Author: Serkadis

With almost 50 million uninsured Americans in today’s world and roughly three million living below the poverty level, healthcare providers have an obligation and duty to help patients of all ages, economical status levels, with and without insurance; but how many providers…

Fracking has turned into an explosive topic at a Colorado school where several staff members may be forced to resign over an informational student presentation. Two young members of the environmental group Earth Guardians educated students at Evergreen Middle School…

Earlier in the week, a tipster brought to my attention that an article I wrote reviewing a natural toothpaste product had been ripped off and pasted on some sort of Nazi website (without my permission or knowledge, of course). ”I guess Nazis want healthy teeth, too…

By now, I’m sure you’ve heard the news about Angelina Jolie testing positive for the BRCA1 gene mutation and the decision to remove her breasts. This decision has been touted as a brave and reasonable choice, considering the assumed high risk for breast cancer. But…

The health benefits of dry skin brushing Skin Brushing Our skin is the largest organ of absorption and elimination. Many people exfoliate the skin on their faces regularly, but the truth is that your whole body could do with thorough and regular exfoliation. Skin that…

Perhaps the biggest impediment regarding the acceptance of alternative medicine in the United States is the fact that Americans have been conditioned to believe that only “traditional” methods of healthcare are effective and acceptable. But the truth is, there are…

Colons today have it pretty rough. Whether from the stress of a hurried lifestyle, consumption of poor quality and highly processed foods like sweets and sugars that feed harmful organisms, inadequate levels of digestive enzymes that send partially digested proteins…

The Fourth Amendment to the Bill of Rights has suffered mightily of late, but the U.S. Supreme Court has recently strengthened it in a case involving drunk driving and a little requirement like a search warrant. In a 5-4 decision, justices ruled that police who are…

Giant snails appear to be invading Texas, according to new reports, and some health experts worry that the unusual creatures might begin spreading a disease that could be deadly to humans. As reported by NBC News, a Houston woman recently discovered what is believed…

Thank goodness for President Barack Obama, for without his wisdom and foresight none of us would know how to live our lives, and in particular, how much money we need to save for our own retirement. Consider the president’s proposal for the government to come after…

Beginning Monday, May 20th, Natural News is broadcasting a free cancer solutions seminar featuring one expert speaker each day for six days. The cost is FREE and there is no registration required. To listen in, just visit Healing.NaturalNews.com beginning Monday at…

Blackstrap molasses has always been a great choice for home baking. Aside from having a delicious and sweet taste, blackstrap is also an effective, and inexpensive, health supplement. Rich in calcium, magnesium, iron, copper, and other trace minerals, as well as a great…

In one point in time, Nokia was the top-selling smartphone vendor in the world by a wide margin. It wasn’t even that long ago, in fact. But when Nokia failed to respond quickly enough to the industry’s shift toward touch, the Finnish giant lost its footing and toppled spectacularly. Just how bad have things gotten for Nokia? Market share numbers paint a pretty frightening picture, but a single tweet from Benedict Evans of Enders Analysis might do an even better job of putting things in perspective.

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Of all the problems to have when launching a new flagship smartphone, trouble keeping up with demand is hardly the worst. Of course, things change a bit when a company has to pump units into channels as quickly as possible before the top-selling smartphone vendor in the world launches the Galaxy S4. HTC undoubtedly lost some sales thanks to its production woes with the One, but a new report suggests its manufacturing issues are behind it. According to Focus Taiwan, HTC North Asia president Jack Tong said that production capacity for the HTC One will double in May and increase further in June. “Our capacity is expected to rise significantly starting from mid-May,” Tong reportedly said Friday at a press conference. “We are optimistic about our high-end sales during April and June.”

Data analytics star Tableau had a successful initial public offering on Friday, closing the day up nearly 64 percent at $50.75 per share. That means the company brought in about $254 million (it sold 5 million shares, while stockholders sold 3.4 million) and has a market cap of $2.9 billion. Shares have remained relatively steady in after-hours trading, trending down only slightly.

“We’re thrilled,” Tableau co-founder and CEO Christian Chabot told me during a call after the market closed. One should hope so.

Chabot and his fellow co-founders stand to make a lot of money if today’s closing price holds up, as does its sole investor NEA. The firm put $15 million into Tableau since it launched in 2003, and has rode that sum to profitability and more than $127 million in annual revenue.

Here’s a quick chart (made using Tableau Public) showing who owns how many share and what they’re potentially worth.

The company didn’t really need more capital to operate, Chabot said, but one of the primary drivers was to raise awareness of the company. It has about 12,000 customers, he said, but there are millions more possible users. As part of attracting them, the company is going to expand globally and is working to improve its reach across mobile devices, the cloud and the Mac operating system.

“I don’t believe in the this whole ‘or’ philosophy with computers,” Chabot said. “It’s ‘and’” — meaning people will use desktops and tablets and smartphones.

More prominence and more users singing its praises might also dispel the notion that Tableau is just about visualization. It has some fairly advanced features under the covers (as a commenter to my earlier post about the company’s influence pointed out), even if they’re hidden by the relatively simple user experience.

“Tableau is not a visualization company, per se, it’s really an analytics company,” Chabot said.

However, if the company really wants to expand its reach to everyone one who wants to gain knowledge from data — something Chabot calls a “timeless human need” — it might actually need to get simpler. More marketing can let potential business users know about new features like forecasting and data-extraction, but it won’t make a dentist is Des Moines better at formatting his data.

After raising $254 million in its IPO, though, Tableau is in a good place to do whatever it has to.

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Database startup Drawn to Scale, creator of the SQL-on-Hadoop technology called Spire, is closing down. Co-founder and CEO Bradford Stephens officially announced the closure in a blog post on Friday.

The company’s product, Spire, which provided full SQL support on top of the HBase NoSQL database, was one of the first products to try to blend Hadoop’s scalability with the robustness and familiarity of SQL. That’s now an increasingly crowded space (and has grown since that linked graphic was created). In March, Drawn to Scale expanded its support to MongoDB, as well.

I wasn’t shocked when Stephens told me the news — questions about the four-year-old company’s financial health had been swirling for a while — but to hear of its financial woes was a bit surprising. His account in the post pretty much echoes what I had heard from others:

“It seemed we had everything going for us — paid customers such as American Express, Orange Telecom, Flurry, and 4 others. Our technology worked brilliantly, we had a big hiring pipeline, and we had great media presence against our competitors who raised 10-100x more cash.”

He added:

“Yet five days before we signed term sheets for a big A round or sold the company, we started getting hit by a series of black swans — and we just didn’t have what we needed to recover. I’ll leave the public detail at that level, but I will say that paying employees’ health insurance out of your meager savings is a powerful incentive to change course.”

Up to this point, the company had raised $925,000 from RTP Ventures, IA Ventures and SK Ventures. There’s no word yet on what will come of the company’s intellectual property.

As Stephens — who’s now doing an entrepreneur-in-residence gig at Ping Identity and helping out other startups (including popular wardrobe app Cloth) — succinctly put it during a phone discussion, “We just don’t have the horsepower to keep running the company.”

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Google is doing a lot of interesting things with maps these days. Not only do they have a whole new Google Maps experience, but they continue to amaze us on a regular basis with some of their imagery.

Google still has a long way to go, however, when it comes to maps, specifically indoor maps. The search giant already has quite a few indoor maps, but as it says, this is the next frontier.

“Mapping streets and buildings is the hard part,” Google says. “But the even harder part is mapping indoors. Not only is Google acquiring floor plans for major buildings and venues, but we’re also working out ways to provide positioning data inside those buildings. When GPS doesn’t work, how do you find your place on the map?”

Sarah Peterson and Waleed Kadous talk about just that in this Google I/O session, which Google has now made available to the general public:

A purported image of Samsung’s upcoming Galaxy Tab 3 8.0 tablet was published on Friday along with supposed specs. SamMobile obtained the image of the unannounced tablet from an unnamed source, and the device shown in the image looks very similar to Samsung’s Galaxy Note 8.0 tablet, pictured above, with slight variations such as the sensor layout above the display. Not much can be gleaned from the render, though the blog also claims to have knowledge of the tablet’s specs, which include an 8-inch TFT display with 1,280 x 800-pixel resolution, a 1.5GHz dual-core processor, 1.5GB of RAM, 16GB of internal storage, a 5-megapixel rear camera, a 1.3-megapixel front-facing camera, a 4,450 mAh battery and Android 4.2.2 Jelly Bean. The leaked image of the tablet follows below.

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