Startups

CharityBuzz has gotten a taste of the tech world’s power, and it wants more. Weeks after auctioning off coffee with Apple CEO Tim Cook for a staggering $610,000, CharityBuzz is starting a new auction, this time aimed right down the strike zone of startup company founders: Bid to pitch your favorite venture capitalist. The charity is the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society, the world’s largest volunteer health agency dedicated to curing blood cancers, and 21 leading venture capitalists from some of the biggest-name investment firms in the country have donated lunch, dinner, or pitch meetings to hear your best ideas … after you’ve coughed up a bit of coin for charity. Those VCs include all-stars like Tim Draper, who’s offering a not just a 15-minute pitch session but a full two-hour dinner for three at the “famous Tamarine Restaurant” in Palo Alto, CA. Menlo Ventures is represented by Shervin Pishevar, and Keith Rabois will be donating a “power lunch” somewhere on the also-famous Sand Hill Road. Which means you’ll have the full time and attention of a powerful, experienced, and — most importantly — looking-to-invest venture capitalist for at least an hour, and up to two hours. Which might be hard to pass up for founders who are looking to make connections and close funding rounds. Here’s the stellar line-up: Tim Draper (Draper Fisher Jurvetson Founder & Managing Director) Shervin Pishevar (Menlo Ventures Venture Advisor) Keith Rabois (Khosla Ventures) Brian Singerman (Founders Fund Partner) Patrick Chung (New Enterprise Associates Partner) Babak Nivi & Naval Ravikant (AngelList Co-founders) Brian O’Malley (Battery Ventures General Partner) George Bischof (Meritech Capital Managing Director) David J. Blumberg (Blumberg Capital Founder & Managing Director) Josh Kopelman and Rob Hayes (First Round Capital Founder & Partner) Megan Quinn (Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers Partner) Tod Francis (Shasta Ventures Managing Director) Ajay Chopra (Trinity Ventures General Partner) Ann Miura-Ko & Mike Maples Jr. (Floodgate Fund Co-founding Partner & Managing Partner) Jon Soberg (Blumberg Capital Managing Director) Tim Chang (Mayfield Fund Managing Director) Gus Tai (Trinity Ventures General Partner) Geoff Lewis (Founders Fund Principal) Ellen Pao (Reddit Strategic Partnerships) Dan Scholnick (Trinity Ventures Principal James Cham) David Lee (SV Angel Co-founder & Managing Director) But it won’t be easy. If the Tim Cook auction is any indicator, prices could get high. Dinner for three with Tim Draper carries an estimated value of $30,000, and already has a bid at $3,000. Many of the others have estimated valuations of $5,000. Ellen Pao A successful relationship with a big-name VC, of course, could be worth many times those numbers. But — and this might be the trouble with this particular auction — founders who are just starting out tend not to have huge sums of money to throw at speculative meetings. Which means that already-funding entrepreneurs who are looking to close a B, C, or D round might have a better shot. If they can convince their boards that this is a good investment. But, lest we forget, it’s all for a good cause in the end, and can probably be written off as a charitable donation. “We are deeply grateful to the venture capitalists who have donated their time to raise money for the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society,” Christina Resasco, Founder of MobilizeForTheCure, said in a statement. “Their generosity will provide crucial funding needed to advance blood cancer research and development for LLS and give hope to those suffering from the disease.” The project is part of the Venture Capital Master’s Lunch Series, which has raised about $200,000 since 2010. Last year’s winners included entrepreneurs from Australia, Poland, Russia, and the Philippines. Filed under: Business, Deals, Entrepreneur,

Microsoft’s team of super hardware geeks talked about what is inside the new Xbox One console. Gamers may not care about the hardware so long as it runs games smoothly and doesn’t get in their way. But the Xbox One is an engineering marvel that combines both cloud processing and a heavily-engineered game console to produce game effects that Microsoft promises will be truly impressive. If you look at all of the tasks that the machine does, it’s clear there isn’t enough silicon in the box. Nick Baker, one of the head silicon engineers at Microsoft and a key architect on the Xbox 360 chips as well as the Xbox One chips. But the cool thing about the box — which has chips with 5 billion transistors in them — is that it can tap supercomputers in web-connected data centers to do processing. That means the hardware inside the box isn’t fixed. Over time, the hardware can get better as Microsoft upgrades the technology in the data centers. For now, Microsoft has more than 300,000 servers in its data centers to support Xbox One and the Xbox Live online entertainment service. The Microsoft super geeks spoke on a panel at the Xbox Reveal in a session moderated by Larry “Major Nelson” Hryb. That processing power enables things like instantaneous Kinect, where voice commands immediately activate tasks on the Xbox, from waking up the machine instantly to changing the channel on your TV. That kind of processing exists alongside other things going on at the same time. You can, for instance, watch TV and then receive a Skype call without turning off the TV show. “There are a growing number of transistors in the cloud that you can move the loads onto,” said Boyd Multerer, one of the software experts at Microsoft. “I think it’s an inflection point. So over time, your box gets more powerful. We move loads into the cloud to free up resources on the box.” Todd Holmdahl, another longtime Microsoft hardware executive, said the load can shift from one device to another. The cloud can tackle tasks in games like physics, artificial intelligence, and even some rendering. The tasks that require low latency, with split second interaction between one chip or one device and another, are the tasks that still have to be handled inside the box.   “This is a radically different way of thinking about a game console,” he said. The machine has things like Gigabit Ethernet so that it can be ready for improvements in internet speeds. It has multiple power states so it can reduce power consumption when necessary. Holmdahl said that the Kinect system was redesigned from the ground up. The sensors are now smart enough to detect your facial expressions, allowing for smarter games that know how you are feeling as you play the game. Kinect has a variety of sensors it can rely on, like time-of-flight depth cameras and infrared, which is good at detecting low-light movements. Baker said that the internal Microsoft chip team had to design five pieces of silicon to handle all of the tasks in the console and the Kinect subsystem, which now comes bundled with the box. The team had to test the chips thoroughly, running 10 trillion cycles of simulation in order to make sure everything worked right. The chips had to be designed to work with each other in a coherent way. The GPU is multitasking, so that it can run compute and cloud tasks at the same time that it renders graphics, Baker said. The net result is that it can do billions of calculations per second. Holmdahl said, “We started with a blank slate. We talked to the hardware, software people. One of the good things about Microsoft is you have those people under the same roof.” Holmdahl said developers will be able to exploit these technologies as they learn more about things like instantaneous voice command integration into the game console. The work started a few years ago. “The development of these things tak

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Nurses are the unsung heroes of the hospital who navigate crappy software on outdated hardware to keep you healthy — and it needs to stop. Executives from Cedar’s-Sinai and Kaiser Permanente explained at VentureBeat’s HealthBeat conference that technology innovators need to start focusing on new, consumer-like user experiences and better end-to-end communications software and hardware. Otherwise, nurses are going to start using their own devices, which creates obvious issues in privacy and data management. “We’ve done a lot of ethnographic research of our nursing areas. … It’s still amazing when you walk into that environment that there’s still a tremendous amount of inefficiency, redundancy.” said Julie Vilardi, a registered nurse, as well as the executive director of Kaiser Permanente’s clinical informatics and strategic projects. “User experience it’s really critically important. Because of the consumer experience now is pretty slick, when you get into the walls of the hospital [consumer-grade experiences are] beginning to be the expectation, and we so don’t deliver it right now.” She explained how nurses manage everything having to do with your hospital stay from the medication you’re prescribed, to food you eat, and the baths you take. They typically have four or so patients who may not even be in the same area of the hospital. These nurses often have to tote around workstations on wheels, and clunky communications devices that simply aren’t effective, but because of their ability work in a chaotic environment, they’re making due. Darren Dworking, the chief information officer for Cedar’s Sinai Medical Center, said the center recently deployed 800 iPhones to its staff. He thought clinicians were going to shy away from using texting for communications, but he was wrong. “A lot of our clinicians are beginning to use technology in other aspects of their life … they want to know how come they can’t have a healthcare version of that,” said Dworking. “Giving them something akin to a cordless phone isn’t going to do it for communications.” Vilardi says she hopes to see developers create a consumer-grade iPhone experience for patient management and electronic medical records (EMR). She wants to be able to push an icon to get a patient assessment, and believes we’re very close to that reality. Dworking, however, encourages innovators to look beyond the EMR, which he says the window has closed on. Instead, he hopes that people will find a new way of displaying data and improving communications. According to Vilardi, iOS phones and tablets really are the devices of choice in hospitals today. This is because vendors in general are taking more advantage of iOS than Android. She explained that Kaiser is looking for ways to integrate Android, however. Nurses, speak up! We want to hear from you about your experiences with workstations on wheels, apps, and more. Send us an email at tips@venturebeat.com or e-mail me directly at meghan@venturebeat.com. Image via Michael O’Donnell/VentureBeat Filed under: Business, 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; }

Microsoft revealed its next-gen Xbox One today, and we are discovering new details about the powerful device. After the event, Microsoft corporate vice president of Xbox Live Marc Whitten told The Verge that the Xbox One will not work with Xbox 360 games. It will support 450 original Xbox games through emulation. We’ve contacted Microsoft to ask if it plans to sell Xbox 360 games through a digital store and what will happen to digital purchases including Xbox Live Arcade games. The company has not yet responded to our request, but we will update with any new information. Sony’s PlayStation 4 has almost the identical problem. Like the Xbox One, it is using a new architecture compared to its predecessor that prevents PlayStation 3 games, including PlayStation Network titles, from working on the next-gen console. Filed under: Games GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here! .blurb-cat-games hr { margin: 10px 0 10px 0; }

With Microsoft’s introduction of the new entertainment watching experience through its new Xbox One console, one of the biggest winners will obviously be for those that love live sports. That said, the company announced a new partnership with the NFL that will see the sports organization bring original content to the Xbox. There was plenty of talk about being able to integrate sports scores, play-by-play views, socialization, and more into the TV screen, as well as making fantasy football leagues more centralized to your experience. Specifically, we don’t know which games or sports shows will get the new Xbox One treatment, but I assume more will be revealed in the weeks to come. I got the sense that the NFL programming will seek to use all the available devices in interesting ways that either don’t overlap or take away from the central experience of the content. The NFL programming is the second that Microsoft revealed during today’s Xbox One event. The first was a new interactive Halo TV show produced by the legendary Steven Spielberg, who created roughly half the childhood favorite films for anyone born during the ’80s. Filed under: Games, Media

Apple CEO Tim Cook is answering some tough question on Capitol Hill today, responding to questions from the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations on Apple’s untaxed billions of dollars in overseas income. But not from Senator Rob Portman (R-OH), who used most of his question time to chat about his own tax code reform initiatives. Portman, who has has some presidential aspirations in the past and clearly wants to massively re-write the tax code to make it easier to “repatriate” overseas income, also tossed a few softballs towards to Cook and his subordinates. And he illuminated an interesting correlation between Apple and Samsung. “Apple and Samsung pay about the same global tax rates, correct?” Senator Portman asked. “But your investment options are a lot more limited.” Source: John KoetsierTim Cook answers questions on Capitol Hill Senator Portmans’ point, which Cook and Apple CFO Peter Oppenheimer agreed to, is that Samsung paid about $4 billion in corporate taxes on about $28 billion in global earnings — roughly equivalent to Apple’s global effective tax rate of about seven percent. And, that Samsung can bring home foreign income without being taxed. “Our international tax code puts our workers at a disadvantage,” Portman continued. “No other country in the world has such high barriers to bringing international income home … and Canada just lowered to its rate to 15 percent.” That 15 percent, of course, is much lower than the U.S. rate of 35 percent which has caused Apple to refrain from bringing about $100 billion in overseas income home to the the U.S. Portman asked Tim Cook if Samsung was Apple’s biggest competitor, which Cook was careful to deflect into “it’s one of them,” and highlighted the fact that Apple is an American success story. Cook answered that Apple’s overseas income has powered Apple’s growth, and that Apple has created or supported 600,000 U.S. jobs. “80 percent of the world’s purchasing power lies beyond our borders,” Portman said. “But we’re living with an international tax code that’s a relic of the 1960s.” Almost all of the OECD countries, Portman added, have moved to a territorial tax system in which earnings are taxed in the countries in which they are realized — i.e., where sales are made. And they do not tax foreign income.   Filed under: Business, Enterprise

Verizon is the largest wireless telecommunications provider in the U.S., and the company is using its extensive network and resources to impact health care. Communication is one of the biggest challenges facing health care today. Doctors cannot use e-mail, social media networks or SMS texting to discuss patients because it violates privacy regulations and Electronic Medical Record (EMRs) systems are traditionally incompatible with each other, which makes the secure exchange of information even more difficult. At Healthbeat today, Verizon’s managing principal of Connected Health Care solutions Nancy Green explained how Verizon can benefit the health care community. “When you think of Verizon, you think of our wireless network, but we have a $6 billion health care practice and a Chief Medical Officer ,” she said on stage. “We are moving and enabling the business of health care so others can innovate. We have experts on compliance and security, and startups can use the size and scope and scale of Verizon to make a difference.” Security and authentication are major concerns when it comes to medical communication. Green said that 27 countries, the White House, and the nuclear launch codes are secured by Verizon. The company knows how to do security and authenticate people and is applying this expertise to the health care. Verizon has credentialed every clinician and physician in the United States and provide a secure channel for transmitting data, such a prescriptions. An example is Verizon’s work with Surescripts to support electronic prescriptions and set up digital signage on devices. From their iPads and  iPhones, doctors can sign in using a passcode, authenticate their identity, write, confirm, and accept prescriptions, and digitally sign documents. Verizon’s “exchange layer” moves the information securely from network to network (doctor to pharmacy) so doctors don’t have to visit a terminal or use pen and paper. Verizon’s dual persona technology is also particularly useful in the medical field. Doctors often use their personal mobile devices for work and Green said that it is a struggle to securely manage patient data on phones and keep it separate from personal information. Through an exclusive partnership with VMware, Verizon has a solution that can lock down the enterprise/clinical side of phones. To quote Voltaire (or Uncle Ben from Spiderman), with great power comes great responsibility. Verizon has a network of 115 million people and a huge telecommunications infrastructure, and Green said the company is committed to supporting entrepreneurs and ideas that use this power for good. So is competitor AT&T, which also has health care solutions. Both companies see opportunities in an industry that makes up 17 percent of the GDP and relies heavily on mobile and telecommunication technology. These opportunities also extend beyond mobile health technology. In March, Verizon announced its new cloud service for health data exchange and a partnership with HealthSpot to power telemedicine kiosks in the field. Photo Credit: Michael O’Donnell/VentureBeat Filed under: Cloud, Enterprise, Health, Mobile 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; }

While we don’t have all of the details on the new Xbox Live features announced at today’s XBox One launch, it’s clear that Microsoft is going all-in when it comes to social and multiplayer gaming. First, they are upping the number of dedicated servers for online play from 15,000 to 300,000 and that nearly all of your content and game data will be store in the cloud. The service will also allow you to take in-game video and photos and share them over social media services. This is similar to Sony’s PS4 solution and is definitely a method allow users to create valuable and viral homemade content while still maintaining control of distribution. As games become more social and more cinematic, this will be an important differentiator and is essentially free advertising for game makers. Finally, the new service adds asynchronous matchmaking, which means you can be searching for potential teammates (or enemies) while watching TV or playing another game. This increases the stickiness of multiplayer titles by nudging you back into the game when a worth opponent appears. Microsoft has also added “bigger matches with more players” and, most important, “living and persistent worlds.” This sounds to me like a direct attack on MMORPGs like World Of Warcraft and could make the Xbox a formidable force in the popular professional gaming subculture, a niche no console maker has yet cracked. We should see further information about the Xbox One at E3 this summer.

The Xbox One was just unveiled at Microsoft’s Redmond campus and, true to multiple reports that circulated before the official reveal, the new console will indeed come with a Kinect. The rumors of a vastly improved Kinect sensor array were right on the money — this next-generation model is capable of tracking motions as minute as wrist rotations, and Microsoft’s Marc Whitten said the new Kinect would even be able to read users’ heartbeats when they’re exercising or when players shift their weight. In short, it’s a massive, massive upgrade compared to the venerable original model, which often exhibited issues with basic limb and motion tracking. We got a brief glimpse of the new Kinect in action when Microsoft SVP Yusuf Mehdi called out commands and used minute hand gestures to manipulate content on the Xbox One. Granted, it was a carefully staged demo, but the Kinect reacted to his commands and inputs without a hint of technical hesitation — if the new Kinect works in the living room as well as it did on stage, Microsoft could be onto something huge here. Edit Developing…