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Joyent Co-Founder Jason Hoffman Steps Down As CTO Of The Cloud Computing Pioneer
Sep 10, 3:24AM
Joyent co-founder Jason Hoffman is leaving his position as CTO of the pioneering cloud computing company. Hoffman said in a blog post that he will remain connected to Joyent as an advisor. We've reached out to Hoffman about his next steps, as well as Joyent to ask who their next CTO will be.Medtech Startup Embrace Her Health Helps Women Track Their Pregnancies
Sep 10, 3:23AM
Among the crowd showing at TechCrunch Disrupt’s Startup Alley was Embrace Her Health, a two-year-old company at work on a suite of maternity apps that aim to enable women to manage their pre- and post-natal health better and cut the risk and costs of preventable complications. Embrace Her Health’s first mobile app for iOS and Android, Pregnancy Companion, serves as both a personal pregnancy tracker and a source of information for expecting mothers. Women plug in their due date, and from there the app uses an algorithm written by the team’s OB/GYNs to power a range of tools related to weight gain, hydration, kicks, and contractions. The app also gives users access to a network of MDs who answer specific questions. Most women only see a doctor once a month during pregnancy, and these appointments are often short, said co-founder Aron Schuftan, MD. This is partly due to the introduction of Obamacare, which resulted in more patients for the same number of doctors. Enabling women to track their own pregnancies fills in those gaps and educates them about risks of which that they might not otherwise be aware. “It’s day-to-day tracking. It’s a more ongoing, proactive identification of risk versus that one-time visit,” CEO and co-founder Denise Terry said. “If your blood pressure doesn’t spike when you’re there [in the office], you’ll never know that it spiked two weeks ago. We’re moving to a daily and weekly self-monitoring state of health. This allows that to happen. You only see a doctor 8 to ten times during your pregnancy. Doctors miss things.” The app assumes a normal pregnancy track, but when certain flags are tripped, they interact with the algorithm to deliver personalized content modules. If a woman learns she is having twins or has gestational diabetes, for instance, the app will provide tips specific to those scenarios. Embrace Her Health was founded two years ago by Terry, Shufton, and Chief Medical Officer Jan Rydfors, MD, who co-authored the widely used clinical handbook “Obstetrics, Gynecology, and Infertility.” Thus far the app has been used by 250,000 women and is distributed by 500 doctors. The company has been bootstrapped so far and is now looking to raise a seed round of $1 million to expand the team and develop similar apps for post-partum health, infant pediatrics, breast feeding, and fertility. That suite will likely launch in Q4. In the next six months, Embrace Her Health willWhat's Ahead For Snapchat? CEO Evan Spiegel Drops Clues In Disrupt Talk
Sep 10, 2:18AM
Snapchat co-founder and CEO Evan Spiegel took the stage today at TechCrunch Disrupt and dropped a number of hints about Snapchat's future products, from wearable tech to social media feeds. What's particularly interesting is how successful Snapchat has been as a product while Snapchat the company is really still in phase one.Forget Quantifying Yourself, Driblet Wants To Help You Quantify Your Water Use
Sep 10, 1:55AM
So our Hackathon technically ended yesterday, but that doesn't mean we're through shining the light on some of the great projects that presented on our stage. Take Mexico-based startup Driblet, for instance. The three-person team (who just recently took home the top prize at AngelHack Monterrey) makes a smart water meter that connects to the water pipes in your house. It sits between the pipe and your shower head for instance or between the pipe and your faucet. Nestled inside the device is a slew of sensors that measures (among other things) water flow and the levels of foreign substances in that water, just to make sure you're working with the really good stuff.Outline Raises $850K To Make Public Policy Tools Accessible To All State Residents
Sep 10, 1:33AM
Born at Berkeley as Politify, a fun app to compare the personal impacts of tax plans of then rival candidates for president, Barack Obama and Mitt Romney, Outline is building a tool to demystify the process of governance. If you have played a real-time strategy game that involves resource management, you understand Outline: Voters can adjust tax rates and the like, and see the impact those changes would have their own budgets, and their state a whole. That it goes both ways matters, as everyone wants more but doesn’t want to pay for it. Outline’s first customer will be the State of Massachusetts, though that deal remains in contractual discussion. The company informed TechCrunch it will likely become cashflow positive following that first agreement. Currently composed of a team of five, Outline is looking to hire three to five more, mostly designers and economists. Outline applies its model to a states’ makeup using datasets from various sources to track tax policy, household income, and other variables. It then allows users to tweak the big dials – statewide tax policy, education spending – and see if their state lands in the red, or the black. It’s an effective tool for showing voters what is, and is not possible. Every voter wants more money for the government programs that they enjoy and personally benefit from, and lower taxes. A state using Outline can cut through that and give everyday citizens a tool that they can understand and use. According to the firm, tools such as theirs do exist inside state governments, but they are complex bits of code, often featuring non-graphical output. Outline flips that by making the process simple, and digestible; if those tools are DOS, Outline wants to be Windows 95. Growth Today at TechCrunch Disrupt SF, Outline announced that it has raised a $850,000 seed round, with the largest chunk of that sum provided by the Knight Foundation. Presuming that the company’s deal with the State of Massachusetts goes as planned, Outline intends to add one state per quarter to kick things off, and double that rate in the following year. Working with the government means long procurement cycles – half a year is within normal bounds – and the company could run into friction. That said, states already expend large sums on similar tools, so its stated sales goals are within reasonable bounds of expectation. The company claims that 10 statesJack The Ripper Is A DIY, 3D-Printed DVD Ripper For Fans Of Optical Media
Sep 10, 1:27AM
If you like DVDs but also like shelf space have we got a project for you. Called Jack the Ripper, this Raspberry Pi-powered system takes DVDs from one pile, drops them into a DVD drive for ripping, and then tugs them out and onto another spindle. Ad infinitum.Zula's Mobile-First Teamwork Tool Lets You Spend More Time Outside Of The Inbox
Sep 10, 1:20AM
Zula, a startup from Jeff Pulver, a co-founder of VoIP success story Vonage, and serial entrepreneur Jacob Ner-David, is hoping to make your life a little less reliant on your inbox. The app combines elements of enterprise collaboration and communication tools, as well as mobile messaging giants like WhatsApp, for a tool that targets enterprise but could also find a home with personal users as well.SlickLogin Aims To Kill The Password By Singing A Silent Song To Your Smartphone
Sep 10, 1:14AM
Launching into closed beta in the Disrupt SF 2013 Battlefield today, SlickLogin lets you log into a website on your computer by holding your phone within a few inches of it.Your Facebook Posts, Gift-Wrapped In Identity, Will Soon Be Given To Marketers
Sep 10, 12:57AM
Facebook knows what you talk about, just like Twitter. But its edge is that it also knows who you are. Facebook's newest APIs let select news outlets view search and see your public posts, plus it tallies keyword mentions and collects the demographic data of everyone mentioning certain keywords. But it's confirmed to me that "We see the potential for these tools to be really useful down the line for brands and agencies. That will definitely come in the coming weeks."Shine Security Is Reinventing The Antivirus Company For The Age Of Zero-Day Attacks
Sep 10, 12:51AM
Launching today at TechCrunch Disrupt San Francisco, Shine Security is reinventing the idea of what it means to be an antivirus company in an age of cyber-warfare and zero-day attacks. The company's technology was built by white hat, ethical hackers, and works in real time, performing behavioral monitoring on end users' systems in order to stop newly emerging threats that other anti-virus firms have yet to discover or identify.Nexon Takes A Strategic Stake In Former Zynga, EA COO's New Gaming Startup
Sep 10, 12:45AM
Nexon, the publicly traded free-to-play gaming giant out of Asia, is continuing its streak of strategic investments in promising Western studios by taking a stake in former Zynga COO John Schappert’s new startup Shiver Entertainment, Inc. They didn’t disclose the size of the deal, which will see Nexon take an equity stake in the company in exchange for exclusive global publishing rights to Shiver’s upcoming games. Nexon’s CFO Owen Mahoney will also get a role on Shiver’s board of directors. Schappert most recently served as Zynga’s COO after holding the same role at rival Electronic Arts. Shiver won’t be Schappert’s first startup, as he founded Tiburon Entertainment back in 1994. That company, which spawned the massively successful Madden NFL franchise, was bought by EA in 1998. Schappert said he knew the day he left Zynga that he wanted to found another startup instead of joining an existing gaming company at a senior level. “I’ve been very lucky to work on the biggest franchises in the industry. What gets me the most excited is building immersive games and working with some of the best creators in the industry,” he said. He hasn’t revealed who is on his team, but says that news is forthcoming very soon. He started the company about nine months ago and hinted that we might see some titles out of the company shortly. He wouldn’t give too many specifics on what genres the company will focus on, except to say, “We’re going to focus on more significant, more immersive games — the high fidelity games that people play $50 to 60 for — except in a free-to-play format.” This isn’t the first company from a Zynga alum that Nexon’s done a deal with either. The Tokyo-headquartered company recently did another similar strategic investment in a startup from Brian Reynolds, Zynga’s former chief game designer. These deals are part of an effort to help Nexon reach more Western audiences. While Nexon generated nearly $450 million in revenues in the first three months of this year, European and North American markets contributed less than 5 percent of the company's revenues during that time. In contrast, China makes up nearly half of Nexon's revenue base. So Nexon is looking to reach North American and European audiences as the Android and iOS platforms weaken the divide between Asian and Western gamers.Ansa Is A Messaging App That Lets You Talk Off The Record
Sep 10, 12:40AM
Ansa is a new breed of messaging app, one that allows you to be yourself. Whenever you don’t feel like sending messages that will stay on your friend’s phone, you can go off the record. Every message will be deleted 60 seconds after reading it. This is just one of many privacy features that will make messaging more personal. Launching onstage at Disrupt SF, the app is now available on iOS and Android. “The difference with other texting apps is that everything you say is permanent,” founder and CEO Natalie Bryla told me in a phone interview before Disrupt. “If you think about that, you will want to use another app that allows you to talk more freely,” she continued. The main feature is the off-the-record button. After hitting a button, your recipient is notified of the change. Both your messages and the responses will be deleted. At any point, you can go back on the record and the recipient will be notified. But it doesn’t stop there. If you think you shouldn’t have sent a message, you can delete it hours, days or even months after sending it. It not only deletes it on your phone, it deletes it on your recipient’s phone as well. This feature is called “sync deletion.” All Ansa features put you in control of your conversation. When you delete a message, it is deleted from Ansa’s servers at the same time. It’s effectively gone forever. However, for your regular on-the-record converstations, Ansa keeps everything on its servers like Facebook does. It allows you to use another phone and find your conversation history. Finally, you can send self-destructing messages. While this feature is very reminiscent of ephemeral startup Snapchat, Ansa allows you to send text messages, photos and videos. And it’s just an additional feature that makes sense to the service. The app allows you to communicate in more creative ways. You can apply filters to your pictures and draw goofy things before sending them. If you want to communicate using a popular song or a cute image, you can search Google images and YouTube without ever leaving the app. All Ansa features put you in control of your conversation. To notify you when your friends join Ansa, the app allows you to sync your address book and Facebook account. But it seems like Ansa users are going to use the messaging app only with aLevelEleven Raises $2M For Sales Motivation App From Salesforce.com, A Former NBA Star And An NFL Offensive Tackle
Sep 10, 12:30AM
LevelEleven, a developer of gamification apps, has raised $2 million from Detroit Venture Partners, Hyde Park Venture Partners, Salesforce.com and a group of investors, including two professional athletes. The company will use the funding to build out its service designed for salespeople.JumpCloud Unveils Service To Make AWS Cloud Servers Less Vulnerable To Attack
Sep 10, 12:21AM
JumpCloud launched at TechCrunch Disrupt San Francisco today with a new way to secure the deep vulnerabilities that come with cloud servers, in particular Amazon Web Services (AWS). The service, in private beta until today's launch, represents a new way to analyze machine data to provide notifications and alerts about a customer's cloud deployments.Shasta Ventures' Rob Coneybeer On Why He's Betting Big On Hardware Startups
Sep 10, 12:14AM
Shasta Ventures' managing director Rob Coneybeer likes the opportunity in hardware startups. A lot. And he's putting his money where his mouth is -- over the past year or so he's made investments in companies like Nest and Ouya, and is actively on the hunt for more that are building physical products. So what's he find so interesting about today's hardware startups?Hands On With The Anova Automatic Sous Vide System
Sep 10, 12:08AM
Sous vide cooking is probably one of the most high-tech methods of food preparation that home cooks can perform without a degree in chemistry and/or killing themselves and those around them. That's why I was particularly excited to try the Anova, an automatic sous vide circulator that can turn a lump of cold chicken into a succulent taste sensation in about an hour.Voxel Virtualizes Mobile Apps To Create Truly Playable, Interactive Ads
Sep 09, 11:55PM
Voxel, a startup aiming to make mobile ads genuinely representative of the apps they're promoting, just launched on-stage as part of the Startup Battlefield at Disrupt SF. The company's founding team includes some experienced entrepreneurs. CEO David Zhao was co-founder and CEO at Zecter, the startup behind cloud service ZumoDrive, which was acquired by Motorola Mobility in 2010. President Russ d'Sa, meanwhile, was an engineer at Twitter (where he said he invented the Twitter Card) and 23andMe, and he also co-founded startups MeetYou and DraftMix. Like Zecter, d'Sa's startups were backed by Y Combinator, and that's where d'Sa and Zhao met.2600hz Launches Platform For Opening The Mobile Telco
Sep 09, 11:39PM
The 2600hz team took the stage at TechCrunch Disrupt today, launching its service for disrupting the mobile telecommunications industry by opening its infrastructure through a set of open APIs that developers can use to build out their own services.
CPUsage Makes It Easier To Harness The Cloud's Compute Power
Sep 09, 11:29PM
The cloud computing services from Amazon, Microsoft and others make it possible for businesses to access a virtually unlimited amount of compute power for their applications. What’s hard, however, is to orchestrate all of the distributed infrastructure, provision the right instances and to maintain these setups. Portland, OR-based startup CPUsage, which is launching at TechCrunch Disrupt SF 2013 today, wants to turn compute into a utility in order to help developers, scientists and researchers to use high-performance computing in the cloud without the need to spend months on setting up their infrastructure. As CPUsage’s co-founders Jeff Martens and Matt Wallington told me, the idea behind the service is to allow anybody to take their existing applications and then allow them to run on virtually any cloud computing service available, whether that’s AWS, Microsoft’s Azure or one of their competitors. That’s still in the future, though. What the company is launching today is support for AWS, with support for Azure and Google’s Compute Engine coming by the end of the calendar year. All of this sounds very technical, but it solves a real problem for many businesses that rely on high-performance computing in the cloud. As Martens noted, a biotech company he talked to often has to analyze up to 100 million molecules per week for the big pharmaceutical corporations that are its clients. That’s a highly compute-intensive job that can take up to 8 million hours of compute time in total. To do that, the company spins up thousands of cloud-based compute instances, but it took them months to build the infrastructure and write their own app-specific APIs and job status dashboards to run these. Then, once everything is in place, it can take another couple of hours just to get everything up and running for this batch of molecules. With CPUsage, Martens argues, it would take them fewer than 20 minutes to create the same kind of setup. While getting started with the service isn’t trivial, it should be pretty easy to do for most developers. CPUsage essentially sets up a sandboxed server (which could run any flavor of Linux and development environment) and the user then logs into it and installs the application. Then, CPUsage’s API builder takes over and creates a custom API that the developers can then hook into to submit the compute jobs. Once the job runs, users can monitor it through a dashboard, andFates Forever: The Creator Of The First Major iOS Gaming Network Brings MOBA To iPad
Sep 09, 11:24PM
After selling early mobile-social gaming network OpenFeint to GREE for $104 million two years ago, lifelong gamer Jason Citron is now setting his ambitions on bringing core gaming to tablets. The iOS platform has played host to many casual and arcade titles. And then it moved upmarket into mid-core gaming over the last year and a half. But is the platform now ready for die-hard gamers? Citron is betting yes. A year after raising some initial seed capital for his latest startup, he gave a preview of the company’s first upcoming game, Fates Forever, on-stage today at TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco. In the game, you play in teams of three against other trios in a Medieval-themed environment. “We’re doing a reinterpretation of the MOBA [multiplayer online battle arena] genre for the iPad. It’s like League of Legends for tablets,” Citron said. He said that while tablet gaming is a fast-growing segment of the market, it hasn’t been large enough to attract gaming companies like Activision Blizzard in a serious way. So there’s this hole in the market that Citron believes he’s uniquely able to address. “The people who have money don’t believe the money is there yet in tablet gaming,” Citron said. “And the people who believe the market is there, don’t have the money. I believe I have the motivation and talent to do this.” Citron has raised about $2.5 million from investors including Peter Relan’s new incubator 9+, Accel Partners, IDG Ventures, General Catalyst Partners, Time Warner and other angels like Kai Huang and Gil Pnechina. The game, which is going to come out whenever “it’s ready” later this year, was built by an eight-person team.If at any time you'd like to stop receiving these messages, just send an email to feeds_feedburner_com_techcrunch+unsubscribe-hmdtechnology=gmail.com@mail.feed2email.net.
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