Startups

Like you and a lot of other people in the Valley, I read the blogs snarking on the Valley, because nothing is funnier than making fun of people just like us, technology elite who download hot apps, ringtones and backgrounds all day and all night – all on our separate phones reserved for day time and night time. It makes you feel like you’re part of a community instead of a tiny speck of dust in the vast Cosmos with no reason for existing beyond randomness. The best one lately is a Tumblr called Jesus Christ Silicon Valley (note the double meaning), and its most dazzling, scathing piece is this relatively mild one about how silly and vain people’s avatar profile pictures are. Yesterday’s piece on the Tumblr acquisition was also pretty good. You’ve probably heard the news. No, you’ve definitely heard the news, because it’s Monday and you’ve been reading tech blogs all day, slowly burning your investors’ money. “Keeping tabs on the industry,” of course. It’s funny because it’s true. Because I am curious and because I like the writing when it’s not too ragey, I dug around a little for the blog’s author. Not too hard obviously (this is TechCrunch after all), just on Twitter and Quora. The Quora question, which is followed by Keith Rabois, postulates that Jesus is one of us. Just a slob like one of us. “The secret lies within the pages of the blog itself. Someone so pathologically clever with hints of self-deprecation would hide where least expected: among the very targets referenced.” Hmm … Perhaps he or she is one of the people lambasted in the profile picture post? That must be it! Who though? Hunter Walk? Tony Conrad? Sheryl Sandberg. And today, I got a response to my Twitter request for an email: An email sent “To the Direction of Alexia Tsotsis” from “jesus94306@gmail.com.” From: Jesus Christ Subject: Greetings, To the Direction of Alexia Tsotsis. Date: May 21, 2013 9:30:28 PM PDT To: alexia@techcrunch.com I am Ivan Moltobov, student in Ukraine. I am big admiring fan of Tech Valley, and writing about love for Tech Valley on the Jesus Christ Silicon Valley tumblr blogspot by wordpress. You like? What is meaning of word “cock?” Sound funny, Americans seem to enjoy. I write much cock words, get many pageviews, exchange for Bitcoin, buy yak. American dream to own many yaks. (I searched and TechCrunch has yet to ‘print’ the phrase “cunty little cumdrops.” What’s with that?!) Well, now we have ‘printed’ that phrase, Ivan. Moltobov is unGoogleable, in case anyone was about to.

You remember Snow Fall, don’t you? It was that awesome interactive reporting piece by The New York Times that everyone talked about for a week. It was called “the future of online journalism.” It was praised as a way for The New York Times to courageously battle back against online upstarts like Buzzfeed and their non-serious cat spreads. Or to not change the company’s fortunes at all. It even won a Webby! (Oh yeah, and a Pulitzer.) The New York Times spent months and had an entire team working on the creation of Snow Fall, and it shows. But what if I told you that you could recreate the same interactive experience in just about an hour? You’d like that, wouldn’t you? Well, The New York Times wouldn’t. Cody Brown, co-founder of interactive web design tool Scroll Kit, did just that. He recreated the Snow Fall piece using Scroll Kit to show that you didn’t need an army of developers or designers to create the same type of interactive storytelling. In fact, the tools exist today to build other compelling narratives that take advantage of the combination of text, and video, and images. To show how easy it was, Brown recorded a video of the process, showing how a user could create the same type of experience in under an hour. And he uploaded it to YouTube, and posted it to the Scroll Kit website. There, he introduced it this way: “The NYT spent hundreads of hours hand-coding ‘Snow Fall.’ We made a replica in an hour.” The video lived there for about a month, Brown tells me, before receiving a letter from The New York Times legal team, demanding that the video be taken down. After consulting with Scroll Kit’s legal counsel, the team complied with the takedown request, kind of. They actually set the video to private on YouTube so that no one could see it. But they kept the line about making a replica of Snow Fall on the website. Because, well, it was true. It wasn’t long before another C&D nastygram from The New York Times arrived, demanding that they not only delete the video from YouTube — which they eventually did — but that they remove any reference to The New York Times from their website. From Scroll Kit’s perspective, the video was only meant as a way to instruct others about how easy it can be to build a compelling interactive experience, not as a way to aid and abet terrorism copyright infringement. Brown said the Scroll Kit team was “super excited” to see Snow Fall released and the amazing reception to it. They had been been working on their tools for longer than the NY Times had been working on Snow Fall, and saw it as a validation of their startup. But at the same time, it also represented the inequality between publications that can afford to create interactive stories and those that can’t. “It’s become a symbol of the potential of journalism, but also the barrier to how something like that could be made,” Brown told me. If the knock against Snow Fall was that only someplace like The New York Times can afford to create something like that, Brown believes Scroll Kit is the tool that would get costs down enough for smaller organizations and independents to enable a whole new set of unique web experiences. Unfortunately, it doesn’t have the legal resources to fight The New York Times — Brown admits that much. But for now, the tiny startup is holding fast and keeping The New York Times reference on its website, and have told the Grey Lady as much. Unfortunately, she is not amused. She is offended! Peep her legal team’s most recent response, from Senior Counsel Richard Samson: Dear Mr. Brown: We are offended by the fact that you are promoting your tool, as a way to quickly replicate copyright-protected content owned by The New York Times Company. It also seems strange to me that you would defend your right to boast about how quickly you were able to commit copyrigh

Guuuuurrrrl, the Valley is on fayah today. In a huge wave of announcements, we saw a bevy of businesses from the Bay getting fierce funding deals. Trust: From Mountain View to Redwood City, from Los Gatos to not-so-sunny San Francisco, our Bay Area startups were snatching term sheets and serving business executive realness. And it wasn’t just deal volume on the Peninsula, either; the numbers these companies posted were pretty sickening, too. No tea, no shade, but if the New York/Austin/L.A./Boulder scenes want to keep up, they. Bettah. Werk. (If you haven’t seen Paris Is Burning nor do you watch an awful lot of Ru Paul’s Drag Race, this whole thing hasn’t made much sense to you, has it? Have no fear, familiar territory is here.) Now, sashay — away. Adaptive Planning nets $45M Mountain View, Calif.-based Adaptive Planning has raised a massive $45 million in its fourth and final round of funding with a goal to further dominate the CPM space, the business said Tuesday. Adaptive Planning offers a suite of budgeting, planning, forecasting, and data discovery software in the cloud. Its software works for small businesses all the way up to large enterprises, which now represent 25 percent of its business. The company had 1,500 customers at the end of 2012 and it estimates it will have 2,000 customers at the end of this year. Read the full story on VentureBeat. Alexza to raise $25M for health-tech gadget In a Form D filing with the SEC, we learned that health-tech company Alexza Pharmaceuticals is rustling up a $25 million round of debt financing. The Mountain View, Calif.-based company makes Staccato, a new gadget for quickly and effectively delivering drugs to our frail human systems. Change.org raises $15M Popular social petition service Change.org has raised $15 million in new funding — cash that will help it further build up the “world’s largest petition platform.” Change.org, the brainchild of two Stanford students, provides an accessible way to enact social change and it makes it simple to create and sign petitions. The service has grown quite a bit in the last year, jumping from 6 million users in early 2012 to more than 35 million users today. More than half of Change.org’s users are outside the U.S. Read the full story on VentureBeat. ConsultingMD secures $10M Palo Alto, Calif.-based ConsultingMD has secured a $10 million funding round led by venture firm Venrock, the health-focused venture capital arm of the Rockefeller family. The mission is to create a virtual clinic where patients are served by the top doctors in the world. “We don’t believe you need a network of thirty thousand doctors to be effective,” said Tripp [pictured above with cofounder Dr. Lawrence "Rusty" Hoffman] in an interview with VentureBeat. “We would rather use the same 750 doctors who achieve successful outcomes again and again.” Read the full story on VentureBeat. Wanderful takes $9M to the bank S’wanderful! S’marvelous! You should get a check! Wanderful Media, a local shopping and discovery app company based in Los Gatos, Calif., told us today that it’s gotten $9 million in new funding from existing investors. This addition brings the company’s total funding to $36 million and comes on the heels of the April launch of the completely reimagined Find&Save, an online community offering a comprehensive collection of local savings. Brightpearl seals an $8M Series B Brightpearl, a UK company with a San Francisco office, has just taken a lovely $8 million in its second round of institutional funding. The company makes loud software that integrates orders, inventory and customer data across multiple retail channels. “We’ve seen customers experience growth rates of 40-50% by adding new sales channels on the Brightpearl platform vs. single-digit growth for the overall retail sector,” said co-founder Charles Grimsdale in a statement on the news. Clique Intelligence goes home with $5M out of $20M

SAN FRANCISCO — Representatives from AARP and Geisinger Health System make no pretensions: They’re not into technology just because it’s cool. While the 50+ population and doctors appear to be dissimilar markets, selling to either requires a deep understanding of customer needs rather than just a sense of having “the next big thing.” If you’re a startup targeting either market, you need to wise up. Here are a couple pointers from AARP and Geisinger, gleaned from a panel discussion at HealthBeat today. How can entrepreneurs sell into a health system? Geisinger Health System serves over 3 million people and is a premier case study in how to deliver effective care. Chanin Wendling leads their eHealth initiatives and gets so many calls each week from entrepreneurs that, she says, her “head is spinning.” “Everyone has a cool new idea but no one has tested it,” Wendling says. For startups that want to work with Geisinger, Wendling first wants to see a solid clinical business case where the technology solves a tangible problem faced by patients or physicians. Once approved, her team will pilot the technology, sometimes three or four different ways, to figure out the right approach to product launch. The technology must also integrate with their online medical records, and Wendling anticipates that the system will implement a data integration layer to facilitate more seamless deployment of technology in the future. Understanding the 50+ market The 100 million people who comprise the digital health market for 50+ is worth about $20 billion. Nice market, if you can get it. Jody Holtzmann, a senior vice president at AARP, advocates that startups embrace the idea of “connected living,” which includes maintaining relationships with family, preserving autonomy, and enjoying life, rather than just connected health (focused on health maintenance.) For the aging, adopting products in order to live life on their own terms is more appealing than using technology to assist with medication adherence. For example, the physical fitness market for 50+ is projected to reach $1.8 billion over the next five years. But for now, Holtzmann asserts that the “quantified self” movement doesn’t reasonate with his target population: “You’re a fanatic and wearing a self-tracking device is a way to let everyone know what a fanatic you are,” he says. Instead, he advocates that startups approach this group in a way that’s engaging, inviting, and, most importantly, fun. Photo: Meghan Kelly, VentureBeat, moderator of the session. 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; }

Basho Co-Founder Antony Falco has raised $3 million for Orchestrate.io, a database API similar to Twilio in its capability to ease the complexity of adding features to mobile and web applications. True Ventures led this initial round joined by Frontline Ventures and Resonant Venture Partners. Falco, who left Basho a few months ago, said Orchestrate.io solves the problems that developers face when building feature-rich applications. Often it means adding multiple databases for geo-spatial, time series or any number of other features. The database problem has been ongoing. It in part stems from the limits of scale with relational databases. Over the years, companies like Amazon and Google reached their own ceilings and were forced to develop new kinds of databases for high-volume queries. The result is a lot of time spent babysitting databases so the applications run well. Orchestrate.io acts as a service on a service, abstracting the database layer. Twilio successfully simplified the way developers accessed services, such as SMS and voice. Falco sees a service that also allows developers to add features by pulling the data through an API . “The comparison with Twilio and Sendgrid is not around the problem we solve but the pattern,” Falco said in an email interview. “We are taking a complex and burdensome task — running lots of databases — and putting it behind an API that programmers can use to more quickly build apps. Twilio and Sendgrid both do a similar thing, vastly simplifying the complex, for telecom and email infrastructure, respectively. Orchestrate.io uses in-memory technology for its service. “Memory — storing indexes and hot data in memory — will be critical to performance,” Falco said. “There are three tiers – the active data and indexes in memory, disk storage for durability and data less often accessed, and as data ages and becomes inactive, a cheaper tier of fault-tolerant storage. The more we serve reads out of the memory, the better our performance will be and, without a lot of latency, users will be able to execute relatively rich queries that might require three or four queries, made sequentially, to separate databases.” Orchestrate.io is using open source databases to build the service. “We aren’t going to build databases,” Falco said. “The databases themselves can change; we are not tied to any one database. Riak (a Basho service) is of course ideal for this use case — for forming part of the foundation of this service. But other than that, we aren’t really tied to any one thing.” The company will use multiple data centers for its service to help get the data as close as possible to the application and the user. That makes sense considering the potential performance issues that may come when a large enough group of users are using a service that is just in one place. For example, an application may be installed in Amazon Web Services East region, and there might be a large number of users in London. Orchestrate will have a large enough data center footprint across different providers to accommodate users no matter their locations. The interesting story for me is about the future of the database. The real gold is in the data, but it is like a pool of oil without a way to access it. Databases access the data, organize and make it available for query. It’s inefficient. And that’s just when a developer is dealing with one database. Add a few as the features build out and the developer faces a Rube Goldberg system. It’s about getting the work done, not herding cats in a data center.

Think technology is mostly for the young? It’s just as much for the young at heart, regardless of physical age. That’s according to a new report from CDW. “Even as the Baby Boomers enter their 60s and 70s, there’s no slowing down this demographic. Most likely the buyers of the first home computers on the market, seniors are still keeping up with today’s modern technologies,” CDW reports. In particular, however, technology is playing a more active role than ever in healthcare for seniors. To prove what a powerhouse for senior health technology has become, check out the new infographic from CDW below.

The typical employer pays an average of $10,000 a year per employee for healthcare.  Keas announced at Healthbeat today two new content partnerships with My Healthy Dish and Noshtopia that will help employees make wiser nutritional choices and save employers money on health care costs.  Businesses use Keas to create and manage their workplace health programs. The system promotes healthy behavior and teamwork by rewarding people for achieving simple exercise and nutrition goals through games and social motivation. Keas’ CEO Josh Stevens said that seventy to eighty percent of health care costs are preventable, like those caused by smoking and over-eating, or conditions triggered by certain habits and behaviors. Unhealthy habits can lead to lower productivity and the business bears the brunt of these costs. Keas uses gamification to make losing weight and making healthy choices a fun, social, and mobile experience.  “It is in employers’ best interest to motivate their employees to do the right thing,” Stevens said. “Healthcare costs are rising and every time an employee takes personal time off to visit a doctor or fill a prescription can result in $250-$500 in productivity costs. The productivity savings of health employees are huge.”  Stevens said his goal is to provide solutions for the “99 percent of a patient’s life when they are not a patient.” Often this means supporting actions like eating more fruits and vegetables and reducing stress. Obesity-related conditions cost around $150 billion a year and a nutritious diet is a central element of overall wellness.  Keas recently conducted a survey to track employee sentiment towards nutrition and gain insight into what it can do to improve workforce habits. The survey found that 73 percent of the U.S. workforce frequently or always reads nutrition labels, 86 percent is eating breakfast at least 5 days a week, and 94 percent is increasing the daily intake of fruits and vegetables. 63 percent believe that fast food and junk food are leading causes of obesity, and an increasing number of people are turning to home-cooking in an effort to eat healthier.  The partnerships with My Healthy Dish and Noshtopia will help employees do things like prepare green smoothies for the morning and provide inspiration for simple-to-prepare healthy dinners.   “These are the folks that publish best content in nutrition,” Stevens said. “They provide meal planning and recipe ideas from experts that employees can use for inspiration. We want to bring everyone together, including CFOs, HR teams, wellness experts, and employees in one central portal.” The easier it is to integrate nutritious eating into every day life, the healthier employees will be and the less employers will have to pay. It seems like a win-win, except for, maybe, the fast food franchises. Photo Credit: Michael O’Donnell/VentureBeat Filed under: Enterprise, Health, Mobile, Social 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; }

Numbler is like Scrabble and Sudoku had a baby. Players build math equations in a familiar crossword style board. It has all the mental fun of popular games like Scrabble and Words with Friends, but using numbers and equations instead of letters and words. Numbler is a universal app available of the Apple App Store and is suitable for educational and recreational users of all ages. Video (0:54): http://youtu.be/OSYRGwlPTV8

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Everybody’s talking about the m-commerce boom, but if you look past the sophisticated surveys, app owners are struggling to figure out why their conversion rates fall short of expectations. It’s not surprising if you consider the fact that mobile shopping cart abandonment rates are around 97 percent. Many frustrated developers have asked me how they can decrease these huge numbers that just don’t fit their business model. I’ve tried to look at this challenge differently, not as a payment expert but rather from a psychological viewpoint, exploring our users’ needs and expectations throughout the checkout process. Many influential payment companies in this ecosystem have introduced backend solutions that address merchants and developers’ needs. So as a developer you can now enjoy easy APIs, friendly onboarding, methods with reduced processing fees, all of which make their lives easier. The one factor that’s left out of this equation is the user, who somehow seems to be neglected, even though they’re the only one who controls the transaction. Maslow’s hierarchy of needs is a psychological theory used to understand human motivation. The hierarchy is based on five levels of needs. In order to reach the next level, a person must first satisfy the lower level of needs. Even though it’s a little far from the original framework, some of its principals can actually be applied to understand the influence of users’ needs in reference to mobile conversion rates. Basic needs: keep it simple Twenty-nine percent of mobile shoppers who abandoned the checkout process did so because they were required to register before buying. Mobile commerce is here to stay. We’re not just targeting early adopters anymore. However, in order to achieve mass market adoption the basic process needs to be clear and simple. Many app owners require that their users create an account, even for a one time purchase. Yet people need to get their feet wet before jumping in the water. Forcing users to register and remember yet another password can be a huge barrier for someone who still has concerns about their purchase. Every complication along the way gives the user a chance to stop and rethink their buying decision, while chasing away most impulse buyers among your users. This is obviously less basic than the need for air or food, but it’s probably the key factor to increasing conversion rates. Main takeaway: Facilitate a simple checkout, avoid forcing the user to create an account or use a password. Safety: Give them peace of mind Forty-two percent of consumers have stopped or abandoned a purchase on a website because of a safety or security concern. Security concerns are probably the #1 barrier to online shopping, and things don’t improve on mobile. However, it’s a matter of perception rather than facts. The level of security available with today’s range of technologies is high. Financial risks exist in the physical commerce world as well, but whenever there’s a mobile payment involved, the fear factor kicks in and users becomes more alert. Delivering a secure process isn’t enough; our biggest challenge is to make users FEEL that the process is secure. One of the problems in most checkout experiences on native apps is redirecting to the PSP’s web page to complete the transaction. At that very point where your user has finally grown to trust you, you pull them away to a different site and bring them back to square one in terms of their attitude towards the purchase. This triggers many doubts about this unfamiliar external page, about its level of security, and what could go wrong while trying to return to the app. Creating a full native experience will ease those concerns and give your users more piece of mind. Main Takeaway: Maintain a native in-app payment; avoid redirecting to an external web page. Belonging: create a familiar environment Forty-nine percent of mobile shoppers don’t shop more on their smartphone due to an awkward shopping experience. A