Keji Technology Blogs

Shyp employs workers to pick up, pack and ship par

Tue, 21 Apr 2015 18:31:17 UTC

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Credit Shyp

From private rides to hamburgers to marijuana, there is perhaps no better time in history to get anything delivered with little more than a tap of a smartphone button.

Add shipping packages to that list.

Shyp, a company that lets customers summon workers to quickly pick up, pack and ship parcels, said on Tuesday that it has raised $50 million in venture capital, the largest funding round in the start-up’s history.

The new round values Shyp at just above $250 million, according to two people with knowledge of the financial terms, who requested anonymity because the deal talks were private. A Shyp spokesman declined to comment on the company’s valuation.

The funding is another significant bet on the future of on-demand start-ups by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, the storied venture capital firm that led Shyp’s new financing round and that recently won a case against a former partner who alleged gender bias at the firm.

With the round, which also includes participation by previous investors Homebrew and SherpaVentures, John Doerr, a Kleiner executive, will join the board of directors at Shyp. Kleiner has also put money in to other on-demand companies like Uber and DoorDash.

Uber, the on-demand ride-hailing service, has also dabbled in the business of moving goods from one place to another, signaling its ambitions to become a way to transport anything and everything to different places around the world.

Shyp, on the other hand, piggybacks on existing transportation networks like UPS, FedEx and the United States Postal Service. Instead of doing all of the shipping itself, Shyp hires contract workers to pick up items from customers, and pack and ship them, eliminating the hassle of standing in line at the post office or finding the proper packaging supplies to send the items.

“We asked ourselves, what is the ideal way to ship something?” said Kevin Gibbon, chief executive of Shyp. “Can we scale this business to happen in multiple cities? Can we improve operations and logistics to make it cheaper and faster?”

Mr. Gibbon said his service was complementary to the shipping networks already in place, as Shyp’s local logistics networks gather many packages together to hand them off to the actual companies doing the transportation, a task that he said would cost companies like DHL and FedEx much more in time, labor and resources to offer. Shyp makes a $5 service fee on each package it delivers.

Shyp also announced it is opening up a pilot version of its service in Los Angeles; it currently operates in San Francisco, New York City and Miami.

Cesar Cerrudo, chief technology officer at IOActiv

Tue, 21 Apr 2015 18:31:14 UTC

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Credit IOActive Labs

So-called smart cities, with wireless sensors controlling everything from traffic lights to water management, may be vulnerable to cyberattacks, according to a computer security expert.

Last year, Cesar Cerrudo, an Argentine security researcher and chief technology officer at IOActive Labs, demonstrated how 200,000 traffic control sensors installed in major hubs like Washington; New York; New Jersey; San Francisco; Seattle; Lyon, France; and Melbourne, Australia, were vulnerable to attack. Mr. Cerrudo showed how information coming from these sensors could be intercepted from 1,500 feet away — or even by drone — because one company had failed to encrypt its traffic.

Just last Saturday, Mr. Cerrudo tested the same traffic sensors in San Francisco and found that, one year later, they were still not encrypted.

Mr. Cerrudo said he was increasingly uncovering similar problems in other products and systems incorporated into smart cities. He has discovered simple software bugs, poorly installed encryption or even no encryption at all in these systems. And he has found that many are wide open to a fairly common attack, known as a distributed denial of service, or DDoS, in which hackers overwhelm a network with requests until it collapses under the load.

Mr. Cerrudo has found ways to make red or green traffic lights stay red or green, tweak electronic speed limit signs, or mess with ramp meters to send cars onto the freeway all at once.

Security researchers say that the opportunities for a maliciously minded hacker or government abound. Last year, security researchers at the Black Hat Europe conference in Amsterdam demonstrated how to black out parts of cites simply by manipulating smart meters and exploiting encryption problems in power line communication technology.

Increasingly, cities are automating systems and services. Saudi Arabia, for example, is investing $70 million to build four new smart cities. In South Africa, a $7.4 billion smart city project is already underway. By 2020, the market for smart cities is predicted to reach $1 trillion, according to Frost & Sullivan, a consulting firm.

“The current attack surface for cities is huge and wide open to attack,” Mr. Cerrudo writes in a report he plans to present this week in San Francisco at the annual RSA Conference on security. “This is a real and immediate danger.”

The threat is not just hypothetical. Last year, security companies discovered a hacking group, known both as Dragonfly and Energetic Bear, that was actively targeting power networks across the United States and Europe.

Last year, the Department of Homeland Security acknowledged in a report that “a sophisticated threat actor” had broken into the control system network at a public utility, simply by guessing a password on an Internet-connected system.

And in 2012, Chinese military hackers successfully breached the Canadian arm of Telvent. The company, now owned by Schneider Electric, produces software that allows oil and gas pipeline companies and power grid operators to gain access to valves, switches and security systems remotely. It also keeps detailed blueprints on more than half the oil and gas pipelines in North America.

In 2013, the energy industry became the most-targeted sector for hackers in the United States, accounting for 56 percent of the 257 attacks reported to the Department of Homeland Security that year.

Some scientists are trying to redesign the smart grid to make it less vulnerable. Currently, the smart grid is centralized, controlled by the energy suppliers, which makes utility companies a juicy target for hackers.

But this year, Science Daily reported that Benjamin Schäfer, a physicist from the Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization; his colleagues Marc Timme and Dirk Witthaut; and a master’s student, Moritz Matthiae, developed a model that showed, in theory, that smart meters could be monitored directly at customer sites, and decentralized in such a way that would make them much less vulnerable to attack.

For now, their research only works in principle. So Mr. Cerrudo said municipal leaders had to start thinking of their cities as vast attack surfaces that require security protection just as a corporate network might.

He encourages municipalities to adopt basic security measures like encryption, passwords and other authentication schemes and an easy mechanism for patching security holes.

He suggests that cities create their own computer emergency response teams, or CERTs, to address security incidents, coordinate responses and share threat information with other cities.

He also suggests that cities restrict access to their data; track and monitor those who do have access; and run so-called penetration tests, in which hackers try to break into cities so that municipalities can learn where they are most exposed.

Finally, he suggests that cities prepare for the worst, as they would for a natural disaster.

“When we see that the data that feeds smart city systems is blindly trusted and can be easily manipulated — that the systems can be easily hacked and there are security problems everywhere — that is when smart cities become dumb cities,” Mr. Cerrudo said.

Apple Watches on display at an Apple Store in New

Sat, 18 Apr 2015 00:30:40 UTC

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Credit Hiroko Masuike/The New York Times

Apple’s method of releasing products like the iPhone is straightforward: On the day of release, you buy the phone at a retail store or it is delivered if you ordered online. The process is a lot less clear for the Apple Watch.

Apple first said in March that the Watch will be available starting April 24. Yet the company was vague about whether that meant the device, which starts at $350, would be as obtainable as iPhones have been on their first day in stores. Apple instead said the gadget would be available online or by reservation in retail stores.

In a memo this week, Angela Ahrendts, Apple’s head of retail operations and the former chief executive of Burberry, was more explicit. She said in the note to retail workers that the Apple Watch would not be available for in-store purchases initially, reiterating that customers will have to order it online. Customers will begin receiving their Apple Watch orders on or after April 24, she added.

“Many of you have been getting questions asking if we will have the watch available in stores on April 24 for walk-in purchases,” Ms. Ahrendts said in the letter, which was first reported by the blog 9to5Mac. “As we announced last week, due to high global interest combined with our initial supply, we are only taking orders online right now. I’ll have more updates as we get closer to in-store availability, but we expect this to continue through the month of May.”

Apple also this week dropped reference of the April 24 release date from its web page promoting the Watch, in a nod to how the smartwatch won’t be available to consumers who just walk into a store. An Apple spokeswoman declined to comment.

Apple has taken a radically different approach for releasing the Apple Watch. For the first time, the company invited consumers into stores to try on the Watch before the device’s official release. In the past, consumers typically couldn’t touch a new Apple device until it was publicly available.

Ms. Ahrendts said in the memo that the company needed to come up with the preview approach for selling the Watch because “There’s never been anything quite like it.”

Stewart Butterfield, chief executive of Slack, in

Sat, 18 Apr 2015 00:30:38 UTC

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Credit Jason Henry for The New York Times

When I recently wrote about Slack, a corporate messaging app that has aspirations to replace email, investors valued the company at $1 billion. That was a month ago. Today, the start-up announced that it has raised $160 million from a half dozen investors, and that it is now worth $2.8 billion.

Slack, which is just a year old, has more than 750,000 daily active users, 200,000 of whom are paying customers. By many estimates, it is the fastest-growing business application of all time.

Still, Slack’s escalating valuation in such a short time seems destined to spark questions about the rising possibility of a tech bubble. I asked Stewart Butterfield, Slack’s co-founder and chief executive, about the company, its growth and the bubble in a wide-ranging conversation this morning.

I’m surprised that you’re raising money, because last time we talked you said that you had enough money.

Do you have enough money?

No. But it’s not free money, right?

It’s pretty straightforward. I’ve been in this industry for 20 years. This is the best time to raise money ever. It might be the best time for any kind of business in any industry to raise money for all of history, like since the time of the ancient Egyptians. It’s certainly the best time for late-stage start-ups to raise money from venture capitalists since this dynamic has been around.

And as a board member and a C.E.O., I have a responsibility to our employees, to our customers. And as a fiduciary, I think it would be almost imprudent for me not to accept $160 million bucks for 5-ish percent of the company when it’s offered on favorable terms.

We don’t have an immediate use for that money. But it increases the value of our stock and can allow potential employees to take our offers, and it reinforces the perception for our larger customers that we’ll be around for the long haul. All of that stuff.

Is there any downside?

Did you watch the last episode of “Silicon Valley”? For a company that’s very early stage — their product isn’t necessarily out, they don’t know if their business model is going to work, they don’t know what conversion rates and retention rates are going to be like — it can be fairly high risk. We’ve seen that in the past. A new company before it has even started has achieved a high valuation, and that hasn’t worked out well.

But it’s not really a factor at this stage. Growth has been unprecedented. It’s crazy. So I think there’s less downside risk here.

The market could turn, and the kinds of valuations you get from V.C. investors might not be as favorable in six months or a year. But on the other hand, we will have a couple hundred million dollars in the bank, and that’s a great position to be in.

Are you saying that having the money in the bank in case the V.C. market turns bad — was that a primary reason to raise it?

It’s one of the best reasons. Let’s say we were a gold-mining business, or maybe just a person who had a whole bunch of gold. And gold prices are going crazy. Selling some of the gold now, so you have cash in the bank in case things change in the future, is not a bad idea.

It’s a hedge, and a hedge that’s unbelievably good for us. It’s a lot of money. In the case where everything turns to [expletive], we will look pretty smart.

You’ve said before that valuations are “arbitrary.” Is Slack’s almost $3 billion valuation arbitrary?

Public investors often have some underlying rationale for getting to a decent price. In this market, there are bets about how big the company’s market can be, how good the team is — but there is also just a whole lot of supply and demand.

And there are a lot of investors who have a lot of money. So when I say arbitrary, I mean that it’s not coming from some airtight, textbook formula for how to value these types of companies. It’s based on how many there are — and there’s only one Slack — and if you would like to invest in this Slack, this is the price that it costs.

It’s very highly influenced by other factors: Interest rates being low, there’s a lot of money in V.C., funds get larger as a result, but the number of deals that they do remains about the same. So therefore the amount that they invest per deal goes up, which means the valuation goes up.

So do you think Slack is worth $3 billion?

It is, because people say it is.

I’m not trying to be trite, and I know why you’re asking, but if you go down to the fundamental level, we all have an agreement about what things are worth — until we don’t.

Maybe the better question is, how great is the risk that the consensus about what Slack is worth will change dramatically?

There is a risk that investors will say, maybe this company, at this time, is only worth half what we thought. But since we came back from the holidays, everything doubled. That’s a crazy rate of growth, but it has remained constant since we launched. We can’t keep that forever — the law of large numbers, we’ll start to saturate markets. But obviously we’re not there yet. I don’t feel like there are any serious vulnerabilities in the business. So I think even if our valuation were to go down, it would go down until we catch up to it.

So it’s a great time to be raising money as a founder. But if you were looking at the tech economy from a different perspective, would you still say it’s a good thing that it’s so easy to raise money?

I’d say it’s probably good. The odds of new companies doing interesting things getting started would go up. I’m sure that it can have some bad effects in the sense of distorting young founders’ perceptions about what their companies should be worth, and frustrating their expectations, potentially. And there are knock-on effects that are bad — pressures on salaries, pressure on rents. We signed a lease on our San Francisco office at $62 a square feet, and we sublet it at $75, nine months later. And down in Palo Alto, people are paying $120 per square foot, and not even fancy offices. And it’s not a great thing, necessarily, for our local economy.

But is it a great thing for the world? You’re getting a whole bunch of money you don’t really need that you probably won’t use. What is the use of giving you $160 million that you’re just going to keep in the bank for a rainy day?

Eventually, we will find a use for it, at least I hope we do. Now, as opposed to this money being used to house the homeless or feed starving children — but that’s not where this money would otherwise go. This is investment capital. One could certainly make the argument that investment capital has inflated out of proportion to the rest of the economy. But it’s not like if they hadn’t given the money to us, they would have given to a homeless person instead.

But the reason people outside of tech look at a story like a year-old company being valued at $3 billion is that they wonder, what if you’re wrong? What if your growth is an illusion and it won’t continue? Or what if there’s something else you’re missing? And not just you, but a whole bunch of other companies like you that have been raising money so fast. Do you worry about that — that there may be some kind of systemic problem?

Yes and no. As a citizen, I don’t think it would be a really bad thing in the end if all these investors lose a great deal of money, because it’s really not a very large percentage of the overall economy. I’m quoting Marc Andreessen here: The entire amount of V.C. funding that happened last year was $50 billion. That’s compared to the total market of share buybacks and dividends by public companies in the U.S. being $1 trillion. So it’s one-twentieth of the overall public market dynamics, which is a small percentage of the overall economy, so it’s not going to make a difference to most private citizens whether V.C.s lose a lot of money here.

It does make a difference to me personally in that sense that it matters what happens to our employees, partners and the investors that I work with directly.

So what are the possible things you can do with this money?

Acquisitions would be one. Advertising could be another. We may want to be able to spend beyond our means to grow the business. It’s nice to have all kinds of options. We might have to defend ourselves against predators. We might find opportunities to do something better or faster that requires capital. At some point we’ll start advertising, and let’s say advertising is effective for us — so we may put tens of millions of dollars into it. I’m not saying that’s what we’ll do, but it’s nice to have the option.

So you go out and raise money and you don’t have to tell the investors what it’s for?

Nope. They want to own some of the company, and they believe it will be worth more in the future. And that’s it.

Benjamin Golub, chief executive of Docker.

Thu, 16 Apr 2015 03:30:20 UTC

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Credit Amazon Web Services

Another day in tech, another company tops $100 million in money raised.

Docker, a fast-moving maker of software for managing applications on a global basis, said Tuesday that it has raised another $95 million. With this fourth round of funding Docker, which two years ago was near extinction, has raised about $160 million.

The company declined to discuss its valuation, but it is likely worth more than $1 billion, up from $400 million last September, according to a source who was not authorized to speak publicly on the issue. But Docker’s chief executive downplayed the importance of the new money.

“Funding is a lagging indicator. Product announcements are more interesting,” said Benjamin Golub, Docker’s chief executive.

Docker’s funding, however, is a good marker of the urgency felt at many tech companies. The technology infrastructure of cloud computing systems and mobile devices is rapidly supplanting older forms of computing. That is now forcing older companies to adjust and new companies to scramble so they might own as much of the market as possible.

Docker is at the center of an open-source project that makes something called “containers,” which enable developers to rapidly make and update software to run harmoniously over a series of clouds, personal computers and mobile devices.

The container business was an afterthought in Docker’s original business, but since open sourcing the software it has become one of the fastest-growing pieces of business software ever. Docker makes money by offering premium versions of the open source product, with things like management software that companies want.

Mr. Golub said Docker still hasn’t spent all of the money from its second round of financing, let alone the $40 million it raised in its “C,” or third, round of funding last September.

“We need to be prepared to add employees, add features, and add functionality that enterprises are asking for – networking, storage, additional security,” he said.

Docker’s newest funding round included investments from Goldman Sachs, Coatue Management, Northern Trust, and was led by Insight Venture Partners. Earlier investors also contributed money.

Dr. Iltifat Husain is the editor-in-chief of iMedi

Thu, 16 Apr 2015 03:30:18 UTC

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Credit Wake Forest Baptist Health

Consumers looking to use their mobile devices to improve their health — or at least maintain their well-being — have tens of thousands of choices.

But if those consumers are already healthy, the apps won’t necessarily do them any good, according to a new report in The BMJ, a British medical journal.

On Tuesday afternoon, for instance, the top 10 free health and fitness apps for iPhones included MyFitnessPal, a calorie counter and diet tracker; the FitBit activity tracker; Pacer, a pedometer and blood pressure tracker; and Period Tracker Lite, a menstrual-cycle tracker, according to data compiled by App Annie, an analytics firm.

For consumers with concerns of a more medical nature, apps in the Google Play store, among others, offer all kinds of advice, self-diagnosis and treatment. One is marketed as an HIV risk calculator, another is a self-described self-test for erectile dysfunction, and a third purports to offer home remedies for cold sores, colitis, conjunctivitis and constipation.

An article published in The BMJ on Tuesday evening, however, questions whether such consumer health apps provide any real health value to already-healthy consumers – and whether the apps could even cause harm by stoking unneeded anxiety among the worried well.

Doctors don’t yet have definitive answers to these questions, partly because smartphone apps are so new and partly because government health authorities regulate consumer health apps at their own discretion, depending on the possible risks to users. As a result, many health and fitness apps lack rigorous clinical evidence to demonstrate they can actually improve health outcomes.

The medical journal article, titled “Can Healthy People Benefit From Health Apps?,” lays out arguments for and against the apps by juxtaposing the opposing views of two doctors.

Arguing in favor, Dr. Iltifat Husain, the editor in chief of iMedicalApps.com, a review site for medical professionals, contended that some apps, by encouraging healthy behavior, could hold great potential to reduce the rate of illness and death.

“They can help people to correlate personal decisions with health outcomes,” Dr. Husain wrote, “and they can help doctors to hold patients accountable for their behavior.”

He recommended that doctors become more involved in educating the public on which health details to track and which apps to use. If doctors waited for scientific studies to prove the benefits of health apps, he added, they could lose their power to influence patients to “the industry dictating which tools people should use.”

To provide a dissenting perspective, The BMJ enlisted Dr. Des Spence, a general practitioner in Glasgow. He argued that many health tracking apps encouraged healthy people to unnecessarily record their normal activities and vital signs — turning users into continuously self-monitoring “neurotics.” He recommended people view these new technologies with skepticism.

“The truth is that these apps and devices are untested and unscientific, and they will open the door of uncertainty,” Dr. Spence wrote. “Make no mistake: Diagnostic uncertainty ignites extreme anxiety in people.”

Although both doctors agreed there was no evidence that health apps had caused harm, federal regulators in the United States have been cracking down on health apps that make deceptive claims — an issue with the potential to cause mistreatment or misdiagnosis of medical problems.

In 2011, the Federal Trade Commission accused the developers of two acne apps of falsely claiming they could treat acne by shining colored light onto users’ skin.

This year, the agency accused two melanoma app marketers of deceptively claiming that their products could accurately analyze skin moles for the risk of melanoma, even in its early stages. Regulators said the marketers did not have sufficient evidence to support those medical claims.

“If an app claims to treat, diagnose or prevent a disease or a health condition, it needs to have serious evidence to back up those claims,” Mary K. Engle, associate director of the F.T.C.’s division of advertising practices, said in a phone interview this year. “We hope marketers will take heed of that and do their homework before they get into the marketplace.”

Segway has faced competition from a number of com

Thu, 16 Apr 2015 03:30:18 UTC

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Credit Dave Hunt/European Pressphoto Agency

HONG KONG — The Segway scooter, the punch line of countless jokes about overhyped gadgets since its invention more than a decade ago, may get the last laugh: On Wednesday, a Chinese company that makes a similar vehicle said that it planned to buy the scooter’s maker.

In an odd turn to the already strange history of the short-distance electric transport vehicle, the Chinese start-up Ninebot said Wednesday it planned to acquire the Segway company as part of a strategic alliance. Ninebot did not disclose terms for the deal but said in the same announcement that it had raised $80 million in its newest fund-raising round from the Chinese smartphone maker Xiaomi and the venture capital firm Sequoia Capital, among others.

Too speedy for sidewalks, too pokey for roads and too expensive for regular consumers looking for an alternative to walking— with a goofy pogo-stick aesthetic to boot — the self-balancing electric stand-up scooter is a niche product in the United States. It has also been widely mocked in American popular culture as an emblem of sloth.

But in China, a country that often embraces novel and niche gadgets, the Segway is taken more seriously, and over the years it has gained cultural cachet.

Tourists across China use Segway- like vehicles to visit attractions — groups can circle the track of Beijing’s Bird’s Nest Olympic Stadium where Usain Bolt won gold. The Jamaican sprinter has run as fast as 27 miles per hour; the Segway, by comparison, goes about 13 miles per hour.

Chinese police and antiterror squads patrol and drill atop electric scooters, the preferred ride in ‘‘ Paul Blart: Mall Cop,’’ often armed with rifles and assault weapons. Stores selling Segway- like products feature in Chinese malls.

Perhaps most famously, in the 2013 corruption trial of the former high-ranking party official Bo Xilai, the well- known businessman Xu Ming testified that he had purchased a Segway for Mr. Bo’s son, Bo Guagua.

Segway has faced competition from a number of companies that produce similar and cheaper vehicles. In a 2014 trade complaint to the U.S. International Trade Commission, Segway said a number of Chinese companies were violating its patents.

In a trade commission document titled ‘‘ Certain Personal Transporters, Components Thereof, and Manuals Therefor,’’ several different Chinese companies are named, among them Ninebot, the company that is planning to buy Segway.

Though the investigation continues, Ninebot showed itself willing to do a bit of borrowing from Apple with its official slogan: ‘‘Think Differently and Innovate Sustainably.’’

In the release, Ninebot’s chief executive, Gao Lufeng, said, ‘‘We believe that this alliance will promote the short-distance transportation industry to develop and grow on the intelligent mobile robot platform.’’ The statement added that the two companies would continue to sell their respective products under separate brands.

Ninebot, founded in 2012, says that its personal transportation robot, the Ninebot E, is distributed at 30 centers around the world.

John Kelly oversees IBM’s research labs and new in

Tue, 14 Apr 2015 06:30:00 UTC

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Credit Ángel Franco/The New York Times

IBM is taking its Watson artificial-intelligence technology into health care in a big way with industry partners, a pair of acquisitions and an ambitious agenda.

The initial three industry partners are Apple, Johnson & Johnson and Medtronic. On Monday afternoon, after the close of stock trading, IBM also announced it would buy two start-ups: Explorys, a spin-off from the Cleveland Clinic whose data on 50 million patients is used to spot patterns in diseases, treatments and outcomes; and Phytel, a Dallas maker of software to manage patient care and reduce readmission rates to hospitals.

The IBM plan, put simply, is that its Watson technology will be a cloud-based service that taps vast stores of health data and delivers tailored insights to hospitals, physicians, insurers, researchers and potentially even individual patients.

“We’re going to enable personalized health care on a huge scale,” said John E. Kelly, a senior vice president who oversees IBM’s research labs and new initiatives.

To date, IBM has done some individual projects using Watson technology with leading medical centers, including Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York, the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston and the Cleveland Clinic. But the creation of the Watson Health unit, Mr. Kelly said, is an effort to apply the technology to the mainstream of health care.

And while IBM has been commercializing Watson technology with tools for mining Twitter, weather and Internet of Things data, Mr. Kelly said Watson Health was the first move into a specific industry.

The Watson Health announcement is also the latest in flurry of initiatives IBM has announced this year that include new corporate partnerships as well as moves in cloud computing, data analytics and Watson. They are evidence that IBM is intent on investing for future growth, and showing it is doing so, in a year when its financial performance is likely to lag.

IBM has reported disappointing earnings recently, and Virginia M. Rometty, IBM’s chief executive, has told industry analysts and investors that 2015 would be a transition year in which new growth businesses like Watson did not yet overcome the profit erosion in some of its traditional hardware and software products.

IBM’s broad vision of combining and analyzing health data from varied sources to improve care has been around for decades. But the company and its partners say that technology, economics and policy changes are coming together to improve the odds of making the IBM venture a workable reality. They point to improvements in artificial intelligence, low-cost cloud computing and health policy that will reward keeping patients healthy instead of the fee-for-service model in which more treatments and procedures mean more revenue.

“Forces in health care are aligning as never before,” said Sandra E. Peterson, a group worldwide chairman at Johnson & Johnson in charge of information technology and new wellness programs. “It could be a unique moment and something like this could have real legs.”

A focus of the Johnson & Johnson partnership with IBM will be improving patient care before and after knee and hip replacements. The company will apply Watson technology to data sources ranging from patient records to digital fitness devices and smartphone applications, which can monitor movement and vital signs. “It will allow us to do much more integrated, personalized care,” Ms. Peterson said.

Medtronic, a large medical equipment maker, wants to use data intelligently to treat diabetes patients beyond providing them with its glucose monitors and insulin pumps. Medtronic devices are already digital and produce a lot of data, but the company plans to use the Watson software to spot patients trending toward trouble and automatically adjust insulin doses and send alerts to care providers and the patients themselves.

“The goal is dynamic, personalized care plans so you can delay or stop the progression of diabetes,” said Hooman Hakami, executive vice president in charge of Medtronic’s diabetes group.

Apple is increasingly a major supplier of health sensors, from iPhone apps to the Apple Watch. Its recently introduced HealthKit and ResearchKit software make it easier for applications and researchers to harvest health information from millions of owners of Apple products, with their permission. That data can now be plugged into Watson. “We want to be the analytics brains behind HealthKit and ResearchKit,” Mr. Kelly said.

The IBM initiative raises questions on how data is handled and about privacy. Mr. Kelly said the data scrutinized by Watson will typically be anonymized and often be read by Watson but not removed from hospital or health company data centers. “There will be no big, centralized database in the sky,” Mr. Kelly said.

Even critics of health information technology say the IBM effort holds promise. “If that future when all this stuff works is going to become real, then having some of the key players come together is the only way it’s going to happen,” said Dr. Robert M. Wachter, a professor at the University of California, San Francisco medical school and author of “ The Digital Doctor: Hope, Hype and Harm at the Dawn of Medicine’s Computer Age.” “This could be a pretty important step along the way.”

Josh James, who built the Web analytics company Om

Sun, 12 Apr 2015 09:29:42 UTC

A long-anticipated product from a showman of business technology — and who runs a company now valued in the billions — made its official debut on Wednesday. The product’s ambitions, and weaknesses, say much about the current state of a fast-changing market.

Short version: Domo, as the company and product are known, shows how much companies are drawing on all sorts of online data to move quickly, and need ample amounts of flashy graphics to consume that information quickly. The problem is, plenty of other companies have figured that out too.

This risks being a little creepy.

“It not only looks internally at how a company is doing, but how to innovate around that,” said Josh James, Domo’s creator. “All of the data about your job is there, all of your peers see how you are performing, and you care about your data.” Somehow that sounds more attractive to managers than workers and like the kind of thing a lot of people will try to game.

Mr. James is a likable Utah native who built the revolutionary Web analytics company Omniture, which he sold to Adobe in 2009 for $1.8 billion. That success, along with an outgoing nature, made Mr. James something of a fixture on the tech conference circuit. He first started talking about Domo onstage in 2010, soon after leaving Adobe.

He’s been secretive since then about the product, he said, because Domo was hard to build and he needed to keep clear of industrial snoops. Companies like Oracle and IBM were asking him what he was doing, he said. “It seemed so obvious to us, we didn’t want them to see the recipe book,” he said.

Omniture tracked the performance of websites and user behavior, giving companies a way to tell how their marketing and other external activities were doing on the Internet.

Domo looks as if Mr. James is turning the same Omniture-like analytic capabilities internally. A sales manager, for example, can view where his group is relative to its quota and who may be underperforming. A marketer can see how the company is doing on social media.

There are a number of services that do things like this, including Workday and Salesforce.com, which can deliver visualizations about the performance of their own software. Like Domo, Microsoft has business analytics products as well.

Domo does seem to draw off a number of third-party and proprietary databases, giving it a relatively rich range of presentations. Mr. James is charging $1,500 to $2,000 per corporate user a year, with expectations of a minimum order of $50,000, so he does need to offer value for money.

When Mr. James started working on Domo, the product was probably cutting edge. Now it looks like the nice kind of graphics available at good web shops. Newer companies have nice presentation too and can suggest new data sources people might want to look at as they analyze a problem.

That makes for an expensive and costly battle among a number of well-funded players. As if anticipating this, the company also announced it had received an additional $200 million in funding, which it said gave Domo a value of $2 billion.

To date, Domo has raised a total of $450 million, or almost a quarter of that big valuation. Online computing may be cheaper, but building this kind of software, and a sales team to go with it, clearly isn’t.

Mr. James said Domo had some analytic capabilities and would be adding more. The effects of the software are already being seen in his early beta customers, he said, like a media company that is changing its content in real time to meet changing tastes, or a retailer that can develop graphic representations of employee theft.

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