This sponsored post is produced by MicroVentures.

VentureBeat recently reported that funding marketplace MicroVentures raised over $16 million for tech startups. Over the past 2 years, MicroVentures has reviewed over 2,000 companies and through its rigorous review process, filtered the prospective list to less than 40, which met the criteria to raise on the platform. This represents approximately 2 percent of the companies that initiated the process. Once the SEC issues the final rules around the JOBS Act, it will pave the way for funding portals to start equity-based crowdfunding, giving more startups an opportunity to find a place to raise capital. Many of those 2,000 companies will now have another resource available to raise capital online.

What does this mean for investors?

It means that investors will likely spend more of their time searching multiple “Equity Crowdfunding” sites attempting to understand the risks associated with deals on any given platform. Early stage investing is inherently high risk/reward. However, risk correlates closely to transparency, which can only be achieved through professional due diligence performed by experienced individuals. Over the last year we have seen an uptick in the number of companies requesting funding as a result of the JOBS Act. Because of this, it is critical that investors are only offered opportunities that have been properly vetted and reviewed prior to listing on a given site, in order for the investor to make an intelligent and informed investment decision. This review coincidentally also adds value to the company looking for capital, as it helps them understand what information is important to investors from Day One, helping them start with shareholder value in mind.

What do online investors look for in a deal?

Here are a few of the many factors investors look for when reviewing a startup:

1)     Experienced Team – Investors look for a team that has experienced both success and failure. They look for teams that have met challenges and figured out how to get over, under, around, or through.

2)     Traction – For early stage companies traction doesn’t necessarily have to be revenue. It could mean a successful beta with active users and a healthy growth rate. However, proof of execution is key.

3)     Angel Money – Investors would like to see investments from angels or VCs, who can add value beyond simply capital.

Receiving positive feedback in the three areas above may create initial interest from investors reviewing an opportunity on an online platform. However, in order to create a win-win for both investors and the company raising capital, investors must have access to fundamental information about the company and be able to determine whether any growth inhibiting liabilities exist. Without rigorous due diligence, this is impossible. For example, it is great to see high profile angel investors participate in a round with a company you might have interest investing in, but that information alone provides you with no detail regarding that investor’s agenda, reason for investing in the given company, personal relationship with the company, etc. It is paramount as an investor that you understand how each startup featured is being vetted and that the due diligence criteria matches aligns with your methodologies for making risk-based decisions.

At MicroVentures, we proactively perform two levels of due diligence before our investors review an opportunity to ensure that we are offering what we believe are high quality, curated opportunities. Further, MicroVentures provides the necessary transparency and tools to investors so they can perform their own due diligence before investing. If you would like to be a part of the investor community at MicroVentures, please sign up today. It is free to join.

Sponsored posts are content that has been produced by a company, which is either paying for the post or has a business relationship with VentureBeat, and they’re always clearly marked. The content of news stories produced by our editorial team is never influenced by advertisers or sponsors in any way. For more information, contact sales@venturebeat.com.

This is a guest post by Aaron Perlut.

In spite of being home to some of America’s most successful companies, as varied as Anheuser-Busch, Enterprise Rent-A-Car, Purina and Energizer, St. Louis has never been perceived as a bastion of progressivism.

The question as to “why” has no easy answer. Maybe it’s the old-line manufacturing heritage, a culture of Midwestern conservatism, or perhaps even the vast amount of trust fund dollars controlled by families who seemingly invested more into charitable causes (how dare they?) rather than into new technologies.

Regardless, for many years the perception from outside of St. Louis was of a nice, conservative Midwest town, possibly waiting for a rebirth of the industrial revolution. But over the past two-plus years the region’s business and entrepreneurial ecosystem has begun to drastically evolve and flourish.

On several fronts, St. Louis is very much becoming a tech town.

“St. Louis is seeing an incredible amount of early-stage tech activity right now, which is leading to a strong funnel of great deals,” said Gabe Lozano, CEO of LockerDome, whose company recently closed a $6 million Series A financing round. “Without question, we will be globally recognized as a top 10 city in technology within 10 years.”

There’s the unexpected, such as the big data pioneers Appistry, which has pulled in nearly $40 million from private investors; digital media-based upstarts ranging from Lozano’s LockerDome to CrowdSource.com, which recently closed on a $12.5 million Series A from Highland Capital Partners; to later-stage tech companies like Answers.com, which is valued in the nine-figure range. And then the not so unexpected, like the biosciences and ag-tech principally headquartered on the CORTEX and BRDG Park incubator campuses.

“The collective energy and momentum surrounding innovation and entrepreneurship in St. Louis right now is pretty palpable,” said Chad Stiening, who’s early-stage life sciences company Kypha has raised more than $3 million in private capital since moving to St. Louis is 2011.

“We’re seeing the human, intellectual, physical and financial capital all reaching critical mass and it’s creating an ecosystem that’s essential to be competitive in the marketplace,” he added.

Indeed, the number of St. Louis-based technology jobs posted on Dice.com jumped 25 percent over the past year, with average salaries rising 13 percent — besting the likes of Austin, Charlotte and Phoenix. And that was before Boeing announced it is moving 600 tech jobs to St. Louis over the next three years.

In addition, there are now more Ph.D. plant scientists in greater St. Louis than anywhere else in the world, according the Danforth Plant Science Center.

While much of the activity has flowed from the robust talent pools coming from Monsanto, the Danforth Center, Washington University Medical Center, and others — the reality is that easy access to capital is breeding a deeper degree of innovation.

“Entrepreneurs follow opportunity,” said St. Louis native and Square founder Jim McKelvey in explaining why so many companies with St. Louis DNA have left town previously. “We now see that trend reversing. Entrepreneurs are moving here, and well they should.  I know two successful firms that would be dead now if they hadn’t come to St. Louis.”

Venture capital and angel activity, of course, is an essential and growing component. There are organizations like Cultivation Capital, in which McKelvely is a partner, or Arch Angels, Billiken Angels and upstart iSELECT Fund; the State of Missouri is leveraging its Missouri Technology Corporation (MTC) to lure out-of-state start-ups, and there are unique incubator programs like Arch Grants and Capital Innovators.

Change is afoot, and just as there was no easy answer as to “why” the region has not in recent years been considered a progressive business environment, there’s no easy answer as to why there’s been dramatic shift in St. Louis’ “Progressivism DNA.”

It’s more than likely the culmination of many colliding factors: A new generation of leaders with a collective vision for the region, young, smart minds producing fresh ideas that are now more readily accepted, an increase local funding sources, and a reduction of silos amongst varying organizations.

Whatever the case might be, the region’s clear progress indicates better days ahead for start-ups and investors alike.

An eight-year resident of St. Louis, Aaron Perlut is founding partner of digital marketing and public relations firm Elasticity, co-founder of the not-for-profit regional marketing initiative Rally Saint Louis, and is a pioneer in the free facial hair movement (no, seriously).

Erply provides POS system and inventory management software for commercial retail and e-commerce businesses. Today the company announced raising $2.15 million in its second round of funding, according to a report in TechCrunch.

The iPad app and cloud-based platform provide a centralized place to manage multiple areas of a retail business, including POS, inventory, payroll, accounting, and multi channel e-commerce in an integrated system. Businesses can easily add new locations into the system and the retail CRM feature tracks customers and captures their data. There are also sales and marketing campaign tools.

Erply can handle data across physical shops, online stores and warehouses, and provides real-time dashboards of activity. The software is integrated with other platforms including accounting programs like QuickBooks and web-shops like Magento, Amazon, eBay, and Google.

Old school POS systems are difficult to manage, not connected to the Internet and expensive, not to mention cumbersome. Retailers used to deal with printers, cash registers, barcode, scanners, physical receipts, inventory software etc… and none of these systems were connected.

Over the past few years, a crop of startups has given the POS industry a mobile, cloud-based overhaul. The most well-known of these startups is Square which pioneered a small piece of hardware known as a dongle that is accompanied by a suite of software called Square Register. However retailers that have existing POS systems may not want to throw them out the window, and Erply’s technology helps them bring together the convenience and connectedness of cloud-based systems, with all the features and support they need.

The company has 100,000 small to medium business (SMB) customers and 120,000 users, and its client base is growing by around 20 percent each month. Customers include Elizabeth Arden, BMW and The Athlete’s Foot and the company is making a push to support Fortune 500 companies and gain traction in the enterprise space.

Erply has offices in New York, London, Australia, Denmark, and Tallinn, Estonia. Previous investor Redpoint Ventures led this round of financing to fuel growth and international expansion, and take on bigger players like Square and PayPal, other startups like GoPago and Vend. Index Ventures and Dave McClure also participated in this round.

It has raised $2 million in 2010 and this brings its total capital raises to $4.2 million.

Photo Credit: Shutterstock

Meet Max

Max is a mechanical engineering student at Santa Clara University. This June he’ll be graduating and is currently searching for a job in Silicon Valley. I asked him to test Collegefeed’s services to see how useful he found it and what his general thoughts on the site were as someone who is the company’s target market.

How easy is Collegefeed’s sign-up process?

When registering for the site, new users are promised “3 steps, 1 minute, and Collegefeed will be personalized just for you.” Max listed the top three companies he would like to work for, then he listed three areas of interest, and finally he filled out basic information on himself, though he was able to pull most of this automatically off of LinkedIn through the site. He said he found the registration straightforward and very easy.

After completing his registration, he worked on filling out his profile. Here he felt that some of the information asked of him was a little specific or odd. For example, the site asks for users to upload work samples. Not sure what to include and hesitant to go searching through old binders and folders, he opted just to skip this step.

As part of filling out his profile, he was asked to create a personal statement, something which he equated to the first question in a real job interview. He thought it would be a good way for employers to quickly get an idea about him. Overall, he thought his profile was a simple but effective way of conveying information about himself and what he values.

With his profile (mostly) completed, he started to navigate around the site. You have three areas outside of your profile to explore: “companies,” “jobs,” and “peer assistance.”

He first clicked on “jobs” and found that the “jobs for me” section was the most helpful. Here the site recommended positions and companies that were similar to the companies and areas of interest he named when registering. The rest of the “jobs” section he found less effective, namely due to being forced to search for companies or keywords rather than just browse. He said this made it difficult to find jobs he was interested in, but once he did find something interesting, it was just a click of a link to be taken to the application page for the position.

Next he navigated to the “companies” section.

“The companies tab is pretty cool, actually. Search by name and then you can click on one and it will give you an overview of the company. The company page has sections for overview, products, jobs, and competition. Although, they don’t always have as much info as I would like, they still have a ways to go to improve the size of their database,” he said.

The “peer assistance” section was where he spent most of his time. In this section other users posted accounts of interviews with different companies and the questions asked. He mentioned that although he found it potentially very useful, the fact that there were not many companies represented diminished its effectiveness.

Overall, Max thought that the site had some kinks to work out but that he found it very useful. Only a user for a few days, he says he plans on using it in the future to find jobs and that once the small issues and limited content issues get fixed, it will be even more helpful of a tool.

How Collegefeed goes about addressing these small issues and lack of content will determine how the company, whose site had a limited launch in March and a nationwide release ten days ago, succeeds in the future.

Collegefeed’s plans for the future

In a phone interview, Sanjeev Agrawal, Collegefeed’s chief executive, revealed that the number of current users was only in the thousands. He would not reveal a more specific number than that. Following up on this point though, he said that the company is not pursuing a large user base at the moment, instead focusing on developing the social network.

According to Agrawal, Collegefeed is currently “like Facebook when it was only likes and pokes.”

Planned for the near future are more conversations between recruiters and users using Google+ Hangouts. The capability to connect with other users is also planned for the near future, though the company is trying to make sure connections are used as a tool to be leveraged, rather than just another metric for the site to boast.

“We don’t want to be social just for the sake of being social,” Agrawal said.

In a landscape with competition such as LinkedIn and ReadyForce, Collegefeed is hoping to attract both new users and companies. The company is currently speaking with investors regarding raising a first round of funding and this capital could be used to attract the users and companies the site needs to truly thrive.

Photo credit: Collegefeed

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

App recommendation engines are getting booted from Apple’s app store because they suck, according to a new player in the app-finding business. But Hooked Media has come up with an entirely new take on app recommendation that has two unique qualities.

One, it doesn’t suck. And two, it can’t be rejected by Apple.

“Obviously, app discovery is a problem on iOS and Android,” Hooked Media CEO Prita Uppal told me, thinking of the hundreds of thousands of apps on both platforms. “The key problem from Apple’s perspective was that no one was solving the problem … they were just looking at opportunities to make money.”

That’s why Hooked Media chose to avoid simply relying on manual curation or social discovery, which is what most app recommendation engines use. Instead, Uppal says, Hooked Media generates app recommendations for its users based on 46 independent factors, including time of day, day of the week, what apps you’ve installed, which you’re deleting, the sequence in which you use them, your demographic factors, and yes, some social factors as well.

The result?

A 30 percent uptick in installs based on Hooked Media recommendations — and 33 percent more play time on games downloaded in response to a recommendation.

And most of that is without the typical app-recommendation app that shows you the free games, highlighted apps, and deals of the day. Because instead of just being an app, Hooked Media provides an in-app app recommendation service that helps mobile developers monetize and get distribution.

In other words, a large part of Hooked Media’s app recommendations happen in other apps: In that moment when you’ve just finished a level or played a game, the app flashes up suggestions of other apps to download. These aren’t just paid ads, they’re personalized recommendations.

“We’ve built a partnership on both platforms,” Uppal says. “We’re helping companies that are already doing this do it better, smarter, and more personal … and increasing conversion rates over 20 percent.”

In other words, because the app suggestions are more targeted, users who see them are more likely to download and use them — and app developers are more likely to be able to monetize their app via other developers’ marketing incentives.

“The minute you add that predictive rating for users, it totally transforms it from being an ad unit to something that’s personal to me, which totally changes that experience,” said Uppal.

It also changes the definition of an app recommendation engine from an app to a cross-platform service that developers can embed in their own apps via an API. That makes it virtually impossible for Apple to take action against Hooked Media, because it’s in thousands of apps — not just an easily isolated one.

Hooked Media, which has been making online game recommendation engines for years, spent a dedicated two and a half years building the technology behind the recommendations for mobile apps. That’s partly due to the many, many factors in Hooked’s complex algorithm, and partly due to the need to provide customized recommendations based on huge numbers of criteria in literally milliseconds.

The service won 25 million users in beta on Android, and an app recommendation app that it built — partially as a proof of concept — was promoted by Google twice. That’s a far cry from Apple, which has been busy kicking app suggestion apps out of the store.

Source: Hooked Media

Personalized app recommendations

And while there’s good opportunity on iOS, which Hooked Media is happy to serve via its API, Android is where there’s a “bigger opportunity,” according to Uppal.

That’s not really due to the fact that Android has more users and now has or shortly will have more apps. Rather, it’s due to the fact that the “app store” functionality is fractured on Android, with more than 200 Android app stores in existence, according to Hooked Media.

“The app discovery problem becomes even more challenging on Android — users don’t even know where to go,” Uppal said. “In the U.S., Google Play is definitely dominant, but outside the U.S., Google Play is very small.”

In Korea, Uppal told me, Google Play is only used by a fraction of Android smartphone owners. (That seems a little extreme, given the fact that Korea ranks number two in the country list for downloads on Google Play.) And, she pointed out, Verizon is soon coming out with its own store. Hooked Media, however, will seamlessly find the right app store to download the right app, dynamically.

The core point?

Hooked Media has built a platform, app store, and app agnostic app recommendation engine. It’s one that can’t be banned by Apple. And it’s one that benefits developers who are seeking monetization as well as those who are seeking distribution.

photo credit: Daniel Y. Go via photopin cc

Follow me on LinkedIn Today, where this story originally appeared.

Imagine walking into a flea market where you don’t know the price of anything until after you’ve bought it.

The sellers won’t tell you exactly what it is they want to sell you. And you can’t even tell how good something might be until after you’ve taken it home and used it up.

Then you get the bill. You might be able to haggle over the price, but only long after you’ve bought the product. Your success rate at haggling will depend a lot on your negotiating skills and clout, as in any market. But in this one, it will also depend your ability to find the seller’s correct phone number, work your way through a complicated phone menu system, and master complicated, unfamiliar terminology.

Now imagine that there’s no way to compare notes with other buyers, because everyone is just as much in the dark as you are.

A flea market like that would be what economists call “inefficient.” Ordinary people would probably use a more vulgar term that starts with “F” and ends with “up.”

Yet that’s exactly what the health care market looks like in the U.S. today. If there was ever a market ripe for technological disruption, this is it.

Because of the lack of transparency over prices, the U.S. health care market has little correlation between price and quality. Sellers have almost total control over the market, and they resist any attempts to change the game by introducing more data — or easy-to-use tech tools to analyze and compare the data — because transparency would hurt their capability to charge high prices and avoid quality comparisons.

But there are signs that the barriers are starting to crumble.

Earlier this month, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services released a pile of data about what 3,000 hospitals charge for the top 100 services they provide. HHS, of course, is the cabinet-level agency that regulates the $2.8 trillion U.S. health care market. It’s got an enormous amount of data about health care in this country, but until recently, that data was not widely available.

“We have a ton of data that we have collected over the years, and lots of it was just sitting locked up in a vault, doing nothing,” said Bryan Sivak, the chief technical officer and entrepreneur-in-residence at HHS, speaking yesterday at VentureBeat’s HealthBeat conference in San Francisco. (He’s @BryanSivak on Twitter.)

The data made a bit of a splash, particularly once the New York Times used it to identify the Bayonne Medical Center as the most expensive hospital in the country.

“It was a big win for the government to put this data out there,” Sivak said, when I asked him about it. “It very accurately demonstrated the wide variety and irrationality of prices that hospitals charge for the same procedures.”

The data dump was a tiny piece of what’s available. Fortunately, it is just the latest step in the department’s “data liberation” project. Sivak’s predecessor, Todd Park (now the chief technology officer of the United States), put the process in motion a few years ago. Sivak estimates that the HHS holds at least 1,000 different data sets in its archives. So far, just 400 have been cataloged on the agency’s data-liberation website, HealthData.gov.

And that’s just pricing data. The real treasure trove is quality data: How well various health care providers do in actually treating the conditions that we’re paying them to treat.

“You could be paying the highest price in the region for a given procedure and be getting the lowest quality, and not even know [this],” said Peter Isaacson, the chief marketing officer of Castlight, when I asked him about it. “And that’s the mark of an inefficient market.”

Castlight offers a service, sold to employers for the benefit of their employees, that shops for medical services by price and quality. It currently works with 50 different corporate customers, but there’s huge potential to offer this kind of service to every American — if the data can be made available.

Medicare, for instance, tracks a variety of data about mortality rates, readmission rates, infection rates, and other details. But it won’t provide this data on a per-facility basis except to qualified academic researchers; for-profit companies can’t currently use it.

What’s more, Medicare charges $100,000 for the data. That’s contrary to the spirit of Affordable Care Act, according to Bob Kocher, who helped shape the health care reform bill as an adviser to the Obama White House. The ACA mandates that Medicare release this kind of information, but it doesn’t specify exactly how or to whom, Kocher told me.

Medicare is probably restricting access in order to protect patient privacy, but it may also be under pressure from health care providers who don’t want to see this data publicized. Still, Kocher said, he’s confident Medicare will eventually release it — if there’s enough demand.

For-profit companies can use other available datasets, but these cost as much as $20,000, an attendee at HealthBeat complained — a barrier to very early-stage entrepreneurs.

Sivak acknowledges that this is a problem. But for those startups who need help, he offered two channels.

One is the department’s fourth annual “HealthDatapalooza,” happening in Washington in two weeks’ time.

“We’re expecting about 1,800 people to come to D.C. for a two-day celebration of all things health data related,” Sivak said. (Sounds like a jumpin’ party.) It will present plenty of opportunities for entrepreneurs and other interested people to dig deep into the HHS’s treasure trove of data, ask questions, and press the department to release more datasets.

Second, Sivak said, he’ll personally try to help any entrepreneurs who are having trouble getting to the data they seek.

We may not yet have all the data we need for an efficient health care market, but we’re moving in the right direction.

Sivak’s email, by the way:  bryan.sivak@hhs.gov.

Flea market photo: Benjamin Stäudinger/Flickr

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

VentureBeat excited to announce the opening of applications for the MobileBeat 2013 Innovation Showdown, one of the highlights of our 6th annual event on the the future of mobile.

Mobile startups: This is your chance to showcase your company, product, or solution to 700 mobile executives, leaders, IT decision makers, venture capitalists, and press.

We’re inviting 10 finalists to present their innovative mobile app or product live at the event. Our expert team of judges will provide feedback, recap the highlights, and determine the winners.

This year’s focus is on how your company embodies, enables, or amplifies a killer “Mobile Experience.” We’re selecting the 10 finalists based on these criteria:

1) Early stage companies (late seed stage to Series A):
We’ll select five companies that have received a range of $500,000 to $3 million in seed or early Series A funding. If you are a startup or a company that has received less than $3 million in funding, you may apply. We will provide you with a mandatory “bootcamp” pitch mentoring process where experts will help you to hone your pitch. We will also accept applications where companies have minimally viable product that is in a pilot or a beta but have not launched on a large scale yet.

2) Midstage Companies (Series A to Series B funding):
The other five companies must have at least Series A or B funding (have received more than $3 million in funding, including your first or second venture round). You have a product on the market with a defined customer base and paying customers or pilots. You have a defined sales cycle and pipeline. You are looking to expand your executive, tech, or sales team and need to do another raise for expansion.

We’ll be announcing prizes in the coming weeks. Click here for full application guidelines and form.

Make sure to register for MobileBeat 2013 soon. Early-bird pricing ends Tuesday, June 28 at 5 p.m. Pacific time.

Thanks the following industry leaders for supporting MobileBeat 2013: CloudOn as Platinum Sponsor; New Relic & Tapjoy as Gold Sponsors, Fjord, Flurry, Kontagent, LifeStreet Media, & MoPub as Silver Sponsors; and Helpshift, IDrive, & Urban Airship as Event Sponsors.

SimpleRelevance’s platform gathers customer data and then personalized emails to specifically target individuals. The technology looks at information like past purchase behavior and combines it with geographic, social, and demographic’ data to send highly targeted emails. The goal is to make emails ‘smarter’ so the right message is automatically delivered at the right time, with custom subject line, content, and delivery times.

The company claims that this degree of customization can increase conversion rates by 51 percent, increase open rates by 21 percent, and increase click rates by 29 percent. It also said that companies integrating the technology into their marketing have seen revenue increases ranging from 40 to 400 percent, as well as better customer engagement.

“The “big data” revolution has exploded over the past decade,” said founder Erik Severinghaus in an email. “Companies now have access to massive amounts of data from multiple, disconnected platforms such as social media, web traffic, and internal sales systems. However, few companies know how to combine this data and make it actionable, especially from an email marketing perspective. Email marketing is one of the easiest and  cost effective forms of marketing, however it is still significantly behind from a technology perspective.”

The technology uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to get evaluate users and make predictions. It gets smarter over time and can be tuned for different types of interactions and objects. The solutions are comparable to those provided by Sailthru, another digital marketing company that raised $19 million in February for its Smart Data platform that personalizes communications through targeted emails, onsite and in-app recommendations, and text messages.

SimpleRelevance is a newer, smaller company that will participate in TechStar’s Chicago’s inaugural 2013 class. Hydpe Park Angels and Hyde Park Venture Partners led this round with participation from i2A Fund and additional angels. The funding will be used for recruiting and hiring, and to expand its enterprise-level solutions.

Carl Esposti is CEO of crowdsourcing advisory firm massolution.

If you think that participating in crowdfunding simply means investing in smaller companies that launch games and devices on Kickstarter, think again. With crowdfunding volumes reaching $2.7 billion in 2012, it has emerged as a viable, scalable alternative to public and private finance across the globe.

After surveying more than 350 active crowdfunding platforms, including IndieGoGo, CrowdCube, Symbid, and Gambitious (full site directory at crowdsourcing.org), and completing an in-depth analysis of market trends, research firm Massolution has identified five major crowdfunding developments for 2013 and beyond.

1. Niche platforms

As crowdfunding platforms try to benefit from market differentiation, niche-, industry-, and sector-specific platforms are emerging.

Platforms offering reward-based crowdfunding see an especially high value in serving a common niche or industry. Examples include platforms focusing on video games, recording art, performing art, real estate, food and beverage, fashion, journalism, and more.

While it’s smart for a new platform to choose a specific niche simply to differentiate its service, there is another big reason why this trend is likely to prevail—it helps build a repeated crowd on the platform. Having crowdfunders visit a platform, not just because they have been invited onto a specific campaign, but because the campaigns appeal to their tastes, is extremely valuable.

#2. Locavesting

In her 2011 book, Locavesting, business and finance journalist Amy Cortese describes how “a revolution in local investing” is emerging and that crowfunding is boosting it. This year, we are going to see increased momentum in this revolution because many new crowdfunding platforms will actually specialize in locavesting.

It’s been over a year since President Obama signed the JOBS Act, but legislation is stymied in the hands of the SEC.

However, at least four states – Louisiana, North Carolina, Georgia and Kansas – have taken the initiative to allow crowdfunding for business loans. Crowdfunding platform Rebirth Financial is specializing in locavesting and offers intrastate, lending-based crowdfunding. Although Rebirth’s offerings are open to anyone within state borders, successful campaigns have so far been driven by very local support – all the way down to the customer-base level.

#3. Enterprise crowdfunding

Large enterprises and associations have begun to look into crowdfunding and how this tool carries new potential for their companies, including raising social profiles, market testing, and spin-ins of entrepreneurial ventures. The perceived benefit is not the additional funding itself, but the democratization of specific decisions that would otherwise be made internally in the company.

The American Institute of Architects (AIA) represents the interests of more than 85,000 member architects across the U.S., a sector that has been hit particularly hard by the recent financial crisis. Recently, the AIA published a report examining crowdfunding’s potential as a new source of capital for residential, commercial, and industrial infrastructure projects.

Crowdfunding shows significant promise for attracting investors to smaller projects and getting them off the architect’s drawing board. In this case, crowdfunding will be used to spur community support and financing for an assortment of infrastructure ventures that would ordinarily have difficulty finding money due to their smaller size.

#4. Crowdfunding economic development

Major development banks and similar institutions — including The World Bank and The Inter-American Development Bank — are seeking to leverage crowdfunding for economic development. Crowdfunding’s social profile and its strong connection to micro-finance are the main drivers.

Crowdfunding has historically been embraced by philanthropic ventures, especially for donation-based crowdfunding and interest-free lending. The models naturally merge with micro-finance because the funding needs are very small, and individual donations or loans are likely triggers of funding success. The next step for crowdfunding in this particular space is the evolution and scaling up to economic development at the macro level.

The Multilateral Investment Fund (MIF) of the Inter-American Development Bank is currently exploring the potential of crowdfunding in Latin America, and how crowdfunding can be used to improve small businesses and bring financing to entrepreneurs who have less access to it. In Latin America, crowdfunding is just gathering momentum with about 40 online platforms, including Crowdfunder.mx and Idea.me, established over the last couple of years.

Platforms in the areas of solar energy, education, and urban development are expected to be the most promising in this region.

5. LIVE crowdfunding

The final trend that we see emerging in the crowdfunding space are launch-party events at the initiation of campaigns or LIVE crowdfunding expos. Besides creating media attention and offering a great marketing opportunity, LIVE Crowdfunding taps into an investor need that is hard to come by through the web: exclusivity.

Exclusivity in access to new products or deal flow can be a triggering factor in itself, and LIVE crowdfunding augments online crowdfunding with exactly that.

This October, the CrowdfundingRoadmap is hosting its second Global Crowdfunding Convention and Bootcamp, this year with its first ever LIVE Crowdfunding Expo, where anyone will be able to participate in donations- and rewards-based crowdfunding campaigns right on the spot.

All attendees will need to do is simply walk up to the booth!

In addition, if entrepreneurs are unable to attend the event or are launching their projects after October, CrowdfundingRoadmap is offering them the opportunity to showcase their crowdfunding pitch videos on the big screen at the expo, with a designated QR code, to help them get in front of potential investors and industry influencers.

Crowdfunding represents a breakthrough in how businesses and local projects are funded and disrupts centuries-old financial flows. While 2012 was the year of acceleration for the crowdfunding markets, these new developments above will fuel its growth for years to come.

Image credit: Shutterstock/Hands with dollars

There are two key problems that require immediate remediation in Congress, according to the coalition of companies, politicians, and nonprofits: jobs and fairness.

“Our outdated immigration system is costing our economy talent, jobs, and innovation, not to mention the toll it’s taking on families and potential immigrants,” the organization says. “America can’t afford to fall behind in the race for global talent — a race we’re already losing. Already, other countries have incentivized innovation and encouraged startups while we make it difficult for talented immigrants to even apply for a visa.”

That sounds like a reference to Canada, which recently created a “startup visa” that gives immigrants who are founding companies instant permanent residency and had its minister of Citizenship, Immigration, and Multiculturalism, Jason Kenney, visit Silicon Valley to drum up applicants who might be having trouble staying in the U.S.

The result could be a net drain on the American economy:

Holy crap! @alexisohanian ‘s mom was an illegal immigrant. If she had been deported? No #reddit for the USA. That’s why #iMarch #latism

— AnaRC (@AnaRC) May 22, 2013

When I chatted with Kenney last week, he called the U.S. immigration system “dysfunctional.”

The U.S. has made attempts to address the situation with a Startup Act of its own, but even that would only allow founders to stay for up to three years. The March for Innovation is looking for much more comprehensive reform that would include help for undocumented immigrants already in the country.

March for Immigration is supported by the Silicon Valley Leadership Group, Steve Case, Mark Cuban, Arianna Huffington, and numerous other business and technology leaders.

If you’re interested in participating, here are four things you can do to help:

1. Tweet or Facebook your senator
2. Spread the word on Twitter or Facebook
3. Change your Facebook profile picture to iMarch
4. Email your friends

The ultimate goal is immigration reform that supports innovation and delivers on the promise at the feet of the Statue of Liberty.

photo credit: gerson721 via photopin cc

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

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

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

Ivan Kirigin

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

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

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

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

Top image via Shutterstock

That’s a lot of lipstick and high heels.

Zalora focuses on 10 countries in Asia: Singapore, Indonesia, Malaysia, Brunei, the Philippines, Thailand, Vietnam, Taiwan, and Hong Kong. The year-old startup says it has already achieved “annualized double-digit million USD revenues.”

“Our company is one of the fastest growing e-commerce companies in Southeast Asia and has bright prospects,” said managing director Michele Ferrario. “It is an honor for us that investors of such great repute have invested into an e-commerce company as young as Zalora”

It is indeed an honor when a year-old startup with two or three million dollars in annualized revenue scores a $100 million investment. And it’s an unusual honor as well. But there’s method behind the madness.

The investment was secured by the German holding company that owns Zalora, Rocket Internet, which claims to be “the largest, fastest and most successful international online venture builder.” Founded by the infamous Samwer brothers — who Jason Calacanis has called “despicable thieves” —  its modus operandi has been to take successful models from American startups and apply them globally.

Genius, perhaps, if not very original. And very, very successful.

Rocket Internet sold Groupon clone CityDeal to Groupon for $126 million in 2010 and eBay clone Alando to eBay for $50 million, among many other lucrative deals. That history is undoubtedly part of what led the investment group, led by Summit Partners, Investment AB Kinnevik, and the Verlinvest and Tengelmann Group, to participate in this $100 million round.

Source: Rocket Internet

Rocket Internet’s impressive portfolio of companies

A big chunk, 25 percent, of Zalora’s revenue comes from mobile commerce, and the company says its app is the top lifestyle app in all the countries it serves, and the top app overall for Singapore, Malaysia and Vietnam.

In other words, Rocket Ventures saw an opportunity to take a big slice of an emerging market, and is moving rapidly — and with massive investment — to own the space.

The capital will be used, Zalora said, to scale up operations and grow the number of local and international brands it carries.

The company has just delivered its millionth order.

photo credit: AehoHikaruki via photopin cc

Divorces are traditionally terrible. But Wevorce, a Y-Combinator-backed startup that has just launched into general availability, wants to change that and make the process of divorce more amicable and less expensive.

Wevorce first caught our eye at March’s Y Combinator Demo Day. At the event, Wevorce founder Michelle Crosby [above] told the story of being dragged through her parents’ painful divorce when she was 9 years old. Her parents fought for 15 years and they still don’t talk to this day.

So Crosby grew up and decided to make a solution that could help people like her parents. Instead of a two-lawyer arrangement, Wevorce assigns a single attorney to a case and gives a divorcing couple software to make the process easier to understand. Wevorce claims the software helps its attorneys complete paperwork in 60 percent of the time it normally takes to go through the process.

“Divorce tests as the second most stressful event in an adult’s life,” Crosby told us via email. “Wevorce is humanizing the transition from one household into two for families. Not only does Wevorce address the legal implications, we also address the emotional and financial aspects that are inherent in every divorce.”

Besides making the divorce process more understandable and speedy, the company also claims to make it cheaper. Wevorce says its set fees range from $3,500 to $15,000. The company says the average case costs less than $10,000 while traditional divorces can cost upward of $27,000.

To date, Wevorce has only been available in a handful of U.S. cities including San Francisco, Seattle, Portland, Boise, San Jose, Calif., Oakland, Calif., Asheville, N.C. But now the service is available so any lawyer in the U.S. can tap the software and any divorcing couple in the U.S. can connect with lawyers through the service.

Check out the video below for more on Crosby’s inspiration to create Wevorce.

Screenshot via Wevorce/Vimeo

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Four female entrepreneurs came together at Healthbeat today for a panel titled “By Women, For Women: Building Technologies for the Chief Medical Officer of the Home.” Each of these women has a child under the age of four and each is building technology that can cut down on the costs and fears associated with family medicine.

A study by the Department of Labor found that women make approximately 80 percent of health care decisions for their families and are likely to be the care giver when a family member falls in. Despite this fact, only four percent of health care CEOs are women. There is a huge opportunity to improve the experience of care for pregnant women and mothers and bridge the gender gap between the people making consumer products and the people using them.

“I started thinking about this company when starting a family of my own,” said Leah Sparks, cofounder and CEO of Wildlflower Health. “I worked in health care for a decade, but pregnancy was the first time I dealt with the health care system as a patient. It opened my eyes to gaps in terms of resources available and risks. When I first started talking about my idea for Wildflower, the response from VCs was it was a niche market. Women represent half the population and pregnancy is the number one driver of hospital costs a year — does that sounds like a niche to you?”

Wildflower Health is a mobile platform that helps pregnant women track milestones customized to their due date, be aware of risk factors, and take personalized actions. The app has already reached 15,000 pregnant women and can significantly cut down on doctor visits by helping women monitor their pregnancy and feel like they are in control of the process.

The costs and fears don’t end once a baby is born. Quite the opposite. Infants and toddlers present whole new sets of health concerns. After spending hours and hours in the pediatricians office with her now two-year-old, Amy Sheng set out to create more convenient alternative.

“Anyone who has children knows that pit you get in your stomach when your child is sick,” she said. “The options are either to take your kid to the doctor during the work day, or go after hours to an urgent care clinic or ER. Neither of those options are good. People want to be empowered in their home to see what is wrong with their kid, to collect data and make an informed decision about whether it is serious enough to see a doctor.”

Sheng is a cofounder of CellScope, a company that makes a smartphone attachment that can snap images of middle ears. Sheng said and there are 25 million ear infection related visits a year in the U.S and ear infections are one of the most common reasons why kids go to see doctors. Using the CellScope, parents can capture photos of their children’s’ ear and transmit it to a doctor to be diagnosed and treated remotely, or brought in for a visit if necessary.

Wildflower Health and CellScope strive to cut down on the time women spend in clinical environments and provide the tools they need to manage their health from home. This not only cuts down on cost and anxiety levels, but also has significant implications for the position of women leaders. Having children is frequently cited as an obstacle to women advancing their careers. Maternity leave is undesirable for employers who don’t want to disrupt workflow and many mothers struggle to balance a time-consuming professional life with the demands of young children. Discrimination against pregnancy and mothers is an issue that contributes to the ‘gender problem’ in the business world, and any tool that can save women time stands to support their professional success.

“I had a healthy pregnancy and yet there were three or four times when I dealt with major issues during the work day,” Sparks said. “Anything that empowers women to deal with their health issues in the work place will help eradicate this myth that you can’t be a mom and a founder. Companies should want these technologies too, because they are in a talent war and want to keep women employees as happy, healthy, and productive as they can. Reducing complications and doctor visits can help do that.”

Photo Credit: Michael O’Donnell/VentureBeat

There’s been a lot of debate around what the right age to be an entrepreneur is, and if there’s really a correlation between age and running a successful business. Well, we have some new input for you on those questions: We met three extremely smart entrepreneurs – aged 13, 16, and 22 – on a youth panel at TiEcon 2013, and they’ve been up to some cool stuff.

Jordan Casey, 13

If you think Mark Zuckerberg was young when he started Facebook, wait till you meet Jordan Casey, a self-taught programmer and the 13-year-old founder and chief executive of Casey Games from Waterford, Ireland. He hands you his business card with a smirk on his face and tells you, “I run an independent mobile video game company called Casey Games.”

His inspiration was Club Penguin, a Flash multiplayer game. “I saw some of the users of the game were making websites about it, so I thought this could be a fun hobby, and so I went to the store and bought a book on programming,” said Casey, who started programming when he was all of nine. A year later he started working on programming projects and got himself into building games.

Casey founded his company when he was 12 and already has four mobile games and one web game on the market. His first game, Alien Ball vs. Humans, which released in February 2012, was No. 1 on the app store game charts in Ireland. Casey has built key partnerships with Adobe and Microsoft, who provide him with free software and support his initiative. He has one staff member, a designer, and he tells us, “My parents have to be the directors of the company because I’m too young.”

His parents are super proud of him, and they accompany him to conferences and events. “At first my parents didn’t understand what I was really doing. Instead of making games, they thought I was playing games,” said Casey. “Once they realized what I was doing, they became very supportive of me.”

Tanay Tandon, 16

Nick D’Aloisio made waves when he sold Summly, his news summarization app, to Yahoo for a whopping $30 million this past March. That put 16-year-old Tanay Tandon, founder and chief executive of Clipped, a content summarization app, in the spotlight.

Although Clipped provides an output similar to Summly, they use a different approach, Tandon told VentureBeat. “Summly has taken a keyword based approach to summarization, while Clipped is more grammatical,” he said. The Clipped algorithm “analyzes how humans might actually read content” based on “subject-predicate-object-pattern-like sentences” to draw summaries.

A sophomore at Cupertino High in Cupertino, Calif., Tandon founded Clipped in January 2013, and he’s already seeing some traction. To date, he’s had 130,000 downloads for his iOS and Android apps, with 10 million summaries provided. He was incubated at Teens in Tech and is now “in talks” with some investors.

He got started with programming on Android apps and wants to study “something computer science,” going forward. “People would drop out but I value education. I definitely want to go to college,” said Tandon, who wrote pattern recognition algorithms for his app from the ground up. When he catches time between school and his startup, Tandon like to play tennis.

Aron Beierschmitt, 22

Aron Beierschmitt founded his company, Foundation Games, in 2010 when he was 19. He employs 15 people and has offices in San Francisco, Philippines, and Sydney today. He has raised $850,000 in funding from angel investors, including the founders of Treyarch – the guys behind the popular Call of Duty series – and some other veterans from the gaming industry.

Interestingly, he stumbled upon his very first investor, Steve Vachani, on LinkedIn. “I took advantage of the early LinkedIn ability to send a lot of InMails without paying for them,” said Beierschmitt.

So far, Beierschmitt and his team have developed five iOS games and are working on three more. “Most of our titles have seen typically 500 to a million downloads” with no real marketing, Beierschmitt told VentureBeat. Lumi, the team’s second release, was featured as Apple’s app of the week; it retails for 99 cents and has seen over a million downloads.

“Born to develop, produce, and sale [sic] amazing products,” reads his LinkedIn profile. Beierschmitt, a firm believer in “putting out really really high quality” games, says, “I aspire to publish my own network.” He attended a startup accelerator program at YetiZen and recently earned a degree in political science from the University of Tennessee. He draws inspiration from his dad, loves to run and ski, and met his girlfriend at a physics lab.

Photo (left to right): Jordan Casey, Tanay Tandon, Aron Beierschmitt. Photo Credit: Chitra Rakesh/VentureBeat

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

With the Under the Radar conference coming up this week, I’ve been speaking to a lot of startups about how they’re managing to get their messages out to business decision makers. The conference is all about how the consumerization of IT is changing how startups design and market their products. And most recently I spoke to Aubrey Sabala (pictured, VP of marketing for “smart data” company Sailthru, to find out how she’s experiencing this change, both as the marketing lead of a startup and as a buyer of technology from other startups. Sabala (pictured below) pulls from quite a bit of experience — she’s previously worked on innovative marketing programs for some of the largest brands in technology, including Google, Facebook, Digg, and AOL and helped lead Facebook’s Consumer Marketing Team, serving as the executive producer for Facebook Live.

Here’s what she had to say.

Debbie Landa: We’ve heard from the likes of Gartner and others that CMOs are quickly outpacing CIOs in terms of technology spending. What types of technologies are you looking for today?

Aubrey Sabala: We’re very data driven here at Sailthru. We want to ensure that our marketing spend is going to the right place and that leads have been qualified. Software that can give us a very informed picture of how our marketing campaigns are converting, or who’s landing on our website — more than Google Analytics — is worth investing in. Our top priority is very accurately quantifying the success of the campaigns we’re working on. Of course, we also leverage Sailthru ourselves, which provides a lot of actionable insight.

Landa: How much of your overall budget is tied to technology purchases?

Aubrey Sabala, Sailthru

Sabala: Because we create a marketing solution, we fall on the lower end, maybe 10-15% — but we expect that to increase. My guess is that the average CMO would say about 30%.

Landa: Do you find yourself competing with your CIO for IT budget?

Sabala: To date, no. It’s more of a challenge at other companies, but we’re spared from some of that drama because many of our tools are built in-house. One thing is true regardless: You need to be able to justify technology purchases. In B2C companies, that’s harder because consumer marketers build out social channels, which is not tied to sales acquisition in a direct or measurable way.

Landa: If you could wave a magic wand and solve specific business problems with technology, what would those be? Where should tomorrow’s entrepreneurs be putting their energy?

Sabala: Today there are many different touchpoints, channels, and data sources that businesses need to connect in order to understand customers. Integrating them is really challenging, and getting insights from them to inform your marketing efforts is even more difficult. However, it’s worth it for organizations of every size and it’s the very challenge we’re solving with Smart Data. I’d also love turnkey customized landing pages that tie into Salesforce so that we could go out and market directly. I’d also love to optimize the sales funnel even further so that we can really identify the best qualified leads — at the right time — so that we can turn them into sales.

Landa: How long does the typical buying process take, from initial pitch to deployment, and what does your vetting process look like?

Sabala: We want to make sure we’re investing wisely, so we ask a lot of questions and always ask for customer testimonials, referrals, case studies, etc., all of which adds time to the process. We want to know if we have the infrastructure in place, that the value outweighs the cost, that it’s solving a real pain, and that we’re buying solutions that will still work in the long-term. We always ask to speak with vendors’ customers to ask the pivotal question: “When you approach the time to renew and you’re evaluating your budget, would you renew or look elsewhere?” All that said, we’re typically able to deploy technology in a month or so.

Landa: What are the biggest challenges associated with choosing new startups to work with?

Sabala: Vendors need to be able to show that they’re proven; that means more data points and more case studies— as a vendor, it’s a challenge we face as well. Vendors should strive not to pitch, but to build trust and credibility. Both vendors and customers should be asking the right questions, connecting the dots with other customers with similar challenges, and diving deeper.

Landa: Many businesses make major purchasing decisions by looking at analyst reports and benchmarks. How important are those reports — like Gartner magic quadrants, Forrester Waves, etc. — in your buying decision?

Sabala: I take them into consideration, but it really depends on the size of the company. Many worthwhile startups don’t make the cut because they’re not big enough. I look at it like hiring an employee: Everything that’s on paper gives you a starting point, but the real story is in the backchannel conversations. Don’t stop at the standard, traditional sources like analyst houses — be proactive with technology exploration! When you think about adopting a technology solution, you want to be able to scale and invest in the long haul. Think more about the problems you’ll have in a year or two and evaluate solutions that solve those problems.

Landa: Why do you attend events like Under the Radar?

Sabala: I think that if you’re not looking at the future of these technologies, you’re already two steps behind. It’s a forward-thinking challenge to participate with entrepreneurs that are innovating in various spaces. I always leave these types of events thinking, “Wow, we will have some very cool tools in our toolbox in the near future!” 

Meet Aubrey Sabala and hear how technology factors into her marketing strategies at Under the Radar 2013, May 22-23, in San Francisco. Register today using special discount code VentureBeatVIP.

For more insight from our Under the Radar series, see our previous stories:

• 12 enterprise mobility startups to watch
• Rackspace CMO to vendors: ‘Be smarter than me’
• How to get a top 10 website to pay attention to your startup
• How to capture Cisco’s attention: An exclusive interview with Biren Gandhi

Top photo of a nervous businessman from Shutterstock.

SAN FRANCISCO — The Affordable Care Act, aka health care reform, aka Obamacare, is spurring a massive creation of new business opportunities.

So says Bryan Sivak, the chief technical officer and entrepreneur-in-residence at the Department of Health and Human Services, the cabinet-level agency that regulates the $2.8 trillion U.S. health care market. Sivak joined VentureBeat’s HealthBeat conference today via a video conference (see photo above).

Just one of the areas that’s becoming fertile ground for entrepreneurial innovation: the health insurance exchanges mandated by the law.

These exchanges bring a level of transparency and openness to the insurance market that hasn’t been easy to find until now, Sivak said. The new exchanges will be large, consumer-facing marketplaces, and the insurance industry hasn’t been exactly nimble about embracing the latest consumer tech trends — so there will be lots of opportunities for startups to bridge the gap.

They’ll increase competition, because people will be able to see and compare insurance plans more easily. Now, any qualified, licensed insurer will have access to a market of potential customers via the exchanges.

Also, he said, the act will bring 30 million to 50 million more people into the ranks of the insured, creating a new pool of customers to market to. And there will be lots of data.

“You have no idea what’s possible, and you have no idea what people are going to come up with, so that’s what I’m really looking forward to,” Sivak said.

Apart from the ACA, Sivak also said government has an important role to play in facilitating health care innovation.

Government can help spur technology in three ways, he said:

• Facilitation: ”Governments at all levels are interested in seeing citizens do great things.” At the federal, state, and local levels, he said, there’s a lot of interest in helping people create new ventures, improve existing health care systems, or create new systems.
• Convening: “We’re really, really good at getting people together,” Sivak said. So if a big problem needs tackling, governments are well-positioned to gather people to talk about it.
• Incentivizing: Governments can be very effective at spurring change through relatively small incentives or through mandates. For example, he said, the adoption of electronic medical records (EMRs) stagnated until it was mandated by the Affordable Care Act in 2012.

“Just think about that: A small government intervention has caused EMR adoption to go from under 15 percent to over 70 percent,” Sivak said.

What’s more, government sits on top of a lot of data. Sivak estimates that HHS has about 1,000 data sets, 400 of which have been catalogued on the agency’s HealthData.gov website. Some of the datasets aren’t free, though HHS is working to bring the costs down. So there’s a long way to go still.

Sivak, a former entrepreneur who cut his teeth in San Francisco during the dot-com days, says his attitude toward government’s role is a new perspective for him.

“The only time I interacted with government was when I needed to file my incorporation paperwork with the State of California,” he said of his experience in the 1990s — not atypical of many tech entrepreneurs.

But if he’s right, techies — at least those who want to do business in the health care field — would do well to pay a lot more attention to what’s going on in government.

Photo credit: Michael O’Donnell/VentureBeat

Bid to pitch your favorite venture capitalist.

The charity is the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society, the world’s largest volunteer health agency dedicated to curing blood cancers, and 21 leading venture capitalists from some of the biggest-name investment firms in the country have donated lunch, dinner, or pitch meetings to hear your best ideas … after you’ve coughed up a bit of coin for charity.

Those VCs include all-stars like Tim Draper, who’s offering a not just a 15-minute pitch session but a full two-hour dinner for three at the “famous Tamarine Restaurant” in Palo Alto, Calif. Menlo Ventures is represented by Shervin Pishevar, and will be donating a “power lunch” somewhere on the also-famous Sand Hill Road.

Keith Rabois

Which means you’ll have the full time and attention of a powerful, experienced, and — most importantly — looking-to-invest venture capitalist for at least an hour, and up to two hours. Which might be hard to pass up for founders who are looking to make connections and close funding rounds.

Here’s the stellar lineup:

• Tim Draper (Draper Fisher Jurvetson founder and managing director)
• Shervin Pishevar (Menlo Ventures venture adviser)
• Keith Rabois (Khosla Ventures)
• Brian Singerman (Founders Fund partner)
• Patrick Chung (New Enterprise Associates partner)
• Babak Nivi & Naval Ravikant (AngelList cofounders)
• Brian O’Malley (Battery Ventures general partner)
• George Bischof (Meritech Capital managing director)
• David J. Blumberg (Blumberg Capital founder and managing director)
• Josh Kopelman and Rob Hayes (First Round Capital founder and partner)
• Megan Quinn (Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers partner)
• Tod Francis (Shasta Ventures managing director)
• Ajay Chopra (Trinity Ventures general partner)
• Ann Miura-Ko & Mike Maples Jr. (Floodgate Fund cofounding partner and managing partner)
• Jon Soberg (Blumberg Capital managing director)
• Tim Chang (Mayfield Fund managing director)
• Gus Tai (Trinity Ventures general partner)
• Geoff Lewis (Founders Fund principal)
• Ellen Pao (Reddit Strategic Partnerships)
• Dan Scholnick (Trinity Ventures principal James Cham)
• David Lee (SV Angel cofounder and managing director)

But it won’t be easy. If the Cook auction is any indicator, prices could get high. Dinner for three with Tim Draper carries an estimated value of $30,000, and it already has a bid at $3,000. Many of the others have estimated valuations of $5,000.

Ellen Pao.

A successful relationship with a big-name VC, of course, could be worth many times those numbers. But — and this might be the trouble with this particular auction — founders who are just starting out tend not to have huge sums of money to throw at speculative meetings.

Which means that already funding entrepreneurs who are looking to close a B, C, or D round might have a better shot. If they can convince their boards that this is a good investment.

But, lest we forget, it’s all for a good cause in the end, and it can probably be written off as a charitable donation.

“We are deeply grateful to the venture capitalists who have donated their time to raise money for the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society,” Christina Resasco, the founder of MobilizeForTheCure, said in a statement. “Their generosity will provide crucial funding needed to advance blood cancer research and development for LLS and give hope to those suffering from the disease.”

The project is part of the Venture Capital Master’s Lunch Series, which has raised about $200,000 since 2010. Last year’s winners included entrepreneurs from Australia, Poland, Russia, and the Philippines.

Image credit: Tim Draper: John Koetsier/VentureBeat

Funding for digital health grew dramatically in 2012 and is continuing to climb. The health market is pegged at $6 trillion worldwide, and there are far-reaching opportunities for entrepreneurs to transform how we practice health care. At the same time, funding for life sciences and medial devices is drying up. Health IT is the darling of investors, and venture capital firms are all trying to get in on the action.

“There are so many carrots and sticks to take advantage of here and venture capitalists like to invest in big trends,” said Stephen Kraus, a partner and Bessemer Venture Partners. “You can’t get in on a bigger trend than 20 percent of the GDP. This is a sector with massive problems, and the government throwing money at it. You would have to be missing a brain not to pick up on this fact.”

Krause participated in a panel discussion about venture capital and growth equity in health IT at VentureBeat’s HealthBeat conference today. The panel discussed trends in health IT/digital health as well as what investors look for in portfolio companies and success stories. Also on the panel was Dana Mead, a partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers who focuses in life sciences investments. He said despite the fact that interest and funding is moving away from life sciences at the moment, this is a period of transition and evolution, and like digital health, there are plenty of opportunities for innovation.

“With digital health, you see traditional life sciences investors and traditional IT investors looking at the same space,” Mead said.”There are a number of companies that could be successful in this second wave of digital health, and everyone is experimenting with business models and finding out who will pay for these products and services. It all goes in cycles. Frankly life sciences got too big and will grow back in a big way.”

Mead said that most consumers view health care as an entitlement and that investors are looking for products that have a clear return-on-investment (ROI). Promod Haque, a partner at Norwest Venture Partners, approaches the sector from an IT background and is interested in companies that bring traditional IT concepts to health care. Like Mead, he emphasized the importance of figuring out a viable business model.

“The big question is ‘Who pays for these things?’ Haque said. “If you are selling health care services to large enterprise providers, you have to convince them that there will be a fast ROI and then investors are interested. There is a general awareness among institutional and strategic corporate investors that this health vertical is very important going forward. Too many companies will get funded eventually, and then there will be a consolidation play. Big companies are not growing, and their revenue is declining, which is where acquisitions come in.”

Most of the conversation focused on enterprise products geared towards clinicians, healthcare providers, and payers. Warren Hogarth is a partner at Sequoia Capital, which has made investments in 20 health companies. He said that in addition to IT products, consumer products also have large and global potential. Certain products and business models may work in the U.S., but not in international markets where the health care industry is not structured in the same way. Mobile technology is growing fast and building products that help consumers manage and control their health care is universally appealing.

“Traditionally, health care is very silo’d– it is different in the U.S.,” he said. “Mobile is a ubiquitous world. On the consumer side, there are opportunities to be a global business from day one.”

Rock Health predicted 2013 would be a record year for digital health. VC interest in this sector is high, but this sector is still new. It came into being over the past couple years in response to seismic shifts in national policy, cultural attitudes, and new forms of technology. It is still early days, and these investors’ strategy is to find forward-thinking, experienced entrepreneurs who can lead the way into the next generation of health care, and generate large returns while they are at it.

A new economic model is emerging as the millennials are thinking smart about ways to make money on everything they own. As the “sharing economy” proliferates, peer to peer and point-to-point luxury cars are being used by the minute and sophisticated car owners are earning cash for their cars while at work. Instead of paying retail prices for top fashion, folks are using online platforms to choose and swap clothing with others. Vacationers are staying at people’s townhouses and mansions and even pitching tents in people’s gardens while homeowners turn a profit on renting out their assets.

Time and space limitations, uneasy economic times, and increasing sustainability and community values have collided to trigger a shift in in behavior, a new business philosophy. While “sharing” has been around for some time, mobile applications, advances in payment technologies and connected social networks are putting in place an infrastructure that supports trust and accessibility for community sharing – pushing this movement to a whole new level.

The impact is in the numbers. Car-sharing revenue is expected to reach over $3 billion by 2016 and peer-to-peer rentals are expected to expand to become a $26 billion industry. Perhaps most telling is the estimated total market for the sharing economy, which is projected to be $110 billion within the next few years. This market is emerging and continuing to expand at a rapid pace.

Join MIT-Stanford VLAB on May 21 for a dynamic discussion on collaborative consumption.

Topics of discussion are to include:

• What made Airbnb such a commodity, and will this work for others startups and in which verticals?
• How do the changes in auto sharing impact auto manufacturing?
• How do insurance models work in the “sharing economy”?
• What barriers are inhibiting this movement to scale?
• Should you trust just anybody with your home, car, dress, or power saw?
• The regulatory environment around this movement.

Moderator:
Kanyi Maqubela, Venture Partner, Collaborative Fund

Panelists:
Andre Haddad, CEO, RelayRides
Ronny Conway, Partner, Andreessen Horowitz
Peter Dempster, Advanced Technologies Engineer — Energy Topics, BMW Group
Andy Ruben, Founder, Yerdle

Where: Stanford University – Oberndorf Event Center (Parking and Directions)
Knight Management Center, 3rd Floor
641 Knight Way
Stanford, CA 94305

When: Tuesday, May 21
6:30 p.m. – 7:30 p.m.: Networking and Refreshments
7:30 p.m. – 9:30 p.m.: Panel Discussion and Q&A

Register here for this upcoming event.

Event Twitter Hashtag: #VLABCollab

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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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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.”

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

I guess it depends what yardstick you use.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cameron Peron is VP Marketing at Newvem

When was the last time you went to a tradeshow?

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

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

Attending a trade show is an investment

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

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

Or is it?

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

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

Gaining knowledge

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

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

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

Deals, deals, deals

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

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

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

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

photo credit: fidelramos via photopin cc

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Educating the well-educated

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

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

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

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

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

Education for the rest of us

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

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

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

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

The power of people

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

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

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

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

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

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

Follow him on Twitter @Harris. 

Top image via Flickr