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There’s been a lot of debate around what the right age to be an entrepreneur is, and if there’s really a correlation between age and running a successful business. Well, we have some new input for you on those questions: We met three extremely smart entrepreneurs – aged 13, 16, and 22 – on a youth panel at TiEcon 2013, and they’ve been up to some cool stuff. Jordan Casey, 13 If you think Mark Zuckerberg was young when he started Facebook, wait till you meet Jordan Casey, a self-taught programmer and the 13-year-old founder and chief executive of Casey Games from Waterford, Ireland. He hands you his business card with a smirk on his face and tells you, “I run an independent mobile video game company called Casey Games.” His inspiration was Club Penguin, a Flash multiplayer game. “I saw some of the users of the game were making websites about it, so I thought this could be a fun hobby, and so I went to the store and bought a book on programming,” said Casey, who started programming when he was all of nine. A year later he started working on programming projects and got himself into building games. Casey founded his company when he was 12 and already has four mobile games and one web game on the market. His first game, Alien Ball vs. Humans, which released in February 2012, was No. 1 on the app store game charts in Ireland. Casey has built key partnerships with Adobe and Microsoft, who provide him with free software and support his initiative. He has one staff member, a designer, and he tells us, “My parents have to be the directors of the company because I’m too young.” His parents are super proud of him, and they accompany him to conferences and events. “At first my parents didn’t understand what I was really doing. Instead of making games, they thought I was playing games,” said Casey. “Once they realized what I was doing, they became very supportive of me.” Tanay Tandon, 16 Nick D’Aloisio made waves when he sold Summly, his news summarization app, to Yahoo for a whopping $30 million this past March. That put 16-year-old Tanay Tandon, founder and chief executive of Clipped, a content summarization app, in the spotlight. Although Clipped provides an output similar to Summly, they use a different approach, Tandon told VentureBeat. “Summly has taken a keyword based approach to summarization, while Clipped is more grammatical,” he said. The Clipped algorithm “analyzes how humans might actually read content” based on “subject-predicate-object-pattern-like sentences” to draw summaries. A sophomore at Cupertino High in Cupertino, Calif., Tandon founded Clipped in January 2013, and he’s already seeing some traction. To date, he’s had 130,000 downloads for his iOS and Android apps, with 10 million summaries provided. He was incubated at Teens in Tech and is now “in talks” with some investors. He got started with programming on Android apps and wants to study “something computer science,” going forward. “People would drop out but I value education. I definitely want to go to college,” said Tandon, who wrote pattern recognition algorithms for his app from the ground up. When he catches time between school and his startup, Tandon like to play tennis. Aron Beierschmitt, 22 Aron Beierschmitt founded his company, Foundation Games, in 2010 when he was 19. He employs 15 people and has offices in San Francisco, Philippines, and Sydney today. He has raised $850,000 in funding from angel investors, including the founders of Treyarch – the guys behind the popular Call of Duty series – and some other veterans from the gaming industry. Interestingly, he stumbled upon his very first investor, Steve Vachani, on LinkedIn. “I took advantage of the early LinkedIn ability to send a lot of InMails without paying for them,” said Beierschmitt. So far, Beierschmitt and his team have developed five iOS games and are working on three more. “Most of our titles have seen typically 500 to a million downloads” with no real marketing, Beierschmitt told V

Debbie Landa is CEO of Dealmaker Media/Under the Radar. With the Under the Radar conference coming up this week, I’ve been speaking to a lot of startups about how they’re managing to get their messages out to business decision makers. The conference is all about how the consumerization of IT is changing how startups design and market their products. And most recently I spoke to Aubrey Sabala (pictured, VP of marketing for “smart data” company Sailthru, to find out how she’s experiencing this change, both as the marketing lead of a startup and as a buyer of technology from other startups. Sabala (pictured below) pulls from quite a bit of experience — she’s previously worked on innovative marketing programs for some of the largest brands in technology, including Google, Facebook, Digg, and AOL and helped lead Facebook’s Consumer Marketing Team, serving as the executive producer for Facebook Live. Here’s what she had to say. Debbie Landa: We’ve heard from the likes of Gartner and others that CMOs are quickly outpacing CIOs in terms of technology spending. What types of technologies are you looking for today? Aubrey Sabala: We’re very data driven here at Sailthru. We want to ensure that our marketing spend is going to the right place and that leads have been qualified. Software that can give us a very informed picture of how our marketing campaigns are converting, or who’s landing on our website — more than Google Analytics — is worth investing in. Our top priority is very accurately quantifying the success of the campaigns we’re working on. Of course, we also leverage Sailthru ourselves, which provides a lot of actionable insight. Landa: How much of your overall budget is tied to technology purchases? Aubrey Sabala, Sailthru Sabala: Because we create a marketing solution, we fall on the lower end, maybe 10-15% — but we expect that to increase. My guess is that the average CMO would say about 30%. Landa: Do you find yourself competing with your CIO for IT budget? Sabala: To date, no. It’s more of a challenge at other companies, but we’re spared from some of that drama because many of our tools are built in-house. One thing is true regardless: You need to be able to justify technology purchases. In B2C companies, that’s harder because consumer marketers build out social channels, which is not tied to sales acquisition in a direct or measurable way. Landa: If you could wave a magic wand and solve specific business problems with technology, what would those be? Where should tomorrow’s entrepreneurs be putting their energy? Sabala: Today there are many different touchpoints, channels, and data sources that businesses need to connect in order to understand customers. Integrating them is really challenging, and getting insights from them to inform your marketing efforts is even more difficult. However, it’s worth it for organizations of every size and it’s the very challenge we’re solving with Smart Data. I’d also love turnkey customized landing pages that tie into Salesforce so that we could go out and market directly. I’d also love to optimize the sales funnel even further so that we can really identify the best qualified leads — at the right time — so that we can turn them into sales. Landa: How long does the typical buying process take, from initial pitch to deployment, and what does your vetting process look like? Sabala: We want to make sure we’re investing wisely, so we ask a lot of questions and always ask for customer testimonials, referrals, case studies, etc., all of which adds time to the process. We want to know if we have the infrastructure in place, that the value outweighs the cost, that it’s solving a real pain, and that we’re buying solutions that will still work in the long-term. We always ask to speak with vendors’ customers to ask the pivotal question: “When you approach the time to renew and you’re evaluating your budget, would you renew or look elsewhere?” All

The brain is a fascinating thing. It morphs over time, forming new connections, assimilating new information, and forging new pathways. According to this video we stumbled across, our brains are also evolving in a new way thanks to technology. If you’ve ever spent more than 30 seconds thinking about it, you probably already assume, as the clip notes, that Google sort of acts as an external hard drive for your own gray matter. But does that mean we’re getting dumber? Or just that we’re thinking smarter, not harder? Want more tech-brain mashup science? Check out our posts on how brain waves could replace passwords, why the Obama administration is spending $100 million to map the human brain, and how this group of scientists captured a video of a thought being formed in the brain. Source: AcademicEarth Image credit: Liz Henry/Flickr Filed under: Science HealthBeat 2013 is a new conference showcasing how technology is transforming health care. We'll explore how IT is driving out inefficiencies on the hospital, practice, and patient levels. Check out full event details here, and register here. .blurb-cat-science hr { margin: 10px 0 10px 0; }

SAN FRANCISCO — The Affordable Care Act, aka health care reform, aka Obamacare, is spurring a massive creation of new business opportunities. So says Bryan Sivak, the chief technical officer and entrepreneur-in-residence at the Department of Health and Human Services, the cabinet-level agency that regulates the $2.8 trillion U.S. health care market. Sivak joined VentureBeat’s HealthBeat conference today via a video conference (see photo above). Just one of the areas that’s becoming fertile ground for entrepreneurial innovation: the health insurance exchanges mandated by the law. These exchanges bring a level of transparency and openness to the insurance market that hasn’t been easy to find until now, Sivak said. The new exchanges will be large, consumer-facing marketplaces, and the insurance industry hasn’t been exactly nimble about embracing the latest consumer tech trends — so there will be lots of opportunities for startups to bridge the gap. They’ll increase competition, because people will be able to see and compare insurance plans more easily. Now, any qualified, licensed insurer will have access to a market of potential customers via the exchanges. Also, he said, the act will bring 30 million to 50 million more people into the ranks of the insured, creating a new pool of customers to market to. And there will be lots of data. “You have no idea what’s possible, and you have no idea what people are going to come up with, so that’s what I’m really looking forward to,” Sivak said. Apart from the ACA, Sivak also said government has an important role to play in facilitating health care innovation. Government can help spur technology in three ways, he said: Facilitation: ”Governments at all levels are interested in seeing citizens do great things.” At the federal, state, and local levels, he said, there’s a lot of interest in helping people create new ventures, improve existing health care systems, or create new systems. Convening: “We’re really, really good at getting people together,” Sivak said. So if a big problem needs tackling, governments are well-positioned to gather people to talk about it. Incentivizing: Governments can be very effective at spurring change through relatively small incentives or through mandates. For example, he said, the adoption of electronic medical records (EMRs) stagnated until it was mandated by the Affordable Care Act in 2012. “Just think about that: A small government intervention has caused EMR adoption to go from under 15 percent to over 70 percent,” Sivak said. What’s more, government sits on top of a lot of data. Sivak estimates that HHS has about 1,000 data sets, 400 of which have been catalogued on the agency’s HealthData.gov website. Some of the datasets aren’t free, though HHS is working to bring the costs down. So there’s a long way to go still. Sivak, a former entrepreneur who cut his teeth in San Francisco during the dot-com days, says his attitude toward government’s role is a new perspective for him. “The only time I interacted with government was when I needed to file my incorporation paperwork with the State of California,” he said of his experience in the 1990s — not atypical of many tech entrepreneurs. But if he’s right, techies — at least those who want to do business in the health care field — would do well to pay a lot more attention to what’s going on in government. Photo credit: Michael O’Donnell/VentureBeat Filed under: Entrepreneur, Health HealthBeat 2013 is a new conference showcasing how technology is transforming health care. We'll explore how IT is driving out inefficiencies on the hospital, practice, and patient levels. Check out full event details here, and register here. .blurb-cat-health hr { margin: 10px 0 10px 0; }

These days, users require intuitive, responsive, and interactive apps that scale to high volumes of data (and users!). While developers work overtime to keep up, they are often locked into programming models that result in lackluster apps. Here are five ways developers can break the cycle of simply meeting user demand and get ahead of the game to create apps that users actually want to use. Single-page applications In traditional web applications, every click or interaction causes a page refresh. This is not an effective way for a user to move through an application. The single-page architecture is shifting the paradigm and allowing developers to build more fluid and interactive applications. To validate user input, traditional web applications send the user input to the server, validate the input, then return results to the user. Single-page applications validate most content on the client, providing a vastly more interactive and responsive user experience. Web browsers and mobile devices provide powerful environments that allow for rich user interaction. For example, single-page application can leverage the capabilities of a mobile device to deliver a rich user experience, utilizing the camera, accelerometer, and/or GPS to specific and contextual experiences. Single-page applications can use powerful visual components to present information in the format selected by the user. For example, a user may want to see data in a chart or in a table; a single page application can switch between these representations without any interaction with the server. The plethora of devices with varying sizes has catalyzed the concept of responsive design, where applications adjust how information is displayed and which content is displayed for the size and characteristics of the device. Single-page applications are far better suited for creating responsive applications because the client can make independent decisions based on the device capabilities. Separating client and server Most Java applications look terrible because the application architecture does not allow UI developers to collaborate effectively with server-side developers. By exposing services and creating a clear separation between the client-side and the back-end services, developers can create much richer applications. A client application, written with HTML or HTML and Java Script, execute server-side functionality. Client developers, with skills in graphic design and user interaction, leverage the efforts of server developers, whose expertise are in scalability and reliability, which provides a powerful combination and results in superior applications. A clear separation between client and server, often using a REST interface and/or JSON payloads, allows both sets of developers to focus efforts in their areas of expertise. Realtime push Historically, web apps are updated only when the user refreshes or moves to a new page. While the user views the page, the data may have changed on the server, thus the user is often seeing outdated information. JVM-based apps can solve this issue using real-time push, which updates the data in real time. In the case of apps like Google Docs this means instant collaboration. Rich user experiences are created with instant content updates. Instant messaging and text messaging are two solutions founded on push notification that have changed how we communicate. Map applications are much more useful when merged with realtime traffic data. Vital business applications require notification to key decision makers, whose business successes require timely information. Data is being collected with growing frequency and volume, providing new opportunities to provide consolidated results that can impact our immediate decisions. For example, the Waze mobile maps application collects the current speed and location of other drivers and adjusts your route based on that information. Scale predictably Web applications must scale to meet demand. The “Oprah Effe

As edtech startups continue to challenge the current state of higher education, and various niche startups focus on educating people through digital means, yet another company is getting a boost when it comes to helping people learn. PopExpert, a learning marketplace that lets students connect with experts in one-on-one video chats, has just raised a $2 million seed round led by Learn Capital, with participation by Jeff Skoll, Ken Howery, Michael Chasen, and Expansion VC. The site’s premise is simple: users can sign in and search for what they want to learn. Right now there are experts in multiple fields across the spectrum of “life, work, and play,” including meditation, nutrition, relationships, productivity, career mentoring, language and music. Once you log in, you can search for something like “yoga” and see a list of experts, validated with credentials and tagged with a price per session. From there, just choose your expert, schedule the session, and get ready to learn. PopExpert even facilitates payments, so the entire process can be completed in one place. According to the company, one-to-one learning is “vastly superior” to any other method. “We are focused on areas that relate more to EQ development than IQ development, for example meditation vs. Excel training and personalized style vs. photography techniques,” explained founder Ingrid Sanders. “These areas of EQ development are particularly suited to personalized interaction with an expert, and a one-to-one interaction is by far the most efficient way to experience them.” For now, the service is only available by invitation, but there are already more than 1,000 experts using the service to teach and make some money. PopExpert recruits these experts after doing their own mini head-hunt, looking through reviews, online sources, and books to find the best possible teachers for the platform. PopExpert generates revenue by taking a small service fee from every transaction.

Welcome to a brand new episode of Cribs, the TechCrunch TV series that goes straight into the heart of the action at the tech industry’s hottest companies to see what it’s really like for the people who work there. For this edition we headed out on the road to the New York City headquarters of Fab, the super-popular e-commerce site that has quickly grown over the past couple years to be one of the web’s key shopping destinations (and one of the industry’s hottest companies from a valuation perspective.) Fab is known for selling all types of products ranging from art to jewelry to furniture, with the key commonality being great design, so our hopes were pretty high when entering into the company’s Manhattan headquarters. As you’ll see in the video above, our tour did not disappoint, and Fab co-founder and chief creative officer Bradford Shane Shellhammer was the perfect person to show us how gorgeous design and high fashion doesn’t have to be intimidating — it can actually be really fun.

Today, Twitter was officially granted U.S. Patent #8,448,084 for an mobile app invention: pull to refresh. That is, of course, the same gesture-based user interface control that many apps already use — such as major Twitter social media rival Facebook. The mechanics of the innovation are simple, and have already added the lexicon of gestures that most mobile users have already become familiar with: Pull the user interface down to force the app to refresh its current view. But, thanks to Twitter’s innovator’s patent agreement (IPA), the business and legal ramifications are just about as easy. Source: John KoetsierFacebook’s mobile app on iOS uses a version of pull-to-refresh As the Verge notes, Twitter’s IPA was released as a 1.0 spec today as releasing it in draft form early in 2012. And the IPA is in full effect for this most recent Twitter patent. Loren Brichter, the developer who created pull-to-refresh — which Twitter acquired in 2010 when it bought Tweetie — was concerned about how Twitter would use his patent. So concerned, in fact, that he asked Twitter to agree with him as part of the terms of the sale of his company that it would never use the patent offensively. Which means, according to the IPA, any company that has not initiated offensive patent litigation in the past decade is safe. Defensive use of the patent, however is permitted by the IPA if the following terms are true: If a company “has filed, maintained, threatened, or voluntarily participated in a patent infringement lawsuit against Assignee or any of Assignee’s users, affiliates, customers, suppliers, or distributors” Or, if a company :has filed, maintained, or voluntarily participated in a patent infringement lawsuit against another in the past ten years” And finally, “to deter a patent litigation threat against Assignee or Assignee’s users, affiliates, customers, suppliers, or distributors” There’s one more loophole for offensive patent action if the above do not apply: If the company that owns the patent asks the engineers responsible for creating the intellectual property for written permission. Overall, however, this is a significant step to making patents better, and reducing the impact of patent trolling and patent lawsuits — if other companies adopt it in large numbers. “We hope the adoption of the IPA will spur constructive dialogue on making patent system work better for companies, inventors, and policymakers alike,” Twitter’s Ben Lee wrote today. Image credits: Twitter icons Filed under: Business, Dev, Mobile, Social

SAN FRANCISCO — Don Jones, a vice president for Qualcomm Life, is on a mission to make the future of healthcare a reality. Qualcomm Life houses a healthcare investment fund, grooms Masters degree programs in wireless health, and sponsors the Tricorder X Prize, dubbed “healthcare in the palm of your hand” (and apparently a product Jones proposed himself.) Jones is also leading the Scripps Clinical Efficacy Center for trials involving connected clinical solutions. As we’ve heard throughout HealthBeat 2013, entrepreneurs should understand clinical workflows to test the adoptability of their health technology solutions before attempting to make inroads into a system already fraught with problems. Jones was joined onstage by Susan Dentzer, former health correspondent for the PBS News Hour and senior policy advisor for the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The two compared the coming changes in healthcare technology to a shift as drastic from horse and buggy to cars. But what exactly does the future hold? According to Jones and Dentzer, it’s healthcare on demand. Jones said, “Once you have healthcare on demand, you don’t want to go back … you won’t accept anything less.” Both payers and providers will have to compete to attract patients, thus shifting markets based on new value propositions facilitated by technology. In rapid-fire succession, Jones described a system that is “smarter, faster, cheaper, more convenient, and more transparent for the patient.” And Qualcomm isn’t just talk. The company has partnered with Stanford University to offer these types of connected healthcare services to all of its employees, located in 100+ locations operating on a 24/7 schedule. Qualcomm Life is focused on making “immediate response” something embraced by both technology companies and the healthcare industry alike by dictating the terms for what a future health system should be. Photo: Don Jones of Qualcomm Life and Susan Dentzer of The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. Photo credit: Michael O’Donnell/VentureBeat Filed under: Health HealthBeat 2013 is a new conference showcasing how technology is transforming health care. We'll explore how IT is driving out inefficiencies on the hospital, practice, and patient levels. Check out full event details here, and register here. .blurb-cat-health hr { margin: 10px 0 10px 0; }