Friday, March 30, 2012

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Sources Say Richard Branson Has Joined Dave Morin's Slow Ventures Top
bransonAmen, the 'strong opinions' app that's making waves and has high profile investors like Ashton Kutcher, released a new version of its iPhone app this week. It's staying deliciously simple but Version 1.5 of the app added some long needed new features. It also took in a fresh $1m (taking its total pot to $2.9m) from Sunstone Capital and Path's Dave Morin, came on board as an Angel angel investor via his vehicle Slow Ventures. But we understand that Amen may well take in a new investor who you might have heard of: noted global entrepreneur, Sir Richard Branson. We have also heard from well placed sources that Branson is a silent partner in Slow Ventures with Morin.
 
Amid UDID Uncertainty, AppRedeem Creates New ID Scheme, Groupon Adopts Top
UDID-e1292882803383As you've likely heard, the "UDID-calypse" is upon us. Because of mounting privacy concerns (from Congress, etc.), Apple has begun rejecting iOS apps that access UDIDs, and will eventually do away with them altogether. For now, it remains unclear how long that will take, but, in the meantime, developers are scrambling to find alternatives. (Yesterday, Kim-Mai laid out some of the options available to those looking to take preemptive action.) There's no question that the UDID issue has big potential ramifications for mobile advertising, as Amit Runchal points out. Developers and mobile ad companies unilaterally need to find a workable solution, and one advertising startup thinks it may have just that. Mobile ad platform AppRedeem is developing an ID scheme it's calling the "Organizational-Specific Device Identifier" (ODID), which it believes provides a long-term alternative to UDIDs.
 
Wikipedia's Next Big Thing: Wikidata, A Machine-Readable, User-Editable Database Funded By Google, Paul Allen And Others Top
wikimedia-logo2Wikidata, the first new project to emerge from the Wikimedia Foundation since 2006, is now beginning development. The organization, known best for its user-edited encyclopedia of knowledge Wikipedia, recently announced the new project at February's Semantic Tech & Business Conference in Berlin, describing Wikidata as new effort to provide a database of knowledge that can be read and edited by humans and machines alike. There have been other attempts at creating a semantic database built from Wikipedia's data before - for example, DBpedia, a community effort to extract structured content from Wikipedia and make it available online. The difference is that, with Wikidata, the data won't just be made available, it will also be made editable by anyone.
 
The Ground Beneath Apple's Walled Garden Top
800px-Eglinton_Walled_garden_wallApple's blanket rejection of apps accessing UDIDs is just the latest in a long line of erratic behavior on Apple's part of enforcing the rules of the iOS App Store. Sure, Apple warned developers that they were deprecating UDID, but like many of Apple's Solomonic pronouncements about the iOS App Store it was a little unclear, vague and open to interpretation. Many developers assumed that they would have at least until the release of iOS 6 to clear things up, but that turned out to be too optimistic.
 
Israeli-American Accelerator UpWest Labs Graduates Its First Batch Of Startups Top
screen-shot-2012-02-07-at-12-49-35-pm2When it comes to countries with thriving startup ecosystems, Israel ranks among the best. With nearly 5,000 startups currently in business -- second only to the U.S. -- the country's pool of entrepreneurial talent has been attracting Western businesses and entrepreneurs for years. But, in January, Gil Ben-Artzy and Shuly Galili launched a startup accelerator that aims to reverse this trend in favor of Israeli entrepreneurs, by bringing the country's promising founders to Silicon Valley to help them kick start their businesses. And, today, after 10 weeks of mentoring, networking, and iterating, UpWest Labs is revealing the six graduates of its inaugural batch.
 
Best Buy To Shut 50 Stores In Streamlining Effort Top
wreckinTechCrunch's Best Buy tag isn't exactly a heartening place to visit. In the last few months, it "stole Christmas," been "finished," and is now "going out of business." Dire straits indeed for a company that has defied the odds not only against big retail competition but against deadlier online opponents as well for nearly 50 years. But an announcement today seems to give a little weight to the doom and gloom expected from a tech community that views Best Buy as an anachronism. Best Buy will be closing 50 of its big box stores and laying off some 400 people, mostly on the administrative side. Is it rightsizing or just plain attrition?
 
Patients Are More Than A Vessel For Billing Codes Top
Patient as Billing Code VesselIt will be virtually impossible to succeed in the new reimbursement model without recognizing what has long been said, but little done about it -- "the most important member of the care team is the patient." Having implemented or reviewed over 100 health IT systems, there is one common purpose at the core of the architecture of these systems -- how to get as big a bill out as quickly as possible. That has been an entirely rational response to the flawed reimbursement model at the heart of healthcare's hyperinflation (here's a not-so-fun fact: Since the 60's, while all non-healthcare expenditures increased 8x, healthcare increased 274x).
 
Kickstarter Shares The Effects Of Its Blockbuster Season Top
df_pledges_per_week_logo.largeFebruary was a big month for Kickstarter. Not only did they have a number of record-breaking projects, but they were shoved into the mainstream consciousness with a flood of traditional news coverage. But there was always the question of whether these thousands of pledges would have any lasting effect on the site. Could such a rush of attention actually have negative effects, increasing competition and bringing in more projects than the site's population of donors can handle? Fortunately, that doesn't seem to have been the case. The site's big month appears to have made a lasting increase in both projects, users, and funding.
 
Confirmed: LivingSocial Co-founder Eddie Frederick Steps Down From Leadership, Board Top
6a00e553b7e58b8834010536b4bf69970c-800wiStartupStats got wind of news this afternoon that LivingSocial Co-founder Eddie Frederick is stepping down from both his leadership position today, and from his role as a member of the company's board of directors. We've since been able to confirm the news by way of LivingSocial Director of Communications Brendan Lewis. Frederick co-founded the daily deal giant back in 2007 with CEO Tim O'Shaughnessy, CIO Val Aleksenko, and CTO Aaron Batalion. The four met while working for Revolution Health, and, after completing work on the consumer healthcare portal, they decided to leave to pursue their already-launched Facebook app, Virtual Bookshelf. The book solution, formerly known as Hungry Machine, was initially the company's flagship product, before it became the Groupon competitor we know today.
 
The Cloud Will Cure Cancer Top
Moneyball-Jonah-Hill-boardMuch ink has been spilled on the huge leaps in communications, social networking, and commerce that have resulted from impressive gains in IT and processing power over the last 30 years. However, relatively little has been said about how computing power is about to impact our lives in the biggest way yet: Health. Two things are happening in parallel: technology to collect biological data is taking off and computing is becoming massively scalable. The combination of the two is about to revolutionize health care. Understanding disease and how to treat it requires a deep knowledge of human biology and what goes wrong in diseased cells. Up until now this has meant that scientists do experiments, read papers, and go to seminars to get data to build models of both normal and diseased cell states. However, medical research is about to go through a tectonic shift made possible by new technological breakthroughs that have made data collection much more scalable. Large amounts of data combined with computers mean that researchers will have access to data beyond just what they can themselves collect or remember. A world with affordable massive data in the clinic and in the lab is on the horizon. This will mean exponentially faster medical progress.
 
WSJ: Google Planning To Sell Tablets Straight To Consumers Top
nexustabHere we go again: the rumors of Google branching out into the tablet space have been floating around for what seems like ages now, and the Wall Street Journal has jumped into the fray. They cite the usual handful of unnamed sources, who this time say that Google is planning to open up their own online store a la Amazon to sell Android tablets. Not just any Android tablets, mind you -- co-branded ones that bear Google's name along with that of the manufacturer. Google does many things (some better than other), but they're definitely not in the consumer hardware production game.
 
Algorithmic Essay-Grading: Teacher's Savior Or Bane Of Learning? Top
roboA contest is underway at data-crunching competition site Kaggle that challenges people to create "an automated scoring algorithm for student-written essays." This is just the latest chapter in a generations-long conflict over the nature of teaching, and to that end it's also just one of many inevitable steps along the line. Automated grading is already prevalent in simpler tasks like multiple-choice and math testing, but computers have yet to seriously put a dent in the most time-consuming of grading tasks: essays. Millions of students write dozens of essays every year, and teachers will often take home hundreds to read at a time. In addition to loading the teachers with frequently undocumented work hours, it's simply difficult to grade consistently and fairly. Are robo-readers the answer? Mark Shermis at the University of Akron thinks it's at least worth a shot.
 
What Does A Post-UDID World Look Like For iPhone And iPad Developers? Top
UDIDThis past week has been a big wake-up call for the iOS developer community. The need to move away from UDIDs, or an ID scheme that many developers rely on to power advertising and store data about their users, took on extra urgency after Apple issued a few app rejections related to UDID use over the past week and a half. Even though Apple told developers that it would deprecate UDIDs about six months ago, the community hadn't yet converged on a good alternative. There is a lot of misinformation right now. Because Apple often communicates policy changes through one-off app rejections instead of publishing a clear and transparent notice to everyone, developers get aggravated by rumors. While being super secretive stokes consumer appetite for Apple products, it's a ridiculously awful way to operate a platform that 700,000 apps rely on. Chartboost, which does direct advertising trades between developers, sent out an e-mail last night saying that the stories about UDID rejections are "completely fabricated." But another indie developer, TapBots, posted an actual copy of a rejection notice they received this morning (pictured below). So what is going on?
 
Maxim Minimized. Big Layoffs Hit Men's Mag Web and Editorial Staff Top
Maxim MagazineThe Internet killed the magazine star. There's been a major round of layoffs at Maxim magazine. Senior Editor Seth Porges is at least one employee who got the axe, according to our sources and confirmed by a recent update to his Twitter bio that now lists him as "EX-MAXIM". Update: We've confirmed there's been six layoffs from the editorial, web, and photo teams, whose total full-time headcount numbers roughly 13, so just under half of that staff. The layoffs could be a response to declining magazine sales due to the fracturing of men's attention caused by rise of the internet and social media. There's just more places for men to look at gadgets, guns, and girls than there used to be.
 
It's Time To Believe In RIM And The BlackBerry Again Top
blackberry1Research In Motion, maker of the once ubiquitous BlackBerry, just released its Q4 2012 earnings. They're not good. Revenue dropped to $4.2 billion, down 19% from the third quarter. Likewise, BlackBerry sales plummeted 21% from Q3 down to 11.1M units, but surprising, PlayBook sales were way up to 500k units. One of the company's former co-CEO's Jim Balsillie resigned amid what we're hearing are deep layoffs throughout the company. This is the first set of financial data released under the new CEO, Thorsten Heins. Even though there are black clouds looming over Waterloo, as my headline states, it's time to believe in RIM again. The conditions are right for a rebirth.
 
Foursquare Adds Bios To Profile Pages, Evolving As A More Self-Contained Social Network Top
foursquare_logoFoursquare today rolled out the ability for users to add short personal "bios" to their profile pages on the site. These bios are limited to 160 characters or less, and can be imported directly from a user's Twitter account or written from scratch. It's another small step in Foursquare's progression from a fun app that plugs into sites such as Facebook and Twitter to a more self-contained, standalone social network in its own right. Since the company secured $50 million in funding at a $600 million valuation last summer, Foursquare has been steadily adding new features such as restaurant recommendations and passive location detection aimed at fleshing out the app's user experience and increasing its stickiness.
 
RIMour: RIM Is Laying Off Execs As Dust Settles Post-Earnings Top
blackberryAn errant tweet points us to the news that Research In Motion CEO Thorsten Heins is "clearing house" and "SVP/VP-level execs" are being fired. What does this mean? Hopefully a turnaround and, more cynically, an effort to reduce costs. Either way, RIM is changing.
 
RIM Falls Short: BlackBerry Shipments Down 21% From Q3, Former Co-CEO Jim Balsillie Resigns Top
sadberryThis just in folks: RIM has released their Q4 2012 earnings report, and it paints a pretty bleak portrait of the ailing company. RIM posted quarterly revenues of $4.2 billion, down 19% from the previous quarter, and down 25% from the year-ago quarter. The Waterloo company also reported a net loss of $125 million or $0.24 per share diluted in Q4, along with earnings per share of $0.80. In the days leading up to the release, analysts expected earnings of $0.83 cents a share on revenue of $4.56 billion.
 
FLA Report Reveals Issues At Foxconn Plants, Details Solutions Top
apple_logoThe Fair Labor Association has concluded its month-long investigation of Chinese manufacturer Foxconn's factory conditions, and as they indicated early on, they have encountered "significant issues," though it's far from the sub-Dickensian hellhole many perhaps expected. They have focused on a few of the most significant problems and made some suggestions as to how to remedy them. Ultimately these solutions will need to be monitored by Chinese authorities — the same authorities under which the previous, nominally illegal excesses of Foxconn's were swept under the rug. But with the eye of the world upon them, it may be that even the most lax of regulators will have to make an effort to keep their industry in line with the laws that ostensibly bind them.
 
Facebook Tests Letting Advertisers Optimize For Results (Such As Page Likes Or App Installs) Top
FacebookAdsAdvertisers looking for higher ROI from their Facebook self-serve ads may soon see some new tools. Facebook tells us its testing new features like "Objectives" which lets advertisers ask Facebook to "Show this to people who are more likely to: [Like my Page] or [Install my app] or [Click on my ad or sponsored story]". It's also trying a simpler interface and allowing more targeting options to be layered. The test is a response to comments from advertisers who wanted "more guidance on how to optimize their campaigns based on their marketing goals." By using it's data of which users frequently Like Pages or install apps to help advertisers, Facebook could get them better results and encourage them to spend more.
 

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