Category: News

Nvidia’s first integrated smartphone chip won’t just have the latest and greatest Tegra processor; it will support some impressive LTE connection speeds as well. Nvidia has upgraded the radio of its forthcoming Tegra 4i to support download speeds of 150 Mbps, capabilities it began demoing at CTIA Wireless in Las Vegas this week.

Nvidia is showing that even though it’s new to the radio silicon market, it’s keeping up with the technical prowess of the competition. The 150 Mbps benchmark is the most cutting edge LTE device currently available (in industry parlance it’s know as category 4 LTE), meaning the Tegra 4i can go head-to-head to with the superchips designed by Qualcomm, Broadcom and Altair Semiconductor.

But also like its competitors, Nvidia is been playing fast and loose with its marketing. It’s calling its modem “LTE-Advanced,” a benchmark no chipmaker in the industry is even close to matching. These chips are still 150 Mbps shy of meeting even the most minimal definition of LTE-Advanced. Nvidia and its peers are clearly abusing the term.

Nvidia has long made powerful applications and graphics processors for smartphones and tablets, but its momentum in the market has always been hampered by its lack of an integrated processor-modem. Integrated chips take up less space, draw less power and are generally cheaper, making it difficult for Nvidia to compete against mobile silicon giant Qualcomm in everything but the highest tier of the smartphone market.

Nvidia rectified the situation in 2011 by purchasing software defined wireless radio maker Icera. It gained an impressive modem to match its impressive multimedia processor, but it still needed to spend two years integrating the two into a single tight package. The Tegra 4i was the result.

When Nvidia first announced the chip back in February, however, it appeared that Nvidia was still having trouble keeping up with the competition. It’s processor was cutting edge, but the LTE modem was still an iteration behind – using category 3 LTE — making it a third slower than the other chips then hitting the market. Nvidia said it was able to rectify that quickly by utilizing Icera’s software defined radio architecture: it upgraded to category 4 with a simple firmware update.

Networks that support category 4 speeds don’t yet exist, though we could start seeing in them appear in the next year or two. That timing, though, works out well since Nvidia and other silicon vendors won’t have their superchips ready for commercial devices until late 2013 or early 2014. In the meantime, Nvidia is demoing Tegra 4i’s 150 Mbps throughput at CTIA over a simulated network, not a real one.

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As an artist, I’m always interested in looking at the defining moments in our lives, understanding how these moments affect us and finding different ways to represent them.

Phil Hansen: Embrace the shakeWe all face limitations. I had the amazing opportunity to share my story at the TED conference this year. I came to do the art I do today not by a well-defined path, but by a defining moment in my life when I learned to “embrace the shake.”

Ever since I started preparing this talk last year, I thought a lot about the limitations we deal with and how they define us. It made me question why they sometimes hold us back and, at other times, push us forward. I became very curious about this process, and I wondered: if we looked at all our limitations collectively, what kind of patterns would we see? And what kind of insights would we have? When we hear other peoples’ stories, we often see reflections of our own struggles, triumphs, fears and hopes, which can give us new perspectives.

So, I had the idea to give out my phone number – it’s 651-321-4996 — and ask people to share a story about a limitation they’ve faced in their life. Many of these stories will be written to create a singular piece of art — based on the photograph below, which I took years ago in Seattle during a time when my limitation held me back from doing art. Every time I look at it, it reminds me of being rudderless and gives me a sense that life is always shifting in turbulent beauty.

Anyone is welcome to watch via the live feed (check it out below, or through my personal website) as each story is written onto the canvas. In the end, there’s a greater story to be told as we reflect on the stories of our lives. On that note, the second part of this project is to bring out the essence of this shared art experience by filming it, and putting together a short documentary. I’m asking people to back it through Kickstarter and, in the end, want to share it with all of you online.

I started the art for this project on Thursday, May 16. So far, it has given me the opportunity to connect with people from all walks of life. Occasionally, when I’m busy, someone will call me endlessly — 15 times or more — because they just need to get it out of their system. It’s a lot to juggle sometimes, between talking to people, making the art, and filming for the short documentary. But so far, it’s worth it. Here are a few stories people have told me so far:

“I was told that my learning disability would make it difficult to finish college. Now I’m having to decide between attending Stanford and Harvard — both universities fighting over me for grad school.”

“My limitation is simply myself. I always question whether I’m good enough, smart enough, pretty enough, artistic enough. I’m my own worst critic, and I struggle with it everyday.”

“Sometimes I lay awake at night wondering what will happen to make me willing to make the HUGE lifestyle change that would be required to lose over 200 pounds.”

There are a couple of really interesting elements that have already revealed themselves in this process. Many of the people I’ve talked to often feel completely alone in their experiences — like no one could have possibly gone through what they have. But then I will run into another story that is very similar to theirs. If you boil it down to just the limitation, with all the personal details removed, what you’ll see are all of our core human experiences.

I hope that people who share their stories can get a different perspective by seeing the limitation that seems so massive become so small on this huge canvas. In the end, I hope that when anybody looks at the final art piece, they can find a story that they connect with.

Today, one of the best music streaming services (excuse the opinion) gets just a bit better. Pandora has been around since 2000, offering customers free and paid solutions for creating custom stations and discovering new music. Now the streaming service wishes to offer more to its customers.

Pandora founder Tim Westergram announces the debut of Pandora Premieres, a new station that brings unreleased music to customers a week in advance.

“Pandora Premieres is a new kind of station for us that lets listeners enjoy on-demand access to early album releases from a variety of artists before they go on-sale,” Westergram tells us. The station debuts with upcoming releases from former CCR singer John Fogerty and also English folk musician Laura Marling.

Once you add the Pandora Premieres station you will be able to choose any track on the featured albums, and play them in any order and as many times as you wish. The company promises new albums each week and also additional exclusive content like video interviews.

Pandora Premieres works with both free and One accounts. One is $3.99 per month, but allows for unlimited streaming and blocks all ads during streaming. The company plans to feature both established and emerging artists.

In a bid to expand its presence across the web, streaming music service Spotify has just launched Spotify Charts, which allow sites to embed clickable lists of the top tracks across the network.

The charts, which will update every Monday, feature both the top 50 most-streamed tracks of the week and the top 50 most-shared tracks of the week. They’re called the “Spotify 50″ and the “Social 50,” respectively.

“What’s so powerful about the streaming charts is they let you hear what people are really listening to, right now, and not just what they’re buying,” says content head Steve Savoca.

The widget, which is available here at charts.spotify.com, is customizable based on country and can be cycled back to reveal the top 50 tracks for the previous 4 weeks. Last month, Spotify expanded into Mexico and other parts of Asia and Europe, bringing the total countries under the umbrella to 28.

Here’s what the widget looks like. Notice the new global play counts, which will also appear on the desktop app.

Non-signed-in users will be able to browse the top tracks, but will have to log-in to their accounts in order to listen. It’s a great new way for Spotify to get more attention, and a cool way for music lovers to see what their country is currently obsessed with. This week in the U.S., it’s Macklemore & Ryan Lewis’ “Can’t Hold Us,” Daft Punk’s “Get Lucky,” and Imagine Dragons’ “Radioactive.”

In March, Spotify announced that they currently have 6 million piad subscribers out of a total 24 million users. Earlier this month, Spotify bought music discovery app Tunigo.

Hurel Corp., a provider of advanced artificial tissue constructs and microfluidic cell-based assay platforms, has named Dr. James S. MacDonald to its board of directors. Hurel recently secured a $9.2 million Series A equity private placement led by Spring Mountain Capital. Hurel is based in both North Brunswick, NJ and Beverly Hills, Calif.

PRESS RELEASE

North Brunswick, NJ, May 21, 2013 –Hurel Corporation (“Hurel”), a world-leading provider of advanced artificial tissue constructs and microfluidic cell-based assay platforms, today announced the appointment of James S. MacDonald, PhD, DABT to the Company’s Board of Directors. Dr. MacDonald is the former Executive Vice President of Preclinical Development of the Schering-Plough Research Institute (“SPRI”), which was the pharmaceutical development arm of Schering Corporation prior to its acquisition by Merck & Co. in 2009.
Over a career that has spanned more than three decades, Dr. MacDonald has brought hundreds of drug candidates into development, over thirty of which have become globally registered, major drugs, including Vasotec®, Zocor®, Primaxin®, Clinoril®, Prilosec®, Fosamax®, Clarinex®, Nasonex®, Vytorin®, and Victrelis®, among others. Dr. MacDonald joined SPRI in 1994 as Senior Vice President, Drug Safety and Metabolism, and, over the next 14 years up until the time of the Merck acquisition, he played a leading role in building one of the most distinguished and effective drug development organizations in the world. As co-chairman of SPRI’s Early Development Committee, he directed the movement of drug candidates from discovery research into and through the development process. Previously Dr. MacDonald held positions of increasing responsibility at Merck, including Executive Director of Toxicology. He received his Ph.D. in toxicology in 1975 from the University of Cincinnati and completed a post-doctoral fellowship at Vanderbilt University. He became a diplomate of the American Board of Toxicology in 1980.
“Jim MacDonald’s track record of getting pharmaceuticals approved by FDA and onto the market speaks for itself,” said Robert Freedman, Hµrel’s Chairman and CEO. “Hµrel is privileged to benefit from Jim’s extraordinary wisdom and experience, both as a scientist and as a drug development executive. His guidance will be invaluable. We welcome Jim to the Board as a colleague and friend.”
About Hurel
Hurel Corporation, based in North Brunswick, NJ and Beverly Hills, CA, is a world-leading provider of advanced artificial tissue constructs and microfluidic cell-based assay platforms which are used by biotech and pharmaceutical research organizations in pre-clinical drug development, as well as in the toxicological testing of industrial materials and consumer products. The Company recentlyannounced a $9.2 million Series “A” equity private placement led by Spring Mountain Capital, of New York. Funds from the transaction will provide working capital to support the current commercial launch of the Company’s products and the continuing research and development of its technologies and future products.
# # #

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ConsultingMD, an online service that provides health care, said on Tuesday that it has received a $10 million round of funding from Venrock. The funding is to help ConsultingMD further develop its digital technology bringing patients together with physicians.

PRESS RELEASE

ConsultingMD Raises $10 Million from Venrock To Change The Practice of Medicine Funds To Drive Patient-Centered Care Through Expansion of Most Prestigious Physician Network; Cutting Edge “Virtual Clinic” Technology
San Francisco, CA, May 21, 2013— Consumers and businesses are reimagining healthcare through a technology that’s changing the practice of medicine. ConsultingMD announces a $10 million round of funding from Venrock to further develop its breakthrough technology enabled service platform bringing the patients together digitally with doctors and to expand its network of prestigious medical experts.
“We chose Venrock because they are far and away the leading venture firm for healthcare IT and they share our commitment to advancing patient-centered care,” said Owen Tripp, CEO and co-founder of ConsultingMD. “We have already established the most exclusive network of experts in their fields. With Venrock’s support, we will grow our team to provide more online and mobile solutions to enable these doctors to provide lifesaving opinions and care.”
ConsultingMD created a completely new technology platform that creates a “virtual clinic” where experts in the network find a comprehensive 360-degree digital profile of a patient’s history and medical records. Once a patient starts a case, the ConsultingMD platform collects and digitizes all medical records, and pages a request to the best expert for the case. The records are presented in reverse chronological order and annotated to convey the full picture of the patient’s care and diagnosis to date. These profiles slash the research and assessment time for doctors to provide a conclusive opinion. While a normal in-person consultation might take as many as three months to conduct, the ConsultingMD experts return an opinion in an average of 48 hours.
The ConsultingMD physician network is comprised of top 0.1 percent of experts in each field including the chiefs and chairs of many of the major medical research universities. Physicians must be invited by an existing ConsultingMD physician and are thoroughly vetted by an internal panel of doctors. The ConsultingMD virtual clinic provides the most leveraged way for a physician to spend time on a case and provides specialized physicians with access to unique cases that benefit their research.
“The ConsultingMD physician network is comprised of the ‘who’s who’ of the medical community and represent a collective state-of-the-art knowledge base for patient care. Combining this network with proprietary technology, ConsultingMD has liberated this vast store of medical expertise, making it available to all consumers on demand, thereby improving the lives and health of their customers,” said Bryan Roberts, partner at Venrock and new board member of ConsultingMD.
Businesses are tapping ConsultingMD as a unique benefit offering for employees. More than half of all corporate executives (55 percent) named healthcare benefits as their biggest business challenge, according to Adecco SA. Ten percent of employer-provided healthcare costs are due to misdiagnosis and improper treatment. Top physicians, like the network of experts at ConsultingMD, are known to offer more accurate diagnoses, leading to cost savings for both the patient and their employer.
Owen Tripp and Bryan Roberts will take the stage as the opening keynote at HealthBeat on Tuesday, May 21 at 8:50am PT at the Grand Hyatt in San Francisco, Calif. For more information, please visit, http://venturebeat.com/events/healthbeat2013/agenda/.
###
About ConsultingMD
ConsultingMD is dedicated to providing access to state-of-the-art medical information and opinions from the world’s top physicians to the people who need it most and to the businesses that want to provide the best care for their employees. By presenting the whole patient digitally, ConsultingMD streamlines the diagnosis process and enables anyone to reach the experts for the most current medical expertise saving time, money and lives. For more information, please visit www.consultingmd.com and follow @ConsultingMD.
About Venrock
Venrock is a leading venture capital firm with offices in Palo Alto, CA; New York, NY; and Cambridge, MA. Originally established as the venture capital arm of the Rockefeller family, Venrock continues an eight-decade tradition of partnering with entrepreneurs to establish successful, enduring companies. With a primary focus on technology and healthcare, portfolio companies have included Adify, Adnexus Therapeutics, Apple Computer, Athenahealth, Centocor, Check Point Software, DoubleClick, Gilead Sciences, Idec Pharmaceuticals, Illumina, Intel, Millennium Pharmaceuticals, Sirna Therapeutics, StrataCom, and Vontu. For more information, please visit Venrock’s website at www.venrock.com and follow the firm on Twitter at @venrock.

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Making food with 3D printers is not a new concept, but it is still largely in the realm of science fiction. NASA wants to make science fiction into reality sooner than later, however, and it’s throwing plenty of money towards those at the cutting edge of the technology.

Quartz reports that NASA has awarded Systems & Materials Research Corporation a $125,000 grant to continue work on what company head, Anjan Contractor, calls a universal food synthesizer. As currently envisioned, the technology would use cartridges of powders and oils to create complex foods one layer at a time.

NASA is understandably interested in the technology as it would provide plenty of inexpensive food to space travelers. The current goal is to have the food cartridges last up to 30 years. It would ensure that any long distance space travel plans to Mars and beyond wouldn’t suffer from food spoilage.

Of course, space travel isn’t the only thing that this particular 3D printer would make easier. Feeding the world’s population would be a cinch if everybody owned a 3D printer and a number of inexpensive food cartridges that only doled out what a person needs so no food is wasted. It seems impossible with our current food production methods, but Contractor’s plans could very well end world hunger.

The first step in space travel and ending world hunger may just lie in the humble pizza. America’s favorite food seems to be perfectly suited to the 3D printing process as one layer of food is added at a time. In the case of pizza, the dough would be extruded onto a heated plate that bakes the dough as its being printed. Afterwards, a tomato powder would be added while being mixed with water and oil to create the sauce. Finally, a “protein layer” made up of plants or animals would be added to the top.

A 3D pizza printer may sound like some kind of revolutionary new concept, but NASA has been playing around with 3D printers for quite some time. The agency is even looking into whether or not it could deploy 3D printers to the surface of the moon to build 3D printed structures out of lunar soil.

As for 3D food printers, NASA may also want to look into Burritob0t or Google’s 3D pasta printer. There’s probably nothing quite like space travel accompanied by a steady diet of starches.

Swipely, a Providence, RI-based merchant account provider, said today that it has raised $12 million in Series B financing led by Shasta Ventures. Existing investors First Round Capital, Greylock Partners and Index Ventures also joined the round. The funding is to help Swipely expand both its merchants’ network and nationwide growth.

PRESS RELEASE

PROVIDENCE, R.I.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Swipely, the simple way for local merchants to accept payments, understand customers and grow revenue, today announced it has completed a $12 million Series B round of financing. Shasta Ventures led the investment and was joined by existing investors First Round Capital, Greylock Partners and Index Ventures. The Series B funding will help Swipely expand its network of merchants and accelerate its nationwide growth.
Since entering the payments space in June 2012, Swipely has enjoyed widespread adoption, now managing more than $700 million in annual sales for merchants in 130 cities and towns throughout the U.S., and unlocking insights into nearly 2 million customers.
This round brings Swipely’s total venture financing to $20.5 million, and comes on the heels of the company being named to Forbes’ 100 list of “America’s Most Promising Companies” and one of the “Best Places to Work in Rhode Island” by Providence Business News. The financing is the largest Series B venture investment in a software company in Rhode Island history.
An Online Operating System for Local Commerce
95% of commerce happens offline. Since launching Swipely’s payments platform in June 2012, the company has grown rapidly to bring local merchants the same tools that e-commerce companies use to better understand customers through shopping data to grow sales.
“We are excited to be part of a company that finally brings the power of data to the offline world, ultimately translating into happy customers and more revenue,” said Sean Flynn, Partner at Shasta Ventures. “It’s a major innovation in payments and marketing for small business, and we hope it will transform the way merchants understand and engage with their customers.”
“Swipely replaces legacy merchant payment and marketing approaches with a powerful online operating system for local commerce to make smarter, faster business decisions,” said Angus Davis, founder and CEO of Swipely. “We empower hundreds — and soon thousands — of leading small businesses with actionable insights to help them succeed and grow.”
Swipely merchants reach from the West Village in New York City to SOMA in San Francisco, and everywhere in between. Since upgrading to Swipely, these businesses have unlocked shopping data to:
Learn how new versus repeat customers contribute to sales
Build a customer database with profiles for every card-paying customer
Measure how online marketing campaigns impact offline sales
Launch trackable loyalty programs that bring customers back
Swipely is a good fit for merchants that accept at least $30,000 in monthly credit card sales. To see how your business can better understand customers and grow sales, visit swipely.com or call 888-SWIPELY.
Bringing A Silicon Valley Spark to the Ocean State
Swipely will use its funds to grow the team across all functional areas, including engineering, sales and marketing, finance and administration. Swipely is headquartered in Providence, Rhode Island, where it is a bellwether among a growing ecosystem of high-tech companies leading a renaissance in the Ocean State’s long challenged economy.
Swipely offers outstanding career opportunities with competitive compensation and benefits, an award-winning office culture and the opportunity to work and win as part of a world-class team. It’s an exciting time to join Swipely. To learn more about current openings, visit http://swipely.theresumator.com/
About Swipely
Swipely is a simple way for local merchants to accept payments, understand customers and grow revenue. Swipely’s valuable payments, analytics and marketing tools work with systems merchants already have and with cards consumers already use. Merchants use Swipely to manage 700 million dollars in sales and to deepen relationships with over 2 million customers.
Founded by Angus Davis and named to the Forbes Magazine 100 list of “America’s Most Promising Companies,” the Providence, RI based company includes veterans of Tellme, Microsoft, LivingSocial and SeamlessWeb, and is backed by leading Silicon Valley investors including Shasta Ventures, Index Ventures, Greylock Partners, and First Round Capital, among others.

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A teenager from Saratoga, California took home one of the top prizes at the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair late last week after showing off her invention, which can fully charge a cell phone in 30 seconds or less. Eesha Khare was given the Intel Foundation Young Scientist Award and a $50,000 prize for being runner-up in the competition, which was won by a 19-year-old who unveiled a new spin on self-driving car technology. Khare’s battery technology requires a new component to be installed inside the phone battery itself, and Intel notes that it also has potential applications for car batteries.

The quantum computers that Lockheed Martin and Google are buying — and that startup D-Wave is building — have some pretty extreme operating conditions: they need to run at near zero temperatures for the quantum effects to work.

As you can see in this photo from venture capitalist Steve Jurvetson, D-Wave uses a pulse fridge to cool the quantum computer to .02 degrees above absolute zero, and they use Helium-3 in the cooling process.

Quantum computers use a different type of processing compared to traditional computing. As GigaOM’s Jordan Novet explained it earlier this year, “rather than working with binary yes-or-no questions — ones and zeros — quantum computing is more probabilistic, also allowing a combination of zero and one to simultaneously answer many questions with quantum bits of information, or qubits, and tell users more about the likelihood of a situation. It’s not necessarily useful for all kinds of computing, but it could solve problems that current computers can’t.”

Keeping quantum computers that can perform such functions cool can be a tricky process. It’s highly energy intensive and can get expensive. But if the quantum computers are not cooled down the molecules — which are being manipulated to store data — move around chaotically and can’t be manipulated and read.

Earlier this year physicists at UCLA developed a new cooling process that immerses charged barium chloride molecules into a super cold cloud of calcium atoms. That research is being funded by the Army Research Office and the National Science Foundation.

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Highland Capital Management, L.P., said on Tuesday that it has named Jun Park as director of business development in Korea. Prior to joining Highland, Park worked at Woori Financial Principal Investment in Seoul. Highland is an investment management firm based in Dallas.

PRESS RELEASE
DALLAS, May 21, 2013 – Highland Capital Management, L.P. (“Highland”), a Dallas-based investment management firm, which together with its affiliates has approximately $18 billion in assets under management, today announced the appointment of Jun Park as a Director of Business Development, Korea.
Mr. Park is responsible for business development and investor relations support in Korea. He reports to Paul Adkins, Managing Director of Business Development (Asia-Pacific region), and is based in the firm’s Seoul office.
“Jun’s hire shows Highland’s deep commitment to the Asia-Pacific region,” said Mr. Adkins.
“His experience in alternative investments strengthens our team and our ability to provide top-tier investment solutions and service for our clients.”
Mr. Park has more than 10-years of experience in global alternative investments. Prior to joining Highland, he worked at Woori Financial Principal Investment in Seoul, where he was responsible for establishing fund structures and managing over $1 billion in private equity assets in a range of categories including mezzanine debt, buy-outs, real estate, and infrastructure investments in the UK, US and Korea. Prior to Woori, Mr. Park worked at The Blackstone Group. He started his career at Salomon Brothers Asset Management in New York City. Mr. Park received his B.A. in Accounting from Syracuse University.
# # #
About Highland Capital Management
Highland Capital Management is an SEC-registered investment adviser which, together with its affiliates, has approximately $18 billion of assets under management. Founded in 1993 by Jim Dondero and Mark Okada, Highland is one of the largest and most experienced global alternative credit managers. Highland’s strategies include collateralized loan obligations (CLOs), high yield bonds, distressed credit, public and private equities, structured products and natural resources.

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Last week, rumors that pop star Beyoncé is pregnant began heating up. The week’s rumors were capped off with what seemed to be a confirmation that the diva is expecting her second child. This week, however, Beyoncé’s husband is once again tamping down the rumors, stating that the pregnancy reports are “not true.”

A program director for the New York radio station Hot 97 this weekend reported that Jay-Z had personally told him that the rumors are not true. He quotes the would-be father as saying, “It’s not true. The news is worse than blogs.”

Neither Jay-Z nor Mrs. Carter herself have commented officially on the pregnancy rumors. Beyoncé is currently promoting her world tour, “The Mrs. Carter Show.” The tour is currently in Europe, and will continue in North America throughout June and July.

Though the pregnancy rumors began over some blurry concert photos, the rumors ramped up last week when Beyoncé canceled a scheduled concert in Antwerp, Belgium. The official word was that doctors had sidelined the pop star for “dehydration and exhaustion,” but fans eagerly postulated that the singer was having morning sickness.

On Monday, Yahoo announced that it has signed an agreement to acquire the massively popular social blogging platform Tumblr for $1.1 billion. Like most major Internet acquisitions, the move has proven controversial.

Is this acquisition going to be good or bad for Tumblr users? Good or bad for Yahoo? Let us know what you think in the comments.

Even before the acquisition was announced formally, a lot of users who got wind of the deal started jumping ship to alternative platforms. WordPress Founder Matt Mullenweg wrote a blog post on Sunday night about a huge spike in imports from Tumblr.

“Imports have actually spiked on the rumors even though it’s Sunday: normally we import 400-600 posts an hour from Tumblr, last hour it was over 72,000,” he wrote.

He later updated the post to say that some people are reading too much into those numbers, adding, “I don’t think there will be an exodus from Tumblr.”

In the comments section, he said, “I don’t think there will be any sort of exodus from Tumblr. For most folks habits overcome internet-outrage. Even if a million people left, that’s just about a week’s worth of signups.”

We haven’t seen an update on the number of imports now that the deal has been officially public for a day, but my guess is that it has increased significantly.

A petition to “Stop Yahoo! from Buying Tumblr” quickly racked up nearly 169,000 signatures. Of course there is no way that this will actually keep the deal from happening, but it does show that there is a great deal of discontent among users (and you have to think there are many more with a similar attitude who did not bother to sign, or even see the petition).

User concerns have ranged from “Yahoo is going to make Tumblr uncool” to “Yahoo is going to clutter up Tumblr with ads” to “Yahoo is going to eliminate porn on Tumblr” among other things.

Yahoo and Tumblr have both indicated from the start that they “promise not to screw it up”. Here’s a line straight out of the press release:

Per the agreement and our promise not to screw it up, Tumblr will be independently operated as a separate business. David Karp will remain CEO. The product, service and brand will continue to be defined and developed separately with the same Tumblr irreverence, wit, and commitment to empower creators.

Yahoo says Tumblr will deploy Yahoo’s personalization technology and search infrastructure to “help its users discover creators, bloggers, and content they’ll love”. This could actually be a good thing for Tumblr, as its current content discovery features could use a great deal of improvement.

“Tumblr is redefining creative expression online,” said Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer. “On many levels, Tumblr and Yahoo! couldn’t be more different, but, at the same time, they couldn’t be more complementary. Yahoo is the Internet’s original media network. Tumblr is the Internet’s fastest-growing media frenzy. Both companies are homes for brands – established and emerging. And, fundamentally, Tumblr and Yahoo! are both all about users, design, and finding surprise and inspiration amidst the everyday.”

“Our team isn’t changing,” said Tumblr CEO David Karp. “Our roadmap isn’t changing. And our mission — to empower creators to make their best work and get it in front of the audience they deserve — certainly isn’t changing. But we’re elated to have the support of Yahoo! and their team who share our dream to make the Internet the ultimate creative canvas. Tumblr gets better faster with more resources to draw from.”

His statements in a blog post were a little more colorful.

So, let’s address some of those concerns users have.

1. Will Yahoo make Tumblr uncool?

Well, this is obviously subjective. To some, simply being part of a major corporation makes you uncool. It certainly didn’t help Myspace. Yahoo itself hasn’t exactly been considered “cool” by portions of the Internet in recent years either, however, the company is making a lot of moves (particularly since Mayer took over as CEO) to change things. That includes some big acquisitions and some new apps.

In fact, even since the Tumblr announcement, Yahoo announced a major revamp of its popular photography service, Flickr. This is a property that has historically had a massive following, and has remained one of Yahoo’s bright spots throughout the dark times, but through the revolving door of CEOs in recent years, many think Flickr has been neglected. Well, no more. You can read about the new experience here.

Other recent Yahoo acquisitions include: Loki Studios (mobile gaming), MileWise (travel search), GoPollGo (real-time surveys), Astrid (productivity), Summly (news aggregation/summarization), Jybe (social recommendation), Alike (social recommendation), Snip.it (social), OnTheAir (video chat) and Stamped (recommendation). These are all under Mayer. Tumblr makes 11 acquisitions (or at least announcements) since October. The company made only that many from February 2008 all the way up to this past October, with the last one before October coming in November, 2011.

So while it remains to be seen if Yahoo can truly become cool again, it is at least trying its damnedest, and spending a lot of money to do so. Whether that translates into making Tumblr uncool, I guess we’ll just have to wait and see.

Hunter Walk, the director of Product Management at Google, who focuses on YouTube, wrote an interesting blog post called, “Don’t Mess Up Tumblr: Five Lessons Learned From YouTube”. In a nutshell, his lessons are: protect Tumblr from “helpful” Yahoos, avoid locality bias in product development, stop short term monetization that won’t scale, infrastructure (tech, process) on Tumblr terms, and separate identity/separate space.

“When Google purchased YouTube there was lots of skepticism and outright derision,” Walk recalls. “Today analysts estimate its enterprise value is approaching $20 billion. So I guess it all worked out, eh? Being one of the first Googlers to join YouTube after the acquisition taught me a lot about what works, and doesn’t work, when you bring a fast growing community property into a larger entity. There are clearly parallels between our situation in 2007 and what Tumblr will experience with Yahoo. Marissa is a friend from our time together at Google and I’m impressed, but not surprised, by her decisiveness and vision. I don’t know David Karp but we share a number of mutual friends and at a 2012 group dinner he passed me the salt, so we’ve got that.”

He goes on to elaborate on each of the lessons.

2. Is Yahoo going to clutter up Tumblr with ads?

I guess it depends on your definition of clutter, but it does look like Tumblr will be getting some new ads. At least one report indicates that they could come as soon as today.

Mayer said flat out in the announcement that the two companies will be working together to create advertising opportunities that are “seamless and enhance user experience”.

Business Insider has some more from the conference call about deal:

Mayer says that Yahoo released “Yahoo Stream Ads” in May, which take text ads and put them in the news stream on Yahoo.com. She says you can expect more of that on Tumblr. On Tumblr, there is the dashboard, which is like Facebook’s News Feed or inbox. Today, Tumblr does some advertising there. Yahoo would like to “introduce a very light ad load” there. Yahoo also might work with some bloggers who want ads on their blogs. That would only be done with permission. Mayer says the ad units will be native and follow the form and function of Tumblr. She says that you can tell interests of users.

In fact, Business Insider also managed to obtain Tumblr’s ad sales pitch deck describing the ad experience to potential clients.

“With Tumblr’s newest ad product, brands finally are front and center, with the world’s greatest creators,” one of the slides says. “Welcome to the richest content stream in the world.”

According to the pitch deck, the ads will be delivered directly in the native dashboard streams of millions of users. The “Web In-Stream” product is in beta, and Tumblr is offering an exclusive launch partnership opportunity to a handful of select brands for the ad unit’s debut, according to the slides, which say that all Tumblr post types are supported. Partners are apparently being offered category-exclusivity.

For $200K, according to the slides, partners can get ten desktop Radar posts within a 30-day span (between May 21 and July 21), 24 hours each for 5% of all Dashboard page views, support from the Tumblr team, U.S. guaranteed impression serving only, over 25 million dashboard impressions ($8.00CPM on Radar impressions), and multi-week exposure as premier sponsor in Spotlight. They also get ninety-day access to Tumblr Analytics and three weeks as an exclusive beta in-stream launch sponsor partner with ten in-stream posts within a 21 day span (June 1 and June 21).

Regardless of what users think of the ads, businesses will certainly have new opportunities with Tumblr’s massive audience.

3. Is Yahoo going to eliminate porn on Tumblr?

Regardless of whether or not you consider porn to be a taboo subject, it makes a big difference in Tumblr’s stats. Tumblr is full of it. If Tumblr gets rid of it, it’s going to drive away some percentage of users, not to mention become less cool to some percentage of users.

Mayer was asked about it at the Flickr event on Monday evening. She said they will not censor content. “No, we won’t,” she is quoted as saying. “It’s the nature of user-generated content.”

It doesn’t stop YouTube, but, Mayer probably earned some “cool” points with that one.

Tumblr currently has over 300 million monthly unique visitors, and gets 120,000 signups every day. It sees 900 posts per second and 24 billion minutes are spent on the site each month. Over half of its users are using the mobile app, and on average, participate in seven sessions per day. Yahoo expects the acquisition to grow its audience by fifty percent to over a billion monthly visitors, and to grow traffic by about twenty percent.

The acquisition is subject to customary closing conditions, and is expected to close in the second half of the year.

Was this a good acquisition for Yahoo? Will this hurt or benefit Tumblr users? Can Yahoo become cool again? Is Yahoo already cool again? Let us know what you think in the comments.

Image: NMA (YouTube)

Publishers these days have a choice when it comes to mobile: design for the mobile browser, or go the app route. Apps tend to allow greater functionality, but it’s a lot more efficient to create a website that renders well on both the desktop and mobile – hence the so-called “responsive design” movement.

Now MySiteApp, the Israeli company that previously put out the UppSite tool for converting websites into native apps, has brought out a new service called Brow.si for making mobile websites behave like apps. Brow.si is a multifunctional toolbar that can be easily inserted in a responsive website through the addition of some Javascript. It’s now in public beta, following a two-week closed beta period in which it was already used by a million people.

Pushing for the web

Much of this functionality is the sort of thing a publisher can put into a mobile website itself – content sharing through social networks, read-later options such as Pocket, font resizing and so on – but Brow.si aims to make its addition easier.

It also introduces something that’s previously only been available on apps: push notifications. Without the user having to install anything, they can subscribe to notifications from all the websites they visit that are using Brow.si, and consume that content through the platform’s own reader. Again, users don’t have to create an account for this – they just need to log into a social network (Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn) for sharing purposes, after which Brow.si will know which user is which.

What’s more, MySiteApp has become a WordPress VIP (see disclosure) feature partner, meaning sites using that publishing platform can easily install the Brow.si plugin. But again, that’s not all: as alluded to above, Brow.si is a platform in its own right, and it aims to help publishers monetize their content.

Cashing in

As MySiteApp CEO Gal Brill explained to me, publishers can add so-called “mini applications” that will only show up when the user activates the Brow.si toolbar. When the toolbar is swiped across the screen, it introduces new real estate below it, so the publisher could for example add a mini-app for the content recommendation engine Taboola, or they could even use this new space for traditional ads.

Mini-apps will be made available through Brow.si’s marketplace, and the company has an open API so third-party developers can help populate that marketplace with their own efforts.

It’s all very clever, and the simplicity of installation should give Brow.si a flying start. It remains to be seen, though, whether this sort of functionality will help publishers monetize their content on the mobile web. There are many variables at play here, from users’ desire for content-related push notifications (granularity seems to be lacking) to publishers’ desire for differentiated presentation.

That said, the addition of a new and relatively unobtrusive patch of mobile screen real estate for advertising purposes could turn out to be a welcome development.

Disclosure: Automattic, maker of WordPress.com, is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, GigaOm. Om Malik, founder of GigaOm, is also a venture partner at True.

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Sprint on Tuesday announced a revised offer for wireless broadband wholesaler Clearwire. The carrier is looking to acquire the remaining Clearwire shares it does not already own for $2.97 per share, or $2.2 billion, valuing the company at $10 billion. Sprint has now increased its bid $3.40 per share, upping Clearwire’s value to $10.7 billion. The revised offer represents a 14% premium over the company’s earlier bid and a 162% premium over Clearwire’s closing share price in October when it was rumored to be part of the Sprint-SoftBank merger discussions. Sprint notes that the offer is the best and final offer it will propose. The company’s press release follows below.

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Kate Hudson has joined the cast of Zach Braff’s Kickstarter-funded film, “Wish I Was Here”, and not everyone is happy about it.

The Kickstarter campaign, which surpassed its $2 million goal in three days, was a highly controversial move on Braff’s part and was the talk of Twitter for a while as moviegoers wondered why they should give up their hard-earned cash to a millionaire actor.

Still, he’s continuing to get backers on the crowd-sourcing site, so there are people who want to see this movie get made. According to Kickstarter, the campaign will end on Friday. Braff, who wrote the script with his brother, will direct and star as a 30-something husband and father who is struggling to find his identity.

Also announced in the cast lineup are Josh Gad and Mandy Patinkin.

Chris Curtis is the co-founder and SVP of Development for Compass Datacenters. We are publishing a series of posts from Chris that will take you inside the complexity of the construction process for data centers. He will explore the ups and downs (and mud and rain) of constructing data center facilities and the creative problem-solving required for the unexpected issues that sometimes arise with every construction process. For more, see Chris’ previous columns on the planning process.

High explosives. Who doesn’t love them? Isn’t a large part of our culture based on blowing things up? Certainly some of our leading celebrities have made whole careers out of appearing in movies that feature one massive explosion after another. Well, the world of data center development is no different. It doesn’t happen often but, every once in a while, we have to roll out the dynamite and do some serious blasting. Like most things in the development world, the need to conduct controlled explosions has some plusses and some minuses.

Lessons in Geology

Most of the time, the average data center can be built without the need to prepare the site using cataclysmic force, but our site resides on what geologist’s refer to as a “limestone shelf.” In the technical parlance used by we developers. this is referred to as “a bunch of rock.” Maybe not as scientific, but a lot more descriptive. I don’t mind telling you, this news made the on-site guys positively giddy with excitement. The prospect of going to work and getting to say things like “fire in the hole” just seems to bring out the best in folks.

Despite the electric atmosphere that the prospect of dynamite utilization brings, this is serious stuff. You know how your mother used to say that it’s “all fun and games till someone gets hurt,” well, this a few notches above that. Being blown to smithereens has a degree of permanence that you just aren’t going to find with the average office related mishap. Just like any refined activity, there is a protocol that must be followed before you can begin demolishing large swaths of real estate.

Telling the Neighbors

First, you must alert the locals. This means going from house to house to advise the occupants of the homes surrounding your project site that they might just want to keep the kiddies and pets inside between the hours of 9 and 11 this coming Tuesday. Naturally folks have questions, “Will it be loud?,” “Am I at risk from flying debris?,” “Can I watch?,” to which the answers are of course, “Yes,” “No” and “Sorry, but our lawyers won’t allow that.”

Second, you put up signs and mark off the area. With this type of signage I’ve found that it’s best to be simple and declarative: “Blast Site – Keep Out,” for example. Some developers prefer “High Explosive Area – Trespassers Keep Out,”, but I find this a little pretentious and wordy. Short and pithy also eliminates the possibility of your sign being liberally interpreted. No one wants to have someone’s body parts distributed though out your job site because they live in the neighborhood and decided that the word “Trespasser” didn’t apply to them. This type of thing can really hurt morale. When marking off the blast area I prefer to go conservative. Sure it costs you a little more in orange plastic fencing, but I think we can all agree that the phrase “better safe than sorry” applies here.

Dress Code: Hard Hat and Ear Plugs

I don’t think that I can describe the level of anticipation until the big day finally arrives. Remember waiting for that special gift at Christmas? This is better, since you now it’s actually going to happen, and you’re not going to get a sweater instead of that new bike you wanted. When blast day finally comes, everyone gets to wear a hard hat and ear plugs–this is a developer’s version of a Fourth of July celebration. I must admit that even though I’ve been to a few of these things I can barely make it until the time that the big switch is thrown. And once it’s thrown – wow. The explosions are deafening, there’s dirt and debris flying everywhere, grown men are jumping up and down and pointing – you just don’t get entertainment like this every day.

Someone once said that “There is always one guy who doesn’t get the memo,” and that’s the case with blasting. Just accept the fact that no matter how thorough your canvassing, or how many signs you post, someone in the neighborhood is going to complain. This being the case, I was not surprised when I received a nasty email from a local resident complaining about the noise and, helpfully suggesting that I build my data center somewhere else. Since all it takes is one crank with a friend that works at Channel 8 to turn your project into a PR nightmare, I recommend handling these situations in a face-to-face manner. As I said, I’ve been through this drill before so I put on my sympathetic face (Note: It’s good to practice this before your visit. Sometimes a sympathetic face can look more like an “I could care less” face, or worse, the “surly punk” face, so you really need to get into character before you go) and went to visit the offended party.

The Developer’s Listening Skills

My first grade teacher always told me to be a good listener. This is great advice for these types of “disgruntled neighbor” situations because, really, what else can you do? After all, the blasting is already done, and there’s a big hole in the lot behind their house, so you sit and listen. Remember to nod at all the points that they use to tell you that your actions are akin to a crime against humanity and assure them that the data center you are building will not have a negative impact on the neighborhood. And this is true. Since it only takes a few folks to run a facility and the building is full of servers, traffic and noise aren’t going to be on-going issues. This is what folks really want to know. Once you’ve apologized and assured them that the worst is over, even the most disgruntled citizen tends to listen to reason. After all, doesn’t everyone really just want to have their “day in court.”

As a developer, the pendulum of your activity can swing widely. One day, you’re just another swarthy guy enjoying the primal thrill of blowing things up, and the next, a mild-mannered Dr. Phil talking an irate neighbor off the ledge. In this role, you must be prepared for anything.

Stay tuned for the next article in the series, titled, Maybe We Should Turn This Data Center into an Ark: How Bad Weather Can Cause Chaos with a Construction Timeline.

Industry Perspectives is a content channel at Data Center Knowledge highlighting thought leadership in the data center arena. See our guidelines and submission process for information on participating. View previously published Industry Perspectives in our Knowledge Library.