Wednesday, 19 February 2014
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BitTorrent's revamped Android apps let you download just the files you want
PediaPress Wants To Print The Complete English Wikipedia In 1,000 Books
This is not a joke. PediaPress launched an Indiegogo campaign to print the entire English Wikipedia encyclopedia on around 1,000 books, representing more than a million pages. The startup printed the first volume to see how it would look — in it, you will find all the articles from “A” to “A76 motorway”.
More than 4 million articles from 20 million volunteers could end up in the printed edition of Wikipedia. But first, the company needs to raise $50,000. You can donate from $5 up to $1,000 to sponsor the work. If it succeeds, the books will be presented at the Wikimania Conference 2014 in London. After that, the books will be donated to a big public library.
As a reminder, PediaPress is an on-demand printing startup for Wikipedia articles. While it’s mostly unknown, you can find a link to create a book in the left column of Wikipedia. After compiling articles, you can order a printed book.
PediaPress CEO Eingestellt von Heiko writes in a blog post that a German user planned to print the entire German Wikipedia using the service. “After doing some back of the envelope calculations and exchanging emails, we mutually agreed to drop his plan,” von Heiko writes. “But the idea was born and stuck with us.”
But it doesn’t tell us why it’s a good idea. Printing Wikipedia is a way to celebrate the gigantic work of the Wikipedia community over the past years. If the company gets enough money, it even plans to go on tour with the printed Wikipedia edition. The project also let you visualize how big Wikipedia is compared to the Encyclopædia Britannica.
But the most obvious reason is probably simpler. This campaign is a great communication move for PediaPress. Now everyone will know that Wikipedia readers can handpick a few dozen Wikipedia articles and print a book. In other words, printing Wikipedia is a fun way to spread the word about PediaPress. And as PediaPress developer Konrad says in the Indiegogo video, “somebody has to do it.”
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Apple's iTunes Festival is coming to the US, and you can stream it live
PopTip Launches Zipline Analytics On Instagram, Letting Brands Monitor Photo-Friendly Conversations
PopTip, the Techstars-backed startup that offers real-time language tracking across social platforms, has today launched its Zipline analytics tool on Instagram.
Unlike PopTip questions, the product that launched the brand, Zipline doesn’t require brands to poll or ask a question to their audiences. Instead, brands can simply choose which words, phrases, etc. they want tracked and then watch the conversations play out right in front of them.
“We saw some really interesting patterns regarding the relationship between browsing on Instagram and purchasing power, so we wanted to get on Instagram to track the conversation,” said co-founder Kelsey Falter. “We have analysis going on Twitter and Instagram for Nike right now, and it turns out that there is 4x the volume of Nike mentions on Instagram than on Twitter, and that’s powerful information for Nike to have.”
When PopTip first launched back in summer of 2012, the company offered a polling product, letting brands ask things like: “do you wear #boxers or #briefs?”
PopTip would then offer a dashboard showing real time conversations around the questions and answers, even if respondents didn’t use a hashtag or spell the word correctly. At its core, after all, PopTip technology is all about natural language processing and tracking in real-time.
At launch, the analytics tool was only available on Twitter.
But in March of 2013, the company expanded their tracking tools to Facebook, letting brands get a true window into their following across multiple platforms.
Shortly after, PopTip launched Zipline, which takes the “polling” out of the equation and simply lets brands watch things play out as they normally would across social networks. With the launch of Zipline for Instagram, brands on PopTip can monitor the conversation across all three of the major network.
If you want to check out how Zipline on Instagram works, check out the demo here.
Zipline customers pay a flat rate of $6,500/month, which lets them track anywhere between 30 million and 50 million messages across all platforms.
PopTip has grown from 3 to 10 full-time employees, with 30 customers, including brands such as L’Oreal, NBA, ESPN, NFL, Spotify, Budweiser and Yoplait.
The New York-based company has raised a total of $2.5 million to date in angel funding from Lerer Ventures, SoftBank Capital, RSE Ventures, David Tisch, Scott Belsky, Soraya Darabi, Amer Rehman, Steve Martocci, Jared Hecht, Ori Allon, Tricia Black and Lee Ann Daly.
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Ubuntu phones arriving in 2014 from Meizu and BQ Readers
Following court defeat by Verizon, the FCC will rework its net neutrality rules
MIT Startup Tesseract Aims To Commercialize Mobile Digital Photo Refocusing And 3D Effects
An MIT project that aimed to bring light field refocusing powers to existing cameras for less than a dollar is being spun out as its own commercial venture: Tesseract wants to provide the same capabilities to mobile devices, and the startup has the demos to prove it, using actual Android smartphone hardware using its technology.
Some of the flagship features of Tesseract include light field-style refocusing a la Lytro, albeit accomplished for much less money. At these rates, incorporating it into existing hardware becomes a lot more palatable for smartphone OEMs, which are constantly concerned about component costs when speccing out new devices.
In addition to refocusing after capture, it also offers up the ability to selectively separate foreground and background components, as well as apply special filter effects to different elements of the photo, and edit on different, automatically defined layers. It’s part RAW, part PSD but straight from your mobile device’s camera.
The plan for Tesseract is to sell its tech directly to OEMs for use in their devices, but there are many other potential uses, too. One client that founder Kshitij Marwah never expected is a bank with annual revenue in the billions that wants to use it to make their account opening process easier, he told me via email. The startup is also in ongoing discussions with smartphone manufacturers, other OEMs and banks to see how it might be adopted in their respective devices and processes.
Already, companies like HTC are reported to be introducing some of these features on their next-gen mobile devices. But HTC’s implementation seems to require multiple lenses and no doubt considerable expense on the component front. Qualcomm recently demoed mobile processors that offer selective refocusing thanks to improvements on the system-on-a-chip, but that too might be fairly costly to implement. With so many different approaches to this kind of camera innovation, one thing’s nearly certain: Within the next few years, no one should have to live with the focal composition they originally chose when they take a photo with their top-tier smartphone.
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Amazon's virtual currency now works on Android phones and tablets
NVIDIA Titan Black cards bring much improved specs, even crazier prices
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Humble Bundle Switches To Steam-Like Region-Based Pricing For The Humble Store
Video game store Humble Bundle announced that the Humble Store has switched to more traditional Steam-like prices, with different prices depending on your region. European customers will have to pay more for some games if the publisher chooses to set higher prices in Europe.
Humble Bundle is mostly known for its Humble Indie Bundles and smaller weekly bundles. So far, Humble Bundle has mostly been about indie games. Even though the company released a couple of bundles with major publishers like EA, small developers and publishers are still on center stage. Similarly, the company has started experimenting with ebook and audio book bundles.
Backed by Y Combinator and SV Angel, the startup recently opened the Humble Store, a more traditional store that allows you to purchase individual games just like you would on Steam or gog.com.
The Humble Store has had compelling arguments to seduce gamers. Most games are cross-platform, DRM-free and come with a Steam key to activate the game on Steam. Moreover, charities, such as the American Red Cross, Child’s Play Charity, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, World Land Trust and Charity Water, receive 10 percent of the proceedings — Humble Bundle keeps 15 percent.
But one of the key differentiating element was also pricing. Everything was in USD, so you knew that you wouldn’t have to pay 20 or 30 percent more because of price differences between regions like on competing platforms. If your bank account wasn’t in USD, PayPal is pretty good at providing a good conversion rate.
Now, there are two scenarios. If Humble Bundle handles the conversion, it will sell the game at the same price in USD, EUR or GBP, without adding any VAT. But if the publisher wants to set different prices, the company will let the publisher do so. Like on Steam, there is apparently no way to choose your currency, so European customers will sometimes be forced to pay more for the same game. Many publishers could now choose to set the same prices in USD, EUR and GBP on the Humble Store and Steam.
For now, the Humble Store only added Euro and British Pound. If you don’t live in a country that accepts these currencies, you will still pay in U.S. dollars. The big bundles and the weekly bundles will still work the same way — everything will be in USD.
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'All New' HTC One leaks again with a bright gold paint job
Ad Company OpenX Hires LongTime Hulu Exec Tom Fuelling As CFO
Online and mobile advertising company OpenX is announcing the appointment of Tom Fuelling as its new chief financial officer.
Fuelling (pictured) previously served as CFO at Hulu for six years, starting in 2007. The streaming video site announced last fall that Fuelling was departing and would be replaced by Disney’s Elaine Paul, following the appointment of new CEO Mike Hopkins.
Fuelling has also served as CFO for Ascent Media Network Services, ARTISTdirect, and Village Roadshow Pictures, among others. He told me that OpenX was a good fit in several ways, including “the entrepreneurial nature of its team” and the fact that it’s bringing “positive, disruptive” change to the ad industry.
The hiring of a new CFO, particularly for a venture-backed company that’s doing well, can be a sign of plans for an IPO. (After all, Fuelling helped ARTISTdirect go public.) When I asked OpenX CEO Tim Cadogan about whether that was a possibility, he gave the (fairly common) answer that he’s focused on “building a company” and doesn’t want to “put the cart in front of the horse” by treating any kind of financing as the end goal.
“Look, companies like ours access the capital markets — that happens in a variety of ways, and it usually leads to public markets at some state,” Cadogan said. “Part of the reason Tom is here is to make sure that we are structured from a financial part of view so that all our options are in front.”
Fuelling added that he sees some “low hanging fruit” when it comes to improving and growing the company’s financial side: “Sometimes the business success gets ahead of some of the processes that underlie it.”
OpenX’s technology supports real-time bidding and ad serving, and the company says that 65 percent of comScore 100 publishers participate in its ad exchange. It continues to expand its offerings, for example with the acquisition of JumpTime and the subsequent launch of its revenue intelligence product.
Cadogan suggested that we’re at “an inflection point” at the end of the first cycle in programmatic ad-buying. with a wider array of possible formats and business models coming up next. He compared it to products like cars and sunglasses, saying that they started out with a few standard models, but now, “You can amke your own sunglasses, and you can pretty much configure your own cars.”
Fuelling is replacing Rick J. Gombos as OpenX’s CFO.
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myTomorrows Raises $2.2M For Platform To Give Patients Access To Development-Stage Drugs
myTomorrows is a Dutch startup that wants to disrupt the way patients with unmet medical needs access to development-stage treatments — drugs that are still undergoing clinical trials and working there way through a lengthy regulatory approval process. It targets patients who are typically up against time (e.g. specific types of cancer) and for whom drugs that could prolong or improve their quality of life do sometimes exist but aren’t yet “approved” and readily available on the market, even though positive trials have been conducted. Right now, how a patient accesses these treatments is somewhat of a lottery, if they can access them at all. By providing a platform that connects patients, doctors and drugs companies, myTomorrows wants to change that.
Today the company has announced a new funding round: it’s raised an additional $2.2 million from “friends and family”, adding to the $3.8 million previously raised from myTomorrows president and co-founder, Ronald Brus, along with a number of the company’s other founders.
“There are great drugs out there that will only be available, if ever, in 3-8 years,” explains myTomorrows CFO Erdem Yavuz. “Most patients can’t wait that long and clinical trials are over selective, or take place in another country, and placebo/control group risks are too high. We allow doctors and biotech companies to help patients with unmet medical needs, given the complicated nature of providing access to development-stage drugs. Patients and their doctors are being empowered to consider newer options.”
Yavuz says myTomorrows has “no competitors”, in the sense of another online platform to connect patients and their doctors with biotech innovators to actually offer access to certain treatments. Instead, he notes there are “plenty of business-to-business CRO [Clinical Research Outsourcing] type players” who charge up-front fees, which his company is attempting to disrupt.
In terms of how myTomorrows plans to make money, it currently charges on transactions, a model that Yavuz concedes requires scale and isn’t yet profitable. In addition, a number of biotech innovators have signed royalty deals with the startup. “So if the treatment passes all the relevant hurdles and is one day approved for marketing authorisation, then myTomorrows will receive a small royalty on sales,” he says.
myTomorrows is currently focusing on patients who suffer from Major Depressive Disorder, Head and Neck Cancers, Colorectal Cancer, Renal Cancer, and Prostate Cancer. It says it will use the new funding to expand its range of disease areas, and to increase its global footprint.
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BigRep's ONE can 3D print full-sized pieces of furniture
Image Recognition Startup ViSenze Gets $3.5M From Rakuten Ventures
It’s been a very busy week for Rakuten as it seeks to take over the Internet. Earlier today the Tokyo-based online services giant announced the opening of its first R&D center in Europe. Just last week, Rakuten disclosed that it will acquire messaging app Viber for a cool $900 million.
Now ViSenze, a Singapore-based image recognition startup, has announced that it received a $3.5 million Series A led by Rakuten Ventures (the company’s venture capital arm). Investors Walden International and UOB Venture Management also participated.
The investment comes seven months after ViSenze, an spin-off company of the National University of Singapore, first announced that it had started collaborating with Rakuten Taiwan to launch visual fashion search and recognition tools on the e-commerce site.
Rakuten’s involvement with ViSenze is especially interesting because it parallels Amazon’s interest in image recognition tech. The U.S. e-commerce behemoth added a shopping-by-camera functionality to its main iOS app earlier this month that makes it easier for shoppers to compare prices on the site while visiting brick-and-mortar stores.
Amazon had previously released a standalone app called Flow, two years after acquiring visual product search startup SnapTell in 2009.
One of ViSenze’s products, called ViSearch, is a cloud-based visual search tool that could potentially allow Rakuten to add similar image recognition features to its apps and sites. Previous moves by Rakuten to establish itself as a stronger competitor to Amazon and other e-commerce platforms outside of Asia include the acquisition of U.S.-based logistics company Webgistix and its launch of the Kobo e-reader.
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AWS For Life Science? With $4.1M In The Bank, Transcriptic Wants To Reinvent Scientific Research
As a biomedical engineering student at Duke, Max Hodak became intimately familiar with the sterile tedium of life in a research lab. Like many others who’ve spent wasted hours of their lives in white coats, he found the fact that most labs still look and operate as they did thirty years ago frustrating. Beyond the fact that many labs are disconnected and aren’t networked, research itself remains a manual, hands-on process, involving a lot of moving small amounts of liquid from one tube to another or handling petri dishes.
Watching researchers spend so much time waiting around to use one machine or another, and navigating a manual process where mistakes are both easy to make and costly, Hodak came to the conclusion that labs could use a little automation — and a few more robots. A programmer since age six, the biology student decided to engineer a solution and give life sciences its own, custom version of Amazon Web Services.
The result is Transcriptic, a startup and service provider that aims to make the day-in-day-out process of wet lab biology research faster, cheaper and more accessible. Basically, Transcriptic is Science-as-a-Service — or, in other words — a software and robot-enabled remote lab, which uses automation and control technology to perform studies and trials in less time than your average bear, er, Contract Research Organization (or CRO).
In today’s life sciences, CROs are the only option for those in need of third-party support for clinical testing and research, and, as such, now represent a multi-billion dollar industry. With its technology and services, Transcriptic is, in a way, looking to play the role of CRO 2.0 and reverse the traditionally lengthy sales process, slow turnarounds and high prices endemic among the incumbents.
Of course, it’s easy for Hodak to say that biology — at least the human side — should revolve around the analysis, creating hypotheses and designing experiments, not the manual leg-work. But biology research, cloning and genotyping, and testing in every area in between is precise, and reliability is key. Furthermore, for some, the manual tasks inherent to testing and tweaking are an important part of the process, and many scientists (especially those over a certain age) are loathe to the idea of outsourcing the research process — especially to a startup.
In part, this explains why, at least in the early-stages, Transcriptic has been finding easy converts among grad students and younger scientists, who, Hodak says, quickly understand the value proposition. Though it’s not limited to younguns, as the startup today counts researchers at Stanford, Caltech, UCSD, Harvard, MIT and the University of Chicago among its customers.
Transcriptic still has a battle in front of it to convince scientists they can trust a startup for fast, reliable and affordable results, though its case can improve as it collects more data, the founder says. Plus, when you get down to it, what lab wouldn’t like to be able to run more experiments in less time? By making this (theoretically) possible, and by pointing to the larger, macro trend of medical and life science companies and processes moving to the cloud, the core concept becomes less frightening.
It’s the case that Transcriptic has also used to appeal to venture capitalists, who apparently are in need of some convincing these days when it comes to life sciences. A recent report from PricewaterhouseCoopers found that life sciences lagged behind other industries in 2013 — both in terms of the amount invested and the number of deals. The startup’s argument appears to be working, too, as Transcriptic closed 2012 by raising $1.2 million in seed financing led by Google Ventures, with support from Founders Fund’s seed investment vehicle as well as angel investors like Mark Cuban and Naval Ravikant.
And now, with a business that Hodak says has been doubling every month since October, investors are doubling down on Transcriptic. The startup added another $2.8 million in this week in a round led by IA Ventures — which sees IA’s Brad Gillespie joining the board — along with additional support from Google Ventures, AME Cloud Ventures, Data Collective and Boost.vc. The round brings Transcriptic’s total to $4.1 million.
With the new capital under its belt, Transcriptic has big product plans in its sights, and although Hodak declined to share too many details, it looks as if the startup is moving to expand its services and research coverage. On top of that, Transcriptic is eager to grow its team and invest in more equipment. Life Sciences hardware can be a hard sell for some VCs, but the company has managed to remain lean (like building a freezer for $8K which Hodak told the Verge would have cost $400K retail) and, if it’s able to follow through (even in part) with its mission to help change how research is done, has big implications.
Plus, as Transcriptic’s “About Us” page reads: “We want seed incubators to fund biotech companies composed of two graduate students and a laptop, not social-local-mobile photo-sharing apps.” For supporters of life science — and, hey, science in general — that’s a goal that’s easy to get behind.
For more, find Transcriptic at home here.
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