiring entrepreneur. When I first talked with the French team, the startup wasn’t working on its viral music video app, but was working on something completely different called Ever.
In only a few months, Mindie was able to abandon its storytelling app Ever, create another app, release it, get a bit of traction. And now it just closed a $1.2 million seed round from SV Angel and others — it even had to turn down investors. In the coming weeks, the team will also relocate to San Francisco.
As a reminder, Mindie is a video-sharing app with a twist. When you record a video, you first pick a soundtrack and shoot a few seconds of video like you would on Vine. Then you share it on Twitter and Facebook. Music is the story of your video, it’s what makes the app so different from Vine, which became a comedy app.
Investors include SV Angel, Lower Case Ventures, Betaworks, David Tisch, Dave Morin with Slow Ventures, CrunchFund (disclosure: CrunchFund founder Michael Arrington previously founded TechCrunch), Pete Cashmore, Lady Gaga ex-manager Troy Carter, and Chris Howard. This is the story of how Mindie came to be.
Building ‘Ever’ Then Restarting From Scratch
Mindie’s first app, Ever, had nothing new to offer. It was yet another storytelling app, like Backspaces, Checkthis and others. A post was basically a few pictures tucked together with a location, a soundtrack and titles. Here’s what it looked like:
It was beautiful. But there were too taps due to a cumbersome hierarchy. You had to tap on a post to see its content, tap on the play button to launch the music, tap on a picture if you wanted to write a comment (and the comment was tied to this particular picture). You could like a story or individual pictures, leading to a lot confusion.
In other words, it was a pretty app with a bad user experience. As Snapchat has taught mobile designers, making pretty things doesn’t matter if your app isn’t efficient at what it should do.
I didn’t even understand what Ever was.
In July, after months of hard work, the team was confident enough to ask for feedback. Co-founder Grégoire Henrion showed me the app, and I know that some French designers had a look as well. Around the same time, the team pitched to get accepted in Paris-based accelerator TheFamily.
“I didn’t even understand what Ever was,” TheFamily co-founder Oussama Ammar very recently told me. But he chose to let the company in the accelerator, thinking that it will have to change its product at some point or work on other projects with other teams. It was a talented team after all — it was able to make a good-looking app, all flaws aside.
Something had to be done if the company wanted to avoid a scenario à la Checkthis – Checkthis’ story is very similar. The team realized that they had to start something new because Checkthis wouldn’t get traction. In fact, it had two weeks left to live when the startup released Frontback, its much more successful next act.
It was the same for Ever and Mindie. Bouncing back is not always easy, but it’s exactly what the Mindie team did.
Meet Mindie, An Addictive Music Video App That Couldn’t Get Funding
At this point, the team showed everyone its main quality: listening to feedback. While everybody around the four of them was probably saying the same thing, it’s hard to have a critical opinion on your own work, especially if you’ve spent months on it.
After refocusing and rethinking what Ever was all about, the team quietly worked on Mindie. In October, Henrion came back to me and sent me a message out of the blue. Mindie was ready for App Store prime time.
When I opened the app, the first video of my feed instantly started playing. It was a very immersive fullscreen video with a soundtrack. When you swiped your finger across the screen, you got another video, another song. And it went on and on. Posting a video took a matter of seconds.
The app design was very efficient, at the opposite of Ever’s intricate design. Instead of having to make dozens of taps, it was all about swiping and holding your finger to record. And everything was straightforward — it was a modern consumer app design. Here’s what it looked like:
Mindie’s launch wasn’t a big splash — I wrote a TechCrunch post, and that’s about it. Yet, slowly but surely, angel investors and product guys in the Valley started using the app. Jack Dorsey tried it and kept posting Mindie videos.
But when the company started taking meetings in France to raise a seed round, a lot of investors said no. Mindie was a moonshot — it could either fail miserably or become incredibly successful. And French investors weren’t convinced.
Finding Mindie’s Investors
The team flew to the U.S. and spent four weeks in New York and San Francisco. It met SV Angel, who immediately invested and started putting together a seed round with business angels. It became clear that Mindie had to say no to many investors. Even though many French investors changed their minds, the round was quickly overbooked.
Mindie’s trials and tribulations show that it doesn’t always go as planned, but it can thrive. A consumer product like Mindie resonates in San Francisco. This is where it can find its audience of early-adopters, investors that understand the product, and many product-savvy people.
That’s why the Mindie gang will move to San Francisco in the coming weeks. The team is hard at work on a new version that will bring new creative possibilities. In the long run, Mindie wants to become the new MTV for the mobile generation. Remember that time when MTV was all about music videos, most of them amateur-looking but very creative? This is Mindie’s future.
Mindie’s first app Ever wasn’t even released in the App Store. This is now all part of the company’s backstory. The road to creating an App Store success is long and winding. But when you struggle and listen to feedback, you eventually know when you have something compelling in your hand.
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Jawbone's second-gen Era headset is 42 percent smaller, comes with its own charging case
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Spotify Goes Unlimited on the Desktop and Other News You Need to Know
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Samsung's Galaxy Tab 3 Lite doesn't bring much to the crowded budget tablet market
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Nickelodeon's new interactive kids channel will bring streaming features to live TV
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China reveals COS: a government-approved mobile OS designed to break the monopoly of foreign software
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Spotify gives desktop users unlimited music without a subscription
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Star Wars en Instagram: por si alguna vez necesitas saber de qué color es un Tauntaun y cosas así
¿Existirá el Pantone Tauntaun?
Igual que el de la NASA el perfil de Star Wars en Instagram hace trampas porque las fotos que sube no están hechas con un móvil; de hecho los móviles, y mucho menos con cámara y conexión a Internet, no estaban ni inventados cuando se rodaron las películas de la trilogía original.
Pero como dice @Pixel_Jonan hay fotos alucinantes en ese perfil que hacen que merezca mucho la pena.
Y el de la NASA también, ¿eh?, aunque por otro tipo de cosas.
- Fotos de Star Wars mejores que las fotos de Star Wars, que no son oficiales ni nada pero molan muchísimo.
- Fotos de los rodajes de La Guerra de las galaxias comentadas por el mismísimo Chewbacca
- Fotos poco conocidas del rodaje de Regreso al Futuro y Back to the Future: las fotos inéditas de los decorados de Hill Valley, más para entretenerse de cuando aún se hacían buenas películas.
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