SAN FRANCISCO, Calif. — Before health care providers can handle “big data,” they first need to learn how to deal with small data.

That’s the frank assessment of Sean Cassidy, a vice president with Premier Data Alliance, a group purchasing organization that helps coordinate the health care provided by 2,800 hospitals, 56,000 non-surgical healthcare facilities, and 34,000 doctors’ offices.

He focused on the data needs of accountable care organizations, or ACOs, which aim to control costs while improving health  care outcomes by basing reimbursements to providers on the effectiveness of the care they provide. To do so, an ACO incorporates a network of physicians, hospitals, and other providers with a wide range of specialties, to ensure that patients can get the services they need within the network. That’s where technology comes in.

“I need tools to coordinate their care,” Cassidy said, speaking from the perspective of a healthcare provider in the ACO context. He was speaking onstage today at VentureBeat’s HealthBeat conference, a two-day event focused on health IT. (That’s Cassidy, above, on the right, speaking with VentureBeat CEO Matt Marshall.)

“The game is, keep folks in the ambulatory setting, keep them out of the ER setting, and that’s how we’re going to dramatically control costs.”

But to make that work, Cassidy says, ACOs need better data. Right now, much of the data available comes from medical claims, data that is “a mile wide and an inch deep,” Cassidy quipped.

Electronic medical records systems (EMRs) would offer much deeper data on each patient’s condition and needs, enabling much more effective large-scale analysis and coordination — but EMRs are hard to work with. That’s a fact acknowledged by many of the speakers today.

“We have had trouble getting data out of EMRs,” Cassidy said. “We have had trouble with closed systems, and with walls being put up.”

For example, Cassidy said, the database records and reporting provided by Epic, one of the largest EMR providers, lacks the flexibility and the transparency that he needs to make it truly interoperable with other systems. Other EMR systems are similarly limited.

That presents a huge opportunity for startups that can help break down those walls and increase the interchange of data, he said.

“What we’d like to see is standards emerge,” Cassidy concluded. “Then everybody, let’s innovate on top of that platform, and let the best companies win.”

Photo credit: Michael O’Donnell/VentureBeat

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SAN MATEO, Calif. — Biolite founders Alec Drummond and Jonathan Cedar were working at a design firm in New York when they had the idea to combine a thermoelectric generator with a wood-burning stove.

The result: The CampStove, a portable, $130 stove that can boil a liter of water in about 4.5 minutes while recharging your iPhone — just by burning a handful of twigs. What’s more, its internal fan produces a very efficient reaction, so the fire is very hot and nearly smokeless.

Source: Dylan Tweney/VentureBeat

BioLite Campstoves turning sticks into electricity at Maker Faire Bay Area 2013. Photo: Dylan Tweney/VentureBeat

“We started to do the CampStove because it was a really good exercise in understanding how the technology worked,” said Drummond. It also encouraged them to build the device as compactly as possible.

But the company has bigger aims in mind than helping well-heeled backpackers go green. Its big project is the HomeStove, a larger stove meant for use in the developing world, and it is using sales of the CampStove to fuel (ha!) development and testing of the HomeStove.

“The company follows a model that we call ‘parallel innovation,’ where we have one technology that has near-term application in an accessible market recreation and emergency preparedness, and take the revenue to incubate longer-term markets in emerging companies,” said Jonathan Cedar, the company’s CEO.

It’s a model that, Cedar says, gives them the large-scale infrastructure and resources needed to bring their technology into the developing world effectively — something that nonprofits often lack.

Open fires: More lethal than malaria

According to BioLite, about half the human population — 3 billion people — cook their food over open fires, creating 1 billion metric tons of CO2 each year and killing 2 million people annually from smoke inhalation (twice as many as malaria). Of those 3 billion, about 1.3 billion lack access to electricity.

The HomeStove gives these people a way to cook more cleanly and efficiently: It consumes about half as much fuel as an open fire and produces only 5 percent as much smoke. Plus, by producing electricity, it can recharge a cellphone and small LED lights, helping these people get access to the Internet, communicate with others, or help their children stay up a few more hours at night so they can study for school.

Cedar says the company is currently market-testing the HomeStove in India and Ghana to find out what kind of prices and marketing are most effective. The goal is to make the HomeStove cost about the same as a feature phone in the local markets, or about $50; the fact that it can recharge those phones helps win the acceptance of men, even though it is a tool that will mostly be used by women for cooking. NIH and USAID projects are helping with the testing of the HomeStove.

BioLite is venture funded: It took a $1.8 million Series A investment led by Clay Christenson’s Disruptive Innovation Fund in Boston in 2011, with additional investments from angels and from Toniic, a network of “impact investors” in the Bay Area. It is based in Brooklyn, NY, and currently employs about 21 people.

Makers to world-changers

BioLite’s founders have deep roots in the maker community, which is one reason the company was exhibiting at the Maker Faire here.

“I think makers are really kind of our roots. Some of the first prototypes I built in TechShop here in Menlo Park,” Cedar said. He’d moved here temporarily from New York to learn about stove technology, for which U.C. Berkeley is apparently a real hotbed of innovation, and found that TechShop was a good place to work on his own stoves.

“We like to see science and technology applied to real-world problems, and I think that’s a lot of what makers are all about,” said Cedar. “Also, from a customer standpoint, the intersection of technology and outdoor exists pretty well here at Maker Faire.”

Both Drummond and Cedar were industrial designers, creating things for HP, Oxo, and Flip, before striking out on their own.

Cedar was always a tinkerer: “I was the kid who broke everything in my parents’ house,” he told me.

The initial idea for the stove came to them in 2006; by 2009 they were working fulltime on the project, and funding followed in 2011.

The company launched in June 2012 and has been profitable and cash-flow positive since then. Its CampStoves sell in REI and other mainstream outlets for $130 each, and the company has sold “tens of thousands” to date, Cedar said, predicting that they will have sold 100,000 units by the end of 2013.

Top photo: Alec Drummond (left) holds a cutaway model of BioLite’s HomeStove, while Jonathan Cedar holds a flaming CampStove, which is recharging the iPhone in his other hand. Photo credit: Dylan Tweney/VentureBeat.

SAN MATEO, Calif. — 3D printers haven’t quite made the leap to mainstream — they’re still a bit too finicky, unreliable, and expensive for most consumers — but they’re getting close. Next month, you’ll be able to buy a 3D Systems Cube printer at Staples for about $1,300.

We got a look at the 3D-printed future at Maker Faire Bay Area here.

At least a dozen companies are offering consumer- and hobbyist-friendly 3D printers now. They range in price from about $800 to $3,000 or more. Some, like the earliest models, can only make small plastic objects no larger than a few inches on a side. The biggest can (or will soon be able to) print objects up to two feet on a side out of a variety of materials, including ABS plastic, PLA plastic, nylon, ceramics, Play-Doh, cupcake frosting, and even hot liquids. (The days when you can tell your replicator you’d like a cup of “Earl Grey, hot” — well, that’s not quite here yet, but will be soon.)

And if you’re not ready to make the leap to running your own 3D printer, you can work up 3D printing files on your computer (using software like Autodesk’s 123D app, an easy-to-use 3D design studio) and send them off to service providers like Shapeways.

There are so many makers of 3D printers and 3D-printed gadgets that the organizers of Maker Faire gave them an entire section of the main expo hall. The gallery here is far from an exhaustive look at this budding field — but it should give you a sense of how many options there are for 3D printing enthusiasts today.

Top photo: Makerbot Industries has done more than any other company to kick off the home 3D printing market. Its printers are looking more polished and professional than ever: Instead of the plywood look of the early models, this fourth-generation Makerbot has a black powder-coated steel chassis and decorative purple lighting on the inside that give it a futuristic look. The new MakerBot Replicator 2 can print objects in PLA plastic up to 11.2x6x6.1 inches with a resolution of 0.1mm. It costs $2,199.

SAN MATEO, Calif. — The maker movement has helped start many companies. This year, the Maker Faire is giving them a place of their own, with a “Startup Pavilion” that highlights 20 new maker-centric companies.

It’s part of a growing recognition that the do-it-yourself spirit is not just a fun hobby, it’s a rich source of economic potential.

“There is a kind of maturation happening to the maker movement,” said Maker Faire organizer Dale Dougherty, when I spoke to him last week. It’s still dominated by hobbyists, but now there are an increasing number of startups, entrepreneurs, small companies, and even big corporations looking to get involved with the DIY spirit.

Related: Google embraced the DIY spirit last week with more than 400 Arduino-based sensors at its Google I/O conference. Find out how Google made the sensors and integrated all the data.

“At the very first Maker Faire, they really were all amateurs,” Dougherty said, of the exhibitors. After a few years, the Faire started hosting vendors — primarily makers of parts and components, like Arduino boards, used by makers. Now, the Faire is highlighting maker-inspired startups. Here’s a selection of the 20-odd startups at Maker Faire:

• SeeedStudio, an “open hardware company develops and brings to market innovative and cost-effective prototyping solutions for hobbyists and aspiring inventors.”
• RedBearLab, which makes a wearable BlueTooth 4.0 board you can use to interface with an iPhone or Android device.
• Formlabs, makers of a high-resolution 3D printer aimed at engineers and design professionals.
• Deezmaker, another 3D printer vendor, this one aimed at making an affordable printer called the Bukobot.
• BioLite, a company that aims to reduce third-world pollution with a small wood-fueled stove that converts heat from the fire into usable electricity, improving combustion while allowing users to charge small devices.
• BlinkM, makers of multicolored, programmable LED lights for use in your electronics projects.
• Smitten, a maker of handmade “artisan truffles.”

Big companies are getting into the act, too. Autodesk, for instance, has a fruitful partnership with 3D printing pioneer Makerbot. Autodesk makes an easy-to-use set of 3D design tools called 1-2-3D, and the 3D files created by those web-based tools can easily be printed on a Makerbot. This year, Autodesk’s large booth at Maker Faire includes a 3D scanning station, where you can get your head scanned and turned into a 3D digital file suitable for printing.

General Electric is also a sponsor of Maker Faire, and has been working with O’Reilly Media (the parent company of the Faire) on the Faire as well as the two-day Hardware Innovation Workshop that preceded it earlier this week.

“It’s a long, slow process of a company trying to understand the maker movement and engage with it,” Dougherty said. GE wants to encourage its own engineers to think more entrepreneurially, but it also sees the value of DIY, maker-type activities for encouraging and education the next generation of engineers.

Even Motorola, the phone manufacturer now owned by Google, is starting to embrace the maker spirit, Dougherty said, by making phones that are easier than most phones to hack, modify, extend, and repair.

“What would the maker community want to do with a cellphone as a platform, not just a fixed device?” he said.

Photo: Makerbot CEO Bre Pettis holds a bunch of 3D-printed heads at a recent New York event. Photo credit: VentureBeat/Ricardo Bilton

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SAN MATEO, Calif. — Sean Riley, the host of National Geographic show “World’s Toughest Fixes,” has a message for kids today: Learn a trade.

Speaking with BoingBoing editor Xeni Jardin at Maker Faire yesterday, Riley pointed out that it takes four to six years to learn a trade, such as plumbing — about the same amount of time it would take you to get through college.

Yet plumbers, especially in big urban areas, will make far more money than the average college graduate. In other words, if you’re smart and ambitious, and you can’t get a Thiel Fellowship to help kickstart your startup idea, you might consider another alternate path: Getting your hands dirty.

In Riley’s case, his trade — rigging — led him to work with a wide range of interesting projects. He mentioned that he recently helped hang the 50,000-pound lighting equipment at the upcoming Rolling Stones show in Oakland, Calif., for instance. But it also led him to become the star of one of television’s more amazing reality shows. In each show, he travels to a different part of the world to watch (and sometimes help) as engineers, crane operators, riggers, and deep-sea divers help fix a wide range of massive problems, from replacing the engine on an cruise ship to swapping out the gate in a big dam lock.

Even if you’re not interested in the trades, Riley thinks more people should know about the massive amount of infrastructure that it takes to make the modern world possible. There’s a lot of redundancy built into systems like the power grid, he says — but that redundancy is diminishing, since we’ve spent less and less on upgrading and maintaining this infrastructure over the past 40 years.

Repairability is also a disappearing quality in many gadgets we own today. “If you can’t open it up and fix it, you don’t own it,” was one of the themes Jardin and Riley discussed onstage.

Learn how to fix things, and you’ll be more in control of the world around you. And, you will be in a better position to build the next great thing.

Riley revealed that, after four seasons with the show, he would not be continuing for a fifth. “I traveled 350 days out of the year,” he said, and said that while it was an amazing experience, it was exhausting, and took a personal toll. Also, he added, “a show like this is incredibly expensive to produce.”

Photo: Sean Riley with a young fan. Photo credit: Dylan Tweney/VentureBeat

AllThingsD reported this morning that Yahoo’s board approved a $1.1 billion all-cash acquisition of microblogging site Tumblr.

ATD had earlier stated that the board would be meeting on Sunday to consider the acquisition. Yahoo plans to announce the acquisition on Monday, according to “numerous sources” contacted by ATD.

“We don’t comment on rumors or speculation,” a Yahoo spokesperson told VentureBeat this morning.

Yahoo has scheduled a mysterious event for Monday morning in New York, to announce “something special.” If that “something” is the Tumblr acquisition, it would be quite surprising, since the event was announced before the board reportedly confirmed the acquisition. But it would also be a convenient venue to announce a major deal like this.

If it pans out, this would be Yahoo’s largest and perhaps riskiest acquisition since former Google executive Marissa Mayer assumed the chief executive job. By one metric, Tumblr is massive: It hosts 51 billion blog posts, a number that grows by 74 million new posts each day. It draws 216 million visitors globally each month, who collectively generate 16 billion monthly pageviews. That kind of monster traffic puts Tumblr in the ninth position among the most-popular U.S. websites.

However, it generated just $13 million in revenues last year, its first year of revenues, as it slowly began integrating ads into its content stream. The company anticipated making $100 million in revenues this year.

As with Facebook’s acquisition of revenue-less Instagram, the acquisition is less about bringing in a new source of revenue and more about capturing growth and traffic. Yahoo’s traffic, while enormous, has stagnated. It desperately needs a faster-growing property, along with a younger, hipper demographic, and Tumblr would seem to provide both.

That is, if Yahoo doesn’t kill it off or stifle its growth through negligence and mismanagement, as it has done with so many previous acquisitions, including Flickr, Delicious, Geocities, Upcoming, and more.

Top photo: Tumblr founder David Karp is about to be a very rich man. Source: Sean Ludwig/VentureBeat.

All the usual writing crew have abandoned me (what, it’s the weekend?).

So instead of yelling at the staff and helping with the odd headline, I’ve actually got to do something useful around here. In other words, I’m going to write a few posts.

But it’s also the weekend that Maker Faire happens in San Mateo, where I live.

Now, I’m not much of a maker, but I do like to get my hands dirty. I’ve got a bunch of half-finished projects all over my house, including two half-finished cigar box guitars, an unfinished Drawdio kit, and an old Nintendo DS that I disassembled in an effort to replace its broken case and could never get to work right again.

You might say I’m more of a breaker than a maker. But I love going to Maker Faire to see what other, more talented makers have come up with.

So I’m going to make lemonade out of this pile of lemons known as the “weekend shift.” We’re going to make VentureBeat into a temporary makers-only zone just for today.

Don’t worry, you’ll feel right at home here. Along with SaaS startups, iPhone apps, and photo-sharing sites, one thing that the technology world is discovering is that making hardware is a pretty good business after all.

It’s easier than ever to make things. There’s a ton of information  online about how to make everything from sauerkraut to sensors. Hundreds of hackerspaces, as well as for-profit workshops like TechShop, make tools and knowhow available to anyone who wants to learn. And once you have a solid idea, electronics manufacturers (in China or even in Oregon) make it easier than ever to go into mass production.

Somewhere between the self-driving couches, the flaming sculptures, and the Arduino-powered blinky light projects, I think we’ll catch a glimpse of the future of tech.

Stay tuned. And if you don’t like maker day on VentureBeat, please send me smoke signal or drum signal stating, “I don’t like learning about people who make things, so I have disassembled my laptop, smartphone, and tablet and am living on a diet of nuts and berries.”

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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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

This column originally appeared on LinkedIn. 

Google Glass is one of the most polarizing user-interface inventions to come along in decades.

We’ll have a chance to see just how polarizing this week when thousands of developers crowd into the Moscone Center in San Francisco for Google I/O, the tech giant’s sixth annual developer conference. Since Glass just started shipping to its earliest adopters, Google I/O will probably have the highest concentration of Google Glass wearers anywhere to date. That means we’ll have plenty of opportunity to watch people struggle with its interface — and to watch bystanders’ reactions. Expect lots of photos of Glass-wearing nerds to pop up in your usual media streams.

On the one hand, Google Glass users look like the Borg, creeping us out as they stare into a digital middle distance that no one else can see. It also raises troubling privacy implications, since it can be used to take photos and video almost surreptitiously.

On the other hand, the device is undoubtedly a harbinger of technologies to come that are even more integrated into our bodies.

The question now is: How do we make the most of this invention without making ourselves look like complete dorks?

Some take a hard-line approach. Bars and restaurants have banned the device. Casinos have said Google Glass is not welcome (due to its potential to help gamblers count cards, no doubt). Other establishments will follow.

Ryan Singel has suggested that lasers could seek out and blind Google Glass cameras using the same technologies currently being investigated for mosquito eradication. (Seriously!)

And many of us will content ourselves with simply making fun of people wearing Google Glass, just as we mock people for wearing Bluetooth headsets.

But let’s not let the dork factor blind us to the real-world possibilities. Google Glass, or something very like it, will have a revolutionary effect in many areas of life.

Among the most promising uses are those that fit into work environments where the addition of data can provide real, meaningful benefits.

Google Glass makes a lot of sense in health care, for instance. Doctors and nurses could use Google Glass to look up prescription details, access patient health records, see reminders about their next appointments, and even get better at recognizing patients’ faces.

What’s more, Glass would have a real benefit in the sanitary environment of a hospital because it could enable health care providers to do all this without having to touch a keyboard or a screen with their hands (or even, god forbid, paper).

For paraplegics and quadriplegics, Glass could be a stunningly useful way to get information and interact with it, as investor John Doerr noted last month when unveiling Kleiner Perkins’ Google Glass-focused investment fund. Its combination of a heads-up display and voice-control mean that it’s potentially ideal for people unable to use hands to control their computing devices. While it might seem creepy to take a picture just by winking, that is exactly the control gesture needed by people who don’t have hands.

For journalists, Google Glass could be an amazing note-taking and content-generating device that lets them shoot videos and photos as they cover a scene in real time. I’m a fan of the Livescribe pen, which lets me capture audio at the same time I’m jotting notes. Whenever I use it to interview someone, I always ask permission to record the audio. The same technique could work with Glass, and I’m looking forward to trying it. Right now, Glass only records 10-second video snippets and only has about 12GB of usable storage, but it shouldn’t be too hard to make an app that records longer audio or compressed video clips, as Jason Perlow noted on ZDNet.

For game designers, Glass presents tempting opportunities to overlay the real world with imaginary video game elements, as Google itself is already doing via Niantic Labs, its experimental augmented-reality project.

Even for tourists, Glass might have some intriguing possibilities: Imagine walking through a neighborhood in Paris, using an app like Findery to view geotagged notes about historical events that happened in a place, interesting architectural details you might have missed, or recommendations for good places to get a pastry and a café au lait.

Just keep in mind that these are special-purpose uses. And just because Glass is useful doesn’t mean I have to enjoy talking with you while you’re wearing it.

Eventually, our attitudes toward Glass and other always-on devices may shift. It’s not uncommon now to see a table full of people at a restaurant, all of whom are busy tapping away at their phones at the same time as they talk to each other. While many people might find that rude, it’s clearly acceptable to a growing circle, whereas five years ago it would have been unheard of.

Similarly, Google Glass might become more socially acceptable as it becomes more ubiquitous.

But that day isn’t here yet. So wear Google Glass all you want at work, or while you’re playing the goggle-eyed tourist or the obnoxious journalist. But please remove the damned thing when you’re talking to me.

Photo: Jolie O’Dell, VentureBeat

David Berlind is an expert on enterprise mobility startups and the MC at Under the Radar 2013, May 23, 2013 in San Francisco. He’s also the chief content officer and editor in chief at UBM Tech Media. VentureBeat readers are invited to attend Under the Radar at a discounted price by using code “VentureBeatVIP”. Register today!

The bring your own device (BYOD) trend has kicked into high gear. Enterprises are moving from a primarily homogeneous BlackBerry-only environment (yes, there were exceptions) to more of a heterogeneous anything-goes situation, and the need to levy BlackBerry-grade security (with all of its various options and shades of grey) onto non-BlackBerry environments is off and running.

Buried in those shades of grey are the myriad opportunities that have given rise to innovation and a great many startups.  For example, it’s not just about the ability to remotely wipe out the memory of a device that’s been lost; one that potentially houses sensitive organizational data. Now, it’s very much about partitioning the that sensitive organizational data from the user’s personal information like photos and music in a way that the former can be wiped out without disrupting the latter.

It’s also about extending to any device the functionality of centrally administered access policies that are enforced by solutions like Microsoft’s Active Directory.  For example, if Joe in the Sales department requires secure access to the latest price sheets that are kept on a Sharepoint server, how does the network know that Joe’s Galaxy S3 is really his S3? What makes us so sure that when the S3 is being used, that it’s Joe who is using it? How is the data encrypted and decrypted during the download process (protecting the data as it’s potentially transmitted over risky WiFi networks)? What prevents Joe from sending (leaking) that price sheet via the Gmail account that’s also connected to his S3?

These and many other security-related questions are the ones being answered by the startups whose solutions will be on stage at the upcoming Under The Radar as well as many UTR alumni.

Below is a partial list of this year’s presenting companies, along with other players in the space. Each has their own unique spin on how to minimize an organization’s risk now that the BYOD trend cannot be stopped.

Appthority

@GetAppthority

SECTOR: Mobile Enterprise

HEADQUARTERS: San Francisco, CA

FOUNDED: June 2011

TEAM: Anthony Bettini, Co-Founder & CEO; Domingo Guerra, Co-Founder & President

FUNDING: Series A – $6.25M; Venrock, US Venture Partners, Gunderson Dettmer

COMPETITORS: Legacy endpoint security companies that are now trying learn mobile

PARTNERS: Appcelerator, Apperian, AppFortify, Arxan, BoxTone, DreamLabs, The Efiia Group, Fixmo, Happtique, IronKey, Joyent, Kaprika Security, LANDesk, Marble Security, Metaforic, Mocana, mSignia, Privacy Choice, Private Core, Quixey

SECRET SAUCE: Appthority helps the enterprise identify and manage the risks hidden in mobile apps. The cloud-based Appthority Platform automatically identifies and grades risky behavior in mobile apps including known and unknown malware, new malware used in targeted attacks, corporate data exfiltration, and intellectual property exposure.

SEEN AND HEARD:SC Magazine, Ars Technica, TMCnet

Armor5

@armor5Inc

SECTOR: Mobile Enterprise

HEADQUARTERS: Santa Clara, CA

FOUNDED: 2012

TEAM: Naveen Ramaiah, Co-Founder; Praveen Banoth, Co-Founder; Suresh Balasubramanian, CEO

FUNDING: Seed – $2M; Trinity Ventures, Nexus Venture Partners, Citrix Startup Accelerator

SECRET SAUCE: Armor5 is a cloud service provider that’s solving the problem of secure mobile access to enterprise data and applications in a new way. The company serves enterprises, cloud solution providers and any organization struggling to secure network access for mobile users. Armor5 offers the only zero-touch, 100% cloud service that accesses a client’s network, virtualizes enterprise data and applications, and provisions secure and compliant access for every end user using any mobile device.

SEEN AND HEARD:CITEworld, Datamation, Silicon Valley Business Journal, NetworkWorld, VentureBeat

FeedHenry

@feedhenry

SECTOR: Mobile Enterprise

HEADQUARTERS: Burlington, MA

FOUNDED: May 2010

TEAM: Cathal McGloin, CEO

FUNDING: Series A – $9M; Intel Capital, Kernel Capital Partners, VMware, Enterprise Ireland, ACT Venture Capital

COMPETITORS: Appcelerator, Rhomobile, Stackmob, Antennae Software

PARTNERS: Telefonica O2, Telefonica Digital, VMware, ActiveState, Symphony Teleca, HP Cloud Services, Bearing Point, AMTSybex, EMC

CUSTOMERS: PWC, Aer Lingus, My Healthy World, Courtagen, Diageo, RSA, DAA, Network Rail, Glanbia, Health Executive, Enterprise PLC, Health New England, VMWare, Bunzl

SECRET SAUCE: FeedHenry offers a platform-as-a-service for business and enterprise to build cross-platform apps that integrate securely with their business through the cloud. This mobile PaaS allows apps to be developed in HTML5, JavaScript, and CSS and deployed to multiple mobile devices from a single code base.

SEEN AND HEARD: VentureBeat, AllThingsD

MobileSpaces

@mobilespaces

SECTOR: Mobile Enterprise

HEADQUARTERS: Washington, D.C.

FOUNDED: 2011

TEAM: David Goldschlag, Founder, CEO, Yoav Weiss, Founder and CTO

FUNDING: Series A – $3M; Accel Partners

COMPETITORS: Good Technology, Enterproid, Mocana

SECRET SAUCE: MobileSpaces helps enterprises mobilize their applications, govern their data, and respect the privacy of their employees. MobileSpaces offers a BYOD Policy Management solutions that protects enterprise apps and data against loss and leakage. MobileSpaces’ App Virtualization technology secures any app on any device, letting the enterprise choose the apps it needs while letting employees chose the devices they want. MobileSpaces is the only solution which allows the enterprise to secure built-in Apps, Public App Stores apps, and Enterprise App Store apps, with no friction.

SEEN AND HEARD: TechCrunch

MobileSpan

@mobilespan

SECTOR: Mobile Enterprise

HEADQUARTERS: Santa Clara, CA

FOUNDED: 2011

TEAM: Nils Bunger, CEO and Co-Founder

FUNDING: Venture – $2.3M

COMPETITORS: Citrix, Watchdox, IonGrid

SECRET SAUCE: MobileSpan lets a company’s workforce be productive from their personal tablets and phones. With MobileSpan, workers can access a company’s internal web applications and documents seamlessly from a MobileSpan app on mobile devices, without VPNs and without creating data security problems. MobileSpan interoperates with all the IT systems that came before it and it can work with existing SharePoint or CMS, file shares, web applications, management tools.   MobileSpan deploys in 60 seconds as a single Windows application inside the corporate network.  MobileSpan requires no changes to corporate DMZs or firewalls, providing an easy way to add tablets and phones to your existing business practices.

SEEN AND HEARD: Silicon Valley Business Journal, Vator.tv, PEhub, CMSwire, TMCnet

Enterproid

@divide

SECTOR: Mobile Enterprise

HEADQUARTERS: New York, NY

MANAGEMENT: Andrew Toy, CEO & Co-Founder

FUNDING: Total – $13M. Genacast Ventures, NYC Seed, High Peaks Venture Partners, BOLDstart Ventures, Google Ventures, Qualcomm Ventures, Comcast Ventures

COMPETITORS: MobileSpaces

SECRET SAUCE: Enterproid helps organizations and individuals get the most out of mobile technology and corporate BYOD policies by providing a dual-persona user experience that is secured and cloud-managed by IT. Enterproid’s flagship Divide™ platform combines cloud-based management with advanced on-device technology that ensures enterprise security and control without compromising personal freedom and privacy.

SEEN AND HEARD: VentureBeat, NetworkWorld

V-Key

SECTOR:  Mobile Security

HEADQUARTERS:  Redwood City, CA

FOUNDED: 2012

TEAM: Benjamin Mah, Co-founder and CEO; Joseph Gan, Co-founder and CTO

FUNDING: Series A – $4M; IPV Capital

SECRET SAUCE: V-Key’s V-Guard suite of technology is a revolutionary next generation comprehensive mobile apps security solution protecting the mobile application sphere from threats of known and unknown application-level attacks. Equipped with mobile threat intelligence analytics, V-Guard provides a comprehensive real-time threat dashboard and reporting ensuring mobile app threat awareness and compliance reporting.

SEEN AND HEARD: The Next Web

Bonus companies

Capriza

Domo

Roambi

Skygiraffe

Mocana

Top image courtesy of igor1308, Shutterstock

This post originally appeared on the blog of startup guru Steve Blank.

I grew up in New York City and for a few years heaven on earth for me was going to Boy Scout camp in the summer near the Delaware River.  The camp had all the summer adventures a city kid could imagine: hiking, fishing, canoeing, etc. But for me the best part was the rifle range.  For a 12-year old kid from the city shooting target practice and skeet with a .22 rifle meant being entrusted by adults with something you knew was dangerous – because they were beating gun safety into our brains every step of the way.

From the minute we walked onto the shooting range to even before we got to touch a gun, we learned basic rules of handling weapons I still haven’t forgotten. You screwed up and you got yelled at and if you did it again you got escorted out of the rifle range.

While target practice and skeet shooting were fun, safety was serious.

Over the years I would learn how to shoot an M-16 in basic training in the military, go through a basic combat course to go to Southeast Asia (when we acted like this was a lark, our instructor stopped our drill and said, “For your sake I hope the guys shooting at you were screwing around in their combat course.”  It got our attention.)

When I bought the ranch, herds of wild boar still roamed the fields. While we were putting in the miles of fencing to keep them out, I bought much heavier weapons to deal with a charging 400-pound boar and hired an instructor to teach me how to safely use them.  Each time, gun safety was an integral part of training with new weapons.  For me, guns and gun safety became one and the same.

Hacking and Cyber Security

For consumers, online surfing, shopping, banking, and entertaining ourselves have become an integral part of our lives. And with that has come identify theft, hacking, phishing, online scams, bullying, and predators online. As well as a loss of privacy.

But for businesses, the threats are even more real. Go ask RSA, Northrop, Lockheed, Google, Amazon and almost every other company with an online presence. Intellectual property stolen, customer data hacked, funds illegally transferred, goods stolen, can damage a company and put them out of business.

I think we’re missing something.

In the last 20 years 3 billion people have gained access to the web. Yet for most of them safety online remains a problem for other people. It pretty clear that for a company going online today is equivalent to playing with a loaded gun. The analogy of comparing the net with guns might seem stretched, but I think it’s an apt one. Guns have been around for hundreds of years, to provide food as well as wage war, but it wasn’t until the 20^th century that gun safety rules were codified and taught.

I think we need the equivalent of gun safety training for online access.

We now know the basic tools online hackers use. We know enough to harden sites to stop the simple hacks and to educate employees about basic social engineering and phishing attempts. It’s time to teach Cyber Security as integral part of the high school and/or college curriculum – not as an elective. Companies need to make Cyber Security education an integral part of their on-boarding process.

The Air Force Academy basic Cyber Security course is a good place to start (Stanford and other schools have similar syllabi.) The class consists of basic networking and administration, network mapping, remote exploits, denial of service, web vulnerabilities, social engineering, password vulnerabilities, wireless network exploitation, persistence, digital media analysis, and cyber mission operations.

Lessons Learned

• The web is not a benign environment
• Companies, high schools and colleges ought to make a basic Cyber Security course a requirement of getting online access.

Steve Blank is a retired serial entrepreneur now teaching entrepreneurship at UC Berkeley, Stanford, and Columbia.

Photo credit: JSmith Photo via photopin cc

If you’re one of the 6,000 developers attending Google I/O this week, you should know that sensors will be tracking your every step.

Not your individual steps, of course. That would just be spooky. But there will be sensors distributed throughout the conference (May 15-17) tracking anonymous crowd data such as noise level fluctuations, footsteps, temperature, humidity, air quality, and more. In all, Google will be collecting more than 4,000 continuous data streams, according to a post on Google’s Developer blog.

The data, along with the devices and code used for the project, will be made available for public consumption via an open source license after the conference.

During the event, several screens around the conference will display real-time visualizations of the data, showing things like how the crowd is flowing from place to place, which are the quietest places for a nap, and which developer Sandbox sessions are the busiest. I’m hoping the data will also tell us which sessions have the best and worst air quality.

Google’s cloud team is teaming up with O’Reilly’s Data Sensing Lab to deploy hundreds of Arduino-powered environmental sensors to collect the data. These “motes” will be connected to one another via a ZigBee-based mesh network and managed by Etherios’s Device Cloud. Google’s Cloud Platform will collect and manage the data, while Google BigQuery will help analyze the data.

The O’Reilly connection is a timely one, as O’Reilly also puts on the Maker Faire, coming up this weekend, May 18-19. So if you’re a hardware-hacking, Android- and Arduino-loving maker type, you can take all the coding skills you learn at Google I/O and show them off at the Maker Faire just a couple days later.

Photo credit: Google

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The STEAM Carnival is your typical geeked-out carny attraction, with fire, lasers, robots, and LED lights. Just another night at Burning Man or the Maker Faire, right?

But this carnival has a mission: To get kids excited about science, technology, engineering, and mathematics — the STEM disciplines that many educators feel are especially critical — as well as art.

Better yet, it may be coming to a school near you.

STEAM Carnival is the brainchild of two Los Angeles-based engineers and entertainers, Brent Bushnell and Eric Gradman, who do business as Two Bit Circus. The pair were involved with Syyn Labs, a collective that produced an enormous, complicated, amazingly fun Rube Goldberg contraption for an OK Go video a couple of years ago. Together, they’ve been spending several years putting on shows with their inventions, which combine LEDs and Arduino chips into interactive entertainment and education experiences. Now they’re about halfway towards a $100,000 fundraising goal on Kickstarter, and with 20 days to go, I’m pretty confident they’ll hit that target.

By dropping an A for “art” into STEM, you get STEAM, which is not only a cooler word, but also a more inclusive, all-embracing concept. The STEAM notion comes from John Maeda, the president of the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD). Once they heard about it, Bushnell and Gradman latched right on.

“As someone with a strong engineering background, I was starting to burn out on engineering, until I discovered I could also make art with it,” said Gradman, during a recent phone interview. ”Discovering that I could use science, tech, engineering, and math to make art transformed my life.”

What’s more, art is suffering from many of the same problems as STEM education is: Lack of funding and the absence of strong champions in many school districts. As a result, it’s hard to get kids excited about it.

The STEAM Carnival hopes to tackle that with a clever, interactive approach to the old-fashioned carnival. A few months before the carnival arrives in town, they’ll send project kits to participating schools. Kits might include parts for children to make musical robots, or perhaps battlebots. Students will spend the next few months building things based on the kits.

Meanwhile, Gradman and Bushnell will be putting the finishing touches on an array of modernized carnival attractions, from ring-the-bottle games with fire effects to a Tesla-coil-enhanced strength test, where instead of a puck ringing a bell after you slam down a sledgehammer, you get to see a blue spark rising up. They’ll load the carnival onto a boxcar and put it on the rails.

Once it arrives in town, the STEAM Carnival will include games and attractions you can play, but it will also include shows that incorporate the kids’ projects.

“You put a bunch of musical robots on stage, and that’s a concert. You put a bunch of combat robots on stage, and it’s a sporting event,” Bushnell told me. (Side note: Bushnell’s father is Nolan Bushnell, the founder of Atari and Chuck E. Cheese’s, who knows a things or two about musical robots. The elder Bushnell is also backing the project.)

With the $100,000 funding, the duo will be able to put on a preview show, ship out kits to selected schools in L.A. and San Francisco this coming Fall, then put on the full carnival in the Spring of 2014, first in L.A., then in San Francisco.

See their Kickstarter video below.

Top photo: A child playing with an interactive display by Two Bit Circus. Source: Two Bit Circus.

Debbie Landa is the CEO of Dealmaker Media/Under the Radar.

This is part three of a five-part series sponsored by Under the Radar aimed at helping innovative startups attract the attention of C-level executives. Meet Suaad and hear how he manages technology at Under the Radar 2013, May 22-23, in San Francisco. Register today using special discount code VentureBeatVIP.

Debbie Landa: We live in Silicon Valley, where there must be thousands of companies and VCs pitching you to consider their products and services. How do you manage this?

Suaad Sait: I regularly get pitched by startups and VCs because I live in Austin, Texas, another hub of startup activity, and also because Rackspace is known for mentoring and supporting early stage startups in the Bay Area and in other markets.

These days, there are quite a few social media and Big Data companies pushing to get their products in front of chief marketing officers (CMOs) and marketing departments.

My criteria for taking a pitch are simple: If it’s a referral from one my VC friends or a Rackspace customer, I make time. For example, a friend at Mayfield recommended that I speak with a portfolio company working on a Big Data and predictive analytics product for B2B marketers. The technology was relevant to our immediate needs and it was a referral, so I took the meeting.

Landa: What are your big pain points?

Suaad: My number one pain point right now is mining the massive amount of data we are accumulating each day. As a CMO, I want to use objective metrics to make effective marketing decisions, but the data dimensions are staggering. All of the data — which shows what kind of companies are finding value in Rackspace and how they are buying and consuming our services — creates a very interesting analysis opportunity.

Interpreting this data and forming a thesis about the things we want to find out about our customers and prospects is problem number one.

The second problem is creating the right kind of reach — as in reaching the right people in the right business with our messages. By that I mean the industry constantly goes through cycles of email fatigue. One day, email is a good vehicle for marketing, and then suddenly it’s not a good vehicle for marketing.  Similarly, we go on again, off again with industry trade events. So one dimension I think about a lot is how to identify the most effective, modern method of communicating and how to reach the audience types that we want to talk to on an ongoing basis.

It’s content marketing, social media, PR and direct marketing — a variety of things.  But what is relevant where and to whom? How do we tailor our programs and messages to buyers? This is a problem we are constantly trying to solve.

Landa: What is your vetting process?

Suaad: First, they must pass the “referral test” so that I know they’ve been vetted — there’s nothing more valuable than a trusted referral.

Second: they must be top of mind and address a business problem we’re actively trying to solve. The predictive analytics company I referenced earlier is a good example; we’re a cloud-based company with over 200,000 customers and lots of data, and I’d like to be able to examine that data in a variety of ways to optimize our marketing. So it made sense for me to engage in a dialogue with this particular company.

I always take calls from Rackspace Startup Program customers that are building (or have built) their applications on the Rackspace open cloud when they reach out. It’s our duty as good tech citizens to be part of the vetting and mentoring process for startups that are using our very own infrastructure.

Landa: What is the last company you bought and implemented?

Suaad: The most recent marketing-focused vendor we selected is Spredfast, a social media marketing platform.

We spend a lot of time and effort trying to understand the influence and impact that social media has on Rackspace brand awareness and our sales funnel, and Spredfast provides metrics and measurements around our social media campaigns to help us evaluate and optimize our programs. Getting this visibility has been in the back of my mind for some time.

When we originally spoke with Spredfast, we weren’t ready as a company to digest this technology because we didn’t have resources to devote to social media marketing in a decisive, measurable way.  It’s become higher priority because social media is one of the top ways our prospects and customers interact with us.

Landa: What are your challenges in adopting early stage companies and what’s the sales cycle?

Suaad: This is an interesting question that hits close to home for me. I personally have been an entrepreneur and have launched early stage startups. Rackspace itself was a startup not too long ago, so we absolutely want to give startups an opportunity.

If a startup is part of a well-known accelerator or backed by a well-known VC firm, the probability of us doing business with them is higher because other smart people have screened the team and the technology.  We do worry once in a while about some of these startups not being around for the long haul.  If we’re experimenting with their technology then it’s not a concern.  If we’re going to bring these solutions to market from a technology perspective, we think about that.

There is no typical sales cycle. It depends on several factors: Whether the product addresses an immediate need, how quickly we can test pilot, and if we have resources to adopt the new product.  It can be 30 days, while others have lingered for 6-12 months.

Landa: Advice for startups pitching you?

Suaad: Nail your positioning and messaging.  Make it simple and elegant, but tell me what makes you unique and valuable to me. I talk to a lot of startups and it often takes way too long for them to explain what they really do and the problems they’re solving.

Landa: Worst pitch you received?

Suaad: I’ve seen a lot of bad presentations, so I won’t single anyone out. I would have to say the biggest mistake I see is around lack of focus and specificity.

I’ve worked at enough startups to know that every startup is only going to be able to do one thing really well. However, I get a bunch of pitches that include a couple of paragraphs of messaging, which basically claim that using their technology will accelerate revenue, improve productivity, reduce operating costs, and lead to total world domination. Sometimes the messaging is just so generic that I can’t determine what’s special about the company.

Any pitch that fails to provide a clear one-liner about what the company does, I’d classify as a bad pitch.

Landa: Best pitch?

Suaad: The best pitches are always the ones that are laser-focused on Rackspace and our markets, delivered by someone who is a whole lot smarter than I am about how to address my problems. That’s what makes the information relevant and engaging to the person or company you’re pitching.

The best way to get my attention is to tell me something I don’t know about my own company. Recently, someone asked me whether I knew that there were 6,348 social media conversations about Rackspace across these three channels in the last 30 days. Immediately, I was engaged and giving my full attention to trying to learn more about what these conversations entailed.

Landa: What value do you get out of attending conferences like Under the Radar?

Suaad: Under the Radar is a valuable face-to-face vetting mechanism or filter. It’s a condensed opportunity to see the best of the best emerging products and speak to the entrepreneurs who are so passionate about solving the big problems we struggle with every day. It gives me a good lens to find the most promising solutions to our challenges. Rackspace actually ended up acquiring a company that recently presented at Under the Radar.

I also look at the Under the Rader event as a really good way for me to network with others in the industry and to learn about what’s on top of their minds.  I think of this in multiple dimensions.  One is technology I can use in the business. But from a macro level, I’m also thinking about Rackspace and our go-to-market strategy.  Specifically, what things are my peers seeing? Are there disproportionate growth inflections in markets that they may be observing?  Overall, the event is an opportunity to network with peers that are thinking about markets in maybe the same or in different ways than I am.

Suaad Sait became the first Chief Marketing Officer for Rackspace Hosting in January 2012, having been a consultant to the company since May 2011. In this role, Sait leads the company’s global marketing and branding efforts. Prior to joining Rackspace, Suaad was the founder and Chief Executive Officer of Reachforce, a venture-backed B2B marketing-data services startup, where he continues to serve as chairman of the board.

Top photo credit: Rackspace

We receive a lot of odd, unsolicited mail at the VentureBeat offices. But this piece of art, pictured above in the hands of a VentureBeat reporter, might take the cake.

It’s an image by Wieslaw Walkuski, who apparently is a famous poster designer, illustrator, and painter. According to the blurb on the back of this poster, he won 3rd prize in the III-rd International Theater Poster Competition in Osnabrück, Germany, in 1997. Congratulations, Wieslaw!

However, this is one horrifying image. When I pulled it out of the mailer, my first reaction was “What the hell is this thing?”

Everyone in the office who has seen it has said something like “Eeew,” “That’s disturbing,” or “Get it away from me!”

The poster was sent to me not by Walkuski but by a startup that’s printing posters from a variety of artists.

If the main goal of a public relations campaign is to get the attention of the media, this mailing succeeded. I have now heard of this company!

And now I’m getting rid of this poster as fast as I can. I was thinking of trying to give it to someone who is a fan of eyeless jesters and green tongues. The problem is, if I find that person, I am not sure I want to get close enough to them to hand them this thing.

Instead, I’ve decided to turn this into a caption contest. So have at it, VentureBeat readers!

What caption should we put on this photo?

Put your suggestions in the comments below. We’ll pick a winner at the end of the day Friday — and if you live in the U.S., I’ll send you the poster, if you want it!

Microsoft’s Windows Phone team has something to celebrate today: Another top-tier app has hit their platform.

Hulu has released the Windows Phone 8 version of its app, and it’s a good-looking one.

“Our team has been focused on creating a beautiful and comprehensive Hulu Plus experience that is optimized for Windows Phone 8,” somebody from Hulu’s marketing department wrote on the company’s blog. “The app leverages Windows design principles that lend themselves elegantly to the rich content catalog and features on Hulu Plus.”

And indeed, the provided screenshots make it clear that Hulu on Windows Phone promises to be a clean, easy-to-use experience, with no chrome or skeuomorphic nonsense coming between you and the videos you want to watch.

It integrates nicely with your Hulu account, so, Hulu suggests, if you fell asleep watching Community last night in bed, you can catch up on the bus ride to work.

I’d test it out, but I no longer have a Windows Phone. If you want to try it yourself, the new Windows Phone Hulu app is free, but you will need a Hulu Plus subscription, which costs $8 per month.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Gmail released a minor update for its official Gmail app for iPhones and iPads today.

The biggest change: When you click on a link for a YouTube video, Google map address, or a URL, the app will take you directly to the corresponding Google app: YouTube, Google Maps, or Chrome.

That will keep you in Google’s world for longer, even though you’re not using Google’s phone.

Previously, links in Gmail would open up a page within the Gmail app’s built-in browser.

It’s a clever workaround for a fact that Google must find very awkward: Unlike on Android, Apple won’t let app developers make their apps into the default handlers for certain kinds of actions. URLs always open up the built-in browser, Safari, unless app developers choose to embed a browser within their own app.

But, with the new Gmail, it appears that app developers can do a sort of workaround, by creating a “suite” of linked apps that work together as a self-contained ecosystem.

The new app is free, available now, and requires iOS 5.0 or later. It’s optimized for the iPhone 5 but also works on the iPod Touch and iPad.

Hat tip: CNet

Screenshots: iTunes App Store

The U.S. Senate voted today to pass a bill that would require large e-commerce companies to collect sales taxes from all of their U.S. customers.

The bill, known as the Marketplace Fairness Act of 2013 (S. 743), passed the Senate by a vote of 69 to 27 (with 4 Senators not voting).

It now goes to the House of Representatives, where it may face a tougher battle.

The bill imposes a single federal standard requiring all retailers with more than $1 million in online transactions to collect the sales tax required by whatever locality the buyer happens to be in. States would have to do their part by setting up a single entity for sales tax collection and providing a single sales tax return form for retailers to use in reporting tax payments, greatly simplifying the process.

We’ve been expecting this bill to pass for awhile.

So the bill is mixed news for e-commerce fans. For customers, that means they’ll have to pay sales tax even if they didn’t before. For online retailers, it means they’ll have to collect sales taxes for a variety of jurisdictions — but the process will be simpler.

Right now, there’s a patchwork of different state and local laws governing e-commerce. Technically, e-retailers are supposed to collect sales tax in many locations. In reality, not many do: In California, only 1.4 percent of online transactions included the required sales tax.

Some online retailers, such as eBay, have stridently opposed the bill, while others, such as Amazon, are in favor. (Amazon earlier fought, and lost, a battle to keep from collecting sales tax from its California customers.)

Brick-and-mortar retailers supported the bill, viewing it as a way to cut down on “showrooming,” where customers visit physical showrooms to check out the latest products, then go online to purchase them at lower prices. The U.S. governor’s association also supported the bill.

CNN has a handy overview of the bill’s main points and what it will mean for you.

Here’s the full text of S. 743.

Corrected 6:06pm: The bill goes next to the House, not to the President.

Photo credit: kenteegardin/SeniorLiving.org via photopin cc

Kevin Leu is the founder of GirlsOnAMap.com.

There are lots of dumb things you could do as a startup entrepreneur — like base your company out of Bakersfield, allow yourself to be acquired by Groupon in an all-stock transition, or pitch your growing U.S.-based startup to the Samwer brothers — but nothing could be more dumb than throwing your hard-earned venture capital money at a public relations firm.

Sure, many startup founders out there don’t have the first clue about how to “do” public relations for their startup. They’ll think long and hard before finally plopping down that $12,000 retainer fee — with a required six month commitment — out of their precious Series A investment.

Don’t do it.

As a former journalist who entered PR for a few years (working in-house, managing PR firms, working with them on joint announcements, and consulting with other startups) I can tell you that most PR firms I worked with are full of sh*t. I’m not saying there isn’t some value, but the value is nowhere near enough to justify the cost, given your limited resources.

Here are five reasons PR firms are crap:

1. They don’t know how to tell a story

I’ll be honest, working in “professional” news and reading press releases every morning really honed my sense of what does and does not make a story. I was able to sift through all the hyperbole from clichéd PR specialists and figure out a way to tell an interesting story. (At least I hope it was interesting!)

So when I joined the ranks of PR, I always thought backwards: from the point of view of the specific trade journalist, to writing the press release so that the journalist would see those points.  Unfortunately, most PR people don’t know how to do this.

I’m not saying that someone who studied “Public Relations” in college can’t tell a good story, but they’re immediately limited by the conformity of a non-innovative industry.

2. They rest on their laurels

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve worked with PR firms who tout their “previous clients” — which are indeed impressive — but who are no longer clients. Or the executives who handled those high-profile clients are not the ones who will be working on your account. Sure, those executives will show up for the first few meetings, then they’ll pass off the duties to a couple of underlings: one mid-level manager (6 – 8 years experience), and the other just a few years out of school. It’s also called Bait-and-Switch, which I learned about from Mike Seaver on Growing Pains. It was a good episode.

3. They act like they know everything

Well, it’s probably mandatory they speak like they know everything, which is how they convince many a startup that their services are needed and the commitment will be rewarded. I have found this bravado to be annoying. Maybe it’s because in Silicon Valley we value humility over braggadocio.

I would be much more impressed with a PR person who showed curiosity and asked a lot of questions about my team and product. There is no one who knows the product as well as you, but if a PR person is any good, he/she’s going to try and get as close to your knowledge as possible.

4. They take more credit than they deserve

During every press campaign, PR firms mark down every publication and online newspaper that “picks up” the story, which for them means whomever re-prints the press release word-for-word. This is an automatic thing that is triggered from release sites like PR Newswire, Business Wire, and PR Web, and does not require the services of a PR firm. Startup entrepreneurs are always impressed by these links when they shouldn’t be. How many people go to the Jacksonville Business Journal and read the re-printed press releases from that day?

Entrepreneurs should be putting a premium on original stories that are being written, not these automatic pick-ups.

I’ve also seen PR firms take credit for stories that were facilitated by me or someone else within the startup, even when they had nothing to do with it.

5. They’re a rip-off

At a market-rate of $12,000 a month, which is pretty standard, they supply you with about 20 hours a week, total, of two junior employees, who they pay anywhere from $50,000 to $100,000 a year.

If you’d like me to do the math for you, they’re charging you $144,000 a year for a half-assed job that costs them maybe $50,000. Did you also know that those employees have other clients? So, even if they do get through to a reporter, their interest does not lie squarely with you. It’s kind of like a taxi driver who gets paid commission to bring a customer to several different places. Wouldn’t you like that taxi driver to have the singular purpose of delivering that customer to you?

Now, PR firms aren’t all bad, and PR is important. This brings me to my key recommendation. Hire an in-house PR specialist, manager, director, whatever you want to call this person. You can pay them much less than $144,000 a year, and get triple the value. Heck, if you hire a journalist (they’re losing their jobs everywhere you look), you could probably pay them $80,000 a year, have them working 60 hours a week alongside the rest of your team, doing much more than crafting the occasional press release and conducting a launch. They can work on the site’s overall message, the outbound emails to clients, a company blog (which builds organic SEO), business development, press contacts, and they can write those press releases – full-time!

If you do want to go with someone trained in PR, put out a listing for a PR Manager with several years experience. I’m sure you’ll have more than enough quality candidates coming from within several of the PR firms you’re considering anyway.

Don’t get me wrong; PR firms do some things really well. Their presentations are always beautiful and concise. And, as people, they’re always very presentable and well-spoken. Okay, okay, okay.  They also know how to coordinate a launch. Whether that’s a website or a product launch, they do it very succinctly and efficiently. They are excellent at scheduling briefings with journalists and getting everyone to agree to a certain embargo for maximum coverage. Still, you can accomplish this with someone in-house.

If you’re going to bring on a PR firm — against all my recommendations — make sure you insist on having one of the senior-level executives working directly with you and that all communication does not go through the recently-hired college grad. It also wouldn’t hurt to know that this executive came from the ranks of journalism (I’m biased! Sorry!).

For an additional test, during the pitch and courtship period, send them an email during non-office hours and see how quickly they respond. Too many times I’ve dealt with PR professionals who didn’t respond to emails for hours, sometimes days, which baffles me. If I had been a journalist on a deadline, an hour’s delay would’ve meant me finding another contact and writing the story without your company.

Remember one final thing: PR firms are like cell phone companies. Once they lock you into a contract, you’re not getting out of it unless you pay them a penalty, even if their service is spotty and you’re unsatisfied with their work. That doesn’t seem fair, does it?

[Editor's note: Since publishing this story, we've had a number of people from the PR field contest its conclusions. Be sure to check out the rebuttal story -- "Here we go again: 5 reasons hiring a PR firm is good business" by long-time PR exec Patrick Ward.]

Kevin Leu is a former television reporter and PR specialist who has worked with various venture-backed startups. He recently launched his own startup, GirlsOnAMap.com, which is a combination of Hot or Not and Tripadvisor that relies on user submitted content to provide travel advice for singles. You can follow him @SVBachelor.

Top photo credit: Mark Z. via photopin cc

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July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Luis J. Salazar is the CEO and co-founder of Jobaline.

Any business owner knows how difficult it is to recruit the right help. Finding the right workers is one of the many challenges companies have long-faced, especially when it comes to filling hourly jobs. Companies from Starbucks to the local gas station rely on hourly employees, which represent over 59 percent of the US labor force and more than 74 million workers, reinforcing the notion that hourly workers truly are the backbone of business in America.

While potential solutions to this recruiting problem should exist within our mobile devices, statistics show that businesses are still struggling to catch up with demand, as only 13 percent of corporate websites have truly mobile versions.

The even greater challenge businesses face is that of a pervasive “digital divide” that separates employers from hourly workers. Most of the population of the latter relies on simple cellular phones and flip phones, and does not have access to smartphones or even personal computers to access web-based recruiting tools such as LinkedIn.

So how are employers supposed to reach the talent pool they need the most?

The hourly worker’s dilemma

Most of the inefficiencies that affect small business owners and corporate America, with respect to hiring hourly workers, are a result of the digital divide. Long associated with the gap between those who have Internet access and those who don’t, today the digital divide has expanded to include the lack of availability of mobile-friendly Internet solutions.

We live in a society of mobile phones. Eighty-eight percent of adults in America have a cell phone, while only 57 percent own laptops, according to the Pew Research Center. A recent study by Potentialpark in 2012 found that 26 percent of job seekers use their mobile devices for career-related purposes, and another 59 percent could imagine doing so.

But in the hourly jobs economy, the technological divide between job seekers and the recruiting needs of business owners is quite pronounced. According to Nielsen research in 2012, people making less than $35,000 per year tend to forego purchasing the $250 smartphone and $100/month data plans preferred by mid- and high-wage workers. Because hourly workers use a large portion of their earnings to cover basic needs, they tend to gravitate towards mid- to low-priced feature phones and cheaper plans that allow text messaging, phone calls and some basic apps.

In addition, 57 percent of hourly workers prefer phone calls to other forms of communication, and text messaging is another popular option — both for smart and not-so-smart phones. The Pew Research Center in 2011 noted that text messaging and phone calls are the preferred means of communication among all demographic groups. Americans send and receive an average of 40 text messages per day, and this number is two to three times higher among the hourly workers demographic.

A simple step to maximize mobility

A huge segment of the workforce isn’t leaving their “basic phones” any time soon. Companies that want to recruit these people will need to reach out not only through web sites, but through mobile means, such as text messaging.

Right now, there are a few steps in the right direction. The recent launch of LinkedIn Mobile signals a response to market demand for mobile solutions, but it does not address the issue of the digital divide. Facebook Zero is also promising — as it aims to give people with feature phones access to the social network — it does not present a holistic solution for matching employers and hourly workers. Classified ads on Craigslist are fairly mobile-friendly, but they’re just simple information-sharing units, without much engagement.

My company, Jobaline, aims to enable engagement with hourly workers — via text message on smartphones and simple feature phones — and to start where Craigslist ends. By supporting employers in connecting with and pre-screening hourly workers via text messaging, we hope to aid in removing the implicit discrimination of Web-based or smartphone-only tools, which only reach people with a certain level of access to technology.

The relatively small step of widening mobile access will help enable workers to secure jobs they wouldn’t otherwise know exist. The same kind of text- and voice-enabled technology that Jobaline has designed can also be applied to other vital elements of work, such as learning about the availability of and applying for healthcare insurance (but that’s another hot-button issue for another post!).

Companies and hourly workers must be on the same page — technologically speaking —  using solutions that enable engagement, much the same way that businesses are currently doing with professionals, for whom most mobile technology is currently geared.

Mobile access for job growth

Rather than focusing solely on improving online access, it is time to build interactive mobile recruiting technologies that reach people on all kinds of devices, even feature phones.

By developing technologies and policies that enable wider — even simpler — mobile access to recruiting capabilities that both employers and hourly workers need to survive, we can help bridge this gap, fill this digital divide, and truly put America back to work.

Luis J. Salazar is the founder and CEO of Jobaline, a simple, social and mobile jobs platform that matches employers with hourly workers. A longtime tech executive in digital media, mobile technologies, and software as a service, Salazar has held leadership positions at Yahoo!, Microsoft, WPP research (GMI), Xerox, and others. Originally from Venezuela, he is working to make a true social impact through developing innovative technology on the United States.

Top image credit: Thomas Kohler/Flickr

This is part two of a five part series sponsored by Under the Radar aimed at helping innovative startups attract the attention of C-level executives. (Previously: Biren Gandhi of Cisco.) Meet Peter and hear how he manages technology at Under the Radar 2013, May 22-23, in San Francisco. Register today: www.utrconf.com.

Debbie Landa is the CEO of Under the Radar.

Debbie Landa: How many times a week do you get pitched by startups to try or buy their product?

Peter Yared: Too many to count. The best way to approach us is through an introduction from someone we know and then to email us directly with your value proposition, screenshots, and a working product link.

Landa: What does every startup want?

Yared: Just 30 to 60 minutes. But the problem is that I don’t have time. Make an effort to clearly communicate what your product does over email and on your website so that we can quickly assess whether or not it is a fit.  If it’s a fit, then we’ll request a face-to-face meeting.

Landa: So what’s your vetting process for a new product?

Yared: We will have one of our business units test out the product. If they like it, chances are that our other business units will like it too.

Landa: What is the last company whose product you bought and implemented?

Yared: Livefyre commenting. We were one of their first customers and currently run it almost network-wide. It’s fantastic and they have been great to work with as they grow.

Landa: What are your big pain points in terms of building out your technology stack?

Yared: Mobile infrastructure, private cloud, and ETL backlog.

Landa: What is typical sales cycle from pitch to adoption of a new product?

Yared: Deals take about three to six months to go from initial meeting to trial to legal to deployment.

Landa: What are your challenges in adopting the products of early stage companies?

Yared: Generally speaking, the products and organizations are not mature enough to deal with a company of our scale.

Landa: What’s your advice for startups pitching you to use their products?

Yared: The best way to get a company to use your product is to make it accessible. That is, are we able to go to your website, learn what it does, and try it out? This is a fantastic way to get us as a customer. Atlassian, for example, does this very well. If your website is nondescript and we have to schedule a phone call to learn about what it does, it is pretty painful. For example, I can download Oracle’s and IBM’s infrastructure software – but, for whatever reason, many startups don’t let you do this.

Also, it is extremely helpful for a startup to have a domain expert on staff: someone who has worked in a large IT department, understands how companies like ours work, how we adopt products, and how our decision-making process works.

Landa: And how about the worst pitch you’ve received?

Yared: Unfortunately, many of pitches we get aren’t very good. They universally ask for a 30-minute meeting and, typically, there has been little time spent figuring out how the product fits into our portfolio or why we’d be interested. I once received a pitch that was centered on how Showtime used a certain product and how it could be useful to CBS. Problem is, Showtime is a CBS property!

Peter Yared is the CTO/CIO of CBS Interactive, a top ten Internet destination, and was previously the founder and CEO of four enterprise infrastructure companies that were acquired by Sun, VMware, Webtrends and TigerLogic. Peter regularly writes about technology trends for CNET and has also written for the Wall Street Journal, BusinessWeek, AdWeek — and for VentureBeat.

Top photo: Sarah Ackerman/Flickr 

GoodData is a privately-held company, but that’s not stopping it from crowing about its revenues — to a point.

The business-intelligence service provider (aka cloud-based big data company) plans to announce tomorrow that its first-quarter revenues in 2013 were three times bigger than the same period a year before. The company isn’t saying say exactly how big those revenues are except to note they are “double digits.”

We got a peek at a few more numbers:

• GoodData has increased its total number of customers from 8,000 at the end of Q4 2012 to 10,000 at the end of the first quarter.
• Also in that period, it closed seven annual contracts worth $250,000 or more.

But that’s as far as its quarterly disclosures go. There were no specifics about any other performance metrics from the quarter.

GoodData may be warming up for the kind of quarterly earnings disclosures that it might do at some future point as a public company — and founder Roman Stanek has stated his intentions for an IPO in the past. But it’s a pretty limited warmup for now.

This much we do know: The six-year-old company has raised $53.5 million to date in several rounds of funding, and employs about 200 people. Its headquarters are in San Francisco. And it’s really hard to find art to illustrate business intelligence or big data, which is why we are giving you this photo of small and big Datas.

Photo credit: JD Hancock via photopin cc

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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

It’s too soon to write off the company formerly known as Research In Motion completely: BlackBerry chief executive Thorsten Heins said the company expects to sell “tens of millions” of its new BlackBerry Q10, according to Bloomberg.

Heins spoke with Bloomberg Television during the Milken Institute conference in Los Angeles. His sales prediction is pretty ambitious given than the Q10 — the first major smartphone in recent memory to have a physical keyboard — only started shipping a few days ago.

The BlackBerry Q10 received pretty good reviews, although its BlackBerry 10 operating system is a bit of a gamble for the company, since it’s brand new and there’s still a very small number of apps available for it. In our review, the BlackBerry Z10, which shipped in February and which also runs BlackBerry 10, looked promising, but its charms faded quickly thanks to the new OS.

“We have very, very good first signs already after the launch in the U.K.,” Heins told Bloomberg. “This is going into the installed base of more than 70 million BlackBerry users, so we have quite some expectations. We expect several tens of million of units.”

Confidence is all that Wall Street needed to send BlackBerry stock up nearly 4 percent to close the day at $15.61, its highest level since March 21.

Photo credit (with Q10 on the right, Z10 on the left): Devindra Hardawar/VentureBeat

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

The web represents one of the biggest triumphs of individual freedom and openness over corporate control.

Now corporations have found a way to roll back that openness. One of of the most successful? Apple, whose quarterly earnings report lands later today.

Amazon, Facebook, and Google are close behind, but nobody has the leverage Apple does. That’s why I think Apple’s long-term revenue possibilities are strong. It’s also why Apple, and those who are busy emulating it, represent a dire threat to the open flow of information.

Openness vs. central control

As Tim Wu argued in his 2011 book The Master Switch, new technologies — the phone system, radio, television — go through several phases. There’s an initial phase of experimentation during which the technologies prove themselves. Then there’s a flowering of alternatives in the market as dozens or hundreds of companies sprout up and grow rapidly to seize previously nonexistent market opportunities. That corresponds with a sense of optimism about the technologies’ potential to change the world and democratize communication.

Eventually, however, market forces and aggressive executives concentrate power — and regulatory control — in a few giants.

AT&T is the classic example: In the early years of the 20th century, hundreds of local and regional phone systems existed, serving small markets in idiosyncratic ways. Eventually, AT&T assimilated them all, bringing the entire phone system under the control of a single, centralized, autocratic monopoly.

That kind of central control is terrific for reliability (you could call anyone in the country — or the world — and get a crisp, clear connection) but terrible for prices and for innovation. It was only with the forced breakup of AT&T’s monopoly that phone rates started to come down.

Similar cycles of openness followed by consolidation followed the appearance of radio and television technologies. But the web, in some ways, is an amazing exception.

For three decades, HTTP (which Paul Ford called “the Web’s operating system”) and HTML have proven to be resilient, flexible tools for interconnecting people and machines, facilitating communication in the most decentralized way imaginable. Anyone can publish a web page to a server on the Internet, and within seconds it is readable by anyone in the world who has the address and a browser capable of rendering HTML.

What’s more, anyone can link to any page on the Web without having to ask permission and without having to worry about what hardware or software delivers that page. All you need is a URL — another widely accepted, well-defined standard for interconnecting information.

If you can’t beat the web, go around it

Now, however, there’s a threat to this openness. It’s called the app store.

Technically, it’s not just the store: It’s the entire ecosystem of apps, content, hardware, and software. Apple perfected the model, and it has transformed the company into one of the most profitable corporations in the world. Even though its share price has plummeted in recent months, Apple is still in a very strong position thanks to the leverage that this ecosystem gives it. Indeed, that position is so strong that Apple continues to generate profits even though its market share among mobile devices is shrinking.

Apple’s model is so successful that others are emulating it. Amazon, as I’ve written before, is perhaps best-positioned to create a similarly integrated ecosystem. Amazon sells content (TV, movies, music, books, news) and apps; it also sells a popular Android tablet that is tied tightly into its own app store as well as its shopping cart for physical goods. 

Others are still in the running, though. Google has an app store, software, and its own hardware, but its ecosystem is less tightly controlled because Google also has to work with dozens of hardware manufacturers — the companies who actually make most Android devices, led by Samsung — who have their own agendas.

Facebook is trying to enfold its customers more and more deeply into its own world, starting with its own quasi-open web standard called Open Graph (really just a markup language aimed at making it easier to share text, audio, and video within Facebook) and, lately, extending to its own Android app, Facebook Home, that takes over your phone and turns it into a virtual Facebook phone.

Microsoft, of course, has lots of leverage with the Windows ecosystem, and while it’s coming from far behind in mobile, it might have a shot with Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8 — but it’s too soon to say how well this will work.

But nobody has all the pieces tied together quite as well as Apple.

What we lose when we use apps

The app approach is working: 80 percent of the time people spend with their smartphones and tablets is spent using apps, not the web browser.

Apps provide a better experience for end users, in many cases, because their performance is better. They’re better-optimized for the screen and for other specific capabilities the device has. And for many publishers, it’s easier to make money from an app, whose experience enfolds the end-user and keeps them contained within an environment of the app publisher’s designing.

With the web, by contrast, users keep escaping to other sites — there’s no wall around the garden. That’s why many mobile sites have those obnoxious popups that encourage you to download the publisher’s mobile app. For these companies, the mobile site’s best use is as marketing tool for the app.

But here’s the problem: Apps are difficult to connect to one another. There’s no universally accepted way to link to a specific page or location within an app. (Many apps don’t even have pages.) To connect with an app, you need to use its application programming interface (API), assuming it has one, or the API of the device it’s running on. Naturally, that API differs from device to device. Making app-to-app connections is far more difficult than linking to a URL because you need to be a programmer to do it.

The difficulty of integrating apps with one another was one of the topics I heard executives discuss, in passing, at VentureBeat’s recent Mobile Summit. I’ll be honest, though, it wasn’t one of the event’s top themes. It matters the most to enterprise IT architects, for whom it’s a hassle as they try to tie together various apps that their employees use.

For big companies and carriers, app-to-app connections aren’t important. They’re too busy trying to build their own ecosystems.

Most entrepreneurs don’t care about the ease of integrating apps: They just want to make their own apps popular and figure out how to make money from them. And for consumers, this issue is not even on the radar screen.

That’s why I’m not optimistic about the future of the open web, particularly on mobile: There are huge companies with a large incentive to bypass it, and very few who have enough of a problem with it to register any opposition.

We may just look back on the past 30 years as a strange and happy interregnum between eras of corporate control. Enjoy it while you can.

Image credit: Phil Aaronson/Flickr

Layer7 is the latest application programming interface (API) startup to find a home inside a corporate IT giant.

CA Technologies confirmed today via a press release that it would be acquiring Layer7. Neither company disclosed the terms of the acquisition.

Layer7, founded in 2003, had raised about $20 million from BDC Venture Capital, GrowthWorks Capital, and Shoreline Venture Management. Its specialty is giving corporations “building blocks” (its words) to expose their internal applications to the world (or to their business partners) via APIs. That simplifies the technical details of integrating the companies’ various applications. In a way, APIs are like the plumbing of the software world, connecting applications to one another so that data can flow between them like water or gas.

Layer7 has hundreds of enterprise customers, and employs about 165 people at its Washington, D.C. headquarters and in Canada, U.K., and Australia.

“This enables us to extend our leading Mobility, Security and DevOps value proposition by liberating developers to securely connect applications to cloud services, expose internal information assets to mobile apps and bridge departments and partners all under a consistent security policy,” a CA spokesperson told VentureBeat via email.

CA, once known as Computer Associates, is a Fortune 500 corporation providing IT management solutions.

The acquisition comes just one week after Intel announced it would be scooping up Mashery, another hot API management company.

Layer7′s VP of client solutions, Matthew McLarty, recently wrote a post for VentureBeat about the lessons that Twitter and Google can teach us about APIs.

Image credit: Eliott Hutchins/Flickr 

The U.S. Senate voted to limit debate on a measure that would require e-commerce retailers to collect local sales tax.

That means the bill, S. 743, will move to a vote later this week, perhaps as early as Wednesday. Today’s vote was 74-20, which suggests strong support for the bill, and that means it’s likely to be headed to the President’s desk.

Right now, there’s a patchwork of different state and local laws governing e-commerce. Technically, e-retailers are supposed to collect sales tax in many locations. In reality, not many do: In California, only 1.4 percent of online transactions included the required sales tax.

The bill, also known as the Marketplace Fairness Act, would impost a single federal standard requiring all retailers with more than $1 million in online transactions to collect the sales tax required by whatever locality the buyer happens to be in. States would have to do their part by setting up a single entity for sales tax collection and providing a single sales tax return form for retailers to use in reporting tax payments, greatly simplifying the process.

Despite those simplifications, many e-commerce companies are opposed to the bill. eBay, for instance, sent an email to customers yesterday asking them to oppose the act.

“Whether you’re a consumer who loves the incredible selection and value that small businesses provide online, or a small-business seller who relies on the Internet for your livelihood, this legislation potentially affects you,” eBay’s letter said. “For consumers, it means more money out of your pocket when you shop online from your favorite seller or small business shop owner. For small business sellers, it means you would be required to collect sales taxes nationwide from the more than 9,600 tax jurisdictions across the U.S.”

Naturally, bricks-and-mortar retailers line up on the other side of the issue.

“You have businesses all around America on Main Streets and shopping malls collecting sales tax on the things that they sell, competing with Internet retailers who do not,” Senator Dick Durbin (D-Illinois) said, as reported by Reuters. Durbin is a co-sponsor of the bill.

The Washington Post’s Wonkblog has an excellent explainer on the Marketplace Fairness act.

Photo credit: kenteegardin/SeniorLiving.org via photopin cc

Alvaro Fernandez is the CEO of SharpBrains.com.

This month, President Obama launched the BRAIN (Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies) Initiative, which the administration calls “a bold new research effort to revolutionize our understanding of the human mind.” The president announced $100 million in funding to kick off the research project, likening the effort to previous “grand challenges” like the human genome mapping initiative and the Apollo space program.

As the president noted, we can identify galaxies light years away and study particles smaller than an atom, but “we still haven’t unlocked the mystery of the three pounds of matter that sits between our ears.” For that reason, the BRAIN Initiative is welcome news.

However, it’s unlikely to move the needle because, unlike previous national projects, it lacks adequate funding and actionable objectives that can capture the imagination of innovators and the public at large.

The U.S. needs more commitment to brain science

To put the BRAIN Initiative’s $100 million in funding into perspective, consider that the European Union has allocated $1.5 billion for its Human Brain Project, and China’s Brainnetome initiative has been operational for almost a decade.

In the U.S., the National Institutes of Health, one of the primary beneficiaries of the BRAIN Initiative, is taking a $1.6 billion dollar hit due to current budget battles.

So while the $100 million in BRAIN Initiative funding is a good start, it’s not nearly enough. And the need for a broad, concerted effort to tackle brain-based challenges couldn’t be more clear or urgent: According to a recent RAND Corporation study, the cost of caring for patients with dementia in the US is already at least as expensive as treating cancer or heart disease, and the cost is expected to double by 2040. Yet, the attention and resources allocated to brain health and mental well-being today pale in comparison to those devoted elsewhere.

The BRAIN Initiative needs actionable goals

When President John F. Kennedy articulated his vision for the US space program in 1961, he outlined a clear objective: “I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to earth.”

The BRAIN Initiative could benefit from a similar clarity of purpose. In his speech, President Obama alluded to new insights into Alzheimer’s disease, autism, strokes and traumatic brain injury that research could produce. But bold initiatives call for audacious objectives: To capture the public’s imagination and inspire cutting-edge scientific innovation, the BRAIN Initiative should “go big,” embracing clear goals and working backwards to achieve measurable progress towards those goals.

As it has been articulated so far, though, it comes across as one more interesting basic research project disconnected from those pressing societal priorities.

Digital health entrepreneurs have a role to play

Is there an alternative approach? Yes. Start with the societal goal in mind, and chart the most likely path to make a groundbreaking difference there. For example, relatively inexpensive assessment tools distributed over the Internet can generate valuable data to expand understanding of cognitive functioning, and Big Data analysis can yield amazing insights that have immediate applications in health, education and productivity. Public-private partnerships could help advance the BRAIN Initiative’s goals.

Other countries have already successfully tried these approaches:

• In Canada, a brain health check-up application is providing valuable data for individuals, while gathering information that will provide insights for public health policy decisions.
• The United Kingdom’s National Health Service has rolled out computerized therapies as a first-line treatment for anxiety and depression.
• In Singapore, quantitative EEG monitoring and training are building students’ concentration capacity.

To inspire progress, focus on fitness

Although the BRAIN Initiative is often compared to the moon project, perhaps the better opportunity would be for it to draw inspiration from JFK’s fitness initiative. In announcing that program, President Kennedy said, “The strength of our democracy and our country is really no greater in the final analysis than the well-being of our citizens.”

The truth of that observation applies to brain health as well as physical fitness. Practical goals related to brain health and a call to action that inspires all Americans — including innovators in the digital health space — would make for a smarter BRAIN Initiative.

I wish the best for the new BRAIN Initiative. It’s always good to have more research dollars and new research tools. But this small initiative is no substitute for the concerted effort we’ll need to plan and implement in order to optimize the brain health and performance of over 300 million Americans and over seven billion brain-owners worldwide.

Alvaro Fernandez, named a Young Global Leader in 2012 by the World Economic Forum, is the CEO of SharpBrains.com, a leading independent market research and think tank tracking health and productivity applications of neuroscience. He has been quoted by The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, CNN, Reuters, and Associated Press, among others.

Image credit: Liz Henry/Flickr

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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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Recycling is as American as apple pie. But is it as American as Apple Inc.? Maybe so: Electronics recycling has sharply risen in the past three years, according to a recent online survey.

General recycling is at all-time high levels, with 84 percent of U.S. residents recycling their trash – helped no doubt by the widespread availability of curbside recycling programs in many communities.

But in 2010, just 39 percent of us were taking our old gadgets to be recycled. Now that nnumber has jumped to 72 percent, according to the survey, conducted by Retrevo and Bizrate Insights. The survey asked about 3,600 online buyers what they felt about various recycling practices, so it probably skews towards the demographic of online shoppers: Electronics-savvy and already fairly well-connected. Still, it’s encouraging for those of us who don’t like to think about toxic electronics leaking from landfills into our water supplies, such as the following nasty stuffs listed by the Retrevo report:

• Lead in the glass of CRTs and cadmium in the CRT phosphors
• PCB (polychlorinated biphenyls) in transformers
• Brominated flame retardants (BFRs) in plastics and printed circuit boards
• Arsenic in some LEDs and printed circuit boards
• Cadmium in NiCad batteries, toners and semiconductors
• Lithium in Li-ion batteries
• Mercury in some LCD backlights, and printed circuit boards
• PVC in cable insulation and other plastics; when burned they release hydrogen chloride gas
• Radioactive Americium in some smoke detectors

However, compared to the rates at which people  recycle plastics (77 percent of us do this regularly) and paper (75 percent), electronics recycling still isn’t a deeply ingrained habit: only 48 percent do it regularly.

Other survey findings: While only 31 percent of respondents always buy the greenest gadgets they can, another 23 percent feel guilty about buying less-green alternatives.

Only 42 percent of shoppers use energy ratings to help them buy the “greenest” gadgets, and young people (under 30) actually care less about these ratings than the over-30 set. That’s right, you whippersnappers: Enjoy the toxic, polluted, greenhouse-warmed Earth you will soon inherit.

Seriously, these numbers are good news. Add curbside recycling for electronics, and I think it’s a good bet that we could get gadget recycling to the same rates as other materials.

This is part one of a five part series sponsored by Under the Radar, aimed at helping innovative startups attract the attention of C-level executives, to pitch them on forming sales or partnership agreements.

Meet Biren and hear how he manages technology at Under the Radar 2013, May 22-23, in San Francisco. Register today using special discount code VentureBeatVIP.

VentureBeat: As a principal architect at Cisco and the person spearheading web and mobile tech initiatives for WebEx Social, there must be thousands of Silicon Valley startups and VCs trying to get your attention.  How do you handle it?

Biren Gandhi: It’s like any other time management challenge. It’s difficult, but at the same time highly rewarding. Having an opportunity to meet and engage with so many smart people is indeed a privilege. My personal motivation always comes from an environment that provides sustained learning in some domain. Getting referrals from startups/VCs is a great learning experience and although at times it demands a lot of energy, it’s all well worth it overall.

VentureBeat: How many pitches do you receive in a week?

Gandhi: Probably three to five.

VentureBeat: What is your vetting process?

Gandhi: It’s a simple 3-step formula with a weed-out filter at each stage:

1. Accept referrals from trusted sources/mentors.
2. Perform my own domain research and get a perspective of competitive landscape.
3. Look at the founding team, the idea, proposed business model, and the sustainable advantage.

Anything that successfully passes through these stages deserves detailed due diligence.

VentureBeat: What is the last company you bought and implemented?

Gandhi: Won’t be able to disclose due to confidentiality reasons.

VentureBeat: Darn. Okay, what are the things you most look for in new technologies?

Gandhi: Simple, intuitive, secure, high-performance, portable (cloud and on-premise hosted) and a delightful user experience! Products, solutions, and tools must make people’s lives easier, not more difficult!

VentureBeat: What is typical sales cycle from pitch to adoption?

Gandhi: Depends on how complex a product/solution is and how many players need to be involved. The more players, the longer the process becomes. If the product/solution is dead simple and solves a specific pain point, a general ballpark timeframe from pitch to adoption is three to six months.

VentureBeat: What are your challenges in adopting early stage technologies?

Gandhi: Culture mismatch and social validation. By their very nature, smaller companies are more agile and want shorter cycles — from business negotiations to engineering/integration to customer shipment. Larger companies expect similarly agile responsiveness and get disappointed in the end. Another challenge is finding social validation for products and solutions, especially if they are very early stage; a few passionate, vocal customers whoa re able to demonstrate value will speak louder than the most charismatic of founders.

VentureBeat: What is your advice for startups pitching you?

Gandhi: Have patience while dealing with large enterprises; they take their own sweet time during evaluation and due diligence. It may not have anything to do with your product or service. Don’t get disappointed, discouraged, or disengaged.

VentureBeat: What is the worst pitch you’ve received?

Gandhi: Nothing specific comes to mind, but a general annoying pattern is “we do XYZ and we believe we can be great business partners…” Wait! Have you tried to understand my problem? Do you know whether your solution is the right one for my needs? Arrogant pitches typically don’t work very well, IMHO.

VentureBeat: How about the best pitch?

Gandhi: Again, no specific names, but a general pattern. A solid team that has a good grasp of the problem domain, possible alternative solutions, an ability to communicate the superiority of their offering in the competitive landscape and, at the same time, an open-minded, discovery-driven, humble approach to engage in a trusted manner are strong indicators of a successful partnership.

VentureBeat: What value do you get out of Under The Radar?

Gandhi: 1,000 brains are better than my lonely one! Being able to meet some of the smartest minds of Silicon Valley, hearing their ideas and being able to engage/partner with them at an early stage are all great opportunities provided by UTR.

Currently working as a principal architect with Cisco, Biren Gandhi is spearheading crucial web/mobile technology initiatives for WebEx Social, an enterprise social software offered both on-premise and in the cloud to Fortune 1,000 customers. Prior to joining Cisco, he was divisional CTO of a few gaming studios at Zynga and a senior architect at Facebook. He also cofounded AdMunity, where he created a highly engaging collaborative social platform for the advertising community. He loves sharing interesting, action-oriented articles on innovation, leadership and organizational culture at http://thoughts.birengandhi.com/. 

Debbie Landa is the CEO of Dealmaker Media/Under the Radar.

Top photo credit: Cisco

When a tragedy hits, we all struggle to figure out what to do. It’s hard to sit at your desk, thousands of miles away from the news, watching scenes of horror and suffering scroll across your screen, and know that there is nothing meaningful that you can do to help the people in the pictures.

We are glued to our screens, watching the liveblogs and scanning our Twitter feeds for the latest scraps of information. It feels like doing something, but it’s not: We’re just passively collecting information while we struggle to figure out what to do.

For those of us in tech, a disaster like Monday’s bombing of the Boston Marathon is also a reminder that there are far more important things in life than social media startups, cute robots, Facebook chatheads, or Google Glass. Things like running marathons. Giving blood. Hugging our children. Letting our friends and family know that we’re OK.

And yet, tech can play a small but meaningful role. Google put up its own person finder for Boston on Monday to help connect people in Boston with those who might be worried about them. But Facebook may have been the most effective people finder of all as Bostonians checked in to say they were safe.

Twitter, for its part, played a role in funneling news from Boston to the rest of the world, and — as is increasingly the case with big, breaking news events — it was the medium through which the first reports and photos (and, yes, Vine videos) began to trickle out. The Boston Police even used Twitter to solicit videos, photos, and tips that could lead to solving the crime, and indeed, online crowdsourcing may play a key role in the investigation, as Wired’s Spencer Ackerman reports.

Surprisingly, I didn’t see a lot of people jumping to conclusions about exactly what had happened or who was responsible. Perhaps that’s a reflection of the people I follow, many of whom are either journalists or are extremely media-savvy. Regardless, the Twitter news stream seemed remarkably focused on facts, not conjecture. I’d like to take that as a sign that Twitter is maturing as a source of factual news.

Still. All that pales in comparison to the calm and orderly help that people on the scene in downtown Boston were providing. Yellow-jacketed marathon volunteers, police officers, and soldiers all worked side-by-side to pull away twisted metal barricades, provide first aid to people, carry victims to safety, and keep the crowds calm and at bay. That’s real help.

So I asked VentureBeat’s readers this morning, “What should the tech community do to respond?”

The responses ran the gamut. “Shut up for once” was the top-rated response, and as a tech journalist, that gives me pause. Even writing this column makes me worry a bit: Am I just taking advantage of a tragedy to put my own spin on things? Is there really a tech story to be written about here? For that reason, we at VentureBeat have proceeded very cautiously in covering the explosions, preferring to write only when we have something to add.

Other responses are more focused. My favorite, from Ron Schott: “Work with Facebook/Twitter/others on a national Emergency Response System for social media that puts important information into people’s feeds during times of emergency.” That’s not inconceivable. Apple’s iOS already has the capability to put AMBER Alerts and other local emergency alerts directly into your phone’s notification center, and those are both turned on by default. Why couldn’t social networks incorporate the same kind of geographically targeted emergency messaging?

One reader suggested that “big data” analysis could help identify threats before they turn into real acts of terror. Another suggested (facetiously I hope) that the answer was more sensors, more cameras, and more drones in the sky.

Joe Chernov, a marketing guy with a Boston-area startup called Kinvey, pointed me to an excellent interview between Washington Post blogger Ezra Klein and security pundit Bruce Schneier. In it, Schneier offers this telling rule of thumb:

I tell people if it’s in the news, don’t worry about it. By definition, news is something that almost never happens. The brain fools you into thinking the news is what’s important. Our brains overreact to this stuff. Terrorism just pegs the fear button.

Klein, by the way, wrote a moving statement on why marathons matter last night. “If you are losing faith in human nature, go out and watch a marathon,” he quotes Kathrine Switzer, the first woman to run the Boston Marathon, as saying.

Finally, here are a few more specific ways you can help.

A Boston-area tech group called TUGG (Technology Underwriting Greater Good) has a fundraising campaign that is raising money to support victims of the bombing. It has raised $38,000 so far. I’m sure they could use more.

The Red Cross always needs donations of blood and of money.

And techies, consider contributing your time and expertise to nonprofits outside the tech world.

“The most important thing the tech community can do is get involved,” wrote Todd Freeman on our Facebook post. “The best thing the tech community can do is start volunteering their expertise to nonprofits and grassroots movements.

“It is much more fulfilling to know, despite terrible news, you yourself are making a difference, than to simply let the depression of a seemingly endless amounts of hate witnessed from media sources slowly erode your faith in humanity. There is no greater payoff in life.”

Boston Marathon photo credit: Aaron Tang/Flickr