Startups

An upcoming update will bring a web browser, email and update store app to Barnes & Noble’s super affordable Nook Simple Touch line of eReaders, which will begin rolling out June 1 according to a source close to the matter who wishes to remain anonymous. The 1.5.0 update was created in response to the positive critical and customer response to the recent Nook tablet update that brought Google Play to B&N’s Android-powered devices. The Nook Simple Touch and Simple Touch with Glowlight will be receiving the over-the-air update starting next month, and this marks the first time that Nook’s entry-level readers get official access to web browsing capabilities. Amazon’s competing Kindle devices have shipped with an “experimental” web browser since the Kindle 2, but have not offered an email client on anything except for the Kindle Fire tablets. Making Nook hardware a little more flexible for users is a good way for Barnes & Noble to help counter flagging sales of dedicated Nook hardware, which were shown to be weak in recent quarterly results. Nook weakness probably ended up prompting the bookseller to offer promotional giveaways with on-hand inventory. When B&N announced that Google Play would be coming to Nook tablets, I praised the decision as a key step in helping the company position them as affordable, fully-featured Android tablets, as opposed to just glorified eReaders that could do a bit more than most. The Nook Simple Touch is still pretty focused on eBooks, but as an email triage device and basic browser, especially for text heavy content, it probably becomes a lot more attractive to an audience that mostly wants books but would like a little more general use value as well. Especially for older buyers, I imagine a simplified device with a cheap price tag has the potential to carry appeal over a much more expensive full-fledged tablet. Will a browser and email client be enough to right the Nook ship? Probably not on their own, but B&N is at least expending effort in the right direction to combat flagging consumer interest in dedicated eReader devices.

Property management software for holiday lettings

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013San Francisco, CAEarly Bird Tickets on Sale For hotels, a technology glitch can result in unhappy tourists and millions in lost revenue. HotelNinjas, a Barcelona-based startup with a vision to be the Salesforce.com for the hospitality industry, is launching this week. Cofounder Avi Meir said he was inspired to start the company after realizing that most hotels still relied on “expensive, outdated, server-based technology.” HotelNinjas cofounder Avi Meir HotelNinjas offers property management and channel management tools (through an integration with WuBook), a customer relationship management service, and a booking engine for hotel websites. Meir says 30 hotels are lined up and are “ready to make the switch.” The company is charging its first customers $4-9 per room on a month-to-month basis. Hotels can sign up directly or via AppExchange, Salesforce’s app marketplace. Meir told me he recently made a trip to Salesforce’s San Francisco headquarters to form a partnership with the cloud giant. He claims the startup is the first hotel technology provider developed on top of Salesforce’s platform as a service offering Force.com. HotelNinjas was founded in September 2012, and has grown to seven employees. Meir is the former vice president of product at BudgetPlaces.com, an online travel agency. To continue its momentum, the company will need to win over customers from more established vendors in the space, including Micros.com’s Opera Property Management software and Medallia. But Meir believes that HotelNinjas has an edge over its competition with its customizable CRM and integration with hotel booking websites. “At the end of the day, the one thing that matters to hotel owners is how they can increase occupancy and revenue,” he said. The founders have poured their own money into the startup, buttressed by grants from the Spanish government. In total, they have raised about $100,000.  Top image via Shutterstock Filed under: Business .blurb-cat-cloud .event-boilerplate { width:278px; margin:0px 0px 10px 20px; padding:10px; float:right; border:1px solid #e4e4e4; font-family: 'Open Sans', sans-serif; color:#000; } .blurb-cat-cloud .event-boilerplate .logo-date-wrap { width:100%; display:block; float:left; margin-bottom:8px; } .blurb-cat-cloud .event-boilerplate img { float:left; } .blurb-cat-cloud .event-boilerplate .date-location { float:right; font-size:12px; line-height:14px; text-align:center; padding-left:7px; padding-top:5px; padding-bottom:3px; border-left:1px solid #e6e6e6; } .blurb-cat-cloud .event-boilerplate .cta { display:block; clear:both; width:100%; border-radius:5px; border:1px solid #1864b1; color:#fff; text-shadow: 0px -1px 0px rgba(0,0,0,0.3); text-align:center; text-decoration:none; font-weight:600; font-size:18px; line-height:17px; padding:4px 0px 6px 0px; background: #1f80e4; background: -moz-linear-gradient(top,  #1f80e4 0%, #1862ae 100%); background: -webkit-gradient(linear, left top, left bottom, color-stop(0%,#1f80e4), color-stop(100%,#1862ae)); background: -webkit-linear-gradient(top,  #1f80e4 0%,#1862ae 100%); background: -o-linear-gradient(top,  #1f80e4 0%,#1862ae 100%); background: -ms-linear-gradient(top,  #1f80e4 0%,#1862ae 100%); background: linear-gradient(to bottom,  #1f80e4 0%,#1862ae 100%); filter: progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.gradient( startColorstr='#1f80e4', endColorstr='#1862ae',GradientType=0 ); } Check out VentureBeat's product data sheets for morein-depth information on CRM software and solutions. .crm-boilerplate { background: #f3f3f3; border: 1px solid #E4E4E4; margin: 18px 0; -webkit-box-shadow: inset 0px 0px 24px 0px rgba(255, 255, 255, 1); box-shadow: inset 0px 0px 24px 0px rgba(255, 255, 255, 1); } .crm-boilerplate p { font-family: georgia, serif; font-size:16px; line-height:22px; font-style:italic; color:#000; text-align:center; margin:15px; } .crm-boilerplate a { text-decoration:none; color:#1f81e5; }

The maker movement has helped start many companies. This year, Maker Faire is giving them a place of their own, with a “Startup Pavilion” that highlights 20 new maker-centric companies. It’s part of a growing recognition that the do-it-yourself spirit is not just a fun hobby, it’s a rich source of economic potential. “There is a kind of maturation happening to the maker movement,” said Maker Faire organizer Dale Dougherty, when I spoke to him last week. It’s still dominated by hobbyists, but now there are an increasing number of startups, entrepreneurs, small companies, and even big corporations looking to get involved with the DIY spirit. Related: Google embraced the DIY spirit last week with more than 400 Arduino-based sensors at its Google I/O conference. Find out how Google made the sensors and integrated all the data. “At the very first Maker Faire, they really were all amateurs,” Dougherty said, of the exhibitors. After a few years, the Faire started hosting vendors — primarily makers of parts and components, like Arduino boards, used by makers. Now, the Faire is highlighting maker-inspired startups. Here’s a selection of the 20-odd startups at Maker Faire: SeeedStudio, an “open hardware company develops and brings to market innovative and cost-effective prototyping solutions for hobbyists and aspiring inventors.” RedBearLab, which makes a wearable BlueTooth 4.0 board you can use to interface with an iPhone or Android device. Formlabs, makers of a high-resolution 3D printer aimed at engineers and design professionals. Deezmaker, another 3D printer vendor, this one aimed at making an affordable printer called the Bukobot. BioLite, a company that aims to reduce third-world pollution with a small wood-fueled stove that converts heat from the fire into usable electricity, improving combustion while allowing users to charge small devices. BlinkM, makers of multicolored, programmable LED lights for use in your electronics projects. Smitten, a maker of handmade “artisan truffles.” Big companies are getting into the act, too. Autodesk, for instance, has a fruitful partnership with 3D printing pioneer Makerbot. Autodesk makes an easy-to-use set of 3D design tools called 1-2-3D, and the 3D files created by those web-based tools can easily be printed on a Makerbot. This year, Autodesk’s large booth at Maker Faire includes a 3D scanning station, where you can get your head scanned and turned into a 3D digital file suitable for printing. General Electric is also a sponsor of Maker Faire, and has been working with O’Reilly Media (the parent company of the Faire) on the Faire as well as the two-day Hardware Innovation Workshop that preceded it earlier this week. “It’s a long, slow process of a company trying to understand the maker movement and engage with it,” Dougherty said. GE wants to encourage its own engineers to think more entrepreneurially, but it also sees the value of DIY, maker-type activities for encouraging and education the next generation of engineers. Even Motorola, the phone manufacturer now owned by Google, is starting to embrace the maker spirit, Dougherty said, by making phones that are easier than most phones to hack, modify, extend, and repair. “What would the maker community want to do with a cellphone as a platform, not just a fixed device?” he said. Photo: Makerbot CEO Bre Pettis holds a bunch of 3D-printed heads at a recent New York event. Photo credit: VentureBeat/Ricardo Bilton 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. .blur

Sean Riley, the host of National Geographic show “World’s Toughest Fixes,” has a message for kids today: Learn a trade. Speaking with BoingBoing editor Xeni Jardin at Maker Faire yesterday, Riley pointed out that it takes four to six years to learn a trade, such as plumbing — about the same amount of time it would take you to get through college. Yet plumbers, especially in big urban areas, will make far more money than the average college graduate. In other words, if you’re smart and ambitious, and you can’t get a Thiel Fellowship to help kickstart your startup idea, you might consider another alternate path: Getting your hands dirty. In Riley’s case, his trade — rigging — led him to work with a wide range of interesting projects. He mentioned that he recently helped hang the 50,000-pound lighting equipment at the upcoming Rolling Stones show in Oakland, Calif., for instance. But it also led him to become the star of one of television’s more amazing reality shows. In each show, he travels to a different part of the world to watch (and sometimes help) as engineers, crane operators, riggers, and deep-sea divers help fix a wide range of massive problems, from replacing the engine on an cruise ship to swapping out the gate in a big dam lock. Even if you’re not interested in the trades, Riley thinks more people should know about the massive amount of infrastructure that it takes to make the modern world possible. There’s a lot of redundancy built into systems like the power grid, he says — but that redundancy is diminishing, since we’ve spent less and less on upgrading and maintaining this infrastructure over the past 40 years. Repairability is also a disappearing quality in many gadgets we own today. “If you can’t open it up and fix it, you don’t own it,” was one of the themes Jardin and Riley discussed onstage. Learn how to fix things, and you’ll be more in control of the world around you. And, you will be in a better position to build the next great thing. Riley revealed that, after four seasons with the show, he would not be continuing for a fifth. “I traveled 350 days out of the year,” he said, and said that while it was an amazing experience, it was exhausting, and took a personal toll. Also, he added, “a show like this is incredibly expensive to produce.” Photo: Sean Riley with a young fan. Photo credit: Dylan Tweney/VentureBeat Filed under: OffBeat

AllThingsD reported this morning that Yahoo’s board approved a $1.1 billion all-cash acquisition of microblogging site Tumblr. ATD had earlier stated that the board would be meeting on Sunday to consider the acquisition. Yahoo plans to announce the acquisition on Monday, according to “numerous sources” contacted by ATD. “We don’t comment on rumors or speculation,” a Yahoo spokesperson told VentureBeat this morning. Yahoo has scheduled a mysterious event for Monday morning in New York, to announce “something special.” If that “something” is the Tumblr acquisition, it would be quite surprising, since the event was announced before the board reportedly confirmed the acquisition. But it would also be a convenient venue to announce a major deal like this. If it pans out, this would be Yahoo’s largest and perhaps riskiest acquisition since former Google executive Marissa Mayer assumed the chief executive job. By one metric, Tumblr is massive: It hosts 51 billion blog posts, a number that grows by 74 million new posts each day. It draws 216 million visitors globally each month, who collectively generate 16 billion monthly pageviews. That kind of monster traffic puts Tumblr in the ninth position among the most-popular U.S. websites. However, it generated just $13 million in revenues last year, its first year of revenues, as it slowly began integrating ads into its content stream. The company anticipated making $100 million in revenues this year. As with Facebook’s acquisition of revenue-less Instagram, the acquisition is less about bringing in a new source of revenue and more about capturing growth and traffic. Yahoo’s traffic, while enormous, has stagnated. It desperately needs a faster-growing property, along with a younger, hipper demographic, and Tumblr would seem to provide both. That is, if Yahoo doesn’t kill it off or stifle its growth through negligence and mismanagement, as it has done with so many previous acquisitions, including Flickr, Delicious, Geocities, Upcoming, and more. Top photo: Tumblr founder David Karp is about to be a very rich man. Source: Sean Ludwig/VentureBeat. Filed under: Deals

President Barack Obama is known for running one of the most tech-savvy political campaigns in the history of US politics. The chief scientist of the Obama campaign’s data analytics team, Rayid Ghani, shared some insights on how that campaign worked at the TiEcon 2013 conference Friday, an event aimed at entrepreneurs. Ghani said he and his team applied advanced data-mining and machine-learning techniques to create new tools for voter turnout, fund raising, advertising, social media outreach, and email campaigns. You’d think the team would have worked with huge amounts of data to come up with simulation models that would shape the outcome of an election, but Ghani said “it was the smallest dataset,” he’d ever used in a real problem. The key data points were voter registration data – information that is publicly available – and data around people who supported Obama by either volunteering or making contributions to the campaign. With a year and a half to put the data to work, Ghani didn’t have the luxury to recruit and train a team of engineers on a new technology, or for that matter “install, figure and implement a new technology.” “We were heavily focused on open source, did a lot of coding ourselves, used a lot of databases, used Hadoop, R, Strata and worked with 20 different vendors,” said Ghani. The campaign also used Facebook’s social graph search function in a big way, Ghani said. Based on experiments, the team came up with predictive models that became the basis of a $300 million TV ad-spend and five billion emails sent out by the Obama Campaign. A machine learning graduate from Carnegie Melon, Ghani worked with Accenture for 10 years before joining the Obama for America campaign. After helping to get the president re-elected, Ghani now works as chief data scientist at University of Chicago. He’ll be running a three-month summer program on “Data Science for Social Good” at the university for which he’s currently accepting applications from students across the country. Ghani is also working on a social good analytics startup called EdgeFlip. Photo Credit: Chitra Rakesh/VentureBeat Filed under: Big Data

Editor’s Note: Semil Shah is a contributor to TechCrunch. You can follow him on Twitter at @semil. Apple has a good deal of cash. And, in the Valley, the startup ecosystem — for many reasons — wants to see Apple spend that cash. As their cash pile continued to grow as their stock price and market cap soared, Apple’s inability to provide robust software services combined with opportunities to expand their reach through acquisitions has become a fancy parlor game which includes every stripe of public and private investor imaginable. On top of this, pumping even a small percentage of cash pile into acquisitions could provide another pool of much-needed liquidity for founders and investors alike. While it all makes sense on paper, part of what makes Apple “Apple” is that they operate how they want to — not how the market wants them to. Recently, in response to a variety of pressures to do something, to do anything, Apple announced a two-part share buyback. There are many explanations for this financial strategy, and while the Valley may have their own armchair financial analysts with a Twitter account, I reached out to some friends who actually work in technology banking or at techonology-focused hedge funds and asked them to send me a paragraph on their perception of the move. Because of the world these folks work in, I’ve reproduced their answers below anonymously, as they are not permitted to publicly share their opinions on such matters: Technology Investment Banker: With the amount of cash stock piled by Apple, and mainly overseas, it was only a matter of time until the water would break, especially with activist investor David Einhorn ruffling feathers. Apple did something very standard and not uncommon, but on a large scale the way Apple likes to do things. At the end of the day I feel Apple’s actions represent the following four points: (1) Increased Shareholder Value: There are many ways to value a profitable company but the most common measurement is Earnings Per Share (EPS). If earnings are flat but the number of outstanding shares decreases. . Voila! . . A magical increase in period-to-period EPS will result; (2) Higher Stock Prices: An increase in EPS will often alert investors that a stock is undervalued or has the potential for increasing in value. The most common result is an increase in demand and an upward movement in the price of a stock; (3) Increased Float – As the number of outstanding shares decreases, the shares remaining represent a larger percentage of the float. If demand increases and there is less supply, then fuel is added to a potential upward movement in the price of a stock; and (4) Excess Cash: Companies usually buy back their stock with excess cash. If a company has excess cash, then at a minimum you can bank that it doesn’t have a cash flow problem. More importantly, it signals that executives feel that cash re-invested in the corporation will get a better return than alternative investments. This is definitely a positive sign for the company going forward. Customers and investors should feel confident with these events transpiring that Apple will continue to deliver value to both parties respectively. Technology Hedge Fund Principal: Since Apple has around $150B cash on the books (70% of which is foreign), it’s clear they need to do something with this cash because it’s just wasted sitting on the balance sheet earning low interest rates. People have assumed the market would respond well to Apple making acquisitions, especially in software and services, particularly in cloud and mobile software. While they have reaped the benefits of profits in mobile hardware, the value going forward is at the application and services layer. Other hardware manufacturers are catching up, if they haven’t caught up already. Unfortunately, Apple doesn’t seem to have an appetite for these types of acquisitions. Another option is to buy back shares, a proven

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All the usual writing crew have abandoned me (what, it’s the weekend?). So instead of yelling at the staff and helping with the odd headline, I’ve actually got to do something useful around here. In other words, I’m going to write a few posts. But it’s also the weekend that Maker Faire happens in San Mateo, where I live. Now, I’m not much of a maker, but I do like to get my hands dirty. I’ve got a bunch of half-finished projects all over my house, including two half-finished cigar box guitars, an unfinished Drawdio kit, and an old Nintendo DS that I disassembled in an effort to replace its broken case and could never get to work right again. You might say I’m more of a breaker than a maker. But I love going to Maker Faire to see what other, more talented makers have come up with. So I’m going to make lemonade out of this pile of lemons known as the “weekend shift.” We’re going to make VentureBeat into a temporary makers-only zone just for today. Don’t worry, you’ll feel right at home here. Along with SaaS startups, iPhone apps, and photo-sharing sites, one thing that the technology world is discovering is that making hardware is a pretty good business after all. It’s easier than ever to make things. There’s a ton of information  online about how to make everything from sauerkraut to sensors. Hundreds of hackerspaces, as well as for-profit workshops like TechShop, make tools and knowhow available to anyone who wants to learn. And once you have a solid idea, electronics manufacturers (in China or even in Oregon) make it easier than ever to go into mass production. Somewhere between the self-driving couches, the flaming sculptures, and the Arduino-powered blinky light projects, I think we’ll catch a glimpse of the future of tech. Stay tuned. And if you don’t like maker day on VentureBeat, please send me smoke signal or drum signal stating, “I don’t like learning about people who make things, so I have disassembled my laptop, smartphone, and tablet and am living on a diet of nuts and berries.”   Filed under: Entrepreneur