Ride-sharing startup Lyft has closed a $60 million third funding round led by venture firm Andreessen Horowitz, the company announced on its blog.

The startup with the tagline, “your friend with a car,” has developed an iPhone and Android app that lets you order a ride from a stranger in a matter of minutes. It’s an alternative to taxi cabs and has taken off in San Francisco and Los Angeles.

Lyft cofounder John Zimmer

The special touch is that Lyft cars are emblazoned with pink moustaches, and drivers routinely fist bump passengers when they step into the car — typically at the front, not the back. “A core value for the company is empathy, and we built that into the experience,” said Lyft cofounder John Zimmer in an interview with VentureBeat.

Lyft launched in San Francisco in the summer of 2012 and is the most recent product from parent company Zimride. Zimride has been around since 2007 and has closed about $7.5 million in funding. Zimmer said that the two products have raised a combined $83 million.

Lyft has seen some impressive traction since it launched. The company announced today that it is now facilitating 30,000 rides each week. For this reason, it’s attracted significant attention from investors; Lyft today confirmed that the $15 million fundraise led by Founders Fund reported by TechCrunch in January 2013 (closed in October 2012) is accurate.

If Lyft hasn’t reached you yet, expect to see moustache-adorned cars in your city by the end of 2014.

Zimmer said that Lyft intends to spread across the country — and eventually across the world — by the end of next year. With the new boost in capital, it will focus on building out the team.

“We have an ambitious goals and we know that,” he said. In the previous 12 months, Lyft has raised $75 million from Founders Fund, Andreessen Horowitz, Mayfield, FloodGate, and others — it must grow at an accelerated rate so its later-stage investors will see a return. It has raised a total of $85 million.

Lyft faces a number of potential challenges as it scales. ”They [our investors] all know there are regulatory hurdles — but it’s clear we’re going beyond what’s expected in terms of safety,” said Zimmer.

Drivers are vetted and subject to extensive background checks. But city regulators and consumers are still nervous — California authorities levied hefty citations against Lyft in November 2012. These were later dropped so the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) could reexamine its policies.

Among the original charges: a lack of evidence of property damage insurance coverage and evidence of workers compensation insurance, and failure to enroll drivers in the Department of Motor Vehicles Employer Pull Notice Program.

To its credit, Lyft has built up a community of supporters, who launched petitions on sites like Change.org to fight in its corner. “Our evangelists came out with thousands of phone calls and emails to the CPUC,” said Zimmer. “I think we’ll rally the troops again if need be.”

A decision from California regulators in favor of Lyft and other regulators could set a precedent. And therefore, Andreessen Horowitz must not have viewed this an obstacle to Lyft’s expansion plans, which are necessary for the firm to get a return on its investment.

In addition, the company operates on a community ride-sharing model, which sets it apart from chief competitor Uber. Passengers are asked for a suggested donation — it’s not entirely clear as it moves across the country (outside of cash flush cities like San Francisco) whether this will be paid. Zimmer recently admitted that he might have to reevaluate the business model.

Spotted: An aggressive ad campaign from Uber against its rival, Lyft

Perhaps the biggest threat of all comes from Uber, which recently rolled out its own ride-sharing service. Uber had relied on third-party limo and taxi services to provide drivers. But it has been watching its competitors steal market share — and has seen regulators give tacit approval to ride-sharing — and isn’t willing to give up valuable revenue.

When pressed about the competitive market, Zimmer quipped: “We led the peer-to-peer ride space — and there is a big difference between the community experience and what our competitors are doing.”

Finally, the company must stay committed to recruiting drivers who are willing to work on holidays and rush hour. To ensure it could keep its drivers happy so they wouldn’t be lured away by rivals, Lyft didn’t take a cut of the transaction for the first six months. Now, it is taking 20 percent from each ride.

To surmount these challenges, Lyft’s founding team is in full battle mode. “Better transportation that’s more affordable and more social is worth fighting for,” said Zimmer.

Read the full blog post announcing the fundraise here:

Celebrating One Year Together

What does the pink mustache stand for? It’s a question we get asked frequently. People are curious when they see it for the first time, but once you’re a part of the community, a bigger meaning comes through. The pink mustache is a smile. It’s the goal of finishing your ride a little happier than you were before. It’s the belief that people are inherently good. It’s the idea that a great conversation on a trip across town can result in a new friend, a job offer, or even a hug after a tough breakup. Longtime Lyft driver, Danielle, put it best when she said “Lyfting restored my faith in humanity.”

Since you’ve helped define this larger meaning, we wanted the Lyft community to be the first to hear about some good news. Today, just one year after we first launched in San Francisco, we’re excited to announce that we’ve received additional investment from the amazing team at Andreessen Horowitz to bring Lyft to cities all over the world. This funding, along with an investment from Founders Fund earlier this year, will support our global expansion, giving us resources to strengthen existing Lyft communities and build new ones. From the beginning, the Lyft community has set itself apart inspiring us with passion, and we’re thrilled to be on this journey together.

To celebrate the past year, we took a trip down memory lane with some of our favorite community moments. We’ve learned that getting a kind note from a stranger can make someone’s day, that spontaneous in-car karaoke sessions are sometimes the best part of a night out, and that simple acts of kindness can bring us closer together.

If you have your own Lyft memories you’d like to share from this past year, we’d love to hear from you on Facebook or Twitter with #lyftlove.

Neurotrack, the startup that won the health prize at this year’s SXSW, has pulled in a round of seed funding, according to a Form D filing.

The $90,000 boost from angel investors is the first outside capital for the company with a diagnostic test for Alzheimer’s disease.

CEO Elli Kaplan is aiming her life’s work at Alzheimer’s and related disorders. “I watched two of my grandparents die ‘alone’ because they could no longer remember their family members who were sitting at their bedsides,” she said.

Neurotrack’s test is bolstered by 25 years of neuroscience research. Millions of dollars from foundations and grants have already been poured into the technology, which was developed by researchers at Emery University.

The company offers a computer-based cognitive test that can detect an impairment on the Hippocampus, the first structure in the brain to be impacted by Alzheimer’s. The program evaluates patients’ eye movement — and the time spent looking at familiar and new images.

Related: The founders launched the company at DEMO — read the full VentureBeat story here.

Kaplan was impressed by the technology, which she claims could predict patients with a high risk of Alzheimer’s up to six years prior to the onset of the disease. So Neurotrack licensed it and is beginning to commercialize the test by selling to pharmaceutical companies.

“The biggest issue that pharma companies have is populating clinical trials with people who are pre-symptomatic,” said Kaplan. To develop drugs to treat Alzheimer’s, they need access to patients before irreparable damage is done.

The Alzheimer’s Association reports that about 5.4 million Americans have Alzheimer’s – and that number is expected to rise to 16 million by 2050. But Kaplan is convinced that we’ll someday develop a drug that can cure the disease.

For now, informed patients can make lifestyle changes (exercising more, adapting eating habits) and take medication to delay the onset of the disease. “We know that some of the symptom-treating drugs are more effective the earlier you can start them,” said Kaplan.

Results from the most recent research is very promising — according to Kaplan, the participants who scored below 50 percent on the test have all received an Alzheimer’s diagnosis within six years. None of those scoring above 67 on the test have converted to Alzheimer’s. Ninety-two people participated in the study.

Neurotrack isn’t ready for the public yet — but if and when it becomes available, Kaplan said, people in their 50s will get tested every year. Patients with a family history of Alzheimer’s may receive the test earlier.

Kaplan would not yet disclose pricing information for the test when it becomes available. The company is in the midst of fundraising for its next round and is still fleshing out its go-to-market strategy. It is a graduate of Rock Health Boston, which has a strong relationship with venture firm Kleiner Perkins, and first launched at DEMO.

Top image of the founders at DEMO via Flickr

Seattle-based Remote Medical just scored $8 million to bring health care to virtually anyone in need, anywhere in the world.

Remote Medical serves companies and individuals in remote places; it’s a good option for military personell, research teams, law enforcement groups, or those lucky billionaires living out their days on private islands.

Remote Medical offers a variety of services, including telemedicine (physicians can securely chat with patients via video), medical training, drugs, and equipment.

One customer, a remote worker on an island in the South Pacific had a heart attack, but a Remote Medical physician and nurse were able to treat his symptoms. The company’s operations team based at the Seattle headquarters booked a plane and crew to fly him to the nearest hospital in Honolulu.

The company will use the funding to expand its team of some 100 employees, enter into new international markets, and beat out competitors like RemoteMd. Remote Medical has been around since 2003, but hopes it can really establish itself this year and predicts a 60 percent revenue growth.

CEO Brian Vincent said he is looking to hire medical professionals and EMTs as well as sales and operations folk.

The funding comes from Columbia Pacific, a firm that owns 23 hospitals across Asia. Remote Medical will use these hospitals as bases of operations as it expands across the region.

joyfull / Shutterstock.com

This is a guest post by entrepreneur Agu De Marco

In the international startup world, there are numerous options when it comes to accelerators.

Those options are even greater if you have a solid idea, strong team, and a sound execution plan. Being a startup from Argentina, our team could also choose between any number of international programs.

After being invited to TechCrunch Disrupt last October, our Wideo team toured the 500 Startups offices. We joined Dave McClure outside for a smoke, and chatted to him about gaining entry to the Fall class of 500 Startups accelerator program.

It was a fantastic opportunity, but we also realized that our team was about to split up. While I relocated to Mountain View, Calif. alone, the rest of the team remained at home in Argentina.

Fast forward eight months, and we reunited to take part in the NXTP Labs accelerator program in Buenos Aires, Argentina.

The biggest question we get now is, “why are you joining NXTP after 500 Startups?” Followed by, “would you do another accelerator?” It really got me thinking about whether it’s a good idea or a mistake to participate in more than one accelerator program.

What are the cons?

The most obvious is the loss of equity. As you enter each accelerator, you give up part of your equity. Logic follows that the more accelerator programs you enter, the more of your company you’re forced to give up.

Depending on your negotiations, this can be a huge loss for your company or a non-issue.

Another con is that you may simply be repeating what you already learned.  Though each acceleration program is different, you might just end up wasting your time. Consider whether this program is offering something that you don’t already know. Ask yourself what you can really stand to gain.

Finally, you may end up delaying your product launch. Is this a big deal?  It’s hard to say, but it could prove detrimental if a competitor launches before you.  In the startup world, there is always a risk of someone getting ahead of you on an idea. The “first mover” advantage is very real.

And the pros?

The biggest pro is the mentors; the people who help you along in the startup process are such talented, intellectual individuals that you can’t walk away without learning something from each one.  The connections you make at an accelerator are simply unmatched in the real ‘non-accelerated’ world.

If you participate in global accelerators, you have a better handle on your market.  Our market is English and Spanish speakers, so we did one of each.  Our market is thoroughly tapped in both the US and Argentina, simply because of our efforts in the accelerator programs.  The awareness of your brand grows when you go global.

Third, sometimes, but not always, validation comes from certain acceleration programs.  We’re a 500 Startups startup and that means a lot, especially since we were one of the first Argentine startups to be accepted.

Would we do a third accelerator?

Maybe. I honestly can’t say no because we might discover that our major market is in Brazil.  We can’t say we wouldn’t like to take advantage of an accelerator program there.

When we entered 500 Startups, our product hadn’t even launched yet.  That program taught us about our market, how to launch, and gave us contacts that we really appreciate. However, we lost focus and our team was separated.

Entering NXTP Labs, we have a strong product that we can actually accelerate, so the decision was relatively easy. We are taking advantage of where we are in product development and what each accelerator has to offer.

Participating in more than one accelerator may not be for every new startup; for us, we just try to make the best decisions at the time for our company.

Agu De Marco is the founder of Wideo.co, a tool to make cool videos. Wideo participated in 500 Startups in the Fall class (one of the first two Argentine startups to be accepted), and will begin NXTP’s program this Spring.  

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Mystery funding of the day? That’d be YesGraph, a stealthy startup in the recruiting space founded by Ivan Kirigin, a former product manager at Facebook and Dropbox.

Kirigin today secured $1.2 million of a $1.8 million round, according to a Form D. A total of seven angel investors participated in the funding.

“The financing has enabled us to build a good product and hire talent — there is a lot that is hard about this space,” said Kirigin on a phone call.

Ivan Kirigin

Kirigin would not say much about the product at this stage. But he did reveal that YesGraph is building tools for tech companies to improve the hiring experience — and not just the “output.” To that end, Kirigin just released a survey, an attempt to find patterns in how startups make their first hires.

“Companies have a hard time hiring good people — we are trying to help them,” he added.

Serial entrepreneur Kirigin is also the founder of a micro-payments service called Tipjoy, which both Facebook and Twitter considered acquiring, TechCrunch reported. After negotiations fell through with Facebook, the company made Kirigin an offer, and he joined in 2009 to work on a virtual currency product. He would later join Dropbox, where he claims on his LinkedIn page to have helped drive growth 12X over 2 years.

Investors in Kirigin’s previous company Tipjoy include Chris Sacca and Y Combinator founder Paul Graham.

Top image via Shutterstock

How much did your last medical visit cost?

Most of us are in the dark about health care prices, even when it comes to our own expenses. This lack of transparency around health spending is a problem that Silicon Valley’s entrepreneurs are angling to solve.

San Francisco-based Practice Fusion just launched a free tool for consumers to manage their health spending. The payment-tracking service is now available on the consumer-focused site PatientFusion.com.

Recently-launched Patient Fusion also gives patients the option to book doctor’s appointments and browse physician reviews. It’s similar to the product offered by New York-based physician scheduling startup ZocDoc, so Practice Fusion is building out new features to stay competitive.

Practice Fusion is best known for its free, web-based electronic medical record (EMR) system used by doctors and medical practices, but this new product is part of an ongoing strategy to serve patients.

“We want to facilitate the entire patient journey and life cycle,” said chief executive Ryan Howard in a recent interview.

Note that the new service, which is still in beta, is only available to patients covered by national insurance payers like United and Anthem Blue Cross.

The goal for the shift into payments is to help patients and their families set aside a reasonable amount per year to spend on health care, so they won’t fall behind on bills. In-depth insurance information will be incorporated in the product, and patients can see whether a claim has been accepted or rejected.

Howard said that patients have been “disenfranchised” in the current system. Still, the challenge will be to get patients engaged in their health between visits; it’s a problem that a small startup known as CakeHealth recently faced when it launched a “Mint.com for health.”

Howard spoke on stage this week at VentureBeat’s HealthBeat conference, and revealed a bit more about the company’s long-term strategy.

“We want to have an active dialogue with patients about their health,” he said. In the future, Patient Fusion will incorporate predictive analytics and alerts; the system will let you know if you’re due for a vaccination or physical exam.

The system will get smarter still when patients are able to manually enter information about their health.

“We’re already the largest, most utilized public health record in America — but we still have so much more to do,” said Howard.

Top photo: Practice Fusion CEO Ryan Howard at HealthBeat 2013. Photo credit: Michael O’Donnell/VentureBeat.

SAN FRANCISCO, Calif. — What do the most innovative doctors and nurses really think about the new wave of medical technology?

While investors and entrepreneurs are making noise about opportunities in the space, health care providers are often the silent, reluctant partner. But to continue to stay at the top of their field, providers are keeping tabs on innovation and new products.

So we invited clinicians from Kaiser Permanente and Stanford University to HealthBeat to discuss the new technology they are piloting in their hospitals, and the gaps that entrepreneurs can fill.

“One of our big challenges is making ourselves accessible,” said Faye Karnavy Sahai, vice president of innovation at Kaiser Permanente (pictured above, right). But Kaiser has built its brand around innovation at the front lines of healthcare, and claims its 17,000 doctors and 49,000 nurses are exposed to new ideas across the spectrum.

“We also work independently with a lot of entrepreneurs and give them advice,” added Sumbul Desai (above, center), a doctor who works as the associate chief medical officer for strategy and innovation at Stanford.

To guide investment in the space, Stanford offers startup founders the opportunity to pilot their technology. A number of innovation fellowships are also available, and the hospital works closely with the accelerator program StartX Med.

“Every morning we’ll meet with folks in the entrepreneurial community — we love doing it and are super invested,” Desai said.

What are the biggest challenges for health entrepreneurs?

Desai said one of the biggest issues is that entrepreneurs don’t do their homework. There are unique regulatory, privacy and compliance issues involved with health care — HIPAA compliance is just the beginning. In addition, founders aren’t as aware as they should be about the competitive market.

The other challenge is integration. Desai stressed that new products need to work well with existing workflows. Kaiser is working on centralizing its electronic medical records (EMR) system, echoing a nationwide trend. To that end, Kaiser inked a deal with Epic Systems, the electronic health record company that health entrepreneurs have a love-hate relationship with.

“Epic is the cornerstone of how we look at our data,” said Desai.

Epic has been criticized for hampering innovation due to its closed system that shuts out third parties. But it has a dominant position in hospitals, and isn’t wise to ignore.

Another issue the speakers raised is that entrepreneurs can often get too fixated on the idea, and not consider the organization that they plan to fit into. It’s easier said than done. So for this reason, startup founders like ConsultingMD’s Owen Tripp are opting to team up with physicians.

And the biggest opportunities?

One of the hottest areas is patient care, but Desai warned that it’s “just one piece of the puzzle.”

Consumer technology is slowly making its way into hospitals. Kaiser is experimenting with putting real-time location data in sponges to prevent them from being left in patients’ bodies during surgery (and producing an ensuing publicity nightmare). In addition, nurses can check in using location proximity badges, making it far easier to track their movements.

Some of the less “sexy” areas include reimbursement and data analysis.

“Big data and analytics will be huge — expect to see predictive diagnostic capabilities,” said Desai. Much of this data will be mined from fitness trackers like FitBit and Jawbone’s Up, which are used by patients as part of a “quantified self” trend.

When asked about the one piece of technology that would be most beneficial, Desai urged innovators in the audience to think big. Physicians need ”an overall digital experience,” she explained, that will clearly list out patient visits, second opinions, virtual visits, and so on.

“Too often we see separate small companies and pockets of innovation right now,” she said.

Photo Credit: Michael O’Donnell/VentureBeat

(Updated with comments from HealthBeat.)

SAN FRANCISCO – Reputation.com founder Owen Tripp is not the kind of entrepreneur who wants to solve small problems. For his new venture, Tripp tells me he has an ambitious solution that will someday “fix health care.”

Tripp’s startup, ConsultingMD, has secured a $10 million funding round led by venture firm Venrock, the health-focused venture capital arm of the Rockefeller family. The mission is to create a virtual clinic where patients are served by the top doctors in the world.

ConsultingMD founder Owen Tripp

“We don’t believe you need a network of thirty thousand doctors to be effective,” said Tripp [pictured above with cofounder Dr. Lawrence "Rusty" Hoffman] in an interview with VentureBeat. “We would rather use the same 750 doctors who achieve successful outcomes again and again.”

Tripp unveiled the funding as well as ConsultingMD’s first product on stage at VentureBeat’s HealthBeat conference today.

“There is a ton of friction between the top experts and the patients who most need them,” Tripp said during an onstage conversation with Bryan Roberts, a partner at venture capital firm Venrock. “We take away all the friction.”

ConsultingMD offers patients the opportunity to consult a leading medical expert for a second opinion — and receive a detailed response in about 48 hours.

Patients are asked to submit some brief details about their case, and sign a release. ConsultingMD’s team will begin assembling a file with a full medical record, demographic information, relevant images, tests, and so on, and select a specialist from the network to take a closer look. ConsultingMD even does optical character recognition and handwriting recognition on the printed files to make them searchable.

The technology is HIPPA-compliant and cloud-based, so doctors can safely review a case in any location, given them what Tripp calls a “virtual clinic” on their iPads. The goal is to make the process user-friendly and efficient for doctors as well as patients.

“Great doctors want to do great medicine, and they’re handcuffed by the technology they have to use,” Tripp said.

Specialists like Dr. Berchuck, director of Gynecologic Cancer Research at Duke University, are already signed up. ConsultingMD offers top doctors the opportunity to review a higher volume of medical cases.

Even in its trial period, physicians were able to access and share opinions on rare cases they might not otherwise have been exposed to. Another draw is the boost in income for top-notch physicians.”As our brand grows, so too will the celebrity of our doctors,” said Tripp.

For patients, it means avoiding flying halfway across the country, or paying exorbitant medical fees for an in-person visit.

ConsultingMD won’t accept just any doctor to its network. “We never went out and perused the phone book for doctors,” Tripp explained. “We made invitations based on recommendations and are getting more in-bound requests each week than we can handle.”

This exclusivity makes sense in light of the business model. Tripp expects the richest and biggest companies like Pepsi and Home Depot to pay for its employees to access ConsultingMD. Large enterprises pay $6 per employee each month; some cases may be covered by insurance. Individuals can also pay for a second opinion – the average cost is $3,750.

“I am a little allergic to the term ‘corporate wellness,” he explains. “I think wellness is something we ought to do as a country.”

But corporations are increasingly offering top-quality and concierge health care to retain employees. An Adecco SA study stipulated that 55 percent of corporate execs view health care benefits as their biggest challenge.

In an interview, Tripp revealed plans for a second product, an online service that helps patients locate and schedule a visit to the top specialist in their area.

“ConsultingMD has decentralized this medical expertise and improves the lives and health of people through technology,” said Roberts, who will join the company’s board.

SAN FRANCISCO, Calif. — Cloud companies like Box and Salesforce have a new sector in mind: health care.

It’s still not clear whether the industry is ready for them.

“Anyone who has to write a check knows the value of cloud computing,” said Joshua Newman, an M.D., who is also the director of product and health strategy at Salesforce, a pioneering cloud technology company and the leader in defining the marketing term “software as a service.” Newman spoke this afternoon on a panel at HealthBeat, VentureBeat’s health-focused technology conference.

Newman said a big part of his job is to communicate the value of the cloud to health providers, and to assuage fears about breaches of sensitive patient data.

In the past, patient records were stored on film, tape and paper charts. As data gets digitized, everyone in the field has grappled with how to keep it secure, including hospitals, physician practice groups, software and hardware companies, consulting firms and affiliated health care organizations.

The federal government recently released statistics that 21 million people had their sensitive health records hacked. This is just the cases that were reported — the actual number is thought to be far higher.

As a result, security challenges have overpowered the benefits of the cloud. Cost-savings and easier software upgrades pale in comparison to leaked health care records. Health providers are treading very carefully.

Newman is convinced that we’ll see increased adoption of services like Salesforce in the coming years. “There are a lot of great examples of how it’s working, and you can see how quickly it’s grown,” he said. “There are emerging standards in health care,” David Chao, a product manager at MuleSoft, said in agreement.

At HealthBeat, we also heard from Box CEO Aaron Levie how the company intends to be an “underlying layer for how content gets stored and shared” for physicians. Recently, Box received HIPAA compliance certification, meaning the product is now considered safe enough to hold on to data about your health — and safe enough for health care developers who use it.

Box and Salesforce are both appealing to progressive CIOs at hospitals and other health providers. But Newman believes it really needs to start small. “Let’s get the ball rolling with small apps,” he said. The hope is that CIOs will then realize the value in these tools.

“Getting into the cloud is not an all-or-nothing game,” said Newman. When it comes to healthcare, he stressed that we can take “baby steps.”

Photo credit: Michael O’Donnell/VentureBeat

SAN FRANCISCO, Calif. – Practice Fusion is best known for its free web-based electronic medical record, but the startup’s goals are far more ambitious.

Speaking at HealthBeat, VentureBeat’s conference, CEO Ryan Howard said the decision to offer the health record to doctors for free is “somewhat of a Trojan horse.”

“We have all this patient information that doesn’t reside anywhere else,” said Howard. The product is currently used by more than 150,000 doctors and tracks 64 million patient records, he claimed.

Aside from mining the data contained within its health record, Practice Fusion also helps doctors with calendaring, scheduling, and billing. The goal is to provide a customer relationship management (CRM) tool for physicians.

On the consumer side, the company launched a service last month, dubbed Patient Fusion, now used by 27,000 doctors. Already, consumers can use it to book appointments and peruse 1.5 million doctor reviews. In the month of April alone, the company offered 3 million open appointments.

That’s a lot of data to work with.

But the sensitive patient information is stripped of personally identifiable factors, and will not be sold to pharmaceutical companies. “We don’t sell data sets to payers,” Howard stressed.

Instead, the goal is to use the data to prevent miscommunication between doctors and patients. Howard observed in a recent interview that accessing and mining patient information can save lives. “We can recommend drug therapies based on their popularity [with previous patients],” he said, and claims there are 200,000 avoidable deaths a year because “data is simply not shared.”

By being among the first to put data in the hands of patients, Practice Fusion hopes to add more doctors to its health record. By marketing products to patients, the company will augment its brand with hospital decision-makers.

Howard revealed that the company is making “eight digit” revenues each year, and plans to go public in the future — but not in the coming year. Practice Fusion still has a long way to go; “we’re only at ten percent of our potential,” Howard revealed in an interview.

Photo credit: Michael O’Donnell/VentureBeat

SAN FRANCISCO — The startup Doximity is commonly referred to as a “Facebook for doctors.” Not anymore. It’s now moving in a new direction: medical education.

The new model came about in collaboration with the Cleveland Clinic, the nonprofit academic medical center. Cleveland Clinic has agreed to offer credit to practicing physicians who use Doximity to learn on the job.

The goal is to move continuing medical education, known as “CME,” to an online space so that it’s not confined to auditoriums and conference halls.

“Doctors spend about 40 hours a year to get accredited and 90 percent of physician education happens offline,” said Doximity CEO Jeff Tangney said. “This is time spent away from practice, not to mention administrative time needed to track the courses they’ve completed. It’s a pain. This platform will make it easier for doctors to track all these credits and automatically keep them up-to-date.”

CME refers to the practice of physicians learning about new areas of the field, and staying on top of the latest research. In the past, doctors have needed to travel to a remote auditorium; now they can access cutting-edge research from a smartphone device.

The news was announced today onstage at VentureBeat’s HealthBeat conference. Prior to founding Doximity to cater to the next generation of tech-savvy physicians, Tangney was the founder of Epocrates, a Bay Area company that develops mobile health applications.

Tangney said the result will be that doctors can save “precious time and reduce the burden of paperwork.” In addition, Doximity will help physicians track everything they’ve learned.

Doximity’s new service offers relevant medical research to its community of registered physicians — about 170,000 and growing. The company’s existing suite of secure HIPPA-compliant collaboration tools will enable doctors to share and discuss cases.

San Mateo, Calif.-based Doximity is one of the fastest growing digital health startups; it recently closed a $17 million series B round led by Morgenthaler Ventures. During a fireside chat with Rebecca Lynn, a partner at Morgenthaler Ventures, Tangey said that doctors “get a bad rap” when it comes to technology, but they were the first adopters of pagers and Palm Pilots. Doctors are busy and on-the-go, and they need solutions that fit into their workflow.

“Our goal is to make medical communication effortless, as easy as it is for the rest of us to shoot an email or text to a friend,” Tangney said. “We’ve gone a great job of digitizing health information, but not of making it easy to access. We can take the technology the teenagers have in the waiting room and give it to the physicians and specialists seeing them in the exam room.”

Twenty-four percent of physicians in the U.S. use Doximity, and the system sends 20,000 secure messages a day. Tangney said that the secure 1-to-1 messaging has “really blossomed” because it saves doctors time by giving them the information they need, when they need it. The new CME platform has a similar goal. Ultimately, the more time doctors save on the “other stuff,” the more bandwidth they have for patients.

When asked a question from an audience member about making Doximity available for nurse practitioners, Tangney said that it is something they are considering. Nurse practitioners, like doctors, also need more effective methods to communicate with each other about patients. Tangney also teased another major partnership down the road.

Photo credit: Michael O’Donnell/VentureBeat 

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

“Video is the new audio”, we often hear from startup founders who are setting their sights on large businesses.

The latest startup in the video collaboration category is Weemo, a company that was founded by French entrepreneur and telecom exec Thomas Cottereau (pictured, below).

Today, Weemo has raised $3 million investment from European private equity firm Idinvest Partners, bringing its total funding to $5 million. With the infusion of capital, Cottereau intends to expand to the U.S., and add more talent to the team so it can compete with established vendors like Vidyo, Avaya, Cisco and Microsoft.

Formerly known as “Wimo,” Weemo has made headway with customers who believe that Microsoft-owned Skype doesn’t integrate well with existing professional tools.

Weemo’s team claims its unique approach will give it an edge over the competition. The company has also developed a set of APIs, which can be leveraged by developers to add live video tools to any application or environment.

Just connect to the Weemo REST API, cut and paste a few lines of code in a web or mobile app, et voila, video calls. Companies are charged on a per user basis, which makes it more affordable than the legacy players in the space.

Cottereau said the goal is to make video a “de facto extension” of employee workflow. Companies don’t need to install any additional hardware (and pay for those expensive upgrades), as Weemo is purely a cloud service.

Weemo was founded in 2007, and currently has offices in Paris and San Francisco.

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

For hotels, a technology glitch can result in unhappy tourists and millions in lost revenue.

Hotel Ninjas, a Barcelona-based startup with a vision to be the Salesforce.com for the hospitality industry, is launching this week. Cofounder Avi Meir said he was inspired to start the company after realizing that most hotels still relied on “expensive, outdated, server-based technology.”

HotelNinjas cofounder Avi Meir

Hotel Ninjas offers property management and channel management tools (through an integration with WuBook), a customer relationship management service, and a booking engine for hotel websites. Meir says 30 hotels are lined up and are “ready to make the switch.” The company is charging its first customers $4-9 per room on a month-to-month basis.

Hotels can sign up directly or via AppExchange, Salesforce’s app marketplace. Meir told me he recently made a trip to Salesforce’s European headquarters to form a partnership with the cloud giant. He claims the startup is the first hotel technology provider developed on top of Salesforce’s platform as a service offering Force.com.

Hotel Ninjas was founded in September 2012, and has grown to seven employees. Meir is the former vice president of product at BudgetPlaces.com, an online travel agency.

To continue its momentum, the company will need to win over customers from more established vendors in the space, including Micros.com’s Opera Property Management software and Medallia.

But Meir believes that Hotel Ninjas has an edge over its competition with its customizable CRM and integration with hotel booking websites. “At the end of the day, the one thing that matters to hotel owners is how they can increase occupancy and revenue,” he said.

The founders have poured their own money into the startup, buttressed by grants from the Spanish government. In total, they have raised about $100,000.

Top image via Shutterstock

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

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 

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.

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.

This is a guest post by David Chao 

It’s a brave new world for healthcare organizations. Hospitals and other providers are teaming up to form Accountable Care Organizations to take a coordinated, community-level approach to health care.

Health insurance companies are no longer passively paying off claims, but are becoming active managers of their policyholders’ health. Providers and payers are having to change what they do and how they do it.

This requires the use of technology to ensure a free flow of information across clinical and non-clinical systems and across legacy, cloud, mobile, and personal device platforms. As the number of systems increase, this integration challenge will only grow.

How can organizations successfully meet this integration challenge?

1. Eliminate point-to-point integrations

All too often in the past, health care organizations have built custom point-to-point integrations between systems, creating a tangled web of connections. Businesses should instead turn to an integration platform that provides a common interface for all systems.

2. Leverage learnings from other industries and adopt a best-of-breed systems approach

Experience from other industries tells us that sharing data through a single, inflexible system is doomed to failure (contrary to what what some heatlhcare vendors would have you believe). Instead, loose coupling of “best-of-breed” applications has proven to be a far more effective model. Initiatives such as the CommonWell alliance and the SMART API platform are on the right track, but more must be done to push healthcare IT vendors to open up their systems.

3. Be pragmatic 

It seems that as a response to outdated technology in healthcare IT, there is a tendency to over-engineer solutions. As Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg said, “done is better than perfect.” Case in point: the 10+ years it took for the HL7 v3 healthcare messaging standard to supersede HL7 v2. For many, v3 is now so bloated that it’s impractical. At the same time, use of v2 is so deep-seated that it can’t easily be replaced. Low-tech examples can be very successful, as we see from the adoption of DIRECT protocol (essentially secure email), and the popularity of the secure e-fax feature in Doximity’s doctor platform. When it comes to solving healthcare interoperability challenges, done is certainly better than perfect.

As we’re all well aware, when it comes to technology, the healthcare industry is struggling to play catch up. The HITECH and Affordable Care Acts have provided a real catalyst for change, and it is up to all of us who work in the healthcare space to ensure we work together to deliver on this promise.

David Chao is a Product Manager at MuleSoft where he leads MuleSoft’s healthcare business. In this role, he works with providers, payers and government bodies to improve patient outcomes and lower costs by solving the challenge of interoperability across healthcare systems.

So you’ve developed a cloud-based electronic health record (EHR) or medical device that will drastically change the way we deliver health care.

Just a few years ago, you may have faced a prolonged struggle to gain investment. Practice Fusion CEO Ryan Howard, CEO of Practice Fusion, one of the more dynamic new EHR companies, recalls having to use the cash from a motorcycle accident to pay the salaries of key employees. But by 2009 when the Obama administration calling for doctors to shift to electronic health records, investors saw opportunity.

Today, investors are rushing to invest in digital health.  This will be a “record year” for investment in the health care, Rock Health recently predicted. The research shows an uptick in deals in the first quarter of the year and an increase in venture capital.

But will the elite venture capital firms open their check books for you? With our inaugural health conference HealthBeat coming up next Monday and Tuesday (it’s almost sold out, but you may be able to get a ticket still if you move fast), I caught up with Sequoia Capital‘s Warren Hogarth, and Morgenthaler Ventures‘ Missy Krasner to dig deeper into their digital health investment thesis.

VentureBeat: What’s the primary area of health that you’re currently interested in? What’s the future?

Warren Hogarth: One of the key areas is bioinformatics. It’s everything that is enabled by cheap genome sequencing. We’ve made about a half dozen investments to date in the U.S. and Asia. We have also taken a keen interest in the consumer side and health IT. These new technologies will play a role in engaging people in their health in a complete way.

Morgenthaler’s executive in residence, Missy Krasner.

Missy Krasner: A sister theme would be “big data” analytics and business intelligence in health care. There is a tremendous amount of interest in sucking data out of health records and mining data from clinical performance.

Hogarth: We’re talking now about the microbiome, not just the genome. We’re understanding that the microbiome interplays with our health, and we’re seeing a new opportunity for non-invasive treatment and testing.

VentureBeat: Have you addressed the ethical concerns around mining data about the human body?

Hogarth: Patients will have choice and control when it comes to their data. Hopefully, we’ll overcome some of the concerns about the broad misuse of data. The trick is to do it in a de-identified way with a clear process.

Krasner: And in 2014, medical underwriting will be banned so patients won’t be rated based on preexisting conditions. [Medical underwriting is already prohibited for children. -Ed.]

VentureBeat: Are you buying into this “quantified self” trend? Is it empowering for patients to have access to all this data about their health?

Hogarth: I think it’s empowering. I just had my genome sequenced, and my doctor was able to use that information to make a decision regarding my health. Companies like Jawbone are taking reams of data and surfacing it to a physician in a meaningful way.

Krasner: I spent five years at Google Health trying to get patients to engage. We tracked some of the early adopters of Basis, BodyMedia (recently acquired by Jawbone), and other great activity trackers. But there are a couple things that still need to happen. The data that is collected needs to actually be put into nuggets that are actionable. We need to take this data and figure out how to use smart algorithms to provide usable clinical insights. Otherwise we’ll get alert fatigue.

Hogarth: We need to go beyond the “chronically worried well.” We need to make an impact on people who are obese.

Krasner: I did some interesting research by signing up for Weight Watchers. I went to the meetings and subscribed to the mobile product, the device that helps you count activity. It’s a great program but we are still in the stage where patients have to record what they’re eating and put manual data into the app. The next piece of technology will automatically know my patterns. We’ll see a fantastic amount of adoption.

[Editor's note: Krasner will moderate a panel at HealthBeat on the "death" of the personal health record (PHR). That's different from the Electronic Health Record (EHR), which is alive and well and seeing serious innovation. Also at HealthBeat, we'll have executives of the major disruptor EHR companies speaking, from Practice Fusion's Ryan Howard, to the leaders of CareCloud and AthenaHealth).

VentureBeat: Are there areas that you wouldn't invest in?

Hogarth: We don't invest in drug discovery or medical devices that are pre-FDA approval. [Venture capitalists say it's a nuclear winter for medical devices. Read more on that here. -Ed.] It’s too risky, and there is a lack of control. When it comes to devices, I would love to see a culture where things happen in a timely manner.

VentureBeat: What’s the one big health care transformation that you’re most excited about?

Krasner: The one area we haven’t talked about is the new insurance models for health. Patients are being asked to pay more out of pocket than ever before. That whole wave is forcing people to think much harder about where they go. There is no transparency around quality and price. There is a big opportunity here.

Hogarth: We will see a big transformation with employee sponsored healthcare — we’ll see businesses not offering insurance. You’ll shop and make a decision about health care based on price. We’re looking hard at startups that consumerize this experience.

Meet and mingle with health investors at HealthBeat, VentureBeat’s conference in San Francisco on May 20 and 21. Partners from Sequoia Capital, Bessemer Venture Partners, Norwest Venture partners, and Kleiner Perkins Caufield Beyers will speak on a panel “Health IT: The Numbers, The Funding, The Exits,” about the drivers making this industry segment more appealing to investors. 

photo credit: Emmanuel Gadenne via photopin cc

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. The company issued a press release announcing the news stating that its success is evidence of “significant demand” from smaller investors in this asset class.

The release reads like a strong nudge to the Securities and Exchange Commission, which is taking its sweet time to finalize rules on the provision of the Jumpstart Our Business Startups Act, known as the JOBS Act.

“As we patiently wait for the SEC to enact rules around the JOBS Act…,” CEO Tim Sullivan begins his statement to the press (pictured above, left, with cofounder Bill Clark).

For over a year, we’ve been hearing from founders of crowdfunding platforms how the rules will change sometime in 2013. At this point, entrepreneurs (and Republicans) are only cautiously optimistic that the SEC will come to a decision this year — the deadlines have passed since the JOBS Act came into effect one year ago. A new October 31 deadline was recently proposed by the House.

As IndieGoGo founder Danae Ringelmann democratically put it in a recent article, the SEC is taking “longer to introduce the Act than expected;” still, she says she’s glad they are “taking the process so seriously.”

It’s a tricky process for the SEC — the regulatory body will need to weigh up the interests of investors, entrepreneurs, and crowdfunding execs from platforms like MicroVentures, AngelList, and FundersClub.

“We will continue working hard amid a busy rulemaking agenda to get these crowdfunding rules done as soon as possible, with an emphasis on getting them right,” John Nester, an SEC spokesman, said last month in a statement to Politico.

For now, Sullivan hopes entrepreneurs will continue to open up their rounds to small dollar investors rather than relying on seasoned Sand Hill Road investors. “We may find that the crowd does an even better job at picking winners,” he said.

A Silicon Valley tech entrepreneur and a Hollywood actor cross paths at a coffee shop in San Francisco’s Financial District.

You’d never know by appearance alone, but one of these men will sleep on the streets tonight.

Scott Glover and Marc Roth are feeling quite comfortable at this branch of Peet’s Coffee. Roth tells me that the homeless spend hours on end in coffee shops, which offer optimal shelter on chilly days like this one.

Scott Glover and Marc Roth (L-R)

Glover is in town for a three-day gig providing protection detail at the annual Veteran’s Day Parade. His current employers don’t know he’s homeless. Roth is no longer living in shelters, but he can relate to his new acquaintance’s transience. Until last year, he was living in his car, in hostels, the BART (for one night after he missed a curfew), and in shelters around San Francisco.

But Roth is a startup founder now. And in true startup fashion, he reels off ideas for future business ventures minutes after I arrive.

His ideas are in various stages of development and include a food delivery service, a laser company, and a hardware accelerator program. But they all have one thing in common: Whatever he does next, Roth intends to hire from within the homeless community, which he views as a hotbed of untapped talent.

How did he move out of the shelter and into TechShop?

One wintery morning in 2011, Roth awoke after a rough night in a homeless shelter in San Francisco.

It was Christmas, and Roth was determined to make a change for the sake of his two kids living with their mother in Las Vegas. He had originally relocated to San Francisco to build a better life for his family, but had developed nerve damage and a condition called Meralgia Paresthetica from standing for hours on end at a pizza restaurant. This condition left him with medical bills so steep, he was soon unable to pay rent and return to his job, and he found himself on the street.

Source: Dylan Tweney/VentureBeat

A quilt and printer at San Francisco’s TechShop

When he spotted a business card for TechShop in the shelter’s garbage bin, it seemed like a sign. Intrigued, he fished it out.

TechShop, a membership-based do-it-yourself workshop, provides tools, equipment, and classes for the community. The San Francisco venue is one of the hubs of the burgeoning “maker movement,” the trend to employ DIY techniques to develop unique technology products.

For a glimpse inside TechShop, don’t miss our gallery below. 

“I had these inventions in my head but didn’t know I could make them myself,” Roth explained. So he spent his remaining dollars on a membership and a few introductory courses.

Roth’s goal was to pick up basic skills like woodworking, laser cutting, CNC machining, and welding. His first core discipline was 3D printing, the process of making a solid object from a digital model, as members don’t need to pay for the materials.

“I was studying 10 or 12 hours a day, seven days a week,” he recalled.

This drive was born of necessity, but Roth soon discovered he had a natural aptitude for it. The opportunity to “make something” appealed, given that he had spent much of his career as a C Sharp programmer. C Sharp is considered a bit outdated today; the most popular and employer-friendly languages are Java and Python. ”My skills didn’t port to the cloud,” said Roth.

Fortunately, TechShop was catering to a different kind of entrepreneurship, and fueling a kind of “Renaissance” for hardware startups. So it didn’t take long before TechShop’s most dedicated member began to receive requests for help.

A number of other makers desperately needed an extra pair of hands to get their prototypes developed and products shipped on time. Many of them were freshly-minted after successfully raising funds for their projects on sites like Kickstarter. A dab hand with a laser cutter, Roth could charge upwards of $20 an hour.

Within a few months, Roth was able to move into a house for startup founders. Chris Fornof, a TechShop member and community builder at 3D gesture controller company LeapMotion, paid his rent for several months “purely out of the goodness of his heart,” Roth said.

He sent a good portion of his earnings to his family in Vegas and started making plans to relocate them to the Bay Area.

OpenROV cofounder David Lang at TechShop

“Marc had this tenacity, commitment to learning and re-skilling,” said David Lang, a member of TechShop who started taking classes around the same time.

Similarly to Roth, Lang’s living situation was unstable. For the past year or so, he had resided on a sailboat in Berkeley, Calif. After discovering TechShop, he saw an opportunity to reinvent himself as a maker.

Lang learned how to build robots and work with machines in less than six months. His first project, a mini submarine for amateur ocean exploration called OpenROV, raised $111,000 on Kickstarter. Lang would later hire Roth on a contractual basis.

By this time, makers were starting to get mainstream media attention. Lang recently launched a second Kickstarter campaign to fund a book on his experiences.

A maker, remade

Fast forward a few years to spring 2013. Roth is now an entrepreneur with a funded laser company. He threw himself into design with such gusto that he’s an Autodesk instructor, consults for LeapMotion, and teaches seven classes at TechShop.

Most importantly to him, Roth still regularly interfaces with the local homeless. He’s a living testament that the right program can make all the difference.

His dream is to build his own version of TechShop called “the Learning Shelter” that specifically caters to the homeless. He envisions a venue with shower facilities (a desperate need in the city), accommodation at a nearby church, computers, equipment, 3D printers, and an openness to any and all ideas. He claims to be already in the early stages of discussions with Autodesk about potentially donating computers.

Roth and business partner Matt Stollenwerk unload a laser cutter for new business “SF Laser.”

But the maker movement is no quick-fix solution, in part because existing homeless programs aren’t ready to embrace it. “With few exceptions, I’ve heard nothing but resistance from shelters,” said Roth.

One of the exceptions is Project Homeless Connect, a nonprofit that caters to the roughly 6,500 homeless people in San Francisco, according to a recent count (I use the word “count” in the literal sense; the actual number is thought to be far higher.)

Director Kara Zordel said the main goal is to help the homeless develop the skills they need to take job openings at tech companies. “If they were just given a little training, they could apply,” she said.

Can the tech industry be a true “meritocracy?”

Zordel believes the tech community has a responsibility to its most underserved population. After all, technology is supposed to level the playing field; we often hear the term “meritocracy” bandied about.

However, homeless people have scant access to computers. To make matters worse, it’s exhausting to simply secure housing. If a homeless person isn’t lucky enough to win the lottery for a 90-day bed, they are forced to queue up for a one-day bed. Those with the best shot have stood in line since 2 a.m. or 3 a.m. the previous night. Good luck competing in a meritocracy if you haven’t had a good night’s sleep in a safe place.

Glover, who met Roth through a mutual friend, has not been lucky enough to secure a bed for the night. At this juncture in our conversation, he hands me a resume and shows a video reel for his acting work. He doesn’t ask for anything but a job. “It feels like we’re stuck in this cycle,” he said.

And there’s another challenge — the lack of self-belief after being told “no” for so many years. Roth tells a revealing story about a friend from a shelter who needed to be coaxed just to admit his life’s goal to open a chicken restaurant. “People aren’t comfortable seeing themselves as creative,” he said. “They just don’t see their own potential.”

With the Learning Shelter, Roth’s goal is to shine a light on the true face of homelessness and a community that is plagued with misconceptions. “I worked hard all my life, but the world changed,” said Roth. But he adapted — it just took $49 for a month’s membership, a 3D printer, and an open door policy.

As Roth wrote on his profile in TechShop’s meetup group, “I haven’t had a bad experience with anyone I’ve met here. I’m so at home here.”

• Want to help the homeless? Attend the next meetup for homeless innovation. Zordel tweets one request a day for a homeless adult or child — search and share via the hashtag #EDCDailyNeed. 
• Interested in joining TechShop? Check out our feature here. 
• Eager to learn more about the Maker Movement? The Maker Faire takes place on May 18-19 in San Mateo, California. 

TechShop images via Dylan Tweney; Marc Roth and Scott Glover images via Christina Farr

If you haven’t heard of Tech Cocktail, you probably haven’t partied much with the startup community.

Tech Cocktail‘s goal is to support emerging tech hubs through events and provide relevant news and information for entrepreneurs on its website. And today, the company raised its first $2.5 million funding round from Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh.

As part of the funding, the team opened a new office in Las Vegas, which will serve as its headquarters. On the company blog, CEO Frank Gruber said the goal is to become the “leaders” of the local, burgeoning tech community.

Entrepreneurs are relocating to Vegas in large part due to the efforts of Hsieh’s “Downtown Project.” Hsieh and his team are on a mission to revitalize the downtown economy through a $500 million fund. Investments are already being made in urban planning and development, schools and hospitals, small businesses, and technology startups.

Last week, I travelled to Vegas with a group of entrepreneurs and investors to find out more about the Downtown Project. Most of the activities, including speaker sessions and networking events, were organized by Tech Cocktail.

“We’ve known Tony Hsieh for over five years, dating back to a party that we threw together for CES 2009,” Gruber said on the Tech Cocktail blog. “It’s great to have a strategic partner who really understands entrepreneurship and the importance of celebrating and building community around it.”

It should come as no surprise that the founders would raise a sizable round of funding (especially for a media company) from the downtown project. Gruber said the team will focus on expanding throughout the United States, and building the brand. He claims that 30,000 people attend one of Tech Cocktail’s events last year alone.

Tech Cocktail will also release a “national platform” for entrepreneurs, but hasn’t disclosed much at this point.

Google Glass will likely be immensely useful for doctors, field workers, and other service providers. But for ordinary people, it’s disorienting and nerdy. 

But that hasn’t stopped developers from responding to Google’s request to build applications for Glass. Owners of the device now have a nifty news aggregation app dubbed “Thirst Droplet,” released today by Thirst Labs.

Thirst believes the investment in Glass was worthwhile and will help it reach “Generation C” (the “C” stands for “connected.”) Either way, it reportedly only spent around three days developing features for the app.

Thirst has already unveiled its Android and iPhone apps for personalizing and curating the news. Follow topics on a mobile device and the web, and Glass will send a push notification when it’s trending on social media. Hundreds of thousands of topics — such as “Oprah Winfrey,” “49ers,” or “Google” — are currently available for you to follow.

The Glass app takes the news experience step further, giving you the opportunity to listen to an entire article. You can also flag an article for future reading and email it to yourself straight from Glass. You can also “like” or “dislike” a story.

Thirst has differentiated itself from other news readers with its language processing tools. Rather than asking readers to discover news, the it automatically finds and presents the most relevant content in what Thirst says is an engaging way. The company tracks millions of data sources — blogs, social media, and so on — to determine whether news is trending.

Don’t miss the explanatory video below to see how the app works.

The Thirst news app for iPad

“Under the hood, you don’t read the same feeds as Google Reader. We find the topics relevant to you,” CEO Anuj Verma said in a recent interview with VentureBeat (pictured above), hitting on how Thirst differs from competing news apps like Flipboard and Pulse. “You don’t really have to hunt for the content.”

Similarly to news aggregation app Pulse, which LinkedIn recently acquired, Thirst Labs was formed by college friends. The founders are a pair of University of Berkeley, California grads who share a passion for UI, UX, and developing algorithms.

San Francisco-based Thirst Labs has raised $950,000 in seed funding from BlueRun Ventures, Steve Newcomb, and Jason Krikorian.

Top image // Google Glass

Kabbage announced today that it will provide loans to both online and offline businesses, and will reject or approve a claim in minutes.

The Atlanta Georgia-based company’s bread and butter is to provide cash advances to sellers on online marketplaces like Amazon and Etsy. It is one of a handful of startups in the “alternative finance” space that offers an alternative to the traditional bank loan.

Today, the company is expanding its scope to brick and mortar stores. The expansion was precipitated by an integration with Quickbooks, Intuit’s small business accounting software that is used by millions of small businesses.

The company claims to be the first to leverage Quickbooks data to determine whether to give out a loan.

Kabbage has experienced rapid growth since it launched two years ago. It recently closed a credit facility of $75 million, and projected that it would fund 100,000 businesses by the end of the year.

Kabbage makes its money by charging fees to merchants for the working capital. Fees depend on how long the online merchant keeps the cash, and the customer’s repayment risk. Rates range from two percent to seven percent of the original advance amount.

Chief executive Marc Gorlin said that he’s received a ton of requests for Kabbage to serve offline businesses — “that day has arrived,” he said. “Today’s expansion dramatically accelerates Kabbage’s vision of democratizing access to capital for all small businesses. ”

Cloud startup SugarSync just closed an additional $3 million in funding, according to an SEC filing. 

A spokesperson for the company just confirmed the debt raise and said it would be used to bolster the product development team. The funding was brought in through an existing investor  – likely Draper Fisher Jurvetson’s Andreas Stavropoulous, whose name appears on the Form D.

The company has not raised funding since February 2012, when it pulled in $15 million to grow and define itself in the crowded cloud storage market.

“This small cash infusion was from existing investors who were simply supporting our focus to continue to improve the user experience,” said the company’s CEO Mike Grossman in an email. ”We’re very disciplined related to what we’re delivering and who we are targeting,” he added.

San Mateo, Calif.-based SugarSync helps individuals and small businesses manage and back up files across multiple platforms, including PCs, Macs, and iOS, Android, and BlackBerry devices. Unlike its primary competitor Dropbox, SugarSync has grown organically through word of mouth.

The company would not confirm whether it will use the additional resources for an acquisition, but it’s certainly a possibility. Another competitive Box has made a few small strategic acquisitions of late — most recently, Crocodoc.

This is a guest post by Jiff CEO Derek Newell

Digital health may be garnering all the glory for its promise to transform health care, but take a closer look and you’ll find a promising next wave of health care investments.

With a proliferation of mobile apps and data being generated at a dizzying pace, few investments have yet to fulfill their financial promise. The real money will be made when companies build services around these applications, make the data actionable, and connect all this inbound patient data to the physical health care system.

Expect companies that find new, creative ways of connecting data to patients, determine what to do with the data when it’s generated, and figure out ways to creatively (and profitably) engage the health care system, to attract the attention of VCs and entrepreneurs alike. Here are three areas worth watching.

Smart sensors

What if a device could predict whether you were going to catch a cold, succumb to diabetes or even your risk for getting cancer? Sounds a little far-fetched, but a new generation of sensors holds the promise to do just that.

Companies developing smart sensors that can be placed on the body or in the home that can accurately, non-invasively predict your chances of becoming ill stand to attract investors’ attention. Component and connection costs are dramatically dropping, while at the same time the value of connecting to the Internet has dramatically increased. Just think of Tesla’s ability to collect data from its cars. Look for value in companies that develop sensors that collect, connect and predict high-cost events that can be prevented by timely intervention.

Software systems for data analysis

Data generated from new smart sensors holds little value if it can’t be analyzed and acted upon. New investment opportunities in the companies that develop software systems to analyze data and determine what to do with it will ultimately be very profitable for some investors. Single-use systems, where a single sensor talks to a single server designed to analyze its data (which is the way most are architected today), will be much less valuable than servers that can import and analyze data from dozens, hundreds or even thousands of sensors.

Businesses across the spectrum are developing algorithms to analyze, for example, whether a person’s blood pressure and weight require a fitness program or whether other symptoms merit immediate provider attention. The smarter the software, the better. Just imagine patient alerts being delivered to warn of an increased risk of illness before the illness is even detectable through symptoms. Watch for large companies, such as IBM, to jump into the fray while new companies emerge to help connect all the dots. It’s also worth keeping a close eye on artificial intelligence companies.

New service models for patients

Smart sensors and smart software, however, will only go so far. At some point, we’ll need good old-fashioned people power. A new crop of services companies will arise to give virtual care a healthy dose of checks and balances. Take, for instance, the smart sensor that detects a racing heartbeat or chest pain.

Software algorithms will take in the information, analyze it and determine, for example, that a person needs immediate attention. But what if the racing heartbeat was just a false positive because the person had just climbed stairs? Activating an expensive health care system will be a waste of money, so services companies that provide the human intelligence to validate and verify the information will be required. A second type of services company will also emerge to manage the care.

Everything that can be done digitally and virtually will be done digitally and virtually. This will dramatically improve access to and efficiency of the traditional health care system. Call centers will be staffed not just by the traditional nurse, but also by physicians, pharmacists and other professionals who can provide a higher level of care.

Derek Newell brings more than 20 years of experience growing and leading innovative health care technology and services companies to his role as CEO of Jiff Inc. He is passionate about exploring the intersection of health care and emerging technologies, and believes that health outcomes and wellness improve when mobile and digital health technologies connect consumers with the traditional health ecosystems. 

Prior to joining Jiff, Newell was president and CEO of Robert Bosch Healthcare. While at Bosch, Newell worked to build Bosch into the world’s largest remote patient monitoring company. Previously, he was the CEO of Health Hero Networks, a US-based remote-patient monitoring company, and the chief marketing officer of a leading disease management company. 

Derek is a leading voice in the areas of health care technology and finance. He has co-developed and taught health care finance classes at the Haas School of Business from his alma mater at the University of California, Berkeley, where he holds graduate degrees in business and public health.

Why do students cheat — and how are they getting away with it?

One unintended use for massive open online courses, dubbed “MOOCs,” is to help professors better understand the mechanics of cheating in online learning.

Bernard Bull, an assistant vice president for academics at Concordia University Wisconsin, will ask his class to cheat for the purposes of anthropological research. Students will then be asked to disclose exactly how they cheated.

The assignment is a unit in a new class, “Understanding Cheating in Online Courses,” which is offered through the Canvas MOOC platform run by Instructure, a course-management company.

This research will come in particularly handy for educators and online course providers like Instructure and Coursera. With a handful of Coursera courses recently approved for credit, the fear is that students will simply perform a Google search if they’re stumped. As the New York Times reports, the solution may be a new technology for remote proctoring, where online test takers are tracked via their keystrokes.

In the meantime, Bull hopes to dig into the psychology behind cheating and to take steps to prevent it. He embarked on a study a few years ago and found that half of all cheaters never get caught, prompting further investigation. According to Instructure, he held off on publishing this research until he could get a better handle on what motivates people to cheat.

One interesting example is a girl who claims a former boyfriend sabotaged her online test by logging in under her user name. But it was a lie — she made up the whole story in order to get a second chance at a test. Bull’s class will explore the reasons that this girl felt compelled to cheat, and whether the current education system can be adapted to prevent such behavior.

OwnerListens has raised over $1 million in funding for its suggestion box that lets customers anonymously communicate with store owners.

The business was formed out of a Hummus restaurant in Palo Alto. Owner Oren Dobronsky noticed that patrons would usually request to speak with him to leave positive or negative feedback — but he wasn’t always around to hear it. Dobronsky also came to the conclusion that it’s easier to offer incisive feedback (highly valuable for any business) in an anonymous setting.

He’s got a point — we’ve all probably been irked by an experience at a restaurant or hair salon, but have opted to wait until we’re home to let out our frustration on a site like Yelp.

The Android and iPhone apps were originally developed for patrons of his own restaurant, Oren’s Hummus. But the apps developed a small following among consumers, and 1,200 businesses promptly signed up. TechCrunch reports that Philz Coffee and Whole Foods are OwnerListens’ customers.

Establishments will still receive feedback if they’re not registered with OwnerListens. The team will hunt down the right inbox, and forward along the message. It’s a great customer acquisition tool — once they receive feedback, many business-owners will opt to sign up.

Menlo Ventures, Promus Ventures, Commerce Ventures, Subtraction Capital, Steve Blank, Jeff Epstein, Cary Rosenzweig, and Marc Abramowitz are among the investors that funded the company’s seed round.

photo credit: andreakw via photopin cc

The highlight of my day, nay my week? Watching Richard Branson serve airline passengers dressed in full flight attendant drag.

Branson reportedly lost a bet to a “frenemy” and former employee, AirAsia CEO Tony Fernandes. Two years after the deal was struck at the 2010 Formula One event in Abu Dhabi, Branson finally made good on his word. He served up drinks on a flight from Australia to Malaysia this weekend sporting lipstick, freshly shaved legs, and a fetching red skirt suit.

Branson tipped a full tray of orange juice on Fernandes, who declared that his skills as an attendant were “rubbish.” Branson was immediately fired after the six-hour flight.

The Virgin Group sent us a few additional photos taken on the flight if you’re in need of a good laugh.

On a more serious note, Branson is a prime example of a business leader taking an innovative approach to a more traditional industry.

We recently ran a contributed piece from an entrepreneur who was invited to spend three days with Branson in South Africa. One of the major lessons learned? “Don’t just experience fun and enjoy after 5 p.m.” As Branson makes clear with his publicity stunts, work should not be rigid and uninspiring.

It’s been a few years since VentureBeat’s editors dived into San Francisco Bay to celebrate a traffic milestone. Inspired by Sir Branson, any ideas for our next stunt? 

Images courtesy of the Virgin Group // Video via USAToday

At a recent tech conference, one Silicon Valley investor told me his strategy is to go where most traditional venture capitalists don’t. He plans to spend the majority of the year in Africa.

Why Africa? The continent’s one billion people are increasingly connected — at least 600 million have mobile phones. It is estimated that by 2040, Africa’s working age population will be the largest in the world.

Opportunities are rife, particularly in urban areas, but major hurdles exist for indigenous entrepreneurs. The lack of bandwidth is still an issue, and there is a shortage of both angel investment and venture capital.

Entrepreneurs speak out at DEMO Africa.

At the inaugural DEMO Africa, entrepreneurs spoke about their startup ideas in the e-commerce and mobile space, which aren’t “a dime a dozen” like in Silicon Valley. As one on-stage speaker put it, “innovation is born from necessity.”

The overriding theme of the conference? “Mobile is changing Africa, and Africa is going to change mobile,” an attendee said.

The footage was shot on location at Nairobi, Kenya on Oct. 24-25, 2012, and whittled down for a mini-documentary. If you have a spare 20 minutes, it’s well worth a watch! 

“Going between the two worlds, I can’t help but notice all the contrast between the cynicism about tech in the U.S. and Europe, and the excitement about it in developing countries,” said the documentary’s producer Jon Gosier in an email interview. “There’s so much going on in Africa that no one ever hears about.”

Inside DEMO Africa 2012 from Jon Gos on Vimeo.