Startups

The last time we met with the folks from Scanadu, we had a very limited look its much buzzed-about line of gadgets that aim to bring vital sign monitoring beyond the realm of the hospital and available to anyone with a smartphone. This week, the company’s CEO Walter De Brouwer stopped by TechCrunch TV with an update to allow us to demo an updated version of the SCOUT and show that Scanadu is coming a significant step closer to actually having its devices in the hands of real users. As you’ll see in the video, De Brouwer says that Scanadu has discovered in recent months through early testing that there are a few features that people really want in their personal medical devices, so the company has made key updates to the Scout and its other tools — and we got a hands-on look at those. Updated version of the Scanadu Scout Also, true to Scanadu’s overall approach to making health accessible and modern, today the company is launching a 30 day crowdfunding campaign through Indiegogo which will let people pay to reserve a first-edition Scanadu Scout (the “early bird special” version is $149 for the device to the first 1,000 participants, with additional units going for $199.) Those who pitch into the campaign will also participate in a usability study of the gadget, which is necessary to bring the SCOUT to FDA approval. We talk about all this and more — and I get my own vital sign reading — in the video embedded above.

Whether you are a regular traveler or just planning a special annual holiday it pays, these days, to be better organized in knowing exactly what you want to take with you. If you travel regularly for business it is essential that you take everything with you that you need. And, while you could probably buy anything you forget to take with you when you away on vacation, the last thing you want to do is to leave your favorite pair of pants in the hotel room. Suitcases is a simple but attractive looking reminder app where you can list what you need to take with you when traveling and what to bring home afterwards. With our lives being filled with things to do on a daily basis its not really surprising that we can forget one or two things - especially when we are away from our home environment. With the convenience of being able to keep your apps in your pocket via your iDevice, Suitcases is the solution to one part of that forgetfulness. The name of the app speaks for itself and has been devised for travelers of all kinds to remind you of everything that needs to be taken with you on a business trip or a vacation. You can use one of the three default suitcases that are labeled for different travel plans. By clicking on the "Beach Trip" suitcase for example, you will be presented with all your items in categories so you know what to take. If you are on a business trip it provides preparations for the road trip or the documents you need for the foreclosure meeting. Suitcases has plenty of suggestions that are perfect for every suitcase just in case you need to be reminded of the important stuff that has to be packed. Everything is classified from your sweet tooth all the way to your personal grooming needs - even your underwear. Aside from the three default ones, you can add more suitcases.? After adding and naming it you can add as much as items in it that you think would fit in to suit your travel plans. Just click on the categories and automatically, the essentials will be listed accordingly.??Suitcases is the simple yet comprehensive packing guide app for everyone. Given the publicity surrounding baggage handlers at airports taking stuff from your bags there might be another good reason to use an app like this one for your travel inventory but that isn't it's prime raisin d'tre. Suitcases is more of a checklist for essential items to pack in your bag and also serves as a listing to check off your items as you leave to come home. The app is simple to use and all you have to do is to tick most of your items to make sure you come prepared. If they aren't in the listing provided you can simply add them manually. Suitcases is a very useful, simple to use and user friendly app that you can keep in your pocket. Every traveler should have an app like this.

Urturn, the social expressions platform that soft-launched as stealthily as possible last year by intentionally hiding under a really boring name, is getting ready to turn the volume up to 11 to start seriously recruiting teens and trend-setters to its meme-stuffed, fashion-friendly, music-loving platform. Today it has announced a $13.4 million Series A funding round, led by Balderton Capital with a $10.7 million investment. The private equity arm of Debiopharm Group invested the remaining $2.7 million. As part of the investment, Balderton founding partner Barry Maloney will join the Urturn board. The London-based startup, which also has an office in the Valley, is also launching an iOS app today, funded by its Series A, to extend its web-based platform to mobile. An Android app is also in the works, due later this year. Prior to the Series A, Urturn had raised around $500,000 in friends/family funding. So what exactly is a social expression platform? Urturn — pronounced ‘your turn’ — is best described as a viral meme-generator. It offers both a social toolbox for creating and sharing ‘expressions’ with other users, with support for sharing these out to other social networks such as Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest, and also a space to hang your creations and browse others (and/or follow celebrity users or your friends). It also has its own bookmarklet browser button to make grabbing source material for meme-making purposes even easier, as Pinterest does. Expressions is Urturn’s term for the visual composites that are its social currency. These often start with a photo but can also include multimedia elements like video and audio, which are then augmented with text or doodles or other graphical elements, by a user selecting the relevant template. So, instead of having to go to Google to copy and paste the meme du jour to post to Facebook or Twitter, Urturn gives its users the tools to make their own version of that meme. Or something else entirely. The image at the top of this post is a basic example of an expression created with Urturn — by first uploading a photo and then adding a series of pointers to the image. Other templates currently available on the site include doodles, collages, quotes, speech bubbles, hashtag tags, cartoon elements (such as the Bunnify expression, below right) and more.  There are also templates that support interactions, such as love it/leave or this/that which ask other users to vote on whether they like whatever else they’re seeing in that template. And templates to incorporate multimedia elements, as noted above. In short, everything an angst-ridden teenager needs to express themselves online. Or a fashion blogger to ask their followers which slacks they dig. Another core piece of site apparatus is Urturn’s ‘Your Turn’ button which encourages the viral component by letting users click a button to easily create their own version of a expression that someone else has made — leading to waves of similarly themed expressions to be generated by, for instance, fans of the musicians who have a presence on the site. The main topics Urturn is focusing on for now are music, fashion, beauty and art & design. It notes that it has received “significant interest” from the music industry as a new way for artists to connect with their fans.  Artists already signed up to the platform include Alicia Keys, David Bowie, One Direction, Green Day, UNIONJ, Ellie Goulding, The Gossip, Carly Rae Jepsen and Kendrick Lamar. Urturn has also attracted interest as a blogging platform to engage with readers from fashion magazines such as Cosmo. Urturn is not currently breaking out its total user numbers but says its biggest markets globally are the U.S., followed by the U.K. and then South America. The original idea for Urturn stemmed from a sense of frustration with the limitions of existing social tools as a medium of expression explains

No, I am not blogging about India Pale Ale, although I must say that I am a big fan of it. I am writing about one of the best patent hacks I have seen in the decade that I have been working to find relief from the ridiculous patent system in our country. Twitter came up with a concept last year called the Innovator's Patent Agreement (IPA) and put a draft IPA up on GitHub. They have gotten a ton of feedback and have iterated and improved the concept since then. The basic idea of the IPA is that it is a contract between Twitter and the engineer(s) and designer(s) who developed the IP. The contract says that Twitter will not use the patent offensively nor will anyone who acquires the patent from Twitter. It goes on to say that Twitter or a subsquent owner could use the patent offensively with the engineers' and/or designers' approval. Twitter announced yesterday that it had entered into an agreement with Loren Brichter, the author of the pull to refresh patent that will subject that patent to an IPA. They also announced that they will subject all of their patents to the IPA. They went on to say that Jelly, Lift, StackExchange, and Tell Apart have agreed to adopt the IPA for all of their patents. USV has been talking to our portfolio companies about the IPA since Twitter posted it last year. They all know we are big fans of it and we hope they will choose to adopt it for all of their patents. We will not do more than that however. Our portfolio companies are independent of USV and can make up their own minds about their IP strategies. That said, I would expect to see other USV portfolio companies join StackExchange on this IPA parade. Twitter is an amazing company and I am very proud to be associated with it. The fact that they would take this extraordinary step and then show leadership in the industry to get others to join them is a testament to that. It's a proud day for Twitter and for me.

Australian startup, Airtasker, is keen to expand out of its home country into Southeast Asia, which it says hasn’t been touched by large competitors yet. The year-old startup provides job matching for freelancers and employers, similar to what oDesk and Elance do. For its first steps outside of Australia, its first port of call will be Singapore, where it wants to hire two country managers. Airtasker joins a scene that already has a few huge competitors. oDesk, for example, has been around since 2005. Last year, the company raised $15 million, making its total funding $45 million to date. The site processes $300 million in jobs on an annual basis. Some early oDesk employees also founded Rev.com, which in March announced $4.5 million in Series A funding. Another big competitor, Elance, raised $16 million in funding early last year as well, as its business has continued to grow in the past two years. 650,000 new job postings were listed on the site in 2011, it said. But big as these sites are, they don’t seem to have made a huge impact on freelancers in Southeast Asia. A quick search for freelancers in Singapore on oDesk showed 248 listings out of 742,113. Hong Kong showed a dismal 84, Kuala Lumpur 7 and Bangkok 31. Jonathan Lui and Tim Fung, Airtasker’s founders While it appears indeed untouched by the large sites, it could just mean that the freelancing scene is a lot less vibrant in Asia, with the majority of workers preferring full-time jobs. It could also be that fewer freelancers rely on online matching sites to get their jobs, as well. Airtasker’s founder and CEO, Tim Fung, said temp jobs in the region are less organized into verticals. He said some common jobs in Asia include handing out flyers at a train station, or a one-day PA. These can’t really be categorized by industry, and Airtasker has organized its job ads and job seeker profiles in a broader fashion, so that more matches can be made by both sides. The bulk of Airtasker’s workers, for now, are based in Australia, and its upward trajectory does indicate some sort of pent-up demand on the freelancing scene. Airtasker now processes about $120,000 worth of jobs per month. Fung hinted that Airtasker will announce a partnership with a global jobs network soon. “I think that’s an indication that the larger ‘mainstream’ job scene is taking part-time job listings more seriously,” he said. The site will also roll out a new design in about a months’ time, with a “responsive design” adapting to mobile interfaces when accessed through tablets and phones. This is going to make a lot of sense as it expands into Southeast Asia, where mobiles are more popular in emerging markets compared with PCs. About 40 percent of users accessing Airtasker’s site are already coming in on mobile devices, said Fung. Airtasker has seven people, including co-founders Fung and Jonathan Lui. It’s raised $1.5 million so far.

By the time the phone rings, there's already trouble. When that manager is called or this department is reached, it's because someone is disappointed, angry or stuck. Illness, broken promises or a real urgency have led to this new conversation even taking place. So don't start with, "[Name of company] mumble mumble" as if there's a blank slate just waiting to be written on. There's already a lot of writing on that slate. Don't demand to know the record number or begin with doubt and an edge of dismissal. Be on our team. "It sounds like we've got a situation on our hands..." is a fine way to disarm the person you're about to talk with. He won't have to spend the first six sentences expressing his anger and urgency, because in less than ten words, you've done it for him. Or perhaps, "I'd like to help, if you'll bring me up to speed..." It's not easy being on the receiving end of a days'-long parade of blame, but no one said it was easy. We asked you to do it because you're good and because it's important, not because it's fun.

Zalora, a Zappos-style fashion e-commerce site in South East Asia backed by the Samwer brothers’ Rocket Internet incubator, is today announcing its latest investment — $100 million, led by Rocket Internet itself, along with regular Samwer investing partners Summit Partners, Investment AB Kinnevik, Verlinvest and Tengelmann Group. The is the largest investment in Zalora to date, and one of the largest in an e-commerce startup in the region. Zalora has operations in Singapore, Indonesia, Malaysia, Brunei, the Philippines, Thailand, Vietnam, Taiwan and Hong Kong, and comes amid a new flush of money for fashion e-commerce companies: just yesterday it was reported that Fab is raising $250 million at a $1 billion valuation (a deal that only one month ago appeared to be for a $100 million raise). Prior to this, Zalora had raised at least two other rounds since launching in March 2012, a “significant double-digit million” investment from JP Morgan in September 2012, and $26 million from Tengelmann in March 2013. It’s been using the funds to build out its footprint into more countries, invest in its logistics and also in R&D, out of its HQ in Singapore, and new platforms — among those, the launch of a iOS app. As seems to be par for the course with Rocket Internet portfolio companies, Zalora has been no stranger to being subject to the rumor mill when it comes to problems. In March 2013, Zalora was reported to be shutting down its regional operations in Taiwan, although the company said that it was streamlining and moving some functions to Singapore. That comes after other reports that Oliver Samwer had to go hands-on soon after Zalora’s launch for a little staff motivation. The company appears to already have changed MDs at the company. Today it is being run by Michele Farrario; in September 2012 the MD was Mato Peric. But any signs of turmoil seem to be behind the company, for now at least. The company is claiming “months of steady growth,” recently delivering its one millionth order, although it doesn’t spell out what those revenues are specifically, noting just “double-digit million USD revenues.” It says that mobile sales make up 25% of all of its sales, which cover 500 brands and some 20,000 products per country site. “Our company is one of the fastest growing e-commerce companies in South-East Asia and has bright prospects,” said Ferrario in a statement. “It is an honor for us that investors of such great repute have invested into an e-commerce company as young as ZALORA. Our goal is to continue serving up world-class products and services, so everyone in South-East Asia can benefit.”

Here’s the Boston deals round-up so far this week Better the devil you know Here are some of the top jobs of the week in tech Alinta plans $1bn debt raising in US Kids love to tweet Here are the cars with the most safety complaints No more ripe pickings in the Russian market Daily funds round-up and Silicon Valley is burning Image credit: Photo of sunrise courtesy of Shutterstock The post peHUB First Read appeared first on peHUB.

Here in this tutorial we will tell you some of the mobile browsing tricks. When you browsing through mobile and using limited data connection, then you should ensure that while browsing you use minimum amount of data traffic. Mobile data connections are generally charged based on data volume consumed unlike the earlier internet connection in home that are charged based on usage time. Hence the 1st step is to avoid viewing websites with too much graphics or pictures and stick to light-weight versions. You should look for mobile versions of all websites which have lighter content and generated 5-10 times less data than normal websites, which can help you to browse for longer time as data consumption will be minimal. Generally popular websites like Wikipedia or Google have mobile version which takes of smaller displays and also consumes less traffic. Some websites automatically detect the mobile platform and will display only the mobile version of the website. If you are using Android smart phone use browsers like Dolphin HD browser or Opera Mini which will have many options and features like, One-Tap share – Share pages from your browser to social media websites like Facebook, Twitter or via E-mail to friends. Synchronize between your Desktop and mobile to store favorites, bookmarks, username and passwords for frequently used websites, caching websites for faster loading etc. Gesture support – Use touch gesture as shortcuts for specific action like opening frequently used website etc. More than 80 Add-ons available which can help you to add more tasks to your website. Speed dial for viewing your favorite websites in single touch Also many browsers and mobile websites display lot of advertisements which is quite irritating for the viewers. Also these advertisements usually contain lot of graphics which consume huge data and impact your overall cost of mobile browsing. You can use Ad blockers or Netvibes to filter such unwanted ads displayed while browsing. They also help to reorganize the elements of the website and display them in a better way to improve readability.  If you are browsing continuously in your Mobile for longer time, then there is possibility for your mobile to become slow and pages will get downloaded slowly. During that time, you should clear the phone’s cache memory and any unwanted data to improve the browsing speed. Use options like “Clear Cache” or “Clear Privacy data” from your phone settings to remove the data from Cache memory and optimize your phone’s browsing speed. Also you should understand how to search on Mobile using search engines. Many mobile browsers has its default search engine as Google in which you can restrict search as Mobile web. It will only display pages which are adapted to mobile, and for normal websites it will show a much thinner or lighter version that contains fewer graphic. You can also surf without images when you are using slower internet connections. Another mobile browsing trick is using WiFi connections available on public places to browse through Internet. Nowadays, in many public places like Airports, train stations or bus stations there is free Wi-Fi connection provided which you can use to browse through your Mobile. Last but not least, security is very important thing to consider when you are browsing through Mobile. Do not download strange or unauthorized Apps which can induce spyware or malware to your Mobile. They can steal important personal or financial data from your mobile and it can be very risky. Always browse through websites which are HTTPS enabled, that means the data is transmitted in encrypted format and is highly secure. You can easily identify such websites with a lock symbol on the left side of title bar. They use SSL (Secure Socket Layer) protocol for transmitting data and are highly secure. Use mobile security software like Norton Mobile Security or Kaspersky Mobile security to protect your mobile from blocked websites, spyware, malware, Trojans, vi

Like you and a lot of other people in the Valley, I read the blogs snarking on the Valley, because nothing is funnier than making fun of people just like us, technology elite who download hot apps, ringtones and backgrounds all day and all night – all on our separate phones reserved for day time and night time. It makes you feel like you’re part of a community instead of a tiny speck of dust in the vast Cosmos with no reason for existing beyond randomness. The best one lately is a Tumblr called Jesus Christ Silicon Valley (note the double meaning), and its most dazzling, scathing piece is this relatively mild one about how silly and vain people’s avatar profile pictures are. Yesterday’s piece on the Tumblr acquisition was also pretty good. You’ve probably heard the news. No, you’ve definitely heard the news, because it’s Monday and you’ve been reading tech blogs all day, slowly burning your investors’ money. “Keeping tabs on the industry,” of course. It’s funny because it’s true. Because I am curious and because I like the writing when it’s not too ragey, I dug around a little for the blog’s author. Not too hard obviously (this is TechCrunch after all), just on Twitter and Quora. The Quora question, which is followed by Keith Rabois, postulates that Jesus is one of us. Just a slob like one of us. “The secret lies within the pages of the blog itself. Someone so pathologically clever with hints of self-deprecation would hide where least expected: among the very targets referenced.” Hmm … Perhaps he or she is one of the people lambasted in the profile picture post? That must be it! Who though? Hunter Walk? Tony Conrad? Sheryl Sandberg. And today, I got a response to my Twitter request for an email: An email sent “To the Direction of Alexia Tsotsis” from “jesus94306@gmail.com.” From: Jesus Christ Subject: Greetings, To the Direction of Alexia Tsotsis. Date: May 21, 2013 9:30:28 PM PDT To: alexia@techcrunch.com I am Ivan Moltobov, student in Ukraine. I am big admiring fan of Tech Valley, and writing about love for Tech Valley on the Jesus Christ Silicon Valley tumblr blogspot by wordpress. You like? What is meaning of word “cock?” Sound funny, Americans seem to enjoy. I write much cock words, get many pageviews, exchange for Bitcoin, buy yak. American dream to own many yaks. (I searched and TechCrunch has yet to ‘print’ the phrase “cunty little cumdrops.” What’s with that?!) Well, now we have ‘printed’ that phrase, Ivan. Moltobov is unGoogleable, in case anyone was about to.