Startups

Truecaller, the Sweden-based creater of a crowdsourced phone directory app and online white pages service, has opened its API to a select group of “handpicked” developers. Truecaller said its directory now contains some 600 million phone numbers, either contributed by individuals or harvested through partnerships with  other directory services. Truecaller’s numbers are global in scope, and include landline, mobile and pre-pay digits — the latter category giving it an edge over other directory services, it argues. Being as phone numbers amount to highly sensitive data in the wrong hands, Truecaller is being careful about who is getting access to its API — hence no open API. Telemarketing companies are specifically barred from getting their wires in. Being the company that helped spammers is clearly not the kind of publicity Truecaller is hoping for here. One scenario where it envisages its API being a benefit to others but also without causing irritation to phone number owners is for call centres to identify who is calling before starting a call. Truecaller’s API allows for reverse number lookup, meaning developers can attach a name to a known number. It also returns a ‘Spam score’ to indicate if a number is a likely spammer (e.g. telesales or robocalls) and — at the other end of the spectrum — a ‘True score’ to indicate how important the number is. This score is “the measurment of how popular a phone number is with our users over time”. Name search is not included in the API but remains solely a feature of Truecaller’s mobile app. Truecaller is charging developers to use some of the features of its API, so this is clearly part of its monetisation strategy. Its free API includes only how popular a phone number is. Pricing for the more fully featured APIs starts at $299 per month, rising to $4,999. Truecaller said cloud e-signing company Scrive has been trying its API — as a way to validate the identity behind a phone number. It did not specify whether anyone has yet signed up as a paying customer. Last September Truecaller raised a $1.3 million Series A from Open Ocean, with the aim of expanding its footprint in its key markets of North America, Asia and the Middle East.

Divorces are traditionally terrible. But Wevorce, a Y-Combinator-backed startup that has just launched into general availability, wants to change that and make the process of divorce more amicable and less expensive. Wevorce first caught our eye at March’s Y Combinator Demo Day. At the event, Wevorce founder Michelle Crosby (pictured) told the story of being dragged through her parents’ painful divorce when she was nine years old. Her parents fought for 15 years and they still don’t talk to this day. So Crosby grew up and decided to make a solution that could help people like her parents. Instead of a two-lawyer arrangement, Wevorce assigns a single attorney to a case and gives a divorcing couple software to make the process easier to understand. Wevorce claims the software helps its attorneys complete paperwork in 60 percent of the time it normally takes to go through the process. Besides making the divorce process more understandable and speedy, the company also claims to make it cheaper. The average case costs less than $10,000 while traditional divorces can cost upwards of $27,000. To date, Wevorce has only been available in a handful of U.S. cities including San Francisco, Seattle, Portland, San Jose, Calif., Oakland, Calif., Asheville, N.C., and Boise, Idaho. But now the service is available to anyone in the U.S. who wants to give it a shot with accessibility via the web. Check out the video below for more on Crosby’s inspiration to create Wevorce. Screenshot via Wevorce/Vimeo Filed under: Entrepreneur Big Data and Predictive/Real-time Analytics startups: Are you looking to jumpstart development & accelerate market traction? Sign up for the SAP Startup Focus program to receive technology, support, resources and community to help you develop new applications on SAP HANA, a cutting edge database platform. Get started here, and enter promo code “VB2013? on the form. .blurb-tag-startups hr { margin: 10px 0 10px 0; }

One interesting element of Google I/O this year were the sensors laid out everywhere around Moscone tracking environmental data throughout the event. Those types of sensors are now all around us, including in our phones and in various smart home devices, and now a new Kickstarter project from ManyLabs wants to help kids get familiar with them very early on. The project is called Sensors for Students, and it wants to build a sensor collection kit that includes a plate for an open-source Arduino board and Grove shield combo, along with one of a variety of parts for a number of different types of sensors, including accelerometers, electromagnetic field detectors, a color sensor, a plant watering kit (similar to one component of the Bitponics automated hydroponic garden), and many more. The team behind ManyLabs consists of Peter Sand and Elliot Dicus, who formed the nonprofit with the ultimate intent of spreading low-cost hands-on tools for teaching science and math to the classroom. Sand has a Ph.D. in Computer Science from MIT, and has focused his work and research on computer vision, robotics and education. Sand and Dicus wanted to make it possible to get kids learning data literacy and experimenting with open source hardware early on in life. Their goals sound similar to those of Adafruit, the NY-based hardware company that’s also trying to make people more comfortable with concepts around electrical engineering and DIY maker culture, beginning early on in life. ManyLabs isn’t just supplying hardware, though, it’s also very clearly marketing a curriculum, with lessons and content being offered alongside each type of kit available to backers, along with online resources that will be made available on a yearly subscription basis. There’s no soldering required in the kits that are on offer, so these are suitable for a range of ages and skill levels, and ManyLabs hopes to put them in the hands of backers as soon as August this year, with kits beginning at $40. The most expensive individual kit is $75, and while ManyLabs requires you to supply your own Arduino, it’s still very affordable, a key value add for educational markets.

Urturn, a UK-based social networking startup for iOS and desktop, has just taken a whopping $10.7 million in its first round of institutional funding. First time at bat, knocked it outta the park. I believe the expression is, “Nailed it.” The remarkable Series A was led by EU firm Balderton Capital, which previously invested in Bebo. “It’s an important vote of confidence from a well-recognized VC for the company,” said a Urturn rep. From what we can see so far, the vote of confidence is, to be blunt, badly needed. Urturn’s main feature is something called “Expressions.” You might also call it a “picture” or a “macro.” Urturn’s WYSIWYG editor lets users create content (“Expressions”) and post it to a public stream. The images could be doodles they draw, digital collages they create, or pics they grab from the web. They can add text if they like. The end result is a Frankenstein monster somewhere between Pinterest and Tumblr. But hey, we’re old. Our not loving it at first sight is no barometer for how Kids These Days will react to the product — or whether the company will be any kind of success. Image credit: Urturn Filed under: Deals

This is a stumper. The chief of the Irish agency designed to promote foreign investment in the country strongly denied that Ireland is a tax haven. But when questioned by Ireland’s RTE News, he could not deny that Apple has paid an effective tax rate of just two percent, much as Senator Carl Levin (D-MI) said yesterday in hearings on Capitol Hill. Which, frankly, sounds pretty tax haven-ish. “There is global competition and tax happens to be one of the areas that Ireland competes for global investment,” IDA Ireland Chief Executive Barry O’Leary told RTE this morning. That also sounds suspiciously like a tax haven. That’s what Senator Levin believes, as well. “You are able to shift profits to places where you, an American company, don’t pay taxes,” Levin said yesterday to Apple CEO Tim Cook. “That is not right … that a company could shift its value to a tax haven, which is what Ireland is.” IDA Ireland was created in 1949 to stimulate enterprise within the country. Since 1994, however, IDA focuses on promoting foreign investment. One of the items of “latest news” on its website trumpets the fact that Ireland was recently selected as the top country to invest in, beating Germany, France, Finland, and the Netherlands, in Western Europe. One of the key factors in the ranking? Tax rates. However, Ireland’s Taoiseach (prime minister) denied that there was a special deal with Apple or that Ireland’s tax law — even for multi-billion-dollar multinationals — is subject to special deals. He also said that the reason that companies come to Ireland is not just for the tax relief, but also for its technology and talent pool. Which, of course, accords with Apple CEO Tim Cook’s testimony yesterday that Apple has over 4,000 employees in Ireland who are key to helping the company understand, sell to, and serve the entire western European market. This issue is clearly a big deal in Ireland, because what the U.S. decides to do for companies holding significant amounts of capital outside the country could have an effect on 150,000 jobs in Ireland that are directly attributable to major corporations investing in and building facilities in the country. Minister for Jobs, Enterprise & Innovation Richard Bruton also told RTE that there was “no side deal” with Apple. And, he said unapologetically, low taxes would continue to part of Ireland’s “offering” to international companies. Lest, of course, the gods of international finance pull their billions from the land of the leprechaun? photo credit: MassafelliPhotography.com via photopin cc Filed under: Business, Deals, Enterprise

With little fanfare, Google has added its cool new conversational search feature to Chrome on desktops, following a demonstration last week at Google I/O. Conversational search is a major upgrade from Google’s previous voice search feature, which merely dictated a search string. You can access it by clicking the microphone icon within the search box of the Google home page and asking a question in plain English (no more tweaking your search strings for a better result). Once Google’s search is complete, you’ll either get a list of results as usual, or get a single card at the top of the screen as well as a pleasant voice answering your query. The best part of the new search is its awareness of context. Once you start a search, you can continue to have a conversation with Google to refine it. For example, I asked for directions to Atlanta, Georgia and was able to follow up with questions about its population and weather. Just like talking to a human, you don’t need to keep specifying the query you’re referring to — Google’s conversation search is smart enough to understand that the pronouns you’re using referring to your existing search query. You’ll need Chrome 27 to access conversational search — you can either update from within the browser as usual, or download it fresh from Google’s website. If you’ve enabled the Gmail Field Trial for Google Search, which grants search access to data on your other Google services, you can also ask questions about your schedule. Conversational search also knows your location, so simply asking “What’s the weather tomorrow?” pulls up your local forecast. At this point, it looks like Google is simply testing conversational search out on desktops. As Search Engine Lands’ Danny Sullivan points out, it doesn’t yet support voice activation (simply saying “Okay, Google” to kick off a search, rather than hitting the microphone button). It’s also missing more complete Google Now integration — it doesn’t yet show cards for your packages, for example, and there’s no predictive searching yet Photo: I/O livestream Filed under: Business, Media

Although one hardly needs a good reason to head to Las Vegas, there is definitely a good reason why hundreds of prominent executives and leaders from across the mobile, marketing, retail, social, gaming, and hospitality industries are preparing to converge on Las Vegas. On Thursday, Mobile Host: The Most Summit for Hospitality and Retail will kick off at the Mirage Hotel & Casino. Fittingly, Darren Withers, Head of Marketing & Casino Client Services at mobileStorm, will be among the presenters. Shortly after the event commences, Withers will present his eagerly anticipated session on SMS and email marketing. Withers will discuss what he has learned from successfully implementing strategies for the likes of Zappos in Las Vegas, Caesars Golf, Landrys, Tao Group, Cannery Casinos and others. He will explain how these highly effective and proven email and SMS strategies can be implemented by hospitality businesses of all sizes. Withers will be joined by other knowledgeable experts in their respective fields. Also scheduled to present on Thursday, for example, are David Jones of Shazam and David Offierski of Konrad Group, to name a few. The conference is only scheduled to last one day inside the Antigua Ballroom, although if any of the scheduled presenters decide to recreate “The Hangover,” there’s no telling when the party may end. So if Darren doesn’t show up for work after the convention… someone should probably check the roof. Either way, MMW will provide more news and insight from Las Vegas as the conference gets underway.

If you’re a big huge e-commerce business, your time is money. Literally. Amazon.com made $61 billion last year, which boils down to $167 million a day, $7 million an hour, and $116,000 a minute. Every minute counts, which is why you cant afford to have your website go down or be slow, even for just a little while. That’s why Los Angeles-based content delivery startup EdgeCast launched a new product called EdgeCast Transact, provides a dedicated CDN built just for e-commerce companies, with all the features that e-commerce companies need. EdgeCast Transact is built on top of the company’s new Commerce Acceleration Network, which is built to be PCI-compliant and enable acceleration and optimization of e-commerce pages. While a number of CDNs tout features that e-commerce websites crave, like application acceleration, page optimization, and small-object delivery, EdgeCast is the only one that has broken its e-commerce offering out and put it on its own dedicated network infrastructure. And the company has spent the last year designing and testing out this purpose-built network for e-commerce providers so that they don’t have to share any infrastructure with media companies or social networks or whatever. That means that e-commerce companies won’t have to worry if there’s a DDOS attack against a media company, or a surge in traffic during the Super Bowl at a social networking site, or whatever. The network is also built to be fully redundant and have all sorts of failover and elastic provisioning to handle holiday traffic spikes and the like. For clients, that’s like not just buying a Rolls Royce, but having your own private highway to drive it on. At least, that’s what EdgeCast president James Segil says. Anyway, in addition to having their own private infrastructure, EdgeCast Transact is designed to provide secure sessions between the origin and end user. It also has mobile device detection and front-end optimization built in, to ensure the best performance regardless of the platform or device someone’s using to access the site. E-commerce companies benefit from also having access to a dedicated customer support team and “white-glove service,” which Segil says is needed for most of those customers. It’s also going to be updated with the needs of business customers in mind — which means e-commerce business cycles, code freezes during the holidays and other busy shopping seasons. EdgeCast continues to win business in the CDN market, with more than 6,000 customers. Those clients include some big names, like Twitter, Hulu, Pinterest, Etsy, and Tumblr. (Don’t worry, Yahoo is a client too.) The company now has about 215 employees, most of which are in the United States… Although it’s been expanding its footprint with sales and support internationally.

Google has updated Chrome in build 27 to include conversational voice search, a feature it demoed on stage at Google I/O this year that allows you to search by voice, but also transcribes your queries in real time and lets you use natural language, asking Google straightforward questions and getting straightforward answers, both read back to you by dictation and in actual Google search results. The transcription feature is awesome, since you can actually watch Google try to anticipate what you’re going to say and then adapt in real time to the right query. So far in my testing, it hasn’t gotten anything wrong; this isn’t the clumsy voice input of five years ago that got things wrong as often as it got them right. Having it understand natural queries is also very cool, and for the first time, you get a sense that this is what we all imagined something like AskJeeves was meant to be, but good and effective. Questions that are easily answerable generally are. Ask about nation and state capitals and get the answer right away, read back to you by Google. Ask about a location and get a map. Ask about a person and get a brief bio. It’s a lot like having your own personal information agent or knowledge broker, and it’s so impressive that I might even eventually be able to get over my embarrassment of using it in public. Conversational search is available in the latest stable build, and can be accessed by going to Google’s homepage and clicking the microphone icon in the search bar. So far, I haven’t run into a single connectivity issue or mistaken query, but let us know if your experience differs. Also, Chrome itself wouldn’t detect the update to version 27 on my Mac, so you may have to go direct to the Chrome website and reinstall altogether to get this up and running.

Practice Fusion has made a name for itself over the past few years by tapping into enormous demand for digital health information — particularly health records. From its inception in 2005, the startup has been on a mission to disrupt the slow-moving, archaic world of Healthcare IT by providing a free, web-based electronic medical records (EMR) platform to doctors and their practices. These days, we take free scalable, online platforms for granted, but at the time, Practice Fusion’s approach to EMR was far from being the norm in the healthcare market. Since then, the company has gone on to raise $70 million, attract some 150K medical professionals and grow to over 250+ employees. Today, Practice Fusion hosts digital health records for over 64 million people in the U.S., making it one of the largest web-based EMR platforms out there. With the success of its EMR software, Practice Fusion is now looking to extend the functionality of its platform with the goal of building a true end-to-end health service. Setting its sights on becoming the Salesforce.com for doctors and the Facebook for health, last month the company launched Patient Fusion — a new complementary site that allows anyone and everyone to compare doctor reviews and book appointments within an hour of arriving at the doctor’s office. The new service takes Practice Fusion into ZocDoc’s territory, combining Yelp-like reviews with an Uber-style on-demand booking service. However, unlike Yelp, which would allow users to rate doctors even if they’ve never stepped foot in their office, Patient Fusion aggregates ratings from patients after their visits. This allows the company to not only build a database of verified reviews (based on visits it knows actually took place), but to lay the groundwork for a sizable local physician search engine as well. With several million reviews now live, today Practice Fusion is taking the next step toward being a full-service health information platform with the launch of a free tool that aims to help patients keep better tabs on their health spending. Now, along with the ability to book appointments and access digital health records, Patient Fusion allows users to track their health spending across their entire history of medical visits. The platform, which officially launches in beta today, is available to Practice Fusion patients who are covered by national health insurance providers like Anthem Blue Cross and United. If the initial launch of Patient Fusion brought the company into Yelp (and ZocDoc) territory, then its new free service marks the beginning of Practice Fusion’s own version of Mint.com for health. By aggregating patients’ health information and family health bills, Patient Fusion allows users to track and visualize the history of their health costs, including out-of-pocket expenses and deductibles, for example. The idea is to help users more accurately plan their flexible spending account (FSA) contributions and estimate the cost of future visits to the doctor’s office, for example. Another key piece of the new service is that it includes insurance claims information to enable patients to view their claims history and determine which claims have been rejected, which have been accepted and which may need to be disputed. By allowing patients to more effectively stay on top of their health bills, the company also sees a potential upside for doctors — as easier expense management could lead to an increase in payments that are more accurate and are actually on time. With the average person now spending $3,000/year on out-of-pocket medical costs and with medical bills now representing one of the leading causes of personal bankruptcy in the U.S., Practice Fusion is hoping that its new tools can alleviate some of this financial stress. While the company is far from being the only service to allow patients to track their health spending, the service has the benefit of