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Plenty of companies have woken up to the reality that IT administrators, executives, salespeople and others want to use their mobile devices to get a sense of their operations. Now Dyn, which provides DNS and email-delivery services for enterprises, has bought Trendslide, which has built out simple mobile dashboards for keeping track of sales data and other inputs.

But Dyn doesn’t want to offer that to its customers; it will transform the app into a tool for devops. In other words, instead of integrating with Salesforce.com, Marketo, Google Analytics and other data sources, users will be able to bring together application-performance management data from providers such as New Relic and Compuware’s Gomez alongside analytics on domain-name server queries and big email campaigns. That sort of mobile app could make it easy for devops guys to see from home if applications are operating without issue, email campaigns are working as they should and DNS queries are going through data centers as they should and within the bounds of what customers have signed up for. If there are issues, devops should be alerted that they need to act.

The acquisition, whose terms were not disclosed, ties in nicely with website-performance analytics technology from Verelo, which Dyn also has acquired.

Cory von Wallenstein, Dyn’s chief technology officer (pictured), was the original investor in Trendslide. He will speak about upgrading infrastructure while maintaining uptime at GigaOM’s Structure conference in San Francisco on June 20.

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If you’re like me, you’ve probably already used up most of the free 5GB Google provides to Google Drive users. You may even be thinking about upgrading. You might want to hold off on that as Google is about to upgrade everybody for free.

Google announced today that its unifying storage across Gmail, Google+ photos and Google Drive accounts. To be specific, Google account holders now have 15GB to store all of their content across all three services. Here’s how Google describes it:

With this new combined storage space, you won’t have to worry about how much you’re storing and where. For example, maybe you’re a heavy Gmail user but light on photos, or perhaps you were bumping up against your Drive storage limit but were only using 2 GB in Gmail. Now it doesn’t matter, because you can use your storage the way you want.

Google is also updating its Google Drive storage page to better reflect how much data is being used across all three services. By hovering over the pie chart, it will bring up how much data each service is using:

As you can see in the above image, Google will soon be eliminating the option to upgrade to 25GB of storage for $2.49 a month. With the move to 15GB of unified storage, Google Drive users can upgrade to either 100GB for $4.99 a month, or 200GB for $9.99 a month.

This all sounds well and good, but what about Google Apps users? Google didn’t forget about its enterprise customers as it will be giving them 30GB of unified storage across Google Drive, Gmail and Google+ photos. As always, files created in Docs, Sheets and Slides won’t count against the limit, and only photos larger than 2048px will count towards the limit on Google+.

Regular Google account holders and Google Apps users will both start seeing the new unified storage system show up in their accounts over the coming weeks.

Angie Everhart has announced that she is battling thyroid cancer and will undergo surgery this week.

Everhart’s rep made a statement about the diagnosis, saying, “Word has been trickling out about supermodel/actress Angie Everhart’s health. She wants to set the record straight by letting everyone know that it is true that she has been diagnosed with thyroid cancer, however, the prognosis is very good.”

Everhart decided to go public with her battle in order to inspire others to learn about cancer prevention. As single mom to a 3-year old son, she says her main priority is getting well enough to get back to “mommy duty”.

Everhart is the latest in a string of celebrities who have battled thyroid cancer and come out on the other end successful, including Brooke Burke-Charvet and Sofia Vergara. Vergara was diagnosed in 2000 and had her thyroid removed, but is enjoying a healthy life these days. Burke-Charvet also endured surgery but says she credits a healthy diet and exercise routine for her energy.

“I was already eating healthy, but it really confirms how good I feel when I work out,” Burke, 41, said. “After lying around for a few weeks, I was like, ‘I need to move. I need to sweat and get that adrenaline rush.’ It’s the best antidepressant. It’s like the best medicine in the world.”

Prayers for my client guys – Angie Everhart — Diagnosed with Thyroid Cancer tmz.com/2013/05/13/ang… via @tmz

— Melinda (@melindagale) May 13, 2013

I like her. Praying for her recovery. RT @tmz: Angie Everhart — Diagnosed with Thyroid Cancer tmz.me/ZV7imo

— Elle, oh Elle (@elle_emm_aitch) May 13, 2013

The Rolling Stones are still touring and still releasing albums. Meanwhile, the band has managed to stay relevant by using social media to keep its fans engaged and attracting some of the hottest new music stars in the business.

This weekend, The Rolling Stones rocked the MGM Grand in Las Vegas with a sold-out crowd. The band’s special guest of the night was none other than pop star Katy Perry, who sang a duet with Mick Jagger. The song the two sang – “Beast of Burden” – was chosen by fans using the Rolling Stones’ official mobile app.

Perry was obviously thrilled to sing and dance with the legendary band. She tweeted out her thanks to The Rolling Stones on Sunday, complete with pictures:

Follow @katyperry

Katy Perry
@katyperry

Mick & Kate forever! @MickJaggerhttp://t.co/0d0FVsIpzW

 Reply  ·  Retweet  ·  Favorite
16 hours ago via Twitpic · powered by @socialditto

Follow @katyperry

Katy Perry
@katyperry

Thanks for letting me be the 5th wheel last night! @TheRollingStoneshttp://t.co/awaEVDjU2t

 Reply  ·  Retweet  ·  Favorite
16 hours ago via Twitpic · powered by @socialditto

(Image courtesy J. Bouquet/The Rolling Stones)

Bing announced the addition of some more information about people in its autosuggest feature. Now, when you search for celebrities, politicians, athletes, or people with LinkedIn profiles, Bing will provide info about that person in the drop-down with the search suggestions.

In cases where there are multiple people with the same name, it will ask which one you meant:

The feature is part of Bing’s “snapshot” pane, which Bing launched last year.

“The goal of Bing’s Snapshot feature – our center column on the main results page – is to help people find information they need to understand their world,” a Bing spokesperson tells WebProNews. “With the people category as the second largest searched on Bing, we’re giving you another way to find people faster and directly from the search box.”

According to Dan Marantz, Lead Program Manager for Bing Query Formulation UX, people searches are the second most searched for category, after navigational queries, and account for roughly 10% of queries on Bing.

“In the milliseconds between keystrokes, Bing lets you narrow down your search by clicking on the correct person,” he says. “If Bing has information on a person, we let you know by displaying it below the search box. In some instances, multiple people share the same name. When this happens, we’ll provide information for the most relevant people with that name, and help you narrow down your search.”

The new autosuggest feature was co-developed By the Search Technological Center in London.

The feature appears to be in the process or rolling out.

Golub Capital said Monday that it provided a $75 million second lien term loan and $4 million in co-investment equity to support Frazier Healthcare‘s buy of AndersonBrecon. AndersonBrecon, which has facilities in Rockford, Ill. and the U.K., provides packaging services.

PRESS RELEASE

CHICAGO, May 13, 2013 /PRNewswire/ — Golub Capital announced today that as Sole Bookrunner, Lead Arranger and Administrative Agent it provided a $75 million second lien term loan and $4 million in co-investment equity to support the acquisition of AndersonBrecon by Packaging Coordinators, Inc. (“PCI”), a Frazier Healthcare (“Frazier”) portfolio company. PCI, a provider of pharmaceutical and biotechnology packaging services, will combine with AndersonBrecon to offer services on a global customer scale.
“We are very pleased to have successfully closed PCI’s acquisition of AndersonBrecon. The merged company is a strong business with terrific growth prospects,” stated Stefano Robertson , a Managing Director at Golub Capital and the head of their Healthcare Finance team. “This is our second deal with Frazier in the past year and we have a high regard for their ability to strategically position their portfolio companies for both organic and acquisitive growth. We look forward to continuing our work together in the future.”
Brian Morfitt , a Partner at Frazier, commented, “Working with both the Healthcare Finance and Capital Markets teams at Golub Capital was a seamless experience. Their leadership throughout the process helped provide strong certainty and facilitated a path to closing.”
About Golub Capital
With $8 billion of capital under management, Golub Capital is a leading provider of financing solutions for the middle market, including one-loan financings (through the firm’s proprietary GOLD, MEGA GOLD and MINI GOLD facilities), senior, second lien, and subordinated debt, preferred stock and co-investment equity. The firm underwrites and syndicates senior credit facilities up to $250 million. Golub Capital’s hold sizes range up to $150 million per transaction.
Golub Capital has been a top 3 Traditional Middle Market Bookrunner each year from 2008 through 2012 for senior secured loans of up to $100 million for leveraged buyouts (according to Thomson Reuters LPC and internal data; based on number of deals). In 2012, Golub Capital was awarded the ACG New York Champion’s Award for “Senior Lender Firm of the Year.” Golub Capital is a national firm with principal offices in Chicago and New York. For more information, please visit the firm’s website at www.golubcapital.com.
About Frazier Healthcare
Founded in 1991, Frazier Healthcare is a leading provider of growth equity and venture capital to high growth and emerging healthcare service and biopharma companies. With over $1.8 billion under management across seven funds, Frazier Healthcare has invested in more than 140 companies across the entire developmental spectrum. From seed stage venture investments to leveraged recapitalizations of cash generating companies, Frazier Healthcare has established itself among entrepreneurs and seasoned executives as a preferred partner to help create and grow successful healthcare companies. For more information about Frazier Healthcare, visit the company’s website at www.frazierhealthcare.com.

The post AndersonBrecon Receives $75 mln Loan From Golub Capital appeared first on peHUB.

Cloud storage solution SkyDrive is getting additional functionality. Microsoft is banking on the service becoming the primary storage method for those who are part of the company’s ecosystem. The software giant has made SkyDrive a focus in both Windows 8 and Office 2013 / 365 Home Premium.

Microsoft’s Omar Shahine announces that “starting today and rolling out over the next 48 hours, we’re making it easier for you to see all of your photos in SkyDrive across all your albums and folders based on a timeline view”. With timeline view you will be able to scroll down to navigate through all of the images. They are organized into groups by event and time.

Shahine describes it thus — “Take 20 pictures at a birthday party with your phone, and then a photo of your parking spot at the airport a few hours later? Now they’ll appear as two different groups in the timeline”.

Timeline is not the only update SkyDrive users can expect. Microsoft also promises to improve upload times by two to three times. It does so through changes to both the app and the server code.

The company also promises full resolution uploads of photos and videos in all markets where Windows Phone 8 is available, as well as a new thumbnail view, with improved readability of the files and folders you have in SkyDrive. This also features the introduction of new thumbnails for your PowerPoint and Word files.

As stated by Shahine, the update is rolling out gradually and should reach all users within the next 48 hours. Microsoft claims photos are the most common file type seen in SkyDrive.

Although visualization is hardly the most technologically challenging part of the data-analysis puzzle, it’s arguably the most important.

Storage, databases, query processing and algorithms are all extremely important — heck, visualization is next to nothing without them — but in a data-driven world where is obsessed with insights, they’re just the foundational layers. They are to big data what server and network configurations are to mobile-app development on platforms like Parse. If you’re going to find out new things from massive and highly complex data sets, or going to give new types of people the ability to analyze even simple data, the presentation of that data and the ability to create consumable presentations are critical.

With that in mind, here are six startups I’ve seen trying to fundamentally change the way that data is visualized. Some are highly complex under the covers, some are not and none are perfect, but they’re all doing their part to make us rethink what it means to look at data and make spreadsheets and static charts look like relics. (And this list is by no means exhaustive, so feel free to add your favorite visualization tools in the comments.) We’ll be highlighting data visualization at our design-focused RoadMap conference in San Francisco in November (sign up here to get first access to tickets this Summer).

Ayasdi

The idea of network graphs isn’t new, but Ayasdi’s approach to it is. Under the covers, there’s an HBase data store, a technique called topographical data analysis and hundreds of machine learning algorithms to churn through complex data sets and determine the similarity among the data points. To the end user, though, there’s a map of the data set that looks a lot like a network graph (only it’s probably not network data) highlighting clusters of related data points that analysts might want to investigate further.

BeyondCORE

BeyondCore actually operates under the same basic premise as Ayasdi — show users the significant correlations so they don’t have to think of the queries that will uncover them — but it uses some different techniques to get there. It uses a different visualization method, too: BeyondCore sticks to standard charts, but actually offers the option of having an avatar talk users through the correlations the software has discovered.

ClearStory

ClearStory has a pretty unique product in the works — even if it’s keeping many details and all of its screenshots under lock and key until its formally launches. Essentially, though, it’s trying to tell stories via visualizations that display mashups of numerous data sources, update automatically when the source data changes, and invoke collaboration and social concepts. Here’s Co-founder and CEO Sharmila Mulligan explaining the idea behind ClearStory at Structure: Data in March.

Datahero

Unlike so many data startups, Datahero isn’t trying to woo people fed up with business-intelligence software or the difficulties of getting insights from Hadoop data. Rather, it’s trying to let people with simple business or personal data make simple charts without ever having to enter an Excel function or worry too much about how their spreadsheets are formatted. Early on, Datahero’s visualizations are still pretty commonplace (bars, pies, plots, etc.), but it’s the ease of creating them that’s so unique.

Platfora

Platfora has undertaken the ambitious task of trying to make analyzing mountains of data stored in Hadoop clusters as easy as analyzing their own Stripe data might be for developers using Datahero. It’s based on a foundation of Hadoop and massively parallel query processing, but is presented like an HTML5 version of current visualization golden boy Tableau that’s all about dragging, dropping, and visually slicing and dicing through data. The latter capability is actually critical in a big data world where there are likely more data points than you can ever digest at once.

Zoomdata

Zoomdata is far from the only analytics company to support mobile devices, but it’s one of the few I know of (Roambi also comes to mind) designed primarily for them. Zoomdata connects to standard business data sources, but takes advantage of touch screens and the D3.js visualization project to offer up some visually interesting charts that are designed to be manipulated like an artist’s palette.

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Ubitus said Monday it had raised more than $15 million cash from multiple leading investors including Samsung Venture Investment Corp. Ubitus, of Taipei, Taiwan, provides cloud gaming solutions.

PRESS RELEASE

TAIPEI, Taiwan, May 13, 2013 /PRNewswire/ — Ubitus Inc., the worldwide technology leader in cloud gaming solutions, today announced it has raised over $15 million cash from multiple international leading investors including Samsung Venture Investment Corporation (Samsung Ventures) for further spearheading the push of cloud gaming to next level.
Since its first cloud gaming deployment in Japan in September 2011, Ubitus had been leading the global market in deploying commercial cloud gaming services with top-tier carriers and OEMs spanning across the United States, Japan, South Korea and China (including Hong Kong).
Backed by the solid market-proven track records, the new round funding led by Samsung Ventures, the venture capital arm of the Samsung Group with mandate to invest in companies that are closely tied to the overall strategy of Samsung Group, will further support Ubitus’ determined endeavor in advancing the cloud gaming to an unprecedented level especially in the TV market.
“We are delighted that leading investors like Samsung Ventures shares Ubitus’ conviction that making video games playing as accessible as the movie and music streaming services nowadays can forever change the way people enjoy games in the past 20 years,” said Wesley Kuo , CEO of Ubitus.
Going forward, with the new investment garnered, Ubitus is committed to take cloud gaming to next level by building new gaming experiences with more instant and social features that are expected to roll out in Q3 this year.
About Ubitus Inc.
Ubitus Inc., the technology leader in deploying cloud-enabled rich media services, offers innovative cloud computing solutions for device manufacturers, wired/wireless communication service providers, telecommunication operators and digital content developers. Founded in 2007 and headquartered in Taipei, Taiwan, the company now has over 200 employees and offices in United States, Japan, Korea and China.
About Samsung Venture Investment Corporation
Samsung Venture Investment Corporation manages investment and investment-related activities for Samsung affiliate companies. The investment mandate for Samsung Venture Investment Corporation tracks closely to the strategic priorities of Samsung affiliate companies’ core operating divisions, and encompasses investments in semiconductors, displays, telecommunications, and consumer electronics.

The post Ubitus Raises Over $15 Mln appeared first on peHUB.

Azureus Software has released Vuze 5.0, a major update of its open-source, cross-platform BitTorrent client. Version 5.0’s improvements and changes have been focused on its “core functionality”, making the locating, adding and downloading of torrents much easier with this release.

This has been achieved by tweaking the user interface, Sidebar and Library views to make these features more visible, and are joined by other changes, including better tools for accessing Vuze remotely and a new tagging system for managing torrents.

Vuze 5.0’s most visible change is found with the new Toolbar Split feature. Toolbar buttons have been moved from the top of the screen to individual view screens, so only relevant options are displayed. In their place go a new search bar and Open Torrents button for adding and finding torrents.

The Sidebar has also been tweaked, with the Files section now described as My Torrents and moved to the top of the Sidebar view. A new view — Content Discovery — has also been added, into which all sections used for locating content, including RSS subscriptions and the Vuze HD Network, can be found.

The new Tags feature sits alongside Vuze’s existing Categories feature, and allow users to assign multiple tags to individual torrents. Azureus admits that Tags will eventually replace Categories altogether, but in this release the two sit side-by-side. Tags can be found in the My Torrents section of the Sidebar.

Vuze 5.0 also adds Torrent Details to the bottom of the library view, saving users the bother of right-clicking a torrent and choosing Show Details to view them. The available tabs including Sources, Peers, Swarm, Pieces and Speed. The Speed view provides a graph allowing users to monitor the performance of a torrent’s upload and download speed over time. A new set of country flags have also been added to make peer locations easy to identify.

The Vuze Remote UI, a separate web-based app for remotely managing torrents via mobile device as well as remote computer, has also been updated for the first time in over two years. Changes include Torrent Info, new Peers and Tracker views, Files View with Priority Setting, and Meta Search on newer iPhones.

Vuze 5.0.0.0 is available now as a free, open-source download for Windows, Mac and Linux.

Photo Credit: Novelo/Shutterstock

Dots for iOS is a simple color-matching puzzler from the folks at New York City-based Betaworks. The free iPhone-only game launched earlier this month, quickly climbing the App Store charts and rapidly racking up more than 1 million downloads.

Initially Dots seems like something of an odd fit for Betaworks. The young media incubator is probably best known for its acquisition of Digg last summer, followed by its recent gain of a majority stake in popular read-it-later service Instapaper. The company simply doesn’t have a history in gaming, and as detailed on the Betaworks blog, Dots’ introduction was, in fact, something of a happy accident.

Betaworks’ resident hacker Patrick Moberg ended up creating the game following several interaction design experiments. It’s experiments like these that Betaworks hope will help the company in gaining valuable user engagement insight. Speaking to Mashable, Betaworks’ Paul Murphy explained that the release of Dots will help the company learn “how to keep people engaged,” adding that what it gains will be applied to Digg and other Betaworks products.

So, is the free game worth your time, or is it just a bare-bones experiment aimed to help Betaworks better its other products? Well, as it turns out, it can be both.

How it works

The straightforward, visually pleasing puzzler tasks you with clearing your game board of as many colored dots as possible within 60 seconds, all in the pursuit of gaining a leading high score.

To clear the dots you must match a minimum of two, dragging your finger in a straight line from one corresponding colored dot to another. Once a link is made the dots promptly disappear and the board refills, replacing them as quickly as you can remove them. A point is awarded for each dot you manage to clear.

Things get interesting when you manage to connect four or more identical dots in a square formation. Doing this will clear the board of all dots of that squares given color. After a few play-throughs, the importance of making squares becomes overly apparent, as they are key to ensuring that you set a respectable high-score that linear connections alone can’t assure.

Comparing your high score to those of your friends is done via Twitter or Facebook. You can chose to connect to just one service, or both, as a means to see your friends results. Support for Apple’s Game Center is sadly lacking, which is a shame as the ability to challenge friends to beat your tally would be a nice addition, especially considering the connections to Twitter and Facebook are underused — you can’t tap on a friend’s name to fire off a challenge via a tweet for example.

Gaining an even loftier score can be achieved by use of power-ups. Dots presents you with three choices to advance your game further, all of which add a certain degree of strategy into the mix. The first, Time Stops, pauses the one-minute countdown for five seconds, giving you extra time if you feel you’re having a particularly good run, and would like just a little longer to rack up some more points. The second power-up is known as a Shrinker, offering the ability to remove a single dot from the game board just by double-tapping it — these come in handy if one dot is standing in the way between you and completing an all-important square. Finally, the third power-up is known as an Expander — these do the same as a completed square, removing all dots of a chosen color.

To use these power-ups you need to purchase them with your gained dots. You soon amass a decent number from just regular play, as each high score is added to your dots total at the end of each game.

For the impatient, dots can also be bought with real cash — 5,000 will cost you 69 cents, 15,000 will set you back $1.49, whereas 50,000 are priced at $2.99. However, due to the ease of which dots can be attained from normal play, buying extra with real money is in no way essential, and instead just a nice way to add to the tip jar for an otherwise free game.

There are times during play when you’ll see a square for the taking made up of more than four dots, and yet despite how tempting it may be to take the time to join the additional points up, especially due to the delightful feedback you receive with each connection, it is a misuse of your ticking seconds. Whether you score a square of four dots or nine, the end result is fundamentally the same — all those colored dots are going to be added to the tally and disappear regardless, so chaining a larger square is purely wasted time. Initially this lack of reward for forming larger squares may seem like a frustrating omission, yet the truth lies in Dots’ clean and clear simplicity. One dot equals one point, and it always will.

Clearing dots is as simple as it sounds, at times captivating and calming, at others frantic and frustrating. The addition of a few select power-ups give this lightweight game just enough in terms of depth to make the high-score objective appealing and incessantly addictive.

Dots is a wholly satisfying pick-up-and-play game, perfect for those fleeting free moments.

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At Google I/O this week, the elephant in the room cloud-wise, will be whether the company announces “general availability” of the Google Compute Engine (GCE), the Amazon Web Services competitor announced at last year’s event. A month ago, Google cracked open access to GCE by making what had been an invite-only service  available to any customers who pay $400 a month for Google Gold support. It’s unclear how many customers took advantage of that offer — or even how many customers have Gold support. My money’s on Google taking the GA plunge but then again the company is known for fielding “preview” products for years. Still, Urs Hölzle, SVP of technical infrastructure for the Google and Greg DeMichillie, director of product management for Google’s Cloud Platform, will host a session Wednesday afternoon on the next-generation of cloud computing which will feature “announcements and demo important new features of the Platform.” Hmmm, smells like a GA announcement to me. A Google spokeswoman said she had nothing to share at this time but referred users to the above-mentioned session. One of the things Google is expected to do is drive use of its cloud platform via its Google Drive and Apps franchises and right on cue, Google on Monday said customers will get 15 GB of unified storage across Google Apps, Drive and Google +. According to the Google Drive blog post:

“So, instead of  having 10 GB for Gmail and another 5 GB for Drive and Google+ Photos, you’ll now get 15 GB of unified storage for free to use as you like between Drive, Gmail, and Google+ Photos.”

While that’s not really tripling the amount of storage for Google users, as some have reported — it actually spreads it across Google properties. But 15GB is still more than what competitive free services offer. Dropbox offers 2GB for free; Microsoft SkyDrive starts users at 7GB for free while Apple iCloud and Amazon Cloud Storage provide 5GB before charges apply.

GA or not, here it comes

But getting back to GCE, here’s the thing:  even some AWS cronies say that GCE is the cloud infrastructure to watch in the upcoming year given Google’s experience in scale-out computing. It would also make sense for Google to roll out a for-real load balancer service, which one AWS partner said is a huge hole in Google’s platform strategy compared to both AWS and Rackspace. Google has also been working to beef up Google App Engine capabilities, something that Snapchat co-founder Bobby Murphy will doubtless address at GigaOM’s Structure event next month. The popular Snapchat photo sharing service runs on GAE. Google telegraphed (by virtue of its Google I/O agenda) that will add a new language to the fold for its Google App Engine Platform as a Service (PaaS). GAE now supports Java, Python, and Go. Speculation at Reddit is that PHP will get the nod . Thomas Clayburn over at InformationWeek would prefer to see Google add Node.js or JavaScript first, so we’ll see. Some also say Google needs better integrate its Cloud SQL database service into its cloud platform

Battle for public cloud workloads ratchets up

Whatever Google’s official roll-out plans, GCE is already considered a contender in a hard-fought battle for public cloud infrastructure dominance by virtue of Google’s size and expertise.  AWS, launched in 2006, has a prodigious head start, but now with Microsoft’s Windows Azure  and GCE coming on line, AWS faces two extremely well-funded and tech-savvy rivals, both of which seem  determined to carve out a healthy chunk of this market. And then there are all the OpenStack-based public cloud options from Rackspace, HP and others. It’s still very early on in the cloud deployment game so things should get very interest in the race to add services — and cut prices. It could be a very good time to be a buyer of cloud services over the next few years.

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BBVA Ventures will invest in the San Francisco-based Radius, a provider of sales and marketing data for the small business market. BBVA Ventures is the corporate venture division of BBVA Group. Financial terms were not disclosed.

PRESS RELEASE

SAN FRANCISCO, May 13, 2013 /PRNewswire/ — BBVA Ventures, the BBVA Group’s Silicon Valley-based corporate venture arm, announced last week that it will invest in Radius, a leading provider of sales and marketing intelligence for targeting the small business market.
BBVA’s investment in Radius aligns with the Group’s commitment to innovation and provides a foundation for BBVA and Radius to work closely together to leverage the Radius technology platform. Since its inception, BBVA Ventures has closely worked with entrepreneurs and venture capital investors to broaden the bank’s understanding of emerging trends, helping advance innovative initiatives in banking and finance.
Today, Radius provides key tools and data on small businesses across the United States. BBVA will seek not only to leverage Radius’ technology and comprehensive index on small business in the U.S. market, but also to explore strategic opportunities for international expansion of the Radius platform.
“Having worked closely with Radius, we see their technology as a key driver and enabler for enhancing our success with small businesses in the international markets where BBVA is present. BBVA is an active Small Business Lender and our ability to pinpoint and track the success and health of small business relies on the integrity and cleanliness of data available to us, which Radius provides via an innovative set of data on small businesses that allows us the ability to understand our customers better while also discovering new customer opportunities through social insight,” said Thomas Whiteaker , executive director, corporate development and strategy at BBVA.
“Having BBVA invest in Radius is a testament to our reach and data integrity. Given the bank’s strong leadership in the Small Business space and international presence, they are exactly the kind of partner we look for. It makes sense that they would want to ensure the data they need to make key investment decisions is accurate and up-to-date. Radius does that and more,” said Darian Shirazi , founder and CEO of Radius.
Earlier this year BBVA announced the creation of BBVA Ventures, a strategic initiative that will invest $100 million in startups looking to transform the financial services industry. The bank completed its first investment in Silicon Valley in early 2012 in the seed-capital fund and incubator 500 Startups Fund. More recently, BBVA completed investments in SaveUp and Ribbit Capital.
BBVA Group has been investing in innovation and technology for some time in order to anticipate the deep transformation under way in the financial industry. This transformation is already taking place with the development of new digital channels and means of payment that are generating new customer relationship models. Against this backdrop, BBVA’s firm commitment to new technologies through enterprises such as BBVA Ventures makes it one of the few banks ready to tackle the changes and compete in the market.

For more financial information about BBVA visit:

http://shareholdersandinvestors.bbva.com

For more BBVA news visit: http://press.bbva.com/
About BBVA
BBVA is a customer-centric global financial services group founded in 1857. The Group has a solid position in Spain, it is the largest financial institution in Mexico and it has leading franchises in South America and the Sunbelt Region of the United States. Its diversified business is biased to high-growth markets and it relies on technology as a key sustainable competitive advantage. BBVA ranks among the leading Euro zone banks in terms of ROE and efficiency. Corporate responsibility is at the core of its business model. BBVA fosters financial education and inclusion, and supports scientific research and culture. It operates with the highest integrity, a long-term vision and applies the best practices. The Group is present in the main sustainability indexes.
About Radius
Radius (http://www.radiusintel.com/) is a leading provider of sales and marketing intelligence and allows marketers and sales teams to reach small businesses. Based in San Francisco, the company provides a comprehensive index of insights and data associated with more than 20 million small businesses in the U.S. Radius’ technology collects and monitors data from hundreds of thousands of online and social sources. The easy-to-use dashboard allows salespeople to discover new prospects, prioritize leads and synchronize data.

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I’ve known for some time that Any.DO is one of the best task management applications on the market. Now a team of investors have shown they do as well: On Monday, Any.DO announced $3.5 million in seed funding led by Genesis Partners and with participation from current investors Innovation Endeavors (Eric Schmidt’s fund), Joe Lonsdale, Blumberg Capital and Joe Greenstein.

Any.DO is a standout for a number of reasons, but one of the most interesting is that it debuted on Android, not iOS. The simple but elegant mobile app appeared in 2011 and I quickly took to it on my Android. What stood out to me was the excellent design and interface; something that most Android apps didn’t share at the time. Any.DO only got better from there, launching on iOS in June 2012 and, most recently adding the Any.DO Moment feature that helps plan each day:

I had a brief email conversation with Any.DO’s CEO and founder, Omer Perchik, and although he wouldn’t provide a detailed user breakdown, he told me the app still has more users on Android than on iOS. However, according to Onavo Insights, Any.DO was the most used “to do list” app on iOS in the U.S. during the month of March, beating out other well-known names such as Remember the Milk, Wunderlist and AnyList to name a few.

Besides a version of Any.DO for Android and iOS, the company also offers a Chrome extension that keeps tasks in sync between your desktop browser and your mobile phone. Now flush with some cash, what’s next for Any.DO? I asked Perchik if Windows Phone 8 or BlackBerry 10 would be the next likely platform target, but he wouldn’t bite.

“The next step of the company is to continue focusing on growth and becoming a more and more vital part of people’s everyday lives,” he told me. So I’ll add an Any.DO task to watch for more announcements.

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Some of the best advice we have all got — be it while making big personal decisions or making critical business decisions — is the same: Follow your inner voice. Most of us have heeded that counsel, yet if we were asked to list the elements that enable better decision-making, we would cite experience, research, data, even polls — but never our inner voices.

Logic precedes sixth sense because the known outnumber the unknown. When the reverse was true, people counted on extra-sensory cues to lead their lives. As our world enters an age of uncertainty, with economics, politics, and society all undergoing upheavals, the unknowns are beginning to increase in velocity and volume.

I wonder if we should try to re-ignite, particularly at work, the extra-sensory cues that once helped govern our lives. Managers struggle to make the right decisions today as they execute complex projects in short time frames, choosing from a vast number of possibilities, some of which they have never before encountered. No wonder only one in two managerial decisions is estimated to be useful!

Recent data suggests that intuition provides extra sensory artillery that helps integrate thoughts, thereby enabling better decision-making. For instance, Tel Aviv University’s Marius Usher found that when people made choices based only on instinct, they made the right call up to 90% of the time. Other researchers have estimated that 80% of successful CEOs have an intuitive decision-making style.

The question isn’t whether rational reasoning is better than intuitive decision-making; it’s how both can be combined for optimal results. The process of integrating intuition into our work lives starts by asking three questions:

Do you acknowledge your gut feelings? When you look at a situation, the inner voice you hear is your mind’s Big Data-based response. Do you heed it? Or do you brush it away? As Carl Jung argued, intuition isn’t the opposite of rationality, but instead, a sophisticated way of chunking data or connecting dots subconsciously based on experiences or sixth sense. Keep it aside, ruminate on it, and use it only when data leads you to a dead end.

Do you encourage intuitive thinking? At a sales review, I once saw a territory rep say: “I have a feeling this vertical is about to take off…” His manager immediately cut him off with an embarrassed: “No one wants to hear about your feelings. Where is your Excel file?” However, feelings-based statements can provide a wealth of information that spreadsheets won’t, so managers need to be open. They should regularly ask for off the data, off-the-record views, and integrate those inputs into decision-making.

Are you open to the messages that your mind sends out randomly? The unstructured sporadic thoughts that your mind broadcasts can hold useful cues, so you should practice the art of acknowledging them.

In a recent post, Purnendo Ghosh, a professor of science and religion, made the case for intuition eloquently: “When you consider that we human beings have a history extending 80,000 years, and our present form of rationality and intellect may be only about 2,000 years old, we need to recognize that non-rational elements have also guided our development and destiny.”

I’m curious. Does anyone disagree?

BOZEMAN, Mont. – Warmer spring temperatures since 1980 are causing an estimated 20 percent loss of snow cover across the Rocky Mountains of western North America, according to new research from the U.S. Geological Survey. 

The new study builds upon a previous USGS snowpack investigation which showed that, until the 1980s, the northern Rocky Mountains experienced large snowpacks when the central and southern Rockies experienced meager ones, and vice versa. Yet, since the 1980s, there have been simultaneous snowpack declines along the entire length of the Rocky Mountains, and unusually severe declines in the north. 

The new study has teased apart and quantified the different influences of winter temperature, spring temperature, and precipitation on historic snowpack variations and trends in the region. To distinguish those varying influences, the researchers implemented a regional snow model that uses inputs of monthly temperature and precipitation data from 1895 to 2011.

“Each year we looked at temperature and precipitation variations and the amount of water contained within the snowpack as of April,” said USGS scientist Greg Pederson, the lead author of the study. “Snow deficits were consistent throughout the Rockies due to the lack of precipitation during the cool seasons during the 1930s – coinciding with the Dust Bowl era.  From 1980 on, warmer spring temperatures melted snowpack throughout the Rockies early, regardless of winter precipitation. The model in turn shows temperature as the major driving factor in snowpack declines over the past thirty years.”

Runoff from Rocky Mountain winter snowpack accounts for 60 to 80 percent of the annual water supply for more than 70 million people living in the western U.S., and is influenced by factors such as the snowpack’s water content, known as snow water equivalent, and the timing of snowmelt.

The timing of snowmelt affects not only when water is available for crop irrigation and energy production from hydroelectric dams, but also the risk of regional floods and wildfires. Earlier and faster snowmelt could have repercussions for water supply, risk management, and ecosystem health in western watersheds.

Regional snowpack accumulation is highly sensitive to variations in both temperature and precipitation over time. Patterns and sources of these variations are difficult to discern due to complex mountain topography, the different influence of Pacific Ocean climate, like La Niña and El Niño, on winter precipitation in the northern versus southern and central Rockies, and the brevity and patchiness of detailed snow records. 

In the study, the regional snow model used by Pederson and his USGS colleagues Julio Betancourt and Greg McCabe allows estimation of snow water and cover variability at different latitudes and elevations during the last century regardless of the absence of direct and long-term observations everywhere. Recent snowpack variations also were evaluated in the context of snowpack evidence from tree-rings, allowing the scientists to compare recent observations to measurements from the past 800 years.

McCabe, co-author of the study, explains that “recent springtime warming also reduced the extent of snow cover at low to middle elevations where temperature has had the greatest impact.”

“Both natural variability in temperature and anthropogenic warming have contributed to the recent snowpack decline, though disentangling their influences exactly remains elusive.” Betancourt said,

“Regardless of the ultimate causes, continuation of present snowpack trends in the Rocky Mountains will pose difficult challenges for watershed management and conventional water planning in the American West.” 

The study, “Regional patterns and proximal causes of the recent snowpack decline in the Rocky Mountains,” is available from Geophysical Research Letters, a journal of the American Geophysical Union. 

David Lozano of San Antonio was inspired to plant a community garden after watching Ron Finley’s talk. Photo: courtesy of David Lozano

Ron Finley is motivating people across the country to pick up a shovel and “get gangsta” by planting fruits, vegetables and herbs in their neighborhood.

Ron Finley: A guerilla gardener in South Central LASince appearing on the TED2013 stage to talk about why he plants edible gardens in the nooks and crannies of South Central Los Angeles, Finley has been profiled in The New York Times and appeared on Russell Brand’s talk show, BrandX. On Saturday, Finley was featured in this CBS News segment, which tells the story of Terence Satler, a 20-year-old who once dreamed of playing football but now is in culinary school. He says that gardening alongside Finley taught him the joy of food.

“The most extensive knowledge I’ve acquired so far has been through Ron’s garden,” Satler tells the CBS cameras. “He has things you would never see. Especially in my ‘hood.”

We in the TED office are also hearing stories of those influenced by Finley to pick up a trowel.

In April, David Lozano of San Antonio watched Finley’s talk and wrote the gardener, saying, “I saw you on TED yesterday and have watched [your talk] three times since … Needless to say my household is going to plant a food garden for everyone to enjoy. We live just two miles south of the Alamo in San Antonio… How do you deal with stray dogs digging up the garden? And could you give me a suggestion what kind of herbs and vegetables you would have a novice gardener plant?”

Last week, Lozano wrote Finley to share an update, with images attached.

“These pictures are of everything when it was planted last month. In the whiskey barrel, we planted zucchini. We decided to not plant directly in the ground due to the metal recycling plants refuse in the air close to our house,” he wrote. ”The neighborhood grocery store has been planted for a month now. We are getting our first jalapeños.”

Lozano’s zucchini, planted in a whiskey barrel. Photo: courtesy of David Lozano

More herbs and vegetables in a planter. Photo: David Lozano