The update, according to a press release from the Redwood City, Calif.-based company, combines its three most requested features: in-app and email alarms, quick note-based to-do lists, and pinning notes to the top of your note list.

The new features are currently available for the Mac, iOS, and Evernote Web platforms. The company says that the features will be available for more platforms in the near future.

Below is a video explaining the update. Evernote faithful with qualifying platforms can also find out more information on the Evernote Blog.

Evernote’s web service launched in 2008, and since that time it has grown rapidly. It is currently ranked 723rd globally in Alexa traffic rankings.

As this publication has reported in recent months, services such as Google’s Keep and Mammoth have risen up to challenge the company’s place in the note-keeping sector. Small updates such as as this one will go far to keep existing customers happy and attract new users.

Photo credit: Evernote

LoyalBlocks

The company was founded in 2011 by Ido Gaver and Eran Kirshenboim and is headquartered in both New York City and Tel Aviv.

LoyalBlocks has two main products that complement one another. The first is their merchant-focused loyalty marketing solution, which enables brick-and-mortar businesses to build an app, set up a base station in their store, and select rewards programs to offer customers. The second product is an app targeted at mobile phone wielding consumers. The base station set up in the business automatically sends rewards to the customer as soon as they walk in the door.

The platform also provides for Facebook integration and smart punch cards that clients can access on customers’ mobile phones. As with other services, the smart punch cards are automatically “stamped” as the customer with the LoyalBlocks app installed on their phone walks into the store.

“We have taken mobile loyalty to the next level by making it easy for merchants to give their clients more, automatically. From a business perspective, it is an incremental layer of marketing that leverages their day-to-day activities. It is a simple, innovative and effortless way of generating more business and establishing long term customer loyalty,” said Ido Gaver, the company’s co-founder and chief executive, in a press release.

General Catalyst Partners led the series A investment round, with participation from Founder Collective and previous investor Gemini Israel Ventures.

The company also announced three additions to its board of directors: General Catalyst Partners managing director Adam Valkin, Gemini Israel Ventures managing partner Yossi Sela, and mySupermarket chief executive Allon Bloch.

Photo credit: LoyalBlocks

This sponsored post is produced by StackSocial.

The iPhone is so much more than a simple phone – it’s replacing a ton of other gadgets that you’d normally take with you when you’re on the go. One of the biggest uses of the iPhone is for taking photos, and this VentureBeat offer will show you how to make the most out of each and every shot – and for just $19!

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The instructor for this course is Chet Davis. Chet has 17 years of experience in the classroom as teacher of a high school Video Technology program in California. He’s made presentations at National and Regional Conferences and led hands-on workshops for in 41 US States, 3 Canadian provinces and in Europe (European Schools Program).

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Tarun Wadhwa is a writer, researcher, and entrepreneur working at the intersection of technology and public policy.

You would think that it would be a terrible idea for a company accused of helping teenagers send each other sexually explicit images to feature bikini-clad young girls in their marketing. Most would avoid such direct associations, for good reason – it’s immature, and edgy when it doesn’t need to be.

But not the makers of the enormously popular app, Snapchat, which allows people to send images and videos that “self-destruct” after a few seconds.

The company claims messages are deleted once they are opened, but there have been a series of recent scandals showing that this may not be completely accurate.  Their product is far from perfect, and there are several ways to compromise the protection they offer.  It is never a good idea to send something over the internet that would damage you or your reputation if it became public.  While this may be common sense, it has little to do with how we actually act online.

The makers of Snapchat are right to reject the “sexting app” label — it’s not clear that this is what it is even being used for, and everyone deserves the option to communicate privately when they want, without automatically being branded as a pervert.

Within a few months of launching, the company has made an enormous and lasting impact on the culture of communication on the Internet, and we should all be grateful.

They have simplified a security process enough to the point that anybody can use it, while validating the market of the next generation of privacy-preserving ephemeral communication.  Most importantly, we may finally get a break from the forced permanence of the Facebook and Google world, where everything you do and share is a data point to be monetized and re-sold to the highest bidder.

And Snapchat isn’t even the best product out there — there’s a whole slew of communication tools that are more secure and functional making their way into the public eye.

One of those is Wickr, created by RSA veteran Nico Sell, a more serious security-focused app that uses “military-grade” encryption to send text, video, voice, and document files that can self-destruct after a given period of time.  Hospitals and law enforcement have expressed interest in a similarly functioning Android app, Gryphn.  Although it’s not “self-destructing,” keep an eye on the exciting and powerful suite of communication apps developed by encryption legend Phil Zimmermann’s Silent Circle company – they are not for “average” users, but they could provide enterprise and more serious clients a massive improvement in security.

What apps like these do is allow us a little bit more freedom to be ourselves, for better or worse.

In the copycat world of Silicon Valley startups and funding, expect to see a lot more “Snapchat for _____” type companies.  Finally, the lack of app creativity may work in the favor of consumers.  We have accepted the notion that what you do on the internet is permanent – a statement that is partially a truthful observation, and partially a threatening promise from the companies and entrepreneurs who are making it a reality – but it doesn’t have to be that way for everything.

Perhaps the greatest impact of this rising industry will be when the giants try to co-opt them, as Facebook attempted with Poke.  The issue of trust in these companies aside, it would be a winning situation for everyone for ephemeral features to be built into the services we already use.

We need more human-behavior-friendly default settings.

Privacy is complicated, and nothing is ever completely secure.  Nobody is immune from this, as Nicholas Weaver wrote in Wired, “even the head of the CIA can’t email his mistress without being identified by the FBI.”  But in the billions of messages already sent through Snapchat are a few people who didn’t have their lives ruined because of something they shouldn’t have shared.

The media can continue to ridicule the “sexting app” that so many young people are using, but they are entirely missing the point.  The same generation being blamed for the supposed “death of privacy” has become wiser than those who are criticizing them.

In a candid admission at the Milken Conference this year, former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair, when recalling his college days playing in a band, told the audience, “thank God social media didn’t exist then, because if it did, I wouldn’t be here.”  The Internet wasn’t built with security in mind, and we’re still dealing with the consequences of that.  The next generations are going to be the ones who pay the true cost of the design decisions we make today.

Tarun Wadhwa is a writer, researcher, and entrepreneur working at the intersection of technology and public policy. You can follow him on Twitter – @twadhwa – or contact him directly at VB@tarunwadhwa.com. Also, check out his upcoming book, Identified, which will be out later this year. 

Image credit: Shutterstock/Shocked man

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

“We offer unified photo storage across all your devices, for free, at 1,024-pixel quality,” founder Steve Cosman told me a few weeks ago in Toronto. “Or you can pay $5/month for unlimited resolution.”

Tomorrow MyShoeBox is launching version two of its photo backup and sharing service, with a new iPad app, updated mobile apps, and a new shared galleries feature that you use to build grouped sets of photos with people you went on vacation with or family members who shared an event such as a wedding.

The freemium model has helped the company get a quick start.

Source: MyShoeBox

Search and self-quantification

After exiting from Toronto accelerator Extreme Startups in the fall, the service saw 13.4 million photos uploaded in November, its first month. And, Cosman says, MyShoeBox users upload far more photos than Facebook or Flickr users — 3,200 each, compared to Facebook’s 220 and Flickr’s 320.

But the value proposition is much more than photo backup.

Instead, MyShoeBox is a way to enjoy all of your photos, all of the time, on any device you have. Frankly, for most people, their photos are strewn around their main computer (photos from their actual, official, camera), their phone (snapshots from their built-in camera), and their social networks (uploaded from wherever you happened to be at the time). There’s no unified view, no way to see — and search — all your photos at once.

Using MyShoeBox for the first time syncs your photos up to the cloud-based service automatically, in the background, and installing the services’ mobile apps on your Android or iOS-based phone will do the same.

That’s helpful, because we often want to see more of our photos on our mobile devices.

“Our new iPad app is an incredible way of browsing your entire photo collection,” Cosman says. “And it’s one of the only ways you can get your full photo collection on your iPad … most people don’t have enough space.”

What most interested me when I chatted to Cosman is MyShoeBox’ solution to a problem that I think I share with many other digital photographers: enjoying your own work and finding photos. A former program manager for Microsoft’s augmented reality team for Windows Phone, Cosman has placed special emphasis on automated sorting, tagging, and exploring features.

“So many people that have given up the concept of a photo collection,” he says. “Faces, places, and things are important ways to automatically categorize photos. And they keep getting smarter every day.”

So MyShoeBox highlights places you’ve been, photos you took last year at this time, events, cameras you used, and more, creating what the company calls “an interactive infographic” of your life. That includes personal quantification data like the top times you take photos, and your most photographed neighborhoods.

And if you want to search your photo collection, MyShoeBox has just rewritten its search features to be much faster and more powerful as its power users often have more than 15,000 photos each.

“iOS, Android, Windows, Mac … it works pretty much anywhere,” Cosman says. “And once together, it’s automatically organized.”

MyShoeBox is based in Toronto, Canada, and is currently raising a financing round. Its new iPad, iPhone, and Android apps will be live in Google Play and the app store tomorrow.

Image credits: MyShoeBox

A month ago CEO Tim Cook disappointed Wall Street and crushed Apple fans by saying that Apple had amazing new products coming out “this fall and throughout 2014.” Which means that none were coming out this summer, and which also means that if some new products are coming out in fall, they need to be in testing now.

Cue iWatch testing rumors.

Taiwan’s Economic Times says that Apple is currently testing 1.5-inch OLED screens from Ritek’s RiTdisplay after first building prototypes with a 1.8-inch display, which Apple rejected as being too large for a wrist-based computing accessory. The OLED screens use OGS touch sensors (“one glass solution”), which will theoretically help Apple keep the iWatch thin and light.

But Apple has presumably not ordered in volume, as Ritek recorded a first-quarter loss. Apple production partner Foxconn has also reportedly received a small-scale trial production order of 1,000 devices.

Testing the new, smaller size right now — and getting into preproduction — could help Apple get product ready for delivery to consumers in late summer or early fall.

But don’t hold your breath.

The iWatch has been rumored since late 2012, including in some almost-certainly-Apple-initiated NYT, Wall Street Journal, and Bloomberg leaks. According to at least one study, a full 20 percent of U.S. consumers want an Apple iWatch, sight unseen, and an Apple patent published in March of this year reveals that Apple is thinking about flexible wrap-around displays built into a transparent housing.

Oh, and perhaps one of the reasons for the rumors?

Samsung is supposed to be working on a smart watch, too. Perhaps Galaxy Watch? Meanwhile, Google’s entrant into the wearable computing sweepstakes is already being hacked on, developed for, and ogled.

Or would that be oogled?

Image credits: iWatch mockup by VeneStudio; Hat tip: C|Net

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hunters are excited by the possibilities, apparently.

Source: TrackingPoint

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

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

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

Ergo, it’s a sniper rifle.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

AbbeyPost is bootstrapped and based in New York.

JOOR is an online marketplace for wholesale fashion buying. The company is on track to do more than $350 million in transactions in 2013, which is more than three times the amount from 2012. More than 580 brands and designers and 30,000 buyers use the platform including many of the biggest names in fashion. JOOR recently opened up an office in Milan and is opening one soon in Sydney.

This is a prime example of a company applying technology to an industry that is predominantly offline, and succeeding. Founder Mona Bijoor said that most transactions in fashion wholesale happen at trade shows, market appointments, and with handwritten orders. JOOR’s business platform puts the sales process online so retailers and brands can connect in a more efficient way.

“This is a highly fragmented market where retailers can only source products from places they actually go and there is limited data available about the inventory,” she said in an interview. “If online sales of clothing makes sense for the consumer world, why shouldn’t it make sense for wholesale? Our job is to make retailers and brands better, smarter, and faster.”

Bijoor spent most of her career working in fashion with brands like Chanel, Elie Tahari, Cynthia Rowley, and in the buying departments of global retailers. She experienced the pain points on both sides and saw an opportunity to “pioneer wholesale evolution.”

The platform’s core technology connects brands and retailers. Brands create a profile page with marketing materials and retailers put up pages with information about their clients and inventory. Search capabilities are available on both sides using filters like price, trend, region, product etc… and the system finds relevant matches.

Buyers have access to real-time analytics about orders, notes, fulfillment, shipping and billing, as well as lead generation tools. Retailers can look at best selling items, discover new brands, and build and place orders on the platform.

The global fashion industry generates over a $1.5 trillion dollars a year and is growing. Most of the discussion surrounding about fashion tech focuses on consumers, but consumers are at one end of a very long and complicated supply chain that JOOR is  trying to make “less archaic.” This is more important than ever as “fast-fashion” has caused consumers to expect rapid turnover.

Joor’s clients include fashion heavyweights Diane Von Furstenberg, Phillip Lim, Alexander McQueen, Rag & Bone, and Thakoon. Right now the platform is only available for women’s apparel and menswear but Bijoor said she is exploring opportunities in footwear and accessories. Competitors include NuOrder, Balluun, Brandboom, but none have the high profile clientele that JOOR does (although NuOrder raised money from Rachel Zoe).

JOOR is based in New York with offices in LA and Milan and has raised $5.5 million to date from Battery Ventures, Lerer Ventures, Great Oaks VC, Landis Capital, and Forerunner Ventures.

Photo Credit: electric stove/Flickr

By Dr. Michal Tsur, a serial tech entrepreneur, and 

We live in a world where young, ambitious women will now contend with a new, and sadly pressured life question – are you “leaning in”?

While Sheryl Sandberg, the second in command at Facebook and author of recent bestseller Lean In, and her ambitious following of female professionals have a nuanced understanding of the concept, in common speak, the words “lean in” convey something too simple, intense, and aggressive.

“We hold ourselves back in ways both big and small, by lacking self-confidence, by not raising our hands, and by pulling back when we should be leaning in,” writes Sandberg in the book.

Sandberg, who is trying to launch a social movement to empower women, is admirable and certainly has wisdom to offer. However, the intensity and pressure conjured by her phrase is not the right message we should be sending to female youth. In fact, remember old high school basketball coaches barking at us to lean in? Sandberg’s message is reminiscent. “Lean in ladies! Be aggressive. Run faster. The quarter is almost over. No taking a rest now!”

The words themselves were designed to motivate us to work harder and faster; to win.

Yet, unlike basketball games, careers are not broken into quarters. They are more of an evolving marathon filled with twists and turns. The opposite of a sprint. And while muscling forward may help one win a basketball game, it’s not clear that more energy, effort, and aggressiveness is what will get women into the boardroom.

What we’ve realized in debating the message of “lean in” while looking at the careers of people like Sandberg and Mayer, is that something big is lost in the colloquial phrase that Sandberg is championing. We must redefine the phrase to convey a vision that is as big in spirit and excitement as it is in raw ambition.

As Sandberg herself states, success depends on a fair bit of luck. Both Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer and Sandberg had the good fortune to jump on the Google train in the early days. And Sandberg’s COO role at Facebook has catapulted her into tech godliness that was largely unpredictable.

Yes, smart negotiation, ambition, and sponsors were important. But, what distinguishes Sandberg, and what we’ve learned from our own careers is that success is also about creating, recognizing, and seizing opportunities.  It’s about putting oneself in a position that maximizes luck.

Let’s look at Sandberg. She had the confidence to jump between jobs with the government, the World Bank, and tech companies, following a varied and non-linear path. Mayer grabbed the CEO opportunity at Yahoo despite being pregnant, and knowing that she’d be following a long series of executive failures.

In our own careers, it’s been the opportunities that came from new connections made in school or at a conference, or from invitations to write, speak, or create, that pushed us forward.

And at Kaltura, we look at examples like Becky, one of our key project managers, who, after being told that she didn’t have enough technical experience or background, decided to take a leap, jump into a technical job and learn engineering basics on the side in order to make a career transition.

Or Charly, who, with no degree or any technical background whatsoever, led customer support at one of our competitors and later joined Kaltura as a key account manager.  Yes, these women fought hard to get ahead, but what really sets them apart is that they identified a passion, took risks, and seized new opportunities.

What we see in these examples are ambitious women that “leaned in” to advance their careers and families simultaneously. The message of “lean in” should not be to push harder, as Sandberg argues, “put your foot on the gas pedal and keep it there.”

The key, rather, is to be mindful, intentional and clear-eyed about possibilities that emerge in life and work. It is about not being guided by fear, but rather knowing your passions, being bold, and taking risks. And for women who are nearer to the top, leaning in is about being conscious of setting precedent and shaping institutions in ways that will also create paths for younger women.

So, to women (or men) who feel compelled and inspired by Sandberg but also scared about the implied added pressure to constantly push higher and farther – take a breath.  There is a way to lean in and achieve success with levity and spirit. Lean in to life. Opportunities will emerge.

The key is to be confident and aware enough to see them.

Dr. Michal Tsur is a serial tech entrepreneur, having co-founded online security firm Cyota and open-source video platform Kaltura, where she is currently president. Leah Belsky is a fellow at the Information Society Project at Yale Law School, where she contributes on online collaboration and technology policy, and is currently SVP Operations at Kaltura.

photo credit: Victor1558 via photopin cc

Today, this hot ticket-selling startup released Fanbase, a suite of customer analytics products that founder Andrew Dreskin said is a first of its kind. Venues and event promoters can use Fanbase to identify their top fans and offer them rewards for loyalty.

Dreskin’s claim to fame is “being the first guy to sell tickets on the Internet.” He cofounded a company called TicketWeb, which Ticketmaster bought in 2000. Around 2007, he saw that the main problems in event ticketing were still not being addressed and started building Ticketfly.

Ticketfly does not only sell tickets. Dreskin describes it as a “holistic technical solution” for events and venues. The platform provides events and venues with tools for ticketing, cross-channel marketing, and analytics that serve to streamline operations and drive sales.

“Historically, this industry had a lack of innovation,” Dreskin said during an interview at Ticketfly’s offices. “There were no integrated technical systems, nothing was connected, and there was no understanding of how tickets were bought and sold and who the customers are. We were the first to bring social ticketing and an integrated platform to this industry, and with Fanbase, we are continuing the theme of doing things first.”

The inspiration for Fanbase came from a discovery: that 7 percent of customers drove 30 percent of revenue. Ticketfly saw an opportunity to harness the power of these users by incentivizing their loyalty. The technology behind Fanbase is based on 12 different criteria that generate a ranking for each customer. Factors include how often a customer visits a venue, how much money they spend, their social media following, etc. Venues can adjust the criteria based on their preferences and reward their top users with perks like VIP access, presale tickets, merchandise, and drink tickets.

“Going to live events used to be an anonymous process, even if you went to the same venue 40 times a year,” Dreskin said. “Fanbase is about encouraging top fans to market on behalf of the venues and promoters, this has never been done before in the industry because no  other provider has access to this data. We are uniquely positioned to do this because we power all the technology for our clients. The industry is yearning for next-generation tools, and Fanbase is a great example of that.”

Fifty venues and promoters used Fanbase during beta testing and the feedback was “overwhelmingly positive.” Ninety-two percent of the clients said they would use Fanbase multiple times a week, and email sent with Fanbase offers to fans were twice as likely to be opened.

Dreskin told me to imagine that my favorite local venue offered me a VIP table for an upcoming show or gave me early access to shows that I might like. What’s not to like?

“It would be disingenuous to say that people solely buy tickets because they like a venue,” he said. “Of course the driver is the artist, but we are seeing more and more that people are developing great affinities for venues and promoters. If it’s a band they kind of like at a venue they love, they will go, and when they walk through the for, they are no longer a nameless, faceless person.”

Since launching in 2008, TicketFly has grown to 105 employees and 1,100 clients. Last year, the site sold tickets to 26,000 events and revenue growth continues to accelerate. Every 90 days, Ticketfly signs agreements to sell a million new tickets, and Dreskin projects it will do 250 million of gross transaction volume in 2013.

Ticketmaster is the startup’s main competitor, but Dreskin said it has major issues with technology and customer relations, not to mention alienating promoters by merging with event promoter Live Nation. Today’s releae is the first iteration of Fanbase and the platform will evolve over time as more people use it.

Ticketfly has raised $37 million in venture capital and is based in San Francisco.

Check out this video about Fanbase.

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UGallery announced today that it now has over 500 artists in its community and 6,000 original pieces of art in its marketplace. According to the company, these are the biggest numbers today for an all-original art focused startup and speak to a growing interest in buying art online.

A report issued in March by Deloitte and ArtTactic found that “the art world is moving online.” Over 300 online art ventures have launched in the past few years and at least 71 percent of art collectors have purchased artwork online and this number is expected to rise. Online and offline, the global art market is on the rise and the international business community is acknowledging art as a desirable area of investment.

UGallery is an online art gallery that features original, curated works of art in a range of genres, styles, sizes, and mediums. All the artists and pieces are reviewed by a team of in-house experts, and only 10 percent of artists who submit an application are accepted to ensure quality. Collectors can browse the inventory, narrowing options down with filters like price and color and give pieces a weeklong “test run” in their home. Major competitors in the space are Art.com, Artspace, and Artsy, but UGallery said it is unique because it eliminates gallery middlemen who are often limiting and expensive.

“For too long, collecting original art was limited to the physical infrastructure of the gallery and auction house,” said founder Stephen Tanenbaum in an email. “Other services like Artsy and Artspace are really just liaisons for art galleries. They aren’t revolutionizing the traditional art business model for artists or collectors. Instead, they’re giving galleries another selling channel. We, on the other hand, have created an online community that connects the two directly, without the hassle of the traditional physical gallery.”

Tanenbaum said this approach makes it easier to sell, discover and purchase original, high-quality artwork at an affordable price. The art world is fearsomely competitive and getting artwork into galleries or museums is difficult. Long before my VentureBeat days, I dabbled with art writing and worked at multiple museums. The process of getting artwork discovered and showcased is a lot like trying to become a movie star. Some people get lucky, but the industry is dominated by an elite cabal of influential people that is not easy to penetrate.

UGallery’s mission is to give artists a functional selling channel with a wide reach so they have opportunities somewhere between posting paintings on coffee shop walls and snagging an elusive gallery show. The company has had year-to-year growth averaging over 62 percent side 2008 and has sold art in over 35 countries.

The company is based in San Francisco with an office in New York.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Yup, you still live in a world where singer Alicia Keys works for BlackBerry.

On stage at today’s BlackBerry Live conference, Keys, the company’s Global Creative Director, announced the BlackBerry Scholars Program, a four-year scholarship that’ll be available to outstanding female students around the world. Applicants will also need to be focusing on specific science and technology curriculums to receive the scholarship.

“It’s clear we need to elevate more women to leadership roles,” Keys said.

She pointed out some startling disparities between men and women in the technology industry: Even though more women earn college degrees than men, only 5 percent of women lead startups, 56 percent leave the technology industry after entering it, and women make up only 11 percent of Fortune 500 CEOs. While the BlackBerry scholarship won’t immediately fix these systemic problems, it’s an effort to level the playing field a bit.

“This is more than just a scholarship, this is the beginning of a powerful network of women,” Keys said.

Photo: BlackBerry livestream

The latest dance crazy in Europe right now is Algoraves, a rave where you’re actually dancing to algorithms that produce music based on who shows up.

Basically the idea behind Algoraves is to take a program that can produce algorithms and constantly alter the music that’s playing. BoingBoing is reporting that the new dance craze started in the U.K. and Germany and is quickly spreading to Mexico and Australia. (I suppose the U.S. is just too lame to pick up on this for at least another year, heh.)

Algorave, a site that looks like an official hub for all kinds of information about the dance raves, explains that lots of electronic music uses software, not only for its production but also while its being played in club. Algoraves seems like a natural extension of that, turning  musical experience into a full performance.

And while this will undoubtedly label me as a trekkie, I absolutely see this as being the first steps to a society that favors math-based music over traditional scores that are inspired by a musician — just like in the Star Trek Voyager episode Virtuoso.

Let us know what you think of the video embedded above in our comment section.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Anna Alenius-Mathson is the head of communication for Rebtel.

Ever since Mother’s Day was established in 1908, Americans have asked themselves the eternal question: “What should I get for Mom?” And for more than a century the answer has usually involved giving her either greeting cards or flowers (or both). The explosion of mobile apps has found a way to change this, bringing mom squarely into the digital age, with products designed to make her feel close even though the distance between you may be great.

So if you’re looking for some new ideas on how to make mom feel special, here are a few clever app ideas that just might do the trick.

Say hello to virtual scrapbooking

Help Mom get on board with one of the nation’s top hobbies with the ScrapPad Mother’s DayPhoto Journal (Free), a virtual photo album scrapbook for the Mac and iPad. For Moms that are already Scrapbooking pros, this app will enable her to abandon her glue stick and create top-quality scrapbook layouts quickly and easily.

Albums can be organized and stored systematically and text can be easily entered in a variety of fonts and colors.

The best part is that all ScrapPad album pages can be shared with others or printed with excellent resolution, so even if Mom doesn’t own the app, you can send the album as a gift so she can show it off proudly to her friends.

Give mom the gift of professional style photos

The Camera+ ($.99) app for iPhone and iPad will let mom fine-tune your mobile camera until it takes photos as well as a pro camera can. It offers a variety of shooting modes, a stabilizer, exposure adjustments, even a grid tool that lets you use the Rule of Thirds to make compositions more intriguing.

The app uses your iPhone’s flash as a continuous fill light to improve the quality of your photos, and there’s even the ability to add aftereffects, use filters, do cropping and touch-up, add borders, as well as an easy-to-use storage system and sharing capability, so Mom can save and share all those sharp photos of her kids and grandkids.

If cards are ‘a must’, why not try a fresh approach?

The Cleverbug Cards App (Free) not only gives you the ability to customize and send your own cards, but it also reminds you about upcoming birthdays, anniversaries and special events. It conveniently stores all of your friends’ and family’s birthdates in proper order and offers hundreds of cards that are classified into useful categories (birthdays, anniversaries, etc.), which you can customize with personal photos or special messages.

The finished design can then be printed out by Cleverbug on high-quality card stock paper and mailed anywhere in the world. Or you can simply post your customized card directly to your Mom’s Facebook wall to show her that you’re thinking of her.

Help Mom chill out with the relaxation app

Give Mom the opportunity to relieve the tensions of each challenging day with a “sound bath” app called Serenity ($1.99), which claims to offer thirty different video and audio options that will help listeners unwind and relax.

Videos include a beautiful waterfall, peaceful fields, underwater vistas and even heaps of adorable sleeping kittens, while sounds include rain, distant thunderstorms and moving water.

There’s also undulating abstract forms that combine with sound to create synchronized light shows, which can be an effective tool for meditation or for use prior to sleeping. Mom can even watch it with Apple TV or stream the high-quality audio to her AirPlay speakers for maximum enjoyment.

A new twist on the Mother’s Day bouquet: Virtual flowers

If you’re completely dead-set on flowers, why not try something a bit unexpected.Flowerly (Free) is an app that will let you send a bouquet of virtual flowers to anyone you love in seconds. Bouquets range in appearance; some are free and some are part of premium bundles.

All you have to do is customize your own message, choose a contact from your iOS address book or your Facebook friends list, and combine it with the bouquet using a card template. Then, mail the whole virtual gift either by email or via Facebook.

The ease of sending makes it worthy download, not just for your Mom, but any Mom you know that deserves some love and recognition.

Send a virtual heart beat (… the next best thing to being there in-person)

Mom probably hasn’t heard your heartbeat since the pre-birth ultrasound days with her doctor looming close by, so surprise her this year with the gift of your own beating heart, which will bring back fond memories of babyhood — and motherhood.

Re:Beat (Free on iTunes and Google Play) allows you to capture and record the exact rhythm of your beating heart by placing your fingertip upon your phone’s camera or by tapping the screen to the rhythm of your heartbeat. The pattern of your heartbeat will then be transformed into a warm animation whose sound and vibration are perfectly in sync with your own heart. You can even send a greeting with your heart like, My Heart Will Always Beat For You or Wishing I Was There.

In terms of imagination and creativity, all these great options leave the traditional flowers-and-card option far behind, so if you can’t be there in-person, why not surprise here with one of unique ideas, which will give her something she can truly treasure, while keeping you close to her heart.

Anna is internationally responsible for all strategy and planning pertaining to Rebtel’s PR and communication activities. Anna has more than a decade of experience in the field of PR, marketing, digital media.

Mother’s Day card via Someecards

ME Clock combines hardware and software to serve as a “personal trainer for your mind.” The system is designed to help people break bad habits and make lasting positive changes. The ME System 24 provides a specific sequence of mind empowering exercises, behavioral modification. learning techniques, yoga moves, music and meditation. It looks like a digital alarm clock radio but has far greater ambitions than waking you up to Top 40 tunes. The accompanying apps deliver the audio content to your smartphone.

“The self-improvement industry is a 12 billion dollar a year industry in the US alone,” said founder Mike Squirrell in a Q&A.” We want to remove the never-ending burden of accumulating hundreds of self-help books and courses that cost people a lot of money and usually yield little effect, not to mention therapy. Our aim is to change the face of 21st century psychology and brain-training by giving everyone access through technology.

Squirrell spent 10 years researching and developing the ME system at his practice in London where he provided integrated medicine, personal development and behavioral training to clients looking for “sustainable transformation.” People are always striving to be thinner, richer, happier, fitter, smarter, less anxious, and more confident and Squirrell said that bad habits and negative thoughts are what inhibit people from achieving their goals. There is a whole field of study called positive psychology that centers around breaking these patterns. The ME Clock incorporates these techniques into a simple training system that customers can embark upon independently.

There are twelve “ME Programs” geared towards your specific goals, including thin, happy, calm, rich, love, energy confident, and smart. Each program has three separate levels which take between one and three weeks to complete and ME Clock will guide people through various mental exercises throughout the day. People can pick and choose the apps to suit their ambitions.

The self-help industry is massive and largely conducted offline in books, seminars and workshops, and private sessions. Sure the idea of  becoming “the ME you want to BE” invites cynicism and eye-rolls. Affirmations are not for everyone, but there are millions of people out there are looking to improve their lives in one way or another. Popular devices and tracking apps like Fuel Band, FitBit, Endomondo, MapMyFitness (and on and on) are a different incarnation of this idea. They  also provide people with information and social motivation to sustain positive habits. However, Squirrell said these systems are geared towards tracking, rather than “fixing,” and fixing requires mental training. That is where MEClock comes in.

ME Clock is hoping to raise $75,000 through the IndieGoGo campaign. The company is based in London and currently has 6 employees.

Just a day after the company reported record sales and its first-ever quarterly profit, Consumer Reports announced that the electric vehicle manufacturer’s Model S has received the highest test rating of any car in its 2013 car ratings. And just to put a cherry on top, the notoriously tough Consumer Reports writers say that the $89,650 Tesla Model S comes close to, and just may be, the best car ever.

“This car performs better than anything we’ve ever tested before,” Jake Fisher, Consumer Reports’ director of testing says. “Not just the best electric car, but the best car. It does just about everything really, really well.”

Wow.

Because the batteries are in the floor, the car’s center of gravity is very low, Consumer Reports says, giving it superb handling. The Model S, which seats 7 with an optional jump seat, has “impressive power” and uses half the energy of a Toyota Prius, for a 200-mile range.

Here’s Consumer Reports video report:

Tesla’s 17″ touchscreen, which drivers use to control the vehicle’s climate and other systems, is “like a giant iPad,” and almost as simple to use, the report states. And despite the fact that Tesla has only been building cars for a few years, the Model S performs better than vehicles made by manufacturers that have been building vehicles for over a hundred years, Consumer Reports says.

Tesla earned its first-ever profit of $15 million this past quarter on record sales of $562 million. In the earnings release, CEO Elon Musk said he anticipates demand of 30,000 cars a year in the U.S., Asia, and Europe. But with reviews like this, he may want to revise that number significantly upwards.

One note for those of us who don’t have $90,000 in loose change under the sofa seats: Musk promised that Tesla’s next model will be much more affordable.

“The Model S is priced substantially lower than the Roadster, and our third generation vehicle will again be priced much lower than the Model S,” he said yesterday in a statement.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Picking the right hostel can make or break your travel experience, and WeHostels wants to make sure you pick the accommodation that is right for you.

WeHostels is a mobile app for booking hostels and cheap hotels. Today, the startup revealed its latest update, which makes the app more friendly to people traveling in Europe. It is now available in German, French, Spanish, and Portuguese as well as English, and updates prices accordingly in pounds and euros depending on your location. WeHostels also announced a partnership with German Ventures, which will provide capital as well as strategic and operational assistance to facilitate the company’s European expansion plans.

WeHostels is a useful solution for those backpackers and wandering souls who don’t like to plan ahead but also don’t want to wander the streets aimlessly or rely on guidebooks to find accommodations. Listings include more than 40,000 places in 800 cities. While traveling, you open the mobile app and search through available listings in your destination. Each listing contains additional practical information as well as photos, comments, pricing and an option to book.

Founder Diego Saez-Gil said the target market so far has been the U.S., but since launching in August, WeHostels has seen significant organic growth in Europe and Latin America, since those are major backpacker/budget-travel destinations. The startup is responding to this demand accordingly by refocusing attention toward international markets.

“In Europe, the travel market is huge for young people and we see a huge opportunity,” he said in an interview. “The larger vision for the company is to become the world’s largest mobile travel agency for young travelers, providing all the products and services that they need on-the-go. As a travel company, we have even more reasons to go global early. The big challenge with expanding internationally is that you have to understand the local culture when it comes to doing marketing, community management and customer support.”

Saez-Gil said American startups are increasingly looking abroad for expansion in the early stages. Companies like Uber, AirBnB, and HotelTonight have met with success outside of U.S. borders, and the infrastructure and web/mobile penetration numbers are growing quickly in international markets. WeHostels competitors include Priceline’s Booking.com, Hostelworld.com, Expedia’s Hotels.com, AirBnB, and Couchsurfing. WeHostel’s takes a mobile-first approach, which Saez-Gil said distinguishes it from competitors.

“Mobile growth is exponential in international markets and smartphones already outnumber PCs,” he said. “The travel industry is a huge market dominated by big players like Priceline, Expedia, and TripAdvisor, but it has been slow to innovate on mobile and provide great services to mobile users. We are the only company that is focused on mobile offerings for affordable accommodations.”

The company was founded after Saez-Gil traveled around Europe and continuously felt the need for a mobile service that could connect him with places to stay. Hostels can range from brightly-colored eccentric hubs where travelers come together to swap stories to seedy dark buildings filled with questionable sanitation and mysterious noises. He relied primarily on guidebooks and word-of-mouth to navigate, and he felt that there was a better alternative.

WeHostels first started out as a social network for cheap travel accommodation called InBed.me, which raised $1.2 million in seed financing. The company received high demand for a mobile offering and responded accordingly by going mobile-first. This decision paid off and WeHostels has grown its bookings by 778 percent since December. Along these same lines, today’s updates are also a result of user demand.

“Last year we saw the growth we were having on mobile queries, so we made a bold decision: let’s go mobile or go home,” Saez-Gil said. “Now we saw the potential of international markets so we made a new bold decision: let’s go global or go home.”

German Ventures will support WeHostels in adapting to international markets. WeHostels has plans to release iPad and Android apps this summer and will continue to add new currencies for South American and Asian countries as well. There are also plans to add more budget hotels into the listings and expand the Hot Trips feature which helps people hunt down housing during big events like SXSW, St.Patrick’s, and Coachella.

WeHostels is headquartered in New York with offices in Bogota or Munich.

Photo credit: WeHostels

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

When you find yourself without a place to stay, HotelTonight helps you find one. Today, the last-minute hotel booking app released an update that seeks to give customers added confidence in their booking, as well as convenience.

‘Snap Your Stay’ is a new review feature where customers can post personal photographs from their stay. Once at the hotel, visitors open the app and are prompted to take a series of photos of the bed, bathroom, view, lobby etc… Once completed, the photos can be edited within the app itself, which even contains light filters (so you won’t need to open Instagram). The images are shareable on social media and will be available as part of the hotel’s profile in the app.

Popular travel sites like Yelp and TripAdvisor are based on user-generated reviews that are [in theory] less biased than branded content. All the hotels on HotelTonight are currently profiled with custom photography. Snap Your Stay will add a layer of accountability and engagement by allowing customers to share what the experience was really like.

“It’s clear that people are excited about sharing information to help other travelers make informed decisions about where to stay,” said founder and CEO Sam Shank to VentureBeat. “With this new release, HotelTonight has reinvented the hotel review for the mobile age. We’ve taken something that is typically very time-intensive and done after your trip concludes, and made it fun, visual, mobile-friendly and something you do during your trip.”

Shank used to work for a travel review site called TravelPost and said he wanted to incorporate hotels reviews into HotelTonight in a way that made sense for the last-minute, mobile user. Combined with the new Price Guarantee feature, he said travelers will have more information and peace of mind when booking rooms at the last minute. The Price Guarantee feature means that HotelTonight will guarantee its rates against competitors offerings, so people don’t need to worry about missing the best deal.

HotelTonight launched in 2011 and is now available in 12 countries and over 100 destinations around the world with more than 2500 hotel partners. Each day at noon local time, HotelTonight offers a new curated set of hotel deals. If you need a hotel room on-the-fly, you open the app, enter your destination, and it will present you with unsold rooms at steep discounts that can be booked on your smartphone.

The company released version 4.0 in September 2012 with more personalized recommendations based on their exact location, booking history, and feedback. Since raising $23 million in June 2012, HotelTonight accelerated global expansion and added German and Swiss destinations. Shanks said this is evidence of HotelTonight’s role as a “mobile commerce trail blazer.”

“We’re innovators in the space,” Shank said. “In fact, we invented the category of last minute hotel booking apps. We’re hyper-focused on mobile travel, and today’s news speaks to our commitment to innovate and continuing pushing the boundaries.

HotelTonight is based in San Francisco, California with a recently opened European headquarters. The company has raised over $35 million to date and is available on iOS or Android for free in English, Spanish, German, Italian, and French.

Enter AnyRoad.

AnyRoad is a travel startup that connects travelers with tour opportunities from local guides. The site features a selection of curated tours that offer a more authentic alternative to guidebooks and organized group excursions. Many of the tours center around niche interests, like food and drink or the great outdoors, and provide independent tour guides with a platform to reach a wider audience.

The company was founded by brothers Jonathan and Daniel Yaffe who said they are trying to do for the travel industry what Etsy did for crafts.

“This is the future of tourism,” Jonathan said during an interview. “We are enabling local tour guides to give the tours they want to give. They are already doing this, but many do not have the resources or distribution to set up their business and make money online.We are not trying to disrupt the industry, we are trying to modernize it and by doing so, democratize the space.”

The Yaffes found the inspiration for AnyRoad while on a trip to China. They were visiting the Great Wall and found themselves mired in a horde of other tourists, with a KFC in plain sight. Not wanting to see the Wall under these conditions, the Yaffes set off to find a different view point. They befriended a local named Mr. Chu who spoke no English, but took the brothers to his rural village where they could see an unobstructed view, free from the scent of fried chicken. They say Mr. Chu was really the first AnyRoad guide, and set out to build a system where people with expertise and knowledge could effectively market themselves to travelers.

Like the Great Wall, the travel sector is a crowded and fragmented space with a lot of players jockeying for growth. There are the big guys like Expedia, TripAdvisor and Viator, as well as startups like Vayable, Peek, and GetYourGuide, not to mention the likes of TripIt and Schemer which are all dedicated to helping you find stuff to do. AnyRoad fits in that middle space between formal, organized, mass-market tours, and peer-to-peer interactions, and is committed to working with local professionals, rather than international tour companies or amateurs.

One of the major problems travel startups face is building up the critical mass of tour guides and travelers on both sides of the marketplace. AnyRoad is overcoming this obstacle by forming large scale partnerships and approaching the problem from the “top-down.”

“The world would be a better place if the tourism industry supported local tour guides and local communities and governments agree with us,” Jonathan said. “We want to be the glue in-between governments, guides, agencies and travelers. We are setting up huge partnerships with governments, guide associations, and ministries of tourism to support these communities and economies.”

The business is three-pronged. There is the consumer facing marketplace where AnyRoad charges a 5.5% booking fee to tourists. Then there is the enterprise side, where guides can use AnyRoad’s CRM and CMS to build up a personal web page, connect with the right audience, and manage their communications and bookings. The service is free and AnyRoad only charges a commission if it brings in business for the guides, for example by connecting attendees at a large convention. Any tours the guides book on their own are fee-free. According to Daniel, this is “pretty revolutionary” because it puts revenue directly in the hands of the guides and enables them to operate independently without dealing with commission structures.

AnyRoad launched in beta last month in six cities- San Francisco, New York, London, Rio, Israel, and Tokyo. The company is currently in discussions with the governments of Turkey and Greece to make the platform available in those markets and localize the tourism industry, so the destination country reaps the benefits instead of international tourism companies. The Yaffes further emphasize their commitment to responsible traveling by donating to a nonprofit of the guides’ choosing.

While connecting travelers with chances to sample wine on Israeli vineyards, surf in Rio, and explore traditional Japanese architecture is a valuable service in itself, the greater opportunity is in empowering local tour guides to run and sustain a business online.

AnyRoad is based in San Francisco, California.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

For many of us, shopping is about desire and the quest for products to fall in love with. Wanelo released the third version of its mobile application today to make online shopping a pleasurable and personal experience “for everyone.”

Wanelo is a social shopping app that has a community of eight million dedicated users. People collect items that they “want, need, or love” to save and share on their profile, so it’s similar to Pinterest.  Unlike Pinterest, Wanelo is intended to drive e-commerce. Clicking an image prompts you to save the item or redirects you where you can buy it. You can follow brands, designers, and stores that you love as well as other Wanelo community members (or build up a following of your own).

This makes Wanelo is a potential goldmine for things like kitschy home goods and inexpensive, on-trend apparel.

“E-commerce is exploding, yet the market has remained primitive,” said founder Deena Varshavskaya in an interview. “We make sense of the world through the people around us, and we have a social network for every basic human need except shopping. When we look at a piece of content, we want to know who created it, who likes or hates it, who uses it, and so on.

“That’s what Wanelo is building.”

Rather than ad-retargeting or recommendation engines, Wanelo uses social networking to find products you may like. Every member has an activity feed, and last year Wanelo introduced a trending feature that reigned in its “first wave of success.” The latest version puts the personalized feed at the forefront of the user experience, so opening up Wanelo instantly provides a variety of products from sources curated by the user, making it “even more dangerous for getting lost.”

The system includes products from over 200,000 stores, including major retailers like Urban Outiftters and Nasty Gal as well as small independent shops like Etsy sellers. The more stores and people you follow, the “smarter” your feed gets. Users are spending an average of 50 minutes per day on Wanelo, and over five million products are saved eight million times a day.

At a recent media dinner that Wanelo hosted, the company’s investors spoke about how significant the traction, growth, and levels of engagement are for the startup, but also for the world of e-commerce. Varshavskaya said Wanelo’s mission is to “democratize and transform the world’s commerce by reorganizing shopping around people.”

There are millions upon millions of products for sale on the Internet and they are difficult to search through. Wanelo is building a “meta-layer” on top of e-commerce to improve the process of finding stuff to want, need, and love. Wanelo’s investors, which include Floodgate, First Round Capital, Naval Ravikant of Angel List, and Forerunner Ventures, see this as the future of shopping.

Wanelo is based in San Francisco and has raised $3 million.

Photo Credit: Wanelo

West Virginia legislators, led by Gary G. Howell (R), hoped to ban motorists from using Google Glass while driving in March. And as it has been revealed that Glass wearers could take a picture just by winking, pundits talk about Google Glass creeping them out, bars that no Glass-wearing geek would enter start banning Google’s wearable computer, and Las Vegas casinos have declared the device persona non grata. Pit bosses, apparently, have cold sweats about poker games being recorded and transmitted and players getting relayed instructions via Glass’ built-in bone subduction speakers.

Really, you wouldn’t have thought a proposal to Borg the entire human species would have met with such resistance.

Seriously, however, almost any individual thing Glass does now has been possible in the past.

Source: Steve Mann

Steve Mann’s computer-assisted vision system.

Memoto, the camera that hangs around your neck and takes a picture every 30 seconds, blew through its Kickstarter campaign goal by a factor of 10. It’s tiny, unobtrusive, and has no on-off switch — a voyeur’s delight in public bathrooms, pools, and who knows where else. Head-mounted cameras are nothing new.

Motorola Solutions — the part of Motorola that Google doesn’t own — demoed its wearable computing and head-mounted mobile computer to our own Dean Takahashi last year. And glasses with cameras are available from multiple manufacturers.

It’s probably the full-meal-deal package that Glass presents that is the problem — and the fact that it houses all of its startling capability in probably the first somewhat attractive device which someone not on the Star Trek convention scene might actually wear.

We’ve already seen the panic and anger that always-potentially-on technology can cause when Steve Mann, who wears a computer vision system, was assaulted in a Paris McDonald’s for failing to take the device off, even though it is permanently attached to his head. Glass promises to ignite that same fear, worry, and concern over privacy, multiplied by millions of potential wearers.

“Welcome to a world through Glass,” Google says in its introduction to what Glass does. “Record what you see. Hands-free. Even share what you see. Live.”

There’s no doubt that Glass is awesome, cool, and empowering, but every power that an individual gains is a power that might infringe on others … and a power that governments tend to want to control.

“This is just the beginning,” Los Angeles privacy lawyer Timothy Toohey told the NY Times. “Google Glass is going to cause quite a brawl.”

photo credit: Dunechaser via photopin cc

Foodpanda, based in Berlin, has raised $20 million to continue expanding its delivery service around the globe. In the past few months, Foodpanda and its affiliated brand hellofood entered 15 new countries, and it’s now active in 27 different markets. It also released iPhone and Android apps. This funding will fuel that growth and support Foodpanda’s quest to become the dominant global food delivery service.

The company operates like Seamless or GrubHub. Customers enter their city and browse through delivery options in that region. Before ordering, they can check out ratings, estimated delivery time and fees, look through the menu, and then place the order online. The approach is not only convenient for customers, but also helps restaurants increase their sales and distribution.

There is a massive market for the taking here, and Foodpanda is not the only one trying to capitalize on the opportunity. Foodpanda faces competition from fellow food delivery startups Delivery Hero (also based in Berlin) and London-based Just-Eat, which have each raised over $100 million in venture capital. However, these companies are active in 12 and 14 countries respectively, with a focus on Europe. Foodpanda’s focus is on emerging markets in South America, Asia, Africa, and Eastern Europe, and in a statement issued this morning, the company said it is the leading food delivery app in most of these areas.

This financing will support Foodpanda as it adds more restaurants, countries, and customers into its systems. The startup emerged out of Berlin-based accelerator Rocket Internet, and this round was led by Investment AB Kinnevik and Phenomen Ventures. Foodpanda is based in Berlin.

Photo Credit: Prenylastman/Flickr

This sponsored post is produced by StackSocial.

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The Runaway Collection: MEElectronics Headphones

No one wants to deal with wires anymore. That idea has shifted more and more to the world of headphones, and we’re offering a pair of great Bluetooth wireless headphones that are sleek, comfortable, and sound spectacular.

The Runaway Collection series of headphones by MEElectronics is 43% off the regular price here at VentureBeat – but only for a limited time. These headphones are only $57 – and that price includes shipping to customers within the continental USA.

To learn more about this offer, visit the VB Store.

Remember – all of these offers are only available for a limited time, so grab them (as well as all of our offers) while you can over at the VB Store!

Since its launch in April 2012, consumer companies have raised more than $10 million on CircleUp. CEO Ryan Caldbeck founded the company after seeing passionate entrepreneurs struggle to attract capital for their products. CircleUp features companies that are already producing and distributing their wares but looking to scale their business and reach a larger market.

“We love that investors are able to see, touch, taste, and experience the company’s products first hand,” said CEO Ryan Caldbeck. “An investor on our site can go to their local Whole Foods or Starbucks to see and test the products, which we believe helps the investor feel more connected to the investment that they are making. We also believe the lack of traditional funding for early stage consumer/retail products creates an opportunity unlike investments in other industries, where the risk of adverse selection for crowdfunding platforms is greater.”

Investors are often reluctant to invest in consumer products companies because they can involve high overhead costs and manufacturing and distribution challenges. As a result, people who lovingly produce natural face creams or kale chips can’t raise the money they need to get their businesses off the ground.  However, consumer products make up a significant portion of the economy, and people are increasingly interested in buying natural, artisanal, handmade items. Caldback founded CircleUp to act as a bridge between promising, vetted companies and investors looking to diversify their portfolio. It seeks to provide a smoother, more transparent channel for investment.

Companies featured on the site raise an average of $1 million and are able to expand their reach through partnerships with corporations like P&G and General Mills. Since the beginning of 2013, the amount of money flowing through the platform has doubled and over 70% of listed companies close deals. Caldbeck attributes this success to CircleUp’s tight focus on this particular vertical. The team has extensive experience that makes it aptly suited to address this sector’s challenges, as well as expertise in the equity-based crowdfunding space.

In a statement, CircleUp said this is the largest raise for an equity-based crowdfunding site.

Union Square Ventures, which also invested in Twitter, Kickstarter, Lending Club, CodeAcademy, and Etsy, led this round. Google Ventures, Rose Park Advisors, Maveron, and others participated in this first institutional round.

PhiSix launched its 3D simulation solution today that allows people to virtually try-on clothing before hitting “buy.”

Founders Jon Su and Jatin Chhugani earned Ph.Ds in computer science from Stanford and Johns Hopkins, respectively. Both men felt the pain of shopping online and rather than just dealing with uncertainty and returns (like most of us), they decided to leverage their expertise to digitalize one of the most important steps of shopping

“Despite all of the advancements we have seen in the past 10 years, we are really at the very beginning of apparel e-commerce,” said founder Jon Su to VentureBeat. “It would be great if we could purchase our clothes online without any doubts, but we really can’t at this point because it is too hard to find the right fit. Our goal with PhiSix is to change this.”

The proprietary technology digitizes articles of clothing from a two-dimensional photograph. Users provide basic information about their bodies and measurements and the engine will drape the 3D garment on an avatar using a physics-based simulation. From there, consumers can look at a 360 degree view, watch the clothing on a simulated catwalk, and check out a virtual fitting room. E-commerce retailers can integrate the technology into their sites with one line of code in an effort to improve conversion rates, drive sales, and cut down on returns.

Su’s background is in physics-based animation and cloth simulation, and Chhugani’s expertise is in interactive computer graphics, virtual reality, computational geometry, and high-performance computation. Together, they have developed advanced technology that maintains high visual quality, as well as customization, and scaleability. Competitors include Fites.me, True Fit, Clothes Horse, Metail, and Styku, but Su said PhiSix is better than its rivals because it can digitize and simulate garments 10 times more rapidly at prices three to five times lower than its competitors.

While e-commerce is growing, it is still dwarfed by brick-and-mortar retail, and abandoned online shopping carts are common. Part of this is due to consumer uncertainty about fit and hesitancy to buy something before trying it on. PhiSix seeks to bridge this gap between the online and offline world by creating a virtual fitting room experience. However, as with many fashion/apparel startups, success doesn’t only hedge on technology. It also requires understanding the personal and often illogical process of selecting and sampling clothing.

No matter how advanced the engine or how realistic the avatars, it may take more than 3D modeling to encourage someone to buy a pair of skinny jeans online.

During initial testing, PhiSix has digitized over 10,000 garments and over 6,000 user avatars have been created. The company is working with clients like the Tie Society and Le Tote as well as “large international e-commerce retailers,” and the tech is being used at “several major Hollywood studios.” PhiSix was founded in 2012 and the six employees are based in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Panna is a digital cooking magazine for iPhone and iPad that features high-definition video lessons led by highly acclaimed chefs like Rick Bayless, Jonathan Waxman, and Anita Lo. An issue is released every months and contains 13 seasonal video recipes from the participating chefs. The emphasis is on home-cooking, so each chef guides the user step-by-step through their favorite recipes in a home kitchen environment.

“It’s inspiring to help anyone create amazing food for someone they care about, and that matters,” said founder David Ellner in an email. “People are always looking for inspiration around recipes to find new ways to impress the people they’re cooking for. Panna uses the best chefs to provide this inspiration. I’m trying to transform the way people follow recipes and give people recipes that are guaranteed to be delicious. I want people to cook more and build their confidence around cooking.”

The app includes highly visual, drool-worthy photography of lacquered chicken, lasagna, and caramelized cauliflower, to name a few. The content is highly curated, and the chefs not only provide basic instructions, but also little tips and tricks and suggestions, like how to cook for company or making the perfect biscuit, and shopping lists. Ellner said that Panna bridges the gap between traditional cookbooks and sites like YouTube which are not curated and often have lower production quality. It was named one of the best apps of 2012 by Apple and chosen as an Editor’s Choice in the app store.

The popularity of shows like Top Chef and the expansion of the foodie movement has led to increased interest in cooking tasty, high-quality food at home. Whether it is for a dinner party or a casual Sunday supper, people are excited about whipping up restaurant-quality food in their own kitchens. Panna caters to this crowd and provides chefs wider opportunities to engage with an audience. The first download is free and after that, individual issues are $4.99 with a year’s subscription for $14.99. Content never expires and each issue also contains one free recipe.

Ellner said that his biggest challenge with Panna is getting people to pay for content in an area where so much content is free. However, since the target audience is people who are passionate about food and the product is “worth it,” this should not be an obstacle to continued growth. Before founding Panna, Ellner spent 25 years as an executive in the media industry and brought his experience with video content and digital technology to make Panna as beautiful and seamless as possible.

Anthem Ventures led this round, with participation from Lerer Ventures, Crosslink Ventures, Maveron, Advancit Capital, RSL Venture artiness, Launchpad LA, David Tisch’s BoxGroup and angels. Panna is based in Hoboken, New Jersey. The company previously raised $435,000 and partnered with  brands like Sur La Table and Whole Foods to include new chef segments on cooking equipment and vegan friendly meals.

This round will be used to expand the team, produce new content, and accelerate marketing and sales efforts. Panna is currently expanding to Android, and the June issue will feature live fire Mexican grilling recipes.

Check out this video from Jonathan Waxman (pictured above) about how to make a perfect apple tart.

Photo Credit: Panna

I’m a big fan of business networking (and I’ve even written a book about it!), but there’s often a misconception that networking events have to be big business card exchanging bonanzas.

Don’t get me wrong, business cards are a valid way to exchange information, but networking events should be much more than speed dating for your business.

Last week I attended my 54th Nashville Geek Breakfast (or that’s what Wolfram Alpha tells me). Together with new and old friends, we discussed topics such as mobile apps, Twitter, Foursquare, WordPress, co-working, and travel. This was just with the few people at my end of the table. Each breakfast always leaves me energized and excited. It was particularly special because a Geek Breakfast was also taking place in Conway, Arkansas; Tampa, Florida; and Grand Rapids, Michigan. Four Geek Breakfasts across the country on the same day — with people prioritizing bacon over business cards.

What I love about Geek Breakfast is the random networking that occurs with the people you end up seated with. You never know who you will meet or what you will end up talking about. There are no sponsors and no membership fees. Just coffee, bacon, eggs, and fellow fans of all aspects of technology. Originally, I started it as a way to keep attendees of BarCamp Nashville and PodCamp Nashville — the city’s two big, free tech “unconferences” — connected between each annual event.

That said, here’s a few tips I’ve learned for keeping the conversation flowing beyond your business card:

1. Always make new people feel welcome. Ask their name and introduce them to others in the group. Bonus points if you can introduce them to someone who works in their field.
2. Arrive early. Try to be the first to arrive to welcome people as they join you.
3. Read your feeds before you go, so you can be up to date on any technology news to talk about. Bonus points if you are already subscribed to VB.
4. Ask open-ended questions to attendees and listen carefully to the answers. Focus on listening more than speaking.
5. Search your event name or hashtag on Twitter before and after the event. Interact and answer the questions you find.
6. Follow up. This one keeps the conversation flowing after the event. If you met someone you want to get to know better be sure to shoot them an email or give them a call and set up a coffee.

Networking isn’t a bad word. It’s about connecting with like-minded people. Business can certainly come as a result, but even better are the long-lasting friendships that are built from meeting in real life.

Bacon photo via Shutterstock

Dave Delaney is President of Delaney Digital Marketing Consulting in Nashville, TN. He writes frequently about new and traditional methods of business networking at New Networking on his blog. Dave is also the founder of PodCamp Nashville, an annual gathering of people who love digital media and want to share their experiences with the community and  Geek Breakfast, a multi-city tech meetup where locals congregate over bacon, eggs, and plenty of coffee once a month to discuss topics like social media, digital marketing, design, programming, and ways to better their communities. His new book, New Business Networking: How to Effectively Grow Your Business Network Using Online and Offline Methods, comes out in June.

Chris Hollindale is cofounder and CTO of seed-funded stealth startup Hasty.

If you’ve ever tried out a Nike+ FuelBand, a Jawbone UP, or apps like RunKeeper or Strava for runners and cyclists, the chances are that you’ve seen the powerful effects that gamification can have.

Gamification is an effective mechanism that taps into our naturally competitive instinct to help change our behavior. And in the case of health and fitness apps, this change of behavior means real lifestyle changes, enabling us to be fitter and healthier.

But is this gamification being applied to the right health metrics? Could it be applied to areas that have even more of a positive health impact?

In the health and fitness space, the best examples of gamification are those employed by the likes of Nike+, Jawbone and FitBit’s tracking devices. Statistical and anecdotal evidence shows how effective the gamification is here – FitBit reports that its users take 43 percent more steps. But is tracking your steps  – which is ultimately what these devices do — actually all that good for you?

I’d argue that there are many more important metrics when it comes to living better and healthier, and this is where the future of health gamification will lie.

An interesting possibility is applying gamification to real health metrics. Services like WellnessFX now allow consumers to evaluate all manner of data points about themselves, from nutrient levels to cholesterol and testosterone. Being able to measure and improve these core health metrics is a huge leap, and I can see exciting applications of gamification applying here in the future. It could be that you’re able to create and compete with your own personal wellness score based on a variety of health metrics.

Or … even try to beat your mate’s level of testosterone – the ultimate “who’s the bigger man?” competition.

Of the metrics that people currently track, the one that has the most overall impact is food. Gamification has the potential to have a huge impact on the way we eat and the choices we make when it comes to food, and this can make a monumental impact in terms of our collective health.

If I earned a badge for eating well during the day, or was competing with a friend to see who could stick to a diet the longest, I would be way more incentivized to persevere and eat well. The problem standing in the way is that currently, tracking is hard: it’s simply not automatic enough.

But if that were to be resolved, the applications of gamification to food tracking become really interesting. Fooducate is a good example of gamification already being applied to food – by scanning barcodes, it grades the groceries that you buy to encourage you to eat better.

And Google Glass has the potential to fundamentally change the way we track and gamify health.

Imagine being able to track and gamify your statistics for any sport – like what your shot accuracy was in your latest tennis game – or having Google Glass automatically read the stats off your bike machine at the gym. And how about creating a proper augmented reality experience for exercise – extending the idea created by the Zombies, Run! smartphone app, your morning run could be turned into all manner of videogame-style scenarios, from escaping zombie hoards to chasing down one of your friends.

And its tracking applications will go way beyond physical health – it could even be used to track and gamify the number of words you spoke during the day, or the number of social interactions you had.

There are many opportunities for new applications of gamification in these areas. As a final thought, suppose Google Glass could record all the food you ate, the portion sizes and how much food you left on your plate. Suddenly, you’d have cracked the food-tracking problem and you’d have a massive opportunity to gamify and fix our increasing battle with preventable, diet-related health problems.

Photo credit: Chris Chabot/Google