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It’s fair to say that the future of news consumption and media won’t look like a bunch of traditional newspapers copied onto the desktop web, and when five different entrepreneurs addressed paidContent Live Wednesday about the ways they’re bringing content online, the approaches were as diverse as the startups themselves.

However, a few themes came out of our presentations from Paul Berry, founder and CEO of RebelMouse, Jeff Fluhr, co-founder and CEO of Spreecast, Matt Galligan, co-founder and CEO of Circa, Aria Haghighi, co-Founder and CTO of Prismatic, and Josh Miller, co-founder of Branch. Here were the ones we found most compelling:

• The future of news will come from other people. This isn’t to say that the majority of the world will eventually get all of their news from Twitter and Facebook, but it is fair to say that we’ll increasingly rely on recommendations and smarter social cues from friends and respected strangers as we sort through the vast amount of information available online. This could mean something like Prismatic, which as my colleague Mathew Ingram has written, is working to combine data from social media with individual interests to create a smarter social reader for news.
• We’ll be reading all the news that fits — on mobile. For traditional sites, having a strategy that works for mobile is not longer an option, but we’ll increasingly see mobile-specific approaches from startups like Instagram, which was able to scale successfully by creating a simple, fast photo experience for mobile users in a hurry, or Circa, the startup that’s re-thinking how to structure news stories based on the attention spans and needs of mobile readers.  ”We distill these important details into specific pages,” Galligan said. “You hop through and jump from point to point.”
• It’s all about the individual person and the brand they build. Obviously individuals have always had a hand in shaping the news since the days of newspaper editors picking the stories that end up on the front page. But since the early days of blogging we’ve seen the rise of the personal brand grow in importance, and our panel earlier on Wednesday with some of the pre-eminent bloggers like Maria Popova and Andrew Sullivan only solidified the idea that smart, passionate writers can build their own readership online. Berry talked about how RebelMouse is allowing any individual, whether a famous blogger or not, to highlight personal achievements and content in one place, and with the rise of Twitter we’ll likely see this continue. “RebelMouse allows you in a very efficient way to say, let’s make this my splash,” he said.
• People want to talk about the news but they’re looking for smart conversations. We’re moving on from the days of television round-tables and flame wars in comment threads — or at least many people are looking to move on. Several interesting tools have launched recently that allow for more dynamic conversations online about the news, and we’re seeing those conversations happen both in text and multimedia. Spreecast joins the likes of Google+ Hangouts in lettings users host video discussions with additional social components, and Branch is looking to re-invent online discussions by making them invite-only and embeddable across the web.
• Traditional advertising can’t support the future, but no one’s clear what the alternative looks like. Some of our most heated discussions all day came from the discussion over how to make money from content in a way that allows writers and artists to benefit, consumers to enjoy reasonable prices, and businesses to stay afloat. From Popova discussing affiliate links to Buzzfeed discussing sponsored content, it’s clear we’re far from reaching a consensus. But from Prismatic’s efforts to work with brands to make money off their content on the service to Spreecast’s premium services, it’s clear that startups are at least considering smarter ways to approach the problem than traditional banner ads.

Check out the rest of our PaidContent Live 2013 coverage here.

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You can already spend Bitcoins on hand-crafted goods on Etsy, and you can keep romance alive on OKCupid using the crypto-currency. Now, thanks to Foodler, you can order food with Bitcoin from more than 17,000 restaurants nationwide.

Paying for food online with Bitcoins isn’t new. Pizzaforcoins has famously set up a site that takes Bitcoins in exchange for ordering a pie from your local Domino’s. Some entrepreneurial food purveyors online, such as Bitcoin Coffee, also deal in the digital currency. (For a detailed explanation of how the Bitcoin economy works, check out my colleague David Meyer’s comprehensive post.) But what’s interesting about Foodler is its scope.

Foodler is an online delivery and takeout portal a similar to GrubHub that hosts menus and handles orders for restaurants in 48 states, and it has made Bitcoin another option for payment alongside credit cards, debit cards and cash on delivery. You can’t pay for a pizza or your mu shu pork order with Bitcoin directly to the delivery guy, but Foodler has set up an account portal that generates a unique deposit address and QR code, which customers can use to deposit their Bitcoins. Using the current USD exchange rate, Foodler turns them into FoodlerBucks, which can then be used to pay for orders and even tip through its online portal or mobile app.

It might sound like a marketing gimmick, but Foodler CEO Christian Dumontet said the company is firm believer in innovation, whether it’s technological, economic or, in the case of Bitcoin, both.

“We understand that Bitcoin users are a small, but influential, group of early adopters and Bitcoin orders will likely be a small percentage of all Foodler payments this year, but as early adopters ourselves, we are excited to support the community and help it grow,” Dumontet said in an email. “We were surprised to receive our first Bitcoin payment from a customer in San Francisco just hours after making it available in our system – prior to any kind of public announcement.”

Of course, given the recent nosedive in Bitcoin value, some people may be reluctant to part with their Bitcoins just yet – it would take four times the amount of Bitcoin to buy an $8 burrito today than it did last week. Still, Dumontet isn’t letting the volatility of the crypto-currency phase him. He said would Foodler would hold on to the some of the Bitcoins it does receive, instead of immediately cashing them in for U.S. dollars, and it plans to participate in the Bitcoin economy by seeking out vendors that accept the currency.

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Aereo’s approach to letting consumers access broadcast TV content on their mobile devices and computers is nothing if not disruptive, and Wednesday at our paidContent Live conference in New York, CEO Chet Kanojia upped the ante even more. Discussing how the company will be able to expand its channel offerings without falling into the old traps of cable pricing, he suggested that a free or low-cost news package is likely on the horizon.

It’s part of a bigger plan to figure out how to address consumers’ base needs first and foremost, before then adding the nice-to-have features for a price. Aereo sees the future of television content as being what Kanojia calls “skinny live, deep library,” so the live parts are only for the content people really need in real time — stuff like news and sports.

“(The consumer is) the one constituent in this industry that’s unserved,” Kanojia said. “Everyone’s businesses are stacked to take advantage of the consumer, not to serve the consumer.”

If on the other hand, the value-add of a movie channel (oh, Aereo’s probably going to add one of those, too) is to watch stuff on your own time, people will probably willing to pay 50 cents or a dollar a month, he said. The same thing goes for programming from, hypothetically, a content provider like Viacom has a broad range of shows that people don’t really need or want to see only while they’re airing.

The only way to do this correctly, though, is to avoid traditional licensing models that have jacked cable prices through the roof and have led to a lot bloat because consumers are getting way more channels than they ever would want to watch. Kanojia wants Aereo to provide 50 percent of the value for 10 percent of the cost of cable, and then let partners and services like Netflix or Amazon Prime fill in the rest.

“The last time I checked,” he joked, “there’s no need to have Desperate Housewives or the Real Housewives of Orange County running on four channels at the same time.”

As for those lawsuits that have plagued the company since its inception, Kanojia said he’s not surprised but he’s disappointed by threats from companies such as Fox and CBS to pull their stations off the public airwaves (the spectrum on which is provided for free because stations are supposed to operate in part in the public interest).

“I just don’t understand the logic behind that,” he said. “I think it’s disappointing to say the least.”

But with significant legal victories already behind it, the future looks a little clearer. He expects the company model could realistically net the company 20 percent of the American television market, and the company is expanding fast outside of New York. It’s supposed to be in 22 more cities by July.

“The one thing that would float by boat more than anything else,” Kanojia said, “is I get a chance to put my product in front of consumers and be judged by the consumers.”

Check out the rest of our paidContent Live 2013 coverage here, and a video embed of the session follows below:

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The really surprising thing about a conversation with some of the blogging world’s most celebrated names is how little they actually have in common — in terms of their motivations, strategies and business models. At paidContent Live on Wednesday, Brain Picking’s Maria Popova, New York Times columnist Andrew Ross Sorkin, The Dish’s Andrew Ross Sorkin, and web marketing guru Tim Ferriss, discussed the various reasons why they blog, and how (if at all) they monetize their web work.

Sullivan, who earlier this year took his popular Dish blog independent, has been using a metered paywall but has been tweaking that a bit in recent weeks, adding in a monthly subscription service, too. “Once you’ve gotten past the surge of Dish-heads, getting others to cough up online is new and difficult,” said Sullivan. He told the audience that the Dish blog is approaching $700,000 raised out of their goal to raise $900,000, and they have 25,000 subscribers. On the latter number, Sullivan compared it to the size of “a great little magazine.”

For Popova, who has amassed a huge audience through her tweets and blog posts linking to interesting topics, blogging isn’t actually a business, it’s something she would do even if she didn’t make money off of it. “I created it for an audience of one, it’s just grown from there,” said Popova.

Author, investor and media personality Tim Ferriss uses his blog to test out ideas that he then uses for his best selling books. “The blog is where I experiment,” explained Ferriss. It’s also a community builder and communications platform, and Ferriss said that he’s connected with quite a few startups through his blog, which he later went on to invest in.

And for the New York Times’ Ross Sorkin, the DealBook blog, which he edits, is just one of the mediums that he uses to tell stories. The journalist also hosts a TV talk show, writes columns and features, and has written a best-selling book. “I wanted to create a site about a sensibility, not about me,” said Ross Sorkin, and he wanted it to be able, in theory, to live on for decades without him, he added.

The one thing the group did have in common seemed to be a love of creating content, a desire to share and connect with readers, and a drive to experiment with new ways to do this. Popova has another job that pays her bills; her blogging is her passion. Sullivan said he isn’t taking a salary for his new venture and put his own savings into it. He also said sometimes the sheer passion and mass intimacy can become so engrossing that you are sucked into it: “If it turns out that blogging kills people, I will be the first to go.”

Check out the rest of our paidContent Live coverage here, and a video embed of the session follows below:

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TechStars is a leader among general tech startup incubators, but can it work its magic in ed tech?

Earlier this year, education giant Kaplan announced a new EdTech Accelerator powered by TechStars. But it’s hardly the only one. In the past few months, no less than five accelerators have launched offering ed tech entrepreneurs money, mentors and a faster track to growth.

Earlier this month, the program announced that it had brought on Don Burton, a serial entrepreneur and investor with a deep background in for-profit education, to serve as the accelerator’s managing director. Ahead of the program’s first acceptance deadline, Burton chatted with me about opportunities and challenges for ed tech startups — and how Kaplan’s TechStars program believes it can rise above the competition.

Here’s a (lightly edited) transcript of our conversation:

GigaOM: Ed tech accelerators are popping up all over the place — why do you think now is an interesting time to be a part of one?

Burton: We’re at the very beginning of major change. We’ve had big success stories, in the sense of online education, like University of Phoenix or Wireless Generation, which was sold to News Corp. But if you look at those opportunities, they’re really more automating the way we currently do education [like] a lot of the education technology that’s been here to date.

What’s really exciting is now we’re thinking of new ways of imagining what learning can look like. Like the Maker Movement and the Quantified Self movement — I think those types of project-based, interest-based and passion-based experiences in the real world are what we can do with all of learning eventually.

GigaOM: TechStars is a big name in the startup world and Kaplan is well-known in education, but with so much competition, how will your program distinguish itself?

Burton: It’s becoming a very popular space so a lot of people are starting up accelerators, but if you think of it, they’re startups. TechStars has been doing this since 2006 and they have such a brand and platform, [including] the network, the mentors and the VC funders. It’s really tough to replicate that. And with Kaplan, we can get you customers [for testing products] right away – other startups won’t have such easy access.

Maybe a lot of startups will get into accelerators because there are so many. But, potentially, we’ll be the graduate school of accelerators, so to speak. Maybe you started at one of the smaller accelerators and, once you’ve graduated and get some traction and are really ready to catapult yourself into a Series A, that’s when you might think now I can apply to the TechStars accelerator.

GigaOM: So does that mean TechStars wants other accelerators to feed into it? Or that you’re looking for slightly more established ed tech startups?

Burton: No, we definitely would take startups that don’t have any traction if we love the idea and we love the team. But let’s say you apply to the Kaplan TechStars accelerator and couldn’t get in early. Maybe you fall back to another accelerator and once you’ve proven yourself, have developed your concept more and have a little bit of traction then you come back to the Kaplan TechStars accelerator.

[We’re casting] a very wide net. We’re trying to find the best ideas and the best teams but also [startups] that we think have the potential to be fundamentally disruptive. We want big impact, not another set of flash cards and exercises for kids to do math. [For example], can it engage kids in a much stronger way than traditional education has engaged kids? We’re looking for a broad spectrum – it could be cradle to grave.

GigaOM: What are some areas of opportunity that haven’t been tapped yet?

Burton: One is the scorecard by which we’re measuring learning. Instead of just a GPA or SAT or IQ score, who is the person that we’re looking at? You look at all the work in the positive psychology movement and Martin Seligman.

They’re talking about the profiles of people’s character strengths [like] curiosity and love of learning and grittiness.  But we don’t really measure that that well. We don’t think about a person’s dispositions or personality but that makes a big difference for how they might want to learn. It’s the same with interest and knowledge areas [and] multiple intelligences. This is a bottleneck issue because in any system, you want to know what your kids are learning and the competencies they’re building. Having a smarter scorecard that can help us profile people in more individualistic ways is going to be really important.

Digital portfolios is [another] big area. How do we represent our competencies as we move to a more competence-based system instead of just a credential or seat-time based system? We’re going to need to capture that in a more effective way.

The last one is smarter pathways. Everyone talks about adaptive learning and personalization and how important that is. But if you look at what’s going on out there today, [it’s] just a scratch on the surface of personalization.

GigaOM: Where do you think the innovation will start?

Burton: [It] will probably come in the informal markets before it comes to the formal markets. There are some innovators in the school markets, for sure — the charter schools and other types of institution. If you look at the MIT Media Lab, that’s really innovative — [students] get to build their own robots or whatever they want to research, they get to build it and perform it, like the Maker movement. There are radical experiments in institutions, but those are almost like rogue departments. But can’t we see all of education looking much more like that?

GigaOM: The industry is in the midst of an investment upswing, but what are the key challenges for entrepreneurs?

Burton: One of the biggest challenges is simply creating change in the formal school systems that are not as market-driven as some other sectors. If you have the best solution, that does not guarantee you adoption in all the schools across all the systems. Even you have amazing success in some districts, how do you get that across the whole system? A lot of these districts across the country have very different ways of doing things and it’s tough to scale your opportunity. And policy — how does the government view technology and for-profit education?

GigaOM: People are already talking about an ed tech bubble – are all these accelerators fueling it?

Burton: It would be a bubble if no change happens, right? If none of this stuff starts to impact how we learn and how we develop. But if you think about where the education sector is [it’s] the second-largest sector in the world. If you think about the change that’s needed and the amount of change that’s needed, we haven’t even started yet. We’re not at a bubble but the very beginning of a new way of envisioning learning. Traction matters and you need to start seeing the impact and seeing tools being adopted, and I think we will see that. We need all of this attention and resources because we have a big issue with education. We need to put some great minds and some great money behind it.

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Since the network vendor-led OpenDaylight Project came to light last week, the tech press, bloggers and even some industry people have expressed doubts about the consortium’s prospects. But at the Open Networking Summit in Santa Clara, Calif., this week, some attendees sounded optimistic about what could come out of OpenDaylight, as it could broaden adoption of software-defined networking.

It’s true that if useful vendor-agnostic code for many networking components is to come out of OpenDaylight, participants will have to clear several hurdles. Some of the 18 companies sponsoring OpenDaylight, such as Juniper and Cisco, compete with each other, and developers might end up having to maintain controller code that works best with certain kinds of networking appliances. While the tech press has brought up that possibility, it’s not completely unfounded; a Big Switch spokesperson has called into question how Cisco specifically will interact with everyone else when it comes to giving code the OpenDaylight stamp.

The lack of customer leadership in OpenDaylight — unlike, say, the Open Networking Foundation (ONF), which has board members from Yahoo, Goldman Sachs and other non-vendors — has been another area of contention. Although it might not have been for lack of trying. When executives from Cisco and IBM were organizing the OpenDaylight Project a few months ago, they reached out to Google and NTT, but neither company got on board, said Vijoy Pandey, chief technology officer of IBM network operating systems. Perhaps companies other than network vendors could jump into the project in the coming months, though.

The role of the ONF, which nurtures the development of the OpenFlow networking protocol, is another open question. In public remarks at the Open Networking Summit on Tuesday, ONF Executive Director Dan Pitt said OpenFlow is a “substrate (that) allows you to build things like open-source software.” He said he didn’t think OpenDaylight would have been possible if there hadn’t been “something to build upon.” Asked if he or the ONF will get involved with OpenDaylight, Pitt said he had no information along those lines.

Even so, the OpenDaylight Project is “much more of a meritocracy” than the ONF, said Dave Husak, founder and CEO of Plexxi, which has paid five digits to be a silver OpenDaylight member. He views OpenDaylight as a vehicle for promoting Plexxi algorithms and application programming interfaces, which Plexxi will contirbute to the project. At the same time, OpenDaylight could surely benefit companies that seek to do more with their networks.

As much as I might want to predict the future and approximate the outcome of OpenDaylight, I’m afraid I can’t do that, and I haven’t found anyone here who can. They all say they’ll have to wait and see. And so will I.

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Sitting in on OpenStack Summit keynotes and sessions this week, I had an epiphany: OpenStack is to technology as kale is to food. Let me explain.

If you’ve taken part in CSA (community-assisted agriculture) program you know you get a bin of in-season fruits and veggies every other week or so — hopefully from a local farm. In that bin will be a few tomatoes, radishes, whatever and a ton of kale, which grows easily and big and is forgiving of bad weather. It’s prolific and it’s cheap. Then you find dishes and recipes to use that kale.

And this is where the fun begins: Kale, it turns out, can be used in everything. In chicken soup, in salads. It can be coated with sesame oil and roasted to make kale chips (my favorite). It can be sliced and diced in myriad ways. It can be boiled, fried (or sauteed, if you’re a fancypants) and baked. And it’s good for you.

Proponents would like to say the same about OpenStack.

OpenStack — in cable, in marketing, on a stick

Look at the various packages and delivery modes coming online: Red Hat this week announced the rollout of its RDO OpenStack distribution, “a freely available, community-supported distribution of OpenStack that runs on Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Fedora and their derivatives.” Piston Cloud (see disclosure) offers what InformationWeek called OpenStack on a stick, the software packed on a memory stick for easy deployment. Nebula just brought out its OpenStack-in-a-box controller for linking legacy applications into the OpenStack arena. HP cloud guru Saar Gillai talked up his company’s “hardened” OpenStack for enterprise use. Cloudscaling offers an OpenStack cloud that will burst into Amazon or Google public clouds as needed.

More to the point is that end-user organizations — not just the usual tech vendor suspects —  showed off some of their OpenStack-based offerings. These included a new Comcast online interactive cable TV guide that helps users quickly navigate their hundreds of channels to find the sporting event they want to see and bring it up on screen for a quick score check. There’s also Hubspot’s use of OpenStack to build a hybrid cloud that powers and helps target its inbound marketing campaigns. Whether or not you want to get targeted in-bound marketing, these are real use cases for the technologies that will impact actual users.

Key to OpenStack success? Making it disappear

As Florian Otel head of HP Cloud Services in EMEA, told a session on enterprise use of OpenStack, that many of the techncial gaps in the software have been filled and folks now have to focus on real customer value. “Remember how many years we heard this would be the year of Linux on the desktop? That never happened. Android is what it took to make Linux attractive to desktop users,” he said. By bundling the underlying technology with hardware and a problem to solve and an application to solve it, Linux in another guise is hugely popular, he said. For htose who would quibble with his Linux analogy, he added: “Linux has as much to do with Android as iOS has to do with BSD.

The same will be true for OpenStack he noted. As it becomes a platform or an enabler for higher-level servcies, it will take off.

Now, to get back to the kale thing: The metaphor unravels a bit because most folks use kale as an adjunct to other foods (although not always) while the goal is for OpenStack to be the basis for a whole realm of services — for enterprise users, for mobile users, for fill-in-the-blank constituencies.  The big question this time next year will be how much of OpenStack is being consumed by the masses — whether they know it or not.

 Feature photo courtesy of  Flick user B*2

Disclosure: Piston is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media. Om Malik, founder of Giga Omni Media, is also a venture partner at True.

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It seemed that CISPA couldn’t get any worse, but its sponsors proved that it could during a rules hearing yesterday. All the of the pro-privacy amendments being proposed were unceremoniously blocked without much of a debate. Now the bill’s sponsors have backtracked by finally supporting a good amendment.

The Hill reports that Rep. Mike McCaul offered up an amendment to CISPA today that has the full backing of CISPA sponsors Reps. Mike Rogers and Dutch Ruppersberger. The amendment would ensure that all cyberthreat information being submitted to the government would first go through an entity created by the Departments of Justice and Homeland Security, both of which are civilian agencies. The amendment was approved in a 227-192 vote.

In the words of Ruppersberger, “This is a huge concession.” Why? The original text of CISPA allowed companies to share cyberthreat information with any governmental agency, including military agencies like the NSA. Privacy advocates demanded that all identifiable information go through a civilian agency first to reduce the chance of abuse.

So, why did Rogers and Ruppersberger back this amendment when they were adamant about not backing any pro-privacy amendments yesterday? It seems that the veto threat from the White House spooked them into backing more pro-privacy amendments in a bid to get Obama’s signature.

“Rogers and I are just trying to deal with the issue of the White House concerns, realizing that if we pass a bill here and it doesn’t pass the Senate and the president doesn’t sign it, we have no bill,” Ruppersberger said. “This threat is so severe, the cyber threat, that we have to do something.”

The amendment is a great first step, but it doesn’t address all the issues that the White House and privacy advocates have with the bill. CISPA in its current state, even with this new amendment, does not address the issue of private information being removed only after it’s already in the government’s hands. The bill also doesn’t remove the provision that grants total immunity to companies that break the law when handing your information over to the government.

CISPA is on track for a full vote on the House floor tomorrow. We’ll be sure to bring you the final vote at that time.

Bitbar said Wednesday that it closed a $3 million financing round led by Creathor Venture, DFJ Esprit, Finnvera Venture Capital and Qualcomm. Based in Helsinki, Finland and Silicon Valley, Bitbar is the creator behind a cloud-based Android testing platform.

PRESS RELEASE

Bitbar, the creator behind the most popular cloud-based Android testing platform, announced that it has completed a $3 million (USD) financing round.

The round is led by Creathor Venture (Frankfurt, Germany), DFJ Esprit (London), Finnvera Venture Capital (Finland), and Qualcomm Incorporated, acting through its venture investment group, Qualcomm Ventures, with additional funding from TEKES (Finland) financing.

Bitbar will use the funding to expand its rapidly growing mobile developer tools beyond Android, iOS and HTML5 that are currently supported, as well as beyond just testing.

“We are witnessing the renaissance of the mobile developer,” says Marko Kaasila, CEO, Bitbar. “We have seen more than 40 percent month-to-month growth on new users and more than 50 percent growth in monthly revenues. This financing round will allow us to grow our platform even further and provide our customers with a fully integrated development, testing and deployment experience for all relevant mobile platforms.”

“Bitbar’s disruptive technology has the potential to revolutionize the entire mobile software development process,” says Marc Biel, Investment Manager at Creathor Venture. “The company has made excellent progress in a very short time and is very well positioned for the future.”

Bitbar offers high-performance mobile software development and testing solutions that are based on widely adopted open standards. Testdroid by Bitbar is the easiest to use automated cloud-based testing solution for mobile apps, testing applications on over 200 real devices in minutes, including smartphones, tablet computers, and even cameras.

“At DFJ Esprit we have a global outlook. World class teams are at the heart of every business we invest in. We are committed to backing the very best European talent right here at home to create businesses that can win in global markets. Bitbar’s customer traction in the Android developer market and the pace this market is developing is what made this investment stand out” said Scott Sage, principal, DFJ Esprit, a Pan European VC firm with more than $1 billion under management and whose recent investments include Datahug, Sport Pursuit and Lyst.

Bitbar’s top tier customer list includes companies from around the world, including Ancestry.com, BMW, Critical Path, eBay (US and UK), Evernote, Facebook, Flipboard, Google, LivingSocial, Lookout, PayPal, Pinterest, Saffron Digital, SoundCloud, Swiftkey, Tesco, The Weather Channel, Top Free Games and Wooga.

About Bitbar
Bitbar is a technology and services company that provides high-performance mobile software development and testing solutions based on widely adopted open standards. The company’s flagship cloud-based Android testing solution, Testdroid Cloud, is the first automated, real-time testing tool for mobile application developers. The company also offers Testdroid Recorder to automatically generate standards-based test scripts and Testdroid Server for companies to build in-house test labs. Bitbar helps accelerate time to market and lowers costs of developing software on mobile platforms – from smartphones to tablet computers and even cameras. The company is funded by Creathor Venture (Frankfurt, Germany), DFJ Esprit (London), Finnvera Venture Capital (Finland), and Qualcomm Ventures. Bitbar is based in Helsinki, Finland and Silicon Valley. Follow Bitbar and Testdroid on Twitter at @bitbar. For more information, see www.bitbar.com.

About Creathor Venture
As a leading European Venture Capital firm, Creathor Venture invests in technology-oriented companies and entrepreneurs. The focus is particularly on mobile, e-, m-, s-commerce, media, cloud, life science, mobile health and diagnostics. Regional focus is on Germany, Switzerland, Austria and Scandinavia. The current portfolio of more than 30 companies is actively supported in development, growth and internationalization by our team of 15 staff. The management team of Creathor Venture consists of the founder of the former Technologieholding VC GmbH, Dr Gert Köhler as well as Ingo Franz, Cédric Köhler and Karlheinz Schmelig. The team has built more than 200 technology companies successfully, conducted more than 20 international IPOs and has achieved exceptional returns for fund investors and the financed entrepreneurs in the past.

Creathor Venture manages funds of more than EUR 180 million (USD 240 mio) and currently has four Offices in Germany (near Frankfurt & Munich), in Zurich and in Stockholm.

The investors of the current fund include the European Union, through which the fund receives funding from the “Competitiveness and Innovation Framework Programme” (CIP), and the “ERP EIF fund of funds” and the LfA – Gesellschaft für Vermögensverwaltung mbH, both facilities of the European Investment Fund (“EIF”), fund of funds, family offices and entrepreneurs. As the largest investor in Creathor the management underlines its entrepreneurial orientation.

About DFJ Esprit
DFJ Esprit is a leading cross-stage venture capital firm that invests from seed to late stage in European technology and media companies. Members of the DFJ Esprit team have experience of investing in over 200 companies and generating strong returns for investors through building valuable companies alongside the founders and management teams. DFJ Esprit is the exclusive European partner for the Silicon Valley-based DFJ Network with offices in over 30 cities around the world. www.dfjesprit.com

The post Bitbar Closes $3 Mln Funding Round appeared first on peHUB.

On Monday, Ozzy Osbourne took to Facebook to admit he had been drinking and doing drugs for the lat year and a half. He apologized to his family, saying, “I was an asshole to the people I love most.”

Osbourne’s confession came just as rumors were surfacing that he and his wife, Sharon Osbourne had split and were living in separate locations. Ozzy stated emphatically that he and Sharon are not divorcing and that he has now been sober for 44 days.

Back in February, TMZ released a 911 call that was placed by Sharon Osbourne. That tape is now being reevaluated in light of the fact that Ozzy may have been in an altered state during the incident.

The phone call was made in January, when the Osbournes’ home caught on fire. Sharon blamed the fire on a candle that had remained lit while the couple slept. In the tape of the call, Sharon can be heard saying that Ozzy put the fire out, and Ozzy can be heard shouting in the background.

Sharon Osbourne — 911 Candle Fire Call … Can You Send a Fireman?

Falcon Pro has just gotten an extensive update which brings even more features and awesomeness to all of you obsessed  Twitter types out there. The update brings the software version to 1.8 and brings new goodies such as:

• *Starred Users* Inline Articles preview with offline access (enabled for all Starred Users that you follow)
• *Starred Users* Individual notifications (disabled by default)
• *Starred Users* Offline access
• New translations including French, Spanish, German, Italian, Russian, Polish & Norwegian— with more to come

Of course users of the app can also expect even more buttery smooth operation and a sweet, intuitive UI to help navigate the show. Hit the Play Store link below to grab the latest update today.

Play Store Download Link

Come comment on this article: Falcon Pro gets major update and brings plenty of new goodies along for the ride

I highly recommend two-step verification for major online accounts, even though the process sometimes is a real hassle. I’ve long ago applied the security measure to my Google account, but Microsoft offered no option. Hell, even Apple beat the software giant with the measure. That starts changing today.

“Over the next couple days we will roll out a major upgrade to Microsoft account, including optional two-step verification to help keep your account more secure”, Eric Doerr, Microsoft Account group product manager, says. The logistics are similar to Google’s — two-step verification most places, application-specific passwords elsewhere and tool for generating authentication codes.

In fairness, two-step authentication isn’t completely new, just widespread availability across Microsoft products and services. Where fully supported, process is simple. Jack Consumer logs into his account and is stopped for additional verification, which can be a code dynamically generated using the Microsoft Authenticator app or one sent to a pre-designated cell phone. Entering the code provides access, which typically is a one-time process per device or app running on it. However, devices not used for 60 days will trigger new verification.

Microsoft released Authenticator for Windows Phone last week.

“The advantage of authenticator applications is that they use advanced cryptography to generate codes to access your account without the need to be online”, Doerr says. This is especially helpful if you’re on vacation and don’t want to pay high roaming fees to receive text messages or phone calls”. But you’re out of luck if among the majority of people using Android or iPhone. “There are excellent authenticator apps that already exist for those platforms and are compatible with Microsoft account two-step verification”, he adds without identifying what they are.

Using the feature is “your choice whether you want to enable this, but for those of you that are looking for ways to add additional security to your account, we’ve worked hard to make set-up really easy”, Doerr says. I’d like to see a day where two-step verification is required.

Consider that Google and Microsoft now require a respective account to access devices running their software, such as Chromebook, Google TV, Windows PC or Xbox, and services like Drive, Office 365 or SkyDrive. Two-step verification protects your single sign-on account, as well as apps, devices and services, since someone seeking unauthorized access would generate a code sent to your phone that you see and they don’t.

There is also huge end-user risk if the security mechanism isn’t properly managed. Doerr explains:

It does require you to be careful to keep your account up to date. If your security information changes (phone or alternative email), it’s important to update your Microsoft account before you get rid of the old info.

If you know your password but lose access to your secondary security proof, customer support cannot update it for you. Your only option is to go through a recovery process that enforces a 30 day wait before you regain access to your account — to ensure someone malicious hasn’t used this as a way to take over your account. And if you lose access to your password AND all your security info, you will not be able to regain access to your account.

I’ll set up two-step autentication as soon as Microsoft enables the feature for my account. Will you?

Photo Credit:  Phase4Photography/Shutterstock

This week I am at the Broadband Communities Summit in Dallas. (An archive of the conference is/will be available on BroadbandUS.TV.) Yesterday I spoke on a panel about digital inclusion…

Meeting the Special Needs of Elderly, Young, Disabled and Low-Income Americans Senior citizens, young people, disabled individuals, and low-income Americans all have special needs that broadband can help address. In this session, our panel of experts will discuss ways in which broadband can enable members of these groups to maximize their earning power and personal growth and fulfillment.

Moderator:

• Don Means – Founder and Principal, Digital Village Associates

Speakers:

• Bill Coleman – Founder, Community Technology Advisors
• Debra Berlyn – Executive Director, Project GOAL
• Geoff Daily – Executive Director, FiberCorps
• Nicol Turner-Lee, Ph.D. – President and CEO, NAMIC, Inc.

I wanted to share some of my observations on the conference.

First I was delighted to hear Angela Simpson, Acting Chief of Staff and Senior Advisor to the Assistant Secretary, National Telecommunications and Information Administration, Department of Commerce, cite the  Blandin MIRC project for its work around Intelligent Community. Successes around social media breakfasts, workforce digital literacy training, business technology training and digital inclusion were highlighted. It was fun to see Minnesota shine.

While we were talking about bridging the digital gap – Heather Gold, chair of the FTTH Council, spoke on the other side of the spectrum – highlighting the top reasons to support gig networks.

1. No more buffering on video
2. Increased affordability with Google setting the bar on pricing
3. Health care applications
4. Education applications
5. Serves as a platform for innovation

We heard some sound advice from Ron Holcomb – Vice President, Business Development, Tantalus during a discussion around the difficulties on shared networks between telecom providers and electric utilities.  Key issues include different service areas, unrealistic revenue expectations of telecom providers, contrasting speed of change in the industries (broadband is dynamic, electric is slow), differences in regulatory environments, historic relationships over things like pole attachment disputes.  To encourage partnership, Holcomb’s recommended first step is a cup of coffee!

Continue reading…

For all the concerns over mobile phone logs, video footage and other data collection that could potentially be used to survail American citizens, it’s times like this that I think we see their real value.

According to a Los Angeles Times article about Monday’s bomb attack at the Boston Marathon, the FBI has collected 10 terabytes that it’s sifting through in order to seek out clues about what exactly happened and who did it. Maybe I’m just a techno-optimist, but I find this very reassuring.

According the Times, “The data include call logs collected by cellphone towers along the marathon route and surveillance footage collected by city cameras, local businesses, gas stations, media outlets and spectators who volunteered to provide their videos and snap shots.”

Lots of data means lots of potential value

It’s reassuring because I’ve spoken with so many smart people over the years who can do amazing things with data. Ten terabytes isn’t a huge data set by any stretch of the imagination, but it’s plenty to work with if it’s of high quality. It’s very possible there are some needles in that haystack of call logs, and I’m optimistic the analysts within the FBI — possibly with some outside help — will be able to find them.

Techniques around video analysis and facial recognition are better than many people think, too. If there’s a way to stitch together hundreds — maybe thousands — of videos into a single truth of what happened, then I’m confident it will happen. By tracking faces and objects over time and place, we can recreate a crime and track down suspects without relying on after-the-fact accounts by witnesses who weren’t paying any attention until the bomb actually went off.

It’s not that witnesses are lying, it’s just that an attack like this might artificially color certain observations as being more nefarious than they really were. A Middle Easterner standing nearby might seem suspicious in hindsight, for example, but a witness might not have seen that guy cheering on a friend beforehand, stop to get a soda, and then meander over to the area where the bomb went off.

I have no clue what really happened, of course, I just know that cameras — especially hundreds of them at different angle and shooting over different timeframes — don’t suffer from selective or incomplete memories.

Can we crowdsource some surveillance?

I also find all this now-surveillance data reassuring because — if it proves useful — it might actually help to preserve our civil liberties going forward. We don’t necessarily needs drones flying overhead and cameras on every corner if we can crowdsource (at least from densely populated areas or big events) relatively high-resolution videos and photos during the investigation phase. We don’t necessarily need all orders of mobile call and location-tracking if we can collect what we need from the relevant area afterward.

This does little to prevent attacks, of course, and intelligence agencies will no doubt continue to trace phone calls and generally do what they do. That’s fine by me. If airports want to use facial recognition to flag known threats as they walk in the door, I’m not sure I can take issue with that either.

But by and large, it seems there’s precious little that surveillance — especially video — can do to predict crime unless an agency already knows what it’s looking for and has the means to act fast enough to make a difference. (IBM Fellow and general identity analytics guru Jeff Jonas wrote a great blog post in November about what’s actually possible to predict given the data on hand.)

So to the extent anyone thinks additional surveillance is going to help solve crimes that we didn’t see coming, I think I’d rather leave the data in the hands of hundreds or thousands of individuals and businesses rather than a handful of city, state and federal governments that might be tempted to overstep the bounds of what’s acceptable.

Really, though, the notion of how to prevent terrorist attacks and other mass-casualty crimes is a complex issue, and I’m not sure there are many ethically right or wrong answers. But when we get past the tragedy and criminality of what happened in Boston, we have to look at it as part of the bigger picture that’s shaping up around all the data we’re generating, collecting and analyzing. If terabytes of geospatially targeted call records and crowdsourced audio-video surveillance can help solve this type of crime and save all the time, money and privacy concerns of more-intrusive and expansive government efforts, then maybe there’s something worth considering.

Feature image courtesy of Shutterstock user Faraways.

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Lemnos Labs, the San Francisco hardware incubator, is setting itself up for a busy spring. The hack space has a named Eric Klein (pictured) as a partner and brought startups Sproutling and Pantry in house. This brings the number of Lemnos startups to 11 and the number of partners to three.

The news also showcases how the evolution of the internet of things is moving beyond deep tech and connected gadgets into everyday life.

Connecting parents and stomachs

The two startups deal with issues near and dear to my own heart: parenting and food. Pantry, a startup that was created 16 months ago, provides a refrigerated kiosk to offices that uses RFID to track the meals stored in the kiosk. Yes, the internet of things is creating a resurgence of interest in RFID. Art Tkachenko, the founder of Pantry, is trying to use its kiosks as a source of new revenue for food companies and a way to deliver healthy food to office workers.

The kiosks work by having workers swipe their credit card to unlock the door. Then they choose between a few dozen meals, snacks and drinks available. As the worker removes the item, the RFID reader tracks the item removed and bills the customer’s card. Pantry also offers a dashboard for the food company tracking expiration dates, empty slots and analytics for future demand. The dashboard can help plan the best route for delivering replacement food to the kiosks around town, essentially using a connected device to create a service that expands the market for food wholesalers.

On the parenting side, Sproutling offers a sensor system for babies that wraps around an infant’s ankle and monitors its vital signs. The resulting data is sent to a parent’s smartphone and is aimed at augmenting (or even replacing) the baby monitor. As Sproutling co-founder and CEO Chris Bruce pointed out, a baby monitor isn’t an ideal experience when most parents just want to know that their baby is safe. Instead of actively watching a video monitor or listening to every cry, the Sproutling device would notify parents when something is wrong.

Both startups have received an undisclosed amount of funding from Lemnos as well as space in the facility. As hardware heats up a lot of entrepreneurs are pulling together cool projects with Arduino boards and cheap radios. But moving beyond the duct tape stage into something that could be both manufactured at scale and make money is a big leap. That’s one reason both founders are excited about Lemnos.

It’s also the reason that Klein, a former Nokia and Apple product executive, has decided to join as a partner as opposed to building his own hardware startup.

“Where do you learn that art of manufacturing and product design?” he asked. “I was blessed to work at Apple in the early 90s and built hardware teams. It’s a profession that you learn on the job and there aren’t as many people who learned at the big schools of Palm, Apple and Sun. But now it is so easy to get into hardware but there aren’t quite as many people who have been building [manufacturable] hardware for 15 years to help.”

Klein decided he wanted to help. Not just his own startup, but the 11 at Lemnos and the hardware community in general. Eventually he’d like to write a book that helps expand the knowledge farther afield, but Lemnos Labs is a good first step.

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Wikipedia suggests that you download the entirety of the website on your Android device using an app called Kiwix.

The Wikimedia foundation posted to its blog today, recommending the app, which lets you download the millions of article contained within Wikipedia to your device, so you can read any article any time, even when you’re offline or when you don’t want to use your data plan).

The app can also be used to download special selections of pages. Wikimedia’s Renaud Gaudin writes:

In places where connectivity is a difficult (at least 30 countries on the sole African continent), the only way to access Wikipedia content is Kiwix Desktop, but it still requires a computer and electricity. Cheap Android devices might spread more quickly, and we really want to facilitate access to free content everywhere.

That said, Kiwix for Android can also be just as useful to Westerners who want to walk around with the entirety of the world’s largest encyclopedia in their pocket (if they have a big enough SD card), accessible at no cost or data fees.

You can find the app in the Google Play store.

As has become tradition lately, the latest Nintendo Direct included a few huge announcements that made Nintendo fans go absolutely wild.

Of course, you may have missed all the big announcements, like a sequel to The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, or that Bravely Default is finally being localized. If you missed out on any of it, you can relive it now thanks to the power of YouTube.

The only depressing thing is that this Nintendo Direct focused almost exclusively on the Nintendo 3DS. There are plenty of great Wii U games on the horizon, but it would have been nice some assurance that the Wii U was getting great content sooner rather than later. In the meantime, Wii U owners will just have to settle for the Virtual Console finally launching on the system.