A full 7.5 million years later, it arrives at the answer: 42.

Google appears to be referencing that bit of geek cult humor in a new device, the H2G2-42, that it is currently submitting to the FCC for regulatory testing. H2G2 is a Wikipedia-ish guide to “life, the universe, and everything” inspired by Adams’ books.

There’s little data available about the device, but Google does say it is a “media player,” and a “fixed base station” with 802.11b/g/n Wi-Fi, which would make it almost certainly a replacement for Google’s failed Nexus Q. The Q was Google’s ”first social streaming media player” that met with almost universally negative reviews, underwhelmed users, and is no longer for sale.

Source: FCC

Google device H2G2-42 is in FCC testing

One change that seems likely: It appears that the H2G2-42 will allow users to plug in external monitors via provided USB ports:

Source: FCC

Google’s H2G2-42 may be connectable to external monitors

As The Verge notes, Google’s new streaming music app broke compatibility with the Nexus Q. The Google Play Music All Access product is impressive, enabling personalized “radio stations” and inexpensive streaming music. Google calls it “radio without rules,” and it seems reasonable that Google would want a shiny new device to go with this major new music push.

Photos are not yet available and more details will have to wait until 45 days after certification. And it’s unlikely that a music streaming device will be the ultimate answer to the ultimate question.

But meanwhile, enjoy:

Image credits: Google, FCC

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

More than 20 million students currently use Google Apps, and another 10 million are soon to join, thanks to a deal with Malaysia.

As students and schools are increasingly storing more of their data and documents in clouds of Google’s servers, Backupify recently announced that it has tripled its education user base, with more than 40,000 new education users since January of this year. Schools are using the cloud-based backup service to ensure critical data is archived and safe, even if it would be accidentally deleted or lost on Google’s servers.

Education is a notoriously slow adopter of technology, but Google Apps is growing quickly, if not virally, doubling over the last two years. And the current 20 million users include seven million inside the U.S. alone — led by Oregon that adopted Google Apps in all K-12 classrooms in 2010.

And sometimes, they’re using Backupify because they have to:

“Millions of students and educators around the world are currently using Google Apps to enhance collaborative learning,”  Backupify CEO Rob May said in a statement. “The education sector is ahead of other industries in this regard, but faces unique compliance requirements for data privacy and retention that demand an effective backup strategy.”

To celebrate the recent growth of Google Apps for Education — and their own growth — Backupify put this infographic together:

Image credit: John Koetsier/Venturebeat

The new TrackingPoint sniper rifle doesn’t fire when you pull the trigger. Rather, it fires when it knows it will hit the target you’re aiming at. And then streams video to the included iPad mini to allow you to share your hunting or sharpshooting experience with Facebook, YouTube, or maybe even Al Jazeera.

Now, the company says, everyone can be an expert marksman.

“With TrackingPoint, even a novice shooter can become an elite long-range marksman in minutes, accurately and effectively engaging targets out to 1,200 yards,” the company said in a press release.

That’s good, if you’re a hunter and you want to “ethically harvest” game by making immediate kills shots. But it’s also incredibly dangerous, since now inexperienced shooters can be as accurate — or more accurate — as trained military snipers from almost a mile away. The potential for terrorism and targeted assassinations is obvious.

The shooter simple tells the rifle what he or she is aiming at by locking a laser on the target. The gun’s built-in laser range finder, compass, environmental sensors to gauge wind speeds, inertial measurement unit, ballistics computer, and networked tracking engine then engage. But the rifle only fires when you’re holding it in exactly the right direction to hit the target, ensuring that even the unsteadiest and untrained hands can deploy death from a distance. And every shot is recorded and streamed to your nearby iPad.

“Think of it like a smart rifle. You have a smart car; you got a smartphone; well, now we have a smart rifle,” company President Jason Schauble told NPR.

Hunters are excited by the possibilities, apparently.

Source: TrackingPoint

XS1 is the largest-caliber Precision Guided Firearm (PGF) available today.

“When I first saw this system, I knew immediately that I had to have one,” said the first owner of a TrackingPoint rifle. “As a sport hunter and professional marksman, I see the TrackingPoint technology as an excellent way to ensure more ethical harvesting of game and to share the thrill of the hunt with anyone. I cannot wait to make amazing shots of my own.”

The Austin-based company that makes the TrackingPoint rifle calls it a “Precision-Guided Firearm (PGF),” carefully avoiding any reference to “snipers” or “sniper rifles.” But the size and weight of this deadly weapon — 27″ long, over 20 pounds loaded — make it a very unusual hunting rifle. I’m no firearms expert, but several sites I’ve checked indicate that average hunting rifles weigh in at 6-12 pounds, and that a rifle of 20 pounds or more is “just too heavy for general purposes.”

Ergo, it’s a sniper rifle.

TrackingPoint has made some efforts around safety. The sophisticated tracking scope that makes the rifle “smart” is password-protected, according to the company’s CEO, so while the gun will still fire without an authorized user, it won’t allow access to all the intelligence that could make a weekend warrior into an instant Marine sniper.

The company made its first deliveries this week, and due to “overwhelming demand,” has set up a web-based application process to get on the waiting list. We can only hope that the application process doesn’t allow any deranged individuals to access this type of deadly weapons.

And, no matter how smart these rifles are, the question is: are they wise?

Google’s I/O developer conference is over, and we’ve learned quite a bit: Devs just can’t get enough of Google Glass, design is a bigger focus for the company than ever before, and Larry Page is kind of sad about a lot of things. It’s been a whirlwind ride, but honestly we’re just glad to be out of San Francisco’s Moscone Center.

Check out our highlights from I/O below:

• Google I/O 2013 keynote live blog
• Larry Page is sad, hopeful, and frustrated in his heartfelt Google I/O speech
• Google Glass apps are easy to develop, but brutally difficult to design well
• What hardware is Google making after Glass? Mary Lou Jepsen knows
• What’s next for Google Glass: More units, more apps, more colors
• How cognitive science and user empathy powered Google’s design breakthrough
• OK, Google, your conversational search is awesome as hell
• Maps rebuilt from the ‘ground up,’ iPad version coming this fall
• Google Play for Education could kill the iPad in schools
• Major design overhaul makes Google+ look a whole lot like Pinterest
• Google announces its Spotify competitor, Google Play Music ‘All Access’ — ‘radio without rules’
• Hangouts, the best part of Google+, gets standalone iOS, Android, and Chro

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The popular and fast-growing blog service is mulling a $1.1 billion acquisition offer from Yahoo. But while the massive blogging powerhouse only pulled in $13 million in revenue in 2012, and raised $125 million at a lower $800 million valuation, Tumblr CEO David Karp feels $1.1 billion is too little.

I guess it depends what yardstick you use.

If you look at an Instagram-style deal, which was originally around a billion dollars but eventually, due to Facebook’s stock market woes, came in a little lower, he might be right. But that deal had one thing going for it that Tumblr does not.

Instagram chief executive and co-founder Kevin Systrom had multiple suitors, while Tumblr only has one.

That’s because, as Forbes reveals, Yahoo is currently negotiating under a lockup. So even though Facebook, Microsoft, and potentially other acquirers are interested, Yahoo has at least a period of time in which it is the only one on the dance card.

In addition Tumblr, which famously hates advertising and only started trying to make money after five years in existence, is in a bit of a pickle, as its $125 million in funding is running out, giving the service only a few-month window in which to raise a new round or find a sugar daddy.

That’s likely a strategic error on Karp’s part, who has said that advertising “really turns our stomachs.”

Tumblr only started to get serious about ad revenue in mid-2012, and is only planning to roll out its third major ad product — pay per view, in which you pay to get others to view — sometime later this year. Being more aggressive on monetization would have given Tumblr more runway to make a leisurely decision about an acquisition, or made the company more attractive to investors if it tried to raise another funding round.

There’s no question, however, that Tumblr is a traffic powerhouse. It ranks ninth on the list of most-popular U.S sites, and with 217 million global monthly unique visitors and 74 million million posts each and every day, the site is both huge and fast-growing. Few companies could monetize its 108 million blogs, 51 billion posts, and 16 billion monthly pageviews as well as Yahoo.

So while Yahoo is likely to come up a little, Karp could pick worse partners. And he might do well to finalize a deal sooner rather than later.

Cameron Peron is VP Marketing at Newvem

When was the last time you went to a tradeshow?

How did you measure the impact that the event had on your business or personal goals?  Attending tradeshows is more than just cruising the aisles and looking and exhibitor booths. Understanding the inherent mechanics of trade shows, executing a well-defined game plan, and measuring the results in your professional life can make the difference between a useless visit and a game changing trip.

And, of course, going to interesting shows and great places more and more often.

Attending a trade show is an investment

We exhibited at AWS re:Invent in November 2012, making a major investment to meet Amazon Web Services (AWS) users in order to help them improve and optimize their cloud infrastructure.

For an attendee the ticket price cost $1,000 just to set foot in the door. Put airfare, hotel room, and a decent expense budget into the picture and an attendee could easily spend $4,000 – $5,000.  For a show attendee justifying an investment like this, both in terms of hard cash and time, is hard if not impossible to achieve.  Especially when managers and other staff see an empty desk for a few days.

Or is it?

Break down the expectations from the event and consider an active game plan (both during and after the event) to measure the time and money ROI the event cloud potentially deliver. Let’s take a closer look.

There are two main areas that a trade show can show a valuable impact on the company: knowledge and deals.

Gaining knowledge

Many tradeshows offer breakout sessions to learn from experts in a specific field of work, industry or vertical.  Think of an accelerated course to capture knowledge that could improve your ability to solve specific issues, learn best practices, and improve workflow analysis and overcoming issues as they come along.

But breakouts are not limited to your direct line of work.

For example if you’re on the sales and marketing side, attending breakout sessions of an IT, cloud, or IT operations event can help improve your knowledge of the everyday flow your customers and prospect are experience. Leveraging this knowledge cloud have a direct impact on your day to day operations (e.g., improving cloud availability for DevOps) or give you added insights on how to engage your customer base (e.g., understanding what factors are important for DevOps to address when improving availability).

Deals, deals, deals

The objective here is to show measurable value in starting new deal flow, accelerating conversions in the pipe, and improving value from existing business. There are a few methodologies to include in your in-event game plan to ensure you allocate the optimal amount of focused time:

• Reach out to everyone related in your industry and start booking meetings
  Take an assertive approach and book 15-30 min time slots based on the objective you want to achieve.  Don’t stop until you get an answer.Total time investment: 50%
• Book sessions with exhibitors in advance
  This is important. Randomly cruising show floor booths is not a preferred strategy unless you’re open to discuss partnerships. Consider that each booth potentially represents months of planning and budget negotiation, meaning that each staff member at the booth is focused on building new business themselves.   Booking time in advance will ensure a decent amount time to carry out your main objective rather than randomly pulling someone out of their booth.Total time investment: 40%
• Cruise the show to understand the landscape.
  Some of your time must be invested in cruising the show to better understand the landscape, identifying potential partners, keeping tabs on competitors (both future and current), and staying in touch with associates.Total time investment: 10%

Understanding the underlying mechanics of a trade show and putting the right game plan to harvest the value at the show — and execute when you return to the office — can help you win budget each and every time you hit a new show.

Cameron Peron is VP Marketing at Newvem, a cloud operations optimization service designed for Windows  Azure and Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud users. Offering a business view into a company’s public cloud operations, Newvem actively tracks cloud health in order to help reveal and solve cloud irregularities related to cost, security, utilization and availability.  Follow Cameron at @cameronperon.

photo credit: fidelramos via photopin cc

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Twenty-four hours after Google released three location tools for its app developers, startups are already integrating the APIs into their products.

The founders of Valet stayed up all night to get the new API into their app as quickly as possible. Valet launched in April in the Google Play store to help people remember where they parked. It tags your parking location with a pin and reminds you when to pay the parking meter. You can set a timer for your meter and share the location on social media. There is, of course, no guaranteeing you will avoid fines, but it does cut down on the “human error” often responsible for the tickets.

Founder Will Roman recently relocated to San Francisco from Austin, Texas, to work at another startup. After “losing” his car a few times in the unfamiliar city and getting slapped with multiple parking fines, he recruited cofounder Josh Deffibaug, and the two set out to build Valet.

The app received mention on Gizmodo and a couple of Android blogs for its “simplicity and beauty” and was attracting a good number of users through word-of-mouth. But when Roman and Deffibaugh heard the news about Google’s new location APIs, they saw an exciting opportunity.

“Everyone who drives can appreciate this,” Roman said in an interview. “Parking tickets suck, and so does forgetting where you parked on a busy day, when visiting a new city, or after a night of drinking. With integration of the new Google Play Services location API’s, all features can be automated on over 95 percent of Android devices thereby preventing you from ever loosing your vehicle or getting a parking ticket again. We’re the only parking app in the world to integrate the Google Play Services location API’s.”

The location application programming interfaces (API) are part of Google Play Services, a tool kit for Android developers. Integrating location-sensing features to your app can be challenging and Google’s fused location provider “intelligently manages the underlying location technology” to make building location-aware app easier and less energy-intensive.  The technology combines GPS with on-phone sensors like the gyroscope, accelerometer, and barometer to collect your movement data and deliver a more accurate, immediate, and power-efficient application.

Using “Activity Recognition,” your phone can figure out whether you are walking, cycling, or driving which has clear applications for fitness apps. The Valet founders realized that the same technology could be used to tell when a car goes from driving to park mode, and can automatically drop a pin in your parking spot without you having to push a button.

“The new location APIs are more accurate, simpler to integrate, and back ported,” Roman said. “They solve a lot of the fragmentation issues of Android and enabled us to cater to the broadest market possible with even better reliability than previously possible.”

Competitors include iCarPark, Car Finder AR, Find My Car Smarter, Car Locator, Where Did I Park. Valet is based in San Francisco, where parking does in fact suck.

That means that yes, at some point you’ll be able to run your little WordPress-powered blog on the biggest server farms on the planet. But it also means that major companies will be able to use Google’s famously reliable services to run their enterprise-scale “big data,” backend, and, yes, consumer web projects, all in the PHP language that that is increasingly penetrating corporations.

I talked to one of the three founding fathers of PHP and current Zend CEO, Andi Gutmans, about the implications for PHP.

It’s a busy time for the Gutmans, the open-source programming language, and Zend, the company Gutmans formed to offer commercial support and tools for PHP. Engine Yard just recently added PHP to their Platform-as-a-Service as well. And Zend is expanding quickly in the enterprise as it has recently released integrated development tools for cloud-enabled mobile applications.

But Gutmans, though busy, is thoroughly upbeat.

And for good reason: The biggest web company on the planet just added support for the most widely used programming language on the planet. And in that support is a massive implied compliment to PHP — the first non-Google programming language to be supported by Google App Engine — and a potentially major boost to Zend’s business.

VentureBeat: Did Google talk to you before adding PHP to Google App Engine?

Source: John Koetsier

Andi Gutmans at ZendCon 2012.

Andi Gutmans: I don’t know how to answer that. I was aware that they were going to make that announcement … I’ve worked with the product manager on the project before.

VentureBeat: Google didn’t formally brief you?

Gutmans: Let’s put it this way: It’s not a surprise that a platform-as-a-service (PaaS) player that’s serious about gaining market share added PHP support. Google App Engine was almost a science project for the first few years, only supporting languages that Google used internally.

But in the past few months, there’s been a real attitude from Google that we’re going to go and compete with Amazon and with Microsoft, and we’re going to do it all fronts. They’ve become very aggressive on differentiating on performance and billing.

VentureBeat: What does this announcement say about PHP?

Gutmans: We have internal jokes about PHP’s web penetration and have used the stat that PHP runs 39 percent of the web because it was the only number we could get from Netcraft.

But I love Google’s stat, that 75 percent of the web runs PHP. No one knows the web better than Google.

If they’re trying to gain market share and gain it quickly, there’s no other language to do it with. And this is the first non-Google language they’re supporting.

VentureBeat: How’s that feel? And how are your customers reacting?

Gutmans: I’m definitely excited about it.

When any player does something like this — especially Google — it’s a huge validation. We got emails from some of our largest customers, saying this is great … it gives our enterprise customers a higher sense of confidence. And that stat that 75 percent of the web runs PHP is great for Zend – anything that is good for PHP, by proxy is good for Zend.

In addition, they said that PHP was their top-requested feature, which means the developer community was very supportive of us.

VentureBeat: Will you offer Google App Engine Support within Zend Studio, so developers can publish to Google right from within their Zend development environment?

Gutmans: We don’t know yet … it’s early and we’re exploring what kind of relationship we can have with Google.

We do support Google Compute Engine — that’s a full integration and some of the larger companies who run PHP already use it — but Google App Engine is just launched, it’s still in experimentation mode.

VentureBeat: What took Google so long to add PHP support?

Gutmans: I can’t speak for Google, but my assumption is that I felt that Google App Engine in the first few years was something they knew they wanted to do really well but … they kinda went down the simple easy route.

But we’ve seen a significant acceleration in the past 12 months. This will be a $20 billion market by 2016, and they moved from testing the waters to being very very aggressive right now.

We recently surveyed 5,000 PHP developers, asking them where in the cloud do you think you’ll deploy. Fifty-one percent said Amazon Web Services, but Google was 21 percent … and we just support Compute Engine right now.

It wasn’t even on the list last year, so that’s a big jump.

VentureBeat: What does this mean for the little guy building in PHP or hosting a WordPress blog?

Gutmans: I think it gives another option for the guys who do the small stuff, who are using shared hosting for $20/month.

What’s really great for the small developer is that it’s a nice value proposition — you can start at a lower cost. And, it’s a modern platform versus shared hosting, which is quite constrained.”

VentureBeat: So what does this mean for PHP overall?

 Gutmans: The number of requests that Google got from developers was very very significant. It exemplifies what we’ve been talking about … that PHP is very broadly adopted, but also by enterprise.

And that is driven by web, mobile, and cloud, which is where PHP’s sweet spot is. We’re seeing a strong tailwind behind us.

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Big Data and Predictive/Real-time Analytics startups: Are you looking to jumpstart development & accelerate market traction? Sign up for the SAP Startup Focus program to receive technology, support, resources and community to help you develop new applications on SAP HANA, a cutting edge database platform. Get started here, and enter promo code “VB2013″ on the form.

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Readers, I think we need to talk. Communication is really important, and I’m just feeling like I need more ways to connect with you.

Good thing investors dumped millions into communications-based companies today. We saw $10 million go to a texting app that competes with companies such as WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger. Texting over anything but data is so passé anyway.

On the flip side of communication, Skyword got $6.7 million to communicate your brand through stories. PR through content is wildly popular now-a-days, but do people actually trust what they’re reading?

For more funding news as it happens, subscribe to our Deals Channel feed. You can also follow VentureBeat on Twitter, @venturebeat, to view funding news as it’s published.

Check out more about these companies below:

MessageMe nabs $10M from Greylock, Google, & others to take on WhatsApp

Better watch out, WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger. Hot messaging app MessageMe has just raised $10 million in its first round of funding, the company confirmed today. MessageMe offers iOS and Android apps that send rich messages to friends, family, and groups. The app also lets you share YouTube videos, iTunes tracks, voice recordings, emoticons, and other things you might not share over traditional text messaging. MessageMe has risen quickly in status; it only just raised seed funding about a month ago. At that time, the service said it had one million users. Read the full story on VentureBeat.

Skyword takes off with $6.7M for content marketing

Consumers these days expect their favorite brands to tell a story, and Skyword helps them tell it. Skyword has announced closing $6.7 million in growth financing for its content marketing solutions. This Boston-based startup provides agencies, brands, media, and retail customers with a platform to publish content and tools to distribute it effectively. It has a database of more than 20,000 professional writers that publishers can use to recruit and manage freelancers and keep track of workflow. Read the full story on VentureBeat.

Doc talking via Shutterstock

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Bang With Friends’ newborn iPhone app no longer appears in the Apple App Store, leaving “down to bang” iPhone users wondering why.

The company’s chief executive Colin Hodge told Valleywag that the app recently passed over one million users, but it’s been removed from the store.

Bang With Friends matches you up with people in your network who are, well, interested in having the sex. You sign up for Bang With Friends using your Facebook account. The “service” will only match you up with those willing to service you; otherwise, your activity remains anonymous.

The company only launched its iOS and Android apps last week, bringing the action off the computer and into the mobile world. You’re now able to find out if someone wants you when you’re on the go, but not if you’re an iPhone user, evidently.

It might not be the subject matter that’s giving Apple pause. If the company found Bang With Friends violating any privacy guidelines, or taking data in a way that Apple doesn’t approve of, it would pull the app. We’ve reached out to both Apple and Bang With Friends to figure out what is behind this removal and will update the post upon hearing back.

BangWithFriends’ website only offers that it will “be right back” and is trying to work with Apple to restore the app.

It was also recently uncovered that you can discover just which of your friends use the app on Facebook. All you need to do is type a special URL into your address bar and it will call up all of your friends who match a certain app identification number. This goes against what Bang With Friends claims, which is that your use of the app will remain anonymous.

via Valleywag; Bang With Friends image via Bang With Friends

Nevahold is a platform where people rally together to get the attention of large companies. Users compose a “shout” and share it with the community to rally support for their cause. Other members of the community can join in the action by sharing on their social media accounts. The ultimate goal is that enough people participate to elicit a response.

“In today’s culture of huge, faceless companies, chances are high that you’ve hit the hair-pulling, mind-numbing, high-pitched-screeching frustration of overpaying for services, buying cheap quality products, being hit with hidden fees, dealing with the worst of customer service skills, or not even getting through to customer service and staying on an endless elevator-music hold cycle,” said cofounder Kena Amoah to VentureBeat. “Nevahold allows consumers to crowd source their social media accounts to harness their power and increase their influence when reaching out to a company.”

Consumers are increasingly turning to social media as a means to express their gripes, grievances, and appreciation for products and services. On the other end, businesses across the board are using social media to connect with consumers and for customer service support. Nevahold’s goal is to give consumers as much efficacy as possible when reaching out to these companies and is based on the principle of “strength in numbers.”

On Nevahold, people send their shout to a company’s social media contact and wait 30 minutes for a response. A shout can include photos, videos, or be a simple comment. If the company is radio silent, then advocates start to retweet an share the shout until the company responds. If the company still doesn’t respond, the question is shared one all of Nevahold’s 12 social media channels.

Nevahold gives each company a customer service score based on their response rates and time. The compare tool helps consumer see how different companies fare side-by-side. There is also a campaign feature that consumers can use to petition for a change in the company’s policy or service.

Amoah said that during beta testing, Nevahold has helped resolve 23,990 questions and complaints in the airline, wireless, and consumer electronics industry and had a 91.5 percent response rate. It recently helped students traveling to a conference stand up against American Airlines and against Barclays U.K.

The three founders met at the Meltwater School of Technology in Ghana. Meltwater Foundation has invested $90,000. Competitors include Gripevine, Gri.pe and Publikdemand.

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July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Nonprofits are waking up to the benefits of having a mobile and social media strategy.

Cure.org raises money for children in need, and it’s experimenting with a suite of mobile apps to draw attention to the cause.

Launching this week, the company’s new iPhone app features profiles of kids in developing countries who desperately require surgeries. You can donate directly through the app and receive real-time updates on the patient’s progress.

Cure was founded in Kenya in 1998 when it opened a new hospital. Since then, the nonprofit has served 1.9 million patients and provided over 138,000 life-changing surgeries in 27 countries. Along with medical treatment, Cure has a spiritual mission, but it says it will treat patients regardless of their religious affiliation.

CTO Joel Worrall, who joined the company over three years ago, was one of the first technology hires. “My goal is to show donors that when they give $1,000, it’s really changing someone’s life,” he told me.

Inspired by crowdfunding sites, the new app features a progress bar on each patient’s profile page [below] to show how much money has been raised to date. Once the target is reached — typically a few thousand dollars — the surgery is scheduled, and donors will be regularly updated on the patient’s recovery.

Once you’ve made a donation, the app invites you to send a get-well message. If there’s a language or literacy barrier, Cure.org claims its on the ground team will translate the messages and ensure they’re received.

Cure.org’s technology is cloud-based, so Worrall can quickly fix any issues. He said the company is using application performance service New Relic to monitor the app’s performance.

Cure.org hopes that by adding a personal, human touch to its app, more people will be inspired to make a donation. For instance, Allan [above] has clubfoot, a condition he was born with that left him feeling alienated from his peers. The app includes detailed information about his family life, schooling, and upbringing.

“This technology is doing a great thing for the kids that we are serving,” said Worrall. “Our goal is to make you feel close to someone on the other side of the world.”

Top image via Cure.org

Yahoo invited press today to a product event in New York saying only that it will “share something special” soon after reports that the company is going to buy blog platform Tumblr.

It seems Yahoo has been very product-focused in the months since Marissa Mayer both took the chief executive corner office and demanded that critical employees not work from home. It has done a lot on the mobile front, releasing apps for the weather as well as Yahoo mail, which VentureBeat’s Jolie O’Dell called gorgeous.

The company also recently integrated Summly, a content summarizing technology, to its mobile homepage, providing a summary of a story to help people decide if they want to read it.

In the past month Yahoo has also acquired a number a companies including GoPollGo and Milewise, a polling app and frequent flyer app respectively.

Yesterday, rumors broke out about what would be the biggest acquisition for Yahoo next — a $1 billion deal to buy Tumblr. We may hear more about this deal at the event, which is set for 5 p.m. Eastern on Monday.

Photo credit: earcos via photopin cc

Google has gone from a company that approached design through cold, hard data to one that’s employing gorgeous, user-centric interfaces.

Design was a big theme at this year’s Google I/O developer conference, with over a dozen sessions exploring design in some fashion. And you can see Google’s new aesthetic focus in plenty of its products — like Gmail’s slight redesign and the upcoming Google Maps refresh — but Android serves as the fastest example of Google’s design turnaround.

Perhaps it’s because design matters all the more on a small smartphone screen. With Android, Google also had to do something about Apple’s head start with iOS. To get Android to look as good at the iPhone, Google had to radically reshape how it thought of design, and fast. Android 4.0 “Ice Cream Sandwich,” released in 2011, was Google’s first attempt to emphasize design in its mobile OS. Its aesthetic has only become more refined since then.

Google being Google, it’s also obsessively focused on the function of its design. Unlike of the old days, where Google went with the design most people liked through rigorous testing, usability is front and center now, with a new focus on cognitive science and user empathy.

Designing to delight on Android

Users brought up a slew of design issues in Android’s first few versions, and Google saw the need for a new direction. Enter Android’s new design principles, co-authored by Google’s Rachel Garb, head of interaction design for Android apps, and Helena Roeber, who previously headed up Android’s user experience research team.

“We thought, what if we turned this long list of shortcomings that bum us out into something that actually inspires us to create beautiful and usable designs,” Garb said during a Google I/O panel yesterday.

Enchant. Simplify. Amaze. With Android 4.0 two years ago, those three seemingly simple principles became the cornerstone of Android’s design.

“We all respond emotionally to every moment we experience, and we experience around 20,000 of these moments every waking day,” Garb said. Negative emotions are so powerful they have the ability to shorten your lifespan, while positive emotions are essential for daily life.

Garb’s goal: to make sure Android serves as a fount of positive experiences. That was a big departure from Android’s earlier days, when it was complicated, technical, and far from user friendly.

As one example, Google developed a subtle animation in the Android home screen to tell users when they’ve reached the end of their available screens. If there was no indication, users could get frustrated. The new animation delighted users so much that they ended up playing around with it just for fun.

“Not only did it tell them they did everything right, it also kind of helped establish the virtual spaces and provided the feedback in an elegant, subtle, and non-disruptive way,” Roeber said.

Google also added a full-time writer to the design team to take charge of all of the user-viewable text in Android. With short words, active verbs, and common nouns, the writer helped transform Android into an environment more suited for typical, non-technical users.

For example, a setting that used to read “Use tactile feedback” was changed to the more human-readable “Vibrate on touch.” Similarly, a warning that used to read “You didn’t insert a SIM card” now simply prompts “Insert SIM card now.”

You can see all the new design principles at work in Google Now, Android’s predictive search virtual assistant. Enabling it simply takes one click on your Android phone (Simplify), and afterwards it simply presents relevant information when you need it (Enchant). Its interface is sparse, consisting of only the cards you need to see at any particular time. Google Now also learns from your behavior to get better over time (Amaze).

Better design through science

“All of our evolution has been optimized for the types of things we’re likely to see,” said Alex Faaborg, a Google designer with a background in cognitive science and machine learning. Speaking at an I/O panel focused on cognitive science and design, he discussed a few examples of how tiny decisions take advantage of human perception to create a better user experience.

Gestalt psychology principles play a significant role in Google’s designs. For example, Google is using white space more liberally across its products to group items (consider that bit of space between Google search results). In Android, it’s taking advantage of our ability to automatically complete shapes for things like form entries (boring rectangular boxes are out, now you just see the bottom portion of a text entry line). Similar objects, like the stars and check boxes in Gmail, are grouped together to make them easier for us to scan.

Even those small notifications you get in Google Docs along the side of the edges of your screen are backed by cognitive science. Faaborg pointed out that we see peripheral motion faster than what we’re looking at directly, so it makes sense to keep your notifications along the edges of the screen.

About half of Faaborg’s talk focused on vision, while the other half focused on attention, focus, and memory. Google learned that repetition may be a better way to teach simple concepts to users, instead of just offering a single tutorial up front. For example, a repeated alert in new Android phones tells users where they can find all of their apps. Previously, users would skip through the short introductory screen.

“Consistency is not critical — you don’t need to build products identical to what’s on the marketplace,” Faaborg noted at the end of his chat, in a takeaway that also tells us a lot about how Google views design now. He urged developers to build innovative designs and trust that their audiences will be able to understand them. “People are smart,” he said.

Is it enough?

While Google’s design breakthroughs have led to some major changes internally, its competition hasn’t been sitting still.

Apple, a company practically synonymous with excellent product design, will likely see a major style evolution now that Jony Ive is in charge of design company-wide. According to rumors, this year’s iOS 7 could be a major overhaul more in line with Ive’s aesthetic (a love of simple and flat designs).

With Windows 8, Microsoft made a radical design shift as well, bringing elements from its slick Windows Phone operating system to the desktop. Microsoft just announced that it sold 100 million Windows 8 licenses in its first six months on the market, which is in line with Windows 7 sales. With its support for tablets and traditional computers, Windows 8′s design could continue to pay off for Microsoft as personal computing trends change over the next few years.

No matter what Google does, it can’t please everyone. But now, at least, Google is trying.

Photos: Devindra Hardawar/VentureBeat: Top image: Google

When people run into major problems with the health industry — trying to get money from insurance companies or to get access to an experimental drug, for example — they’re no longer just turning to lawyers. Increasingly, they’re turning to online petitions.

One petition website, Change.org, has already seen over 7,000 health-related petitions come through — with some big successes.

Chief executive Ben Rattray, who is speaking at VentureBeat’s HealthBeat conference next week in San Francisco, explained that that he has seen people successfully take on big-name organizations like the USDA and insurance providers — and those successes inspire him. Indeed, healthcare companies are often quite inaccessible despite the fact that they’re involved in such a sensitive and critical aspect of life.

Change.org isn’t focused exlusively on healthcare or health tech. The company helps people petition specific leaders on any issue. But health-related issues have quickly become one of the most popular topics on the site.

We chatted with Rattray to see just where his company fits into the healthcare conversation:

VentureBeat: What role does Change.org feel it plays in grassroots health activism?

Ben Rattray: Our role is to empower people everywhere to create the change they want to see. We’re an open platform and therefore don’t advocate for campaigns ourselves, but we are a place where parents and siblings and friends who haven’t been able to make their voices heard are starting petitions on behalf of their suffering loved ones. We think people deserve to be part of the decisions being made that affect their lives, so we’ve created a tool that gives them a voice in that conversation.

VentureBeat: How many campaigns has Change.org hosted and what kinds have you seen?

Rattray: More than 7,000 people have started health-related petitions on Change.org, covering every health topic imaginable. One of the most popular topics is around medical coverage from major insurers. For example, last year a young man from DC named Jason Warren successfully petitioned Blue Cross Blue Shield to cover his father’s recovery from a heart attack after gathering 190,000 signatures — a shift we have seen many insurers make in response to petitions. Another popular topic is healthy food; in one campaign last year, Bettina Siegel, a mom in Texas, successfully petitioned the USDA to stop packing “pink slime” in school lunches in just one week with more than 250,000 signatures –  after health advocates had been working on the issue for 10 years.

VentureBeat: Why is this, in today’s digital age, more powerful than picking up the phone and talking to your representative?

Rattray: There’s still value in many types of civic action, including picking up the phone. But on a phone call, you’re just one person with an opinion. On a petition, you’re a member of a collective movement, and your voice is shared publicly for everyone to see. Even if they want to, there’s no way a government official or company can ignore your comment – it’s like a highly visible time capsule of public sentiment.

Take Jenn McNary, the mother of two boys with a rare, lethal disease, Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy. One of her boys had access to a medical trial for a new drug, and his condition improved dramatically. Her other boy doesn’t have the trial drug, and his muscles are deteriorating rapidly. Soon, he’ll lose all upper body strength, and he won’t be able to eat or drink on his own.

Jenn’s petition asks the FDA to approve the medication through the Accelerated Approval Program, which expedites approval of drugs that treat serious diseases. Jenn could have picked up the phone – and trust me, she has, many, many times. But it was her petition, with its 179,000 signatures, many from parents of other DMD-afflicted kids, that got her a meeting with senior FDA officials. Jenn just sent us an email a few weeks ago saying they were “extremely supportive, engaging, and receptive” to her ideas – so things are looking up. That’s the power of the Change.org platform.

VentureBeat: Do you believe Change.org is really making a difference? Can you point to any successful campaigns?

Rattray: We’ve seen hundreds of health-related victories. The 28-year-old UC Davis student whose radiation treatment was finally covered by Anthem after four long weeks of appeals. The 21-year-old severely disabled student who got Medicare to continue her nursing care through the end of college, when she could move back home for support from her family. The Ohio woman who got Governor Kasich to add autism benefits to the state’s essential health benefits package. The list goes on and on. The question of whether petitions can have an impact is by now clearly answered – they can and do every day.

VentureBeat: Do you see spikes in health petitions around current events?

Rattray: We may see a small spike around, say, the Affordable Care Act — people who want it passed, people who don’t want it passed — but in general, it’s pretty consistent. That’s because our platform is really built for micro-movements: small, personal petitions replicated hundreds or thousands of times over across cities, states, even countries. At Change.org, we deeply believe in the power of starting local and building movements from the ground up instead of jumping on huge national problems and trying to tackle them from the top down.

VentureBeat: What role can social media sites play in health activism? Are they too unorganized to make a real difference?

Rattray: Social media sites can play a crucial role in raising awareness about health issues. Where they sometimes fall short, though, is translating that awareness into effective, coordinated action. That’s where Change.org comes in; because our platform is built explicitly to make changing the world intuitive and easy, it’s generally more effective than social media sites not structured for that purpose.

VentureBeat: Why should people use Change.org for health-related issues over creating a White House petition online?

Rattray: We’re big fans of the folks working on We the People, the White House’s petition platform. Over the past few months, we’ve actually worked with them on building out their API.

The Change.org platform is unique not only because it lets anyone start a petition about anything they care about, but also because people can target whichever decision maker has the power to do something. If the issue is political, sometimes that’s the Obama administration, but more often than not, it’s the director of a smaller government agency or the head of a specific task force. For non-political issues — say, an insurance provider who won’t cover a loved one’s medical treatment — you can use Change.org to petition the right people there, too. And it works — thousands of people have won their petitions using our site.

VentureBeat: If you could ask tech companies for any one thing to help Change.org health petitions get more attention, what would it be?

Rattray: Send us your engineers — we’re hiring.

Ben Rattray photo via Chrissy Farr/VentureBeat

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This Boston-based startup provides agencies, brands, media, and retail customers with a platform to publish and effectively distribute content. It has a database of more than 20,000 professional writers that publishers can use to recruit and manage freelancers and keep track of workflow.

“The art of content marketing is in the beauty and quality of the writing itself – its voice and ability to speak to an audience in a personal and compelling way,” the company said on its site. “To excel at the science of web content creation, you need a technology framework to adhere to the 3 Ses of successful content.”

The three in question are “searchable, snackable, and shareable.” Once content is created, Skyword recommends keywords and suggestions for SEO and provides built-in tools for sharing across social media. Skyword also includes analytics so publishers can track marketing and writer performance, social media metrics, and search engine rankings and make editorial decisions accordingly.

Clients include IBM, MarketWatch, and AutoTrader.com. Cox Media Group led this round which will expand the team and help the company meet increasing customer and partner needs, “as content marketing becomes an integral part of brand marketing initiatives.” Skyword was founded in 2010. This brings its total capital raised to $12 million.

Photo Credit: Mike Cogh/Flickr

Better watch out, WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger. Hot messaging app MessageMe has just raised $10 million in its first round of funding, the company confirmed today.

MessageMe offers iOS and Android apps that send rich messages to friends, family, and groups. The app also lets you share YouTube videos, iTunes tracks, voice recordings, emoticons, and other things you might not share over traditional text messaging. MessageMe has risen quickly in status; it only just raised seed funding about a month ago. At that time, the service said it has 1 million users.

It will take more momentum on MessageMe’s part to displace WhatsApp’s traction. WhatsApp CEO Jan Koum recently told the world his app is “bigger than Twitter” and is now processing 8 billion inbound messages a day and over 12 billion outbound messages a day.

MessageMe’s new funding first leaked out through an SEC filing. The round was led by Greylock Partners’ John Lilly, with participation by Google Ventures, True Ventures, First Round Capital, SVAngel, Resolut.vc, and Social+Capital Partnership. Every firm that participated in MessageMe’s $1.9 million seed round participated in this round except for Andreessen Horowitz.

Top image via MessageMe

The advertising industry’s top kudos show, the Clio Awards, gave Google the advertiser of the year award for 2013 for creativity and excellence in advertising this week.

Here are some of the best examples:

Google Fiber — and toy cars:

Build with Chrome — and Lego Sydney Harbor Bridges:

100,000 stars (go forth and explore):

And, of course, no gallery of great Google ads would be complete without Dear Sophie:

Image credit: Google; Hat tip: Mashable

Thanks to technology, we’re watching a revolution happen in education right now.

From the explosion in popularity of language learning apps like Mindsnacks to the media furor about the rise of massive open online courses (MOOCs), companies are being built around the idea that technology can radically reshape our relationship with education.

Educating the well-educated

MOOCs have attracted more attention than any other edtech category, and with good reason. Imagine being able to take a physics class with Stephen Hawking without having to enroll at Cambridge, or learn poetry with Helen Vendler, and explore the solar system with Neil deGrasse Tyson.

The possibilities are seemingly endless — especially for the hyper-literate, hyper-educated communities of bloggers and journalists who typically write about this technology. These platforms started as experiments in distributing high quality education for single classes, and blossomed into fully-fledged companies on the strength of early, massive enrollments.

There’s an amazing amount of potential embedded in the idea of MOOCs, but for now, they are only struggling experiments aimed at the outer edge of enthusiasts of esoteric learning.

Enrollment figures point squarely at largely unfulfilled promises. Katy Jordan, an educational researcher, pulled together published stats, largely from Coursera, and plotted enrollment and completion rates for various popular MOOCs.

Harvard’s computer science class CS50x on edX had an amazing 150,349 enrolled students, of which 0.9 percent completed the course. Attrition rates on that level would instantly doom a college. While MOOC proponents argue that these completion rates are irrelevant because of varied interest levels of participating students at the outset, they’ve set the stage for their own measurement by using enrollment factors as their topline metric in interview after interview.

Education for the rest of us

But let’s say you ignore the massive discrepancy between enrollment and completion. Let’s say you focus, instead, on the stated mission of these companies. Each company states that its mission is access to education. So who is getting that access? Certainly not the millions of elementary and high school students struggling with a crumbling K-12 system in the U.S. Even if these kids have access to computers and broadband at home (which is a big “if”), they don’t necessarily have the skills to teach themselves the material with little or no human interaction.

Educating these kids in the subjects, and with the methods that they need to learn are not directly tied to jobs or expensive credentialing systems — the emerging business models of the biggest players in edtech. These kids are in the thick of the learning bell curve, not the autodidactic wunderkinds taking symbolic systems courses at the age of 12.

Many of the students that we work with at my company Tutorspree fall into this category. They are kids who are still learning to learn. Some are hugely advanced for their age, some need extra help — all want something more than the purely digital options being pushed by media and many government agencies.

These kids and their parents tell us every day that they need a real person to teach them, to learn with them, to react in real time to errors and successes, and to provide the kind of personal warmth and encouragement that computers cannot provide.

The power of people

We’re not the only ones noticing the importance of having real people interact with one another to make education work better. The MOOCs are beginning to hire teaching assistants and tutors to create emotional buy-in and attachment with students.

Sal Khan isn’t pushing for his videos to be the final say in teaching. They are meant as a gateway to unlock significantly higher rates of one-to-one teacher student interaction in the flipped classroom. Codecademy may use a carefully structured system to help people start learning to code, but they also encourage meetups and high school groups to get together to support one another through the really hard stuff.

The media likes to talk about how technology is creating radical shifts in education. Journalists talk about increases in access, tracking, and new mediums for delivery. But none of that is enough.

The real test of edtech is still to come. Companies will have to prove that they are able to actually teach students, not just put lessons in front of them.

We need teachers if we want a system that is effective for the students who really need help, and want real progress.

Aaron Harris is the founder and CEO of Tutorspree, a New York-based startup that finds the perfect tutor for every student.

Follow him on Twitter @Harris. 

Top image via Flickr 

Google tricked out its entire I/O conference with hundreds of sensors this week. Today, we got a glimpse at some of the data and the work that went into making it happen.

Michael Manoochehri, with Google’s cloud engineering group, explained the project from Google’s perspective: It’s a big experiment designed to help Google figure out how to use its many cloud tools to collect, organize, and analyze large quantities of sensor-driven data.

To pull off the project, Google needed some hardware-hacking experts. So it called on Kipp Bradford, a professor of engineering design and entrepreneurship at Brown University; and Alasdair Allan, a hardware hacker with Babilim Light Industries in the U.K.

The pair designed a sensor module based on the Arduino Leonardo R3 chip, a popular microprocessor that many DIY hobbyists use. Each module, or “mote,” carries a mix of temperature, humidity, noise, and other sensors. Some have air quality monitors that measure the amount of particulates (dust) and volatile gases (from cleaning fluids or alcoholic drinks). Some are connected to floor mats that record footsteps.

The devices send their data via a Zigbee-based mesh network back to Google Data Store, a NoSQL database running on Google’s App Engine. BigQuery, a tool for doing analysis on large datasets that is based on Google’s own internal data analysis tool, “Dremel,” allows the team to perform rapid queries on the enormous dataset (see sidebar for some of the project’s metrics). The team even used the Google Maps API to display data from each sensor on a map of the conference center.

Tableau Software, which held an IPO this week and whose stock is already up 60 percent in its first day of trading, provided real-time visualizations of the data. That’s a Tableau-generated chart at the top.

Bradford and Allan are editors at Make magazine and have done similar work with O’Reilly’s Data Sensing Lab, albeit on a smaller scale. (O’Reilly is the publisher of Make and the organizer of the Maker Faire, coming up this weekend in San Mateo, Calif.) For O’Reilly’s Strata conferences, the Data Sensing Lab build networks of about 50 such devices.

Also helping Bradford and Allan were Julie Steele, a project manager for O’Reilly, and Harry Johnson, a Stanford engineering student who laid out the project’s first circuit board and acted as the project’s “sanity check,” Bradford said.

“When the first prototype came back and it worked, I breathed a huge sigh of relief,” Bradford told me.

Once the team had built several working prototypes and ironed out the kinks, Bradford send the circuit board design to Sunstone, a company in Oregon, which produced hundreds of custom circuit boards. He then arranged to have the boards and various components sent to VR Industries, a company in Rhode Island, which assembled all 525 devices. The per-unit cost was about $120, though that’s with volume discounts figured in (it would cost you more than that to build one or two of these things).

After that, the team spent a nearly-sleepless week configuring and setting up all the devices.

“We basically spent the last week locked in a room at Google Boston doing integration and testing,” Allan said.

For Google, it was a chance to get its hands dirty with real-world data.

“We wanted to understand how this kind of use case could work with the Google Cloud platform,” Manoochehri said.

Did they learn anything about the conference? So far, the takeaways seem pretty obvious. For instance, in the steps-per-minute graph above, there’s a big spike of activity as people lined up to enter the Google I/O keynote on the first day. Then activity settles down as they all sit to watch the presentation. There’s a flurry of activity as people attend the first evening’s party, and the noise level spikes during Billy Idol’s concert. Air quality tends to go down when people are milling about, as they raise dust, and it gradually improves after they go away. Also, a cleaning crew comes through the Moscone Center at 4 a.m. every morning.

The company is making all the hardware, code, and data from the project available freely to the public. The goal is to make it easy for others to use the same kinds of technologies in their own data-gathering projects.

There are already lots of sensors out there. From wristband health and fitness sensors to smart thermostats like Nest to automobile sensors, we are increasingly surrounded by connected sensors. These devices are already collecting a lot of data, and soon will be collecting orders of magnitude more, Manoochehri said.

“This is a really big deal,” Manoochehri said. “So we need to understand this use case, and test that our platform is good for this use case.

“People collect all this data, and they go, ‘Oh my god, what do I do?’”

This project provides an answer to that question — provided you’re willing to use Google’s many cloud services.

Also, if you are looking for the best place to take a nap, check the graph below, which shows Manoohchehri’s “serenity metric,” showing a combination of low average audio noise and low noise variance. Conference rooms in the far corners of the building are your best bet. The least serene location? Apart from Google’s radio-controlled blimps (which carried sensors over the crowd), the second floor escalator was the least serene location.

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Simeon Simeonov is founder of Swoop.

The coverage of Google I/O 2013 developer conference has focused on Google’s plans for world domination through an increasingly more interrelated and stickier set of consumer services. What’s gone unnoticed is Google’s radical developer ecosystem management strategy. The company has made a fateful choice that may leave Google with an exposed flank at a critical time.

Consider the following: in 2012 95 percent of Google’s revenue (a cool $43 billion) came from advertising. Yet, at this year’s Google I/O conference the Google Ads track has only five sessions — a mere 2.5 percent of the conference topics. And the number of sessions related to search advertising, where the majority of Google’s ad revenue comes from? Zero.

Out of curiosity, I checked out the sessions for last year’s I/O conference. It didn’t even have an ads track. If this doesn’t seem surprising to you, think about Apple’s WWDC event not covering OS X and iOS; Microsoft’s Build event ignoring Windows, Office, and Xbox; or Oracle’s OpenWorld event without sessions on databases, middleware, and applications.

The lack of sessions on ads is clearly a strategic decision made at the very top. The unedited version of the pitch goes like this: “Dear developers, please help us grow market share where we don’t make much money: Android, Chrome OS, cloud, apps, social, etc. We are fighting on too many fronts and we can’t win without you. At the same time, please do not concern yourself about all the money we make through advertising. We got that covered. There is nothing for you there, except for maybe paying us to advertise your apps.”

This ballsy move may turn out to be brilliant. Google is fighting a five-front war with Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft and web publishers as a whole. By leveraging its tech cool and focusing developers on the key platform battles Google needs to win to extend its control of consumer services and advertising, the company may end up perfectly positioned for the long game. At the same time, Google is taking a big risk by closely and independently managing the advertising portion of its business.

Successful platform companies rely on strong and vibrant vendor ecosystems, whose combined revenues often far exceed the revenue of the platform companies. Microsoft did it by making Windows the dominant desktop OS but staying away from most types of infrastructure and apps for a long time. Oracle did it by creating products that required tons of customization and ongoing service & support. Apple did it by creating market-dominating devices with great developer tools while leaving the apps space wide open. These companies deeply understood the importance of bringing third party developers close to the very core of their revenue engines because developers, while they may be hard to win, tend to stick with what they know. They provide stability and support for platform companies when hard times come.

Some people on the Google Developer Relations team are trying to change things from the inside by associating organizational success metrics to the revenues of Google ecosystem partners. So far they have been unable to convince the powers that be that the financial success of Google partners is worth focusing on.

Google’s developer ecosystem positioning adds to the growing consensus that the company doesn’t like to share where it counts. Its moves to disintermediate publishers in a broad range of user tasks are another prime example. This fact is not lost on some of its large competitors as well as many of its publisher & advertising partners, who’d like to see more innovation and choice. Google may be helping publishers and agencies make billions but there is no deep allegiance there and no real stickiness. There are significant opportunities for startups and investors bold-enough to ignore the “we’ve got it covered” message from Google.

Simeon Simeonov is founder of Swoop, which extends search advertising to content, and Evidon, which brings transparency to online advertising. A lifetime ago  his first startup built the first large web developer community. Sim tweets @simeons and blogs at blog.simeonov.com.

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Abbey Post is a plus-size fashion marketplace and community. The company just released a totally rebuilt version of the site, which now features an internal social network and expanded inventory. It takes an Etsy-style approach where anyone, from independent designers to established brands, can sell their wares.

“I chose this model of peer-to-peer commerce specifically because I want to build community,” Schames said in an interview. “Plus-size women feel really disenfranchised, neglected, and left out of conversations about fashion. There are many people who think fat ladies aren’t sexy and don’t care what they look like, even though there are over 100 million plus-size women in the US. If you give them a platform to connect over fashion and buy clothes that make them feel good, that math adds up real fast.”

After leaving her sales job, Schames gained e-commerce experience by founding an online consignment store for luxury accessories. She is a plus-size women herself and was drawn to handbags and jewelry because they are size agnostic. As a professional in New York City, she said it was consistently difficult to find plus-size clothing because a lot of brands are pulling their plus-size clothes out of stores and moving sales entirely online. However, none of the online retailers provided particularly appealing options and none incorporated the social element that makes shopping enjoyable for many women. Schames repeatedly had conversations with women who felt marginalized in the same way and realized there was a bigger opportunity out there.

“I’m not sure who told people that size 14 and up love polyester, but it’s not true,” she said. “Plus-size women are tired of going to the mall and looking through two abandoned racks in the back. Fashion is aspirational and today’s runway model averages a size zero. That does not reflect a majority of women. The fashion industry wants to fetishize thinness and sell us this fantasy, but it’s not real life and it pisses me off. I have a daughter and I don’t want her growing up feeling bad because she isn’t like the magazine. Part of our mission is telling women it is OK to love who you are. I am working hard to bring a positive and accepting and inclusive environment to normal women.”

Social e-commerce and peer-to-peer commerce are trendy right now and changing the experience of shopping online. The e-commerce sector didn’t see too much innovation for many years — brands and retailers put their inventory online and shoppers searched for what they were looking for. Recently, a wave of fashion startups such as Wanelo, Luvocracy, Etsy, Poshmark, and Polyvore have taken various approaches to transforming this experience and finding new ways to browse and buy products online. At a recent media dinner about social e-commerce, Angel List founder Naval Ravikant (who is an investor in Wanelo) said this is the future of shopping.

Abbey Post is using these new models to target an underserved and highly valuable market. It is a passion project that addresses a widespread and unique set of needs. There are other plus-size online retailers out there like Avenue.com, Fashion to Figure, SimpleBe, Jessica London, and OneStopPlus, but Schames said her focus on high-end clothing and her social approach sets AbbeyPost apart. She also said there are products and features in the pipeline that will make Abbey Post an innovative tech company, rather than just a tech-enabled one.

AbbeyPost is bootstrapped and based in New York.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Say what you will about Windows Phone, but the platform’s greatest strength has always been Nokia’s Lumia phones.

And the latest phone in the series, the Lumia 928, is no different. The Lumia 928 is the first high-end Lumia for Verizon, which by default makes it a very important device for Nokia itself. But is it any good? Here are a few first impressions.

A camera to kill for, maybe

Above anything else, Nokia and Verizon are selling the Lumia 928 on the power of its camera. The phone’s 8.7-megapixel shooter “captures amazing blur-free photos and videos even in low light”, according to Nokia, which has gotten in trouble for making lavish claims about its phones’ cameras before.

The Lumia 928′s camera ain’t too bad.

So do those claims hold up with the Lumia 928? Sort of. I took a bunch of shots with the phone, and very few of them came close to the almost-flawless sample shots that the phone teases you with. That’s not to say my photos weren’t nice (the one of the Manhattan skyline is especially good), but they just didn’t consistently match the quality I was expecting. I wasn’t blown away.

Still, the camera is fast, and features like Smart Shoot (which captures a series of images and merges the best ones) and Cinegraph (which is Nokia’s answer to Vine) are neat, if slightly gimmicky, additions. The best part? The Lumia 928 comes with a hardware camera button, which, in full disclosure, I only just now remembered exists.

Nokia is also making a big deal out of the Lumia 928′s Xeon flash, which helps freeze motion in certain kinds of shots. I didn’t get a chance to try this out, but MyNokiaBlog gives a good idea of how it works.

Nokia ditches color for yet another black slab

One of the best, most immediately striking things about the Lumia phones is that they come in a wide, attractive variety of colors. They feel unique, interesting, and fun to hold. That color is gone with the Lumia 928, which, with the exception of its white back, feels like just another black slab. The phone is pretty, but there just isn’t much to care about beyond that. (And the giant Verizon logo on its front doesn’t help either.)

As far as the whole feel-in-hand goes, the Lumia 928 sits right on the line between being solid and uncomfortably bulky. Maybe it’s the squared edges or the plasticky back, but the phone just isn’t particularly enjoyable to hold. For lack of a better word, the Lumia 928 just feels, slimy.

In fact, the Lumia 928 would be a far, far better phone if it had the same aluminum casing as the Lumia 925, which Nokia annouced earlier this week.

One thing I do appreciate about the Lumia 928, though, is its power button, which is placed in the center of its right edge. It’s a tiny thing, but it shows that Nokia puts a lot of thought into how people are using their phones. So thanks, Nokia.

We’ll have a more detailed review of the Lumia 928 very soon.

Stitcher Radio is rolling out a new feature on its iOS app today that makes it much easier to use the streaming service while driving in a vehicle — which is exactly where radio belongs.

Unlike the majority of streaming audio services, Stitcher focuses entirely on radio shows and podcasts. The company said about 60 percent of listeners are already using the app in their cars, which is why it decided to add a “Car Mode.” Essentially what you’re getting is a new interface that makes the audio player controls easier to see, with larger buttons and very little clutter. Because when you’re driving, you don’t want to be screwing around with a hitting the wrong buttons on a touchscreen.

You can flip on Car Mode by hitting the Stitcher logo at the top of the screen, and you can operate in both landscape or portrait orientations. The new app update also includes a revised front page view with top headlines, access to an archive of favorite shows, a sleep timer, and various improvements that make playback quicker.

The updated Stitcher Radio app is available for free via iTunes App Store.

Today, not that much has changed.

After debuting close to $40 and cratering to just under $18 in August, the stock has somewhat stabilized in the $25 region, down 30 percent from its opening-day high. And along the way, the story emerged of how Facebook tried to hide some of the mobile risk inherent in its business and how the company panicked and botched its IPO by using vague positive language in its public prospectus and, apparently, specific negative information about slowing revenue growth to institutional investors privately.

Not to mention the $100 million paid to banks to stabilize the stock — on top of $176 million in IPO fees — for efforts that ultimately failed. And technical glitches that cost the NASDAQ $62 million in compensatory fees.

All of which negatively affected the overall IPO market.

That all said, however, Facebook has seemingly nicely recovered from the disaster — at least from a business fundamentals perspective. Revenue growth was strong in its latest quarterly earnings release, with the company booking $1.46 billion in revenue for Q1 2013, compared to about $1 billion a year ago. More importantly, mobile was significantly up, accounting for 30 percent of ad revenues, and Facebook singlehandedly accounted for 6.5 percent of all online ad dollars spent in the U.S.

Not exactly Google numbers, but pretty good nevertheless.

And the company has massively beefed up its advertising options. It’s now posting retargeted ads right in the news feed, once sacrosanct territory. And in a move aimed directly at advertising giant Google, Facebook has launched a self-serve tool that allows advertisers to target its users based on what they actually buy and want to buy offline … which is a significant move to targeting the intent graph that Google hits so well by virtue of being a search engine, but Facebook has often missed since its visitors are on the site to meet and greet people. In addition, as soon as July, Facebook will be rolling out 15-second video ads in the news feed, a product that it will be charging major brands millions of dollars for.

All of which is having an effect.

The consensus recommendation for Facebook is currently a buy, with a price target of $34. Most analysts are in the Strong Buy category, with few or none in the dreaded Underperform or Sell slots. And in the past four weeks, analysts have revised their earnings estimates upward by a factor of 6 to 1.

So there’s a lot of positive in Facebook’s future, and there’s a ton of potential. But it’s still challenging when analysts compare Facebook stock with other internet high-fliers like LinkedIn or Yelp, which rose 148 percent and 48 percent in their first years, respectively.

But at least it’s better than Groupon and Zynga, both down around 75-80 percent.

And, I would argue, while there are a ton of challenges and many very significant competitors — primarily Google — the future for Facebook is bright.

Even if the public start was a stubbed toe.

Marketing automation business Marketo made its debut on the Nasdaq stock exchange today, and early trading looks strong, with shares up 55 percent over initial pricing.

Last night, the company priced 6.1 million shares at $13 — the high end of its $11-to-$13 range — and ended up raising $79 million. As of this writing, the stock is trading at over $20 a share.

Marketo and competing marketing automation firms like Eloqua, Pardot, and Silverpop offer software and services focused on improving and managing sales lead generation. The company purchased social campaign service Crowd Factory a year ago to help with its mission and to reach more consumers.

Back in early April, Marketo filed for a $75 million IPO. Prior to the IPO, San Mateo, Calif.-based Marketo raised $108 million in VC funding from big players including Battery Ventures, Institutional Venture Partners, InterWest Partners, Mayfield Fund, and Storm Ventures.

Big data business Tableau Software also had its IPO today and shares popped 60 percent in early trading. Today is clearly a good day for enterprise tech IPOs.

Marketing concept via Shutterstock

Now, after passing Pentagon tests, the devices are actually approved for use.

Before authorizing any devices for use in security-conscious military environments, the military requires a very specific and detailed implementation and deployment plan. A large part of that is the creation of policy for approved use as per DoD Directive 8100.02, which says that cellular devices are not allowed into areas where classified information is discussed, stored, or processed without written approval.

And until that happened for the Apple devices, the hundreds of thousands of phones and tablets were in administrative limbo.

“Most of them have not been deployed and are still sitting in a warehouse,” a source I talked to a month ago said. “They haven’t yet been able to build an implementation guide on how to use them.”

Today’s decision, however, paves the way for the U.S. military to actually use the devices in secure areas, and potentially expand their purchase order. It marks a turning point away from BlackBerry devices, which have been considered more secure, and which to date have formed the vast majority of government-issued mobile phones.

The problem with clearing smartphones for use in top secret environments is that they are, essentially, full of radios: Bluetooth, WiFi, cellular.

“With standard consumer devices, there’s no way to prove that the Wi-Fi is turned off,” my source told me.

One solution the DoD had previously implemented for iPads was to hand them off to a second party after delivery from Apple to crack open the cases and “snip the Wi-Fi radio” to disable it, and then close them up again. Apparently, the DoD reached a special agreement with Apple to maintain warranty eligibility, which would normally be voided after opening the case.

Today’s approval, however, is for a version of iOS 6 that has likely been customized by Apple and certified by military technologists to ensure security compliance without actually having to snip wires.

Interestingly, according to Bloomberg, the military plans to create its own app store for military applications, which would allow DOD personnel to use commercial hardware but employ tested and approved applications.

photo credits: The U.S. Army via photopin cc, Devindra Hardawar/VentureBeat

Working with video rental stores in Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, Domino’s stamped DVDs with heat-sensitive thermal ink and scented varnish. Since DVDs and Blu-Ray players tend to get hot during operation, the discs warm up throughout the movie. By the time the movies ends and you pull the disc out, you’re both seeing an image of pizza on the DVD … and smelling what you could be tasting.

And, in thermal ink, a message invites you to enjoy your next movie with a “hot and delicious” pizza from Domino’s.

Here’s the video:

That’s simply a brilliant marketing campaign. And a very savvy mixture of both high and very standard technology.

While broadband has killed the video rental store in North America and much of Europe, Brazil’s Internet is not quite so robust, according to the marketing agency that created the campaign for Domino’s. So unless you’re wealthy or in a neighborhood with good Internet, chances are, you’re still using DVDs.

photo credit: bunchofpants via photopin cc

Enterprise tech IPOs have seen big movement over the past few years. Now we can add big data and data visualization company Tableau Software to the list of successful enterprise IPOs, as its share price has popped as much as 60 percent in early trading today.

Last night, Tableau priced its IPO at $31 per share, raising $254 million with an offering of 8.2 million shares. Now that price has shot up to about $49 on the New York Stock Exchange, as of this writing.

Tableau offers products to help technical and nontechnical users create interactive charts and simulations based on raw data. Tableau generated $127.7 million in annual sales in 2012, more than double its 2011 revenue and more than quadruple its 2010 revenue. Back in November, we picked Tableau as one of 10 startups leading the way in big data.

“Our mission, to help people everywhere see and understand data, isn’t all that different from Google’s,” Tableau CEO and cofounder Christian Chabot told us in a recent interview.

Tableau originally filed for its IPO in early April. At that time, it was just looking to raise $150 million in its initial public offering.

Prior to the IPO, Seattle-based Tableau raised $15 million in funding over two rounds from New Enterprise Associates. NEA’s partners and investors have got to be pretty happy with this deal, as the fund was seeing a 20x return on its investment in Tableau, according to Fortune’s Dan Primack — and that was before today’s pop.

Screenshot via Tableau/YouTube

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HealthBeat 2013 is a new conference showcasing how technology is transforming health care. We'll explore how IT is driving out inefficiencies on the hospital, practice, and patient levels. Check out full event details here, and register here.

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July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Samsung’s Galaxy S4 may be tasteless and unrefined, but that’s not stopping lots of people from buying it.

After a month on the market, the Galaxy S IV will hit its 10 millionth device sold next week, according to Samsung co-CEO Shin Jong-kyun.

That may not sound like a big deal, but the importance of the announcement is clear once you consider that it took Samsung 50 days to get to that point with the Galaxy S3 and five months to get there with the S2.

All of this underscores one clear and unsurprising point: Samsung still dominates the Android world, even though its phones lack the stylistic finesse of the iPhone or even our recent Android favorite, the HTC One. Tasteless or not, Samsung is pulling in the cash: According to recent estimates from market research firm Strategy Analytics, Samsung captured 95 percent of the $5.3 billion in profit made by Android in the first quarter of this year. If Samsung doesn’t own Android in influence, it definitely owns it in profit.

Strategy Analytics agrees. ”We believe Samsung generates more revenue and profit from the Android platform than Google does,” Strategy Analytics’ executive director Neil Mawston said in a statement.

That probably horrifies Google — or at least you’d like to think so. But instead of feeling threatened by Samsung’s devices, Google is embracing them — albeit in its own special Google way. Yesterday, the company unveiled its own Nexus-ified version of the Galaxy S4, which will be sold stripped of Samsung’s TouchWiz interface. Google’s message with the device was pretty clear: “Samsung, we love your hardware, but you can keep the software.”

Turns out there are a lot of other people who really love that hardware, too.

Photo: Devindra Hardawar/VentureBeat 

If you can’t be cool, why not buy someone who is? That’s what Yahoo is looking to do with an investment in — or perhaps outright acquisition of — blogging service Tumblr, whose valuation could be as high as $1 billion.

All Things D first reported the rumors of a Yahoo investment in Tumblr, and Adweek followed up citing sources of its own. Adweek’s report seems more certain that Yahoo is interested in an outright acquisition, while ATD’s report is more circumspect.

Tumblr has raised $125 million in funding to date at a reported valuation of $800 million. It is reportedly in talks to raise another round of funding at a reported $1 billion valuation, according to ATD.

While Tumblr is popular, it only made $13 million in revenue last year, when it first started selling ads, and hopes to grow that to $100 million in revenue this year.

Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer has already presided over several acquisitions as head of the company and just a week ago she snapped up two more startups — GoPollGo and Milewise. Most of the deals thus far have been much smaller deals, more focused on hiring strong talent rather than getting shiny new products. In fact, Yahoo has shut down most of the services it has purchased.

A deal to buy New York City-based blogging powerhouse Tumblr would act in an opposite fashion, and Yahoo would almost certainly leave Tumblr’s products fully intact. But Tumblr has hardly monetized its large audience and just a few weeks ago it introduced a mobile ad platform to let brands to advertise inside Tumblr’s mobile apps. If Yahoo were to take its advertising know-how and apply that to Tumblr’s platform, it could lead to big bucks.

“If you could pick a company that fits in with what Marissa Mayer has demonstrated in her career — aesthetics software technology and fast-growing — you could not land on a better choice,” a source told AllThingsD.

Tumblr’s investors include Union Square Ventures, Sequoia Capital, Greylock Partners, Insight Venture Partners, The Chernin Group, Spark Capital, and CrunchFund.

Yahoo did not immediately respond with comment but we will update this post if the company gets back to us.

Marissa Mayer photo via Sean Ludwig/VentureBeat

It seems privacy issues related to Google Glass are drawing government attention. A committee in the U.S. Congressional Privacy Caucus sent a letter to Google chief executive Larry Page asking just how the company plans to protect both people wearing the device and the people it records.

The group was particularly interested in the idea that Google Glass can use facial recognition to deliver a wearer information about the people nearby. Mostly, the caucus wanted to know if this facial recognition can be turned off or opted out of by a specific person.

The committee also brought up Google’s past with privacy issues, including the recently settled case where Google collected data from unsecured Wi-Fi networks as a part of its Street View project. Google agreed to pay a $7 million fine as a result of that lawsuit, though it has obviously left the U.S. government wary of Google’s privacy protections.

The letter was signed by eight of the Privacy Caucus’ members, and was led by Rep. Joe Barton (R-TX).

As All Things D notes, Google Glass product director Steve Lee explained that privacy and “social implications … of Glass, of people wearing Glass, has been at the top of our mind.” He went on to explain that Google will likely not deviate from the current privacy policy it has set up — another concern of the Privacy Caucus.

Letter to Google from Congress privacy group regarding Google Glass privacy

via All Things D; Google Glass image via Jolie O’Dell/VentureBeat

AirWatch, which helps companies manage employee’s mobile devices, raised another $25 million in a follow-on to its first round of funding today because the $200 million it received in February just wasn’t quite enough.

Today’s funding was led by Accel Parterns. The $200 million round it got three months ago was led by Insight Venture Partners.

AirWatch makes a suite of mobile security products used by customers such as Delta, Lowe’s, and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. It covers a range of different IT needs such as managing not only the phones themselves, but the apps, emails, and other content on those phones. It covers Android, iOS, BlackBerry, Symbian, Windows Phone, and other devices and can be tailored by industry.

The company’s goals with this addition are the same as those it had when it took on the original amount: expand globally, and beef up its sales team. It also looks like AirWatch wants to branch out with new research and development. This funding gives it the resources to do so.

What likely happened is Accel Partners wanted in on this company and offered up some extra cash. Accel is a very well-known venture firm that has invested in such companies as Facebook, Spotify, Rovio, and mobile security company Lookout Mobile.

AirWatch was founded in 2003 and is headquartered in Atlanta.

Man catching money image via Shutterstock

As the one writing about the funding news AND going to see Star Trek on day 1, does that make me queen of the nerds? Probably not, but a girl can dream.

SAP boosts startup fund by 2.6X to stimulate big data innovation

SAP is betting big on startups. And big data. The business software behemoth is more than doubling its commitment to the SAP HANA Real Time Fund, going from $155 million to $405 million, to support innovation surrounding real-time applications and big data. The SAP HANA fund launched in 2012 and primarily makes investments in early stage venture capital funds and startups building off SAP’s technology. Read more on VentureBeat.

Airwatch adds $25M into its coffers, because $200M isn’t enough

AirWatch, which helps companies manage employee’s mobile devices, raised another $25 million in a follow-on to its first round of funding today because the $200 million it received in February just wasn’t quite enough.  The round was led by Accel Partners. The Atlanta-based company makes mobile security software that manages devices, apps, email, and other content. It’s customers include Delta and Lowe’s. Read more on VentureBeat. 

MicroVentures doles out $16M in investments while it ‘patiently waits’ for the SEC

MicroVentures has a powerful pitch for startups: We’ll help you raise money. The Austin-based company helps accredited investors pool their cash together (usually somewhere between $1,000 and $30,000 per person) to fund early-stage startups like Ribbon and Medigram. For investors, it’s the opportunity to fork over as little as $1,000 but still get in early alongside more seasoned angel investors. MicroVentures has reached $16 million in investments today and claims to have surpassed any other equity-based crowdfunding platform. Read more on VentureBeat. 

Pebble raises $15M, launches SDK update for better smartwatch apps

After raising more than $10 million on Kickstarter, smartwatch maker Pebble announced today that it has received $15 million in first round funding from Charles River Ventures. That’s a pretty heft sum for a company that was initially shot down by VCs, a blow that led to the Kickstarter campaign. After nabbing around 85,000 orders on Kickstarter and successfully kicking off Pebble shipments, it’s not surprising to see investors taking a second look. Pebble says the funding will let it expand its software engineering team, scale for demand, and grow its open development platform. Read more on VentureBeat.

Marqeta raises $14M to bring ‘Starbucks-type loyalty to every merchant’

Loyalty and payments startup Marqeta has raised $14 million and announced that it will power the Facebook Card. Marqeta’s approach to e-commerce encourages consumers to make their purchases online to earn rewards from participating retailers. Marqeta keeps tracks of all that information in one place. Consumers save money and retailers gain loyalty. Existing investors Greylock IL and Granite Ventures participated in this round, along with new investor Commerce Ventures. Read more on VentureBeat.

¡Más dinero! BPM solutions provider BonitaSoft raises $13M

BonitaSoft, the business process management (BPM) solutions provider, announced today it has raised $13 million it its third round of funding thus far. The company’s open source software allows for easy business process modelling and implementation. It is based in Southern France. The Series C was led by the French National Fund for Digital Society (FSN PME), a French government initiative that invests in technology companies. Returning investors Ventech, Auriga Partners, and Serena Capital were also involved. Read more on VentureBeat.  

Luvocracy raises $11.5M in venture capital to power social commerce

Social e-commerce site, Luvocracy has raised $11.5 million in funding from Kleiner Perkins, Google Ventures, RPM Ventures, XG Ventures, CrunchFund, Marissa Mayer, Ali Pincus, Jim Lanzone, and Tony Robbins. Luvocracy is a San Francisco-based startup that lets you buy products you “luv” based on recommendations from the people you trust. You can also earn rewards if someone buys a product you recommend. Read more on VentureBeat.

EdgeSpring launches with $11M in Series A funding to help simplify analytics 

The “big data” and analytics startup EdgeSpring officially launched today with $11 million in financing from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Lightspeed Ventures. The company’s business intelligence and analytics platform enables you to quickly obtain business information from any size, structure or data without having to depend on data analysts or information technology professionals. The platform makes it easy for average users to ask questions about data like financial or user information any time and anywhere across data silos. Read more on VentureBeat. 

I don’t think you’re ready for this Jelly

Biz Stone’s under-the-radar startup has raised money from some very well-known people. In a blog post today, the Twitter founder announced closing a funding round led by Spark Capital with participation from SV Angel. An elite group of individual investors also contributed, including Jack Dorsey, Bono, Reid Hoffman, Steven Johnson, Evan Williams, Al Gore, Greg Yaitanes, and Roya Mahboob. Read more on VentureBeat.

Bitcoin startups get hotter: BitPay nabs $2M from Founders Fund & others

Relatively young Bitcoin startup BitPay has announced it has raised $2 million more in funding to lead the market in Bitcoin payment processing. This follows a $510,000 seed round it raised in January. BitPay specializes in e-commerce, B2B, and enterprise solutions for Becton and it claims processing fees as low as 1 percent with no setup fees. It signed up more than 1,900 new merchants in April, and it claims to sign up about 100 new merchants per day at this point. The new funding was led by Founders Fund, the fund behind the so-called “PayPal Mafia.” Also on the round is Max Keiser’s fund Heisenberg Capital, a London-based fund targeting Bitcoin-focused companies. Read more on VentureBeat.

Ringadoc nabs $700K to bridge the communication gap between doctors & patients

Patients need a better way to communicate with their physicians, and Ringadoc believes it can help. The San Francisco-based startup added another $700,000 to its seed round today, bringing its total funding to $1.9 million.Ringdoc helps doctors separate personal and professional messages, and enables them to triage patients before speaking to them on the phone or in person. Investors include Ryan Howard, CEO of Practice Fusion (Ringadoc is currently incubating in Practice Fusion’s offices), Sharon Knight, cofounder of One Medical, the chain of concierge primary care practices, Siemer VC, Telegraph Hill Group, and Dr. Lyle Dennis, the neurology chief at Bon Secours Health System. Read more on VentureBeat.

TheMadVideo raises $500K for video of Steve Job, among other things

TheMadVideo has raised $500K in seed funding for its platform that brands and content creators can use to make video moments taggable and shareable. The technology indexes moments in a video by people, place, things, topics etc…  so brands can pinpoint moments in videos the feature their products and link them to sale pages. The company was founded in Spain and is now based in San Francisco.

Photo Credit: Edward Beaver/Flickr

Data visualization company Tableau Software has raised the price range of its initial public offering to $31 per share.

In a media release, Seattle-based Tableau announced that it has raised $254 million by offering 8.2 million shares at $31, above the revised range of $28 to $30. The shares are expected to begin trading on the New York Stock Exchange on May 17 under the symbol DATA.

The company originally filed for its IPO in early April. Back in November, we picked it as one of 10 startups leading the way in ‘big data.’

“Our mission is to help people see and understand data,” Tableau’s prospectus says. The company offers products to help technical and nontechnical users create interactive charts and simulations based on raw data. Tableau offers a variety of public, corporate and premium products, and caters to a range of customers.

Source: Tableau

Tableau CEO Christian Chabot

Tableau’s is the latest in a series of high-performing enterprise IPOs, including Workday, Splunk, and Palo Alto Networks, making 2013 the year for business software.

“Data visualization applications like Tableau are ushering in a post-spreadsheet era, threatening to kill Excel as the killer app for desktop analytics,” said data scientist Mike Driscoll, who is also the CEO of Metamarkets.

Still, Tableau faces strong competition from giants like IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, and SAP as well as startups like Tibco Spotfire. And maybe even Google.

“Our mission, to help people everywhere see and understand data, isn’t all that different from Google’s,” Christian Chabot, the company’s cofounder and chief executive, said in a recent interview with VentureBeat.

Goldman, Sachs & Co. and Morgan Stanley are acting as lead joint book-running managers for the offering.

Michael Yang is Managing Director, Comcast Ventures.

[Editor's note: Michael Yang and Keas CEO Josh Stevens will be debating the topic of educating employees on health benefits at HealthBeat 2013 next week. See Josh Stevens' story published yesterday: "Getting American employees online is key for health care — and reducing health costs."]

Despite some recent news that healthcare spending may be slowing down, it continues to increase each year, and traditional financial sponsors of healthcare in the U.S. — be it the government, the health plan, or the employer — are increasingly adopting a more “consumerist” mindset when it comes to healthcare.  This is especially prevalent in the employer market, which continues to underwrite approximately half of Americans’ healthcare costs.

So what have the leading employers in our country been doing about it? From pushing patient portals rich with online content, to offering decision-support tools for provider selection and procedure price transparency, to leveraging game dynamics and social networking techniques for corporate wellness programs, HR benefits teams have introduced numerous waves of innovation targeted at making employees more sophisticated consumers of healthcare. The central hypothesis is that if you know what you are consuming and how it affects you financially, you will better manage your utilization of healthcare. But is it working?

Health tech is no different than any other new innovation – just because you build it, does not mean they will come. No one remembers the portal’s URL address; no one remembers their log-in for their provider search tool; and no one cares about the leaderboard for weight loss. We are losing the war on patient engagement as these solutions on a standalone basis are not enough. If the patient or employee will not engage, then there is little hope that information is exchanged, proper guidance is given, and appropriate actions are taken. So the real question is, how do you encourage employee engagement?

True engagement can only be achieved through the helping hand of an emerging class of players in the health advocacy, health assistant, and health navigator space. Our Byzantine healthcare system is so complicated that most of us are effectively healthcare illiterate. “Do-it-yourself” is arguably easier with a home remodel than a chronic condition in our healthcare system. As such, it is falling on the shoulders of companies like Accolade, Health Advocate, and Quantum Health that are offered as an employee benefit to assist employees through their healthcare journey. Professionally trained health coaches and assistants are accessible to employees by phone, email, chat and even sometimes on-site, and can help problem-solve a wide range of topics from administrative to clinical, all with the objective of helping the employee understand their options and having all the relevant information in front of them to take the right next step. A patient portal, a wellness program, or a price transparency tool is so much more powerful when an employee can talk through what they’re seeing with a health assistant (or better yet, have their health advocate do it for them).

Early results are in and engagement is high, patients are satisfied and healthcare costs can be managed. Perhaps this is the formula for the future. Engaged employees can equal smarter patients, which in turn can be healthier employees, but you have to help them become engaged.

To learn more, come hear Meghan Kelly of VentureBeat moderate a fireside chat with Michael Yang and Josh Stevens of Keas at HealthBeat 2013’s Healthy Employees=Smarter Patients.

Disclosure: Comcast Ventures is an investor in Accolade.

Doctor image via Shutterstock

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HealthBeat 2013 is a new conference showcasing how technology is transforming health care. We'll explore how IT is driving out inefficiencies on the hospital, practice, and patient levels. Check out full event details here, and register here.

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BonitaSoft, the business process management (BPM) solutions provider, announced today it has raised $13 million it its third round of funding thus far. This is good news to fans of the company’s open source software, which allows for easy business process modelling and implementation.

Based in Grenoble (Southern France), the company’s open-source software is available for free download from its website and is offered with three optional subscription packs: teamwork, efficiency, and performance. Each subscription package unlocks new product and support features.

The Series C was led by the French National Fund for Digital Society (FSN PME), a French government initiative that invests in technology companies. Returning investors Ventech, Auriga Partners, and Serena Capital were also involved. The company has raised over $28 million since it was founded in June 2009.

According to the company’s press release, it is planning on using the new capital to expand further expand its business into Latin America, the United States, and Europe. It will be targeting mid and large sized businesses as it attempts to increase its number of clients. Part of this expansion will be the addition of 60 new employees at its San Francisco, Paris, and Grenoble offices.

“We are delighted with the support from the FSN PME fund established by the French government,” said Miguel Valdes Faura, BonitaSoft’s chief executive and cofounder, in the press release.

“The vote of confidence shows the value BonitaSoft brings to the BPM market. Customers have made it known that they want innovative, flexible and cost-effective solutions to improve their business processes, and we will continue to deliver solutions that meet this need,” he said.

BonitaSoft saw sales growth of 130 percent and a 390 percent revenue increase in the United States last year. It has over 600 clients worldwide, including Accenture, DirecTV, Old Dominion University, Teach for America, and Michelin. The company’s open-source BPM solution has been downloaded over 2 million times.

Photo credit: BonitaSoft

In one of the last I/O sessions for today, the Google Glass team answered some of the community’s most urgent questions about the product, including when the next units are shipping and what apps should come next.

Next recipients

Steve Lee, Glass product director, told the audience that of the I/O attendees from last year, everyone who signed up for Glass has received a unit.

Next, the 8,000 people selected from the #ifihadglass hashtag contest will start getting their devices; that rollout should begin fairly soon.

We still don’t have a date for when Glass will be widely available to normal consumers, so no need to play a Best Buy overnight camp-out just yet.

Next apps

Still, the panel is excited about the apps the developers at I/O will likely go home and build for the devices. Currently, there are fewer than a dozen functioning Glass apps.

“I’d love to have a fitness application on Glass,” said Lee. “That way, I could have relevant information to my workout without ever having to stop my workout.”

Charles Mendis, Glass software engineering director, talked about the hassle of buying groceries with a couple small kids in tow, saying, “I’d love a way to pay easily at the cash register.”

Isabelle Olsson, lead industrial designer for Google Glass, said, “I’m really into karaoke. … If there was a way to sing karaoke in a way that you actually faced the audience, which is usually your drunk friends, that would be awesome. Please make it!”

New features

One developer asked the team when app developers might have access to voice triggers so end users can use voice as a control mechanism for apps other than the Glass device itself.

Mendis responded that more voice commands might be possible in the future. We expect more information will be available when Google releases its Glass Development Kit, which will give devs access to native hardware capabilities.

As for the hardware itself, Olsson got a couple questions about Glass’s colors — currently a limited palette of black, gray, white, orange, and blue.

“We’ve developed five colors based on personalities and also what people look good in,” she said. “We started to see how important color was, how nonintuitive it was and how people develop an attachment to a specific color. … Colors are much more important than you would ever imagine. I want to keep on doing cool colors.”

Normal people

Throughout Google I/O, it’s been a surreal experience to walk through huge crowds of people, a third of whom look like Robocop Lite. It’s also been an interesting exercise in basic manners — knowing when not to take a picture or when to ignore a notification, for example.

“The social etiquette of using Glass has been on the top of our minds,” said Lee, “not just the people who wear them, but the people around them.

“The display is up above the person’s eye. We learned that very early on. Some of the early prototypes actually covered your eyes, and we discovered that a lot of human interaction has to do with eye contact.”

Lee, who is from Idaho, is hopeful about Glass’s chances in the wider market of consumers.

“They are very optimistic and intrigued about Glass,” he said. “There’s already interest, so there’s a real opportunity for Glass to become mainstream.”

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Want to call your doctor but can’t abide that awful 1970s call center system and the hour-long wait?

Patients need a better way to communicate with their physicians, and Ringadoc believes it can help. Investors agree; the San Francisco-based startup added another $700,000 to its seed round today, bringing its total funding to $1.9 million.

Startups like One Medical are taking on some of the biggest challenges in health care. But sometimes the right approach is to start small and focus on one specific problem. Ringadoc is laser-focused on building simple tech to bridge the communication gap between doctors and patients.

Ringdoc helps doctors separate personal and professional messages, and enables them to triage patients before speaking to them on the phone or in person. In addition, physicians can access after-hours calls on a smartphone or tablet device anytime through the answering service.

Ringadoc initially developed and launched an app that let patients record video messages ahead of a virtual visit with a physician. But the company has dropped video for now and shifted to phone consultations.

“Ringadoc reduces the human error associated with costly answering services and live operators by allowing the doctor to hear the patient’s issue in their own voice and words,” said CEO and co-founder Jordan Michaels (pictured above, right, with co-founder Micah Grossman).

Michaels said that conversations between patients and doctors are “an instrumental part of the health care conversation” and were “previously overlooked.”

The company claims its cloud-based answering service has now successfully handled over 100,000 calls for practices across the country. The business model is also clear and simple; Ringadoc charges physicians $49 per month.

Investors include Ryan Howard, CEO of Practice Fusion, Sharon Knight, co-founder of One Medical, the chain of concierge primary care practices, Siemer Ventures, Telegraph Hill Group, and Dr. Lyle Dennis, the neurology chief at Bon Secours Health System.

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