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Ed. note: This article by Valerie Jarrett was first published on the Huffington Post. You can read it here. On Friday, March 8th at 3:45 p.m. ET, Valerie Jarrett, Senior Advisor to the President and Chair of the White House Council on Women and Girls, will participate in a session of White House Office Hours to answers your questions about the Violence Against Women Act on Twitter. Ask questions now with #WHChat, and then follow the Q&A live.

Today, President Obama signed a bill that both strengthened and reauthorized the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA).  Thanks to this bipartisan agreement, thousands of women and men across the country who are victims of domestic violence, sexual assault, dating violence and stalking will be able to access resources they need in their communities to help heal from their trauma. In addition, thousands of law enforcement officers will be better equipped to stop violence before it starts, and respond to calls of help when they are needed.

President Obama and Vice President Biden have steadfastly supported reauthorization—it’s what’s right for our country. We thank Senators Patrick Leahy, Mike Crapo, and Patty Murray and Representatives Nancy Pelosi, Steny Hoyer and Gwen Moore for guiding this legislation to passage.

For the past 18 years, since Vice President Biden initially wrote the Act in 1994, VAWA has helped to decrease the rates of domestic violence across the country. Three years ago, our federal interagency group on violence against women began meeting to consider gaps in our country’s response to this violence and make recommendations to Congress to fill those gaps. We are proud that many of these recommendations were included in the final bill. Now, we will be better equipped to recognize violence in its early stages, and help to reduce the number of domestic violence homicides.

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On Wednesday, Google flipped the switch to provide data compression in its Chrome beta for Android, which can speed up your browsing experience while also using less mobile broadband capacity. You actually have to enable the experimental function on your Android device first — here’s how to do it — before seeing the results.

Since sharing that information, I’ve been using the data compression function on my Galaxy Note 2. It feels like a slight speed boost to me: Google is using SPDY web connections, compressing images to the WebP format and removing unnecessary page data such as information on blank space. But it’s difficult to quantify how much faster or how much data I’m saving.

It turns out that Google has a little flag in Chrome to show exactly how much broadband savings the compression feature brings. I found out about it by watching Google’s Mobile Web Thursday’s video for developers.

To see your data savings once the experimental compression feature is active, simply type chrome://net-internals in a Chrome browser tab. On the left side of the page that appears, you’ll see a number of options; tap the one for Bandwidth and you’ll get a handy little tablet showing the data savings for the current browser session as well as for all time.

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Investments in education technology are beginning to rival the boom in the late 1990s, causing some to wonder if another bubble is brewing.

But, speaking to a packed auditorium of educators and technologists at the SXSWedu education technology conference in Austin, Bill Gates said that given the impact of education on all other parts of society, investment in the sector is “absolutely not” enough.

“If you had to say what is the sector of the economy you’d like the most R&D, the most risk-taking in, because any improvement you make benefits all the other areas of the economy and, more from an equity point of view, allows the country to deliver on its promise of equal opportunity, you’d think that education would be a very high R&D sector. It never has been,” according to the co-founder of Microsoft and head of the multi-billion-dollar Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.  “We’re going to have to grow this.”

Advancements in computing, the growing penetration of technology (particularly mobile devices) and the rise of cloud storage have helped make this a “special time for technology in education,” Gates said.

But he also acknowledged that in the late 1990s and other periods, the industry similarly thought that technology could make a dent in improving education and the promised revolutionary advancements never happened.

“Obviously, it begs the question: is it like that time when we were kind of naïve? We can think through that those things weren’t very deep and now it’s pretty obvious that they weren’t going to do that much,” he said. “But there was this belief and so we have to check ourselves and say ‘is it really different this time?’ I think we have data from the early things that really show that it is. It’s just fundamentally very different technology.”

Digital divide still an issue

Gates also made the important point that while technology is pushing its way into the hands of more students, the uneven access of Internet access needs to be addressed.

“People talk about the hardware but, in fact, if we take any reasonable time period, even two years, you’re going to spend more on your Internet connection than you do on that hardware,” he said. “So making sure so that’s either pervasive in the home or public spaces that students have easy access to that becomes pretty important, particularly, if you’re going to expect a lot of ongoing activity outside the classroom.”

When Gates took the stage, many in the audience rose to give the Microsoft founder and billionaire philanthropist a standing ovation. Over the past few years, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has become a major player in education (clearly evident in the number of sponsored events, banners and panels related to the foundation at SXSWedu). But as the keynote continued, some of the commentary on Twitter turned more critical, highlighting the split composition of the conference attendees and a feeling that Gates didn’t go deep enough into issues that need more attention.

One ed tech thought leader wrote:

THIS MAN HAS NO IDEA WTF HE IS TALKING ABOUT #SXSWEDU

— Audrey Watters (@audreywatters) March 7, 2013

Another audience member said:

#sxswedu #edtech Agree with twittersphere on the @billgates talk. Cheerleading tech but no deep-diving into user (teacher/parent) challenges

— Nitya Narasimhan (@nitya) March 7, 2013

I agree that while he provided important context around why education technology is growing, I was hoping for more. He didn’t provide the bold statements or visionary messages one might expect from a concluding keynote speaker, and especially one who has supported technology in education as much as Gates and his foundation have.

But, the reaction to his speech really drove home that the conference, like ed tech at large, includes many stakeholders with different interests and perspectives. While those in the audience closer to technology may have found Gates’ comments lacking, educators who spend more of their time thinking about managing classrooms than big tech trends seemed to think it was a success. The media specialist next to me, for example, said she found Gates’ keynote “very inspiring.”

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Apple (AAPL), Google (GOOG), Microsoft (MSFT) and other leading technology companies spend millions each year lobbying Washington, and now Samsung (005930) is learning that it too needs to grease the wheels a bit more actively if it hopes to compete with top rivals in the U.S. According to regulatory filings analyzed by Bloomberg, Samsung boosted its lobbying spend to $900,000 in 2012, up 500% from $150,000 in 2011. Rival Apple spent twice that amount in 2012 and Google spent a whopping $18.2 million. Samsung’s lobbying expenses will likely rise even faster in 2013 as it continues to battle Apple in court.

Today, the world’s largest social network announced a sweeping overhaul to major UI motif News Feed. Photos are bolder — as are advertisements — and white space more generous. But the big change is uniformity, as Facebook offers a fairly consistent visual experience across devices. That’s a claim Google can’t make.

Still, Facebook looks lots more like Google+ — or will once changes roll out to everyone. That’s a good thing. Clutter creep long defines the Facebook user experience, something its rival avoids. Well, so far. But the larger social network isn’t copying Google+ so much as acting out of necessity. All that clutter in the browser overwhelms smaller device screens, particularly smartphones. To get similar UI across devices, something had to go — and come, too.

Four for One

Puffier photos will matter more on smartphone or tablet and in ways more meaningful, engaging friends, family and coworkers on the go. Presentation of other content, such as events, maps and news, is bolder, too. Emphasis on what matters most, what engages users, is smart focus, and where Facebook tried and failed before — well, if clutter measures misery.

To give up clutter, Facebook increases complexity, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. There are four new News Feeds:

• All Friends is self-explanatory — everything friends share
• Following serves up news from Liked pages and followed Friends
• Music is part of Facebook’s push to become what MySpace once was to artists
• Photos feeds pics from Liked pages and, obviously, those that Friends will share

More News Feeds increases complexity, while also breaking up the flow of information. Google+ is more flexible by letting users create Circles of people that matter to them. Facebook takes tighter control for many reasons. Among them:

• Familiarity. People are used to News Feed. Something like Google+ Circles would be too radical for many users.
• Platform. Presumably, the social network would need to make radical back-end changes to offer an even more-flexible News Feed.
• Advertising. Facebook ads tend to be highly contextual based on user activity. The different categories, but Music and Photos particularly, are easily curated for marketing purposes.

One for All

Uniformity, and less clutter with it, is the big thing here — and not just to the 1-billion-plus users. Facebook wants to increase advertising revenues. Less clutter distracts from ads and uniformity makes placing and selling them much easier across platforms. Facebook doesn’t want to sell ads that appear just in desktop browsers, particularly as mobiles’ use grow.

Late last month, Facebook ended weeks of rumors by formally announcing acquiring Atlas Solutions from Microsoft. The social network plans to bolster ad management services for desktop and mobile, but the latter is an increasing priority — and for good reason.

During fourth quarter, Facebook reported 680 million mobile monthly active users, exceeding those on the desktop for the first time. That’s stunning 57-percent year-over-year increase, by the way. Mobile ad revenue rose to 23 percent of all advertising, up from 14 percent in third quarter.

The eyeballs Facebook wants to reach most increasingly look to mobile devices. From the perspective of where users want to be and where the ads need to be to reach them, uniform motif across devices is the right approach. Some investors agree. In late-day trading, Facebook shares are up more than 4 percent to $28.64.

Many Stories

Something else: During today’s announcement, CEO Mark Zuckerberg referred to the revamped Facebook as a “personalized newspaper”, with the users and their friends essentially the publishers. What would a newspaper be without advertising? The social network will provide plenty.

Interestingly, Google, which depends on advertising for the bulk of revenue, does nothing really to monetize its social network. Google+ isn’t anywhere as uniform across devices, nor are uncurated Circles as effective storytelling. Facebook’s redesign is all about telling stories — the people that matter most to you.

The two social networks now both use strong card-like motifs — Google+ even more so after design tweaks introduced yesterday. But based on Facebook demos, I see a much more contextual experience that’s visually more appealing — and accessible. Whether or not the storytelling is compelling depends on many factors — and how the News Feeds work in practice, rather than just demo, is high among them. At first blush, I’m impressed.

Facebook plans on rolling out the changes over many weeks. You can sign up for the waitlist here.

As you may have heard, big changes are coming to your Facebook news feed. At an event today in Menlo Park, Mark Zuckerberg and crew unveiled the new news feed, which they describe as a closer step towards a “personalized newspaper.”

Old metaphors aside, Facebook’s new news feed is a big improvement, at least visually. It’s also shaping up to be a total timesuck (in a good way), but we’ll have to play around with it a little more to make that determination.

So you want it, right? Well, you can’t have it. Not yet. But you can put yourself on a waiting list and maybe get it faster than your friends.

Simply head on over to facebook.com/about/newsfeed, scroll all the way to the bottom, and click the big, green button that says to join the waiting list.

And there you go, you’re on the list!

And now you play the waiting game. Facebook says that this rollout will be slow and deliberate so that they can make sure that it’s all optimal when it finally goes live to everyone. This shouldn’t surprise anyone, as Facebook did the same thing with Graph Search earlier this year.

Facebook’s new news feed features large visuals with more impact across all fronts – friends’ photo uploads, albums, maps, news articles, and yes, ads. It also features content-specific feeds so you can sort what you see by categories like photos, games, music, and “all friends.” The new design is more fluid across all devices – both mobile and web, with the two borrowing elements from each other.

The Associated Press is reporting that former NBA star Michael Jordan has applied for a marriage license in Palm Beach County, Florida.

A spokesperson for the county clerk’s office told the AP that Jordan and his fiancée, Yvette Prieto, showed up at the courthouse on the morning of Thursday, March 7.

Jordan and Prieto, a Cuban-American model, have been a couple for some years now. The couple became engaged on Christmas Eve in 2011.

If the report is true, this would be Jordan’s second marriage. The basketball star married Juanita Vanoy in 1989, and the couple had three children, Jeffrey, Marcus, and Jasmine. The couple divorced in 2006, with a divorce settlement that was, at the time, the largest public divorce settlement on record according to Forbes.

(Image via Steve Lipofsky/Wikimedia)

Imagine a city skyline — a jagged line of peaks, drops and plateaus — all filled with rooftop farms. This is the dream of Roman Gaus, CEO of UrbanFarmers, which aims to turn city roof space into a place to grow fresh food and even raise fish.

Gaus has contributed an essay to the new TED Book, City 2.0: The Habitat of the Future and How to Get There, an anthology born out of The City 2.0 TED Prize and produced in partnership with The Atlantic Cities. In the essay, he writes about the need for better local food sources in cities and the exciting potential of aquaponics.

Here, we ask him a few questions. 

So, what is aquaponics and why is it good for cities?

Aquaponics is the combination of commercial fish rearing (aquaculture) and cultivation of plants in water (hydroponics). Aquaponics does not require extensive land use or fertile soil to grow plants. This makes it particularly attractive for urban agriculture, where both space and fertile soil are limited. 

You launched your company with the idea that it was time for aquaponics to grow up. What does that mean? 

Growing up means becoming a competitive force in the way food is grown in the city.

Aquaponics and its application in urban agriculture is a relatively new phenomenon. The technology and its commercial scale are still in an early stage of development. In order to provide a meaningful contribution toward food security and global awareness on urban resilience, we need to drive solutions that are robust and scalable.

Why is it so important to find large-scale urban food solutions?

In order to meet the global demand for food by 2050, The Food and Agriculture Association of the United Nations estimates that food production needs to double. While access to new arable land can only increase this by 5 percent — and agricultural intensification and efficiencies are peaking — new technologies and solutions are required to help solve the problem.

Urban agriculture has the potential to transform city-dwellers from “suckers” of natural resources to better-balanced consumers and producers — with local food production and greater resilience. This makes a lot of sense for both the planet and the people; it would have a big impact on the way cities are becoming more self-sustainable.

How do you envision aquaponics taking off in the future?

We are getting a lot of requests from all over the world for our solution. Our goal is to provide the tools, services and the brand for urban farming in the city. I think we need both a bottom-up as well as a top-down approach to achieve scale. Of course, community-based initiatives are important, but enterprise-level activities as well as public and governmental support are also required. Why shouldn’t a large supermarket chain or a large public hospital grow on its own rooftops? We see market-based initiatives or “urban farmers” as true entrepreneurs in their cities. The eco-net of financing, technical support and distribution networks needs to be created as well.

City 2.0 is available for Kindle and Nook, as well as through the iBookstore. Or download the TED Books app for your iPad or iPhone. A subscription costs $4.99 a month, and is an all-you-can-read buffet.

The City 2.0 is an online forum that showcase stories and projects for urban innovation, and also doled out 10 grants for thinkers with great ideas for cities throughout 2012. Here, meet 8 of the winners and hear their fascinating ideas »

Twenty-month-old Metaps, a Tokyo-based company focused on helping developers “monetize” their products and services over the Android operating system, has raised approximately $11 million from Fidelity Growth Partners Japan, along with existing investors.

PRESS RELEASE:

Metaps Inc. (HQ:Tokyo, Japan, President and CEO:Katsuaki Sato, hereafter “Metaps”) has secured JPY 1 billion (approx. $11MM USD) in Series B private equity financing from Fidelity Growth Partners Japan (Japan Head:David Milstein, hereafter “Fidelity”) along with existing investors. Metaps is pleased to partner with Fidelity, bringing their global investment expertise to springboard the company’s strategy to the next level.

Metaps is an Android monetization platform that supports developers by providing them with the necessary tools to attract customers, activate users, and monetize traffic. Metaps enables developers to free themselves of traditional SNS development platforms. Since its launch in August 2011, Metaps has been focusing on Asian markets to consult developers mainly in Japan, Korea, Hong Kong, Singapore, and additionally North America.

As of February 2013, participating Android apps using the Metaps platform have achieved an amazing 62 million downloads, making this the largest network in Asia. Since the summer of 2012, sales of Android smartphones increased globally at a staggering rate, which fueled Metaps’ 60% average monthly growth. When combined over one year, Metaps revenue has grown over 175 times. Most importantly, the remarkable growth has been due to the Asian smartphone makers in Korea and Taiwan along with the growing usage of Android OS, which in turn has enabled the success of the world-wide Android application market. Mainly, games are the category of apps that enjoy the greatest results, which has contributed to the success of developers using Metaps.

The proceeds from this private placement will be used for securing top talent and growing Metaps service in Asia along with expansion to other countries. The company aims to accelerate business and become the largest Android monetization platform in the world by the end of 2013.

About Fidelity Growth Partners Japan

Fidelity Growth Partners Japan is the venture capital and private equity arm of FIL Limited (hereafter “FIL”), focused on investing in Japan. Fidelity helps companies accelerate growth by providing them with FIL’s proprietary capital, expertise and access to global resources. FIL has actively invested in Asia for more than 15 years, and has venture capital and private equity investment teams in Hong Kong, Beijing, Shanghai, Mumbai and Tokyo with decades of experience in the Asia Pacific region. FIL also has a financial services business which operates under the brand name of Fidelity Worldwide Investment, and is a global leader in asset management, providing investment products and services to individuals and institutions in the UK, continental Europe, the Middle East and Asia Pacific.

The post Tokyo-Based Metaps Raises Roughly $11 Million Led by Fidelity Growth Partners Japan appeared first on peHUB.

Houston, Texas is the favorite hosting location for the world’s most popular web sites, according to Pingdom, which has mapped the hosting universe using the top 1 million sites. The Pingdom survey found Houston was the clear winner, hosting 50,598 of those top million sites, followed by Mountain View, Calif. (29,594 sites), Dallas (24,822) and Scottsdale, Arizona (23,210).

Why are these locations ranked so highly? Not surprisingly, the top cities track with the locations of major hosting companies.

An example: Houston is the home to multiple data centers hosted by SoftLayer Technologies, which houses more than 100,000 servers across its infrastructure (see Who’s Got the Most Servers? for more). Because SoftLayer is a “host of hosts,” popular sites hosted by large providers like HostGator and Site5 also map to Houston. Hosting’s not the only game in town, as dozens of the world’s largest energy companies also host their infrastructure in the Houston area, much of it at CyrusOne.

Mountain View is home to Google, which operates many of the world’s most widely used web services, including hosting offerings like Blogger and Google App Engine. The numbers for Mountain View may also reflect some of the many sites hosted in data centers in adjacent Silicon Valley hosting hubs, like Sunnyvale and Santa Clara.

Dallas is home to more than 50 data centers for many of the world’s leading hosts, including Rackspace, SoftLayer, CI Host, Colo4Dallas, Savvis and Terremark/Verizon, as well as major hosting buildings such as the INFOMART and 2323 Bryan (the Univision building).

Scottsdale is the location of domain registrar GoDaddy, which is also one of the world’s largest shared hosting providers (for a closer look at the company’s operations, see Inside Go Daddy’s Phoenix Data Center). Scottsdale is also home to a major multi-tenant data center for IO.

While most of the top 20 cities in the Pingdom survey are familiar to followers of the data center industry, there are some that aren’t immediately obvious. Brea? That would be Brea, California, which is where DreamHost houses some of its operations.

For more including a map and photo, see the post over at Pingdom. For additional coverage, see Houston Hosts More than 50K of the Top Million Websites at The WHIR.

Google has struck a licensing deal with media codec patents licensing company MPEG LA that clears the path for a wider adoption of Google’s open VP8 video codec and its WebM video format. The deal means that MPEG LA will abandon its efforts to form a patent pool and go after Google and other users of VP8 and previous-generation video codecs owned by Google. It also clears the path for the development of VP9, which is currently underway at Google.

A press release quotes MPEG LA President and CEO Larry Horn with the words:

“We are pleased for the opportunity to facilitate agreements with Google to make VP8 widely available to users.”

Google’s deputy general counsel for patents Allen Lo is quoted saying:

“This is a significant milestone in Google’s efforts to establish VP8 as a widely-deployed web video format. We appreciate MPEG LA’s cooperation in making this happen.”

There is no word on the financial details of the deal, but one can assume that Google paid enough to get on MPEG LA’s good side and license patents from 11 companies that could be essential to VP8. It’s worth pointing ou that Google will be able to continue to freely relicense VP8, meaning that MPEG LA doesn’t have a claims against anyone using the codec.

Video codec patents are as inside-baseball as it gets in the online video industry. But this deal could have far-reaching implications for a whole range of applications from premium video services to video conferencing, which is why it’s worth to take a look back at the conflict between MPEG LA and Google:

Google open sourced VP8 as part of its WebM video format back in May of 2010. Right away, VP8 got attacked by patent holders for allegedly violating patents related to video compression and other technologies that are part of the competing H.264 video codec.

MPEG LA, whose business includes H.264 licensing, threatened to form a patent pool against VP8 just days after Google released the codec. The company followed up on this threat in 2011, when it said it had identified 12 companies whose patents were essential to VP8.

Google long rejected these threats, and they didn’t stop the company from using VP8 or working on a successor format. However, there definitely was a chilling effect: Microsoft in particular expressed concerns about patent liabilities, and said it wouldn’t add support for WebM to Internet Explorer until these were resolved.

That not only hampered efforts to make WebM the default choice for plugin-free, HTML5-based video on the web, it also complicated industry-wide efforts to come up with a common standard for real-time video communication: Think video chat, but without the need to download Skype or any browser plugins.

Google is driving force in these efforts, which are known as WebRTC. Microsoft is participating, but has pushed for a standard that’s substantially different from Google’s implementation, in part because it doesn’t want to rely on VP8. A license for VP8 could possibly help to ease these concerns and get everyone to agree to a common standard more quickly.

Updated at 12:55 pm to clarify the licensing arrangement between Google and MPEG LA.

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In addition to being a pop music sensation, Chris Brown is infamous for his temper, which led him to beat pop star Rihanna back in 2009. Since that time, other incidents have demonstrated the singer’s inability to control his temper.

Today, TMZ is reporting that Brown had a recent altercation with a valet at an L.A. bowling alley. The report states that Brown was shaken up over a $10 service charge. According to the video below, the parking attendant was witholding the vehicle’s keys until the service charge was paid.

The valet was quickly surrounded, and Brown got very close to the man’s face. In the video, Brown can be heard using strong and threatening language toward the man. Brown obtained his keys seconds later, though it is unclear whether the valet received the $10.

Retailigence, a Redwood City, Calif.-based company whose back-end database helps track whether items are stocked in the stores of its retail customers, has raised $6.3 million in new funding from its existing investors Draper Fisher Jurvetson and Motorola Solutions, along with new investors Telenav and OPT, one of Japan’s largest digital ad agencies. Retailigence had previously raised $4.2 million.

PRESS RELEASE:

Retailigence (www.retailigence.com), the leading Online-to-Offline (O2O) Local Marketing and Commerce Platform company, today announced $6.3 million in new funding to respond to growth in demand following its triple-digit revenue growth in Q4 2012.

Retailigence’s preeminent open O2O platform has proven to substantially enhance marketing and commerce performance for brands and retailers compared to traditional digital marketing approaches. O2O refers to any and all activity that originates online yet eventually results in a shopper going to a physical store. Forrester Research predicts that by 2016 more than half of the $3.5T spent in US retail offline will be influenced by the web. (Forrester’s US Cross-Channel Retail Forecast, 2011 To 2016.)

“Mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets have dramatically changed the way shoppers interact with brands and retailers,” said Jeremy Geiger, founder and CEO of Retailigence. “Brands and retailers are adopting new path-to-purchase strategies to capitalize on these trends, and that’s where Retailigence comes in. With Retailigence, marketers can alert shoppers on their mobile devices exactly when a particular product is available and indicate where it can be purchased at the closest retail location, increasing in-store sales to the benefit of both product brands and retailers.”

Retailigence currently works with top retailers such as Home Depot, Best Buy and Nordstrom, as well as brands in the fashion, consumer electronics and CPG categories. The Retailigence retail network now covers 50 percent of U.S. retail sales. Leading brands and retailers rely on Retailigence’s O2O platform to convert mobile consumers into local shoppers with the following solutions:

adPOP (Point-of-Purchase) – Ad solution that dynamically embeds Retailigence’s proprietary access to local store inventory data into hyperlocal mobile ad creative to improve local ad relevance and to guide shoppers along the local path-to-purchase. The solution has proven not only to increase awareness and engagement for brands, new products and retailers, but also tangibly increase sales.

appNET – Commerce solution for retailers that helps hundreds of thousands of shoppers every day, using any one of the large and growing number of mobile application partners, find specific products and brands for instantaneous convenience.

“This type of real time product inventory data is the holy grail for mobile and local shopping,” said Michael Boland, Senior Analyst at BIA/Kelsey. “Given that the vast majority of retail spending happens offline at local physical stores, it can really close the loop on the increasing levels of shopping that’s influenced online and in mobile.”

Existing Retailigence investors DFJ, Quest, and Motorola Solutions Venture Capital participated in the Series B funding as well as new investors including Telenav (TNAV), the leader in personalized navigation, and OPT, one of the largest digital ad agencies from Japan and Retailigence’s exclusive Japanese digital ad partner.

Brands looking to improve both traditional and ROI-oriented digital ad performance by an average 50% should contact Retailigence at [email protected].

Retailers looking to capture the significant online-to-offline commerce opportunity that has demonstrated increased top-line revenue by as much as 10% should contact Retailigence at [email protected].

Advertising solution providers and agencies that want to improve ad performance by adding local relevance should contact Retailigence at [email protected].

Advertisers with Japan operations interested in taking advantage of the growing O2O shopping behavior trend in Japan should contact Retailigence Japan at [email protected]

About Retailigence

Retailigence is an Online-to-Offline (O2O) local marketing and commerce platform that utilizes brick-and-mortar inventory data obtained directly from retailers to turn online consumers into offline shoppers. Serving both retailers and brands, Retailigence distributes local store inventory-based advertising via its own network of location-based application partners, mobile ad networks, mobile ad exchanges, search providers and social networks. The result is an increase in both top-of-funnel awareness and bottom-of-funnel sales for brands, new products and retailers. Retailigence is a privately held company based in Silicon Valley backed by Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Motorola Solutions, Quest Venture Partners, Telenav, OPT and other leading investors.

The post Retailigence Lands $6.3 Million in New Funding from VCs appeared first on peHUB.

Claims by the wind industry that another year-long extension of the Production Tax Credit (PTC) would create American jobs are based on “self-serving industry interviews and unsupported wind capacity forecasts that have no credibility,” according to a study released today…

The OKAngel Sidecar Fund, an investment vehicle created through a partnership with the Oklahoma Department of Commerce and the U.S. Treasury State Small Business Credit Initiative, has invested $300,000 in Sway Medical Technologies. Tulsa, Ok.-based Sway makes portable balance testing software for iOS devices, ostensibly allowing phsyicians to better assess their patient’s stability and their risk of falling, among other things.

PRESS RELEASE:

The OKAngel Sidecar Fund, managed by i2E, Inc., recently closed a $300,000 investment in Tulsa, OK-based Sway Medical Technologies. The i2E managed fund participated in an investment round of $700,000 that included co-investment from Oklahoma angel investors.

Sway Medical is a mobile software company focused on the development of medical grade mobile applications that monitor patient outcomes in the field of orthopedics, geriatrics, and pharmacology while providing a better on-field assessment of concussion symptoms in athletes. The company’s initial product is the Sway Balance software, an FDA cleared balance system for stability assessment using existing hardware in a mobile device.

OKAngel Sidecar Fund is one of three Accelerate Oklahoma! investment vehicles created in 2011 by i2E through a partnership with the Oklahoma Department of Commerce and the U.S. Treasury State Small Business Credit Initiative. The OK Angel Sidecar Fund specifically targets opportunities to invest alongside Oklahoma angel investors.

The co-investment ratio with the federal funds upon closing exceeds 1:1 and subsequent investments and traditional financing are expected to result in a greater leverage ratio within five years.

About Sway Medical

Management: Chase Curtiss, CEO

Year started: 2011

Location: Tulsa, OK

About i2E, Inc.: With offices in Oklahoma City and Tulsa, OK, i2E’s nationally recognized services include business expertise and funding for Oklahoma’s emerging small businesses.

The post OKAngel Sidecar Fund Plugs $300K into Sway Medical Technologies appeared first on peHUB.

Green Innovations, a Miami, Fla.-based distributor of American Hygienics Corporation’s 100% tree-free bamboo-based product line, has added Philip Rundle to its strategic advisory board. Rundle spent 16 years with the consumer goods giant Kimberly-Clark, including as marketing director and business unit director for South Africa and the U.S.

PRESS RELEASE:

Green Innovations Ltd. (otcqb:GNIN) GNIN +19.87% (“Green Innovations” or the “Company”) is pleased to announce that Mr. Philip C. Rundle has agreed to join the Company’s Strategic Advisory Board. Mr. Rundle is considered a visionary business leader with over 20 years of extensive domestic and international experience in the tissue, diaper, wipes, and feminine care products business.

“Philip’s direct industry experience at Kimberly-Clark and more recently at a leading USA tissue manufacturer make him ideally suited to help guide the Green Innovations team as we continue to execute our business strategy,” stated Bruce Harmon, Chief Executive Officer of Green Innovations. “I look forward to working with him to gain and apply his unique insight to potentially accelerate and expand our growth plans.”

During his career, Philip spent 16 years with Kimberly-Clark, a $21B leading international consumer goods company. In 1999, after holding various positions within Kimberly-Clark, including Marketing Director and Business Unit Director for South Africa and the USA, Mr. Rundle was named Vice President, Central and Eastern Europe. In 2003, he was named Vice President of NATO Brand Development, which brought him back to the USA. In this role, Philip led the effort to revitalize revenue and profit growth, and directed an international team of employees. His most recent industry role has been as CEO of a leading tissue manufacturer based in North America, where his efforts led to double digit growth and brand leadership for the past three years. He currently consults for a leading private equity firm on potential acquisitions in the consumer products group (CPG) field. Philip has a Bachelor’s Degree in Marketing from Damelin College and an Advanced Management Diploma in Business Administration from the University of Witwatersrand in South Africa.

“In many ways, Green Innovations is where my previous company was when I first joined their team a few years ago,” stated Rundle. “I was able to use my industry contacts, insight, and experience to help establish them as a leading paper products supplier in the USA very quickly. Now I’m eager to utilize some of what I learned to help Green Innovations build their brands and achieve their sales and distribution objectives.”

The Company’s Strategic Advisory Board now consists of four members; Kalpesh Parmar, Mark DeFilippo, Michael Perfetti, and Philip Rundle.

About Green Innovations Ltd.

Green Innovations Ltd., through its wholly-owned subsidiary Green Hygienics, Inc., is the exclusive licensed North American distributor of American Hygienics Corporation’s 100% tree-free bamboo-based product line, including personal care and paper-based goods. The Company provides consumers the opportunity to enjoy high-quality and performance eco-friendly goods from dedicated experts that have been producing bamboo products for over a decade, along with the cost-benefit of local raw material manufacturing, and the satisfaction of knowing that by using these products they are doing their part to reduce their carbon footprint and to continue the movement towards a more healthy and sustainable planet.

For further information regarding Green Innovations Ltd., contact:

Green Innovations Investor Relations(866) 947-5567 (Toll-free)E-mail: [email protected] Website: www.greeninnovationsltd.com

Disclaimer

This press release contains “forward-looking statements”. Statements in this press release which are not purely historical are forward-looking statements and include any statements regarding beliefs, plans, expectations or intentions regarding the future, and specifically references to accelerating and expanding growth plans, and achieving sales and distribution goals. The reader can identify these forward-looking statements by forward-looking words such as “may,” “will,” “expect,” “potential,” “anticipate,” “forecast,” “believe,” “estimate,” “project,” “plan,” “continue” or similar words. The reader should read statements that contain these words carefully because they discuss future expectations, contain projections of future results of operations or of financial condition, or state other forward-looking information. Forward-looking statements include, but are not limited to, statements regarding potential products, customers, revenues, expansion efforts, and future plans and objectives of Green Innovations Ltd. (“Green Innovations”). The risk factors listed in our disclosure documents and the cautionary language on this website provide examples of risks, uncertainties and events that may cause actual results to differ materially from the expectations and projections described by Green Innovations in its forward-looking statements. Actual results relating to, among other things, product launch, sales, customer acceptance and market share could differ materially from those currently anticipated in such statements. Factors affecting forward-looking statements include: consumer preferences, competition from more established brands, ability to develop market share; changes in the operating costs; changes in economic conditions, foreign exchange and other financial markets; changes of the interest rates on borrowings; hedging activities that Green Innovations develops or produces; changes in the investments levels; litigation; legislation; environmental, judicial, regulatory, political and competitive developments in areas in which Green Innovations operates; technological, mechanical and operational difficulties encountered in connection with Green Innovations’ development activities; and labor relation matters and costs. The reader should refer to the risk disclosures set out in the periodic reports and other disclosure documents filed by Green Innovations from time to time with the Securities and Exchange Commission and other regulatory authorities.

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Spring is in the air folks and you know what that means, spring cleaning. When people say, “spring cleaning” people always think about cleaning their house or office, but it doesn’t stop there. Your phone might need a little as well, especially if it’s not running like it was when you first took it out of the box. We actually did a post about that last year, but there is a newer app on the scene that will assist you in cleaning your cache, uninstalling apps, and deleting  files, bookmarks, and text messages. It’s called Clean Master from Ksmobile, and it reminds me of CCleaner for Windows. It’s so simple to use, that I guarantee that after using the app for a few minutes, your phone will be as good as new again.

The interface is simple, clean, and features the Holo UI. Those are three things I love in apps. The main screen will give you a quick glance at how much storage you have left on both your device and on your SD card (if  installed). You have four options: History, Privacy, Tasks, and App Manager.

History has two parts and the first is your cache, which are temporary files created by all your apps. Over time they accumulate and take up a lot of unnecessary space as well as drain your memory. Just tap “History” and you will get a list of all your installed apps as well as how much cache storage each one has. The majority of them will be classified as System Cache. Clean Master will already check off the ones that it feels you should delete, and it will also go as far as tell you what you shouldn’t delete. You can still uncheck or check any of the apps if you so wish. Just tap clean, and presto, it will delete all the cache files from the selected apps. To give you a point of reference, my current phone is about 4 months old, and my total cache was 821MB. Cleaning your cache is probably something you should do every week or so. The second part of History covers your residual files such as music, videos, documents, etc. You can quickly see all these types of files as well as how much space they are taking. Just checkoff the ones you want deleted and tap clean.

Next up is Privacy. In Privacy, you can delete SMS/MMS messages, Call Logs, and Search History. For both SMS/MMS and Call Logs, you will have the choice of deleting all history or by contact. One thing I would like to see is the ability to tell Clean Master to only delete messages that are older than a certain amount of days. This way you can still keep some of your more current messages, and is something they may include in a future update. If you tap on Search History, you will be given a list of the apps that are saving such data like your Browser, YouTube, Gmail, Google Search, etc. Unfortunately Chrome doesn’t show up in this list, but is something that should be rectified soon. In addition to Clean Master’s built in deleting mechanism, the app will also take you to the stock Android app page for individual apps so that you can clear data manually, which would also remove account settings and passwords.

Tasks is simply a task killer. It’s not a task manager, which would supersede Android’s task managing abilities, of which I’m totally against. This is a manual task killer, which probably isn’t all that necessary since every Android phone UI has it’s own built in version. Nevertheless, Clean Master lets you checkoff a bunch of apps to close at the same time.

Last but not least is the App Manager, which lets you uninstall apps as well as backup apks. Android already makes it fairly easy to uninstall apps, but Clean Master makes things easier when you are really looking to delete a lot of apps. It will list all apps installed on the device as well as any third party apks. You can check off the ones you want to be uninstalled and bingo, Clean Master will get rid of them in one swoop. If you want to backup any apks, you can do that as well, but keep in mind, it won’t backup app data even if you’re rooted.

So there you have it. Clean Master is quick and painless and will help you free up a lot of space that will enable your phone to be a little bit more like it was the day you first turned it on. Of course, we can all use the extra space for more music or pictures as well. It’s absolutely free in the Play Store, so give it a shot and let me know what you think. You can check out my hands on video below as well as download links.

Full Features List:

1. History Eraser –  clean cache and clean residual files
2. Privacy Protection – clean selected messages (SMS&MMS), selected call logs, Google search history, clear clipboard data, and protect other app privacy such as wechat, whatsapp, etc.
3. Kill running tasks/release RAM/1Tap Boost
4. Application manager – uninstaller and backup

Clean Master supports the following languages: German, Italian, Spanish, Korean, Russian, Simplified Chinese (China), Portuguese, Vietnamese, Hungarian.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Play Store Download Link

 

Come comment on this article: Featured Android App Review: Clean Master [Tools]