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  • Austin Ventures Leads $7.5 Mln Series C for Dachis Group

    Dachis Group said Wednesday it closed $7.5 million in Series C funding led by Austin Ventures. Dachis Group, of New York, provides a big data social marketing analytics platform in market.

    PRESS RELEASE

    Dachis Group, a leader in data-driven social marketing solutions, today announced the completion of $7.5 million in Series C funding led by Austin Ventures.

    Brand marketers and agencies worldwide have quickly come to understand the explosive power of social marketing and the promise of engaging with their key constituents at scale. However, optimizing investments in social and measuring concrete ROI has proven difficult.

    Dachis Group offers the most advanced big data social marketing analytics platform in market, meeting the increasingly complex measurement and amplification needs of global brands.

    “There is no doubt in our minds that social engagement is driving more effective brand marketing,” said Chris Pacitti, General Partner, Austin Ventures. “Given the enormous market for brand spend globally, we are a big believer in Jeff’s vision and approach. With an ever-expanding set of social engagement currencies, it is our continued belief that the disruptive platform the team at Dachis Group has built has the opportunity to become the ‘de facto’ standard in social measurement. We are delighted to continue to partner with Jeff and his team.”

    Building on a successful 2012, which saw the company launch its social analytics software, Dachis Group will use this investment to accelerate the development of its core big data social analytics platform, and meet the dramatic increase in market demand for its social marketing solutions.
    “If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it, and we have the most powerful enterprise class social analytics platform in market today to help brands measure and manage social engagement programs across all social engagement touch points,” said Jeffrey Dachis, Founder, CEO and Chairman of Dachis Group. “This additional funding will enable us to better meet the growing needs of our customers who all share our belief that data driven social marketing is modern marketing’s future.”

    Over the last 12 months, Dachis Group has seen significant traction and rapid growth for its software platform and data-driven marketing software solutions customer base:

    · In less than one year, across its product suite, Dachis Group has sold over 100 enterprise licenses into large global brands including Nokia, New York Life, Starwood, Bloomberg, Bank of America, Estée Lauder, Juniper, Acer, and AT&T.

    · The Dachis Group platform currently analyzes the social engagement of over 35,000 brands and several hundred million social actions every day.

    · The Dachis Group platform currently analyzes the social engagement of over one million passionate brand power advocates, who in turn drive over 20% of all earned brand impressions for the brands the company tracks.

    · This data represents over 850 trillion permutations of data and the analysis of almost three million brand relevant social signals a day and the effectiveness and brand impact of almost 20 billion earned brand impressions daily.

    For more information, visit www.dachisgroup.com.

    About Austin Ventures

    Austin Ventures has worked with talented entrepreneurs to build valuable companies for over 25 years. With $3.9 billion under management, Austin Ventures is the most active venture capital and growth equity firm in Texas and one of the most established in the nation. With an investment focus on business services and supply chain, financial services, new media, Internet, and information services, Austin Ventures invests at all stages of company development. Austin Ventures’ strategy is to partner with talented executives and entrepreneurs through its CEO-in-Residence and Entrepreneur-in-Residence programs. Visit austinventures.com for more information.

    About Dachis Group

    Dachis Group is the global leader in data-driven social marketing solutions. Built on a proprietary big data analytics platform, Dachis Group’s social performance measurement and amplification software applications, collaborative insights and reporting capabilities, and world leading data-driven social marketing solutions group help the world’s largest brands engage@scale with their customers.

    Every day, Dachis Group’s big data social analytics platform monitors over 10 billion social behaviors and 50 million+ social signals in real-time.  Dachis Group delivers powerful insights by tracking, monitoring and helping manage conversations and content across 35,000 brands, 100 million social accounts, and an aggregate audience of 7 billion followers, fans, subscribers and contributors from 233 countries across dozens of the largest social platforms.

    The company serves many of the world’s largest brand marketers and their agencies including Disney, Estée Lauder, US Cellular, Hewlett Packard, Nestlé, and Nokia.

    Dachis Group Social Marketing Software and Solutions – Engagement@Scale

    Performance Measurement
    Campaign Performance Monitor – Dachis Group’s Campaign Performance Monitor measures the value of social campaigns by providing detailed isolation of campaign specific engagement metrics around the content, conversation, advocates and campaign relevant social signals needed for optimizing social marketing campaign performance while they are executing.

    Social Performance Monitor – Dachis Group’s Social Performance Monitor is a powerful brand-based social performance benchmarking, measurement, insights, and optimization solution for measuring social marketing’s impact on brand performance.

    Amplification
    Advocate Insight – The world’s largest global brands have large numbers of passionate fans.  How do you identify them and maximize their earned media value? Dachis Group’s Advocate Insight offers advanced advocate identification, management, and activation capabilities.

    Employee Insight – Employee advocates are an untapped resource for most of the world’s brands. Dachis Group’s Employee Insight offers advanced employee advocate recruitment, management, and activation capabilities including a configurable online portal to mobilize employees with workflows and messaging to accelerate participation and authentically echo and amplify a brand’s social efforts.

    Collaborative Insights and Reporting
    All Dachis Group solutions come with collaborative insights capabilities enabling social teams, agencies, and brand management to easily collaborate on driving insights from social engagement data, and deliver out of the box gorgeous “Boss Ready” reporting with just one click.

    Data-driven Social Marketing Solutions
    To help brands or their agencies drive engagement at scale and social marketing success, Dachis Group offers a set of packaged, managed and custom social marketing engagement programs around the optimization of earned vs. owned vs. paid media investments, content, conversation, advocacy, community, and campaigns, and ongoing solutions for reporting, benchmarking, analysis, and insights.

    Engage@Scale with Dachis Group

    Social Business Index
    Dachis Group develops and maintains the Social Business Index, providing ongoing real-time ranking, analysis, and benchmarking of social business performance for over 25,000 companies and over 35,000 brands tracking their conversations and activity across a social business graph of 100 million social accounts and 233 countries.

    Social Business Summit Series
    To provide ongoing support to customers that want to engage@scale, Dachis Group hosts an ongoing series of annual Social Business Summits around the globe, exploring the most current ideas in social business thought leadership, fostering ongoing dialog among participants, and engaging other social business practitioners in real-time, in-person, day-long events.

    Social Business Council
    Dachis Group operates and manages the Social Business Council, the largest peer-to-peer knowledge-sharing community for social marketers and social business practitioners to share ideas, best practices, and learnings from a community.

    Social Business Journal
    Dachis Group publishes a quarterly journal with in-depth coverage and analysis of the most relevant topics related to social marketing in both print and digital format.

    Dachis Group is hiring the best people to join the world’s most advanced big data social analytics team and to work on the most sophisticated data-driven social marketing solutions.  Review job opportunities at http://www.dachisgroup.com/careers/ and contact [email protected] to introduce yourself.

    The post Austin Ventures Leads $7.5 Mln Series C for Dachis Group appeared first on peHUB.

  • Mediacom Launches New Generation Broadband Service

    Thanks to the folks from Mediacom for sending me this update.

    Digital Families Gain Faster, 50-meg Internet Speeds; Broadband Boost for Carlton, Lake, Itasca, Pine and St. Louis Counties

    GRAND RAPIDS, MN – March 19, 2013 — Mediacom Communications announced today that it has more than doubled the speeds of its broadband Internet service to provide homes and businesses throughout its Northern Minnesota service areas with download speeds of 50 mega-bits-per-second (Mbps) and upload speeds of 5 Mbps. The higher-speed Internet service, Ultra 50, is 150-percent faster than the 20 Mbps service many customers have been using.

    Mediacom’s Ultra 50 broadband service became available in recent weeks after upgrades to the company’s fiber-optic communications network were completed in Cloquet, Eveleth, Hibbing and Two Harbors. Ultra 50 is the result of the cable industry’s innovative channel bonding technology known as DOCSIS 3.0 that uses a cable modem to deliver faster Internet speeds used for bandwidth-intensive applications such as movie downloads, file sharing, and online gaming.  The 50-meg service is ideal for homes and businesses where multiple devices or multiple Internet connections are used to send or receive data.

    “From the largest cities to the smallest towns, Americans are consuming more bandwidth and demanding a faster Internet,” Jensen said.  “With recent launches, Mediacom delivers the high speeds of Ultra 50 broadband service through an extensive area of Minnesota, from Worthington to Litchfield in the southern and central areas of the state, and now extending north to include communities in Itasca, St. Louis, Carlton, Pine and Lake Counties.”

    The DOCSIS technology of Mediacom Ultra 50 allows a consumer to download a high-definition (HD) movie (6 gigabytes) in just 16 minutes.  That compares to the 4.4 hours it would take to download the same movie using a common 3 Mbps DSL service from a traditional phone company, according to Mediacom Regional Vice President Bill Jensen.

    “This broadband boost demonstrates Mediacom’s commitment to continually invest in technology and expand our fiber network to ensure that consumers in all of our service areas can connect to reliably fast broadband service,” Jensen said.

    Jensen explained that new Internet applications have rapidly developed and changed how today’s consumers use the Internet.  “We watch news, sports and movies online; we frequently check updates for weather or sports scores, find recipes, play games, share digital photos with friends and family.  The list goes on and on.”

    Mediacom was among the earliest cable companies to offer the new-generation broadband service of DOCSIS 3.0, which it makes available to both residential and business customers.  Each Mediacom Ultra 50 customer is equipped with a new, more powerful modem configured for the higher Internet speeds.

    “The broadband speed of Mediacom Ultra 50 is in greater demand today than even just 12 months ago,” Jensen said. “It has become essential for families using multiple devices that connect to the Internet — tablets, laptops, smart phones or gaming consoles.  With the dramatic changes in the way today’s families and businesses use the Internet, the need for more bandwidth has never been greater.  The speed of Ultra 50 delivers a reliably better experience for the whole family or office.”

    Mediacom Communications is the nation’s eighth largest cable television company and one of the leading cable operators focused on serving the smaller cities in the United States, with a significant concentration in the Midwestern and Southeastern regions. Mediacom Communications offers a wide array of broadband products and services, including traditional and advanced video services such as digital television, video-on-demand, digital video recorders, high-definition television, as well as high-speed Internet access and phone service. Through Mediacom Business, the Company offers affordable broadband communications solutions that can be tailored to any size business.

    # # #

    IMPACT AREA:  higher-speed broadband service, Mediacom Ultra 50, is available to residents and businesses in the areas listed below.

    Carlton County:  Cloquet, Esko, Carlton, Moose Lake, Moose Lake Township, Thomson, Windemere

    Itasca County: Calumet, Cohasset, Coleraine, Grand Rapids, Harris Township, Keewatin, La Prairie, Marble, Nashwauk, Taconite

    Lake County:  Beaver Bay, Silver Bay, Two Harbors

    Pine County:  Sturgeon Lake

    St. Louis County:  Hibbing, Chisholm, Buhl, Kinney, Mt. Iron, Virginia, Fayal, Eveleth, Gilbert, McKinley, Biwabik, Aurora, Hoyt Lakes, White Township, Proctor, Midway Township, Hermantown

    It sounds as if there are tiers of service available beyond their standard Mediacom Prime which is 15 Mbps; they offer Prime Plus speed at 30 Mbps (down) x 2 Mbps (up). They mentioned to me that more and more people are starting to take advantage of the higher level services, which I think helps indicate that while build and they will come may not work for minimum speeds – folks will upgrade with less coaxing once great bandwidth is available.

  • Teen Mom Star DUI Arrest Takes Place in Omaha

    Farrah Abraham, one of the starts of the reality TV show Teen Mom, has been arrested for driving under the influence.

    TMZ is reporting that Abraham was pulled over in Omaha, Nebraska after making a wide turn. The police later determined that she had a blood alcohol level twice the legal limit.

    Abraham began starring in the MTV reality series Teen Mom in 2009. The show has chronicled Abraham’s family problems and her difficulties raising her four-year-old daughter, Sophia Abraham. Police have stated that Sophia was not in the car with Abraham when she was arrested.

    Abraham has not directly addressed the incident, but did post a reference to it to her Twitter feed:

    Abraham is not the first Teen Mom star to run into trouble with the law. Last summer, Amber Portwood was sentenced to five years in prison for domestic battery charges.

    Abraham also made headlines in January, when video surfaced showing her forcibly waxing Sophia’s eyebrows:

  • Apple sued again, this time over security patents by Intertrust

    A company that holds many patents to digital rights management (DRM) software is suing Apple over 15 patents. Intertrust Technologies, which is based near Apple headquarters in California, says the iPod, iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple TV, iCloud and iTunes and other Apple software infringe on its security-related and distributed computing patents, according to papers filed in federal court.

    The Wall Street Journal first reported the suit on Wednesday, and noted that Intertrust is not some fly-by-night operation or random patent troll. It has two big backers who are also consumer electronics companies: Sony and Philips.

    Intertrust has 250 patents related to digital copy protection software security and and has licensed them to plenty of Apple’s peers — HTC, Samsung, Nokia,, Huawei — but Apple is apparently refusing to pay up, which resulted in the filing of the suit.

    In a statement, Intertrust CEO Talal Shamoon said:

    “Apple makes many great products that use Intertrust’s inventions. Our patents are foundational to modern Internet security and trusted computing, and result from years of internal research and development. We are proud of our record of peaceful and constructive licensing with industry leaders. We find it regrettable that we are forced to seek Court assistance to resolve this matter.”

    Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
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  • Metascan Client scans for viruses from the cloud, but doesn’t remove them

    OPSWAT has announced the availability of Metascan Client, a lightweight on-demand virus scanner.

    The program is extremely basic — there’s no real-time protection or scheduled scanning, and it can’t remove whatever it finds — but could still be useful as a backup to your regular antivirus tool.

    Metascan Scan is extremely convenient to use, for instance. It’s portable, entirely free and couldn’t really have a much simpler interface: you just launch it and click “Scan”.

    The program then checks all your running processes and modules, calculating hash values for each. These are sent to the Metascan server, where they’re passed to several antivirus engines. (It’s not clear which ones will be used at any one time, but OPSWAT says the list includes ESET, AVG, Microsoft , Bitdefender, Symantec, F-Secure, GFI, Kaspersky, and McAfee).

    If the engines don’t recognize a hash, the relevant file is uploaded to the server for a closer look. And once the process is over you’ll be given the results.

    This is all a little basic, and there are a few obvious improvements which could be made. Our test reports gave us the all-clear, for instance, based on an “Engine count” of “5″, but we would have liked to know which engines had been used.

    The ability to scan more than just running processes would be useful, too. And there is a sign of that in the interface, which includes greyed out “Full Scan” and “Custom Scan” options, so perhaps we’ll see more features later.

    Even now, though, Metascan Client could be very useful. If you think your PC has been infected by something, but your regular suite hasn’t raised an alert, then it provides a quick and easy way to check your running processes against several antivirus engines. And that alone makes it worth including in your portable security toolkit.

    Photo Credit: Andrea Danti/Shutterstock

  • Terbeek Joins Greycroft Partners

    Mark Terbeek has joined Greycroft Partners as a partner. He will be based in the LA office and focus on investment opportunities in the digital media sector with an emphasis on online video. Terbeek was previously a partner with MK Capital.

    PRESS RELEASE

    Greycroft Partners LLC, a venture capital firm that specializes in Internet and media investments headquartered in New York and Los Angeles, is pleased to announce the addition of a new Partner, Mark Terbeek, to the investment team. Mark will be based in the LA office along with Partner and Co-Founder Dana Settle. Mark will utilize his expertise and knowledge to focus on investment opportunities in the digital media sector with an emphasis on online video.

    Mark will draw on years of experience as a Partner with MK Capital, where he concentrated on investments in the digital media and data center automation sectors. Prior to MK Capital, Mark also co-founded Jamcracker Inc., an early software as a service (SaaS) company, where he served as vice president of corporate development. Mark also worked at McKinsey & Co., a management-consulting firm early on in his career.

    “I am really excited to join the Greycroft team. The firm’s institutional knowledge in advertising technology, digital marketing and SaaS software is a perfect match for my background in media investing,” said Mark. “As the only venture firm in the country with offices located in New York and Los Angeles, we believe we are poised to help our portfolio companies as they expand in these critical media markets.”

    Mark was involved with and sat on the Board of Directors of many successful investments, including Machinima, ZEFR, AwesomenessTV, DramaFever, Bladelogic, Kontiki, and VPNet Technologies. He was also a Board Observer at Exodus Communications. Mark is a graduate of DePauw University and the Stanford University Graduate School of Business.

    “We are thrilled to add Mark. His experience as a venture capitalist and entrepreneur is a good complement to our existing team, and his style is a perfect fit for Greycroft,” said Dana Settle, Partner and Co-Founder of Greycroft Partners. “We are looking forward to working with Mark to expand our West Coast presence.”

    About Greycroft Partners:

    Greycroft Partners is a leading early stage venture capital firm focused on investments in digital media. With offices in the two media capitals of the world – New York and Los Angeles – Greycroft is uniquely positioned to serve entrepreneurs who have chosen us as their partners. Greycroft leverages an extensive network of media and technology industry connections to help entrepreneurs gain visibility, build strategic relationships, successfully bring their products to market, and build successful businesses. Greycroft manages $400MM and has made over 75 investments in leading companies including Babble, Buddy Media, Collective, Huffington Post, Klout, M5 Networks, Maker Studios, Paid Content, Pulse, and Trunk Club. For more information please visit the Greycroft Partners website at http://www.greycroft.com.

    The post Terbeek Joins Greycroft Partners appeared first on peHUB.

  • From Amazon’s top data geek: data has got to be big — and reproducible

    Much has been done to bring big data closer to the people who need it. The advent of public cloud infrastructure has decimated the cost of collecting, maintaining and processing vast amounts of data. The next frontier is making that data reproducible, said Matt Wood, principal data scientist for Amazon Web Services, at GigaOM’s Structure:Data 2013 event Wednesday.

    In short, it’s great to get a result from your number crunching, but if the result is different next time out, there’s a problem. No self-respecting scientist would think of submitting the findings for a trial or experiment unless she is able to show that the it will be the same after multiple runs.

    “Much of today’s statistical modeling and predictive analytics is beautiful but unique. It’s impossible to repeat, it’s snowflake data science.” Wood told attendees in New York. “Reproducibility becomes a key arrow in the quiver of the data scientist.”

    The next frontier is making sure that people can reproduce, reuse and remix their data which provides a “tremendous amount of value,” Wood noted.

    For more on Wood, check out this Derrick Harris post.

    And check out the rest of our Structure:Data 2013 coverage here, and a video embed of the session follows below:


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  • Customize Notifications by Message Type or Contact With HUB++ for BlackBerry 10

    HUB++ by Devcellent, (makers of Email++) is a productivity app for BlackBerry 10 that allows you to customize your notifications in a variety of ways. Their supporting of the “disco” style of LED color cycling is a BlackBerry 10 first and opens up a range of customization option for your incoming notifications.

    The highly rated app allows for very specific LED notifications. For example you can have a different LED sequence play if the incoming email has been CC’d to your boss.

    A lot can be learned from the notifications now without having to unlock your device and read. The different notifications can be queued up so that you can decipher that the purple flash means your work email was replied to while a rapid disco means your best friend has texted you about tonight.

    The preview settings also turbocharge your BlackBerry Hub such that you can mark things as read or flag for another look later very quickly and easily.

    Here are a few more features of HUB++:

    • Clean and Stunning UI built in Cascades Native Platform
    • Many LED color combos to choose from
    • Choose Disco patterns and speed
    • Over 40 preloaded audio alerts
    • Choose your own custom audio
    • Set the audio alerts to loop forever
    • Custom vibration lengths

    Click here to buy HUB++ for BlackBerry 10 for $2.99 from BlackBerry World.


  • Pinterest acquires local recommendation app Livestar

    Pinterest announced Wednesday that it has acquired local recommendation app Livestar, adding the company’s engineering talent to the quickly growing social content site. While this might seem like a slightly odd fit (a photo-sharing site acquiring a Yelp-like service?), Livestar’s founder was an early investor in Pinterest, and Pinterest is likely looking to add talented engineers in the realm of mobile and social as it grows.

    In an emailed statement, Pinterest explained why it sees the Livestar team as a good fit for joining the company:

    “We are happy to announce that we have agreed to acquire a startup called Livestar and will be bringing their talented engineering team onboard.  Livestar is an app that helps people find local recommendations from their friends and others. We think the Livestar team is a natural fit for Pinterest because of their commitment to inspiring people to do things in their everyday lives through social and expert recommendations.

    The Livestar engineering team will be joining Pinterest in the coming weeks. CEO and founder Fritz Lanman will not be joining the team, but he will continue to advise Pinterest. An active angel investor in startups including Pinterest, Fritz will continue to invest and advise startups and will be undertaking a new, yet to be announced project.”

    Livestar will be closing down, less than a year after launching in June 2012, when we wrote about the company’s vision and explained the rationale behind Lanman’s approach:

    “The result of Lanman’s work is Livestar, a new iPhone app (Android coming soon) that makes it easy to find the two kinds of recommendations that matter most to many users: friend suggestions and professional reviews. The app serves as a sort of search engine, Q&A platform and review aggregator, combining elements of Yelp, Google, Quora, Metacritic and Facebook. But while many of those services started on the desktop web, Livestar is built from the ground up to be mobile only.”

    Just this week Pinterest announced the wider launch of its new redesign, which includes larger photos and a smaller activity feed. Pinterest also recently released a web analytics tool for brands, just after announcing a new $200 million funding round.

    Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
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  • Samsung Galaxy Note III, Galaxy Tab 3 reportedly set for September debut

    Galaxy Note 3 Release Date
    The next major addition to Samsung’s (005930) Galaxy Note lineup — the Galaxy Note III “phablet” — may be set to debut at the IFA 2013 conference, which kicks off on September 2nd this year. The report comes from SamMobile, which has a good track record when reporting details about unannounced Samsung devices. The blog also claims that Samsung’s next major Galaxy tablet iteration, the Galaxy Tab 3, will debut at IFA 2013 as well. No specs or details regarding launch timing were provided for either device.

  • Play Games Before They’re Released With Steam Early Access

    Pre-loading on Steam has given gamers everywhere the chance to play a game the moment its released. Now Steam is taking that idea a step further – allowing gamers to play a game while it’s still in development.

    Steam Early Access gives players a chance to play PC games before they’re officially released so players can give critical feedback to developers during the development of the title. Here’s how it’s going to work:

    The goal of Early Access is to provide gamers with the chance to “go behind the scenes” and experience the development cycle firsthand and, more importantly, have a chance to interact with the developers by providing them feedback while the title is still being created.

    To support the interaction between Early Access players and developers, Steam offers easy and automatic updating of games, letting developers iterate quickly to respond directly to bug reports and feedback from customers. And, like all Steam games, Early Access players will be able to interact with other players, making it easy to create and share screenshots, tips, and in-depth guides.

    In essence, Early Access will have players buying into an alpha or beta build of a game to gain early access while helping the developers find bugs and work out balance issues before the game officially launches. This was a model employed most famously by Mojang for Minecraft as the game was available for purchase during its alpha phase, and players helped shape the game into what it is today.

    To kick off Early Access, Steam will be making a number of games available as part of the new program starting today:

  • 1… 2… 3… KICK IT! (Drop That Beat Like an Ugly Baby)
  • Arma 3
  • Drunken Robot Pornography
  • Gear Up
  • Gnomoria
  • Kenshi
  • Kerbal Space Program
  • Kinetic Void
  • Patterns
  • Prison Architect
  • StarForge
  • Under the Ocean

    • The one thing these games all have in common is that they come from small indie studios. It will be interesting to see if any major studios take advantage of the program as it could provide them with a form of QA testing where participants pay to beta test products. That being said, the democratization of game development is a slippery slope, and some games are better off sticking to their original vision.

    Either way, Steam Early Access is another interesting experiment from Valve and it will be fascinating to watch what happens to the games that take part in the program.

    [h/t: Kotaku]

  • Big data is still hard, but it gets better

    What’s standing between your staff and big data analysis? That was the existential question posed of DJ Patil and Jeff Hammerbacher at the GigaOM Structure:Data event today in New York. The two had different takes on how easy it was to give people the power to use data, with Hammerbacher, who is the co-founder of Cloudera, saying that it’s pretty simple today.

    He did say that today many aspects of the input and ingress of data will end up being automated, much like systems administrators responsible for running the data center have seen many of their tasks automated.

    Patil, who is now a data scientist in residence at Greylock Partners, was a bit more focused on end users. He shared his visit to a nonprofit called DoSomething.org earlier today, and said that people there had plenty of curiosity and a desire to play with data and ask questions, but they didn’t always know what to ask to get the insights they seemed to want. “We need another layer to help those people figure out what they want to ask,” he said.

    From Patil’s perspective we need tools that will help us tell stories with data and let people play with it in ways that can help people come to new conclusions or see new relationships. “This is less of a machine learning problem than a ‘Can I try a bunch of things with the data?’ kind of problem,” said Patil.

    And for those who are still intimidated by playing around with big data Patil has this to say, “Most people doing sophisticated analysis they don’t really know what they are doing.”

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


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  • Google Updates Sports Search Results with More Detailed Info

    It looks like that full NCAA Bracket isn’t the only sports-related information that Google is adding to search results.

    They have just announced an update that will display interactive info cards for various sports-related queries. This includes schedules, stats, and standings for the NBA, NFL MLB, and more.

    “League schedules are now grouped by day/week, so you can easily see who’s playing and when. Clicking on a game gives you detailed information with links to more content on official sites. You can find complete league standings just by doing a quick search for [NBA standings], and you can even see the latest stats from your favorite players,” says Google.

    If you want to see this in action, just search “NBA.” You’ll see a “scores and schedule” card above all results that is viewable by date. When you click on an individual game, you’ll see the teams’ records, the time and location of the game. You’ll also see a couple of links to outside sites – “preview” and “tickets” links to NBA.com.

    Here’s what searching “NBA standings” looks like, once you’ve expanded the info card:

    Sure takes up a lot of the results page, huh?

    Of course, when Google puts information like this inside search results, it makes it less likely that you’ll need to visit an another site to obtain what you’re looking for. These info cards, along with Knowledge Graph, have and will continue to impact traffic to other sites. But for users, it’s a great feature that gives them the info they desire, faster.

  • Pinterest Buys Livestar, Shuts Down App

    Pinterest just announced that it has agreed to acquire Livestar, an app that helps people find local recommendations from friends and others. The app will be shutting down, and he engineering talent will be part of the Pinterest team.

    “We think the Livestar team is a natural fit for Pinterest because of their commitment to inspiring people to do things in their everyday lives through social and expert recommendations,” a spokesperson for Pinterest says in an email.

    “The Livestar engineering team will be joining Pinterest in the coming weeks,” she says. “CEO and founder Fritz Lanman will not be joining the team, but he will continue to advise Pinterest. An active angel investor in startups including Pinterest, Fritz will continue to invest and advise startups and will be undertaking a new, yet to be announced project.”

    “Our goal at Livestar is to help people find great recommendations from friends, critics and strangers with similar taste,” says the Livestar team in its own announcement. “Over the last two years, the Livestar community has shared millions of ratings and reviews. Today we wanted to let you know that we’ll be making our next move: the Livestar engineering team will be joining Pinterest.”

    The Livestar app will be shutting down immediately.

    Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

  • ‘Do no harm’: Patient-centered end-of-life care means happier patients who live longer

    New doctors take an oath to do no harm, but many physicians, in their zeal to prolong people’s lives, often end up exposing patients to aggressive treatments that don’t improve outcomes and that drive up health care costs.
     
    Researchers from the UCLA Department of Urology have found that patient-centered end-of-life care — ensuring that a dying person’s wishes are known and followed — results in happier, less depressed patients who are in less pain and survive longer. By eliminating aggressive measures that patients might not want, this type of care also helps to keep costs down for those with advanced cancers and other diseases that can’t be effectively treated.
     
    “We can improve care while reducing costs by making sure that everything we do is centered on what the patient wants and what his or her specific goals are, and then tailoring a treatment plan to ensure we provide the specific care he or she wants,” said Dr. Jonathan Bergman, a Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholar at UCLA and co-author of a new perspective paper published March 20 in the peer-reviewed journal JAMA Surgery.
     
    Medical care during the final stages of life is often poorly coordinated and fails to take into account a patient’s preferences, the UCLA researchers say. It also consumes the lion’s share of health care dollars. A 2004 study found that 30 percent of Medicare resources are expended on the 5 percent of beneficiaries who die each year, and one-third of the costs in a patient’s last year of life are amassed during the final month.
     
    Yet research has shown that by instituting patient-centered care, costs in the last week of a patient’s life can be reduced by up to 36 percent, and death, when it comes, is less likely to occur in an intensive care unit.
     
    UCLA researchers are currently testing the patient-centered care model on cancer patients at the West Los Angeles Veterans Affairs Medical Center. One of the first things doctors do with these critically ill patients is determine their goals in a multidisciplinary environment, integrating a palliative care specialist at the outset. The physician and specialist see the patient on the same day to coordinate their care.
     
    “Unfortunately, the opposite is usually what happens,” Bergman said. “Patients come in with incurable diseases and there’s no discussion of prognosis and goals of care. Then a lot of very aggressive treatments can occur, due to inertia — patients are placed in an intensive care unit with oxygen and feeding tubes, and that’s not always in line with their goals.”
     
    Patients who want aggressive care should, of course, receive it, Bergman said. But the UCLA research team is discovering that many don’t want such treatments and simply have not been queried about their needs and desires.
     
    To change this, the perspective paper suggests that medical residents first be educated about patient-centered care. Physicians will be better prepared to practice in the 21st century and to maximize patient outcomes if they are guided toward appropriate care for their patients in life’s final stages, Bergman said.
     
    Second, changes should be considered to Medicare, which pays for the majority of care at the end of life. To date, meaningful policy discussions on this issue have proven elusive, Bergman notes, with talk about “death panels” and the like causing policymakers to shy away from such decision-making.
     
    “Given the disproportionate cost of care at the very end of life, the issue should be revisited,” the perspective paper states. “Addressing goals of care, not to deny aggressive care to those who want it, but to ensure that we deliver aggressive care only to those who do, reduces costs and improves outcomes.”
     
    Lastly, the UCLA researchers suggest that hospital “scorecards” be changed to reflect this new care model. The Joint Commission, which accredits hospitals, issues an annual report that ranks hospitals on quality and safety using evidence-based measures linked to patient outcomes. However, none of the 44 accountability measures or the six non-accountability measures in the report address end-of-life care or the assessment of patient preferences.
     
    “Adding such measures to the report would improve practice, as well as inform patient-centered care by empowering individuals to make educated decisions,” Bergman said. “Better care in life’s final stages should and can be led by physicians, who have accepted the mission of skillfully — and thoughtfully — caring for patients at every step of life’s journey.”
     
    For more news, visit the UCLA Newsroom and follow us on Twitter.

  • Google: We Still Need Text To Index Your Content

    Google’s latest Webmaster Help video discusses Google’s need for text in indexing content. Matt Cutts responds to a question about how important text is in getting Google to understand their site. The user has a site that is mostly made up of images, and says that users like it better, bounce rate has declined, and conversions are up.

    “Google does still want text,” he says. “So there’s a couple options. One is: if you have an image that you’ve made of some text that’s really beautiful, you can include some textual content there. You can sort of say, ‘alt,’ you know, or the title – that sort of thing. So you can say, for an image, here’s some text to go along with that, and that can help.”

    He goes on to say that one reason a site might be having more user interaction, time on site, conversions, etc., is because it’s prettier. “And we see that,” he says. “Better design can help people enjoy and use your site more.”

    He also suggests considering Google Web Fonts.

  • For big data achievements, IT and analysts need to work together

    One trend emerging throughout GigaOM’s Structure:Data conference today is the collaboration between man and machine to solve big-data problems. Speaking with Phil Francisco, vice president of product management for big data at IBM, and Emile Werr, head of enterprise data architecture at the New York Stock Exchange, my colleague Barb Darrow spent a session Wednesday explaining how people — a company’s IT experts and business experts — sometimes need to work in different ways to achieve the same business goals.

    Developers need to build systems for crossing lots of data sets from legacy data warehouses as well as Hadoop clusters and make available options for visualizing trends that might otherwise be obvious, Francisco said. That’s when business experts come into play and ask questions and derive insights that could lead to new strategies and campaigns.

    How does that work in practice? Facing greater volumes of data, the NYSE has trained business analysts as “data architects” to develop a system with IBM products for capacity planning and spotting patterns to detect fraud in billions of transactions each day, Werr said. Analysts also need to be able to figure out if a a possible fraud case is a false positive. Those are early-stage use cases for analyzing data in near-real time.

    For now, financial deployments tend to play out on premise. Werr pointed out places where public clouds make sense. Developers can test out new data architectures for data sets. But the cost advantage of running on production scale on Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) such as Amazon Web Services is appealing, Werr said. But, at least for now, bandwidth across multiple data centers is an issue, he said.

    Check out the rest of our Structure:Data 2013 live coverage here, and a video embed of the session follows below.


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  • President Obama Tells Israeli People: The U.S Is Proud to Be “Your Strongest Ally and Your Greatest Friend”

    President Obama and Israeli President Peres inspect an honor guard in Tel Aviv, Israel, March 20, 2013

    President Barack Obama and Israeli President Shimon Peres inspect an honor guard during the official arrival ceremony at Ben Gurion International Airport in Tel Aviv, Israel, March 20, 2013.

    (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)

    On the first day of his visit to the Middle East, the first foreign trip of his second term, President Obama was in Israel, where he met with President Shimon Peres and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The visit is historic, marking the first time the President has visited Israel since taking office, and comes as its citizens celebrate the 65th anniversary of a free and independent State of Israel.

    President Obama's visit began with an arrival ceremony at the Ben Gurion airport, followed by an inspection of the Iron Dome Battery defense system in Tel Aviv. The Iron Dome is a short range rocket and mortar defense system, which was developed by Israel and produced with U.S. assistance and is part of a multi-tier missile defense developed to counter the rocket threat against Israel’s civilian population. From there, the President flew on to Jerusalem, where he met with Israeli leaders and attended a working dinner with Prime Minister Netanyahu.

    read more

  • Hospice Murder-Suicide Rocks Pennsylvania Community

    An elderly man and woman in Allentown, Pennsylvania are dead, following a murder–suicide.

    CBS is reporting that 86-year-old Elwood Osman shot his 83-year-old wife while she was lying in bed in the hospice wing of Lehigh Valley Hospital on Tuesday, March 19. He then took his own life in the same room. The wife, Mildred Osman, had only been in the hospital’s care since March 7.

    Hospital and Lehigh County authorities have stated that no other patients or staff witnessed the event and that no danger was posed to other patients. Security at the hospital is being reassessed.

    “It’s a love story,” said Jim Geiger, SVP of operations at Lehigh Valley Health Network.

  • Amazon Is Working With Record Labels On Subscription-Based Music Service [Rumor]

    Despite earlier attempts to bring streaming music to the masses, Spotify really nailed the concept when it launched in 2008. Now its the service every company in the business of selling music is trying to copy, including Amazon.

    The Verge reports that Amazon is currently in talks with record labels on setting up its own subscription-based music service. If successful, Amazon could prove a formidable rival to incumbents like Spotify as it really has an established business in selling physical and digital music.

    Of course, it probably will be a while before we see anything from this. Those privy to the meetings say that Amazon and the record labels are now just beginning to talk, and that said talks are “very informal” at this point in time.

    Amazon is just the latest company said to be in talks with record labels about setting up a subscription music service. Analysts have predicted that Apple will get into the streaming Internet radio business this year to take on services like Pandora. Google is also reportedly getting into the streaming music scene with YouTube.

    Out of all the rumored players, Amazon seems the most well suited for the music streaming business. It already has an established cloud infrastructure with Amazon Cloud Player. There’s also the rumored existence of a Kindle phone and $99 Kindle Fire HD; both of which could provide the perfect platform to launch a streaming service on.

    As always, the above is nothing but a rumor for now. That being said, it’s completely within the realm of possibility so don’t be surprised if Amazon announces something similar to Spotify this year.