VentureBeat

23andMe, the startup that helps consumers decode their genetic information, has announced two big hires: former LinkedIn Vice President of Revenue and Customer Operations, Sarah Imbach, is the Mountain View, Calif. startup’s new chief operating officer; former Yahoo User Experience Vice President, Larry Tesler, has been named a “Product Fellow.”

23andMe says Imbach was at LinkedIn for four and a half years and before that worked as an independent consultant and at PayPal. Tesler’s background include stints at Amazon and Apple. It’s interesting to see the startup making hires from internet companies, rather than the life science side, though in Tesler’s case his resume also includes Stanford University’s Department of Genetics.

David Hamilton wrote about 23andMe for VentureBeat back in February and was impressed by the interface and the depth, especially compared to competitor deCODE Genetics. 23andMe has been getting plenty of attention for its “retail DNA test”, including being named Time Magazine’s invention of the year. Basically, customers send their saliva to a lab and the company determines your predisposition to diseases like cancer and obesity. The question is whether people will see the company’s test as a tool for good health or as a novelty — even the recently reduced price of $399 is a lot to pay for a novelty.

Taking a page from fellow Brits Monty Python’s recent move into online video, Broadway composer Andrew Lloyd-Webber’s entertainment company, Really Useful Group (RUG), has launched its own YouTube channel.

RUG, which is a theatrical, TV and film production company that owns several West End theaters, hopes its online presence will translate into more music downloads, ticket sales and merchandise purchases. This pairing also highlights how Broadway shows, whose ticket sales have cooled, are trying to tap into online audiences with YouTube clips for shows such as In The Heights.

Clips on the channel span over 40 years of Lloyd Webber hits, with live performances of “Don’t Cry for Me Argentina” (Antonio Banderas sings!) and segments from the film version of Jesus Christ Superstar, plus music videos.

For those of you who want to know more about the man behind the musical mask, there’s even a Charlie Rose interview with Lloyd Webber.

Lord Lloyd Webber (yes, he was knighted) has been trying to cement his relevance in the world of pop culture, with an appearance as a guest judge on the singapalooza phenomenon show American Idol earlier this year. It makes sense that he’s trying to move his greatest hits to YouTube. Besides, he created the iconic musical Cats eons before videos of cats flushing toilets became YouTube favorites.

Sadly, my fruitless search for the Saturday Night Live parody of Cats from 1999 is mirrored by a lack of Cats videos on RUG’s YouTube Channel. Well, we’ll always have this Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat shoutout, immortalized by the TV show Seinfeld.

[Photo via malaspina.com]

When I wrote last month that I had seen and played an early build of EA’s SimCity for the iPhone, many of you seemed excited (to say the least). Well, now you can have a chance to preview the game as well — in an Apple Store — provided you live in one of the few select cities.

Apple stores in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Chicago are hosting these “EA Games Sneak Peek” events on select days in December. The idea is for EA to show off all of the games it currently has in the App Store for the iPhone and iPod touch directly to consumers, and also to show previews of two of its newest games due to launch this month: SimCity and Need For Speed Undercover.

Along with SimCity, I also got the chance to play Need For Speed Undercover last month; it’s a solid racing game that utilizes the accelerometer well. Other games sure to be on display are Monopoly (which just launched and is a lot of fun), Spore (which is kind of lame), Tetris, Scrabble and many others.

Here are the upcoming dates (unfortunately the New York event was a few days ago):

12/13 (LA) - Apple Store Third Street at 2:00 PM

12/14 (SF) - Apple Store San Francisco at 2:00 PM

12/20 (Chicago) - Apple Store North Michigan Avenue at 2:00 PM

Update: SimCity for the iPhone is now available.

[photo: flickr/paul halloway]

Laser maker Raydiance has picked up $20 million more in its quest to manufacture lasers for everyday commercial use in medicine, manufacturing, energy and other fields.

Raydiance’s lasers are a type called ultrashort pulse (USP) lasers, which pulse light on the femtosecond time scale — a method that can help keep excess heat from building up, thus preventing damage to surrounding material. But the company’s real innovation, it claims, is in making lasers easier to acquire and use.

When Raydiance first started talking about its products, it focused on the fact that its lasers were many times smaller and easier to use than the USP lasers previously available. Now the company has added another marketing message: That it can also build many times as many as other manufacturers, making the devices far more accessible.

The technology could ultimately be used to cut, slice and modify nearly any material. However, it’s immediately accessible for uses like cutting thin-film solar cells and less-invasive surgical techniques, such as placing stents in heart patients.

The investment was led by Greenstreet Partners, with previous investor Draper Fisher Jurvetson joining. The company has taken $55 million to date, split between four venture rounds and one government grant.

Since the launch of the Apple App Store for the iPhone and iPod Touch in July, there have apparently only been two games that have racked up over 2,000 reviews while maintaining a 4-star or above average (out of 5 stars): Tap Tap Revenge and Aurora Feint: The Beginning, says Aurora Feint investor and chairman Peter Relan. What that means is that a lot of people have really enjoyed these games, and in Aurora Feint’s case, there is an established fan base. With that in mind, its creators are launching a new iteration: Aurora Feint II: The Arena.

While a lot of sequels claim to propel the ideas of an original game forward, Aurora Feint II really does. Rather than being a single player experience, as the original Aurora Feint was, its sequel is focused on multiple players competing against one another. And that’s really the idea developers Jason Citron and Danielle Cassley always had in mind for the game. They wanted it to be a massively multi-player online gaming experience, and with Aurora Feint II, it will be.

But don’t think of Aurora Feint II in terms of some other popular MMOs like World of Warcraft. Instead, the game is being billed as an “Asynchronous Massively Multi-Player World.” Basically, that means that while you will be competing against others online, you will be doing so at your own leisure rather than head-to-head in real-time. The rationale behind this make sense: “What if one of the people [playing] gets a call?” Relan notes. The iPhone is an actual phone after all.

Normally, such an interruption would kill any chance of a successful online competitive gaming experience. The same can be said for a text message, or needing to check email or if you simply lose your connection. But because of the asynchronous nature of Aurora Feint II, none of that matters — the game goes on.

Here’s how it works: One person plays a level of the game (which is, at its heart, a puzzle game) and when he or she is done, sends that data to the game’s servers. As a competitor, you can then download this data (which includes not only scores but also a play-by-play of how the player made his or her moves), and put it into your game, creating a sort of “ghost” competitor.

If you’ve every played Mario Kart or other similar racing games, it might work to think of this as a ghost player record holder in time trial competition. (For talk about Aurora Feint’s gameplay itself, see my original post about the first release.)

But what’s cool is that you can actually manipulate the opposing player’s score by making certain moves at the right time. This may seem a bit odd since the other person has already played, but using weapons, you can alter their game and work toward a victory.

An Aurora Feint social network of sorts that resides within the game allows users to search for opposing players including friends who have set up a challenge for them to take.

But there is one potentially major downside to Aurora Feint II. Whereas the first game was free, the sequel will be $9.99 (though it’ll be on sale until the holidays for $7.99). But this may end up being a good strategy. Aurora Feint basically built up a fan base by creating a great game that was free. Now that people play it and love it, they may be willing to pay for it.

Considering that this version took the developers something like two to three times as long to make as the original, let’s hope so. The online elements of the sequel are much more complex, and the graphics have been updated (they look great), as has the music.

“We’ve got to find a way to pay our bills,” Cassley says. If Aurora Feint II takes off like the first one did, that shouldn’t be a problem.

Aurora Feint II: The Arena should be available at some point today in the App Store. Of course, that is entirely up to Apple, so it could be pushed back to early next week, but look for it soon.

Update: Aurora Feint II: The Arena is now available in the App Store. Find it here.

Mohr Davidow Ventures, a Menlo Park, Calif. firm, has hired two biotech experts to help it make prudent investments in personalized healthcare companies. Essentially, they will look for startups that apply technology to give patients more control over their medical experiences, and to cut costs for care providers and drug developers.

Daniel Riskin — who actually worked as a surgeon before entering industry — and Phyllis Whiteley both have firsthand experience at biotechnology companies. Riskin, named entrepreneur in residence, served as president of Interventional Dynamics, a medical tech research company. Whiteley, now executive in residence at MDV, cofounded therapeutics provider Anaphore, and has since worked pharmaceutical companies Perlegen Sciences and F. Hoffman-La Roche.

While Riskin will be primarily responsible for selecting promising startups and products, Whiteley will work with existing portfolio companies to advance their business models.

Healthcare is just one of several areas of focus for MDV, which also funds operations in the cleantech and information technology spaces. Its growing interest in personalized medicine follows current trends, which will favor new diagnostic tools, genomic efforts and health products designed for consumer use. Right now, its health portfolio includes Artemis Health and Adamas Pharmaceuticals.

Despite an endless succession of startups claiming to “beat” Google and Yahoo, there’s not, strictly speaking, any need to do so. For the average consumer search has been solved, with most searches ending satisfactorily. DeepDyve wants to tap another group of users: Students, researchers and other “information workers” who need to quickly find expert-level data.

What makes DeepDyve, formerly called Infovell, unusual is that it uses a technology fairly similar to Google’s statistics-based search. While semantics and natural language processing are the buzz words of the day, Google’s method of doing business is considered too well-developed to go up against. The difference between DeepDyve and Google is most easily understood as one of quantity. Whereas most Google results are just a few words long, a DeepDyve search could yield paragraphs of text. And instead of indexing words, DeepDyve indexes entire phrases up to 20 words in length.

Biologists, chemists, material scientists and their ilk will appreciate search that’s optimized for long strings of text because their fields are full of technical jargon. Being able to find multiple terms in proximity to one another will provide a valuable advantage in finding the right result.

One Google product, Google Scholar, does compete directly with DeepDyve. However, there’s stronger competition in the form of entrenched research tools like Ovid, which have been used for years by professionals, although those search offerings tend to be optimized to specific fields or uses.

Right now, DeepDyve is in the process of adding search verticals. It started with the life sciences, and is now branching into some other fields, like clean technology. The company is also working to raise awareness of its product with universities and individual researchers. Rather than slipping ads into search, it plans to charge a monthly subscription fee for some premium search options, like a visual layout of search terms showing their relation to each other. The company will also index journals behind subscription walls, so users may need to have paid access to individual sources to fully use DeepDyve.

DeepDyve has about 30 employees, split between offices in Menlo Park, Calif. and Shanghai, China. It has taken angel funding, and is currently looking for $5 to $10 million in venture funding,