Thursday, January 12, 2012

Y! Alert: TechCrunch

Yahoo! Alerts
My Alerts

The latest from TechCrunch

Do We Need Doctors Or Algorithms? Top
HealthTechI was asked about a year ago at a talk about energy what I was doing about the other large social problems, namely health care and education. Surprised, I flippantly responded that the best solution was to get rid of doctors and teachers and let your computers do the work, 24/7 and with consistent quality. Later, I got to cogitating about what I had said and why, and how embarrassingly wrong that might be. But the more I think about it the more I feel my gut reaction was probably right. The beginnings of "Doctor Algorithm" or Dr. A for short, most likely (and that does not mean "certainly" or "maybe") will be much criticized. We'll see all sorts of press wisdom decrying "they don't work" or "look at all the silly things they come up with." But Dr A. will get better and better and will go from providing "bionic assistance" to second opinions to assisting doctors to providing first opinions and as referral computers (with complete and accurate synopses and all possible hypotheses of the hardest cases) to the best 20% of the human breed doctors. And who knows what will happen beyond that?
 
Peel Launches New Social TV App For iOS Top
peel-20You may remember Peel as the makers of the pear-shaped hardware device which sits in between your smartphone an TV, turning your phone into a universal remote control. Today, as promised, the company has updated its companion mobile application with more social features that allow you to share the shows you're viewing, see what your friends and family are watching, post recommendations and comment on others' posts.
 
With The Clicky Value-Wheel, Groupon Puts The "No" In Innovation Top
clickyYou can say a lot of things about Groupon, but not that they lack a great sense of humor over there. This morning, the company distributed a press release touting a new invention called Clicky, the Clickable Value-Wheel (make sure you watch the behind-the-scenes video below too). The company invites players to sign in with their Facebook account and then spin the wheel to potentially score a discount on select Groupons ($5, $10, $50 or $100).
 
Meet Your New Reality TV Stars: Start Engine Announces Its First Class Of Startups Top
start-engine-production-3Today  Start Engine, the L.A.-based accelerator that's the focus of a new reality TV show, is announcing its first round of startups. The show, which comes from Cameron Casey, producer of the TechStars reality program on Bloomberg TV, will again film entrepreneurs in a documentary-style format as they make their way through a tech accelerator program.
 
Eyeview Raises $5.2 Million For Personalized Video Ads (And They're Pretty Nifty) Top
holosharkPersonalized video ads sound like one of those visions of that future — like holographic sharks — that are always a ways off. But a company called Eyeview is already making them. Their technology is impressive, and they've worked with brands including AT&T, T-Mobile, and McDonalds. Today, the company is announcing that it's raised $5.2 million in Series B funding, in a round led by Nauta Capital (Nauta general partner Dominic Endicott will be joining the company's board). Also participating in the round are existing investors Gemini Israel Funds, Lightspeed Ventures, and Innovation Endeavors — which is best known for being longtime former Google CEO Eric Schmidt's firm. Eyeview's technology is best demonstrated by looking at one of their actual ads — which you can see in the video embedded below.
 
Return Path Expands To Austin, Acquires TC50 Finalist OtherInbox Top
otherinboxEmail certification and reputation monitoring company Return Path this morning announced that it has acquired OtherInbox, which helps users regain control over their email inbox. OtherInbox is and will remain based in Austin, Texas, as a wholly-owned Return Path subsidiary with CEO Joshua Baer still at the helm. We're very familiar with OtherInbox around here - the company was a finalist in the TechCrunch 50 conference we organized back in 2008.
 
Ampush Media Acquires One Of Bill Gates' Favorite Education Startups, Academic Earth Top
Academic EarthAmpush Media, an online marketing startup, has acquired Academic Earth, an online education video site that's sort of like a "Hulu for Education" and a Bill Gates-favorite. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. As we've written in the past, Academic Earth is a user-friendly, curated platform for educational videos that allows anyone to freely access instruction from the scholars and guest lecturers at the leading academic universities. The site offers 350 full courses and over 5,000 total lectures from Yale, MIT, Harvard, Stanford, UC Berkeley, and Princeton that can be browsed by subject, university, or instructor through a user-friendly interface.
 
Google Fuses Google+ Into Search — And There Are Bigger Changes Afoot Top
Personal Results 2-1Since the launch of Google+, Google has been putting a lot of muscle behind promoting and integrating the service into its core products. Fire up a new Android 4.0 device, and you'll be prompted to create a Google+ account if you haven't already. They've given it TV ads, not to mention a priceless promotion on its homepage. And today, Google is launching an update to its core search engine at Google.com that continues this trend — and then some. They're calling it 'Search plus Your World'. The short version is that Google search results are going to be automatically personalized (to a greater degree than they were already) for each user, with signals drawn from your Google+ Circles being used to highlight things your friends — or you, yourself — have shared.
 
Mo' Money, Mo' Marketing: Zmags Raises $7M, ThinkVine Lands $8M Top
zmagsZmags, a provider of rich media mobile and social merchandising solutions, has secured $7 million in financing from Square 1 Bank and from existing backers OpenView Venture Partners and Northcap Partners. Marketing optimization software company ThinkVine this morning announced that it has raised $8 million in Series C funding from Northwater Capital Management and existing investors, including Draper Triangle, DFJ Portage, CincyTech and Ft. Washington Capital Partners.
 
BetterWorks Adds Catering To Office Perks Platform Top
betterBetterWorks, a company that gives small companies an easy way to reward and incentivize employees, is adding a new feature to the mix—catering. As we've reported previously, BetterWorks, which was co-founded by Paige Craig and co-creator of Farmville Sizhao Yang, launched to help small businesses manage company perks and rewards. The startup gives small businesses, startups and companies access to corporate rates on things like gyms and salons, which those businesses can then offer to their employees as perks.
 
Medialets Turns On Private Marketplace For Mobile Ads Top
Medialets Private MarketplaceBuying mobile ads across different apps and mobile sites is a highly inefficient process today. There are dozens of ad formats, about 85 percent of mobile ad inventory goes unsold, and it is difficult for advertisers to reach the scale they require. Mobile ads are ripe for a marketplace to make it more efficient, but publishers are wary of ad marketplaces, having seen how they pushed down average prices per impression on the desktop web. Today, Medialets is launching a private marketplace for mobile ads which attempts to address the problems of both mobile publishers and advertisers in a unique way.
 
Oracle Taps Cloudera For Hadoop Distribution Of Big Data Appliance Top
cloudOracle has tapped Cloudera, the startup that commercially distributes and services Apache Hadoop based data management software and services, to provide an Apache Hadoop distribution and tools for Oracle's newly announced Big Data Appliance. Hadoop is a Java software framework born out of an open-source implementation of Google's published computing infrastructure which is fostered within the Apache Software Foundation. Hadoop supports distributed applications running on large clusters of commodity computers processing enormous amounts of data. Cloudera helps distribute Hadoop, and provides practical services around the technology, similar to what Red Hat does for the Linux framework.
 
Badgeville Proves Gamification Is Here To Stay, As Recyclebank & Others Buy In Top
95585v5-max-250x250Badgeville is convinced that 2012 is going to be a big year for gamification and that the startup can help your company take advantage of all the elements of gaming that make us tick (and click), whether they be leaderboards, badges, leveling up, experience points, or any of that good stuff. That was the motivation behind the company's launch at Disrupt San Francisco in 2010, where Badgeville won the Audience Choice Award. And there are plenty who agree that gamification (and Badgeville's vision of what it means to web business and enterprise) will continue to play: Among them, Norwest Venture Partners, El Dorado Ventures, Trinity Ventures and Webb Investment Network, who collectively poured $12 million into the startup in July of last year. (Following a $2.5 million round of seed post-Disrupt in November 2010.)
 
SohoOS's Small Business Management Suite Gets An $8M Vote Of Confidence Top
SohoOSA year ago, Mangrove Capital Partners invested $1.75 million in SohoOS and its small-business management service. Today the company is announcing that Morgenthaler Ventures is leading a second round of financing to the tune of $8 million (it's also the firm's first investment in an Israeli-based startup). All existing investors, including Mangrove Capital Partners, Kima Ventures and The Time are participating in the round as well. Joining Mangrove's Michael Jackson on the company's board will be Morgenthaler Ventures' Mark Goines, whose previous experience of running TurboTax, GM'ing Inuit's consumer division, as well as backing the likes of of Mint.com as an angel investor, should come in handy for SohoOS as it begins to double down on user acquisition.
 
Sony Shares Holiday Sales Numbers For The PlayStation Top
playstation-default-554x341Sony Computer Entertainment reported some solid sales numbers for its various PlayStation systems for the past holiday season today. Sony says that they moved a total of 6.5 million PlayStation 2/3/PSP/Vita units worldwide (Sony defines "holiday season" as between November 21 and January 5 in Asia, November 21 through December 31 in America, and November 18 through December 31 in Europe).
 
Daily Crunch: Showtime Top
1517Here are some highlights from yesterday’s post on TechCrunch Gadgets: Live Coverage of CES 2012 Eyes On: The Delightfully Retro Samsung DA-E75 Speaker Dock New Pocket Projectors From 3M Pump Up The Lumens MakerBot Announces Their Latest 3D Printer, The Replicator Vizio Breaks Into PC Market With Five New Models Monster Wins CES With Feathers And Spikes
 
Former Facebook Engineer Impressively Logs A Bunch Of Facebook Bugs Top
Screen Shot 2012-01-09 at 11.35.25 PMAbout two weeks ago, I couldn't update my status on Facebook, like it just wouldn't let me, showing me "Invalid Request" error messages even though my requests are totally valid DAMMIT. And then just like that the fail stopped and I could update, inexplicably.  In my humble experience, I've come across so many Facebook bugs I've given up on getting frustrated and now just hope they'll eventually go away. I regularly just straight up don't receive Messages and can we just talk about how the Like button just doesn't work. Can we?
 
Takeaway.com Picks Up €13 Million In Funding Top
takeSome interesting news from The Netherlands: online food ordering and delivery service Takeaway.com has been delivered 13 million euros - roughly $16.6 million - by Dutch VC Prime Ventures. With the additional capital, the Dutch company behind the food ordering service aims to continue its international expansion, after starting local websites in a number of European countries (including Belgium, Austria, the UK and Germany).
 
Formspring Hits 4 Billion Answers; Transforms Into Content Curator With "Smile Sort" Top
formspring-logoAs Sarah wrote in November, social Q&A service Formspring has been making an effort to slowly build out the connections between its users by offering "who made you smile" and "who you responded to" categories to user profiles, but it is also going up against Facebook by becoming a "network built around users' interests." Of course, the site has to contend with the billions of "Likes" accumulated on Facebook, which compose its own interest graph, and it has done so with "Smiles," Formspring's equivalent of "Likes." Today, the service is adding another feature to its functionality, a tool called "Smile Sort" that aims to transform the service into a content curator.
 
Basis Unveils Web Interface For Sensor-Laden Fitness Band Top
jeffsdashboardmedThe makers of the Basis fitness band were at Pepcom's Digital Experience event showing off their namesake accessory, but that's not all that they wanted to reveal. They also demoed their new web interface, which is meant to take all of data the Basis can collect and it turn into a meaningful way for users to track their activity levels.
 

CREATE MORE ALERTS:

Auctions - Find out when new auctions are posted

Horoscopes - Receive your daily horoscope

Music - Get the newest Album Releases, Playlists and more

News - Only the news you want, delivered!

Stocks - Stay connected to the market with price quotes and more

Weather - Get today's weather conditions




You received this email because you subscribed to Yahoo! Alerts. Use this link to unsubscribe from this alert. To change your communications preferences for other Yahoo! business lines, please visit your Marketing Preferences. To learn more about Yahoo!'s use of personal information, including the use of web beacons in HTML-based email, please read our Privacy Policy. Yahoo! is located at 701 First Avenue, Sunnyvale, CA 94089.
Posted by at

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)