Startups

The Gillmor Gang — Robert Scoble, Kevin Marks, Keith Teare, John Taschek, and Steve Gillmor — neatly sidestepped the Yahoo Tumblr acquisition and segued into the wonderful world of messaging. As Facebook Home settles into a cot at the homeless shelter, Google is revving up for an all-out assault on the service suite. Google Glass is just the tip of the iceberg; below the waterline, the search giant is sucking image, location, traffic, and advertising data in realtime. It may seem like the Gang is tilting over into Google love, but scratch the surface (no pun intended) and you’ll find just as much Apple love lurking beneath. The consensus is not so much a two-horse race as a widening duopoly that makes it very hard for Yahoo or Microsoft or Amazon or any new player to break the hold these two giants maintain. Of course, that’s what they said about Microsoft, which in reality was the duopoly of Windows and Office. @stevegillmor, @scobleizer, @kteare, @jtaschek, @kevinmarks Produced and directed by Tina Chase Gillmor @tinagillmor Live chat stream

Google Buzz, the social service that Google launched way back in 2010 and then killed in 2011, reminded former users that their data still lives in and will be moved over to your Google Drive accounts in July. That’s lovely. The email describes exactly what will happen with your data, which won’t count against your Drive storage limits, thankfully. If you don’t delete the data and let Google move your stuff to Drive, it says that the public Buzz posts you shared in the past “may appear in search results and on your Google Profile.” OK, then. Here’s the entire email in case you’ve filtered out Buzz communication to go directly to Spam or Trash: In October 2011 we announced Google Buzz was shutting down. On or after July 17th, 2013, Google will take the last step in the shutdown and will save a copy of your Buzz posts to your Google Drive, a service for storing files online. Google will store two (2) types of files to your Google Drive, and the newly-created files will not count against your storage limits. If you’d like to wipe Buzz from your online world completelly, go here and delete the data now: https://profiles.google.com/me/deletebuzz 1. The first type of file will be private, only accessible to you, containing a snapshot of the Google Buzz public and private posts you authored. 2. The second type of file will contain a copy of only your Google Buzz public posts. By default it will be viewable by anyone with the link, and may appear in search results and on your Google Profile (if you’ve linked to your Buzz posts). Note, any existing links to your Google Buzz content will redirect users to this file. 3. Any comments you made on other users’ posts will only be saved to those users’ files and not to yours. Once the change described in this email is final, only that user will be able to change the sharing settings of those files. This means that if you have commented on another author’s private post, that author could choose to make that post and its comments public. If you would like to avoid that possibility, delete all your Buzz content now. 4. The new Google Drive files will only contain comments from users that previously enabled Google Buzz, and the files will not contain comments that were deleted prior to moving the data to your Google Drive. Once the files are created, they will be treated the same as any other Drive file. They are yours to do with as you please. This includes downloading them, updating who can access them, or deleting them. Before these files are created, you can view the Google Buzz posts you have authored here. If you do not want any of your Buzz posts or comments saved to Google Drive files, you can immediately delete your Google Buzz account and data. Thank you for using Google Buzz. Since Google mentions that you can delete your data not once, but twice, in the email, that’s the course of action that I’ll be taking. Buzz never took off, and Google went on to focus all of its efforts on Google+. There were a slew of reasons why Buzz didn’t work, mostly centered around privacy. The close integration with Gmail made the entire experience a mess, blurring the lines between what should be personal and what should be public. This is clearly the last step for Google to completely rid itself of the product, and all of the privacy concerns and issues that cropped up around the product. Oh, and just in case you missed that delete link, here it is again. Thank you, Google.

Givey makes it easy to give to causes you care about. Givey's social donation platform makes charitable giving really easy, via text, tweet and online. It's also totally social, connecting you with new people based on the causes you care about and the actions you take to help.

Krowds are collaborative spaces where you can share videos based on where you are, and what you’re interested in. The app lets you tap into the videos and points of view of anyone else nearby who’s also using Krowds.

Although 3D printing technology has existed for some time, it’s only now beginning to cross over into mainstream awareness, thanks to increasingly affordable access to the printers themselves, as well as attention-grabbing headlines about 3D printed guns and life-saving medical applications. While less eye-catching, perhaps, the innovation is also powering a new class of creatives, who are using 3D printers to produce art instead. Their “handmade” goods, including jewelry, home decor, gifts and more, appear on sites like the marketplace for crafters, Etsy, and the 3D printing resource center and online shop, Shapeways. These modern-day artists don’t always fit the traditional mold – or stereotype, rather – of what an artist should be. They don’t necessarily have a studio or workshop, nor do they always have an art background or related experience. Sometimes, they’re drawn in because of the technology and science involved, only then discovering their more artistic side. And sometimes, they’re just everyday people working day jobs in unrelated fields who have discovered 3D printing as a new way to express themselves creatively, communicating their visions and ideas to a wider audience than they had ever thought possible. These are their stories. This is part two of an ongoing series which will showcase some of the art that’s being fueled by the ever more accessible 3D printing technology, and the artists behind the work. In part one, we profiled a formally trained artist who was inspired to use 3D printing for her work, after first coming across the technology years ago.  ~~~~ Part Two: The Self-Taught Learner When Dutch designer Maaike van der Horn wanted to learn how to use 3D modeling software, she turned to YouTube. The site, she says, is filled with several tutorials that walk you through the basics, and sometimes she would watch these over and over while trying to find her way. “If you have an idea in your head, and you spend a little bit of time – well, a lot of time, actually – you can actually get pretty far,” she says with a chuckle. Van der Horn currently works as a market researcher for a European airline, but over the past couple of years she had been trying to learn something entirely different: she wanted to be a goldsmith. Hoping to make a career change, van der Horn has been training part-time at a school for goldsmiths in the Netherlands in order to learn the trade. “But I got frustrated because I had all these ideas in my head about things I wanted to make, but I realized that with the traditional goldsmithing techniques and practices, I wouldn’t be able to make those, or would only be able to make those after 20 years of experience, maybe,” she says. Even if she became an expert in goldsmithing, the soldering and welding techniques wouldn’t have allowed her to make some of the jewelry that’s she’s able to make today using 3D printing, and whatever she had ended up producing because of those limitations wouldn’t have been her original vision — only some watered-down version instead. “You wouldn’t be able to make such complex and very geometric objects,” she explains. “You wouldn’t be able to be so precise.” 3D printing offered a better alternative. Van der Horn first heard about the technology after spotting an article in her local newspaper, which talked about the website Shapeways – a site offering printing services as well as tools and help to guide those who are new to using the technology, and which just closed on $30 million in Series C funding in a round led by Andreessen Horowitz. The website soon became a valuable source of information for van der Horn. She then began teaching herself how to use free software like SketchUp and Blender - a feat that’s even more impressive considering that she never had formal training, nor does she

Your government is worried. The world is “going dark.” Once upon a time, telephones were the only way to talk to someone far away, and the authorities could wiretap any phone they wanted. Nowadays, though, suspects might be communicating via Facebook, Google Hangouts, WhatsApp, Snapchat, Skype, Viber. And so, inevitably: “Today, if you’re a tech company that’s created a new and popular way to communicate, it’s only a matter of time before the FBI shows up with a court order to read or hear some conversation.” But some of those providers have no interest in spying on their users. The FBI is not amused. “A government task force is preparing legislation that would pressure companies such as Face­book and Google to enable law enforcement officials to intercept online communications as they occur,” according to the Washington Post, by fining them increasing sums until they build government-accessible back doors into their systems. Which invites the titular question of this post. The FBI may be looking back with dewy-eyed nostalgia on the phone wiretaps of yore, but I think we can all agree that those would have been ridiculously ineffective if anyone with anything to hide had been able to easily acquire and attach tiny devices that made wiretapping impossible. That’s exactly the case today: anyone even remotely au fait with technology can securely encrypt their digital communications themselves, via eg RedPhone. So the FBI would only be able to wiretap suspects who are either too dumb to use encryption — in which case they ought to be easy enough to catch without wiretaps — or who think they have nothing to hide. Meanwhile, they’d be setting a terrible precedent for other, more draconian governments. Critics say “We’ll look a lot more like China than America after this” … but the Obama administration, which not coincidentally appears to hate whistleblowers above all else, still seems poised to support this initiative. But wait, it gets worse. In order to claim this empty chalice, the powers that be will require a surveillance system that could be abused by the very kind of people it’s supposed to be used against. Could, and almost certainly would: if you build a tool that can be used malevolently, then inevitably it one day will be. Consider how Google was hacked in 2010 by adversaries who used the intercept facilities built into GMail – at the FBI’s insistence – to access the private email of Chinese dissidents, and: Google had a database with "years" worth of FISA surveillance orders it received.The Chinese hacked it. washingtonpost.com/world/national…— Christopher Soghoian (@csoghoian) May 20, 2013 Put another way: Basically, FBI is proposing massive fines for companies that design their systems to be secure. Insanely bad idea. j.mp/Y9hiL3— Julian Sanchez (@normative) April 29, 2013 Is the FBI actually too stupid to realize that this is a terrible, horrible, very bad, no good idea? Or — get your tinfoil hats on — is the pretext of hunting criminals and terrorists merely a smokescreen for requiring what in effect will be a gargantuan cross-platform surveillance system that will let them spy on anyone’s conversation at any time for their own ulterior motives? Probably not. (At least, he said paranoiacally, not yet.) But that is exactly what’s happening in other countries. Witness this post by legendary security guru Moxie Marlinspike, the creator of RedPhone among other tools, who was approached by the Saudi Arabian government to help monitor and block tools like Twitter, Viber, Line and WhatsApp. When he declined, they suggested: If you are not interested than maybe you are on indirectly helping those who curb the freedom with their brutal activities. That’s right, folks: if you’re not helping the government of Saudi Arabia secretly spy on all of its residents, then you’re on the side of the terro

This sponsored post is produced by MicroVentures. VentureBeat recently reported that funding marketplace MicroVentures raised over $16 million for tech startups. Over the past 2 years, MicroVentures has reviewed over 2,000 companies and through its rigorous review process, filtered the prospective list to less than 40, which met the criteria to raise on the platform. This represents approximately 2 percent of the companies that initiated the process. Once the SEC issues the final rules around the JOBS Act, it will pave the way for funding portals to start equity-based crowdfunding, giving more startups an opportunity to find a place to raise capital. Many of those 2,000 companies will now have another resource available to raise capital online. What does this mean for investors? It means that investors will likely spend more of their time searching multiple “Equity Crowdfunding” sites attempting to understand the risks associated with deals on any given platform. Early stage investing is inherently high risk/reward. However, risk correlates closely to transparency, which can only be achieved through professional due diligence performed by experienced individuals. Over the last year we have seen an uptick in the number of companies requesting funding as a result of the JOBS Act. Because of this, it is critical that investors are only offered opportunities that have been properly vetted and reviewed prior to listing on a given site, in order for the investor to make an intelligent and informed investment decision. This review coincidentally also adds value to the company looking for capital, as it helps them understand what information is important to investors from Day One, helping them start with shareholder value in mind. What do online investors look for in a deal? Here are a few of the many factors investors look for when reviewing a startup: 1)     Experienced Team – Investors look for a team that has experienced both success and failure. They look for teams that have met challenges and figured out how to get over, under, around, or through. 2)     Traction – For early stage companies traction doesn’t necessarily have to be revenue. It could mean a successful beta with active users and a healthy growth rate. However, proof of execution is key. 3)     Angel Money – Investors would like to see investments from angels or VCs, who can add value beyond simply capital. Receiving positive feedback in the three areas above may create initial interest from investors reviewing an opportunity on an online platform. However, in order to create a win-win for both investors and the company raising capital, investors must have access to fundamental information about the company and be able to determine whether any growth inhibiting liabilities exist. Without rigorous due diligence, this is impossible. For example, it is great to see high profile angel investors participate in a round with a company you might have interest investing in, but that information alone provides you with no detail regarding that investor’s agenda, reason for investing in the given company, personal relationship with the company, etc. It is paramount as an investor that you understand how each startup featured is being vetted and that the due diligence criteria matches aligns with your methodologies for making risk-based decisions. At MicroVentures, we proactively perform two levels of due diligence before our investors review an opportunity to ensure that we are offering what we believe are high quality, curated opportunities. Further, MicroVentures provides the necessary transparency and tools to investors so they can perform their own due diligence before investing. If you would like to be a part of the investor community at MicroVentures, please sign up today. It is free to join. Sponsored posts are content that has been produced by a company, which is either paying for the post or has a business relationship with VentureBeat, and they’re always clearly mark

One of the problems for copy writers for web pages is that they have far more interest in words than they do with the overall presentation. While it is the written word that is going to sell your product or idea to your customers, there is not a lot of point if your visitors get bored with the site before they get your message. This can be achieved a number of ways but the simplest way is to illustrate your article with relevant pictures to draw the eye of your visitors and have a better chance of keeping them reading. It can be very painful and time consuming to find relevant free images to flesh out your site so a publishing and photo application like Imonomy could come in very handy. It scans your web pages and automatically finds free relevant photos that match up with your written content. If you have a large amount of written content across your site it is important that you have balance and add high quality content related images that will encourage your users to stay longer on your site. Great looking images create a much higher user engagement and give your pages the exposure that they deserve while reducing bounce rates significantly. Thats where imonomy comes in. They have developed a special web-app using algorithmic technology that scans the text from webpages and instantly and automatically locates free images and finds the optimal image placement on the webpage layout. This unique engine also creates intelligent links between pages, encouraging visitors to engage more on your website and stay longer while easily navigating through more relevant content. Your website is more attractive to your visitors and user engagement can increase significantly. The special semantic visual engine constantly scans the text on the publisher's website and fits relevant images to the pages that are posted. The content related images give readers a more pleasurable experience while reading through the website content. The bottom line is that when you use the app you get the chance to improve your page views, lessen your bounce rates and use the best copyright-free images on the net. What we are all looking for with our websites is better visitor engagement and, as a consequence, the chance to sell something to them and make your bank manager happy. But you can write the most fluent piece of prose about the service or product that you offer and it still doesn't capture the attention of an audience that generally has a short attention span. So we tend to spend as much time searching for pictures that are relevant as we do writing the more important text. Imonomy is an easy way to automatically illustrate your text with pictures based on the content of your article. This means better audience response - they might even take the time to read your article while looking at the pictures - and better monetization and revenue for your site.

Editor’s note: Jon Gottfried is a Developer Evangelist at Twilio, Co-Founder of the Hacker Union, and a StartupBus Conductor. Follow him on Twitter @jonmarkgo. Being one of the first cyborgs in the world, I have been privy to a unique set of bizarre experiences that have led to some early observations and theories about the future of Google Glass and wearable technology. At Glass Foundry SF, among the likes of Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, the New York Times and Hearst, was a rag-tag group of independent developers building Ice Breaker: myself, Song Zheng, and Rajiv Makhijani. When I pitched the idea of creating a Google Glass version of the dorm-room game Assassins, I thought it would be an interesting tongue-in-cheek jab at the Terminator-esque form of this new piece of technology. I could not have imagined it would turn into a six-month secret project slated to launch at one of the largest tech conferences of the year. We were building the first (and only) game for Google Glass. We had a six-month head start, early access to the Google Glass Mirror API and Glass devices as early as they were available. Developing applications for Glass is actually more similar to building a website than it is to building an Android application. Let’s start off by talking about the reality of what it is like to develop applications for Google Glass. Like many of you, I expected it to be very similar to building mobile applications for Android. In fact, I began learning to build Android applications in preparation. My efforts were for naught, because the Mirror API is a RESTful web service. This means that developing applications for Glass is actually more similar to building a website than it is to building an Android application. Once a user logs in to your application, they grant you permission to push “cards” to their Glass devices and to receive responses from it. It is purely asynchronous, and is not designed for real-time applications, such as an augmented-reality game or a Call of Duty-style, heads-up display. This will likely change with the upcoming release of the GDK, but for the moment you are restricted to building asynchronous applications. No problem for Twitter or Tumblr, where there is no need for instantaneous interactions. However, it certainly puts a damper on many of the science-fiction-esque predictions for Glass. But there are still many reasons why I am excited about Glass and will continue to develop applications for it: 1. It gives us all a nerd boner. Developers love technology for the sake of technology. People flock to line up for product launches with the same excitement that a tween feels when they spot Bieber for the first time. Glass is exclusive, mysterious and futuristic. As the first wearable-computing platform to have even a hint of mass availability, it makes us feel as if we are truly living in the future. You could meet a thousand Valley founders all creating the “next big social network,” but no amount of SoLoMo innovation can match the excitement or fear that we will all soon be addicted to The Game, only to be saved by a young Wil Wheaton. We have the opportunity to create the canonical user experience for wearable computers. 2. We are defining the future. As developers, we have the unique opportunity to quite literally define the experiences that consumers have with technology. The first third-party applications for the iPhone set the stage for all mobile apps to follow. The same rings true for Glass. Whether or not the product itself is successful, we have the opportunity to create the canonical user experience for wearable computers. In the future, when there are both iGlass and Microsoft Senior Professional Heads-Up™ Displays for Business, they will all be modeled off of these initial applications for Glass – consciously or not. 3. There is money to be made. While it is unclear whether there will be mass consumer adoption of Glass, it is obvious that this will be a valu

Here in this post we will tell you 5 things to check before deciding to buy UPS. Here are some important points you should keep in mind: UPS stands for Uninterrupted Power Source and it’s an electrical apparatus that provides backup/alternate power during power failure from actual power source. The UPS is different from standby generator or emergency power system since it offers instantaneous protection from power failure as the energy is stored in huge lead batteries or flywheel. There are certain things which you need to consider before purchasing a UPS battery which are listed below, 1. Decide the Size of the UPS Required Before you purchase an UPS battery you should decide the amount of power required. You should only connect the UPS to equipment that requires protection from power failures which includes Emergency lights, personal Computers, backup servers, communication systems etc. You should not connect printers, fax machines, air conditioners, fans or any other device that does not impact your business productivity. You can calculate the total power requirement of all individual devices based on which the amount of power required from UPS can be derives. In order to calculate VA rating you should multiply total current for each device with local grid phase for neutral voltage.  In a 3-phase system you should find the total current by adding all 3 phases. You can find the current demand from user’s manual or from electricity meter in your home. You should check with equipment manufacturer to find accurate value and generally VA rating will be thirty percent higher than current rating since some power will be consumed by equipment as well. The power factor 0.7 can be used normally to calculate VA rating. 2. Determine the brand/budget There are many brands of UPS systems available in the market and you should device which brand and model is suitable for your requirement. Some popular brands like EXIDE, APC , MGE, Libert are widely used in the market and the quality of these products are very good. If you are going for a good brand with decent warranty and service, the cost involved will also be higher. So you should decide based on your budget and model, which brand can be suitable for your business. To know more details and find out best deals available in market Click here for a UPS battery. Once you have decided everything, check for best deals from popular manufactures and choose the one with aligns your requirements. 3. Decide the Backup Time Autonomy time refers to time required by batteries for backup operation and switchover immediately after power failure. Size of the batteries and load consumption will determine the time requires for back-up. UPS systems having the rating of 20-30 KVA generally have internal batteries. High and medium power system with KVA rating of 3-5 will have external batteries for back-up time expansion. If there are frequent power failures in your area, then you should purchase huge batteries to backup more power and protect expensive hardware and data. 4. Decide the UPS Model and Type Before you purchase an UPS power supply, you should determine which type of UPS you require. There are 3 main classes of UPS which include Offline UPS, Double Conversion On-Line UPS, Line Interactive UPS. Offline UPS is very cheap and simple model, which feeds the load from Main continuously. When there is outage of Main, the load connection will be shifted to the invertor that gets power from batteries. There are risks when using such batteries during over voltage or voltage spikes because of transient nature. Such models are preferred in home computers and small offices where there is no critical application. The line Interactive model also has drawbacks similar to offline model while the On-Line or Double Conversion UPS is the most expensive and offers maximum protection from power failures. The Online UPS is preferred for large business where power consumption is in range of megawatts. In this case, loa