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After launching a new Gmail interface and updated Play Store and Play Music apps, Google still wasn’t done for the day. They have also updated their Calendar app, which now features a new UI and custom event colors. The design is totally Holo-riffic now, with snazzy redesigned date and time pickers. Customizing event colors, a feature missing until now, is very  to accomplish. In addition, the update also makes it easier to schedule repeating events and schedule events in different time zones.

While the update is technically live, it will be rolling out gradually. When it’s your turn, you can grab it from the link after the break.

 Play Store Download Link

Come comment on this article: Google Calendar update includes new UI and color-coded events

In the year or so since its launch, online learning startup Coursera has touted partnerships with some of the world’s most elite institutions. And, under most of those arrangements, the schools create online courses for tens of thousands of students anywhere to watch.  But with its latest cohort of partners, which the company is set to announce Thursday, Coursera is trying a different strategy on for size.

Working with 10 state schools, including the State University of New York, the University of Colorado System and the University of New Mexico, Coursera said it plans to explore various uses for massive open online courses (MOOCs). Instead of just creating open courses for anyone, the institutions plan to use MOOCs for blended learning experiences (that combine online and offline instruction), as well as to improve completion rates, quality and access at their schools.

“Up until now we’ve been doing a very good job giving a free education to people around the world,” said co-founder Andrew Ng. “But one thing a lot of people still need is a college degree. This is a big step toward helping make that better.”

Noting that about 75 percent of people in the U.S. attend schools in state university systems, Ng said Coursera’s partners plan to experiment with Coursera in a variety of ways.

For some partners, Coursera could enable various campuses within a system to pool resources, which could be particularly helpful as state schools face tighter budgets. For example, one campus could create an effective Introduction to Biology class, another could create an Introduction to Psychology and the courses could be shared by students across the system.

For other partners, the platform could enable faculty to adapt existing MOOC content to fit their courses or offer courses to non-matriculated students that could potentially be used for credit.  Ng said that very few partners currently award credit for Coursera courses offered by their institution but five courses have been won approval from the American Council on Education (ACE) for credit equivalency.

At the University of Kentucky, for example, the plan is to use Coursera to help prepare admitted students for college-level courses. As with several colleges, many students enter the University of Kentucky unprepared for science and math courses, Vince Kellen, the university’s CIO and senior vice provost, told me. While anyone online will be able to take the Introduction to Chemistry course the school plans to place on Coursera, he said it will primarily be intended for incoming freshmen and sophomores at his school.

“Rather than trying to build a course for the elite learning, this lets us reach a large percentage of students preparing for college,” Kellen said.

In the past few months, MOOCs have come under attack at a few universities, with faculty arguing that the massive online classes could weaken non-elite schools and promote a two-tier university system. Ng said he believes that Coursera’s partnerships could help strengthen state schools through blended learning and other approaches that enable professors to bring more resources into the classroom. And he said that he doesn’t buy the notion that MOOCs will lead to a two-class college system.

Even though Coursera may offer a great Intro to Calculus class offered by the University of Pennsylvania, that doesn’t mean students at every school should take it, he said, adding, “There are students at different levels, adding content makes sure you have content at different levels… [For some students], having their local professor create a different course would serve them better.”

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Tesla plans to make an announcement about its Supercharger network on Thursday morning, but on Wednesday night at the AllThingsD D11 conference (our live blog here), Tesla CEO Elon Musk let the cat out of the bag early and said “What we were going to announce tomorrow is that there is going to be a dramatic expansion of the Supercharger network. By next month we’ll triple the coverage area.”

Musk said that on Thursday they’d unveil a detailed map and that Tesla Model S drivers would “be able to drive all the way from LA to New York using the Supercharger network.”

 

Superchargers are basically fast chargers that can charge up one of Tesla’s Model S cars in around 30 minutes (depending on how low the battery is). The idea is that because the market for electric cars is so new, there isn’t enough charging infrastructure out there to enable EV drivers the comfort of driving wherever they want, whenever they want — like taking a road trip up and down the state.

“Range anxiety is real,” said Musk at D11. That’s why Tesla has become an infrastructure provider as well as a car maker. The chargers have solar panels on them from Musk’s other company SolarCity, and Tesla has been building out the chargers along well trafficked long distance highways.

Until now most of the Superchargers had been installed on the coasts. But back in September 2012 Musk had said that within two years he wanted the U.S. to be covered in Superchargers. Tesla also wants to build them in Europe and Asia, too.

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Driverless cars have the potential to drastically reduce accident rates and saves hundreds of thousands of lives worldwide each year. Google has been hard at work making autonomous vehicles a reality but its fleet of vehicles is equipped with a large array of bulky cameras and sensors that cost thousands of dollars, making mass production unlikely. Due to the high cost, earlier reports claimed the technology isn’t expected to go mainstream until 2025, however an Israeli company has created a relatively low-cost system that could see self-driving cars come to market sooner than we thought.

Continue reading…

With hectic schedules, it can be hard to keep track of everything in your news feed. That’s why we created the TalkAndroid Daily Dose. This is where we recap the day’s hottest stories so you can get yourself up to speed in quick fashion. Happy reading!!

Apps

Gmail gets new tabbed inbox, Android update “available within the next few weeks”

Granny Smith Apple gets updated to bring leaderboard and achievements through Google Play Game Services

New Google Play Store 4.1.10 update starting to roll out

Twitter updates to 4.1, gets richer notifications, new compose mode

Google Play Music app updated to version 5.0.1041J

Hardware

MediaTek back again with new, tablet-oriented quad-core chip

Shield

Nvidia releases video showing off final firmware of Shield with some pre-loaded games

Phones

HTC One set to launch in T-Mobile stores on June 5th

Blue and red variants of the HTC One smartphone are on the way and will arrive in the coming months

HTC M4 set for a June release date with the Butterfly 2 to follow in the third quarter of 2013

Huawei CEO denies lowball price rumors for Ascend P6, defends quality of Chinese devices

Lenovo unveils dual-sim S820, a female-oriented device for the Chinese market

Infamous Motorola X phone will come out by October and is packed with several different sensors

Samsung Galaxy S 4 mini specs confirmed, Snapdragon 400 and qHD display

Tablets

Samsung Galaxy Note 8.0 passes through the FCC with AT&T LTE radio in tow

[Deal] Grab a refurbished Nexus 10 32GB for only $380 through Woot

Updates

Verizon Galaxy S III slated to receive large update, includes multi-window and several other features

Miscellaneous

Tim Cook on Android’s dominating market share: ‘Winning has never been about making the most’

HTC accusing Samsung for ‘using component shortages’ as a competitive weapon

CyanogenMod wants your help in improving security and privacy

 

Come comment on this article: TalkAndroid Daily Dose for May 29, 2013

When Marissa Mayer took over as CEO of Yahoo last year there was some hope that she would bring more focus to a company that had long been adrift and without clear goals. Wired’s Ryan Tate, however, notices that Yahoo under her reign has actually become “more bloated” by paying $1.1 billion for blogging service Tumblr and $30 million for news digest app Summly. What’s more, the company has put itself in the mix to buy a stake in Hulu by reportedly bidding between $600 million and $800 million, so it doesn’t seem as though the company exactly has a laser-like focus on one particular area these days.

Continue reading…

Amazon Web Services faces growing competition from a dozen or more legacy name-brand IT giants. But instead of taking a hit, it poses a bigger-than-ever threat to the those vendors — all of which are building their own competitive clouds, according to new Morgan Stanley research. Oh, and the researchers project that AWS will hit $24 billion in revenue by 2022. Amazon doesn’t break out AWS revenue, but most pundits figure it passed the $2 billion-a-year mark about a year ago.

The fact that AWS has a huge lead in cloud over the rest of the world is not news to anyone who’s been watching, but these projections  could be a wake up call to investors who think tech incumbents — companies like IBM, Microsoft, HP, VMware, Red Hat as well as every telco and hosting provider — can challenge Amazon in cloud computing.

“Applying retail economics to the delivery of technology services well positions Amazon Web Services [to be] a Top 5 vendor within the $152 TAM [total addressable market,] ” according to Morgan Stanley analysts Scott Devitt, Keith Weiss and team.

Nobody’s immune

The move to cloud computing means fewer companies will buy huge numbers of servers and storage arrays for their own use. Over the next 5 years, Morgan Stanley’s expects that 3 percent to 17 percent of current spending could be sucked up by cloud-based IT service providers. AWS represents a key risk for infrastructure vendors EMC, Brocade, NetApp, VMware and Qlogic, in particular, according to the report.

Other key takeaways:

• “We expect on-premise server growth to remain negative long-term on the back of smaller footprints post the adoption of server virtualization combined with new workloads moving to the cloud. Partially offsetting the decline is 20% growth in servers shipped to cloud providers, though some of the demand is fulfilled by whitebox makers like Quanta and Wistron.
• Storage market at risk of decelerating growth that isn’t fully baked into expectations (unlike servers which already declined in 2012). We expect 0-5% storage revenue growth going forward, down from 5-10% historically. EMC and NetApp likely gain share from server vendors, like IBM. We downgrade BRCD to UW, given over 30% of revenue derived from server OEMs.”

AWS as enterprise software power

And then there is enterprise software where Amazon threatens VMware and Red Hat in the virtualization market. And, as we’ve reported, Amazon is pushing hard for enterprise workloads with its  DynamoDB NoSQL database and RedShift data warehousing. Those AWS efforts represent a long-term threat to Oracle, SAP and Microsoft. In content delivery, where Amazon’s CloudFront is a factor, Akamai faces a long-term threat.

Morgan Stanley isn’t the first analyst firm to up the ante on AWS expectations. In January Macquarie Capital projected that AWS would account for $38 billion of an overall $71 billion cloud services market by 2015. If you don’t like Morgan Stanley’s take on AWS, hold on, there are bound to be others.

The growth of Amazon’s public cloud infrastructure and its push beyond startups into the enterprise, will doubtless come up at GigaOM’s Structure event where Amazon CTO Werner Vogels will speak.

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Earlier today Steve Kondik took to Google+ to talk about think out loud in regards to an ever popular topic of conversation: mobile security. As we see malware threats come and go, it comes back to just how secure one’s device really is. As more apps try to take advantage of folks and security exploits, people are growing paranoid with their personal data. Some read app permissions carefully, while others, like myself, just blow through them. Earlier builds of CM even developed a way to allow users to pick and choose which app permissions they were comfortable with. This idea of permission picking was short lived however as it caused instabilities and took trust away from app developers. Some have taken to say that the CyanogenMod team really isn’t looking out for its users but as Mr. Kondik replies:

“Proponents of the patches say that CM isn’t looking out for the users. I think these patches are just more security theater and don’t really solve a problem. Why do you want to run malicious applications anyway?”

He raises a good point. Why would we want to install malicious apps? Some people may do so on accident and this permission picking could essentially be a safety net but it wouldn’t solve the bigger issue: mobile security as a whole. So with that, Cyanogen has taken to the community in hopes of hearing ideas of increasing security while avoiding “smoke and mirrors.” So if you think you have a good idea on how to do just that, hit the source link below to voice your idea. While one option would be to split CM and create a secure, martial-law style version of the ROM that only helps a small group. Your ideas may help avoid that while helping everyone.

source: Google+

Come comment on this article: CyanogenMod wants your help in improving security and privacy

The controller for Microsoft’s upcoming Xbox One console can be mashed and smashed by gamers for the next decade. Microsoft accessories and hardware manager Bob Brown revealed in an interview with Pocket-Lint that there have been numerous rigorous tests the company put the Xbox One’s controller through during its development. Microsoft tested 20 controllers over the past six months, pressing their buttons repeatedly between 4 to 5 times per second for a total of 2 million taps apiece. The thumbsticks are also worked over and over again to ensure reliability and the company even conducts a series of drop tests to ensure the controllers remain intact. The executive noted that controllers should last between seven and 10 years, or in some cases even longer. Given that Microsoft usually updates its console every five to eight years, the Xbox One’s controller should still be alive and well when the company’s next-generation system is released.

Online video marketing company TubeMogul announced it has $10 million in a Series C tranche that was led by SingTel Innov8, the venture arm of SingTel Group. Cross Creek Capital joined the round and existing investors Digital Advertising Consortium, Foundation Capital and Trinity Ventures also participated. The Emeryville, Calif.-based company previously raised about $33 million in total funding, including a $20 million first tranche of the Series C in late 2012, according to data from Thomson Reuters (publisher of peHUB). the company has recently opened offices in Singapore and Sydney and, in conjunction with the funding announcement, has opened an office in Beijing.

PRESS RELEASE

TubeMogul Raises $10 Million for Asian Expansion

Second tranche of the company’s Series C financing, led by SingTel Innov8, will be used to expand programmatic buying of video ads worldwide

Singapore – May 29, 2013 – TubeMogul announced that it successfully completed the second tranche of its Series C funding today. The funds will be used to expand the footprint of programmatic buying of video advertising throughout Asia.

TubeMogul is backed by venture capital from a diverse group of financial and media heavyweights from both Asia and the United States. This round of financing was led by SingTel Innov8, the corporate venture capital arm of the SingTel Group. Cross Creek Capital, a venture fund associated with Wasatch Advisors, also participated in this round along with existing investors Digital Advertising Consortium, Foundation Capital and Trinity Ventures.

“TubeMogul fits perfectly into our strategy of investing in top advertising companies that are poised for rapid growth in Asia,” says Punit Chiniwalla, Director, SingTel Innov8. “We are impressed by the product and team on the ground and look forward to working more closely with the company.”

The company plans to use the capital to ramp up information technology infrastructure and hires in a region where it is already seeing traction. In the past year, TubeMogul’s offices in Singapore and Sydney have grown from having a handful of sales executives to full teams spanning account management, marketing, and operations and planning. In addition, TubeMogul Japan, which was launched in February and led by CEO Masahiro Kano, has already signed on with several of the country’s leading advertisers, including Digital Advertising Consortium and Omnibus.

In line with its expansion, TubeMogul opened an office in Beijing today, headed by Director of Business Development Sven Rossbach. Previously, Mr. Rossbach helped Cadreon (Interpublic Group’s trading desk) develop a presence in Asia, pioneering global technology partnerships. At TubeMogul, Mr. Rossbach’s responsibility is simple: introduce Chinese brand marketers and publishers to the programmatic buying of video ads, and grow TubeMogul’s presence.

“Our private investments are focused on high-growth, late-stage companies with the potential to become public companies and TubeMogul fits that bill,” says Karey Barker, CFA, Managing Director at Cross Creek Capital. “TubeMogul will continue to see high growth as marketers adapt to changing consumer viewing habits.”

“Partnering with best-in-class buying platform TubeMogul will help DAC continue to push the frontiers of real-time buying in Japan,” said Hirotake Yajima, President and CEO at DAC. “The result creates a powerhouse for marketers looking to harness the persuasive power of video advertising.”

“TubeMogul is simplifying what was once a complex ecosystem for brand marketers and quantifiably delivering on their goals,” says Ashu Garg, General Partner at Foundation Capital. “We look forward to continued collaboration with the company.”

“TubeMogul’s singular focus on the intersection of branding and technology is resonating with marketers. In just over four years since Trinity first invested, TubeMogul has become an undisputed leader in programmatic brand advertising. We are delighted that TubeMogul is building a world-wide organization to bring its solution to marketers around the globe,” says Ajay Chopra, General Partner at Trinity Ventures.

About TubeMogul
TubeMogul is the leader in programmatic brand marketing. The world’s largest brands and agencies centralize their video advertising on TubeMogul’s enterprise platform. Created specifically for brand marketers, TubeMogul’s platform enables the execution of scalable digital video campaigns, while providing the measurability and accountability marketers demand. Founded in 2006, TubeMogul is based in Emeryville, CA with offices in New York, London, Tokyo, Singapore, Sydney, Toronto, Chicago, Detroit, Austin and Los Angeles.

About SingTel Innov8
SingTel Innov8 (Innov8), a wholly-owned subsidiary of the SingTel Group, is a corporate venture capital fund, with its own set of decision making, approval and funding processes. It has an initial fund size of S$200 million. Innov8 focuses its investments on technologies and solutions that lead to quantum changes in network capabilities, next generation devices, digital content services and enablers to enhance customer experience. It works closely with the ecosystem of leading innovators, developers, government agencies, R&D and capital providers to bring cutting-edge technologies and solutions to the various markets the SingTel Group operates in.

About Cross Creek Capital
Cross Creek is a venture capital firm founded in 2006 inside of Wasatch Advisors, Inc. Through its direct investment strategy and fund investment strategy the firm seeks to invest in what we believe are high-quality late-stage companies and top-tier venture capital funds. The strategies are mutually beneficial in their goal to strengthen ties between private and public investors and to achieve above market returns for limited partners.

About Digital Advertising Consortium
As an Advertising Business Integrator building a new business model to meet the needs of the era of Internet Media, D.A.Consortium Inc. (DAC) is contributing to the development of the 21st Century’s Advertising Media. We provide excellent client services based on our three main services: Media, Operations and Technology.

About Foundation Capital
At Foundation Capital, we’re dedicated to the proposition that one entrepreneur’s idea, with the right support, can become a business that changes the world. We helped Atheros create the mobile Internet, EnerNOC invent the energy demand response market, and Netflix revolutionize media distribution and consumption, among many others. We’re currently invested in more than 80 high-growth ventures in the areas of consumer, information technology, software, semiconductors, and clean technology including BoardVantage, Chegg, Coverity, Lending Club, MobileIron, Simply Hired, Sunrun, TubeMogul and Venafi. Foundation Capital’s eighteen initial public offerings include Envestnet, Financial Engines, Netflix, NetZero, Responsys and Silver Spring Networks. For more information, please visit www.foundationcapital.com.

About Trinity Ventures
Trinity Ventures is a boutique early stage venture firm with an unwavering dedication and respect for entrepreneurs. We are smart, focused, passionate professionals with significant experience, deep expertise and a sincere commitment to help entrepreneurs build enduring companies. We were founded in 1986 by two entrepreneurs who saw the opportunity for a different approach to venture capital — an approach long on collaboration, short on hierarchy, and with none of the “our way or the highway” mentality

The post TubeMogul Secures $10M, Plans Asian to Singapore appeared first on peHUB.

PayPal co-founder and all-around Silicon Valley star Max Levchin isn’t really the kind of person you’d expect to hear discussing the intricacies of women’s health and fertility. But there he was Wednesday, on stage at the D11 conference, getting all technical about menstrual cycles and cervical mucus (a phrase he apparently said no less than five times).

That’s because his newest startup, called Glow, wants to help couples conceive by using big data analytics to pinpoint a woman’s most fertile days.  As women input information, like the length of their menstrual cycles, basal body temperature, emotions and health-related habits, the app crunches the data within the context of other user data and known medical correlations to predict when she’s most likely to conceive. Down the road, he said, the app could integrate with various sensors to make inputing data even easier. (As he told Om earlier this year, one of his current areas of interest is how sensor data could influence our daily lives.)

With his track record and expertise, the startup clearly has a lot going for it – his name alone could bring needed attention and innovation to women’s health. But he’s entering a very crowded space. Apple’s app store is chock full of apps claiming to help women track their cycles and get pregnant. And, even when it comes to bringing big data to fertility, Glow isn’t the first.

Ovuline, a Cambridge, Mass.-based startup, debuted its fertility app in September, and it similarly uses algorithms and millions of data points to help women identify the best times of the month to conceive. Its most recent version integrates with Fitbits and other health-tracking devices, and it offers women a premium version that lets them connect with fertility experts for personal advice. And it has a pretty healthy head start – so far, it’s been used by 55,000 women, many of which have paid $49.99 for the premium version.

But what I found interesting about Glow is its financial component, Glow First. In addition to the prediction service, the startup created what Levchin called a “mutual assistance program.” Each user can choose to put $50 into a pool and, if at the end of 10 months users are still not pregnant, they get a share of all the money entered into the pool during their first month of trying. Levchin himself said he’s kickstarting the risk pool with $1 million of his own money.

Sure, you could say it’s just a gimmick meant to assure potential customers the company is confident in its ability to get you pregnant in 10 months.  But I like that Levchin is putting his money where his mouth is, and that he’s encouraging a community fund among app users. To start, it may just double the amount of money each user contributed, he said. But the idea is to create an alternative “insurance” pool for couples that will ultimately need fertility treatments, which are largely not covered by insurance. Down the line, Levchin suggested that the company may go through the necessary regulatory hurdles to make the program even closer to a true insurance policy.

“The thing that’s been missing for people that cannot do it naturally is data and financial coverage,” he said. “Because it’s this elective procedure bucket that gets swept under the rug, I thought it needed some help.”

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Google Play Music has been updated and given some features that I had no idea it didn’t even have. The official version is 5.0.1041J and includes:

v5.0.1041J
* Added option to delete tracks
* Can share song and add to playlist from Now Playing screen
* Remove from My Library now supported

For some reason I always thought the ability to delete tracks has always been there. Either way, good to see it being added. Links to the Play Store will be right below!

 
Play Store Download Link

Come comment on this article: Google Play Music app updated to version 5.0.1041J

Elon Musk is generally not at a loss for words, and I’ll attempt to live blog his appearance this evening at D11 starting at 730pm PT. That time is probably approximate; dinner and cocktails will happen first.

Musk has a lot to talk about. Tesla is on a roll, reaching profitability amid a stock surge and expanded production. And he’s got that other little project called SpaceX that’s doing some pretty interesting things. Before things get started, check out Katie Fehrenbacher’s epic tale of how Tesla got to this point.

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Tim Cook revealed on Tuesday at the AllThingsD: D11 conference that Apple has now sold more than 13 million second-generation Apple TV devices. Even more impressive, the CEO noted that roughly half of those devices were sold in the past year alone. Philip Elmer-DeWitt of Fortune crunched the numbers and found that Apple controls more than half of the digital media receiver market. Not including dedicated gaming systems such as the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360, Apple TV has a 71% share of the market. The popular Roku box has sold more than 5 million units, giving it a 27% share of the market, and the Boxee Box sold about 200,000 units, for a 1% share, before it was discontinued last summer.

This recent video uploaded by Nvidia shows off the Shield project in its final form (firmware wise). Also in the video is Sonic 4 Episode II and Expendable Rearmed being showcased and will be part of pre-loaded games that will be on the device. The device has been up for pre-orders since May 17th and will currently run you $350. Check out the video right after the break!

Click here to view the embedded video.

source: NVIDIA

Come comment on this article: Nvidia releases video showing off final firmware of Shield with some pre-loaded games

The HTC One has been a great success thus far for the struggling company with more than 5 million units sold to date. While it’s a great number, HTC claims it could have sold even more if it wasn’t for supply shortages. It’s not new news that the HTC One did suffer some serious supply shortages upon its release earlier this quarter. What’s interesting about this comment by HTC is that they’re not blaming the lack of supplies via production, but yet they’re blaming other companies like Samsung claiming they use it as a “strategy” to essentially bottleneck other companies such as HTC in selling more of their devices.

HTC’s own Jack Tong used the HTC Desire as a prime example of this. 2 years ago when the Desire was selling quite well for the company, they had to halt the production and ultimately affected some of its sales because Samsung stopped supplying the company with the AMOLED screens that were being used on the device. HTC was forced to slightly redesign the phone and supply it with an LCD screen instead. It was then that Tong mentioned,“We found that key component supply can be used as a competitive weapon.”

source: Focus Taiwan

Come comment on this article: HTC accusing Samsung for ‘using component shortages’ as a competitive weapon

Well folks, some actual “real” facts have finally surfaced concerning the infamous Motorola X phone. Coming from Motorola’s own Dennis Woodside himself, the device will come out this October and most of it will be built in Fort Worth, Texas. Woodside even gave a slight tease mentioning the device is already in his pocket.

You can expect the device to feature a galore of sensors. One being a sensor that can detect when the device has been taken out of the pocket, and even a sensor that will detect how fast you’re currently traveling if you were to be in a car that way the phone will act differently for safety measures.

Sadly that’s all we know about the device, screen size, processor and everything else is still up in the air. I’m sure more about the device will surface sometime this summer as it will eventually have to pass through the FCC. Stay tuned!

source: All Things D

Come comment on this article: Infamous Motorola X phone will come out by October and is packed with several different sensors

Two weeks ago, singer George Michael was involved in a car accident. He was treated for “superficial cuts and injuries,” but is now out of the hospital.

Reuters reports that Michael was released from the hospital today after being held for observation. The singer was checked out with a clean bill of health.

Michael’s official Facebook page released the following statement:

It’s unknown what Michael will be up to next, but he had wrapped up his latest tour last October. Fans are no doubt looking forward to his next tour, and it’s a relief to see his accident didn’t keep him down.

Locks are not only the gatekeeper to your home, but they are also a gateway to building out a connected home. Which is why August, a company building a connected lock is worth a look. The startup, which was formed last year, has built a Bluetooth lock that’s pretty, social and in the same price range as other connected locks.

The service lets you open your door without a key, but it also lets you set times that your door could be unlocked by people you’ve invited into your home. So you might send a plumber the code to unlock your house set for a one-hour window, or you could invite your friends over for a barbecue and they could wander in during a multi-hour window without having to wait for you to let them in. You send or revoke invites from the app on your smartphone, although you can also still open the door using a key if you want (or if your battery dies in your handset).

From a user perspective the most important thing you need to know about the August lock is that the use of Bluetooth means you won’t have to take out your phone and use an app in order to open your door. The Bluetooth radio in your phone (or a friend’s phone if you send them the code via text or email) is enough to trigger the door. This is nice, since other options on the market such as the Lockitron (on older iOS and Android phones that don’t have native Bluetooth support) or specialty products require an app and sometimes even a gateway in the house.

But the August lock, designed by Yves Béhar, may benefit you if you do decide to take out your phone. The service provided with the lock (there’s always a service element for the best connected devices) lets people leave “notes” for people who trigger the lock that can be sent via the August app. So if your guest opens the door, you can send them a note about the alarm code once they’re inside or tell them that they can find clean towels in the laundry room. If it’s your husband you can ask him to empty the dishwasher.

I think it would be awesome to sync the locking service to my Evernote account so I could set myself reminders for when I leave the house. That’s not a feature offered yet, but imagine a situation in which my daughter locked the door every Wednesday as she was leaving for school, and she got a reminder asking if she has her karate bag. The locking or unlocking of the front door is a more exact way to pinpoint when someone leaves, as opposed to GPS or Wi-Fi.

In our interview, Béhar also was excited about the social aspects of leaving notes for people after you left the house. I personally could care less if someone who came over for a barbecue leaves a note telling me they liked the ribs, but I am a bit of a curmudgeon. There are plenty of people who will like the social aspects associated with the lock. Plus, technology like this will help overcome some of the physical hurdles in the sharing economy. Being able to grant access via an app is a lot easier than meeting someone to hand over a set of keys.

However, when paired with other services, or even on its own, I think this is a lock worth looking at when it comes out in the fourth quarter of this year. Jason Johnson, a co-founder, said the price would be less than $200 and installation is about a 10-minute endeavor. The lock requires four double A batteries that should last about 6 months (Johnson says it may last up to a year).

August has developed a secure layer on top of the Bluetooth protocol to add a level of security. They also won’t let you send someone an access code to get into the house with the home address, although a diligent search through previous emails or texts on a stolen phone might reveal that. And if you’re like me and wonder how to give people (small children, Luddites) access to your home if they don’t carry a smartphone, Johnson says they are looking at providing a way to let other Bluetooth devices such as personal fitness trackers or even specialty dongles work with the lock.

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How much does one startup need to sell software to manage utilities’ energy data? For Thomas Siebel’s C3, it turns out, a good deal.

According to a filing C3 has raised another $15 million of a planned $30 million round, adding millions to the now about $60 million we estimate they’ve raised. Siebel has said that C3 is building a $100 million to $150 million big data software platform that it has been selling to utilities to help them manage their energy data.

The company’s Board of Directors is also now even more of a who’s who of retired energy executives, including Mayo A. Shattuck III, the former CEO of Constellation, Stephen Ward, the retired CEO of Lenovo, S. Shankar Sastry, the Dean of Engineering at University of California, Berkeley, former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, President of Yale, Richard Levin, and former Secretary of Energy Spencer Abraham. Newer executives hired include Tendril’s former COO Ivo Steklac, and Under Secretary and Assistant Secretary at the U.S. Department of Energy, Cathy Zoi.

Earlier this year, Siebel talked about some of the recent milestones that the four-year-old C3 has met, including a data grid analytics project for PG&E, and a joint development deal with GE to create a big data energy platform.

The PG&E project crunched data about commercial and industrial buildings in the utility’s footprint, and helped PG&E work with these customers to reduce their energy usage. The GE software, which is built on the C3 platform stack, can pull in disparate data from a variety of sources like grid sensors, utility databases and even social media sources, and utilities can use the software to peer into their grids, and combat blackouts in real time.

C3 said that as of earlier this year it had three of these types of projects live with customers, and planned to launch another five projects in 2013 and another five in 2014. Other C3 customers include Entergy, Northeast Utilities, Constellation Energy, NYSEG, Integrys Energy Group, Southern California Edison, ComEd, Rochester Gas & Electric, DTE Energy, and McKinsey.

Over the years C3 has pivoted from its original business plan, which was focused more on managing carbon emissions and working with corporations on those sustainability goals. Now C3 is squarely focused on energy data and utilities.

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