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Google’s recently stepped up their advertising game to try to draw some attention to their Nexus lineup, and the latest really hits home. The small story focuses on a couple trying to decide how to handle having their first child, and it goes through the beginning expecting stages all the way through the couple trying to decide on a name. The video of course showcases the cool things the Nexus 10 can do in a relateable way, like multi-user support for both parents’ schedule, and Google Now for making that tough naming decision.

It’s definitely a memorable commercial that’s bound to drum up a bit of interest for the 10-inch tab. Hopefully we’ll see a few more showcasing the other features Google stuffed into their devices. Hit the break below to check out the commercial for yourself.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Come comment on this article: Google’s latest Nexus 10 commercial tugs at your heartstrings

Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) giant Salesforce.com is announcing new features for its Chatter social network’s Android and iOS native apps, as part of a larger effort to enhance its mobile offerings.

Inside the Chatter app for smartphones and tablets, users will be able to view and edit the status of deals in progress, share and view files, assign tasks, start polls and see updates in real time. Some of those abilities are available now, and others will come in the second half of the year. Until this week, though, users have been limited to viewing and posting status updates and browsing through user profiles.

The new functions let salespeople and other employees do more of their work and keep track of projects on the go, whether during the morning commute or outside the door of a potential client. The most talented salespeople might not want to be tethered to a desk to use legacy customer-relationship management software; they want to work with the mobile devices they know, said Anna Rosenman, senior manager of product marketing for Salesforce Chatter.

The rollout follows a Salesforce announcement last month about new live chat and co-browsing capabilities for mobile users of the company’s Service Cloud product.

Stay tuned for other mobile announcements from Salesforce later this year, a spokesman said. How will the company execute on its mobile strategy? Look for it to make acquisitions, as it did for the co-browsing technology. As my colleague Barb Darrow reported last month, Salesforce will “be aggressive and look at everything” in terms of acquisition prospects, CEO Marc Benioff told analysts.

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Bowers & Wilkin’s Zeppelin speaker is one of its best products, but as times evolve, so does the company and its products. That’s why the British Speaker manufacturer is introducing the Zeppelin Air wireless speaker and the brand new Z2. Not too long ago, B&W released the A5 and A7 speakers, for consumers who are truly wireless. Neither speaker has a dock of any kind, but rather stream music wirelessly through Apple’s AirPlay. But with the A line, B&W realized that, regardless of wireless play or not, people enjoy having a dock on their speaker. “When you walk into your home, the speaker is always in the same place, and we’ve heard from customers that they like slapping their phone down on the dock and letting it charge,” said Brian Devlin. “That way they always know where it is.” Both the Zeppelin Air and Z2 have both wireless functionality as well as iPhone 5 docks.

Zeppelin Air

To start, the Zeppelin Air hasn’t seen much of an update in the design department. And perhaps rightfully so, considering the speaker has one of the more iconic designs in its class among competitors. The Air has been updated with a Lightning dock, and the company even made that dock flexible. Because it bends, you’ll never have to worry about damaging the Lightning port on your iOs device or the dock of the speaker. The Zeppelin Air is available in May for $599.99.

Z2

The Z2 is instantly reminiscent of the Zeppelin Mini, B&W’s shot at a Zeppelin spin-off. Bowers & Wilkins insists the Z2 is not a next-generation Mini, but a brand new product line. Just like the Zeppelin Air, the Z2 offers Airplay streaming, a lightning dock, and B&W’s flexible dock technology. The Z2 comes in a considerably smaller package than the Air, and the dock almost seems invisible until you’re hovering over the speaker. The Z2 is available in April in both black and June in white for $399. Both products are made for the high-end listener, but if you can pick up an A5 or A7 along the way, Bowers & Wilkins will have truly completed its goal. The focus with all new products out of the company is that the music should follow you, and not the other way around.

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Amazon Publishing said in a letter to literary agents Monday that it will start paying its authors royalties on a monthly basis, up from every three months.

“In this digital age, we don’t see why authors should have to wait six months to be paid,” Amazon’s VP of publishing Jeff Belle wrote in the letter. “Beginning with our March payment cycle, we will move to paying our authors on a monthly basis. More specifically: each month’s royalties will be released within 60 days of the end of that month, every month.  For example, royalties for sales in January will be released by March 31, royalties for sales in February will be released by April 30, etc.”

Most publishing houses pay royalties twice a year. Authors who self-publish through Amazon’s KDP and Createspace lready receive monthly royalties.

Belle also wrote that “Based on sales in February, Amazon Publishing now ranks as the 5th largest publisher on the U.S. Kindle platform (excluding free downloads but including KOLL loans, for which we pay authors).”

Full letter:

Friends,

The team at Amazon Publishing has been working to continually improve our business, with the goal of turning efficiencies into higher author royalties, faster payments and even more support for the books we publish.  Building a new business can take time and patience, and the feedback and encouragement we’ve received along the way from you has been invaluable in making us better.

We’re particularly excited to tell you about upcoming changes to the way we pay royalties.  In this digital age, we don’t see why authors should have to wait six months to be paid.  Beginning with our March payment cycle, we will move to paying our authors on a monthly basis.  More specifically: each month’s royalties will be released within 60 days of the end of that month, every month.  For example, royalties for sales in January will be released by March 31, royalties for sales in February will be released by April 30, etc.

We recognize this may create a little extra paperwork in some cases, but we feel this change is in the best interests of authors — we hope you’ll agree.  As with any such change in our business, our tireless Author Relations team is standing by to answer any questions you may have on this topic.

In other news, 2013 is off to a strong start.  Based on sales in February, Amazon Publishing now ranks as the 5th largest publisher on the US Kindle platform (excluding free downloads but including KOLL loans, for which we pay authors).  The latest book to reach the 100,000 copy threshold is 47North’s THE MONGOLIAD: BOOK ONE, the first installment in the epic Foreworld saga, written by Neal Stephenson, Greg Bear, Erik Bear, Joseph Brassey, Mark Teppo, Nicole Galland and Cooper Moo, which surpassed 100,000 copies in February.  Similarly, CRAZY LITTLE THING by Montlake author Tracy Brogan continues up the Kindle charts, also surpassing 100,000 copies in the last week of February.  Another Montlake bestseller, NOT QUITE DATING by Catherine Bybee exceeded the 100,000 copy milestone just last week as well.  Also of note is Christina McKenna’s “wittily and winningly-detailed” debut novel THE MISREMEMBERED MAN, which we acquired from Toby Press and re-published under AmazonEncore in 2010, re-entered the Kindle Top 10 in February on the strength of our backlist promotion, and is now on the verge of the 100,000 copy mark as a result.

Our AmazonCrossing imprint has also been on a roll lately. In January, THE BEGGAR KING by Oliver Pötzsch, the third installment in the bestselling Hangman’s Daughter series, debuted in the Kindle Top 10 to outstanding reviews, and just today surpassed 100,000 copies.  Translated from German by Lee Chadeayne, the Hangman’s Daughter series has been a breakout success, with over 800,000 copies sold to date (and occupying the top 4 slots in the US Kindle store, as of this writing).  In February, we launched the latest in our series of translations from Icelandic with REPLY TO A LETTER FROM  HELGA by Bergsveinn Birgisson, which garnered immediate praise as “a stunning work of art — resonant, earthy, heartbreaking”.  Meanwhile, in the other direction, our translations from English into German continue to surpass our expectations as well.  ABDUCTED by T.R. Ragan, itself a Kindle bestseller in the US and UK, was translated into German by AmazonCrossing as IM NETZ DES SPINNENMANNS in November, where it quickly reached #1 in our German Kindle store (combined English and German copies have already surpassed 100,000).  In all, for the month of February, six AmazonCrossing titles reached the Kindle Top 10 in Germany.

Meanwhile, Kindle Serials also continues to outperform our expectations.  Since the release of the first episode in its serialization, OPTION TO KILL by Andrew Peterson has sold over 70,000 copies and is now available as a complete book in both Kindle and trade paperback. And we are excited to see PINES, Blake Crouch’s Kindle bestseller, which has been called a “genre-bending, completely riveting thrill ride” of a novel, going into development at Fox and FX, with the pilot to be directed by M. Night Shamalyan.

We’re pleased with this strong growth overall, and in particular the results of our US and German translation publishing businesses, as well as Kindle Serials.  And yet we are also quite aware of the many improvements and inventions that lie ahead —as always your feedback is welcome and appreciated.  If you have any suggestions or questions about the new royalties process, or anything else about Amazon Publishing, please feel free to reach out to me directly.  –Jeff

Jeff Belle
Vice President
Amazon Publishing

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While it won’t be all that easy to watch full NCAA March Madness games online unless you’re a cable subscriber, you will be able to tune into quick highlight clips from the big games at a slightly unlikely source — Twitter.

As USA Today reported Monday evening, Twitter will be teaming up with Turner Broadcasting and a startup called SnappyTV to provide short, 15-second highlights from all 67 games, tweeted out shortly after the moments happen. The Twitter account @marchmadness will have the clips, which will serve like instant replays on the social media site.

While Twitter started out as a text service — SMS, in fact — it has moved into the realm of visual content and media recently as part of an attempt to create a full-featured news stream with associated in-stream advertising.

The company launched a photo editing and filters app, the video app Vine, and there has been talk of a music app as well. Video replays around sports, which is an area with lots of advertising dollars, would make sense as Twitter builds up its monetization efforts and looks to add multimedia content into the service.

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Google has been working hard to unify their products. Their latest project, combines its currently fragmented messaging platforms under one powerful and effective service. The new initiative, affectionately called “Babble”, will do just that. Currently, Google is maintaining Google Talk, Hangout, Voice, Messenger, Chat for Drive collaboration, and the pseudo Google Talk for G+. The only two that work even fairly well together are Google Talk for Gmail and G+ and even they can evoke frustration with users from time-to-time.

The Babble cross-platform solution could enable Google to dominate chat services such as iMessage and BlackBerry Messenger. Google is building Babble from the ground up, which may or may not be a blessing depending on how you look at it. On one hand, they will be working from a clean slate and there will be no boundaries as to what they can make the app do. On the other hand, Google will be pushing out another Beta product based on past experiences that may have more bugs than a Louisiana bayou on a hot summer afternoon. We will just have to hope the geeks at Google push out a well polished, well oiled, version of the app on Beta release. 

Babble will enable several enhancement features, such as:

• Share photos in chat windows.
• Start a hangout with anyone in your contacts list.
• Conversations are threaded across the different services.
• Ability to use same window for all chat products.

XMPP has served Google well over the years. Google’s recent decision to block non-native XMPP requests may be their first step towards building their own closed communications platform. In order to use the chat service their will be restrictions in place set by Google that must be adhered to closely. Bad news for those of you that are used to customization and tweaking, but transparent to the rest of us that are just looking for a simple, high quality, high performance chat solution that will get the job done.

No official release date has been announced as of yet, but we expect to hear something concerning the unification of these products during the upcoming Google I/O 2013. All that is known is that the new service comes with an app that will span across Android and Chrome OS, so it is unclear how it will be unveiled officially to the public.

I am excited that Google is addressing the chat fragmentation issue that has been affecting their platforms for years.

Source:  Geek

Come comment on this article: Google Babble Chat Client to Unify Now Fragmented Messaging Platforms

It might be snowing on the East Coast, but it’s almost spring here in San Francisco, which makes it a great time to think about cleaning your house. Or so I hear.

Several startups have been cropping up in the Bay Area recently that are specifically targeting the young, affluent professionals who are ambivalent about home cleaning and chores. While there are already countless numbers of cleaning services on Yelp or Angie’s List, these startups are attempting to displace traditional services with a more tech-savvy approach, generally touting credit card payments, mobile apps and online booking as selling points.

As Om wrote this weekend in response to the Uber strike in San Francisco, we will continue to face questions as we get used to booking and rating services online that are performed by other people, and likely these cleaning services will be no different in the challenges they face. But for a lot of consumers getting used to booking and paying for services online, these kinds of apps and services could become the norm.

House cleaning

Hipstermaid

Only in the Bay Area can you hire an American Apparel-clad, self-proclaimed hipster to come clean your house. (With organic cleaning products, naturally.) Hipstermaid was launched by ex-Googler Cathy Tang who wanted to book and pay for home-cleaning services online, as she was accustomed to doing with most other daily tasks.

The premise of the company is fairly absurd (since it’s unclear why a hipster would clean a bathroom better than anyone else), and the company’s prices are definitely more expensive than some of the other options. Tang, who is CEO of the company, said the average San Francisco house cleaning job with costs $129-$159 (typically two cleaners covering a one or two bedroom apartment.) But the company does offer eco-friendly cleaning supplies, flexible booking and online payments, and Tang says having hipster in the title is mainly part of the marketing strategy.

Homejoy

Homejoy was frequently known as Pathjoy, but has recently re-branded to emphasize its focus on home cleaning and care. Just like some of the other services, Homejoy lets you book a cleaner on the site for a flat price per hour, and you’re guaranteed a home cleaning in the time you specify, as well as online booking and profile of your cleaner. You can leave reviews of your cleaner afterwards and give Homejoy gift cards.

The service is available in New York City, San Francisco, Los Angeles, San Diego, San Jose and Seattle. The company charges a standard $20 per hour rate with a minimum booking of 2.5 hours, although cleaners can be booked for longer periods of time as well.

Handybook

Based in New York, Boston, and San Francisco, Handybook lets you book cleaners online, as well as find a handyman to put together your IKEA furniture, hang pictures, paint or help you move. The company also helps you locate plumbers in your area. Any of the services booked through the site and you can pay with a credit card, and the company has an app on iOS right now.

CEO and co-founder Oisin Hanrahan told me that they wanted to take the friction out of booking home services, but quickly discovered that it’s as much about standardizing the experience (making sure the cleaner shows up on time, uses eco-friendly materials, brings his or her own vacuum, etc.) as it is about allowing credit cards:

“The whole process puts so much friction and tension on the customer, we think it just doesn’t make any sense. We want it to be as easy to book a home service as it is to book an Uber or buy a book on Amazon,” he said.

Handybook estimates that home cleanings cost between $25 to $35 per hour.

Do-it-yourself cleaning

BrightNest

As someone with the time and energy to clean my own small apartment, I’m less interested in finding a service to do it for me, and more interested in reading about the best ways to do it myself. BrightNest is a website (and iPhone app that just launched Monday) that allows users to check out different tips for home cleaning and maintenance, depending on the type of home you have and the size of your family.

I’m a single person without pets, kids, or a lawn; my needs are fairly limited. But after signing in and telling the app about my basic living setup, I received tips for making a butterfly feeder, removing stains from carpets, cleaning out my fridge, purchasing a smoke detector, conserving tap water and organizing my closet.

Aside from the butterfly feeder, which sounds like a kick, it’s a pretty useful list of things I might use with detailed information under every suggestion. Plus, the app is fairly attractive to use, and you can save particular items to do on an ongoing basis.

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It was only a few months ago that network optimization startup Vasona Networks came out of stealth mode, and now it’s closing a $12 billion funding around. The company’s Form D popped up at the Securities and Exchange Commission on Monday (spotted first by VentureBeat) revealing the Series B funding, and the company confirmed with GigaOM that existing investor Bessemer Venture Partners led the round with participation by New Venture Partners and Vodafone Ventures.

Vasona is one of a myriad of companies that develop traffic shaping technologies for mobile networks, but Vasona sets itself apart not in what it optimizes but where it does that optimization. As I wrote back in January:

Where Vasona distinguishes itself from the lot is in the level of precision it can target with its traffic shaping techniques, said Biren Sood, CEO of the Santa Clara, Calif.,-based company.

Most optimization technologies apply the work across entire classes of data in the network core, or they follow specific subscribers as they move to and fro, throttling back their speeds or compressing their videos regardless of the prevailing network conditions.

But Sood said that the network should be treated as a collection of its parts, rather than as a unified whole. Congestion occurs at the individual cell, so carriers should optimize their networks accordingly, applying traffic management techniques only where congestion dictates, Sood said.

“We understand the nature of the cell, and we understand the capacity of the cell,” Sood said. “With that understanding we can get the right bits to the right applications in the most efficient way.”

I checked back in with Sood on Monday, and he told me that Vasona plans to use the funds to scale its operations and trial activity globally. The company is already engaged in several trials with operators, Sood said, though he wouldn’t reveal specific operators (given Vodafone is an investor, it might be a safe bet). Vasona has now raised a total of $22 million.

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Ed. note: This post was first published on the official blog of healthcare.gov. You can see the original post here

In the past, too many parents had to worry about how they would pay the mortgage or the car payment if their sick children were dropped from insurance coverage. Victims of breast cancer worried about what would happen to them or their families if they reached a lifetime limit on coverage and no longer could afford treatment.

These were real concerns for real people. Because of the health care law, however, they can put these worries aside and know they are getting a better value for their premium dollars.

The Affordable Care Act brings an end to some of the worst insurance industry practices that have kept affordable health coverage out of reach for millions of Americans, especially when they needed it most. Under the health care law, consumers can be confident that their insurance will protect them if they get sick and their families won’t be crushed by medical bills.

As we observe the third anniversary of the President signing the health care law, let me tell you what this means in real terms to many American families:

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In 2011, the U.S. passed a law that changes the centuries-old way that the country hands out patents. Instead of a “first to invent” system, America will now give a patent to whoever files first. Here’s a quick summary of the law and what it means:

Why did the law change?

Congress decided to adopt the first-to-file system as part of a larger 2011 patent reform law known as the America Invents Act. The first-to-file system, which is used by every other country in the world, took effect on March 18.

What does it mean for inventors?

In the past, the Patent Office granted a patent to whoever invented it first. Now, the patent will go to whoever filed the application first.

Isn’t that unfair?

In the past, if someone stole your idea and obtained a patent for it, you could start an “interference proceeding” with the Patent Office. If you could show proof that you were the real inventor, the office would hand the patent to you. That won’t happen in the new system.

So, yes, in theory the old system was more fair. But in reality, interference proceedings were very rare — one report says that in 2007, they arose in fewer than one percent of all patent applications. And, of these, the patent was given to the second-to-file a grand total of 7 times. In addition to being rare, the proceedings were also expensive: a 2005 survey said the average cost was over $650,000.

Finally, America has a special rule that will help inventors in many cases. The rule says that if you disclose the invention at a conference or elsewhere, you have a one year grace period to file a patent for it. This means that your disclosure will prevent someone else from getting a patent on your invention (but it could also harm your chances to get patents in other countries).

What does first-to-file mean for small inventors?

One criticism of the U.S. patent system is that it favors big companies like Apple and Google who have the budget and the lawyers to file patent applications all day long. The new system won’t change this and could benefit the big companies even more. But, ultimately, it’s unlikely to make things much different than they are right now.

The bigger problem with patents is that too many are being issued in the first place. This leads to companies abusing 20-year monopolies over basic technology — often with no net benefit to society.

Where can I learn more about the first-to-file rules?

PatentlyO has the relevant text of the statute and a detailed description of what it does here.

Thumbnail photo courtesy Flickr user opensourceway

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President Barack Obama delivers remarks during the Women’s History Month reception in the East Room of the White House, March 18, 2013. Standing at right are First Lady Michelle Obama and Amanda McMillan, who introduced the President.

(Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)

President Obama today welcomed a group of accomplished and inspiring women to a reception in the East Room of the White House. The group, which included leaders like A&E Networks CEO Abbe Raven, Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake, Girl Scouts' CEO Anna Maria Chávez, astronaut Sunita Williams, activists Dolores Huerta and Lilly Ledbetter, and WNBA star (and 3-time Olympic Gold Medalist) Tamika Catchings, joined the President, First Lady Michelle Obama and Dr. Jill Biden to celebrate the progress women make in this country each and every day. President Obama highlighted the changes we've seen in the past century:

When I look around this room, it is hard to believe that 100 years ago this month, thousands of women were marching right outside this house demanding one of our most fundamental right: the right to vote, to have a say in our democracy. And today, a century later, its rooms are full of accomplished women who have overcome discrimination, shattered glass ceilings, and become outstanding role models for all of our sons and daughters. And that means we've come a long way, and that’s thanks to the efforts of so many people like you.

Because of the hard work and exemplary leadership of the women in this room, military families have protected family and medical leave. Women have legal recourse to fight against pay discrimination… Women have the opportunity to serve on the front lines of our military conflicts, and that means that they're getting paid and promoted equally. Women have the opportunity to make their own choices about their health.

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VendAsta Technologies, a Canadian provider of white label digital brand management technology, has raised $8.25 million from Vanedge Capital and BDC Venture Capital. The money will be used for development. VendAsta is based in Saskatchewan, Canada.

PRESS RELEASE
VendAsta Technologies, the industry leading provider of white label digital brand management solutions, is raising $8.25 million in funding from Vanedge Capital and BDC Venture Capital. The new round of funding will help VendAsta accelerate platform development to meet partner demand for new features and tools, and provide additional support.

“For any business, digital fragmentation creates acute challenges in managing local brand reputation. The various channels that businesses must monitor and engage are seemingly endless. VendAsta’s platform closes the loop for businesses, supplying them with tools to succeed in the digital world,” says Jed Williams, Senior Analyst at BIA/Kelsey.

VendAsta launched its Reputation Management platform in 2011, and within two years the company has grown to become one of the largest Reputation Management providers in the world. Together, its channel partners include eight of the top ten newspaper companies in the United States, as well as large pure play digital agencies, Internet Yellow Pages, and other independent digital and SEO agencies that provide Reputation Management to over 100,000 local small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs).

“VendAsta Technologies has done an excellent job partnering with top tier media companies across North America,” said V. Paul Lee, Managing Partner at Vanedge Capital. “Customer calls revealed VendAsta is agile, responsive, and delivers what they have promised. We have been told multiple times that VendAsta is a top vendor.” Robert Simon, Senior Managing Partner of the BDC Venture Capital IT Fund added that “the SMB market has been, to a large degree, untapped. We see VendAsta growing to be a very significant company. This investment is strongly aligned with our efforts to ensure a healthy and vibrant early stage ecosystem in Canada and to help build the globally competitive Canadian companies we are so passionate about.”

“We have built a white label reputation platform that allows businesses to monitor, manage and build their brand,” said Brendan King, CEO of VendAsta. “With these tools, our partners — whether large newspapers and yellow page companies, or small traditional and digital agencies — can be up and running in days and on the street selling products, backed by a full suite of prescriptive sales and marketing materials. This funding will allow us to accelerate the development of new products and maintain our culture of continual improvement.”

VendAsta’s platform currently includes Reputation Monitoring, Brand Analytics, Social Marketing, Presence Builder, and Concierge tools to help local businesses build their online brands. As an example, an agency that manages digital marketing for a local restaurant can keep track of the reviews the restaurant gets on relevant websites, generate tasks to respond to these reviews on the client’s behalf, ensure all the listings about the restaurant are accurate, and identify new leads by monitoring relevant chatter on social media — all from one common white label Business Centre. For its larger partners, VendAsta offers a suite of API-based services that can integrate this data directly into their platforms.

Interested parties can request demos of VendAsta’s solutions by going to http://www.VendAsta.com.

About VendAsta

VendAsta Technologies is a leader in digital marketing and brand management solutions for small to mid-sized local businesses. VendAsta provides white label solutions to media companies that work directly with local businesses, including online directional media companies, newspapers, broadcasters, SEO services, certified marketing representatives, web hosting providers, and interactive agencies. VendAsta’s reputation and presence management platform includes Reputation Monitoring, Brand Analytics, Presence Builder, Social Marketing lead generation tools and Concierge CRM platforms to help manage and sell digital products. Today, over 10,000 digital sales representatives across 250 media organizations provide VendAsta powered solutions to local businesses. For more information, visit http://www.vendasta.com.

About Vanedge Capital
Vanedge Capital is a Vancouver BC based venture capital fund focused on investments in interactive entertainment, digital media and infrastructure software businesses. The fund managers have extensive experience and relationships in this sector, and have built and led world class companies in video games, cloud storage and enterprise software, among others. For more information, visit http://www.vanedgecapital.com, or contact info(at)vanedgecapital(dot)com.

About BDC Venture Capital
BDC Venture Capital helps transform great ideas into great companies. With more than $1 billion in current and planned investments and 25 years of experience in venture capital, BDC Venture Capital focuses on innovative IT, health, and energy/clean technology companies, as well as venture funds, with high growth potential. BDC Venture Capital works with entrepreneurs and venture capital investors in the private sector to build outstanding Canadian companies. BDC Venture Capital is involved at every stage of the development cycle, from seed through expansion to exit, and its goal is to deliver excellent return on investment, while working to create a sound financial ecosystem for Canadian technology ventures. Find out more at http://www.bdc.ca/vc or on Twitter @BDC_VC.

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Tenth Avenue Holdings has invested an undisclosed amount in Hello Products, a maker of branded oral care products designed in partnership with BMW Group DesignworksUSA. Specifics were not disclosed. Tenth Avenue Holdings in based in New York.

PRESS RELEASE
Hello Products LLC today announced that it has received financing from a group of strategic investors led by Tenth Avenue Holdings (TAH) for the company’s breakthrough line of unique, branded oral care products designed in partnership with BMW Group DesignworksUSA, the global design subsidiary of BMW Group. The company’s proprietary hello™ branded products will debut in March at various Food, Drug, and Mass retail stores nationwide.

The company’s lead investor, New York City-based Tenth Avenue Holdings, is a private, diversified holding company, and its Co-CEO’s, Joel Citron and Laurence Denihan, join hello’s Board of Directors. Additional investors include William Morris Endeavor, Harmony Partners, and a select group of strategic consumer packaged goods and retail veterans.

Joel Citron, Co-Chief Executive Officer of Tenth Avenue Holdings, stated, “We see great promise for hello to shake up a staid category and give consumers a brand and experience they can really embrace. We believe that hello’s products bring a velocity of change – comparable to the technology industry – to the stasis of the oral care aisle, which looks today a lot like it did 30 years ago. As a firm, we are always interested in brands and products that relate to how consumers see the world and themselves, and hello’s philosophy and design-centric, 99% natural positioning make for a perfect fit.”

He added, “Because Tenth Avenue Holdings is privately held, we have no restrictions, and our singular focus is investing in opportunities with the outsized potential for long-term growth. We believe in Craig and the power of hello, and we plan to build this relationship, and our mutual success, for the long haul.”

“We are extremely fortunate to attract such a stellar group of investors and advisors,” said Craig Dubitsky, hello’s founder and CEO. “This unique group of partners brings an unparalleled depth of operating experience, insight, key relationships, and financial resources to the table. It’s truly a dream team, and we can’t wait to create the future together.”

“Craig understands consumers and their needs, and hello is evidence of that,” said Ari Emanuel, Co-Chief Executive Officer of William Morris Endeavor. “It’s a great line of products, and we look forward to being a part of the brand’s future.”

Harmony Partners co-founder, Mark Lotke, who was an early stage investor in both E*Trade and Priceline.com, noted “Craig has assembled a great constellation of partners that will enable hello to make a significant impact in a category that hasn’t seen material innovation in decades. We are extremely excited to be a part of what we feel will be the next major success story in the consumer space.”

The company has also established a strategic Board of Advisors, with deep domain expertise across consumer packaged goods, branding, marketing, and merchandising.

“I spent a lot of time in the oral care aisle during my 36 year retail career, and learned not to expect a lot of excitement,” said Chris Bodine, an investor and member of hello’s Advisory Board, and previous EVP of Merchandising and Marketing and President of Healthcare Services at CVS Pharmacy. “When Craig introduced me to hello, I knew I had to be a part of it. Hello is innovative, revolutionary and disruptive – and totally appealing. I strongly believe that once shoppers discover hello, they’ll wonder why they ever settled for anything else.”

John Replogle, CEO of Seventh Generation, former CEO of Burt’s Bees, and GM of US Skincare at Unilever, an investor and member of hello’s Advisory Board, said “Every 10 years a visionary entrepreneur and transformational brand comes along in a category that needs to be reinvented. Craig is that visionary, hello is that brand, and now is the time. I’ve been in CPG for 25 years and I’ve rarely been more excited about the ability of one brand to transform a category and the way consumers greet the day. Hello!”

In addition to rolling out its products nationwide, the company plans to use the financing to invest in proprietary packaging, inventory, marketing and retail development, as well as continue to invest in new product development and sales expansion.

About Hello Products
hello is the first-ever seriously friendly™ oral care brand for consumers, and believes it is time that personal care became, well, personal again. And beautiful. So, hello has created a 99% natural, delicious, pain-free and gorgeous product line that includes toothpaste, mouthwash, breath sprays and toothbrushes. For more information – or to pop by, say hello, and make new friends – please visit www.hello-products.com.

About Tenth Avenue Holdings
Tenth Avenue Holdings (TAH) is a private, diversified investment holding company based in New York City with permanent equity capital in excess of $500 million. TAH is able to structure customized deals and opportunistically invests in public and private companies as well as real estate across a broad range of industries in the continental US. The firm was founded in 2009, upholds strict ethical standards and professional integrity, and is a strategic partner to its portfolio companies and management teams. It has a distinctive approach to owning and capitalizing businesses and entrepreneurs with a focus on long term growth, ongoing cash flow and capital appreciation. For more information, please visit www.tenave.com.

About William Morris Endeavor
William Morris Endeavor (also known as WME) is the largest and oldest global talent agency, with offices in Beverly Hills, New York City, Nashville, London, and Miami. The company was founded as the William Morris Agency in 1898, becoming the first talent agency in the world, at the time representing vaudeville artists. Now, WME represents artists from all facets of the entertainment industry, including motion pictures, television, music, theatre, digital, publishing, lifestyle, and physical production. WME also advises some of the world’s most recognized consumer brands to create “entertainment-based marketing solutions”. WME is the result of the 2009 merger of the William Morris Agency with the Endeavor Agency, which combined the oldest talent agency in the world with the newest of the “major” agencies, respectively.

The post Tenth Avenue Holdings Backs Hello Products appeared first on peHUB.

There’s a lot of positioning within the Hadoop community over who has the most contributors to Apache Hadoop and whose distribution is the most open source. Depending on the source, MapR might be singled out as the antithesis of what Hadoop should be. But MapR doesn’t mind the digs: The company is racking up customers and just closed a $30 million venture-capital investment that brings its total funding to $59 million since launching in 2011.

Because its roots are as an open-source project, some members of the Hadoop community are rightfully concerned about keeping it as open as possible. This gives customers more flexibility in moving from product to product, they argue, and could help prevent a technological splinter like what happened with Unix in the 1980s and significantly slowed the popular operating system’s uptake and rise to ubiquity.

MapR’s feature list

MapR catches some flak because it has made its name pushing a pair of Hadoop distributions (one free and one not) that are based on the company’s proprietary file system that it claims is significantly faster than the standard Hadoop Distributed File System that many of its competitors use. Last year, it announced a commercial version of the usually HDFS-based HBase database, currently in beta, that also includes many of MapR’s homegrown improvements around performance and reliability.

Although, according to MapR VP of Marketing Jack Norris, the criticisms of its semi-proprietary aren’t entirely fair. He told me during a recent call that there are more than a dozen open-source packages within the company’s Hadoop distribution, and noted that allowing data access via NFS is hardly a tool of vendor lock-in.

The company is also spearheading the Apache Drill project, an open-source re-envisioning of Google’s Dremel for SQL-like queries on Hadoop data. Tomer Shiran, MapR’s director of product management, will be discussing the project during a panel at our Structure: Data conference this week in New York.

But at the end of the day, MapR is a business and it’s doing what it can to make money in the new world of big data. If customers want features they can’t get from open-source versions of Hadoop, MapR will gladly supply them. In fact, he said, open source is “really not a core issue that comes up during the sales cycle.” (Norris took a more-defensive tone in a discussion about this topic last year: “No one can name the top 5 or 10 engineers on Oracle’s database,” he told me, “and no one really cares.”)

Norris points to a recent blog post from Gartner analyst Merv Adrian in defending his company’s position. Addressing the concern over open source and Hadoop — particularly as it relates to MapR and former OEM partner EMC — Adrian wrote: “Having some components of your solution stack provided by the open source community is a fact of life and a benefit for all. So are roads, but nobody accuses Fedex or your pizza delivery guy of being evil for using them without contributing some asphalt.”

But MapR could just as easily point to its customer list and partnerships to prove the effectiveness of its approach, at least. Norris said its customers in fields such as advertising and retail analyze data on more than 90 percent of the internet population monthly and more than a trillion dollars in transactions every year. (It’s pretty mum on naming customers, although Norris did cite ComScore and Ancestry.com as users.) Both Amazon Web Services and Google have partnered with MapR to boost Hadoop performance on their cloud platforms.

Still, Hadoop is still relatively young as a commercial technology and it’s very early on for Hadoop as an IT market all its own. What customers like now might not be what they like forever, and there’s plenty of competition for those workloads and dollars. When you look at its bigger, better-funded and better-known competitors such as Cloudera, Hortonworks, EMC Greenplum and now Intel, it’s easy to see just how tough a fight MapR has in front of it.

Norris isn’t sweating it, though. “The big major weakness that needs to be addressed [with Hadoop] is the dynamic read/write capability of HDFS,” he told me. As long as the other players keep relying on HDFS at the storage layer, MapR will at least have a strong point of differentiation.

Mayfield Fund led MapR’s latest investment round, and existing investors Lightspeed Venture Partners, NEA and Redpoint Ventures also participated.

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