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- Mayor Bloomberg Unveils The Made In NY Digital Jobs Map For Silicon Alley Startups
- Tenable Network Security Creates A Gibson-esque Network Visualizer
- SaneBox Adds Smarter Reminders, Lets You Snooze Emails, Sync Reminders To Calendars
- The Timeline Bump: Khan Academy And Quora Latest To Integrate With Facebook’s Open Graph
- Smule Finally Makes Their Android Debut With The Auto-Tuning Songify App
- Qualtrics Raises $70M From Accel And Sequoia: “The Biggest Software Company You Haven’t Heard Of”?
- White Label App Platform Appia Rolls Out Pay Per Install Service For Google Play
- Inside Microsoft’s New Azure Accelerator — Will Redmond Get The Startup Mojo?
- Watch Out Google, Zoho Just Launched A Better DIY Website Builder (And It Does Mobile, Too)
- Factual Releases Three New Location And Mobile Ad Targeting Tools
- BBC Worldwide Extends Its Partnership With Video Site Viki To Cover Advertising
- Engagio Brings Its Social Inbox To Your Gmail Inbox
- Ikea’s Upcoming Uppleva HDTV System Further Detailed
- Personalized Music Video Service Cull TV Acquired By Twitvid, CEO Departs
- Rock Health Grad HealthInReach Merges With PriceDoc To Bring Price Transparency To Healthcare
- Kantar Worldpanel: Android Dominates Smartphone Sales Overall; In U.S. iOS Closing In
- Honestly.com Becomes A Talent Search Engine, Renames Itself TalentBin
- Simplee Raises $6 Million Series A For Its Mint-Like Approach To Tracking Healthcare Expenses
- Look Out: Pinterest Marketing Platform Curalate Lands $750k Seed From NEA, First Round, MentorTech
- Facebook Files New S-1, Pricing $34-38 Per Share, For A Market Cap Of Nearly $100B. Instagram Delay
| Mayor Bloomberg Unveils The Made In NY Digital Jobs Map For Silicon Alley Startups Posted: 15 May 2012 09:07 AM PDT  Today Mayor Bloomberg rolled out the Made in NY Digital Map, an easy way to find New York City’s tech startups and job opportunities. The interactive map keeps startups, investors, developers and designers in the know about what’s going on in Silicon Alley. From the Made in New York Map site: “The Made in NY Digital Map is a visual testament to the vibrant state of New York’s digital industry – showing a powerful constellation of over 500 homegrown startups, investors and coworking spaces across the five boroughs. Browse by neighborhood, review job postings, or add your own startup to the digital landscape – the Made in NY Map is a living resource that reflects New York City’s dynamic innovation ecosystem.” According to the site there are currently 324 NYC tech companies looking to hire. Every startup, investor and shared workspace in all five boroughs is mapped out with links to each respective company and job board.
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| Tenable Network Security Creates A Gibson-esque Network Visualizer Posted: 15 May 2012 08:51 AM PDT This video by Tenable Security is pretty wild. It shows a visualization of an office network. Using different colors and lines users can pin-point problem areas based on traffic and data being sent and received to each machine. The system lets you call out various aspects of the network using marker shape, color, and network lines. For example, you can change symbol colors depending on vulnerabilities and even change the shape and position of mobile devices. You can see a little more of the visualization over here. Tenable released 2.0 of the software this month and sits on top of the company’s Nessus security scanner software. Sadly, the visualizer doesn’t show the “polychrome shadow, countless translucent layers shifting and recombining” of the average computer virus. Maybe we need to wait for the Kuang Mark Eleven.
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| SaneBox Adds Smarter Reminders, Lets You Snooze Emails, Sync Reminders To Calendars Posted: 15 May 2012 08:33 AM PDT  SaneBox is definitely starting to get my attention. The company, which is focused on solving the very real problem of email overload, has just rolled out a minor, but clever, new feature: reminders that sync to calendars. With the so-called “SaneRemindMe 2.0″ offering, you can quickly defer emails until you’re ready to deal with them. It’s essentially a “snooze” button for your email. Starting now, those reminders don’t just bump up emails in your inbox at the appropriate times, they can also sync to your calendar, too. Here’s how the feature works, if you’re unfamiliar. When you get an email that you want to defer to a later date, you send it to an email address specifying that date or time. The email address can be very specific, like October15@sanebox.com or more general, like 30minutes@sanebox.com or 1week@sanebox.com, for example. If you later reply to the email in question, no reminder is ever sent. But if you don’t reply (as is typically the case), SaneBox forwards the email back to the top of your inbox at the time specified. The feature can also be used on emails you send out – just cc: or bcc: the @sanebox.com email address to remind yourself to follow up later with the recipient if they don’t reply. That part (above) isn’t new – it was previously available in the initial SaneBox offering. What is new is that the feature will now also sync up the reminders with your preferred calendar service, like Google Calendar or iCal, for example. Hmm, reminders that are integrated into email, work via forwarding, and automatically sync with other products in your office productivity suite? And why is it that we’ve had to wait for a third-party to develop this technology, again? Well, thanks, SaneBox. If you’re interested in trying it out, SaneBox works with almost any email service, including Gmail, Yahoo, AOL, Apple, Outlook and others. Fine, I’m signing up.
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| The Timeline Bump: Khan Academy And Quora Latest To Integrate With Facebook’s Open Graph Posted: 15 May 2012 08:25 AM PDT  Last month, Facebook drove 160 million visitors and 1.1 billion visits to third-party apps, an increase of 100 million visitors and 780 million visits from the month prior. And that’s just mobile, it doesn’t even account for canvas apps or website integrations. Thanks to the size of its user base, and the increasing power of its funnel, Facebook is now able to, in a sense, play kingmaker, choosing what types of apps and content see traffic from its news feed. As Josh points out, this is true for content of all stripes, whether they be photos, games, or news readers — or the most recent and perhaps most-buzzed-about evidence: Open Graph video apps. Since integrating with Facebook Timeline, the “Instagram for video” competitors, Viddy and Socialcam, have exploded. Viddy’s “Timeline Bump” saw it surpass some big names in its rise to the top of the App Store rankings. Since integrating, Viddy claims to be seeing 500K new users a day, and last week confirmed that it closed a $30 million series B round at a reported $370 million valuation. Viddy’s success could be due to the Instagram Effect, a great product, its celebrity backers, or, perhaps more likely, it’s due in large part to its Timeline integration and Facebook promoting its content. Though some would say it’s a combination thereof. Either way, Viddy and Socialcam are hardly alone. Flixster has seen referral traffic jump to 480,000 hits a day, up 10-fold from the prior month, while BranchOut’s recently launched, Facebook-integrated mobile app saw traffic leap from one million monthly active users to 12.5 million MAU. Unsurprisingly, app developers and websites are eager not to miss the train — the Open Graph/Timeline Lift. The latest additions to the cavalcade of integrators? The cult favorite community-directed Q&A site Quora and the fast-growing, increasingly popular non-profit educational video repository Khan Academy. In a blog post last week, Quora announced its integration with Facebook Timeline, allowing users to more easily share their Quora activity with their Facebook friends. Users simply go to the homepage or their their Settings page, connect their Facebook account, and enable Timeline. Once that’s done, Quora-ers can share questions, answers, posts they upvote, and people they follow to Facebook, with that content aggregated by type in a widget on their Facebook profile. In turn, Facebook friends will see the most interesting stories you’ve interacted with on Quora right in their news feed. Of course, those who might be hesitant to enable this feature for the sake of avoiding spamming their friends’ feeds with every instance Quora activity, however, users will generally only see the five most recent upvotes, questions followed, etc., a cap that’s intended to keep the integration from overwhelming your profile. Generally speaking, the stories that do show up tend to do so because a number of friends all upvoted the same story. On top of this, Quora also added a bit of granularity to its sharing options, as users can now share to both Facebook and Twitter when creating new questions, answers, and posts. You can choose whether you want to share a particular answer, for example, by checking/unchecking the Facebook and Twitter options. The more Facebook is able to filter by relevancy to show stuff that’s created, shared by, and popular among your friends, the more addicting the experience — and this integration — becomes. At least that’s the intent anyway. In terms of Quora, specifically, from my experience, it really can be a nifty enhancement to discovery. Frequently, we dont have the time to spend hours combing through the database, so Facebook integration provides a great alternative for finding those gems that would otherwise go unseen. For Facebook, the appeal is transparent. Any mobile app or web platform that has a highly engaged audience becomes a great potential source of ad revenue. Quora, which definitely qualifies in terms of an engaged audience, sends its clickable Q&A content to news feeds and Timelines, whereupon Facebook can serve relevant ads, promoting brands and experiences you and your friends are already interacting with and, as Josh points out, as users move towards mobile, Sponsored Stories can keep the same model and become a big source of revenue. In turn, Quora just raised $50 million at a reported $400 million valuation, which D’Angelo says will be used to scale and expand its platform. If AppData is to be believed, 20K daily active users and 180K monthly active users log in to the site through Facebook Connect — a small fraction of its total number of users. No doubt with deeper Facebook integration in place, Quora could see this number increase significantly — it’s a win-win for each side. And considering that, as Josh describes at length, Facebook is controlling the news feed like an editor, curating the content its users see in their feeds and profiles, the close ties Quora’s founders have to Facebook could be a boon for its content on Facebook. Of course, as mentioned previously, Quora is not alone. Yesterday, Khan Academy joined in on the fun, also announcing via blog post that it has added integration with the new Open Graph protocol to enable users to display their badges on their Facebook profiles. For a little context for those unfamiliar with Khan, as users work their way through the platform’s repository of 3,200+ micro lecture video tutorials, they can earn badges for becoming proficient in three different skills or by quickly (and correctly) answering five quiz questions in a row, for example. With its new Facebook integration, users can now click the “Share” button on any badge, and, once permission is granted, the badge will appear on users’ Timelines. (This share functionality also works for Twitter and email.) After a user shares a couple of badges, just like the Quora Timeline experience, a dedicated section will appear in your Timeline, in this case for Khan “Badges Earned.” Users can, thankfully, edit or remove that view and if you’ve collected and shared more badges than can fit in the view, you can customize which badges appear and change settings for individual badges. Not unlike Foursquare, if a user clicks on a particular badge (in this case on Facebook), they’ll be taken to a page that describes the steps it takes to earn the badge as well as a complete list of all badges offered by Khan. Many educational platforms are on a mission to make their content more social and shareable, and this is an action taken by Khan Academy with that goal in mind. The badge experience adds a gamification element to its experience, but what good is collecting badges if you can’t show them off publicly to all your friends? It’s a great way to encourage competition among students, and for Khan, it offers an opportunity for exponentially-increased brand exposure. Khan’s educational videos have racked up millions of hits on YouTube, but its name still remains relatively unknown outside of tech and educational circles. Now, with users displaying the badges on their Facebook profiles, friends that have no idea what Khan Academy is can click on those totally sweet badges (that’s a bit of snark, Khan definitely needs to work on these) and instantly walk through the process it takes to earn them, and, in turn, they are introduced to the Khan platform. It would be surprising if content from both Khan and Quora didn’t get big play from Facebook curators. Both sites are fundamentally educational in nature (although perhaps a little more loosely used in Quora’s case), engaging, and have dedicated and active user bases. Badges and Q&A’s may be a little harder for Facebook to monetize that game apps and videos, but they both still provide tons of data on the user’s interests and behaviors during interaction on Facebook, with a peek into those behaviors outside of its network. All in all, it will be interesting to see how much of a bump Khan and Quora receive from their respective Facebook integrations, and we will try to relay that info if and when they’re willing to share. But if Viddy, Socialcam, BranchOut, Flixster and many more are any indication, the Facebook Lift is coming soon. For more, find Quora’s blog post here and Khan Academy’s here.
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| Smule Finally Makes Their Android Debut With The Auto-Tuning Songify App Posted: 15 May 2012 08:12 AM PDT  Smule has been churning out scores of popular music-making iOS apps for years now, but they’ve been notoriously gun-shy about bringing those apps to other platforms. As of today though, that streak has finally come to an end — the company has just released their auto-tuning Songify app into the Google Play Store. Originally developed by Khush (whom Smule acquired toward the end of last year), Songify turns user-recorded speech into surprisingly listenable songs by tuning those voice inputs to go along with preset background music. The iOS version peaked at #1 on Apple’s Top Free Apps chart shortly after its launch in July 2011, and Smule now hopes for similar success as it expands into new territory. For a while though, it seemed like this day would never come. Late last year, Smule co-founder and CTO Ge Wang told InsideMobileApps that Android app development was under consideration by the company, but issues of audio latency in certain devices meant that not every user would have a consistently solid musical experience. Though company representatives are quick to note that latency is becoming less of an issue over time, Songify sort of side-steps that issue because it doesn’t rely on instantaneous audio feedback like some of Smule’s other apps (say, Ocarina for example). Still, that didn’t stop the company from testing the waters ahead of today’s official launch. A preview version of Songify was recently published in the Google Play Store to generally positive reviews, though they did point to a few issues that were addressed in the final build. So what’s next for the team at Smule? In case Songify doesn’t provide you with quite enough musical mirth, Smule has also revealed that their Magic Piano app is set to make its Android debut in just a few weeks, though it too is currently available in preview form for those who just can’t wait. For now though, Smule is content to hunker down on Android and iOS — company representatives confirmed (again) that expansion into platforms like Windows Phone isn’t in the works at this time.
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| Qualtrics Raises $70M From Accel And Sequoia: “The Biggest Software Company You Haven’t Heard Of”? Posted: 15 May 2012 08:00 AM PDT  Two of the top venture capital firms have written a big check for Qualtrics, a 10-year-old company offering online data collection and analysis. The $70 million round is Qualtrics’ first institutional investment — the company says it has been profitable since it was founded in 2002. The money comes from Accel Partners and Sequoia Capital, which both have growth funds targeting investments like Qualtrics — mature companies that have already achieved some success but have bootstrapped thus far. Apparently it’s the largest investment the two firms have ever made together. (Past joint investments include AdMob, the mobile ad network acquired by Google for $750 million.) Co-founder and CEO Ryan Smith says Qualtrics is offering a new approach to market research. In the past, companies that wanted to conduct this research had to hire outside firms, which is a pricey proposition. There are a few startups are offering cheaper alternatives, but they’re usually simple tools like surveys, which aren’t going to replace serious research. Qualtrics, on the other hand, has developed technology that allows companies to conduct sophisticated research on their own, without hiring an outside firm or even asking their IT team to handle a complicated installation. “Our mantra is: ‘Sophisticated enough for a PhD, easy enough for an intern,’” Smith says. Qualtrics claims to have more than 4,000 enterprise customers, including Barnes & Noble, CVS/Caremark, GEICO, Microsoft, Neiman Marcus, Royal Caribbean, Southwest Airlines, Thomson Reuters, Toyota, Vodaphone, Zappos, and 600 universities. Smith says a lot of that growth came in 2008 and 2009, after the financial crash, when companies realized they needed to become more data-driven: “We can’t just throw mud at the wall and see what sticks.” The company recently expanded its product lineup from the core Research Suite to include Qualtrics 360 (an employee assessment tool) and Qualtrics Site Intercept (which serves custom content to targeted website visitors). Smith says he decided to take on the new funding to invest heavily in growth — in the next year, he plans to add 250 new employees to the 200-person workforce. And he plans to do that in the company’s headquarters in Provo, Utah. Accel’s Ryan Sweeney and Sequoia’s Bryan Schreier are both joining the board. Sweeney says he heard about Qualtrics after seeing several other companies “we know and admire” using it to collect data. He soon realized that Qualtrics was “powering all these different things and [we were] frankly begging them to take meetings with us.” Schreier (who, in the press release, calls Qualtrics “the biggest software company you haven’t heard of yet”) tells me he’s known one of the Qualtrics co-founders since 2003, when they worked together at Google, but the company had sounded like a “humble corner store business.” Then, a few months ago, he saw Qualtrics’ numbers, and they were “mind-blowing.” He also says he was impressed by Qualtrics’ commitment to customer service — in fact, Smith tells me that there is an honest-to-goodness siren in the office that goes off every time the customer service phone line rings three times without being answered.
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| White Label App Platform Appia Rolls Out Pay Per Install Service For Google Play Posted: 15 May 2012 08:00 AM PDT  Appia, an app marketplace and white-label app platform, is broadening its support for Android with the introduction of Pay Per Install App Advertising for Google Play (formerly known as the Android Market). Up until now, all the downloads generated through PPD (pay per download) were done through an Appia-powered app store, but now developers can purchase a Pay Per Install campaign and drive traffic back to Google Play. This, in turn, can then boost their app’s install numbers and rank. The news comes at a time when Appia is hitting another notable milestone: its network has passed 500 million mobile consumers worldwide. To give you an idea of their growth, when we covered the launch of their PPD service in April 2011, the company was reporting more than 200 million mobile subscribers. In addition to this 250% growth in terms of network reach, the company also claims to have driven more than 15 million sponsored app installs over the past 12 months, with an average of more than 25 million total app downloads per month, and more than 400 million app downloads since its debut. The new support for Google Play allows developers to now run both Pay Per Download and Pay Per Install campaigns. Plus, it offers advanced reporting which will show campaign activity by platform, device, and geography (country). This allows the developers to really see where their campaign is working and where it isn’t. To generate this data, developers can install tracking via an in-app API or through server to server integration. A big difference between Appia and its competition (think TapJoy, and other incentivized Pay per Performance networks) is that the traffic Appia sends is non-incentivized. That means users aren’t offered virtual currency or other rewards in exchange for their actions. In addition, the company allows developers to buy on-deck ad placement on the app portals from over 50 major operators globally, including Vodafone, Vodacom, Telcel, America Movil, Claro, Comcel, Myxer and Zedge. Given its reach, Appia attracts big-name advertisers. Over the past 12 months, the company has seen advertisers like Facebook, AT&T, Priceline, Gameview Studios, Amazon, MocoSpace, CrowdStar, Blue Lion, Tequila Mobile, Storm8, Pocket Gems, Per Blue, Big Fish Games and others using its platform to bring in new mobile users.
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| Inside Microsoft’s New Azure Accelerator — Will Redmond Get The Startup Mojo? Posted: 15 May 2012 07:56 AM PDT  Back in March this year Microsoft launched its first ever “direct” startup accelerator, based out of Tel Aviv, Israel. That meant it would, for the first time, be an accelerator owner/operator. Dubbed the Windows Azure Accelerator (WAA) it looked, at least on first inspection, to be designed to push its Azure cloud computing platform. Perhaps this was some paper-thin marketing initiative? “Look everyone, startups are choosing to use Azure!” seemed to be the initial message. Indeed, the move led to some confusion in the market. Microsoft already works with TechStars and all members of its Global Accelerator Network. It also has an ongoing BizSpark marketing programme to push Microsoft products, and numerous R&D centres around the globe. What on earth was going on? Was this going to be some sort of prison for startups, where they would be force-fed gruel and lashed like galley slaves if they didn’t use Azure? It turns out, no, there’s more to it than that. But there is a back story to this move and a strong hint that this single move may, in the not too distant future, lead Microsoft back to its roots and re-inject that essential startup DNA back into the corporate giant. I took a trip out to Tel Aviv to get under the skin of this new initiative, to meet the startups they are backing and work out why the hell Microsoft would be doing an accelerator. But let’s look at the detail first. Housed in the Microsoft Israel Research and Development Center, the Accelerator is part of the Center's outreach program ThinkNext, a startup engagement program. Run a little like TechCrunch Disrupt, the ThinkNext Summit is an in-house, invitation-only Microsoft conference which has been running for 4 years featuring key MS people, but which also puts 20 startups on stage. It’s also taken under its wing the Microsoft “BizSpark One” program, which deals with about 50 companies out of a broader 45,000 BizSpark startups. THE WINDOWS AZURE ACCELERATOR The Windows Azure Accelerator itself is a four-month, biannual program for 10 startups. Featuring over 30 mentors from the industry (from CEOs to investors to marketing experts), startups also get all the usual free software offered through Microsoft BizSpark Plus. At the end of the programme they get a demo day for investors in Israel and one in Silicon Valley in September. Running the WAA day to day is Hannan Levy a former serial entrepreneur and cofounder of United Parents Online which has been covered on TechCrunch. A CTO for the Accelerator is due to be hired. The key point here is that Microsoft isn’t hiring from within its own borders, but bringing in entrepreneurs who can understand other entrepreneurs. As with most accelerators, the startups get free office space, coaching, mentorship, legal assistance – the usual. There will be a big focus on User Experience, something Israeli companies haven’t traditionally been strong in and – in something of a first for a Microsoft initiative – Agile and Lean Startup methodology will be promoted. The specific Azure cloud use element is good for two years (worth up to $60,000) – so in some respects this is kind of an investment. Now, you’d think the startups would be leaned on to use it. But in fact I saw zero evidence of this. Quite the contrary – when I visited I saw startups happily talking about their iOS or Android apps and working on Macs just as much as PCs. The startups also get access to customers and advertising/design partners like the giant Y&R ad agency. In reality I spoke with the mentors from these companies and it’s a lot simpler and less corporate than it sounds – what they are getting in practical terms is the time of two key guys from those companies, and their ability to green light anything the startups need. Mentor David Sable of Y&R says it’s about “giving the startups practical real-life understanding of what they need to sell and to understand what their clients will need.” At a WPP level Y&R is accountable for the entire Microsoft relationship so he calls it the WAA initiative a “strong partnership” which “is a huge value add for us” and adds “huge energy to my company”. Yoram Tietz of E&Y explains: “Big companies have a problem with innovation. The position of E&Y is pro bono. E&Y was chosen as partners because they have a market reach into the Israeli tech market.” The other mentors on the programme feature many well known names from the Israeli tech scene including Zohar Lvkovitz – Founder of Amobee; Guy Schory – head of new ventures, eBay; Moche Levin – managing general partner, DFJ Tel Aviv ; Shmulik Well – founder, SundaySky; Gil Peretz, a Neuro Linguistic Programming expert and Ali Diamnt, Former funder of Emblaze Systems, now in the Microsoft R&D centre. SO WHAT”S THE DEAL? More unusually the startups inside WAA get no money from Microsoft. But then again, no equity is taken either. So, free offices, free mentoring, access to lots of big potential partners. It’s all just a little too good to be true. What’s going on here? WHAT DOES MICROSOFT GET OUT OF THIS? It’s clear Microsoft wants to get something out of this relationship but, but it’s also, at this stage, happy to be vague about the outcomes. The criteria for startups to join WAA is simple enough: they need to have a cloud component, a big vision for their product, they need to be “coachable / mentorable”, be a small team of less that 4 people and be capable of being nimble. Amongst the startups I met, it was clear they were small, but hard working. After speaking to a few people I uncovered some typical startup behaviour – office hours amongst these guys usually work 11am to midnight, for instance. In return for this social contract, Microsoft gets to plug into new ways of working and new trends in technology. Yes, it could get those in other places, like the Valley, but not in such an intimate setting. Indeed, if the startups in WAA choose NOT to use Microsoft technologies, then guess who gets to pump those guys for information directly about why not? Microsoft gets to work out how to fix these issues much simpler way than if they had to engage with startups outside of any Microsoft connection. It’s true that Microsoft wants to encourage more entrepreneurs to build their cloud-based applications using Windows Azure – but the reality is subtler than that. As I worked my way through the people involved it became clear that they have big plans for the place. And it’s not really just about Azure – it’s about connecting with the startup vibe and informing wider strategy. Perhaps that’s better done outside of the stuffy confines of Redmond, in a venue spitting distance from Tel Aviv’s gorgeous beaches. But this is no holiday camp. BUT WHY ISRAEL? The background to this is instructive. Microsoft has been in Israel since 1991. It created the first R&D centre outside the US in Tel Aviv. Microsoft’s R&D Center houses 550 engineers. And while there are now 45 R&D centres globally, only three are considered “Strategic” ones. They are located in India, China, and Israel. While the former two are – how can I put this? – cheaper to run, Microsoft maintains its R&D centre in comparatively expensive Israel. The reasons have been expounded up so many time they are barely worth repeating, but for the record: Despite its small 8 million population, Israel has the third latest VC spending in the world according to the OECD and is third only to Silicon Valley and New York in total numbers (not per capita). It’s number four in the world in patents after Taiwan, China, Japan and the US (even though many patents in the US were originally developed in Israel, according to the WEF Global Competitive Report 2011-12). Israel has the largest number of tech startups traded on the NASDAQ. It has 4 of the top 30 computer science universities in the world. Of course, it goes without saying that the reasons for this tech proficiency are obvious: it’s a country with few natural resources, surrounded by enemies and on a constant state of near-war footing. Unfortunately, there’s nothing like a cold war to accelerate innovation and the heady mix of Israeli culture and national army service ends up producing a lot of technically proficient people, as was documented at length in the book Startup Nation. WHERE DID THE WAA COME FROM? As Zack Weisfeld, Senior Director of Strategy and Business Development at Microsoft's Israel Development Center, tells me, it was out of this startup-driven R&D centre, plus the ThinkNext programe, that they came up with the idea of the accelerator. (Weisfeld is a startup veteran who was at Modu and M-systems, acquired by SanDisk in 2006 for $1.6 billion). They were no longer talking about just innovation, but “innovation excellence” and “fast productisation.” Out of this R&D culture came the die of “rainmaking” – literally seeding the clouds. Clearly there was a missing link to achieve this: they needed the mojo of startups. And thus came the idea of the Azure Accelerator, says Weisfeld. Gradually people inside Microsoft listened to these siren voices. They needed more than R&D – they needed new blood. They needed the special energy bright by startups, and an accelerator was born. They also realised startups want more interaction with large corporates in a more collegiate atmosphere. Admittedly the stock markets might disagree with him but, as Weisfeld told me: “It’s not about Windows versus iOS versus Android or whatever. It’s more complicated than that. It’s not about selling more Microsoft Office licenses. “It’s really about working across all platforms. Azure is not the main target of the accelerator – it’s about being more connected to startups, trends, ways of working,” he says. Eventually this helps impact MS in other ways. Although the only requirement with the Azure accelerator is to use Azure, he says, startups can use anything else they like including open source tools and other platforms like iOS. “Working with startups gives Microsoft a better chance to compete in the future.” “People forget Microsoft is still a huge tech company and innovator. It suffers from a bad reputation in some ways, but this initiative shows it can work with startups.” As Weisfeld says, Microsoft getting access to fast-moving, agile startups “makes us better”. NEXT UP – THE XBOX ACCELERATOR The Windows Azure Accelerator is just the first of, perhaps, many more. Weisfeld says that while WAA is the first, others are likely to follow globally. More interestingly, the next one will be in the same building as the Azure Accelerator and will focus on the Xbox. Yes, Microsoft already has a ‘Kinect Accelerator‘,which is a venture run with TechStars in Seattle. But TechStars takes its usual 6% equity stake. This Microsoft-run version will be quite different. This Xbox accelerator will sit next to the Azure Accelerator and right next door to the R&D centre. This makes plenty of sense – the special technology associated with Kinnect comes out of Israeli ‘Machine Vision’ engineering, and guess where Machine Vision is a speciality? Yep, the Israeli Armed forces. CAN THE WAA IDEA SCALE? What stuck out eventually about the WAA startups I spoke to was that they were all from Israel. Technically speaking, that needn’t be the case, and I was told the WAA had had applications from 10 countries globally. However, practically speaking, startups don't get funding to come and live and work in Israel. That meant the gene pool was going to limited to startups from Israel, or even just Tel Aviv. On the plus side, I was told that in the future the WAA “will be happy” to house startups from other counties, and even “regionally”, so long as they could fund their 4 months in Tel Aviv. Personally, I took this as code for ‘other countries in the Middle East’ – quite some leap of faith for an Israeli initiative. I was also told to “watch this space” on that front. For here’s the rub. For a global organisation like Microsoft, should we not ask the question: is Microsoft’s first direct accelerator too focused on one country? Surely it ought to be the case that for a huge organisation like Microsoft to start a brand new accelerator then it should be one to all comers not just to Israeli start ups? It’s a delicate question which is perhaps best understood in the context of Israel’s powerhouse technology centre – one which almost rivals Silicon Valley in hard-core technology and innovation. The signs are though, that despite it’s all-Israeli makeup – Microsoft’s first ever direct accelerator is likely to be the first of many, as we’ve seen above with the Xbox initiative. CORPORATE ACCELERATORS – THE NEW NEW THING The WAA is clearly part of a wider trend. OK, you haven’t seen Apple or Facebook open accelerators, and nor are you likely to. But while Google hasn’t opened a direct accelerator it is certainly dipping its toes into the water. It recently started Campus London, a large building in London’s high tech cluster in the East of the city which houses accelerators and co-working spaces. Meanwhile, Telefonica is rolling out its Wayra incubators globally, while Deutsche Telekom announced its hub:arum incubator for Berlin this month. But in truth it feels like the more corporate the company culture, the more need there is for this kind of initiative. NEW MOJO FOR MICROSOFT? Ultimately, though, I think what we are looking at here in Israel is a kind of prototype accelerator, the model for which will inform Microsoft’s roll out of similar initiatives. It’s interesting that one of the key missions Microsoft’s R&D center is to look at social networking and monetization – that means social startups need to be part of the equation. And social startups are clearly in this first tranche at WAA. Perhaps all this activity will inform Microsoft’s future direction as a company. Or perhaps some corporate drone will dismiss it as a flight of fancy, and they should just concentrate on selling more Office and Azure products. Only time and – many more startups – will tell. THE STARTUPS AT WINDOWS AZURE ACCELERATOR Durados Evento EverCloud MediSafe Vidit AppsFlyer Twtrland RotaryView Stevie – Stealth mode company Disclosure: Travel costs to Israel were met by Microsoft
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| Watch Out Google, Zoho Just Launched A Better DIY Website Builder (And It Does Mobile, Too) Posted: 15 May 2012 07:14 AM PDT  Web-based productivity suite Zoho is launching a new app today which, again, puts it head-to-head against its biggest competitor, Google, while filling a much-needed hole in Zoho’s business tools lineup. The company is debuting Zoho Sites, a drag-and-drop website builder that allows anyone to build a professional website in minutes, without needing to know HTML or CSS. The product takes on two of Google’s own offerings in one shot, including Google’s simple website builder known as Google Sites, as well as Google’s latest addition, a mobile website conversion tool powered by DudaMobile. The difference between Zoho’s offering and Google’s is that Google’s products work separately, and are designed for different purposes. One (Google Sites) is a very basic website and wiki building tool, which is more appropriate for personal use or for use in small teams, not as a consumer-facing webpage. Meanwhile, Google’s DIY mobile site tool is more of a way to convert a professionally designed website into a mobile-friendly site that syncs with its desktop counterpart when changes are made. Zoho Sites, on the other hand, is an all-in-one product. It allows business owners to build desktop-sized websites which are already optimized for mobile devices. Plus, it comes ready with third-party app integrations, including support for Google Analytics, Google AdWords, Google Maps, YouTube, Google+, Facebook, Twitter, Flickr and Picasa. These elements can be dragged-and-dropped into place on the website. The site builder is also integrated with other tools in Zoho’s productivity suite. For example, Zoho stores all content in the Zoho Creator database, and when that database is modified, the website automatically updates. Also powered by Zoho Creator, Zoho Sites offers a form builder which lets site owners handle things like support requests, again without writing code. The forms can kick off email notifications and other integrated custom workflows as well. A number of other features are offered, too, including themes, built-in blogs, domain registration and hosting, integration with Google Apps, and support for multiple authors or site moderators. Zoho Sites will be available both as a free service (two websites with two forms each, one blog, unlimited pages) and paid. The Professional Edition is $39/year and includes six websites, each with 10 forms, a blog, and unlimited pages). This is the only edition to support AdSense and a full rebranding. Below, a video tour of the Zoho Sites offering:
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| Factual Releases Three New Location And Mobile Ad Targeting Tools Posted: 15 May 2012 06:40 AM PDT  Open data platform Factual.com is beefing up its Global Places offering today with three new APIs that will provide mobile developers with access to a ton of new data which can help them build better location-aware apps. But the company notes that the APIs’ launch will be of special interest to mobile ad providers, including mobile ad networks, demand-side platforms and agencies, who are looking for new data points around geography. This is particularly important on mobile where traditional methods of ad targeting – beacons and cookies – aren’t viable. The Geopluse API (beta) is the first of three, and works to reveal directionally where users intend to go, rather than signaling their arrival at a destination. The API provides everything Factual knows about the location. You provide it latitude and longitude, and Factual returns additional attributes which it calls “pulses.” These pulses use Factual's network of signals, calculated metrics, and census data, which come from Factual itself, publicly-available data, or from third parties. The first few “pulses” to become available include:
The more interesting ones here are the Factual Commercial Density and Factual Commercial Profile. The company has taken its Places data and provided overviews of the density and type of businesses in the area. A potential use case for this API could involve a brand like Starbucks, which wants to know when, where and to whom it should serve its ads to in order to get the highest yield and conversions. With the API, the company would know not only the exact location of the consumer (the latitude and longitude), but also all the contextual info about and around the location, too. More “pulses” will arrive in the next few months. Factual says that pricing will depend on use case and usage volume. The second API is the Reverse Geocoder API (beta) which converts longitude and latitude into an address (U.S. only) or region (49 other countries). There a a few of these out there already from Google, Yahoo and MapQuest, Factual notes. While the company says that it does not see itself getting into the mapping business, it does see a need to serve its own API to complement the other offerings in its Places product. Finally, there is the world World Geographies API (beta) which is primarily used to translate place names between languages, and determine what cities are found in what regions, what states in what countries, etc. This is another complementary service, as Factual has already published small businesses and landmarks. This adds 6 million more natural and administrative geographies. Factual admits that there are a few other players that have similar products to those it announced today, but wants to differentiate itself with data (especially in terms of the Commercial Density data, above), speed and scale. The company claims to provide near real-time access to these datasets well-under 100ms.
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| BBC Worldwide Extends Its Partnership With Video Site Viki To Cover Advertising Posted: 15 May 2012 06:27 AM PDT  BBC Worldwide, the commercial arm of the BBC, today announced an extension of its relationship with social, online TV site Viki. On the heels of a strategic investment it made last year — BBC Worldwide participated in a $20 million Series B round that also included SK Planet, Greylock Partners, Andreessen Horowitz, Charles River Ventures, Neoteny Labs and others — and a content licensing deal, now BBC Worldwide will also working on advertising for Viki. Through its BBC Advertising arm, the BBC will be pooling together ad inventory from its own BBC Worldwide operations with that of Viki, which is accessed in over 200 countries and offers TV shows, movies and other premium content in over 150 languages — with those translations powered by its user base. The deal will mean that BBC can add further scale to its own advertising operations to target a class of larger advertisers looking to reach that international audience on a wide scale. The agreement covers Viki’s operations in Asia, Europe and the Americas, the companies said, and has already resulted in one successful campaigns trialled in South East Asia for Coca Cola, Procter & Gamble and Samsung. Viki provides a kind of open-source approach to world-wide video consumption: it gets the rights to TV shows, films and music videos and then volunteers in its community use Viki’s software to provide subtitles for that content. That content is then broadcast online, on mobile and via smart TVs. Viki says that to date some one billion videos have been viewed on its service, with some 200 million words translated. But that is a very long-tail approach to online video — and while Razmig Hovaghimian, CEO and co-founder of Viki, says its viewership is growing “by millions each month,” that is happening across a massive footprint that might otherwise be difficult to sell against for advertising. Working with another partner like the BBC can help consolidate some of that audience in different national markets. On the other side of the equation — the content side — Viki has amassed an impressive list of partners for sourcing the original content. In addition to BBC Worldwide, it also features Korean dramas, Japanese Anime, Spanish novellas, Bollywood, and independent films, including distribution deals with Hulu, Netflix, Yahoo and MSN; and from NBC, A&E; TVB in Hong Kong, SBS in South Korea, Fuji TV in Japan and Amedia in Russia.
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| Engagio Brings Its Social Inbox To Your Gmail Inbox Posted: 15 May 2012 06:05 AM PDT  What’s the best way to manage our conversations across all the websites and social networks we’re visiting? William Mougayar, founder and CEO of Engagio, says that it’s through a Gmail-style social inbox — after all, that’s the interface we use to handle most of our communication already (not that everyone’s happy about that), and heck, it’s the way many of us read our social network updates already. Now Mougayar is taking that approach a step further. Instead of accessing their Engag.io inbox in a separate website, users can install a Chrome extension, then read Engag.io as a separate folder within Gmail itself. I installed the extension earlier this morning, and yes, I can report that Mougayar isn’t kidding about it being Gmail-style — each social network message or update looks like an email, and each conversation is threaded, just like their email counterparts. You can reply to messages from within Gmail, as well as sharing, viewing, and “liking” them. It’s also pretty much identical to the existing Engag.io interface, but again, the new context makes a difference — it’s no longer a separate website that you have to visit, but instead just another folder in your inbox that you have to keep up with. Engag.io can integrate with Disqus, Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Hacker News, Tumblr, Foursquare, LinkedIn, and more. I only wish it had a Priority Inbox like Gmail, so that it wasn’t dominated by random people tweeting my articles. (I love people tweeting my articles! It’s just not that awesome to browse those tweets in an inbox format.) The company is tackling the discovery problem in other ways. Today it’s also unveiling a Engagement Discovery Dashboard, where you can find friends and follow their conversations as well. This turns Engag.io into a social network, of sorts, rather than just a tool for managing your presence on other networks. (In concept, it sounds a bit like FriendFeed, though the interface is completely different.) Mougayar says that this is a good way to find the “signal from the noise” amidst social network fragmentation, because the fact that an update led to a larger conversation is a good sign that it’s interesting and relevant. Together, Mougayar says the updates mark a new phase for the company: “It’s almost like Engag.io 2.0.” It’s also adding support for managing multiple accounts from one network, which can be particularly useful for brands and other businesses. The company has raised $540,000 in seed funding from Rho Canada with participation from Real Ventures, Extreme Venture Partners, Bullpen Capital, Fred Wilson, Mike Yavonditte, and other individual investors.
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| Ikea’s Upcoming Uppleva HDTV System Further Detailed Posted: 15 May 2012 06:03 AM PDT  Taking the term home theater in a box to a new level, Ikea made waves a few weeks back when it announced plans to start selling a self-branded HDTV and home theater system with a starting price under $1000. However, the company didn’t out all the tantalizing details at the time. Gigaom managed to get a bit more info on the system including the type of apps included on the rather impressive HDTV. The Uppleva system, as it’s called in traditional Ikea fashion, allows buyers to customize their whole entertainment system starting with the screen size but also including the type and size of cabinet and so on. The approach takes the focus away from the TV and instead on the owners space. Each Uppleva system will ship with a Blu-ray player, 2.1 audio system with a wireless sub, and some sort of media cabinet. As detailed in the original announcement, the HDTV isn’t a slouch. The 1080p display has a 400Hz response time and built-in apps. GigaOm learned that the system will launch will at least 15 apps including YouTube, Vimeo, Dailymotion, TuneIn Radio, and a browser (possibly Opera for TV). That puts this Ikea set on the same level as sets from Sony, Samsung and LG. The original plan is to systemically roll the HDTV system out starting in select European stores this year followed by a broad launch in 2013 that includes the US. If this system lives up to its potential, it could be the most disruptive force in home theater since the advent of buying from Internet vendors. Best Buy better have an answer in place.
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| Personalized Music Video Service Cull TV Acquired By Twitvid, CEO Departs Posted: 15 May 2012 06:00 AM PDT  Social video network Twitvid has closed another acquisition today, following its March deal which involved bringing the team from daily deals aggregator Frugalo on board. Today, the company is announcing it has acquired Cull TV, an independent music video sharing site, which CTO John Hurliman describes as a little bit like Pandora mixed with MTV. Cull TV, founded in early 2011, currently offers a catalog of some 2 to 3 million videos, with 100 brand-new ones appearing per day. The service offers 25 prominent channels devoted to various genres, but gets more specific than just “indie rock” or “hip hop.” Some of the featured channels today, for example, include “Euro Popped,” and “New Chilean Rock,” to give you an idea of how niche some of the content can be. The company relies on its in-house team of experts to curate the selections to determine what’s trending, but it also relies on the wider web of music bloggers, Hurliman explains. There’s other technology behind the site, too, which involves “a lot of web analysis and continuous crawling” to find out which bands and videos are generally popular. And Cull TV can customize channels to your own interests as well. “Once you log in with Facebook on the site,” adds Hurliman, “we can get a lot more personalized intelligence by looking at your Facebook posts and your Facebook likes to determine what bands you like and turn those into continuous video playlists,” he says. As for Twitvid’s interest in the site, it goes far beyond curating music videos. Explains Twitvid CEO Mo Al Adham, “we’re going to use a lot of the know-how and knowledge the [Cull TV] team has acquired to integrate those learnings into Twitvid,” he says. Cull TV did a lot of work in figuring out how to get really great content out of long tail video, and knows how to use a combination of manual curation and algorithms to surface the most relevant content. “We hope to bring what we did very well in independent music, and broaden that out to Twitvid’s more generic approach to all of long-tail video,” Hurliman says. During the transition period, Cull TV will remain up-and-running for at least the next few months, but whether it will remain up indefinitely has yet to be determined. Also of note, Cull TV CEO Katherine de León will not be joining the Twitvid team, but will be moving on to a new project. Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed, but the results of the integration will arrive soon after Twitvid’s big product announcement they’re teasing for June (hopefully a new iPad experience). According to CEO Al Adham, Twitvid has more than doubled the number of video views it serves over the past five to six months, now in the range of 70 million+ views. The last time they talked to press, the Twitvid network was seeing 10 million unique visitors. Today, that’s over 15 million. Stay tuned.
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| Rock Health Grad HealthInReach Merges With PriceDoc To Bring Price Transparency To Healthcare Posted: 15 May 2012 05:30 AM PDT  Earlier this month, we covered Castlight’s whopping $100 million series D investment — one of the largest venture rounds raised by a healthcare IT startup to date. The reason? Castlight is on a mission to bring price transparency and comparison tools to healthcare through a B2B service that provides self-insured companies with the ability to let their employees compare quality and costs across a variety of medical procedures. With the cost of healthcare skyrocketing and insurance premiums on the rise, there’s a serious need for price transparency in healthcare — and a growing movement to put consumers back in control of their health by reforming the system so that care providers display the prices they charge for appointments, treatments, and procedures. Founded in 2009 by Scott Sangster and incubated in healthtech accelerator Rock Health’s inaugural batch, HealthInReach is tapping into this need by offering a transparent online marketplace for healthcare. The startup has essentially devised a consumer-focused (or B2B2C) complement to Castlight, whereby those who are uninsured or pay out-of-pocket for medical procedures can use its marketplace to search for and learn about doctors, dentists, based on experience, reputation and prices. The providers on HealthInReach are specific to those offering dental, vision and elective care — a bit different than the focus of Castlight — but an equally sizable market. HealthInReach Founder Scott Sangster tells us that more than 130 million Americans are currently living without dental insurance and collectively pay billions of dollars in out-of-pocket expenses because the system doesn’t allow them to find out the price of procedures in advance or compare available, local care options. As mentioned, reform is badly needed in this regard. Met with high out-of-pocket expenses or high deductibles, consumers want better ways to reduce costs without forgoing their essential healthcare needs. So HealthInReach has built a resource which provides consumers with a single destination to research costs of particular medical or dental procedures, take advantage of pre-negotiated group discount rates, and, after locating the best option, schedule their appointment online. Because processing insurance paperwork is a pain in the ass for doctors, patients who pay out-of-pocket represent cost-savings. HealthInReach groups self-paying patients and allows doctors to pass savings to people who book appointments online. The resource gives doctors, dentists, and optometrists a searchable database by which they can be more easily discovered, share their necessary info and prices, and convert anonymous clickers into paying customers/patients. And therein one finds the startup’s business model. For every conversion, HealthInReach takes a cut. On the flip side, for the consumer, HealthInReach makes it easier to find new dentists, optometrists and doctors who specialize in elective procedures — anything from Botox to Lasik — gives them price and quality comparison tools, discounted rates, as well as education, training, and patient reviews. To date, over 3 million people have used the service to look for doctors. However, from the outset, HealthInReach intentionally limited its market to southern California (the startup is headquartered in L.A.), but it’s been looking to expand nationally and grow its database of doctors, optometrists and dentists. To do so, the company is today announcing that it has merged with PriceDoc, a startup with a very similar mission — to build an online marketplace that connects healthcare providers with consumers looking for medical and dental procedures. Founded in 2008, PriceDoc, like HealthInReach, provides consumers with comparative pricing tools on medical, dental, vision, chiropractic, allied health and elective procedures, as well as the ability to dig down into information on the practice and its doctors’ credentials. Although the specific terms of the deal were not disclosed, the combined company will operate as HealthInReach, with Scott Sangster continuing as operating CEO. Together, the two companies now offer more than 1.6 million appointments every month and descriptions and prices for about 50K specific procedures. Just as before, users can book appointments, receive reminders, and lock-in discounts before they show up at the doctor’s office. HealthInReach has developed a proprietary database and uses patented technology to compare dynamic pricing schemes that display prices not in the past (from historical data, like Castlight) but in the future. Although HealthInReach was already employing this tech, its reach was minimal, whereas PriceDoc had built a much deeper and more national database of practices. Now, the two can leverage the tech and the database to offer a more robust service. The companies have integrated their services and officially launch the “new HealthInReach” today. Of PriceDoc’s three co-founders, CEO Bob Kurilko will be staying on as an advisor, President Patrick Bradley will be joining the board, and Chief Medical Officer Julian Henley will be returning to Yale, where he is a practicing MD. As of today, PriceDoc, as an independent entity, is officially kaput, and its web services will be shut down in the coming months. Collectively, the two startups have raised over $6 million in venture funding. And, of course, it’s worth mentioning that, in the online medical appointment booking space, HealthInReach obviously faces serious competition from its largest player, ZocDoc, although it’s currently doing little in the way of price comparison/transparency, arguably a much larger problem than online booking. Though it depends, of course, whom you ask. For more on PriceDoc, check them out here. For the new HealthInReach, go here.
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| Kantar Worldpanel: Android Dominates Smartphone Sales Overall; In U.S. iOS Closing In Posted: 15 May 2012 05:15 AM PDT  New figures out today from Kantar Worldpanel ComTech — a market research division of WPP — show that Android is, overall, continuing to make large gains in the smartphone market, accounting for a majority of sales in the 12 weeks that ended March 18. Drilling down, Android is doing particularly well in some places. In Spain, Android is the platform to beat. It accounted for a 72.3 percent of smartphone sales in the period — the highest proportion among the markets analyzed by Kantar. But Android’s domination is not across the board: in the U.S., sales of devices based on Google’s platform actually declined by about 6.6 percent over last year and accounted for 47.6 percent of all smartphone sales in the country. Apple, meanwhile, saw its percentage of sales in the U.S. go up by 12.8 percent to account for 43 percent of all sales. Kantar also says that while now the majority of consumers in the UK and Australia now own smartphones, in other markets that it analyses, the tipping point has yet to be reached. Kantar notes that in Australia, 57 percent of mobile consumers now own smartphones; and in the UK, 53.1 percent own smartphones. But in Germany the percentage is at 32 percent; France at 40 percent; Italy at 39 percent; Spain at 37 percent; and the U.S. at 38 percent. Those figures are a moving target, though. In the UK, for example, Kantar’s analyst Dominic Sunnebo notes that in the next year, 22 million consumers aged over 13 will be buying mobile devices in the next year and some 80 percent of them are expected to buy a smartphone. In Spain, Android also saw the biggest gains in terms of sales in the last 12 weeks: its 72.3 percent share of sales represented a huge rise of nearly 40 percent on a year ago. The platform saw similarly large growth in Germany (up 27.2 percent to represent 61.8 percent of sales); France (17 percent up to 54.6 percent); Italy (up by 29.3 percent to account for 48.5 percent of all sales) and Australia (up nearly 20 percent for 52 percent of all sales). Kantar notes that among the top Android makers in the last quarter, Samsung and HTC were selling the strongest, together accounting for 86 percent of all sales in the the UK, for example. He notes that the HTC One X has been selling particularly well since its launch. In contrast, Sony only had 10.4 percent of Android sales in the past 12 weeks and LG had less than 1 percent in the UK. Among other platforms, Symbian’s share declined across the board: Nokia’s legacy smartphone platform lost between 9 percent and 36 percent sales market share in the countries covered by Kantar Worldpanel. Sales of Windows Phone — the platform that Nokia is now using as its primary smartphone platform — are yet to make up for that. In markets where Microsoft’s OS saw gains (Spain being an exception), growth was in the low single digits in all cases — as was the total share of sales attributed to the platform. Windows Phone’s highest share of sales was in Germany, where it accounted for 6.2 percent of smartphone sales: that’s including all manufacturers building on Windows Phone, not just Nokia.
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| Honestly.com Becomes A Talent Search Engine, Renames Itself TalentBin Posted: 15 May 2012 05:01 AM PDT  Honestly.com, a startup that allowed professionals to submit anonymous reviews of their coworkers, has been pretty quiet for the past couple of years. Turns out that’s because the company has been busy reinventing itself. Today it’s unveiling a new product and a new name — TalentBin. Co-founder Peter Kazanjy says TalentBin addresses one of the big problems with Honestly, namely the lack of content. Rather than relying on users to create all the reviews, TalentBin looks at the content that already exists on the Web — specifically, people’s activity on a variety of social networking sites. Kazanjy calls that activity your “professional exhaust,” and argues that it contains lots of relevant information about your professional interests and accomplishments. So TalentBin aggregates a person’s activity across sites like Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus, Meetup, Quora, Github, Sourceforge, and Bitbucket, then uses that data to create a searchable profile for recruiters. Comparing the product to LinkedIn’s recruiting tools, Kazanjy says, “we’re kind of like that for the rest of the Web.” In other words, recruiters can use TalentBin to take their search beyond LinkedIn, finding new candidates and new information about existing candidates. For example, Kazanjy says he conducted a search for Ruby on Rails in the San Francisco Bay Area, and he found 4,500 matching profiles on LinkedIn, 156 profiles on BranchOut, and 22,000 profiles on TalentBin. He also argues a TalentBin profile can be much richer than what you’d find on LinkedIn or a traditional resume. A profile might just say that someone was an engineer at Company X and then at Company Y, with no additional detail, but TalentBin might show that they’re constantly tweeting and posting on Quora about Ruby and therefore rank them highly in a search for Ruby engineers. And since recruiters theoretically get a better sense of your real interests and passions, that may mean you’re more likely to get approached about jobs that you actually find exciting. For now, TalentBin is focused on technical talent, but Kazanjy says it could expand into other fields where this data is relevant, which he predicts is “any knowledge worker.” It’s also entirely recruiter-facing for now, meaning that only recruiters see the profiles, but Kazanjy says it might add features that allow people to see and correct their profiles in the future. (Coderwall is also trying to create an aggregated profile and reputation system for programmers, but rather its model is inverted, starting out as a site for coders then maybe eventually moving into recruiting, and the name, at least, implies that it’s pretty focused on programmers.) Recruiters can access TalentBin via the website, or as a plugin to Human Resources Information Systems, Recruiting CRM programs, or Applicant Tracking Systems. This is actually the company’s second rebranding, because back in 2010 it changed its name from Unvarnished (at the same time it announced $1.2 million in funding from First Round Capital, Ron Conway's SV Angel, Charles River Ventures, and others). Hopefully this will be the last. Kazanjy says early signs are positive — even though today is the official relaunch, TalentBin has been in private beta testing for months, and already has 60-plus corporate customers including Intuit, Groupon, and Yahoo.
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| Simplee Raises $6 Million Series A For Its Mint-Like Approach To Tracking Healthcare Expenses Posted: 15 May 2012 05:00 AM PDT  Simplee, a Mint-like platform for tracking healthcare expenses and then paying them online, is today announcing the close of its $6 million Series A round of funding. The round was led by The Social+Capital Partnership (aka “s23p”), and includes current investors, Greylock Partners Israel. As a part of the investment, s23p’s General Partner Ted Maidenberg and Greylock's Tilli Kalisky joined Simplee's Board of Directors. The funding will help Simplee extend its product from bill tracking and payments to other areas, including plan recommendations, care recommendations, and more. The company is also preparing to roll out its B2B offering to partners, and launch its first mobile app. The company is based in Palo Alto, but company CEO Tomer Shoval is Israeli, which is why Simplee’s seed round of $1.5 million included Greylock Israel and a ground of Israeli angels. However, the company is focused on the U.S. market, in terms of its offering. For a little background, Simplee aims to do for your medical insurance accounts what Mint.com did for financial accounts, which means, basically, it helps you make better sense of them. Something of a Cake Health competitor, it brings in medical, dental and pharmacy bills and presents them in an easy-to-understand dashboard showing things like total costs, how much you’ve paid out-of-pocket, your deductible, how many doctor visits you’ve had and more. Besides making it easier to visualize spending, Simplee also tracks your insurance company’s database, and updates its platform with a new bill when it becomes available. It shows you how much of that bill you owe, and how much your insurance will pay, so that you can then make the correct payment directly through the service itself. Shoval tells us that the company is weeks away from launching a pretty exciting new feature: it will soon start detecting and flagging billing errors. For those with a lot of healthcare expenses, this could end up saving you quite a bit of money. He’s not ready to disclose how exactly the technology works, but hints that it’s based on the company’s knowledge of your plan and the payments you’ve already made. A second feature, plan recommendation, is also on the horizon, says Shoval. With this, Simplee will look at aggregate data to determine what plan best fits a user’s needs. Further down the road, Simplee will also roll out tools to help you find the right doctor for your needs, too. Since its launch in May of last year, Simplee has managed nearly half a billion dollars in medical expenses for members across thousands of medical providers. Today, the company covers 80% of insurers in the U.S. market, and the average Simplee bill pay user pays around $1,000 per year via the platform. User engagement with the service is high, too, the company reports, with more than 65% returning regularly (within a 90-day window) Thanks to the new funding, the company can now really focus on its new product updates and is also poised to announce several new B2B relationships involving large partners who will bring Simplee to their members. The partners will include employers, HSA banks and FSA administrators, but Simplee is not disclosing their names at this time. “It’s a great opportunity that can help us scale in terms of user base and monetization,” says Shoval of the new partners. Partners will pay for Simplee via its advanced SaaS subscription model, which doesn’t offer per-seat pricing, but will actually adjust pricing based on user engagement. When users get results, partners pay more. For its consumer-level offering, Simplee will remain free. And in case you’re worried about putting your medical expenses in the hands of a third-party, Shoval assures us that they will “never share user data with anyone.” The company may examine aggregate, anonymized data to make recommendations, but your personal data and expenses remain private.
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| Look Out: Pinterest Marketing Platform Curalate Lands $750k Seed From NEA, First Round, MentorTech Posted: 15 May 2012 04:46 AM PDT  A new breed of social media sites led by visual rather than text-based interactions is now spawning a new breed of marketing service catering to the new format. The latest of these is a startup called Curalate, which is officially launching today with $750,000 in seed funding from NEA, First Round Capital and UPenn-focused MentorTech for a service that lets brands search and track its images across the social network, whether they have been posted by the brands themselves or by everyday consumers. Although the site is only officially launching today, in its beta format it has already managed to pick up more than 150 brands as customers, its co-founder and CEO, Apu Gupta, tells me. That speaks to how, up to now, there hasn’t been an analytics service available quite like the one that Curalate is offering. Gupta notes that while there have been a number of companies that have jumped on the Pinterest bandwagon and started to offer analytics to measure how brands are resonating on the social network, Curalate is the first to look not just at what a brand is posting on the site, but it can also track what regular people are posting. In other words, not just the sweater as J.Crew pins it, but as you or I might pin it, too. “Think of us as playing a giant game of Memory,” he says. “Every time someone adds that sweater it adds that brand. We play that game of memory and deliver the conversation and analytics behind it, all at ‘Pinterest scale.’” Curalate is then able to track how that one piece of content moves throughout Pinterest and potentially eventually goes to a company’s site to convert into a purchase. Gupta notes that the solutions Curalate has built are proprietary but are based on some known techniques in visual search. This is a gap that Patrick Chung, a partner at NEA, says is only now starting to get addressed, as brands continue to see huge traffic coming from the image-based social network — contrary to whatever reports we’ve heard that traffic seems to be leveling off at the site. “Pinterest is being crushed under the weight of its own traffic,” Chung says, who notes that brands can tell that there is a lot of traffic coming to their e-commerce sites from Pinterest, but that’s effectively all they know. "Brands have no idea how it's all happening, it's a massive amount of traffic being driven to their e-commerce sites. Right now, it's coming from a magical black box. The complaint is 'we have all this traffic from Pinterest and we want to know more about it." The idea, with Curalate, is that they will be able to now track exactly how that user arrived at its site — so that the brand can then hone and improve how it interfaces with sites like Pinterest in the future. Chung notes that while NEA invests in other social analytics companies — for example Hearsay Social and Sprout Social. Curalate is the first to concentrate on visual-based analytics. Companies that have already signed up to the service in two months of beta use are a testament to how the service, in its early days, is appealing both to other tech-savvy startups but also more traditional brands. The customer list includes Birchbox, Bonobos, Kraft, Neiman Marcus and Curalate’s Philadelphia neighbor, the online eyeglass sensation Warby Parker. Pricing comes in three tiers: $19/month, $49/month and $99/month for varying levels of service and tracking, Gupta says. While Pinterest will be the initial focus for Curalate, the plan is to extend it to other social networks that are also making a significant impact not through text but images: other sites that are likely to be added into the mix are Polyvore, Fancy, Wanelo and Instagram, says Gupta.
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| Facebook Files New S-1, Pricing $34-38 Per Share, For A Market Cap Of Nearly $100B. Instagram Delay Posted: 15 May 2012 03:41 AM PDT  Facebook has filed a new S-1, and it contains more details on the IPO. It will offer underwriters the right to purchase up to an additional 50,612,302 shares of Class A common stock to cover over-allotments. Facebook anticipates that the initial public offering price will be between $34.00 and $38.00 per share. In total there will be 337.5 million shares offered, plus the 50.6 million additional shares (so up to 388 million shares sold), and it wants to raise $14.7 billion. The stock will be trading under FB. The additional 50.6 million shares, and the pricing of between $34-38 per share, confirms a report we ran yesterday noting both the “greenshoe” of additional shares to meet demand, as well as the stock pricing. In that same post, we noted that that this could mean a valuation of between $92 billion and $103 billion. Here is an updated calculation based on the shares as they are detailed in today’s S-1:
Adding that up, the market cap will be between $87,315,575,663 ($87.3 billion) and $97,574,660,911 ($97.6 billion). There are also the 50.6 million shares, which would net an between $1.72 billion and $1.92 billion extra on top of that. Instagram: It also looks like Facebook has worked into the S-1 indirectly that its Instagram acquisition may end up getting delayed. In the past it had noted that it expected the Instagram acquisition to close by Q2 2012, but now it has modified that to say “expected to close in 2012.” Facebook will have to pay Instagram a $200 million termination fee, it says, “if governmental authorities permanently enjoin or otherwise prevent the completion of the merger or if either party terminates the agreement after December 10, 2012.”
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