July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

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San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee praised Twitter today, saying that 11 companies have found a home in Twitter’s mid-Market Street location due to the company’s commitment to the run-down section of the city.

“Bless them. They located an area where we really needed investment,” said Lee at Bloomberg’s Next Big Thing conference. “It’s kind of our city’s Skid Row. … [The warehouse where Twitter is headquartered]“

Lee says there are a total of 1,826 tech companies in San Francisco county (the city and the county share the same boundaries), which employ over 42,000 people. But payroll tax often draws these growing tech companies from the city into surrounding areas. Lee explained that it was a two-way street working with Twitter to keep the company in the city.

“I said, well, look, I can’t just give you a free tax break; we got to get something for it,” said Lee. “Now mid-Market is thriving.”

Not every company can get a tax break, however, and that’s where Lee is looking to three other factors he hopes will keep tech companies and their employees in the city: education, infrastructure, and arts and culture. And, it seems to be a circle of replenishment. Tech companies that grow big in San Francisco are starting to give back to these three city needs. Salesforce donated millions for the San Francisco’s public school system.

Despite this cyclical support, however, tech is still not the biggest job creator for San Francisco. Tourism remains the largest industry in the city. Guess a lot of people really like that bridge.

Mayor Ed Lee photo via Meghan Kelly/VentureBeat

After a year-and-a-half search and carefully reviewing more than 6,000 potential applicants, NASA today announced its “2013 Astronaut Candidate Class.”

The class has eight students, and half are women. And that’s a record of sorts, as it makes for the highest percentage of women astronaut candidates ever selected for one class in NASA’s history.

“We picked the eight most qualified candidates, and it just so turned out this way,” said a NASA rep, talking of the man-woman split.

All the selected astronauts are in their mid- to late 30s, six of them have prior experience in armed forces, and half of them are scuba divers.

They all have one thing in common and that is “passion,” said Janet Kavandi, a flight crew operations director at NASA. One is Josh A. Cassada, a cofounder and chief technology officer of a startup, Quantum Opus, and a former naval aviator. Another is Victor J. Glover, a Lt. Commander in the U.S. Navy and an A-18 test pilot who has flown 24 combat missions. Both of them have logged in over 2,000 flying hours.

Jessica U. Meir, an assistant professor of anesthesia at Harvard Medical School, has also been selected to represent NASA.

This group will begin training at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston in August. They will receive a wide array of technical training at space centers and remote locations around the globe to get ready for missions to low-Earth orbit, an asteroid, and even Mars.

These candidates will be the public face for NASA in the future, and they can look forward to a ton of cool stuff: spacewalks, survival training, robotic training, and learning about systems in spacecraft, to name a few.

Kate Rubins, who joined Astronaut Corps in 2009, describes the selection as “incredibly exciting.” She was running a research lab at MIT at the time.

Besides supporting the international space station, “we’re looking at a number of mission concepts,” said Johnson Space Center director Dr. Ellen Ochoa. One “is to explore an asteroid, first with a robotic mission, which would push the envelope in terms of solar electric proportion and understanding how you might actually capture an asteroid.” Once the team directs the asteroid into a stable orbit around the moon, it plans to send up astronauts to get samples.

The selected eight will also get to work with companies to develop a commercial crew transportation system and a multipurpose crew vehicle.

“NASA is developing missions to go farther into space than ever before,” said NASA Administrator Charles Bolden as he congratulated the 21st class of NASA astronauts and called upon them to lead us to new frontiers.

Image/Video Credit: NASA

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

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Coupons may not be sexy, but IPOs are.

RetailMeNot, “the world’s largest digital coupon marketplace,” filed for a proposed initial public offering. The proposed maximum aggregate offering price is $230 million, and the stock will be listed on the NASDAQ as “SALE.”

In February, RetailMeNot announced that it crossed the 1 billion visits threshold since the site launched in 2006. The marketplace features coupons from over 60,000 retailers and companies, and it has contracts with more than 10,000 retailers. RetailMeNot brought in $113.4 million in net revenue in 2012 and in the first quarter of 2013 alone generated $406 million. Its Coupons app has been downloaded more than 3 million times.

RetailMeNot features digital coupons across a range of product categories. The discounts are accessible through web and mobile applications and consumers can easily search for, and redeem relevant offers for online and in-store purchases. Brands can use RetailMeNot’s channel to reach and engage consumers, and the business is built on a pay-for-performance model.

“We believe our marketplace benefits from network effects. As more consumers use our marketplace, we are better able to obtain high quality digital coupons from retailers and brands, which in turn attracts a larger consumer audience,” the company  said in its S-1 filing. “We seek to reinforce our position as the leading digital coupon destination by continuing to increase consumer traffic and growing the breadth and depth of our digital coupons, as well as our retailer and brand relationships.”

The company is growing fast. Retailers and brands are always looking for ways to attract consumers and encourage them to spend, and consumers are always looking to save money. A January article by eMarketer estimated that 48 percent of U.S. adult Internet users redeemed a digital coupon for online or offline shopping the past year.

By going public, RetailMeNot intends to increase traffic and monetization, growth depth of paid relationships with retailers, invest in technology and innovation, expand internationally, and pursue strategic acquisitions.

Austin company WhaleShark Media acquired Australian RetailMeNot in 2010. WhaleShark Media has raised $300 million to date and assumed the name of RetailMeNot. In 2011, the company started on acquisition spree and scooped up VoucherCodes.co.uk as well as other local coupon sites including deals com in Germany, bone-de-reduction and Poulpeo in France, and most recently, actiepagina.nl in the Netherlands.

But a pin on Pinterest? That can last thousands of times longer, according to a new study by Piquora (formerly Pinfluencer).

“Sure, you get 70 percent of your clicks in the first two days,” Pinquora CEO Shara Verma told me last week. “But there’s a huge long tail. Clicks kept coming all the way for 30 days, and even beyond.”

That’s important information for brands like Sephora, which says its Pinterest followers spend 15 times more than its Facebook fans. And it’s good to know that if you spend time picking out the perfectly shareable pin, that effort won’t disappear within minutes.

Source: Piquora

The lap between pinning and visiting can be up to 40 days.

The key difference is that while Pinterest is a social network, it’s also an ideas-and-inspiration website, whereas Twitter and Facebook are social networks with a massive emphasis on immediacy. When people visit Pinterest, they browse, they search, they surf, and they uncover more pins.

“In the world of Google, 70 percent of searches are long-tail, composed of four or more words,” Verma says. “Our hypothesis is that the same thing is happening on Pinterest … searching and Pinterest categories resurface the old pins.”

But that’s not all.

Verma, who used to be a director of product management at Yahoo Search, says that when web surfers go to Google and search for something, if they don’t see it in the first page of results, they think Google “didn’t get” what they meant, so they go back and reformulate their query. That doesn’t happen on Pinterest.

“On Pinterest, there’s no next page,” Verman says. “Just infinite scroll … so if you keep scrolling, you see a lot of pins, including older pins.”

One other difference is that Pinterest pins are accompanied by a lot of metadata. While Facebook is trying to apply metadata to people’s status updates and adding structured updates like how you feel so that it understands more about what and why you’re posting, and can improve graph search, Pinterest has that built in. In fact, a full 95 percent of pins are going to boards that are named after categories, Piquora says, and five percent are going into explicitly commercial boards with titles like “I want this” and “My dream list.” That’s almost a social CRM for retailers, who can check those boards and see which products are hot.

One other interesting stat Verma left me with:

Pinterest’s virality ratio has gone up 42 percent between the last quarter of 2012 and the first quarter of 2013. In 2012, pins published by brands were re-pinned at at .21 ratio, meaning that every brand pin would be repinned .21 times. Now, the ratio is .3.

Which means that either marketers are getting smarter about what gets repinned on Pinterest, or Pinterest users are getting more interested in sharing.

Image credits: Piquora

Keaton Row is a fashion startup reigning in “the future of personal styling.” Its platform connects women with trained stylists who help them create a curated, customized wardrobe.

Women create a profile and Keaton Row matches them with three potential stylists to choose from. The stylists are vetted. After learning about their clients, they shop through Keaton Row’s catalogue of 5,000 items and create the individualized lookbooks that consist of 5-to-7 complete looks (30-50 items) from retail partners. The customer then shops directly from her lookbook and has a unified checkout experience, even though items come from multiple retailers and brands.

“For the first time, any woman is able to have the luxury and convenience of personal styling and fashion-forward entrepreneurs can use their expertise to help clients feel good about getting dressed each morning,” the founders said in an email. “For the first time, personal styling is relevant and accessible to the modern woman. Keaton Row has transformed the e-commerce shopping experience from a commodity into a service.”

Founders Cheryl Han and Elenor Mak met while working in the cosmetics industry. Han worked at L’oreal and Clarins and Mak spent four years as an executive at Avon. They both attended Harvard Business School and saw how many of their professional female friends struggled with what to wear. They would ask their stylish friends for help, and Han and Mak saw an opportunity to put this process online.

The Keaton Row approach makes quality fashion advice more available to women. It encourages them to break out of their clothing comfort zone, while also helping tp cut through the overwhelming amount of clothing options online. The startup also provides style-savvy women with a way to capitalize on their expertise. Furthermore, professional stylists can use Keaton Row as a way to grow their own business, without working or a brand or retailer.

Keaton Row does not charge customers or stylists. It takes a sales commission from partner brands and retailers and shares the commissions with the stylist. Retail partners include Piperlime, Shopbop, and Trendseeder. Since it launched in 2012, Keaton Row has added roughly 1000 stylists in over 30 states around the country. The average order is $450, which the founders said is 7 times higher than the average e-commerce order, and the conversion on the “personalized e-commerce boutiques” is a 38 percent. Customers not only spend money on the site, but they come back twice every three months to shop.

Keaton Row has raised $1.2 million from Rho Ventures and Grape Arbor. It has 10 employees and has offices in New York and Montreal.

Photo Credit: octarina8/Flickr

Network security engineer “Richee” posted complete details about how to make a tiny Raspberry Pi computer look like a ordinary laptop power brick — and then give himself a physical backdoor into corporate networks.

Technically, the job is laughably easy.

The Pi is a tiny computer that could fit in the palm of your hand. But it’s got a 700 MHz processor, a half a gigabyte of RAM, and runs a custom version of Linux. It also has HDMI and USB ports and — critically — Ethernet. Kids, geeks, white-hat hackers, and case-modders buy the cheap $25-$35 computer and build beautiful cases for it, install apps from the Pi Store, and craft robotic bartenders with it.

With a little soldering and gluing, Richee fit the tiny Pi into an old power brick, hooked up a black Ethernet cord, and jimmied up a power supply out of a plug and a USB converter. Voila: an inconspicuous ET-phone-home hacker’s best friend.

Of course, the software is the critical part.

With a few lines of code, Richee built a little script that will phone home to his designated server over SSH (secure shell). Once the Pi phones home, he’s got an insider’s access to the network it’s on.

Of course, Richee doesn’t have nefarious intent — it’s simply a tool for remote support. In the wrong hands, however, it could go unnoticed for weeks, if companies have lax security oversight, and offer very tempting access to ostensibly-secure data.

There is one problem, of course: Laptop power bricks don’t normally have Ethernet cords hanging from them. Richee has a solution for that:

It looks weird when you stare at it, but put it behind a plant and nobody will ever notice it (except the guy who waters the plants).

And the guy who waters the plants is unlikely to know to much about network security.

Image credits: TunnelsUP

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

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The health care industry is sick, but increasing numbers of startups are applying their tricks and treatments to nurse it back to heath.

Health startup Medivo has raised $15 million to expand its health monitoring platform that connects doctors, consumers, and clinical labs. The company’s vision is to save and improve lives through faster and easier access to quality health care.

Its applications are designed to improve the level of understanding and communication between patients and providers. Patients get free, secure access to symptom-tracking tools and lab results along with simple explanations of those results. The system also helps patients understand connections between symptoms and factors like diet and medication and automatically reports that information back to the doctor.

Medivo organizes a patients’ lab results for providers so they can identify who needs office visits and prioritizes visits by who needs care the most. The condition management services analyzes patient data to see who needs what lab tests and which patients require urgent follow-up care.

The platform includes modules for physicians and patients with diabetes, dyslipidemia, hepatitis C, gout, low testosterone, irritable bowel disease, hereditary angioedema, and chronic myelogenous leukemia. This financing will support expanding the network of labs and modules to include obesity, rheumatoid arthritis, hepatitis B, HIV, colon cancer, breast cancer, prostate cancer, myelofibrosis, multiple myeloma, growth hormone deficiency, osteoporosis, hypothyroidism, and multiple sclerosis.

The team has extensive experience in using technology to improve patent care and clinical outcomes. CEO and cofounder Sundeep Bhan was the founder Medsite, a online portal for continuing medical education that was acquired by WebMD in 2006. Cofounder Dr. Destry Sulkes worked as an executive in health care IT for over 15 years. He saw the potential in using  data analysis to bridge gaps between patients and their providers, and he’s led medial education programs helping doctors in this area. Cofounder Jason Bhan is a practicing family physician who previously founded Ozmosis, a physician’s network and resource for medical knowledge.

The three came together to form Medivo in 2010. In the past year, the startup has significantly expanded its reach and increased its professional network. It closed a $7 million Series A round in 2011. Merck Global Health Innovation Fund led this $15 million second round, with participation from existing investors Safeguard Scientifics and MentorTech Ventures.

It’s a good year to be a health startup. Digital health incubator Rock Health recently released data that forecasts a record year for digital health deals. Remote patient monitoring, personalized health, and cloud-based electronic health records technologies are all attracting attention from strategic and VC investors. In the first quarter of 2013, some big deals went down. HealthCatalyst raised $41 million from Kaiser Permanente Ventures, Norwest Venture Partners, and Merck Global Helath Innovation invested $20 million in mobile health company PatientSafe Solutions.

Medivo is based in New York.

Image credit: Shutterstock

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

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Poster, an app that allows you to post articles on WordPress from you iOS device, has been acquired by WordPress.com parent company Automattic, the app’s creator announced today. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

The app’s sole developer Tom Witkin will also be joining Automattic and will presumably work on improving the company’s mobile efforts. WordPress does already have its own mobile apps for iOS, so I’d expect many of Poster’s features to pop up there in the future.

In a blog post, Witkin said the app will no longer be available for purchase in the iOS App Store, but those that have already purchased it can still re download it at any time. He also said he’ll continue supporting Poster for the time being.

Automattic’s purchase of Poster was more of an “acquihire,” and not the first one the company has made in the last few months to boost its mobile development team. The company also acquired data synchronization startup Simperium (maker of SimpleNote) back in January. And more recently, the company got a $50 million investment from Tiger Global — meaning additional acquisitions might happen further down the road.

Photo credit amperegrino/Flickr

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

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Targeting the back-to-school shopping rush, Google announced today that its Chromebook computers will soon be headed to even more major retail stores — including the most coveted retailer of all: Walmart.

The retail giant will begin offering the cheapest Chromebook, Acer’s $199 model, starting tomorrow. That computer should be particularly appealing to Walmart’s cost-conscious customers, especially as parents will soon be looking for cheap computers for kids to take to school.

Additionally, Staples will soon offer Chromebooks from Samsung, HP, and Acer later this summer. Those models range from Acer’s $199 model to HP’s gigantic $330 Pavilion Chromebook.

Best Buy already carries some Chromebook models in its stores, but the addition of even more physical retailers could be a big win for Google. With netbooks on their way out, Chromebooks could fill an important gap for inexpensive (and somewhat disposable) computers. It also makes much more sense for Google to spotlight its cheap Chromebooks, rather than the insanely expensive $1,299 Chromebook Pixel.

Chromebooks run Chrome OS, Google’s stripped-down operating system built on its Chrome web browser. They’re meant to be cheap, light, and singularly focused on web apps, which makes them well-suited to classrooms. Most Chromebooks don’t have much storage for media, and they also can’t play games offline. (Great for parents who want less distractions for their kids, bad for kids who want to waste time.)

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

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A beta version of news-curation service Digg’s long-awaited RSS reader is scheduled to arrive next week, the team announced on its blog today. For many, this will replace the nearly retired Google Reader.

Google Reader was really good at collecting RSS feeds of all your favorite news sites and blog posts as they were published throughout the day. Personally, I found the service to be more than a bit overwhelming, but others (such as my VentureBeat colleagues) were outraged when Google announced it was shutting down the service earlier this year. The Digg team saw this as an opportunity and immediately began working on a successor called Digg Reader, which would compliment its efforts to re-create a curated front page for all the hottest news on the Web. The aim for is to provide all the same RSS aggregation while keeping the experience simple, quick, and easy to navigate.

There are a few key differences in Digg’s business strategy that should ensure it doesn’t have to shut down after you’ve become reliant on it, too. First off, the service will operate as a freemium product, with the best features being offered as  premium service. The team noted that several people said they’d be willing to spend money on a Google Reader product, which is something Digg Reader is exploring. The beta version due out June 26, however, will be free to everyone.

Digg showed off a web version of Digg Reader along with screenshots of an iOS app. The team also promised that an Android version is on the way. Ultimately, the web version is probably the most important right now as Google is planning to shut down Google Reader on July 1. That gives people a pretty small window of opportunity to sign up and migrate all their feeds into Digg Reader.

Digg isn’t the only company hoping to grab Google Reader users. Zite has also bent over backward to revise its own news-reader service, which welcomes but doesn’t cater to Google Reader power users.

July 9-10, 2013
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YouSendIt chief executive Brad Garlinghouse announced today that the company is renaming itself. However, he said it’ll be a little bit longer before the name is revealed.

“Sounds like two syllables,” joked Garlinghouse at Bloomberg’s Next Big Thing conference.

YouSendIt started in 2004 as a file-sharing company but has quickly grown to include more services than just the “sending” function, as Garlinghouse explained. Recently, the company purchased Found, a startup that helps users with document discovery. That is, on many of these file-sharing and storing websites, documents pile up and are difficult to sift through. With this purchase, YouSendIt can now help you find documents you might otherwise have missed. And this will extend to services beyond just YouSendIt.

Garlinghouse has expressed this desire for YouSendIt to “go beyond send” before, saying managing data is a focus for the company. It also recently released an iPhone app as well as apps for Windows 8, Windows Phone 7, and Samsung S Pen.

At the conference, Garlinghouse played around with Aaron Levie, the chief executive of competitor Box, saying he was going to steal Box’s name or rename YouSendIt “Red-shoes Box.” Levie was wearing bright red sneakers on stage.

The company has raised a total of $49 million in venture funding and has over 40 million users.

Brad Garlinghouse photo via Rev Dan Catt/Flickr

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

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Old St. Louis wants to become hot with young startups.

Civic and business leaders are raising $100 million to kick the region’s burgeoning startup scene up a notch. Dubbed the Regional Entrepreneurship Initiative (REI), it seeks to attract venture capital over the next five years to support the “rapidly growing entrepreneurial ecosystem and high-growth startup activity” as well as fund new ventures.

“A year ago, I asked what we needed to provide the best environment to help our best startups grow, and the answer came back with a resounding ‘get them more money,’” said St. Louis County Executive Charlie A. Dooley. “Now we are saying we need the money and are putting an aggressive plan in place to raise that capital. This guaranties the best new companies will stay in St. Louis and thrive for years to come.”

St. Louis is not exactly what you’d call a startup hub. The dominant industries are manufacturing, healthcare, and shipping, and the city is home to large corporations like Anheuser-Busch, Enterprise Rent-A-Car, Purina, and Energizer. It may not be a “bastion of progressivism,” but this is beginning to change.

Local entrepreneur Aaron Perlut said that over the past couple years, the region’s business and entrepreneurial ecosystem has begun to dramatically evolve and flourish and is becoming a “tech town.” Technology job postings are on the rise, as are salaries, and St. Louis is attracting enough human, intellectual, physical, and financial capital to emerge as a center of innovation. A startup called LockerDome recently closed $6 million in Series A financing, “big data” company Appistry pulled in nearly $40 million from private investors, and CrowdSource.com closed $12.5 million.

“St. Louis is seeing an incredible amount of early-stage tech activity right now, which is leading to a strong funnel of great deals,” said Gabe Lozano, the chief executive officer of LockerDome. “Without question, we will be globally recognized as a top 10 city in technology within 10 years.”

Square cofounder Jim McKelvey is a St. Louis native and said that in the past, many St. Louis startups left the area to get their business off the ground, but now that migration is reversing. REI is designed to fuel this trend by attracting new talent and keeping native success stories home. This requires access to capital, which is one of the main roadblocks that entrepreneurs outside of the tech bubble face, and it’s one of the main reasons they head to the Valley.

The impact that a thriving startup scene can have on the economy is well known, and President Obama is a vocal supporter of initiatives that support technology and innovation. REI is not only about capital flow but also about strengthening St. Louis’s ecosystem as a whole. Other components include building a regional customer relationship management system (CRM) to track startup assistance, investment, and impact; developing a common measurement system to track results; creating marketing and communications campaigns aimed at expanding awareness and increasing participation from people inside and outside the region; establishing programs to include minority, female, veteran, and immigrant entrepreneurs; and setting up regional mentorship programs. The $100 million will also contribute funding to pre-seed companies as well as increase the availability of Series A venture capital.

REI received a $1.5 million grant from the U.S. Economic Development Administration, will be entered at AccelerateSTL.org, and includes a coalition of public and private sector leaders as well as the region’s leading entrepreneurs and venture capital community. Some of the existing players in the St. Louis scene include Cultivation Capital, Arch Angels, Billiken Angels, and iSELECT Fund. There are also the incubator programs Arch Grants and Capital Innovators.

The money hasn’t been raised yet, but the passion is there. It is, after all, a city with a lot to offer. It has the Gateway Arch, the Cardinals, and a wealth of American history. Plus, it’s home to the gooey butter cake, which for me is enticement enough to go.

Photo Credit: era404

National Security Agency (NSA) whistle-blower Edward Snowden may be holed away in Hong Kong avoiding the U.S. government’s wrath, but that doesn’t mean he can’t take the time to answer a few questions from the average Joe.

The world’s most famous information leaker took to the Guardian’s website today, answering reader questions about not only his leaks but also the press and political fallout that emerged from them as well.

First, Snowden is sticking to his guns with the notion that the U.S. government has “direct access” to the servers of big tech companies like Facebook and Google. Every company implicated in the initial PRISM reports has denied those claims, but Snowden says those responses, while technically true (at least in the doublespeak sense), were “misleading.”

More, Snowden says that while Google and the others may be hesitant to disclose the details of their relationships with the NSA, “that does not comply them from ethical obligation [to do so].”

If for example Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and Apple refused to provide this cooperation with the Intelligence Community, what do you think the government would do? Shut them down?

Essentially, Snowden is saying what a lot of other people have been for days: Tech companies can and should let the world know when the government is overstepping its bounds. Fortunately for Snowden’s cause, recent reports suggest that Yahoo and others did indeed resist the NSA’s orders – at least initially.

Overall, while Snowden’s responses are often a tad cryptic (“This country is worth dying for”), they do help paint him as a whistle-blower who is more deliberate than, say, Bradley Manning, who has long been criticized for his more reckless leaking of government documents.

Snowden confesses that the deliberateness is intentional: “I understand that many media outlets used the argument that ‘documents were dumped’ to smear Manning and want to make it clear that it is not a valid assertion here,” he said.

It’s also worth noting that there didn’t seem to be all that much backtracking or hedging in Snowden’s responses even though both the Guardian and the Washington Post have stepped back from some of the language in their original reports — in particularly that of what actually constitutes ”direct access”:

More detail on how direct NSA’s accesses are is coming, but in general, the reality is this: if an NSA, FBI, CIA, DIA, etc analyst has access to query raw SIGINT databases, they can enter and get results for anything they want. Phone number, email, user id, cell phone handset id (IMEI), and so on — it’s all the same.

#PewPew on Repeat: I made this hole on Mars with 100 laser shots over 20 minutes [GIF] http://t.co/PP9V0MOzy5

— Curiosity Rover (@MarsCuriosity) June 17, 2013

Perhaps not a very big hole, but a hole nevertheless.

Over the course of 20 minutes, Curiosity fired its million-watt laser at a tiny section of Martian soil 100 times. A million watts might sound like a lot of power, but Curiosity’s laser only operates for five one-billionths of a second. Still, that was enough to transform a small part of the Martian surface through all four states of matter almost instantaneously: from solid to liquid to gas to plasma within milliseconds.

The plasma then explodes (NASA calls it “rapid expansion”) and creates a minicrater as you can see in the animated GIF above. NASA didn’t specify but was likely checking the vaporized matter for its molecular and atomic makeup in an attempt to learn more about the present and past surface of Mars.

I refuse to believe NASA scientists were just “having fun” shooting a laser from a robot on Mars.

The crater is tiny — perhaps a millimeter in size — so there is no danger of indigenous Martians interpreting the laser blasts as a sign of incipient Earthling attack.

Image credits: NASA

Japan-based electronics manufacturer Kyocera announced today it is supplying approximately 30 megawatts of solar power to agricultural facilities across Japan in a deal worth 8.5 billion yen ($89 million).

Kyocera will supply, engineer, construct, and maintain 30MW of solar power generating systems to the project implemented by the National Federation of Agriculture Cooperative Associations (Zen-Noh) and the Mitsubishi Corporation.

The goal of the project is to reinvigorate the agriculture sector and local farming towns and to further spread renewable energy use. There are almost 1.5 million farmers in Japan, and Zen-Noh and Mitsubishi are planning to build one of the country’s largest solar power projects by installing 200MW of solar power systems on farmers’ and Zen-Noh facilities.

Mitsubishi and Kyocera have jointly established the JAMC Solar Energy Company to operate the project and will sell the power generated from the installations to regional utility power companies under Japan’s feed-in tariff program. The objective of the incentive program that began a year ago as a result of the nuclear disaster in Japan in March 2011 is to diversify energy resources, with solar power being the main source of alternative energy.

Kyocera will provide around 124,000 solar modules to the project to be split between 80 locations. Through this project, Kyocera hopes to promote the use of renewable energy and to contribute to local communities.

Kyocera has expanded its solar energy business to include production, supply, installation, construction and operation of large-scale solar power plants and has been researching solar energy since 1975.

Image via Kyocera

July 9-10, 2013
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I’m sure you’re happy to know that deep neural networks perform significantly better than shallow networks. But you might be thrilled to learn that Microsoft has doubled the speed at which it can translate what you say into text … while also improving accuracy.

What do the deep neural networks (DNNs) have to do with it?

Microsoft says that DNNs, which function more like a human brain than a traditional computer, can detect tiny variations in speech that stay the same even when your voice changes. In other words, even when you speak faster or yell, or when you’re winded from running up the stairs, those variations remain stable. Even better, they remain stable from individual to individual as long as you’re speaking the same language.

The result is that a message that takes 1.06 seconds to render into text with Microsoft’s old technology now takes .53 seconds. That may not seem like much, but in the video below it feels almost instantaneous. To skip the theory and see the goods, fast-forward to the 1:08 mark:

The best part is that the error rate is now down as well — from 16 percent to 13.5 percent — and that the technology is resistant to background noise interference. All of which — as we use more and more voice-recognition technology to control our mobile devices, our gaming systems, and to dictate our texts and messages — is a great help.

The update is currently rolling out to Microsoft data centers in the U.S.

Image credit: Microsoft

Social coding site GitHub has just launched Repository Next, a new design for repos that puts the focus on content, speed, and everyday use.

The new look and feel comes several months after the launch of new profile pages and more than a year after the company launched its spectacular page generator for developers’ projects on GitHub.

Back to the new design.

“We’ve been working toward this redesign for almost a year now, and we think it’s a massive step forward in using GitHub,” says lead designer Kyle Neath in a blog post.

“GitHub is a product you use every day,” he continued. “We’ve focused on this and optimized for how people interact with GitHub on a daily basis. The next time you click through on a notification email, you’ll find a dramatic reduction of persistent section navigation cluttering up the page.”

The team also simplified the interface to bring more focus to the code itself, including pull requests and issues. Other optimizations were all about decreasing load times thanks to some pjax magic.

“It’s a big change and may take a few days to feel right,” Neath said. “As always, this is just the beginning. This redesign paves the way for an even faster, more focused GitHub. And we can’t wait to see what the future holds.”

The rollout starts today and will be complete within the next couple weeks.

GitHub, famously bootstrapped for most of its half-decade lifespan, took a record-breaking $100 million Series A about a year ago. The cash, which came from Andreessen Horowitz, was specifically intended to fund products and projects like this — things that add polish to an already popular application, making it more appealing to the enterprise customers who supply the company’s income.

July 9-10, 2013
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Intel is testing a number of “experimental devices in the lab,” one of which is a smartwatch-like device, according to chief technology officer Justin Rattner.

“Actually, we’re looking at novel display devices. The watch is kind of — if you want to put the time on it, that’s fine ,” said Rattner at Bloomberg’s Next Big Thing conference. “But if you’re talking about texting today, wouldn’t it be nice if you could just look at your wrist?”

Late last year, rumors came out that Intel was working with Apple on a smartwatch. Whether Apple is involved in these tests are unknown.

The smartwatch gained popularity a little over a year ago when Pebbe raised over $10 million on crowdfunding website Kickstarter and sold out its 85,000 preorders. The watch tells the time (thankfully) but can also push your incoming calls, emails, and calendar entries through a connection to your smartphone. In May, the company raised $15 million from Charles River Ventures and opened up a software development kit so that the smartwatch community could start creating apps to run on Pebble.

A number of other companies such as Google are said to be jumping on the trend as well.

Intel’s “novel display device” seems to be focused on communications. The company is also working on “contextually aware computing,” a technology that can tell when you want to use it. Other environmental clues control its functions. Intel could use this kind of tech to push its smartwatches forward and keep them energy efficient.

Intel CTO photo via Meghan Kelly/VentureBeat

The Tianhe-2 was ranked No. 1 on the TOP500 list of the world’s most powerful supercomputers. This marks China’s first return to the top position since November 2010, when the Tianhe-1A was named top dog.

Also known as Milky Way-2, the system was developed by China’s National University of Defense Technology. Most of the features were developed in China although TOP500 editor Jack Dongarra said it uses Intel products for the main computing part. Tianhe-2 has 16,000 nodes, each with two Intel Xeon IvyBridge processors and three Xeon Phi processors for a combined total of 3,120,000 computing cores. It will call the National Supercomputer Center in Guangzho, China its home.

The TOP500 list first started out of a conference in Germany in 1993 and is now a “much-anticipated, much-watched, and much-debated twice-yearly event.” The latest edition was announced today during the opening session of the 2013 Supercomputing Conference in Leipzig, Germany. Information about high-performing computers is of interest to manufacturers, users, potential users, and tech junkies. TOP500 publishes this list in an effort to strengthen the high-performance competing community and provide a better understanding of the market through communication and collaboration.

The list contains the 500 most powerful computing systems, which are judged by their performance on the Linpack Benchmark, a “yardstick of performance” that uses a dense system of linear equations to assess the systems. The list also tracks the sector’s development over time and identifies trends.

The latest report found that there are now 26 systems with performance greater than a petaflop, which is up from last year, and the total combined performance of all 500 systems has grown to 223 pflops, as compared to 162 plops six month ago and 123 pflops one year ago (I really like writing pflop). The entry level on the list moved unto 96.6 teraflops, compared to 76.5 teraflops six months ago.

A total of 54 systems are using accelerator/coprocessor technology, which is down from 62 in November 2012. Thirty-nine of these use Nvidia chips, three use ATI Radeon, and 11 systems use Intel MIC technology. Intel continues to provide the processors for the largest share (80.4 percent) of TOP500 systems. Eighty-eight percent of the system use processors with six or more cores. IBM’s BlueGene/Q is the most popular system among the top 10.

The list also looks at geographical trends. The U.S. is the leading costumer of high-performance computing systems. It has 252 of the 500 while Europe has 112 and Asia has 119. Of those systems, 66 are in China, 30 are in Japan, and the U.K. has 29.

The Milky Way-2 took the supercomputing throne away from Titan, a Cray XK7 system installed at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory. It is now ranked No. 2 for achieving 17.59 pflops on the Linpack Benchmark. It is still one of the most energy-efficient systems at the list. The third-place system is also part of the Department of Energy. Sequoia lives at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

Photo Credit: TOP500

“This means instead of carrying laptops around, a developer could write an app, test it, and deploy it — all from the iPad,” Shankar explained to VentureBeat via email.

Binary also features tabs, themes, syntax highlighting, and all the handy code editor/IDE features you love so well.

“I use a Bluetooth keyboard with it and do most of my development on the iPad now,” said Shankar. “With Binary, you can write any app — a website, Node.js server, Python server, an iPhone app — anything!”

Of course, there’s the text-entry problem. Shankar says he gets around the necessary hassle of carrying a Bluetooth keyboard by using a keyboard-iPad case combo (left).

While iPad coding isn’t totally new, it’s generally the noteworthy exception rather than the rule. In fact, as recently as last September, Slashdot was still asking when, oh when, coding on the iPad would migrate from fantasy to reality.

And the fantasy isn’t one of simple pleasure or mere convenience or even novelty. For any developer, especially startup developers, the need to code on the go can change from nonexistent to urgent in a few seconds. You know the drill:

“Imagine this: I’m relaxing on the beach. I get a notification on my iPad saying the servers are down,” Shankar said. We’ve all been there.

“I open up Binary, fix a couple lines of code, push the changes to the server, and get back to playing with the dogs on the beach.”

It eliminates a little bit of the panic from those “oh, sh*t” moments that always seem to pop up.

“Binary is freedom,” Shankar said. “Coding is my trade, my craft. And now I can code and do my work from anywhere on the planet.”

Binary’s currently in public beta. Use the site link above to get in.

July 9-10, 2013
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A Rolodex filled with two million of the wealthiest and most influential people in the world sounds like a business urban legend.

Relationship Science has created one, however, and people are willing to spend thousands of dollars for access. Today the startup announced raising an additional $30 million, closely following its public debut and a $60 million round of funding in February 2013.

Instead of being about “who you know,” Relationship Science proclaims “it’s all about you who really know.”

The startup offers “the ultimate business development tool.” It has amassed an online database of two million “top decision-makers” including bankers, private equity workers, and venture capitalists as well as 800,000 organizations across the public, private, finance, and nonprofit sectors. The cloud-based customer relationship management (CRM) tool tracks the “1 percent” and relies mostly on manpower to do it.

During an interview with VentureBeat surrounding the startup’s launch, founder and chief executive officer Neal Goldman said that the decision not to rely on an algorithm to scrape the data was deliberate. Many influential people do not use social media sites like Facebook or LinkedIn, and thus Relationship Science’s results are more sophisticated and personalized. It has taken almost 700 people — mostly in India and New York — over two years to build.

Clients use the research-driven profiles to gain a deeper understanding of the people and organizations they want to do business with. The profiles include information about work history, board connections, deal history, education, nonprofit donations and affiliations, political donations, personal interests, creative works and awards, business relationships, and relevant familiar connections.

It’s like learning a potential business partner is an avid boater and reading up on schooners … times 100.

Using Relationship Science enables people to discover new relationships, advance existing ones, and maximize every opportunity as well as figure out the best way to contact that person directly. The site does not contain people’s phone numbers or email addresses, but it does map connections so you can leverage your own professional network to find warm leads.

A number of other relationship CRM tools have attempted in the past and largely failed, but the company is extremely well funded, and Goldman said his ultimate goal is to build “the entire interweb of relationships.” New investors include Reuben Jeffery, David Komansky (former chairman and CEO of Merrill Lynch), Randy Lerner, Stephen Luczo, William Rudin, and Salesforce.com. Previous investors include Ken Langone, Henry Kravis, Stanley Druckenmiller, Andrew Tish, Ron Burkle, and Joe Perella.

So far this year, Relationship Science has signed up over 150 client organizations, including well-known investment banks, private equity firms, law firms, wealth management firms, universities, hedge funds corporations, consulting firms, and nonprofit organizations. While its niche is the financial industry, the plan is ultimately to branch out into other sectors. This funding will support the company as it strives to meet customer demand, accelerate development of new services, create new applications, and expand the content of its database.

Photo Credit: Renaissancechambara/Flickr

July 9-10, 2013
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Gay mobile-social network Hornet now has more than 1 million users and will soon launch an iPad app, the company revealed today.

San Francisco-based Hornet launched in January 2012, has seven employees, and has raised about $500,000 in seed funding. It offers social and dating features for “gay, bi, and curious guys” with profiles, messaging, and “stealth mode” for anonymity.

The service has been growing quickly even while facing competition from Grindr, the reigning king of the gay mobile-social space. (Grindr claims to have more than 6 million users.) About a year ago, Hornet had 150,000 users doing 100,000 sessions per day. Now it has 1 million users who have engaged in 178 million sessions.

Hornet chief executive officer Sean Howell told us that the app prides itself on providing a safe space for men to meet each other, but it isn’t a “sleazy” experience.

“The gay space is hyper-competitive, and we’re showing that you can have a less sleazy app and do well, which is a common misconception about the space,” Howell said. “Nearly all of our profiles contain tame face pics as profile pics versus other players out there. … People have much longer chats on our platform versus others.”

Like many other popular mobile services, Hornet has apps for iPhone and Android. Howell said both apps see a lot of traction, but usage patterns are slightly different on each platform. For example, Android users send 22 percent more messages than iOS users, and iOS users send 37 percent more pictures. New York City is the most popular city for iOS users while Hollywood is the most popular city for Android users. App usage is highest before and after work hours.

Next up for the service is the launch of an iPad app, which may happen next week. This move will likely help the brand reach even more users. Howell said many people have been asking for an iPad app for a long time and that they’ve reluctantly had to use the iPhone app on the iPad.

“It will be a better experience for iPad users,” Howell said. “We expect huge lift off it and think there will be thousands and thousands of app downloads in the first week.”

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013 San Francisco, CA

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“Life is awful; it just sucks,” CloudFlare chief executive officer Matthew Prince jokes.

His company is now processing 150 billion page views every month. Every minute, it generates 30 gigabytes of server log files — records of pages and images that have been sent to web-surfers around the globe. Last year, CloudFlare had more traffic than Amazon, Wikipedia, Twitter, Instagram, and Apple combined. Now it has more traffic than the king of online engagement itself, Facebook.

“We keep growing, despite our best efforts,” Prince told me last week.

CloudFlare is a content-delivery network among many other things. Add your site to its cloud with a few lines of code, and it’ll be served out by thousands of machines prepositioned all over the globe — faster and more reliably than you can yourself and (for most sites) for free. Want better performance, more analytics, guarantees, and a “2,500 percent service level” agreement? That you’ll pay for.

Source: LinkedIn

Matthew Prince, CEO of CloudFlare

What the company is focusing on now, Prince told me, is building its own equipment direct from Quanta. In other words, like Facebook and Google, it’s no longer buying from an original equipment manufacturer like Dell or HP but designing its own servers straight from the original assembler in Asia to cut about a third of the cost, Prince says. And importantly, it’s partnering with up to 1,000 global Internet service providers to put those servers right in their data centers — as close as possible to clicking data consumers.

“It’s like a giant game of Risk,” Prince says as he talks about trying to put servers in Turkey, which is hard, and settling for Bulgaria, which is the gateway to the country. “Increasingly, ISPs are inviting us to take our servers and install them in their data centers. There’s a Chilean ISP that we sent a gigabit of data to every second of every day that is just begging us for servers.”

The key when you’re a gigantic global mover of data is to preposition the data as close as possible to where it’s needed and then replicate it and cache it locally. That not only saves on bandwidth transfer costs but also speeds up access for users. Right now, CloudFlare is in only 23 ISPs. By the end of the year, Prince plans to ramp that to 50 of the world’s largest and then to 1,000 by the end of 2014.

If he accomplishes that goal, he’ll have joined a very, very exclusive group of companies.

“Only 2 companies in history that have pulled that trick: Akamai and Google,” Prince said. “We’re joining that club.”

One country that’s particularly annoying is Australia. While Asian Internet traffic is expensive, Prince said — on the order of five times the cost of U.S. and Western Europe traffic — Australian bits cost five times more to move, making the Aussie Internet 25 times more expensive than that of the U.S. Prince blames the Aussie’s former national telephone company, Telstra, for being noncompetitive.

The other key when your bandwidth requirements are massive and doubling roughly every four months is peering.

“As you get larger, you can start peering traffic off your network,” Prince says. “ISPs are asking us to send traffic across private peering exchanges, and as we move closer to the ISPs, that’s easier.”

Peering allows other companies to use your infrastructure to transfer their data for free while they allow you to use theirs for the same price. Interestingly, when it comes to transferring traffic over other companies’ pipes, the U.S. is one of the most difficult countries in the world.

I asked Prince when he sees the company’s massive growth leveling off.

“You’d think with the law of large numbers it would slow down,” he said. “But it doubled in the last two and a half months recently … which is way scary … and it’s only accelerating.

Image credit: Viewminder/Flickr

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

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Samsung isn’t slowing down with its Galaxy S4 variants anytime soon.

After announcing smaller and tougher versions of its flagship smartphone, Samsung is now gearing up to launch a new version of the S4 with support for LTE-Advanced networks, Reuters reports.

The phone could hit South Korea as soon as this month, Samsung co-chief executive officer J.K. Shin told Reuters. LTE-Advanced (LTE-A) is a major upgrade over the current LTE standard, and it could end up being the driving technology behind future “5G” networks. For now, though, it looks like carriers are approaching LTE-A as a way to speed up existing 4G LTE networks. T-Mobile, for example, claims it’ll be the first to offer LTE-A in the U.S. because it has newer LTE equipment than other carriers.

LTE-Advanced will potentially offer speeds up to 300 megabits per second (three times faster than LTE’s theoretical bandwidth), so you can be sure that carriers will want to market the heck out of that upgrade. Samsung claims its LTE-A Galaxy S4 will be about twice as fast as the current LTE models.

For the most part, the LTE-A Galaxy S4 seems like a show horse for Samsung. It gets to claim that it’s the first in the LTE-A handset market, but most consumers won’t be able to take advantage of the faster speeds for some time. The phone will also serve as a way to push Samsung’s 4G networking-equipment business. (After all, it’ll only be able to convince carriers to adopt its LTE-A equipment if there’s a phone that supports the faster network.)

Photo: Devindra Hardawar/VentureBeat

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

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“We’re all about customer experience and enriching lives,” Apple CEO Tim Cook told Wall Street a couple of months ago.

That’s occasionally a little difficult to believe.

There’s no question that Apple is among the more customer-focused companies in the computing and technology industry. But there’s also no question that the company has a history of moves that can be tough pills for its fans to swallow.

One case in point is the iAd WorkBench/AppGratis scenario that has played out over the past few months.

This past week Apple unveiled iAd Workbench, a new mobile app advertising solution for companies that want to promote their iOS apps.  Just in April Apple pulled AppGratis, a very successful app discovery app, from the iOS app store — just five days after approving it – and then, after having had significant discussions with AppGratis over previous weeks as the company had adjusted its app according to Apple’s concerns, Apple refused to speak to AppGratis again.

Coincidence? I doubt it.

AppGratis was a free-app-of-the-day-style app that developers paid for access to in order to drive downloads of their iOS games and apps. Only iPhone owners who wanted the app downloaded it, so it was a self-selected audience, and the company was selective about who it featured. By late 2012, AppGratis was getting big enough to be able to drive upward of 500,000, and in some cases 1,000,000, downloads in just days — big enough to drive apps straight to the app store leaderboard.

Apple’s new iAd Workbench is an advertising solution for app developers. App developers who want to increase their downloads will buy ads that will be placed onto other apps, ones that users have already downloaded, and they can pay Apple per install of their app. iAds has come from rich interactive ads for 7-figure contracts with massive global brands to $50 minimum buy-ins to flog your apps.

What’s the key difference?

In scenario one, you paid AppGratis to drive downloads of your app. In scenario two, you pay Apple.

There’s other differences, and there are some nuances, sure. But that’s the core difference.

Apple was concerned about developers using AppGratis to “game” the app store top-10 ratings as well as alleging that AppGratis broke the app store guidelines. I fail to see how iAd Workbench couldn’t be used in a similar way, or how ads in any other online or mobile locations couldn’t do the same thing. And it is very clear that there are multiple other mobile app discovery solutions and ad companies who are doing the exact same thing.

I also fail to see how Apple couldn’t have devised a method of tracking downloads from AppGratis — or any other app discovery app — and adjusting the app store leaderboard to more heavily favor “organic” downloads. I wonder if something like that will be built for iAd Workbench, or if a massive spend on iAd Workbench will drive your app right up into the upper echelon of app store stardom.

Source: Apple

iAd Workbench app advertising solution from Apple

I talked to AppGratis CEO Simon Dawlat recently, but he doesn’t want to comment publicly. The company has been burned enough by the press, and by Apple’s reaction to it. But it’s pretty clear that success almost killed his iOS business. That — and the fact that Apple wasn’t “getting a piece.”

Which is why AppGratis is now on Android, where Google doesn’t exercise such heavy-handed control. And why, for iOS, it’s now focusing on the web, which Apple can’t control.

Which is an important point for Apple to remember.

While Apple was first to build a successful and massive mobile ecosystem with devices and apps and media, it’s not the only game in town anymore. It is the most lucrative in town, paying $10 billion to developers over the last five years, including a staggering $5 billion just in the last year. But sometimes platform owners have to do what’s good for the platform, and for third-party developers who are on the platform, not just what’s good for them.

The risk, if they don’t, is that at some point they’ll no longer have a platform.

Image credit: Nathan Makan/Flickr