Category: News

Tumblr has just hit a major milestone in its path to blog network domination. Today, Tumblr officially topped the 100 million blog mark.

Tumblr currently has 100.1 million individual blogs, which are responsible for 44.6 billion posts.

The Next Web first noticed that the ticker had crossed the 100 million mark.

Tumblr, which was founded in 2007, hit 50 million blogs about a year ago. At the beginning of March, Tumblr reported 93 million blogs. That means that Tumblr has added around 7 million blogs in less than a month. That’s some serious growth.

If you want to get a sense on how post blog posts are rolling in on a daily basis, Tumblr reports that there have been over 80 million post today alone.

In the last few months, Tumblr has launched a new native iOS app, and has added tablet support for both Android and iOS.

Tumblr also broke into the top ten sites in the U.S. rankings, although they currently sit at #14 in terms of Quantcast data.

Tumblr is growing like a weed – even topping Facebook in a recent usage survey of teens. Here’s to another 100 million blogs, guys.

Yahoo and CNBC announced the launch of Big Data Download today. This is a new twice daily online program hosted by CNBC’s Courtney Reagan, and regularly featuring Yahoo Finance’s editor-in-chief Aaron Task, senior columnist Michael Santoli and co-host of “The Daily Ticker” Lauren Lyster.

“‘Big Data Download’ is a daily digital program that taps into the big data revolution to deliver valuable information to everyday investors and business decision makers,” Yahoo says in an email. “The show, which will air twice each day, will draw upon sources including Yahoo! Search data, social sentiment and investing algorithms created exclusively for this program from the Yahoo! Labs team.”

“The inaugural episode of, ‘Big Data Download’ examines whether the housing market is really in recovery, by looking at both housing stocks and Yahoo! Search data,” the company says. “In the second episode, ‘Big Data Download’ drills into gas prices. Are you being ripped off at the pump? ‘Big Data Download’ explores oil, gas, distillate inventory numbers to shed light on where prices should be and which companies will get a lift when the price goes up.”

Thursday’s episodes will look at “key economic indicators that tell where the S&P 500 should really be right now,” and a controversial new program at Bank of America.

The show will air regularly Monday through Friday at 11AM and 2PM Eastern.

Last summer, Yahoo Finance and CNBC announced a partnership to reach a wider audience, and share information and ad revenues.

Apple’s (AAPL) “iTV” is a lot like Guns’N’Roses’ chronically delayed Chinese Democracy album: Eventually the rumors about its existence will come true and it will finally be released for public consumption. The latest iTV rumors come to us from Digitimes, which claims that Apple is building a 4K Ultra HD television set with a resolution of 3,840 x 2,160 pixels that will release either in late 2013 or early 2014. Don’t worry about the iTV’s impact on the supplies of iPhones and iPads, however: Unnamed sources tell Digitimes that Apple is “banking on LG Display (LPL) to be able to mass produce Ultra HD TV panels by the second half of the year” while freeing up other Apple component suppliers to work exclusively on other gadgets.

So here we are – you, me and the 2013 Ford Taurus SEL. This is a car that I really wanted to like, I mean I really did, but unfortunately, I just couldn’t get behind it. This is the sixth generation of Ford’s family hauler, the Taurus. This is the vehicle that redefined what a family car should aspire to be back in the 1980′s. However since its release almost 30-years ago, the Taurus has seemingly lost its way. Yes it will still haul you and your family, but it’s also trying to be a jack-of-all-trades, and unfortunately this is where things go south.

The Taurus is, and always will be, middle America. It’s meant to carry five adults in reasonable comfort, get decent mileage and have a few nice amenities thrown in for good measure. It’s also supposed to be priced right and offer up more than its import counterparts. And while it has succeeded in some instances, it doesn’t blow them out of the water.

A good looking car, the styling of the 2013 Taurus is actually quite refined. Smooth and elegant body lines, a nicely sculpted grille and mildly chopped roof line give the Taurus and air of European sportiness. And while it may look great, it seemingly fails to impress once you get underway.

For instance, at almost 17-feet in length one would expect the Taurus to have loads of interior room. However thanks to an over-sized center console, driver and passenger leg room is actually quite tight. Taller drivers will have their right leg pinched up against the console while those riding shotgun will be constantly moving their seats up for those positioned in the rear.

Ford’s touchscreen SYNC system sits dead center in the dash and provides one with access to everything from the vehicles climate and audio settings, to your Bluetooth and navigation unit. Beneath the touchscreen resides a secondary touch pad that will also help you with climate and audio controls, however it’s void of actual buttons, thus making it feel cheap and like somewhat of an after thought.

My tester came equipped with the optional 2.0-liter I4 Ecoboost engine that pumps out 240 hp and 270 lb.ft. of torque. Not terrible numbers mind you, but not great numbers either, especially for a car that weighs around 4,000 lbs. Economy is the name of the game with the I4 Ecoboost and it delivers to the tune of 22 mpg city and 32 mpg hwy. Power is put down by way of a smooth shifting 6-speed transmission with a thumb mounted gear selector.

An interesting touch, but honestly, just leave the thing in automatic mode and let the engine and transmission work as the engineers intended. Stomp the gas and Taurus will get to 60 mph in just over 7-seconds and move you onto a top speed of 112 mph. It will also provide the driver with nicely weighted steering and confidence inspiring brakes.

The interior is a combination of leather, soft and hard touch plastic and vinyl. And while there are some silver accents thrown in for good measure, I found it to be a rather drab place to be. However trunk space is quite liberal at 20.1 cubic-feet, so if you’re planning on a road trip, rest assured that you’ll be able to fit quite a bit of stuff back there.

Driving the Taurus is about exciting as eating a bowl of matzo ball soup. Yes, it will fill you up and make you feel cozy and warm, but it won’t fill you with adrenaline, nor will it trigger much emotion.

Here’s the thing. Ford makes GOOD cars, they do. I mean the Mustang kicks ass (hell, I own one), the Focus in any form is great, and then there’s the F-150 which we all know is awesome. So why then Ford – why’d you drop the ball so far on this Taurus? In trying to make a car that appealed to everyone, it feels like you created something that simply doesn’t have enough of anything to get us excited. $35,180.00 is a lot to pay for plain vanilla ice cream. However throw in a little whipped-cream and a cherry next time, and you may just have something.

Deluge is a BitTorrent client developed for multiple platforms, which provides full functionality and comes with a vast array of plugins that extend its uses.

It’s not clear why, but Deluge has lost some of its fans along the way, in favor of other similar solutions. The reasons are not apparent because this is an excellent client and it deserv… (read more)

As Seth MacFarlane so tactfully pointed out at this year’s Oscars, Hollywood has a bit of a fascination with seeing actresses’ boobs. It’s not a particularly radical concept for mature adults (or Europeans), but sometimes the push for a breast tissue can pressure young actresses into baring their chest when they would rather not.

Take Jessica Brown Findlay, for instance. The actress gained fame playing the rather modest role of Lady Sybil Crawley on the hit show Downton Abbey. More recently, she has taken the role of Alais Pelletier Du Mas in a TV adaptation of Labyrinth. In the upcoming show, Findlay bares quite a bit of her body, but it’s the skin she showed in the past that she told the Radio Times she regrets.

According to the interview, Findlay stated that a scene in the movie Albatross in which she flashes a store clerk was “naivety” on her part and that she didn’t know she could say “no.” Going forward, Findlay advises actresses to be “honest and natural” with their nude scenes, but that she would have prepared her body more in hindsight.

“I was drinking pints and eating burgers.” said Findlay. “But actually, it’s not something I would do again.”

The video below is the scene from Albatross, and is, naturally, NSFW:

Amazon just announced that it is adding its X-Ray feature to TV shows. The feature already worked with movies thanks to data from IMDb, but the company will now use this very same data for other video content. All the Kindle Fire family will receive the feature. The Amazon Instant Video app on Wii U will get is as well.

As a reminder, X-Ray allows you to discover more about the content you are reading or watching. It first appeared with books, it shows you the different characters, where they appear in the book and how they are related to the story. Then Amazon added X-Ray to movies back in September 2012. In that case, watchers can instantly know the name of an actor in a scene. IMDb is an Amazon company, allowing the Kindle team to tap into a very comprehensive movie database. As IMDb provides data for TV shows as well, adding TV shows to X-Ray was just a matter of time.

The idea is to make the video experience unique on Amazon’s devices, making people want to buy those tablets and stay in the Amazon ecosystem. It’s been known that Amazon doesn’t make much profit from selling hardware. Instead, it wants people to use the Kindle Fire tablets to buy content.

Of course, the X-Ray feature only works with videos you buy or rent from Amazon Instant Video or videos from the Amazon Prime collection. X-Ray could be one of those little features that make you choose Amazon over Netflix or iTunes.

In addition to providing the X-Ray feature to Kindle Fire users, the feature will make its way to Amazon Instant Video’s Wii U app. This little fact shows that what matters for Amazon is that people consume content from Amazon, no matter the platform. X-Ray for movies and TV shows may eventually come to Android and iOS.

If the experience is not compelling enough, customers will neglect their tablets and Amazon won’t make any money from those users. That’s why Amazon cut the price of the Kindle Fire HD 8.9″ as well from $299 to $269 for the base model. Amazon now wants to get the best tablet they can make in everyone’s hand so that people can start reading and watching content — Amazon content.

Developing…

For most of us, sitting in the waiting room, twiddling our thumbs, is as much a part of the doctor’s visit as stepping on a scale and getting our temperature read. But, according to data released Tuesday by doctor review site Vitals, where you live can make a difference.

Nationwide, the overall average doctor wait time actually decreased slightly, from 21 minutes last year to 20 minutes and 15 seconds. But the company said the shortest average wait time increased. Last year, Wisconsin led with an average wait time of 15 minutes and 26 seconds. This year, the state with the shortest wait time is Alaska, at 16 minutes. Denver topped the list of cities with the shortest times, with a wait of 15 minutes and 25 seconds.

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SynapDx Corp., a company developing a “blood-based autism spectrum disorder” diagnostic test, has sealed an undisclosed amount of funding from The Kraft Group. The Kraft Group, headquartered in Foxborough, Mass., is the holding company for the Kraft family’s various businesses.

PRESS RELEASE
SynapDx Corporation today announced it has secured a significant investment from The Kraft Group. The funding will support the ongoing clinical development of SynapDx’s breakthrough blood-based autism spectrum disorder (ASD) diagnostic test, designed to help clinicians identify children with autism earlier than they do today.

Conducting business in more than 90 countries with more than 5,000 employees worldwide, The Kraft Group, headquartered in Foxborough, Mass., is the holding company for the Kraft family’s various businesses, with interests in paper and packaging manufacturing, sports and entertainment, real estate development and a portfolio of private equity investments.

The Kraft Group investment, for which financial details were not disclosed, builds on SynapDx’s recent momentum, which includes a $6 million round in financing announced in December 2012, a $2 million investment from LabCorp and strategic partnership with next-generation sequencing pioneer Illumina. Working closely with ASD experts at leading institutions across the country, SynapDx will use the investment to fund further studies of its early ASD diagnostic test.

“The Kraft Group has a broadly admired business and philanthropic history with a deep interest in healthcare innovation,” said Stanley Lapidus, CEO, SynapDx. “This investment further validates our approach and the impact our test could have on families and patients.”

About SynapDx Corp.
SynapDx is a private company developing laboratory diagnostic services for autism and neurodevelopmental disorders, with the initial goal of enabling earlier detection of autism spectrum disorders (ASDs). The company collaborates with ASD experts at leading institutions. SynapDx was founded in 2010 and is based in Lexington, Mass. SynapDx’s investors include North Bridge Venture Partners, General Catalyst Partners and LabCorp.

The post The Kraft Group Invests in SynapDx appeared first on peHUB.

Redbox has just hit a major milestone in Canada. In only 10 months after launching the first kiosks outside of Vancouver (and eventually spreading across Western Canada), the company has hit 1 million total rentals.

To celebrate this milestone, Redbox is offering specific rental deals to Canadians, which can be found on Redbox Canada’s Facebook page until April 11th.

“We’re delighted that Canadians have chosen Redbox as their destination for easy, affordable entertainment a million times over in just 10 months,” said Ron Cihocki, country manager, Redbox Canada. “To thank Canada for helping us reach our one millionth rental, we invite customers to enjoy great rental offers by visiting our Facebook page over the coming weeks.”

For Redbox, Canada is a market in its infancy. In the U.S., Redbox sees 62 million rentals a month. As of the end of 2012, Redbox had rented out over 2.5 billions discs to U.S. customers.

Of course, Redbox kiosks are everywhere in the U.S., with over 34,000 locations nationwide. 68% of the U.S. population lives within a 5-minute drive of a Redbox kiosks. By comparison, there’s less than a thousand Redbox kiosks in Canada – so 1 million rentals is a big deal.

Redbox kiosks in Canada, like Redbox kiosks in the U.S., have just recently received a boost from the brand new Redbox Instant service.

Redbox Instant, the company’s streaming service with partner Verizon, just launched out of beta and became open to the public earlier this month. The service costs $8 a month for unlimited streaming of over 4,500 movies (no TV shows yet), and also contains 4 free DVD rentals built into the monthly price.

Flipboard has launched a big overhaul with version 2.0, which transforms the reading experience to something of a creation/curation experience. Now, in addition to reading news in a magazine-like format, you can create your own magazine-like experiences based on your interests.

“When you search, we instantly create a magazine out of your results. It’s faster, more visual, and easier to navigate,” explains the Flipboard team in a blog post. “And, for the first time, you can collect and save articles, photos, audio and video by organizing them into beautiful magazines. These can be private, or if you want to connect with like-minded enthusiasts, you can make them public and share them on Flipboard and beyond. Now everyone can be a reader and an editor.”

Users can hit the + button next to articles, create “magazine” names, and addd descriptions. There’s no limit to the number of magazines you can create (at least that’s what they say). In addition to news sources, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, SoundCloud, LinkedIn and Tumblr can be used for magazine content.

The new Flipboard also comes with more content, including a partnership with Etsy, which should mean good things for the rapidly growing online marketplace.

There’s a bookmarklet, which users can add to their browsers and use it to addd any piece of content on the web to Flipboard.

“If you’d like to be inspired, tap on ‘By Our Readers’ in the Content Guide, which contains a selection of magazines from staff and friends of Flipboard who’ve been experimenting with 2.0 in our beta program,” says Flipboard. “They include bloggers like Gardenista’s Michelle Slatalla, entrepreneurs like Kate Kendall, curators like Bureau of Trade’s Michael Phillips Moscowitz, small business owners like Elizabeth Leu, musicians like Linkin Park, and people with passions around graffiti, fashion, apps, horses, travel, food, kids and more. We’ll be highlighting many of them—and people like you!—in our blog in the coming weeks.”

Other new features include: a new content guide, commenting, more recommended reading, subsections in partner magazines, newspapers and websites, fast section switching, and optional Facebook Open Graph integration.

Flipboard’s redesign, of course, comes at a time when a lot of people are looking for replacements for Google Reader. For power users, Flipboard has hardly been an adequate alternative. Sure, it’s pretty, but for organizational and productivity purposes, it just hasn’t fit the bill. For the casual news reader, however, it’s an eye-pleasing experience, and possibly even better now.

Flipboard has a reported 50 million users. It’s unclear when the new features will make their way to Android.

Moovweb raised $16 million from by Jafco Ventures and Trinity Ventures in its first institutional financing. Existing investors, including Andy Bechtolsheim, also participated in the round.

PRESS RELEASE
Moovweb today announced the investment of $16 million by Jafco Ventures and Trinity Ventures in its first institutional financing. Existing investors, including Andy Bechtolsheim, also participated meaningfully in the round. The capital raised will be used to further the company’s vision to fundamentally transform Web development to create unmatched business agility for organizations of all sizes. The company also announced the appointment of industry operations and finance veteran Tony Russo as its new chief operating and financial officer.

“We feel very fortunate to continue this exponential growth with the help of Jafco and Trinity. Companies are recognizing that old development approaches simply aren’t working in a post-PC world. Moovweb’s experience platform was built to give businesses unprecedented power and flexibility in this new world.”

“In the last 18 months, our revenue has quadrupled,” said company founder and CEO, Ajay Kapur. “We feel very fortunate to continue this exponential growth with the help of Jafco and Trinity. Companies are recognizing that old development approaches simply aren’t working in a post-PC world. Moovweb’s experience platform was built to give businesses unprecedented power and flexibility in this new world.”

The Moovweb experience platform empowers businesses to go mobile by taking a fundamentally different approach to unifying their Web and mobile development. With Moovweb’s patent-pending site virtualization technology, a business’s mobile sites and apps inherit and stay in sync with a desktop site’s content, features and business logic. This approach allows powerful mobile experiences to be delivered in days, not months, and drives radically improved business agility over time. The cloud-based Moovweb platform has transformed nearly 12 billion mobile pages for some of the highest volume mobile sites, apps and tablet applications in the world, including: Macy’s, 1-800-FLOWERS.com, Sur la Table, Golfsmith, Vitacost, Kroger, Accenture, Cox Communications, Chico’s, Sharpie and many others.

Joe Horowitz, managing general partner at Jafco and Paul Sallaberry, a seasoned executive who held senior roles at Veritas and Oracle, recently joined Moovweb’s Board of Directors. Gus Tai from Trinity will be added as a Board observer.

“In my 30 years of experience in venture capital, I have never seen a company of the quality of Moovweb grow to such significance with such capital efficiency. This speaks to the quality of the team, its products and the enormous market opportunity that they are addressing,” stated Mr. Horowitz.

Also helping to lead the company into the next phase of growth is new Chief Operating and Financial Officer Tony Russo. Russo brings over 20 years of experience in managing and building companies from an operational and financial perspective, having most recently served as CFO at Efficient Frontier, a company that was acquired by Adobe last year.

“The opportunity for mobile commerce is predicted to reach more than $1 trillion in global mobile transactions by 2015,” said Tony Russo. “I joined the Moovweb team because of the company’s unique technology that enables organizations to take advantage of this mobile revolution. Moovweb has significant traction in the market and I look forward to helping them achieve even greater growth.”

About Moovweb

Moovweb’s vision is to fundamentally transform Web development to create unmatched business agility.
Our enterprise-class, cloud-based platform is transformational for businesses that need to innovate faster and drive extreme results through their mobile channels. The platform offers developers, design agencies and systems integrators a set of powerful tools to radically shorten delivery times for compelling mobile sites and native apps. The Moovweb platform is one of the world’s busiest, with nearly 12 billion mobile pages transformed for some of the world’s largest mobile sites and apps, including those for Macy’s, 1-800-FLOWERS.com, Sur la Table, Golfsmith, Vitacost, Kroger, Accenture, Cox Communications, Chico’s, Sharpie and dozens of others. Moovweb is headquartered in San Francisco.

Moovweb® is a registered trademarks of Moov Corporation. All other registered and unregistered trademarks in this document are the sole property of their respective owners.

The post Moovweb Scores $16M appeared first on peHUB.

Blume Distillation, a provider of bioethanol production equipment, has raised $2.2 million in Series A financing. The money will be used for the assembly of Blume Distillation’s prototype bioethanol production system.

PRESS RELEASE
Blume Distillation LLC, the leading provider of appropriate-scale alcohol fuel (bioethanol) production equipment, announced today the successful closing of its $2.2 million Series A financing round. The round comprises angel and impact investor backing. The funds are being used to accelerate the assembly of Blume Distillation’s prototype bioethanol production system. The Company is focused on developing and acquiring intellectual property in the areas of mechanical and biological systems, processes, and co-products. The company has added key engineering and development partners.

“For communities all over the world, the need for locally produced, clean and low cost fuel is absolutely life-critical,” said David Blume, Founder and Chief Technical Officer for Blume Distillation LLC. “Our advanced distillation technology will produce renewable alcohol fuel that is 98% pollution free and, because of modular designs, allow our customers the flexibility to produce fuel from a diverse range of available, sugar and carbohydrate-rich fuel feedstocks.”

Blume Distillation is engaged in the design and development of turnkey appropriate-scale equipment that will produce bio-ethanol from waste and surplus resources as well as native and cultivated crops. The commercial systems are designed to produce from 20,000 to 500,000 gallons of fuel a year, ideally suited to powering applications such as transportation, clean indoor cooking, electricity generation and refrigeration.

The Company has identified hundreds of thousands of potential equipment placements worldwide and received nearly 300 pre-sales order registrations. Key potential customers include food processing businesses, beverage producers, industrial/nutraceutical companies, commercial agriculture operations as well as waste haulers and individual business owners. The profit potential of bio-ethanol sales, the utilization of waste stream resources for fuel production and the ability to develop high-value coproducts support a capital equipment payback in as little as 24 months.

“We are pleased to have reached a significant fiscal milestone, successfully closing our seed stage funding round,” said Ryan Sarnataro, CEO at Blume Distillation LLC. “We have attracted an active community of investors who recognize the potential for making a positive global impact by advancing the localized production of renewable bio-ethanol. Our investors see the prospect of earning solid returns comparable to traditional venture capital offerings.”

In the past three years the company has reached a number of significant operation and development milestones and has added IP and proprietary design features that greatly enhance valuation. As a result, the company anticipates continued growth and the completion of prototype systems by Q3, 2013.

About Blume Distillation LLC
Blume Distillation LLC is focused on designing and developing world class small to mid-sized turnkey distillation systems that will produce bio-ethanol fuel from a diversity of locally available feedstock resources. Blume Distillation systems are suited to rapid deployment in a wide variety of commercial and geographic settings, designed to produce fuel at costs comparable or lower than large-scale producers.

The post Blume Distillation Inks $2.2M Series A appeared first on peHUB.

While the physical infrastructure that makes up the internet is colloquially known as a “series of tubes,” thanks to the late Sen. Ted Stevens, the physical infrastructure that comprises the cloud has no friendly sobriquet. What could we call it? A huddle of hypervisors? A bunch of boxes? A cluster of nodes?

But even without a cute name, the distributed infrastructure that underlies the web services that we turn to day in and out is just as important. And this year as we gear up for our sixth Structure event (June 19 and 20), dedicated to the infrastructure that serves both the internet and the cloud, we’re thinking about what’s changed in the last year and what’s ahead.

Last year, we spent a lot of time discussing software-defined everything — broadly, the abstraction of the physical hardware from the applications and even operating systems running on top of them. We had tiffs and debates over different platforms and whose APIs are really open. We even had a group hug.

This year’s focus: The physical cloud

Looking ahead, we’re peeling back some of the software-defined abstraction to focus on the physicality of the cloud. Like how do we build special-purpose architectures for our apps? What happens when we scale beyond the confines of the data center with dark fiber or other distributed resources?

We’ve got some amazing speakers signed up already: from Pat Gelsinger, the CEO of VMware who will undoubtedly hit upon the business side of the cloud, to Adrian Cockroft of Netflix, who will talk about some of the practical issues associated with supporting a giant movie streaming service on Amazon’s cloud. And of course, we’ll have Amazon’s Werner Vogels back for his sixth appearance onstage, where he’ll defend the online retailer’s title as the king of the cloud. Just kidding, this isn’t a boxing match, it’s an infrastructure conference. So please, no wagering.

Meet the people getting their hands dirty with deployments

And for those who have moved beyond the public and private cloud debates, or the “Is the cloud secure enough?” worries, we’ll have several practitioners discuss how they operate their businesses in the cloud. The CIOs of The Clorox Co., Revlon and Pabst Brewing Co. will all be onstage. We’ll also have tips for making sure your software is built to scale without breaking the bank, and processes for building out IT infrastructure in a more flexible manner.

One of the emerging trends we’re seeing in applications is that their architecture is no longer this static set of code, but is actually evolving not just with little tweaks, but with wholesale architectural rewrites. Speakers including Kevin Scott, an SVP of engineering at LinkedIn and Sam Schillace, a VP of engineering at Box will share their experiences building new application architectures to meet both scale and business needs. It’s not enough to keep your application from breaking. It needs to run efficiently for the business too.

So join us on June 19 and 20 in San Francisco at our Structure conference. We’re going to have something for everyone, from the business team to the developer community. Register now and get $500 off the regular ticket price with our earlybird discount. See you in San Francisco.

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Horizon Technology Finance Corp. provided a $5.5 million venture loan facility to Lotame Solutions Inc., maker of a data management platform for publishers, ad networks and marketers.

PRESS RELEASE
Horizon Technology Finance Corporation HRZN -1.10% (“Horizon”), a leading specialty finance company that provides secured loans to venture capital and private equity backed development-stage companies in the technology, life science, healthcare information and services, and clean-tech industries, today announced that it has closed a $5.5 million venture loan facility to Lotame Solutions, Inc. (“Lotame”), the leading data management platform for publishers, ad networks and marketers, to support the firm’s continued growth.

With Horizon’s financial support, Lotame plans to strengthen global initiatives across five continents, and make key hiring decisions to expand the sales, technology, and executive teams. These efforts are part of Lotame’s marketing strategy aimed at boosting adoption of their data management technology platform on a worldwide scale.

“Lotame is an exciting company with a strong entrepreneurial spirit,” stated Gerald A. Michaud, President of Horizon. “As Lotame continues to meet its strategic goals, we are pleased to provide the company with important growth capital to accelerate the sales and marketing of its innovative data management platform.”

“We appreciate the support and confidence in Lotame shown by Horizon with its $5.5 million venture loan facility,” said Andy Monfried, Founder & CEO of Lotame. “Horizon and its financing products came highly recommended to us, and its experienced team delivered a financing solution that provides us with the additional liquidity we need to execute our business plan and meet the strong and growing demand for our data management products and services.”

About Horizon Technology Finance Horizon Technology Finance Corporation is a business development company that provides secured loans to development-stage companies backed by established venture capital and private equity firms within the technology, life science, healthcare information and services, and clean-tech industries. The investment objective of Horizon Technology Finance is to maximize total risk-adjusted returns by generating current income from a portfolio of directly originated secured loans as well as capital appreciation from warrants to purchase the equity of portfolio companies. Headquartered in Farmington, Connecticut, with regional offices in Walnut Creek, California and Reston, Virginia, the Company is externally managed by its investment advisor, Horizon Technology Finance Management LLC. Horizon’s common stock trades on the NASDAQ Global Select Market under the ticker symbol, “HRZN.” In addition, the Company’s 7.375% Senior Notes due 2019 trade on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol “HTF.” To learn more, please visit www.horizontechnologyfinancecorp.com.

About Lotame Lotame is the global leader in unifying data management, empowering innovative publishers, networks, and brands to unlock the full value of their audience data. Clients leverage Lotame’s Unifying DMP, Crowd Control® to collect unstructured audience data from disparate sources anywhere, and organize it into one user friendly interface to convert that audience data into action, insights and intelligence everywhere. With Lotame, publishers, networks and brands can make informed decisions, build unique products and drive positive business outcomes from their data assets. For more information, visit www.lotame.com.

Forward-Looking Statements Statements included herein may constitute “forward-looking statements” within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Statements other than statements of historical facts included in this press release may constitute forward-looking statements and are not guarantees of future performance, condition or results and involve a number of risks and uncertainties. Actual results may differ materially from those in the forward-looking statements as a result of a number of factors, including those described from time to time in our filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The Company undertakes no duty to update any forward-looking statement made herein. All forward-looking statements speak only as of the date of this press release.

The post Lotame Solutions Inks Debt Financing appeared first on peHUB.

Not so long ago occupying the “corner office” was a sign that managers had reached the pinnacle of status in their organizations. However, the spare bedroom in one’s house has quietly usurped the corner office when it comes to the alpha position in organizations, as increased working from home (or from wherever) has come to signal greater power and autonomy within an organization.

In this sense, Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer’s recent dictate to report to work was viewed as much as an attack on individual freedom as an attack on the family. Paradoxically, FastCompany.com published an article that same week about how “employees work beyond the cube,” showcasing Plantronics‘ decision to give their employees the choice to either work from home, commute to headquarters, or join one of three Bay Area locations of NextSpace (shared workspaces). The co-working choice was heralded as a win-win for workers and their companies, with proximity, diversity and choice of location all stimulating creativity. Google then chimed in by saying that they don’t even have a policy — at least that anyone could find — that says when and where people need to work. Their belief is that a workplace that is comfortable, healthy, and inviting drives the desire to be there.

What these examples all hinge on, however, is autonomy — control over how you use time and space. It is important to realize that when one works from home, that person (typically) has total control over time and space. However, at the office, control over one’s minutes-in-the-day and who’s-standing-at-my-door-now, evaporates. For this reason, I am a big fan of cave-and-commons designs in offices — private spaces (caves) where one can work without being interrupted by colleagues walking by or cube chatter. (Of course, it’s also a good idea to turn your cellphone off.) And close-by, common areas where team members can pull together for critical face-to-face time. If you take all the caves away, people are distracted and interrupted and creativity falters.

Every organization needs the right balance of caves and commons — and what that precise balance is depends on what the organization’s particular goals and challenges are, and more granularly, what the immediate situation of a work team is. The overarching truth is this: there is no question that physical distance creates barriers to communication. However, constant co-habitation can decrease performance, particularly when people are working on creative tasks. In my work and teaching, many are surprised by the fact that over five decades of research have unequivocally shown that people working alone are more creative than those working in teams. Given that the tasks facing organizations and teams require flexibility, a cave-and-commons approach to organizational design helps ensure that people can work individually, away from potential distractions, but also can nimbly pull themselves together for teamwork.

How do you know when to emphasize the commons and pull people together, and when to free them up to find and spend time in caves? In my book, Creative Conspiracy, I set out these guiding rules:

Ring the team dinner bell and find the commons (in other words, get to the office for a team meeting) when:

• the group first forms (norms and expectations can be set within microseconds of a group’s first meeting);
• the overarching goal is not clear;
• trust is low (physical co-presence increases trust and bonding) — for example, oxytocin, the human bonding hormone, is released when people can connect physically;
• uncertainty is high;
• a crisis erupts;
• conflict needs to be resolved (conflicts that are dealt with via email and text start to spiral out of control as compared to face to face interaction) — people are more likely to “flame” each other in an email, but not face to face; and
• when team members need to give and receive feedback.

Extend the curfew and allow people to go home or at least find their private, uninterrupted space — perhaps at home:

• after the group is formed;
• when the work to be done is clear, deliverables specified and the group has essentially completed a team charter;
• when status differences exist that might stifle the input of younger, less senior people and their input is needed — for example, when teams meet virtually, merit is the biggest determinant of influence (not personal charisma); and
• when participation is uneven — for example, when groups meet in person only one person can talk at a time and typically one person dominates — but this is not true when meeting virtually.

Ideally, every organization should allow some flexibility on the where-and-when-to-work question — if not for any other reason than to optimize performance across the diverse set of challenges that teams face. If organizations don’t take proactive steps, people manufacture their own caves — whether by working from home, putting on earphones to tune out the drivel, or simply slipping out to the local WiFi café. The same is true for commons — there is a human need for people to gather around the water cooler and so, making the workplace inviting in different ways can build community. The challenge for leaders is in achieving the right balance through informal influence and modeling, and formal policy moves.

Tidemark is putting a fresh spin on its cloud-based enterprise performance management applications with infographic-like visualizations of financial planning data, showing that the consumerization trend popular with IT is fit for finance and operations staffers, too.

Sidestepping static dashboards, Tidemark’s shareable Storylines feature lends itself to adoption by people beyond the chief financial officer, according to company founder and CEO, Christian Gheorghe. The idea was born a few months ago, Gheorghe said.

He was “frustrated with the fact that we have had all these years to understand businesses better with all kinds of analytical tools, and yet most people can create a fantasy football pool to see (who can) win faster than they can understand how their company is doing from a performance perspective,” he said. The result — infographic formats based around company health, workforce, profitability and other areas — is a “home experience brought to work, not the other way around,” Gheorghe said.

Tidemark takes less time to implement than legacy offerings from IBM and Oracle — 90 days instead of six to nine months, Gheorghe said. Tidemark, which has raised $35 million from Andreessen Horowitz and Greylock Partners, among others, competes for marketshare in the cloud enterprise performance management space alongside Adaptive Planning, Anaplan and Host Analytics. Whether infographics are the best means or not, the appealing presentation calls to mind the cool visualizations more common in business intelligence, and Tidemark’s competitors might have to come up with their own answers to keep up.

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Another established hardware startup is turning to Kickstarter to help fund its next wares. This time it’s the turn of Click & Grow, maker of the smart garden that lets you grow a plant indoors with little or no intervention. After selling over 50,000 units of its first device, the Palo Alto, U.S. registered company with an R&D lab in Estonia, is launching a crowdfunding campaign to get its second generation product — the Smart Herb Garden — off the ground.

Hoping to raise a minimum of $75,000, the money will be used to turn a functioning prototype into something production-ready, with a shipping date loosely pegged for September. The Smart Herb Garden builds on Click & Grow’s first product, but with several improvements following feedback from customers; namely that people want to grow more than one plant at a time and that the amount of natural light available in a person’s home is often not enough for healthy plant growth. The new improved version features a built-in LED light, as well as a change in the plant pot part of the design to make it easy to grow three different plants simultaneously, with the same ‘smart’ technology taking care of the heavy lifting. It also plugs into a power socket rather than relying on four AA batteries, while the new design negates the need for a pump or sensor.

The aim of Click & Grow’s smart garden system is to automatically provide the correct water and nutrient balance needed for indoor plants to grow. The company claims that 3 years of R&D has gone into the Smart Herb Garden, of which the core technology is the growth medium, a nanotech material engineered to “supply plant roots with the right amount of oxygen, water and nutrients at any time”. This is supported by the newly incorporated LED light. In practice, you simply insert the supplied cartridges and fill the reservoir with water. Then power the thing on and — bingo — in a matter of weeks you should see green shoots of awesomeness. If plants are your thing, of course.

“Very few can afford to launch a new product and fail”

The Smart Herb Garden starter kit will come with cartridges for basil, thyme and lemon balm. Refills will be available for various herbs, lettuce, mini tomato, chili pepper, and even strawberries, apparently.

Once it finally reaches market, the Smart Herb Garden is expected to retail for $79 but Kickstarter backers can bag it for $39 for a white model, or at the top tier, $1,000 for a “next generation interactive model”, though the latter is short on details.

As for why a VC-funded startup would choose to go down the crowdfunding route — Click & Grow has raised over €1.5 million from backers WNB and Primo Holding — founder Mattias Lepp tells TechCrunch that “for makers of novel hardware, Kickstarter is the best place to sense check your ideas before you start assembly lines”.

It’s hoped Kickstarter will enable the company to validate the market for its new product and get feedback on prices and colour options, dimensions, and the plants that people want to grow. “So I’d say it’s first and foremost a market insights platform,” he says. “And of course, the money also helps at our stage.”

For hardware companies like Click & Grow who have already had some success and raised funding, it’s not that they can’t afford to start manufacturing a new product, it’s that “very few can afford to launch a new product and fail”, says Lepp.

Yesterday you may have noticed that your Facebook news feed was very red, and that there were a bunch of equals signs everywhere. This was the result of the Supreme Court beginning to hear arguments on California’s Prop 8 same-sex marriage ban. All of the red equals signs were simply marriage equality supporters, well, showing their support.

The red equals sign was a play on the standard blue and yellow equals sign logo for the Human Rights Campaign.

Today, Facebook has some quick numbers on the top-buzzing terms over the last day, and it looks like equality has won out.

According to Facebook’s Talk Meter, which looks at buzz around specific events, the term “Equality” was the most-used term surrounding the gay marriage debate. Facebook says its use was up 5,000% on Tuesday.

Also:

The top age group talking about the landmark cases yesterday, in advance of oral arguments, was the 35-44 range followed by 25-34 and 45-54.

Geographically speaking, people in Washington, D.C. were buzzing the most in anticipation of the hearings, followed by users in Utah, Oklahoma, Arkansas, California, Oregon, New Mexico, Nevada, Arizona, and Colorado.

Here’s Facebook’s full list of the top ten terms buzzing on the network on Tuesday.

1. Equality
2. DOMA
3. Supreme Court
4. Perry
5. Kennedy
6. Prop 8
7. Kagan
8. SCOTUS
9. Scalia
10. Defense of Marriage

Don’t expect the Facebook buzz for same-sex-related and Supreme Court-related topics to die down today. Tuesday, the court heard arguments on California’s Prop 8. But today, the court will begin to hear arguments on the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act, or DOMA, which barred many federal agencies from recognizing same-sex marriage (in terms of some benefits and such). Many high-profile tech companies and other American businesses (including Facebook) have filed a amicus brief arguing that DOMA is simply bad for business.