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Tuesday, 21 January 2014
Verizon plan lets you send unlimited international texts for $5 per month
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Amazon reportedly considering live TV channels for new pay-TV service
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¡Ñammm! ¡Soylent Green!
Al parecer, esta suculenta lata de Sylent Green junto con la galleta verde de la milagrosa comida de alto poder energético se vendió una subasta por unos 2.000 euros . No está mal para un pequeño trasto del atrezzo de una medio olvidada peli de principios de los 70 de la que todo el mundo recuerda básicamente una frase.
(Vía Boing Boing.)
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Nokia Lumia 1320 review: an oversized phone that struggles to stand out
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This headset uses sensors and pyschology to control gamer rage
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Outbox Shuts Down Its Mail Digitizing Service
Mail startup Outbox just announced that it’s shutting down its current service.
The company has one of those ideas that’s both intriguing and slightly crazy sounding — it sent people by your home to pick up your physical mail, then it digitized that mail, all for $4.99 a month.
After a pilot program in Austin, Outbox launched the service in San Francisco a year ago, and it raised a $5 million Series A led by Floodgate over the summer.
The company itself isn’t going away. Instead, the blog post says it’s “focusing our team and resources on a totally new product.” Outbox says there just weren’t enough people signing up to pay for the service, at least given the company’s costs:
However, after an extensive email marketing campaign to our waitlist, total yield from the waitlist was under 10 percent. And as we started marketing outside of this network, we had difficulty finding a repeatable and scalable acquisition channel. Across all of our efforts, our acquisition numbers were over $50 per lead.
As our marketing efforts lagged behind schedule, our density numbers remained consistently flat, causing us to spend about double our projected cost to service each customer. Even our most dense routes cost us approximately 20 percent more than our break-even target.
After several months of testing and refining, we reasonably concluded that we were executing well and collecting good data—it told us that there wasn’t enough demand to support the cost model.
That may not come as a huge surprise to the critics who found the idea impractical or downright creepy. I tried it out myself for a few months, but eventually canceled my subscription — I wasn’t bothered by Outbox employees opening my mail, it just wasn’t as useful as I’d hoped, and it was a pain for me to coordinate with a roommate who didn’t subscribe.
As for current customers, the company says they’ll will be able to download a copy of their digital archives until February 28.
For nostalgia, if nothing else, here’s a video we made of the actual mail pickup service.
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Apple brings iBooks and iTunes U educational tools to more than 50 new countries
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Pinterest recipe search makes the joy of cooking easy to pin down
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LogMeIn ditches free accounts, asks users to pay up or it'll LogYouOut
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Adidas Smart Run users can now export GPS data, while firmware update improves battery life and media player
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4C Raises $5M To Turn Social Data Into Smarter Marketing
Social data startup 4C is announcing that it has raised $5 million in Series B funding.
The company was formed last year from the merger of Voxsup and The Echo System, combining the former company’s strength in social data with the latter’s focus on advertising and e-commerce. (Apparently the merger wasn’t publicized at the time.)
Voxsup founder Alok Choudhary, who’s also a professor of electrical engineering and computer science at Northwestern University, serves as 4C’s chairman and chief scientist, while The Echo System founder Lance Neuhauser is CEO.
The company says that it looks at how online behavior affects consumer attitudes toward brands, for example by helping advertisers choose the best audiences to target on Facebook and Twitter. When I asked for some examples of what 4C can do, Neuhauser pointed (via email) to a study done “in conjunction” with Facebook” that “looked at over 50 different brand categories, consumer engagement data and television viewing preferences”:
A prime example comes in the surprisingly strong and over indexed connection of Financial Services to Reality TV Viewing. Consumers of both Financial Services and Reality TV are drawn to the unscripted drama that occurs within both interests. However, at 4C we also have the ability to look deeper than categories and identify direct connections between brands, users and precise interests. In past social ad campaigns top performer connections have been; Nicorette to Santa Claus, PGA to the Kennedy Center for the Arts, & Microsoft to Post-it Notes.”
4C says it works with Fortune 500 brands and large ad agencies like Publicis Group’s VivaKi. Neuhauser said plans for the new funding include growing the team, expanding internationally, and “including insights for more efficient television advertising planning, buying and selling.”
The Series B comes form Jump Capital and brings the total amount raised (including funding for Voxsup and The Echo System) to $8.25 million.
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Engadget giveaway: win a Slingbox 500 and Motorola SURFboard courtesy of ARRIS
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Fast-Growing Kareo Lands $29M To Help Doctors Move Their Practices Into The Cloud
As technology to penetrate into the tired old world of healthcare, the average patient stands to benefit in a big way, but doctors are struggling to keep up with a changing world. With origins dating back to 2004, Kareo has been on a mission to help doctors manage the increasingly complex business of medicine. Through its cloud-based practice management software, Kareo has worked to enable small practices to simplify day-to-day operations by taking the paperwork and administrative hassles out of the hands of their doctors to free them up to do what they do best: Work with patients.
In working with over 20,000 doctors at small practices in the U.S., says CEO Dan Rodrigues, the company quickly found that practices would rather turn to one provider for their digital needs, rather than deal with one provider for electronic health records practice management and another for billing, for example. So, early last year, Kareo expanded beyond expanded beyond its flagship practice management software for the first time, allowing its customers to access both cloud-based Electronic Health Records (EHRs) and billing services as part of an integrated suite.
With over 800 paying doctors joining the platform every month and now generating “several tens of millions in recurring revenue,” most of which has come since the expansion, Rodrigues says, Kareo is taking on a big new round of funding to help it fully integrate its new business lines. The new $29.5 million in growth capital brings the startup’s total funding to $72.5 million and follows the $20.5 million Kareo raised in January of last year.
The nearly $50 million in capital Kareo has taken on in the last 12 months are a tribute to the startup’s growth rate over the same period, and a sign that the company is moving fast to address what it sees as a big opportunity in the small practice segment. While small practices traditionally have been a less attractive area for SaaS companies, Rodrigues says, they are the ones who feel must overwhelmed by the pace of change in healthcare.
With the the on-going revision of digital standards in healthcare, increasing requirements for doctors, the proliferation of mobile devices and wearable gadgets — along with the market’s shift to more patient-focused incentive structures and consumer-centric models — small practices are struggling to keep up. As a result, the Kareo CEO believes that doctors are looking for a trusted service provider they can turn to that will provide access to a solution that helps them make sense of the changes and manage their increasingly digital practices.
In turn, the company has moved into spaces in EHR and billing that are occupied by popular startups like CareCloud and PracticeFusion in the former and a long list of enterprise incumbents in the latter. It’s now competing on three different fronts, and is taking on capital to support the integration of its cloud services, to increase awareness among doctors and grow its ballooning staff of 300.
Kareo hopes to build upon the quickening growth it has seen since expanding into these new verticals, which saw its EHR solution generate more than 5,000 signups in over the last 10 months its billing service attract more than 1,000 paying providers across 46 specialties.
Rodrigues hopes that by not only offering its suite of cloud-based services on mobile but in a freemium model that allows doctors to get up and running on the basic features for free, Kareo is lowering the barriers to entry for small practices looking to go digital. The company can then up-sell practices into its full-scale, integrated suite and, by offering this familiar SaaS pricing structure, it can gain a leg up on its enterprise competitors, which tend to offer more expensive and more complicated pricing tiers. Today, doctors can access Kareo’s full suite of services for under $300/month, he says.
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Beats Music to reach Windows Phone listeners on January 24th
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Veho's new K-series action cameras have pro features, amateur-friendly price
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Online Booking Platform BookingBug Raises Further $1M, Plans To Open Up Protocol To Developers
The UK startup BookingBug, which provides an online booking and reservation platform for businesses — SMEs right up to larger enterprise outfits — has raised a further $1 million in funding. The round comes from newly-established fund, Deep Ventures, and is the only funding taken by BookingBug since it raised a rather modest seed round of $350,000 back in 2011. That’s the great thing about a startup that produces revenue from the get-go: BookingBug offers an array of tariffs for businesses taking bookings through its wares, which increase in price based largely on number of bookings made per-month.
BookingBug launched all the way back in 2009 as a way for, then mostly SMEs, to share and charge for their availability -– by hour, day, week or as classes, courses or events –- providing a platform to accept those bookings and handle enquiries online. We described it as being “realtime” (a very popular buzz work back then) and distributed, in that the London-based startup offered a widget that could be embedded on a business’ own customer-facing site or those of its affiliate partners and even through social media. It also added a basic API for further third-party site integration.
However, BookingBug has since expanded its customer base to also target the enterprise, where there’s a lot more money to be made and keeps BookingBug less reliant on SMEs who are increasingly being offered an array of niche/vertical platforms (think dedicated wares for dentist practices or hairdressers etc.). Related to this, and with today’s new funding, it plans to completely tear down the current API and widget building capability to open up its protocol to select developers and become a platform in the true sense of the word.
Or, in PR gobbledygook, BookingBug wants to become “the go-to protocol for anyone wishing to connect the online and offline worlds.”
In a call with TechCrunch, BookingBug CEO Glenn Shoosmith likened the approach to that of e-commerce platform Magento, in that the startup plans to make its platform fully customisable and embeddable into existing systems used by the enterprises, big retailers and government organisations that it’s now selling into. In fact, Shoosmith says he was inspired by the UK government’s “open” e-gov agenda, and that demand for a more expansive platform also came from those larger customers.
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Sony could launch its Xperia Z Ultra phone as a WiFi only 'tablet'
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Los lugares más fotografiados del mundo, según Google
Sightsmap utiliza el posicionamiento o la información relativa a la ubicación contenida en las fotografías enviadas a Google Maps y Google Earth a través de Panoramio para dibujar un mapa de las ciudades y de los lugares más fotografiados en todo el mundo.
La aplicación web, similar al Google Maps convencional, permite filtrar criterios de búsqueda, obtener listas automáticas de los lugares más fotografías, recomendaciones de visitas y herramientas para planificar viajes.
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Sketchfab’s Photoshop Integration Allows You To Share Your 3D Models On The Web
Adobe recently updated Photoshop with a few 3D capabilities. A hidden gem that wasn’t much discussed is the ability to export and share 3D models directly from Photoshop thanks to Sketchfab.
The main focus of last week’s update was on 3D printing support directly from Photoshop. While Photoshop is not a 3D modelling application, it has had the ability to open 3D files for a while. It can be useful if you want to add textures and work with the actual 3D model.
Adobe is rethinking this a bit and positioning Photoshop as the last stop before exporting your 3D model. After modelling your object in your favorite 3D application, you open it and Photoshop and print to your MakerBot or send your file to Shapeways, which will handle the 3D printing part.
But what if you are just working on a 3D character for a video game, or want to send your model to your coworkers to get feedback? This is where Sketchfab comes along. As a reminder, Sketchfab is a Soundcloud for 3D models. You can upload, browse and embed 3D models from your browser.
And now, you can just press the “export to Sketchfab” button in Photoshop to bring your file to the web. Adobe-owned Behance already supports Sketchfab embeds to showcase your creations in your online portfolio. But there are many other potential use cases, including internal communications.
Finally, as Sketchfab relies a lot on the WebGL technology, Adobe is now indirectly a WebGL proponent. It would have been different a few years ago when Flash was the de facto platform to share interactive content on the web.
It’s a validation of Sketchfab’s technology, and the team of 11 can expect more users now that Sketchfab is directly integrated in Photoshop. The startup has raised $2 million and now faces the difficult feat of becoming the default 3D sharing platform before anyone else does.
Here’s an example of a Sketchfab embedded model:
(Top gif by: Rhizome)
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With Box, ESPN And Square On Board, Entelo Takes Its Recruiting Platform Mobile With A “Tinder For Talent Search”
Entelo launched in late 2012 to join a new generation of startups attempting to leverage technology to help companies address the age-old struggle with finding and recruiting great candidates, particularly engineers. To do so, Entelo has developed software that aims to help companies, HR departments and recruiters use alternative means and data sources (namely social) to search for and identify top talent.
Last summer, with 80 corporate customers having adopted its recruiting software — including the likes of Groupon, Square, Box and Yelp — Entelo took on $3.5 million in Series A financing from Battery Ventures and Menlo Ventures, among others. Since then, the company has turned its attention to mobile and to the dearth of quality enterprise productivity tools available for mobile devices.
While people want to use their smartphones to be productive, says Entelo co-founder Jon Bischke, today, the world of mobile enterprise productivity is limited to email. However, as enterprise software companies (particularly SaaS companies) begin to provide apps and services that allow employees to be more productive on the go, things are beginning to change, he says.
Capitalizing on the ongoing “consumerization” of the enterprise and productivity software, Entelo recently launched its first mobile app, Entelo First Pass, which Bischke says takes several cues from the consumer product world, especially the popular dating app, Tinder. The founder says that the product design goal behind Entelo’s new mobile app was to create an equivalent to the “Tinder for recruiting” — in other words, one that makes the process of discovering the best matches during the recruiting process simple and easy — and hopefully, more addictive.
“We found that recruiters and hiring managers spent a huge amount of time on triage, particularly in finding candidates to source and moving candidates through pipelines,” he says. “After trying multiple different approaches, we ultimately found that the easiest way to help companies was to take a similar approach to user flow as Tinder, and so we set about attempting to replicate that experience in a way that works for recruiting.”
In practice, this means that, once teams have created lists of candidates using Entelo’s software, they can then view and evaluate those candidates while on the go. Like Tinder and other consumer applications, users can quickly swipe through candidates, upvoting and downvoting as they go. The idea is to transform the experience of using enterprise recruiting and productivity software into a more familiar, consumer product-like feel and maybe even make it slightly enjoyable — relatively speaking.
For those unfamiliar with the company’s recruitment software itself, Bischke and co-founder John McGrath created Entelo to leverage the ever-advancing technologies behind this Brave New World of “Big Data” (and data mining) that everyone’s talking about. In other words, Entelo has developed a massive database of tens of millions of potential job candidates, tracking and aggregating data on the activity and statuses of candidates’ contributions to StackOverflow and Github, their locations (gleaned from Twitter) and updates to profiles on LinkedIn, for example.
When we last covered Entelo, the co-founders described the key difference between Entelo’s software and the other enterprise recruiting services out there as the attempt to create a more robust resume than one typically finds on Facebook or LinkedIn. That is, to create a more detailed profile of a candidate’s job status, qualifications and contributions by analyzing data inputs from a wide range of sources, particularly social.
As the platform accrues more data about candidates, the idea is that Entelo’s predictive analytics in turn become more accurate, and are able to better understand and identify the signals and footprints that developers leave across their networks. In particular, those which might have recently changed jobs or are quietly looking for new positions.
First Pass, then, makes Entelo’s core products, including its candidate search tools, predictive analytics and its dashboard for monitoring those candidates available in simplified form for mobile.
However, alongside the launch of First Pass, the company is also releasing a new product, called “Entelo Inside,” which takes the company’s realtime social data, search tech and predictive analytics and applies them to a company’s applicant tracking system. The idea, Bischke says, is to help companies unlock more value from their tracking systems and more easily identify candidates for current jobs from those that may have already applied.
Since September, the company has grown its headcount from seven to 15, secured a partnership and integration with Jobvite, and its enterprise customer base, which includes names like Box, ESPN and Yelp, has grown to more than 100.
For more, find a quick demo of First Pass below:
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