Startups

Editor’s note: Ross Rubin is principal analyst at Reticle Research and blogs at Techspressive. Each column looks at crowdfunded products that have either met or missed their funding goals. Follow him on Twitter @rossrubin. An ancient and once-sacred bond between author and audience, reading and writing have become but two more tasks along with a multitude of other things that we do on a host of digital devices — watcing videos, listening to music, playing games, and really anything except using Facebook Home. Still, there are some for whom the intimate act of interface between pen and paper retains more magic than all the electrons powering all the devices in the world have not been able to recreate. For them, a trio of European crowdfunding projects have trotted out a range of products to improve both endpoints of analog document creation. Whacked: LazyPete. Arrgh! Listen up, ye scurvy dogs, as I tell ye the legend of Lazy Pete, a pirate so wrapped up in his romance novels that he didn’t see a great white shark leap from the ocean to leave him with just one hand. ‘Tis in Lazy Pete’s honor that Philip Musche surely named his one-handed book reading contraption, which essentially puts one of those book stands that keep pages open on a beefy handle. Despite showing off the reading aid in nearly enough colors to cover the Seven Seas, Musche failed to capture enough crowdfunding booty, and the campaign ended with only £533 of the desired £30,000 treasure. Backed: Idae. What the GoPro is to most digital cameras, Idae is to most pocket journals, even the durable Field Notes. The waterproof, tear-resistant notebook is just the thing for when you need to make that critical addition to your grocery shopping list in the middle of your next scuba dive, and a perfect match for your Fisher Space Pen. And if you needed any more proof of just how extreme it is, it has a hole for a carabiner. That said, fire will consume it along with the haiku you were inspired to write on the slopes. And if you’re not planning to keep your notes around indefinitely, the notebook can be recycled. Developed in Milan and shipped to backers last month for between $20 and $30 depending on cover color, the 32-page thought preserver cleared its $7,200 funding goal with a couple of hundred dollars to spare, but you’d expect that kind of nail-biting excitement from such a tough guy. Backed: Meteor Grip. The pencil has been thin enough to serve as a benchmark against which to compare high-tech electronics. While it’s comfortable for many, at least for short periods, it can be difficult to grasp for some. Receiving inspiration when his partner Zoë, a tattoo artist, began suffering hand pain in December 2011, Pontefract, UK-based Jai Dickerson Pierce developed the Meteor Grip. Few details are provided about what material is used to create the grip. Rather, the key to its uniqueness is being available in both right and left-handed versions. As the campaign page employs double negatives to claim, “No other manufacturer produces an ergonomic hand grip that is not ambidextrous.” That said, the campaign is not above covering a spectrum of uses, claiming that the product is useful as a novelty gift while also proclaiming that it is “changing the writing experience forever.” Not yet changed for kiddies, though, as a potential meteorite grip is for now on the drawing board. With a bit over three weeks left to go, the Meteor Grip has collected about a quarter of its humble £875 goal. Seven pounds will marry your love of astronomy with hatred of thin writing tools, and ten pounds can get one for you as well as the cramping tattoo artist in your life as soon as this month.

Editor’s note: Richard Bennett is a Senior Fellow with the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation and co-author of ITIF’s 2013 report, “The Whole Picture: Where America’s Broadband Networks Really Stand.” Follow him on Twitter @iPolicy. We’ve all heard the story: America’s broadband networks are second-rate. We pay exorbitant prices for shoddy service because broadband providers print money and hold innovation in a death grip. While America languishes, our competitors in Europe and Asia are racing ahead to a user-generated content utopia. The only way forward is a government takeover, or, failing that, a massive dose of regulation. So go a number of recent treatises such as Susan Crawford’s “Captive Audience”; works by like-minded Internet aficionados Tim Wu, Lawrence Lessig, and Yochai Benkler; reports by public interest advocacy groups Free Press, Public Knowledge, and the Open Technology Institute; as well as numerous tech bloggers. The only problem with this story is that it’s almost completely untrue. Granted, as recently as the late aughts, the story was plausible: In those dark days, our rankings in terms of both broadband subscription growth and speeds were falling. Increased demand for data capacity and a technology lull combined to push our average Internet connection speed down to 22nd in the world at the end of 2009, according to Akamai’s measurement of “Average Connection Speed.” Since then, the speeds of such shared connections have nearly doubled from 3.9Mbps to 7.2 Mbps, raising the U.S. to eighth place. U.S. Average Connection Speed per Akamai Akamai’s Average Connection Speed measures individual TCP streams over IP addresses that are often shared — and doesn’t sum simultaneous streams — so it’s more a measure of usage than of network capacity, however. To see the capacity of the underlying broadband network, it’s best to look at Akamai’s “Average Peak Connection Speed” metric. The distinction between these two metrics flummoxed Ars Technica’s Cyrus Farivar, who maintains that the shared-connection measurement is the more meaningful indication of “user experience.” Farivar is clearly wrong about that, and Akamai’s “Average Peak Connection Speed” is the better indicator of network improvement. The Average Peak measurement shows performance in the U.S. tripling over the past five years, up to 31.5Mbps in Q4 2012. We don’t know where the U.S. ranked on this scale before mid-2010, but it’s currently 13th. The tripling of network capacity combined with a doubling of “shared speed” says that networks are getting faster, as the U.S. is simultaneously using them more heavily Average Peak Connection Speed per Akamai America’s broadband speeds are improving for two reasons: first, broadband providers have installed newer technologies, such as Verizon FiOS, DOCSIS 3 cable modems, and AT&T U-verse that are four or more times faster than the technologies they replaced; and second, users have begun to demonstrate a preference for higher-speed broadband by opting into higher-speed upgrades. Some upgrades are costly and others are not; Comcast recently doubled the speeds of most of their Bay Area broadband plans for free. While our networks are improving, we’re retaining low prices for entry-level broadband plans first noticed by the Berkman Center’s “Next Generation Connectivity” report: the U.S. is currently second in the price of broadband for entry-level users. The nation is also third in network-based competition, second in the fiber-optic installation rate, first in the adoption of next-generation LTE, ahead of Europe in broadband adoption, and doing quite well in Internet-based services. While U.S. cable TV companies still lead telcos in new broadband subscriptions, fiber-based telco broadband is gaining subscribers at a faster rate than cable. U.S. broadb

Mark Suster of Los Angeles’ GRP Partners is known for his unique insights on the tech and digital media worlds, having famously had success on “both sides of the table” as a repeat entrepreneur turned investor over more than a decade in the industry. And he hit headlines several times this past week, with his viewpoints on acqui-hires (he says they’re often very bad) and founders stepping down from the CEO role such as what happened with GRP portfolio startup Awe.sm (he says sometimes, it’s the best thing that can happen.) So when we heard that Suster was in San Francisco for a couple of days, we asked him to come by TechCrunch TV to talk a bit more at length about these concepts and much more. And while he warned us that he was a bit tired due to a late night visiting with industry folks here in the Bay Area the evening before we met, he was just as engaging as ever, talking about the topics mentioned above as well as the latest hot stuff coming out of the Southern California tech scene. Check it all out in the video embedded above.

How could we here at the FeedMyApp offices pass up the opportunity to review an app with a name as tasteful as this one. After all, is there anyone out there that can manage to refrain from offering a smile when someone even mentions the fart world. We are a strange race, that's for sure. Fart Guitar is actually a music application for iOS and Android that offers a new take on the grunge guitar sound. It lets you play your licks on your device with some of the wildest farting guitar sounds this side of the Black Keys. You can play all your favorite songs but with a particular down and dirty sound rather than the clean sounds of a normal guitar sound. Fart Guitar is a heap of free fun for those of us with a warped sense of humor. well, we've all heard of the phrase musical fruit,' i would guess. Fart Guitar is guaranteed to bring a laugh to you and your warped friends while you make music. This good looking app features flatulent notes as well as real guitar tones mixed in together and can be easily adjusted to make a true Hendrix like experience. Well, i might be exaggerating slightly there but it is certainly guaranteed to break the ice at parties. At the moment, the app offers chords in the key of G on an acoustic guitar but plenty of others are in the mix for future release. Electric guitar, with distortion, is the first of the updates and coming soon plus, there will also be other keys and effects. Dont think, by the way, that we are being served up shonky guitar sounds here either because all the guitar samples are provided by four-time Grammy nominated guitarist Andy Reiss and the fart samples are provided by renowned producer Karius Vega. There's absolutely nothing even vaguely highbrow about Fart Guitar, that's for sure. It's a simple guitar distortion effect that lets you play your notes on your Android or iPhone in exactly the same way you would play a normal smartphone guitar app. The big difference here, though,is the sound that comes out of it. It's big, it's fat, it's dirty but, thankfully, it isn't smelly. Personally I can see some enterprising new grunge band recording a whole album using it as a guitar effect. And, just in cae you are wondering, the grunge revival is literally just around the corner now that the '80's thing is finally about to end. fart Guitar is a fun music app to impress your friends with your new dirty guitar sound. Let's hope one of the upgrades that come isn't anything to like smellovision.

Do people still play real board games, I wonder. One thing's for sure, it's getting harder and harder to find a true toy store that sells these sort of games. The problem is, I guess, that with so many games now being transformed into games that can be played digitally there is a perception that if they ain't on your smartphone or tablet then they aren't worth playing. The introduction of the incredibly user-friendly iPad a few years back and the consequent rise of the tablet revolutionized the market even more and opened up all these games to a new technology geared audience. Choozwho is one of those such games. Do you remember playing a game called Guess Who when it introduced in the '80's. This fun and very entertaining free game is a two-player picture based guessing game where players take turns to identify the mystery celebrity orf rind that their opponent has picked by asking simple yes/no questions. ChoozWho is a modern take on the classic board game It is a two-player picture based guessing game, packed with the latest celebrities, where users pick a mystery face and have to take it in turns to try and work out who their opponent has picked. Users can play anonymously against other players or connect to their Facebook account and play against their friends. Earn virtual tokens from the games you win and collect and use then to unlock more features. To begin with, the user selects a card which their opponent will try to guess. If you play against a random player, you can choose a current celebrity or, if playing against a Facebook friend, you can pick from your mutual friends. Players then can ask each other yes/no questions in an attempt to eliminate some of the faces, until they feel confident enough to take a guess. You can select from the questions embedded in the game or make up their own specific questions. When you think you know your opponent's which card they can make a guess and the first player to correctly guess their opponent's card is the winner. The more games you win, the more tokens are earned and they can be exchanged for badges that can be used to give you advantages in winning the game. I remember playing Guess Who when I was younger and it was a whole heap of fun and, thankfully, ChoozWho loses nothing in entertainment value when translated into a digital format. While the celebrities format is a whole heap of fun though, the best use of this game is when playing against your Facebook friends where, instead of having Bradgelina or Posh and Beck to unravel, you can delve into the secrets of your family of mutual friends. You can even modify the appearance of your friends' faces with a hilarious range of props. ChoozWho is a great free time waster that reintroduces the classic board game to the digital world to give hours of entertainment for friends and family.

In Douglas Adams’ book The Hitchhikers’ Guide to the Galaxy, a vast computer named Deep Thought spends several eons constructing an answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything. A full 7.5 million years later, it arrives at the answer: 42. Google appears to be referencing that bit of geek cult humor in a new device, the H2G2-42, that it is currently submitting to the FCC for regulatory testing. H2G2 is a Wikipedia-ish guide to “life, the universe, and everything” inspired by Adams’ books. There’s little data available about the device, but Google does say it is a “media player,” and a “fixed base station” with 802.11b/g/n Wi-Fi, which would make it almost certainly a replacement for Google’s failed Nexus Q. The Q was Google’s ”first social streaming media player” that met with almost universally negative reviews, underwhelmed users, and is no longer for sale. Source: FCCGoogle device H2G2-42 is in FCC testing One change that seems likely: It appears that the H2G2-42 will allow users to plug in external monitors via provided USB ports: Source: FCCGoogle’s H2G2-42 may be connectable to external monitors As The Verge notes, Google’s new streaming music app broke compatibility with the Nexus Q. The Google Play Music All Access product is impressive, enabling personalized “radio stations” and inexpensive streaming music. Google calls it “radio without rules,” and it seems reasonable that Google would want a shiny new device to go with this major new music push. Photos are not yet available and more details will have to wait until 45 days after certification. And it’s unlikely that a music streaming device will be the ultimate answer to the ultimate question. But meanwhile, enjoy: Image credits: Google, FCC Filed under: Business, Cloud, Gadgets, Media

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013San Francisco, CAEarly Bird Tickets on SaleMore than 20 million students currently use Google Apps, and another 10 million are soon to join, thanks to a deal with Malaysia. As students and schools are increasingly storing more of their data and documents in clouds of Google’s servers, Backupify recently announced that it has tripled its education user base, with more than 40,000 new education users since January of this year. Schools are using the cloud-based backup service to ensure critical data is archived and safe, even if it would be accidentally deleted or lost on Google’s servers. Education is a notoriously slow adopter of technology, but Google Apps is growing quickly, if not virally, doubling over the last two years. And the current 20 million users include seven million inside the U.S. alone — led by Oregon that adopted Google Apps in all K-12 classrooms in 2010. And sometimes, they’re using Backupify because they have to: “Millions of students and educators around the world are currently using Google Apps to enhance collaborative learning,”  Backupify CEO Rob May said in a statement. “The education sector is ahead of other industries in this regard, but faces unique compliance requirements for data privacy and retention that demand an effective backup strategy.” To celebrate the recent growth of Google Apps for Education — and their own growth — Backupify put this infographic together: Image credit: John Koetsier/Venturebeat Filed under: Business, Cloud .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 ); }

Company / App Name: ProofHub http://www.proofhub.com Twitter – proofhub What does it do? ProofHub is a web based project management software that helps to manage, discuss and communicate projects with team members and clients at one central place. Why do we need it? For Project Management and Collaboration at one central place. Who is it for? Business Organization, Students, Anyone who need to manage project and need a central platform to manage projects with team members and clients at one central place. What makes it stand out from the crowd? ProofHub is loaded with many features like To-do’s, milestone, discussions, file sharing, proofing, inbuilt browser chat, time tracking, casper mode and some more. Multiple projects can be managed with ProofHub at one time. What’s next? With Time, proofHub provides more features that will help to manage projects with more ease. ProofHub on Mobile: Manage your Projects with Proofhub on the Go Pitch Video http://www.proofhub.com

Stagecrush is an exclusive global music community! Stagecrush is the home for your online music collection. It's a place where you can easily store, share, and listen to the songs and music videos that you find from across the web.

Google’s I/O developer conference is over, and we’ve learned quite a bit: Devs just can’t get enough of Google Glass, design is a bigger focus for the company than ever before, and Larry Page is kind of sad about a lot of things. It’s been a whirlwind ride, but honestly we’re just glad to be out of San Francisco’s Moscone Center. Check out our highlights from I/O below: Google I/O 2013 keynote live blog Larry Page is sad, hopeful, and frustrated in his heartfelt Google I/O speech Google Glass apps are easy to develop, but brutally difficult to design well What hardware is Google making after Glass? Mary Lou Jepsen knows What’s next for Google Glass: More units, more apps, more colors How cognitive science and user empathy powered Google’s design breakthrough OK, Google, your conversational search is awesome as hell Maps rebuilt from the ‘ground up,’ iPad version coming this fall Google Play for Education could kill the iPad in schools Major design overhaul makes Google+ look a whole lot like Pinterest Google announces its Spotify competitor, Google Play Music ‘All Access’ — ‘radio without rules’ Hangouts, the best part of Google+, gets standalone iOS, Android, and Chro Filed under: Business, Dev, Mobile 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. .blurb-cat-dev hr { margin: 10px 0 10px 0; }