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Electronic health records provider Practice Fusion is bringing in some new blood. On Wednesday, the San Francisco-based company said it made its first major acquisition in purchasing 100Plus, a personal health prediction startup.

Founded in 2011, 100Plus last month launched a mobile app that combines data analytics and game mechanics to encourage people to take healthier steps.

In the acquisition, 100Plus’ five-person team will join Practice Fusion’s data and product development teams, with Chris Hogg, co-founder of 100Plus, becoming the associate vice president of data science.

Ryan Howard, Practice Fusion’s CEO, who is also a co-founder of 100Plus, said he and Hogg first met a couple of years ago when Practice Fusion challenged about 50 teams to hack deidentified patient records to come up with interesting applications. Hogg created a tool that found patients’ “health twins” and then predicted their future health based on the trajectories of those twins – an application not so unlike 100Plus, which similarly generates health predictions based on datasets, from sources like 100Plus and the CDC, and user behavior.

Practice Fusion, which entrepreneurs fingered as the health tech startup most likely to hit a $1 billion valuation in the next five years in a recent survey, offers doctors’ offices free electronic medical records software but plans to build out patient-facing consumer applications.

“We’ll be launching other consumer apps and we see 100Plus as dovetailing beautifully with that,” said Howard, adding that while the 100Plus app will continue to exist in its current form, they’re not sure if it will be a standalone app or live within the Practice Fusion umbrella.

Although older companies like eClinicalWorks and AllScripts dominate the electronic health records industry, Practice Fusion offers doctors a free version of what can be expensive software (its paid for with advertising) and its plan has been to out-innovate rivals. With 100Plus, it could give patients a mobile app that feels more like a consumer app than a clinical tool to facilitate communication with doctors. For example, with beautiful photography and fun language, the app currently prompts users to “drink more water” or “walk your neighborhood” and Howard said those prompts could ultimately come from doctors through Practice Fusion.

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Social navigation app Waze is pushing an update to iOS and Android users on Wednesday that will let users report road closures. If enough people use that capability, it could start automatically helping to route other users around the closure.

Waze, you might recall, is one of the apps Apple CEO Tim Cook recommended last fall that dissatisfied Apple Maps users try until the Apple product improved. But it’s been around for two years, and Waze’s maps are available in 45 countries. The free app has been downloaded 40 million times, the company said Wednesday.

Waze is already used to report speed traps, the cheapest gas stations and accidents that other users can see in real-time and plan their routes around. But road closures is the newest crowdsourced feature and will automatically influence other drivers’ directions. It will work like this: if a road is closed due to snow or ice, if construction pops up, or a street is closed for an event, a user can report it and the app will automatically re-route the user around that road. But if a certain number of people report the same closing, then the app will automatically start re-routing everyone around that road.

That “certain number” isn’t the same for every kind of road. Two people can’t report Highway 101 as shut down and cause the app to re-route, for example. Waze won’t say exactly how many, but it would have to be a lot more than a single-digit number of reports to take effect. By contrast, a rural county road may be routed around and considered officially closed after a much smaller number of closure reports.

Waze will automatically detect when a road is back open too — as soon as someone drives through that point and doesn’t report the closure, the app considers the road re-opened.

Waze says it got a taste of the utility of its real-time crowdsourcing after being asked for help by the White House and FEMA to help in the aftermath of Superstorm Sandy last fall. Waze asked New York area Waze users to mark on the map the gas stations they came across that were open, the length of the lines, and how long the gas was expected to last at that location.

“Sandy gave us confidence,” Waze spokesman Michal Habdank-Kolaczkowski told me. ”We’re not trying to turn Waze into a crisis-solving app, but as a driver you should know what’s happening on the road,” he said, whether that’s snow, a street fair or construction. “There’s a lot of reasons a road can close, not just a crisis.”

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Spotify for iOS has just received a makeover, and it brings a new interface that makes navigation, playback, and more a whole lot easier.

The first big thing that you’ll notice is that you can now navigate around the app through a new sidebar. At any time while using the app, simply swipe left-to-right to bring up the menu. From there, you can jump off to the search feature, radio, playlists, friend list, what’s new, and settings.

There’s also a new track menu that can be accessed by a “…” button to the right of every track. That new menu allows users to quickly add the track to a playlist, star it, add it to their queue, share it, begin radio, and more.

But for me, the most important update is version 0.6.0 is the new “Now Playing” bar that adorns the bottom of the app. Instead of having to access the now playing screen manually, you’ll now always know what’s playing by checking the bottom of the screen.

The new Now Playing bar also allows you to pause and play the track, as well as skip to the next or backtrack to the previous song simply by swiping left or right inside the bar.

The update also fixed a few nagging issues including the shuffle function and wrong tracks displaying on the lock screen.

You can grab the update right now over at the App Store.

Apprenda is a bit of anomaly. It’s a tech company based not in Silicon Valley or Redmond or Cambridge but outside Albany, N.Y. While rivals tout the appeal of public Platform as a Service (PaaS),  Apprenda holds that private PaaS is the way to go — at least if you want paying customers. And, it eschewed the multi-language goal of many rivals to focus on .NET applications only. Until now that is.

As of now, Apprenda will also support Java, says CEO Sinclair Schuller. It’s not really a huge surprise, even though Schuller was a vocal proponent of single-langauge PaaSes . Last May, he told GigaOM if he were forced to choose a second language to support, Java would be it.

Well the time has come. “Our thesis has been we want to be the enterprise PaaS and for that we’ll tackle the two languages that make up 80 percent of the [corporate] application portfolio,” Schuller said in a recent interview. “Some companies are 60 percent/40 percent Java, some 60 percent/40 percent .NET but Java and .Net are always in there.”

Apprenda counts Honeywell and Diebold as reference customers and now adds JP MorganChase to the list. The country’s largest bank has decided to develop, deploy and maintain all its custom .NET and Java applications on Apprenda. At a time when many of the multi-language public PaaSes have a hard time naming real customers, this is something of a coup.

These customers use Apprenda for applications for handling  patient relationship management, oncology treatment, mortgage management, inventory management and predictive analytics for retail and other verticals, Schuller said.

 

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iSpeech, a Newark, N.J.-based startup that specializes in lifelike text-to-speech apps and previously rolled out voice technology for the connected home, is launching a platform for publishers, the company plans to announce Tuesday. The tools are designed to help publishers quickly and inexpensively convert books and articles into audio. iSpeech’s first two publishing clients are Evernote and Pearson.

iSpeech gives publishers three options for creating content. They can convert PDFs to audio files; they can add a widget to a website that essentially adds a “play” button to an article; or they can use more sophisticated developer tools built on iSpeech’s API and add them directly to their web pages. Pearson is using the PDF option for its textbooks. Evernote is using the developer tools to integrate speech technology into its read-it-later platform Evernote Clearly. “The natural evolution of this is to potentially bring this functionality into all of Evernote’s products,” iSpeech COO Yaron Oren told me. “One of the things we hear directly from Evernote customers is they want to be able to listen to their Evernote notes in the car, so it would be great to have this kind of of functionality.”

The publishing platform’s business model is basically pay-per-use, Oren said, and the cost usually ends up totaling “less than a tenth of of the cost of professional narration.” For websites, iSpeech charges by the word, which varies depending on volume but ranges from $0.01 to a fraction of a cent per word. For books, the company charges by the page; there are volume discounts, but Oren said that in general, the maximum cost to convert a 250-page book to audio with iSpeech would cost around $1,000. “We’ve heard from publishers that a book with voice talent tends to cost in the order of $15,000 per book,” he said.

Amazon ran into legal trouble when, in 2009, it automatically added text-to-speech technology to ebooks. The company insisted that text-to-speech features don’t violate copyright, but said at the time, “We strongly believe many rights-holders will be more comfortable with the text-to-speech feature if they are in the driver’s seat,” and decided to let rights-holders “decide on a title by title basis whether they want text-to-speech enabled or disabled for any particular title.” Oren says iSpeech will avoid those issues by leaving the decision to publishers — though it seems as if Evernote Clearly could potentially run into trouble, since it doesn’t hold the copyright to the articles that users save to its platform. (Evernote says it’s “comfortable” with the feature.)

For now, iSpeech’s publisher tools are primarily going to be of interest to nonfiction publishers — not publishers of, say, novels. “It’s a viable alternative to nonfiction, textbooks, or more straightforward news content,” Oren said. “For fiction, or other content where there’s more emotion and differences in reading style, this is not an alternative [yet].” But, he said, “this is about making more content available [as audio]. Professional voice talent is very expensive, and as a result, most books never get made into an audio format. Now there’s an option.”

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Electronic medical records management company Practice Fusion has made its first acquisition, scooping up 100Plus for an undisclosed amount. 100Plus, which was launched in Practice Fusion’s health tech incubator in San Francisco, previously raised $1.25 million in seed-stage funding from Founders Fund (which is also a Practice Fusion investor), Greylock Discovery Fund, Felicis Ventures (another Practice Fusion investor) and the Band of Angels. 100Plus was co-founded by CEO Chris Hogg, a health care data analytics expert formerly with Gilead Sciences. He’ll join Practice Fusion’s data and product development group. At 100Plus, he and his team developed applications that give liefspan predictions based on a person’s lifestyle choices. For instance, in 2012, the company launched the 100Proof app at SXSW to track a user’s alcohol consumption and give recommendations to improve one’s health.

PRESS RELEASE

Practice Fusion Acquires Personalized Health Prediction Startup 100Plus

Supporting its mission to improve health and save lives, the nation’s largest physician- patient community expands data and patient initiatives in its first major acquisition

SAN FRANCISCO – February 27, 2013 – Practice Fusion, the free, web-based electronic medical record (EMR) platform, today announced the acquisition of 100Plus, the personalized health prediction startup that uses data analytics and game mechanics to show how small changes in behavior can lead to a longer and better life. The acquisition will drive forward Practice Fusion’s development of patient-facing tools using clinical data to provide health insights.

100Plus was founded in 2011 and quickly attracted attention from Founders Fund, Greylock Partners, Felicis Ventures and Band of Angels Acorn Fund. The company’s first app, showcasing the impact of alcohol consumption on lifespan, launched at SXSW in March 2012. The second app, currently in beta, helps users discover, track and see the long-term impact of small health behaviors. In 2012, CNNMoney named 100Plus one of the top innovators reinventing healthcare.

“The 100Plus team has found a way to inspire the average person to make daily changes in their lives—this is a huge challenge that is rarely achieved,” said Patrick Dugan, Associate Vice President of Corporate Development at Practice Fusion. “Whether it’s through accountable care organizations or reminding people to the take medications, healthier habits mean a less costly healthcare system and longer lives for patients. We’re looking forward to using 100Plus’ talent and vision to make this happen.”

Practice Fusion’s first major acquisition, 100Plus has long been aligned with the company’s focus on developing life-saving technology. The startup began as a member of Practice Fusion’s health technology incubator in San Francisco, along with doctor-patient connection service Ringadoc. 100Plus applied de-identified clinical data from Practice Fusion to study health behaviors, determine how those behaviors might impact future health and provide new information to influence change.

The 100Plus team will join Practice Fusion full-time as members of the data and product development groups. Chris Hogg, CEO and co-founder, will be taking on a leadership role as Associate Vice President of Data Science. Hogg was previously selected as a winner in Practice Fusion’s 2010 data challenge and will bring his experience and background using clinical data to positively impact patients across the country and develop new ways for Practice Fusion to use de-identified clinical data.

“We created 100Plus with the goal of using data, design and technology to positively impact people’s lives and health. Joining the innovative team at Practice Fusion will allow us to achieve these results on a massive scale,” said Chris Hogg, Chief Executive Officer at 100Plus. “I have always had a lot of respect for Practice Fusion and the platform they have built. I am excited for the opportunity to help build smart products that are able to help doctors provide better care to patients.”

To learn more about Practice Fusion, please visit www.practicefusion.com.

About Practice Fusion
Practice Fusion provides a free, web-based EMR system to physicians. With medical charting, scheduling, e-prescribing (eRx), lab integrations, referral letters, Meaningful Use certification, unlimited support and a personal health record for patients, Practice Fusion’s EMR software addresses the complex needs of today’s healthcare providers and disrupts the health IT status quo. Practice Fusion is the fastest growing electronic medical record community in the country with more than 150,000 users serving 56 million patients. The company closed a $34 million Series C financing led by Artis Ventures in June. For more information about Practice Fusion, please visit www.practicefusion.com

The post Practice Fusion Buys Venture-Backed 100Plus appeared first on peHUB.

Corporations assume that employer-sponsored volunteerism programs keep employees engaged while also making a difference to the social organizations they serve. And that’s true, but there’s more to the story. What is it that makes a corporate citizenship program most effective in terms of employee satisfaction and community impact?

In my previous role as Deloitte‘s Chief Talent Officer, I witnessed first-hand how important volunteerism was to our people. They would often return to the office after working in an adult literacy program or at a community school seeming renewed and sharing stories of their service. Yet, as an inherently left-brain organization, we wanted hard proof that our programs were delivering results. With this in mind, we surveyed hundreds of our employees. They told us “skills-based” volunteerism that leverages an individual’s particular strengths and interests was more rewarding than traditional programs that offer a generic opportunity to help. Furthermore, we learned that this mode of giving delivers a greater impact to the community because it helps fill critical capability gaps in nonprofits.

A skills-based, or pro bono, approach is about donating skills, not just money. We set people up to use their area of expertise, be it strategy, accounting, operations, technology, finance, or human resources. For example, if a nonprofit is experiencing an issue with hiring, we provide human capital consultants to help them revamp their process. Matching the strengths of employees with the specific needs of nonprofits changes philanthropy from passive and episodic to active and ongoing. And it evokes pride and engagement in ways that writing checks alone never can.

Our professionals cite pro bono engagements not only as critical to their job satisfaction and skills development but also among the best experiences they’ve had at Deloitte. In fact, 76% of staff on pro bono projects stated that they gained significant, job-relevant skills. Additionally, they report that they are better able to build relationships with current and future clients who share a mutual interest in the causes we support.

Lilly Miskimmin, an infrastructure operations manager based in San Francisco, worked on a pro bono project for four San Jose nonprofits as they and the City of San Jose assessed operating subsidies and facility agreements, “Using your skills in these projects makes you feel like the work is going to have a much greater impact,” she says, noting that the operating and real estate data she (and others) collected reinforced for the city the immense value the organizations brought to the local community. “I want to feel like I’m giving back, but I also want to use my business background.”

It’s clear to us that skills-based volunteering makes a difference in attracting and retaining employees, especially Millennials, who more than other generations look for purpose in their work. Among Millennials who work at Deloitte, 70% of those polled said they favor companies committed to giving, and even 61% of non-volunteers said they consider a company’s community involvement when evaluating job offers. Likewise, our summer interns tell us that they factor engagement with the community into their employment decisions.

To reap these benefits, corporations need to take pro bono work seriously. At Deloitte, we treat these projects exactly the same as a paid client engagement. When we take on a new project, we staff it based on skills, we give it a work order code, and we hold our people to the same standards and expectations as we would on any other engagement. This model enables our professionals to share their skills in a meaningful way. It also ensures that nonprofits get high-quality assistance from a committed organization.

The value of these projects goes beyond talent retention and brand enhancement for Deloitte. The nonprofits we work with also cite significant gains. Fully 68% classified the organizational capacity gains provided by our pro bono volunteers as “transformational.” Many nonprofits are very sophisticated when it comes to social issues, but even the best struggle with internal capacity and capability. They need help with financial management, marketing, product development, service delivery, and technology. They’re looking for partners to help solve large, complex problems — and that’s what many large companies do best.

A skills-based approach also allows companies to collaborate and network with other businesses to solve our world’s most pressing social issues. For example, creating a “pro bono marketplace” would allow nonprofits to tap into the much-needed services and expertise that we, as corporations, have in spades and often take for granted. Consistent with the mission of A Billion + Change, a national campaign to mobilize companies to develop pro bono volunteer opportunities, any individual company can make a difference — but 500 companies, working side-by-side can change entire communities.

In order to engage their people, and make a difference in the world, businesses and nonprofits need to change the way they think about corporate philanthropy. They need to think beyond financial terms. Companies have other valuable assets to offer, particularly the skills and knowledge of their people.

Follow the Scaling Social Impact insight center on Twitter @ScalingSocial and register to stay informed and give us feedback.

Dan Toler, who played guitar for the Allman Brothers, has died of complications from ALS, also known as Lou Gehrig’s Disease. He was 65 years old.

Toler played with the Allman Brothers through the ’70s and ’80s, then moved on to play with the Gregg Allman Band, enjoying several years of success with both. But when the disease struck, his ability to play guitar and even speak were compromised. Former bandmate Chaz Trippy remembers visiting Toler at the height of his illness and describes how his friend motioned to his guitar, then to his heart.

“He was telling me it was breaking his heart that he couldn’t play guitar,” Trippy said. “I didn’t cry in front of him but I sure did when I got back into my car.”

Toler’s illness was especially bad in the last two years; in 2011, he was confined to a wheelchair but still had use of his hands and could play guitar. Musician Bonnie Bramlett performed at the two-day Dan Toler ALS Support Benefit Concert Festival alongside him and remembers how strong he was through all the struggle.

“To see how Danny walked tall through that disease and play guitar so beautifully with his blue eyes burning that night. What a hero,” she said. “He really showed people how to live, and how to die. He really made you check yourself. What a great man and a great musician.”

Apparently all it takes to make one of the best car chases we’ve seen in awhile is some cardboard, hot glue, a few RC Mustangs and a butt-load of talent.

Click through to check out some extreme automotive awesomeness after the jump.

Source: Youtube.com

Kickboard, a web-based school analytics platform, has raised $2 million in Series A financing. New Markets Venture Partners and Two Sigma Ventures led the round. The company, based in New Orleans, has raised a total of $2.8 million to date.

PRESS RELEASE
Kickboard, a web-based school analytics platform that allows educators and school leaders to capture, analyze and securely share critical student performance data, announced today that it has received $2 million in Series A funding led by New Markets Venture Partners and Two Sigma Ventures, with participation from several angel investors. The new round adds to $800,000 from previous seed and angel rounds, bringing the total amount raised to $2.8 million.

“Today’s announcement signals the start of an exciting period of growth for Kickboard,” said Jennifer Medbery, founder and CEO of Kickboard. “With this funding we plan to expand our team and invest in further product development, particularly enhanced dashboards that offer new ways to visualize student performance, including shared information from other tools teachers and school leaders use. In a performance-based culture, it is imperative that teachers, students and families have greater visibility into all elements of student performance so that they can take informed, decisive action and improve student outcomes.”

Kickboard enables schools to complement the deficiencies of their student information system by going beyond the gradebook to develop richer profiles of student progress that include multiple assessments, standards mastery, 21st century skills, reading growth and, most uniquely, student behavior, character strengths and personal interests. The platform’s dashboards provide real-time visibility into student performance in and across classrooms so that teachers have the information they need to make meaningful adjustments to instruction and interventions. With Kickboard, schools are able to improve data-driven teaching, increase collaboration among educators, better facilitate family communication and advance a culture of performance school-wide.

“We believe the answers to K-12 quality, innovation and scaled efficacy are born in authentic data at the classroom and, moreover, end user levels,” said Elizabeth Chou of New Markets Venture Partners. “Kickboard has created a unique and powerful platform that makes it possible for teachers and school leaders to easily and efficiently collect, analyze and act on student behavior and academic data. We recognize the wide-reaching and positive impact Kickboard can have on students’ lives and we look forward to helping the company expand and grow.”

Currently more than 200 schools nationwide have implemented Kickboard school-wide to support their performance-based culture and increase alignment, consistency and real-time visibility of student performance information. Additionally, due to demand from teachers requesting to use Kickboard in their classroom without waiting for school-wide adoption, Kickboard recently began offering free starter accounts to individual educators and teams of up to three teachers per school. The Kickboard starter accounts include most of the same features and functionality as the enterprise platform, allowing teacher leaders to use student data to advance a culture of performance in their school directly by fostering a more transparent, collaborative, growth-minded and results-driven environment in their classrooms.

“In many industries, thoughtful, user-conscious analytics and visualization of data can be incredibly powerful,” said Colin Beirne of Two Sigma Ventures. “Kickboard puts actionable real-time data at the fingertips of teachers and school administrators to better enable them to fine-tune their instruction and management, and ultimately better fulfill their school’s mission. As strong believers in the power of data to drive insight and results, Two Sigma Ventures is proud to support Kickboard’s efforts to build strong, healthy schools where teachers and students thrive.”

For more information about Kickboard, visit www.kickboardforteachers.com.

About Kickboard
Kickboard is a web-based school analytics platform that allows educators and school leaders to capture, analyze and securely share critical student performance data. The platform’s features include simple yet powerful dashboards that increase the real-time visibility of student performance across classrooms, traditional and standards-based grading, one-click behavior data capture, easy to read charts and graphs and immediate performance reporting, including customizable report cards. With Kickboard, schools are able to improve data-driven teaching, increase collaboration among educators, better facilitate family communication and advance a culture of performance school-wide. Delivered as an on-demand solution, Kickboard can be easily integrated with a school’s SIS, and deployed in a single classroom or across an entire district. For more information, visit kickboardforteachers.com.

About New Markets Venture Partners
New Markets Venture Partners is a venture capital firm that invests in and actively assists innovative education, information technology and business services companies. The New Markets Team has decades of experience investing in and building high growth companies, maintains proprietary relationships with centers of innovation and has particular domain expertise around technology and education. It prides itself on working to add value before, during and after the investment process. Visit newmarketsvp.com for more information.

About Two Sigma Ventures
Two Sigma Ventures is a division of Two Sigma Investments, a leading technology company that applies a rigorous, scientific method-based approach to investment management. Since its founding in 2001, Two Sigma Investments’ vision has been to develop technological innovations that intelligently analyze the world’s data to consistently deliver value for its clients.

Two Sigma Ventures invests the proprietary capital of Two Sigma in innovative companies that harness technology, computing, mathematics or data to tackle problems in a new way. The firm invests in companies in various stages of growth and across a wide variety of industry segments, with a focus on companies that utilize technologies and competencies in which Two Sigma has expertise and that can potentially benefit from the firm’s deep expertise in research and technology.

The post Kickboard Raises $2M appeared first on peHUB.

Team Win Recovery Project, the group of developers behind the popular custom Android distribution TWRP, is at it again with a new version. The latest iteration sports a significant number of changes, bug fixes and improvements over the previous release.

TWRP 2.4.2.0 adds a screen timeout feature which will automatically turn off the display after 60 seconds of inactivity, in order to save precious battery life and prevent screen burn-in, the latter feature designed “especially” for AMOLED panels. The popular custom recovery also introduces a brightness setting, a feature available for specific setups and with support only for “some devices”.

The biggest improvement is, however, the ability to verify for root access and install the SuperSU root management app on devices that cannot run apps with elevated privileges. TWRP 2.4.2.0 can also verify and fix root permissions, if broken. Other new features include a 24 hour clock, changed from the old setup with AM/PM indicators, a write buffer for libtar backups which touts speed improvements for exFAT and minor benefits aimed at other file systems, support for “some MTK6xxx devices” and a “clicked” animation for the majority of buttons, file selector and listbox.

Some settings have been removed from TWRP 2.4.2.0, including forced MD5 sum on Zip files and size checking for image backups, and there are some minor bug fixes and changes as well. The new version brings vfork instead of libtar to “help prevent memory problems”, stock recovery reflash check after the reboot cycle, and improvements for timezone listbox, which is now “more like file selector” with per pixel kinetic scrolling, among other things.

TWRP 2.4 is available to download from the Team Win Recovery Project site.

Photo Credit: Kirill__M/Shutterstock

When Anna and Gregg Brockway moved within San Francisco after he sold Tripit in 2011 to Concur Technologies (for $120 million), the husband-and-wife team found they didn’t have enough room for all their furniture, and it was hard to sell high-end furniture online, via Craigslist and eBay. At her urging, the idea was born for Chairish, a curated, online consignment-like high-end furniture reseller. The company launched today and is self-funded, without any venture funding. Brockway told peHUB that Chairish is open to raising capital in the future from the right VC, but didn’t need to for its launch, “thanks to our previous outcomes.” Chairish was founded by a team of senior executives and founding entrepreneurs from Hotwire and TripIt, including the Brockways, Andy Denmark (formerly with Tripit), Eric Grosse (Hotwire) and Nancy Ramamurthi (Tripit). The launch of Chairish comes at a time when a number of heavily venture-backed ecommerce retailers are trying to tap into the online furniture market, such as 1stbids, Wayfair and One Kings Lane, which all have raised huge rounds recently. Brockway says the company’s monetization model is based on a sales commission that ranges up to 40%, but which he says is still lower than most consignment shops.

PRESS RELEASE

Announcing Chairish:  First Peer-to-Peer Consignment Marketplace for Exceptional Pre-Owned Home Furnishings

Delightful and simple way to buy & sell fabulous home furnishings arrives!

San Francisco, CA — February 27, 2013 – Chairish is the world’s first online consignment marketplace for design-obsessed people to buy and sell their exceptional pre-owned home furnishings. Buyers get access to a curated selection of high quality, designer, and often unique home décor of all types and styles, from “like new” to those with great bones that need a little love. All Chairish listings are pre-owned pieces straight from their design loving owner, so buyers enjoy huge savings on their purchases.

Now, owners don’t have to merely give away, let sit, or pay to store great home furnishings that just don’t happen to fit anymore. Chairish makes it easy, safe, and hassle-free to sell to a broad online audience; convert that furniture into cash; and make more money, more easily, than through other online or traditional channels.

Anna Brockway, Chief Curator and co-founder at Chairish adds, “I believe having a stylish home doesn’t have to mean spending a fortune. The inspiration for Chairish came when after a recent move, I found myself with really terrific things that needed a new home. I knew there were people like me out there who would really appreciate them, but there was no easy way to reach them. With Chairish we’re creating a place where individuals who appreciate style can both sell and buy fabulous, gently used decor. Our mission is to make the world more beautiful, one room at a time and save people money in the process!”

Eric Grosse, President and co-founder states, “Home design is a major investment for most households, but unfortunately, new furniture currently depreciates faster than new cars or any other significant consumer purchase. Chairish brings liquidity, convenience, and style to a multi-billion dollar market and makes the experience of selling and buying quality furniture and design what it should be: accessible, easy and fun.”

Chairish was founded by a team of senior executives, founding entrepreneurs, and design obsessed individuals from Hotwire, TripIt, Yahoo!, Expedia, eBay, and Levi Strauss & Company. This team includes: Gregg and Anna Brockway, Andy Denmark, Eric Grosse, and Nancy Ramamurthi.

How Chairish Works
For Buyers:

Shopping at Chairish is a joy. Consumers just browse, shop, and buy from our curated selection of fabulous pre-owned home furnishings using any major credit card. White glove shipping is arranged, everything has a 48-hour return policy.

Two “easy as pie” ways to sell:

1.  Standard service – anywhere in continental United States
Complete a simple online form, share the story behind the piece, and upload photos.  That’s it! Once Chairish curators approve the listing, it is posted and ready for purchase by our design obsessed buyers. Free to list and a 20% commission upon sale. Our white glove shippers arrange pick-up. Simple, hassle free, straight-forward.

2.  Concierge Service – SF Bay Area (will be rolling out in additional major markets)

With this completely turn-key service, a Chairish representative comes to your home, inspects your furnishings, writes the listings, carefully moves the pieces into secure storage, and professionally photographs them. We manage payment, shipping logistics and only then do we take a 40% commission. Listing is free. The only thing not included in this amazing service is a foot massage.

About Chairish
Chairish is the world’s first online consignment marketplace for design-obsessed people to buy and sell exceptional pre-owned home furnishings. Buyers get access to a curated selection of fabulous home furnishings that come direct from the owner at a great price. Owners get an easy, safe, and hassle-free way to sell their exceptional home décor to a broad online audience; convert their high quality furniture into cash vs. giving it away, having it sit, or paying for storage; and make more money, more easily, than through other online or traditional channels. For more information, please visit:
www.chairish.com
Twitter:  @chairish
FB:  https://www.facebook.com/chairishco

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If you have an Android phone, check your apps — you’ll likely a have a new one lurking there. The green Google Settings app, added today, gives users quick access to various settings for services such as Google+, Apps with Google+ Sign-in, Maps & Latitude, Location, Search, and Ads. The options you see will depend on your device and what’s enabled.

The biggest, most noteworthy feature here is of course Google+ Sign-in which lets you to use your Google ID as a universal sign-in for third-party apps and services. My colleague Joe Wilcox discussed the possibilities of this following Google’s announcement of its new authentication system yesterday.

If you want to try out this new feature, the best way is to install one of the supported apps. Shazam is a good one. Once installed, you’ll be presented with a red Google+ Sign-in button, hit this and specify who you want to share your music discoveries with on Google’s social site.

Go back to the Google Settings app and tap Apps with Google+ Sign-in. This will show you Shazam, and give you the option to disconnect it, and also delete its activities on Google.

The Google+ option in the app will let you turn Notifications, Messenger and Hangouts on or off. You can choose if you want Google+ connections added to your Android ones, and let Google make suggestions based on the people you communicate with most on your phone.

You can also turn Instant Upload on or off and choose which accounts to sync.

Maps & Latitude lets you manage location reporting and sharing, and control which friends can see your current position. You can also enable location history, and turn automatic check-ins on or off.

The Ads section let you choose whether or not you want ads from Google and AdMob personalized on your device. I personally don’t but you may not be bothered.

While most of the settings on offer can be accessed through their respective apps, this new offering provides a simple way to access all of the important Google options in the one place.

Photo credit: Wayne Williams

Dell has rolled out a new, more secure iteration of the 10-inch, business-oriented Windows 8 tablet it originally launched five months ago.

The Latitude 10 in stock trim, retails from $449 as an “essentials” model, but the American computer manufacturer has government agencies, financial institutions and healthcare organizations in its sights with the more expensive Enhanced Security model, which is available for $779, a not so insignificant difference.

The Dell Latitude 10 Enhanced Security packs a 10.1-inch, 5-point multitouch, IPS LCD display with Corning Gorilla Glass and a resolution of 1366 by 768. The tablet is powered by an Intel Atom Z2760 processor running at 1.8GHz maximum frequency, 2GB of RAM, an Intel Graphics Media Accelerator graphics card and a 30Whr replaceable battery. Other specs include 64GB of solid state internal storage, 2MP front-facing HD camera and an 8MP back-facing shooter. The Dell Latitude 10 Enhanced Security runs Windows 8 Pro in 32-bit trim.

The Enhanced Security model features an integrated smart card and fingerprint reader. Dell touts it as “the only dual-authentication Windows 8 tablet” that has both. It also includes Microsoft BitLocker Drive Encryption, Computrace Support for stealth tracking software and a Noble Lock slot for additional hardware security.

You are a new expatriate manager at the American subsidiary of your German firm in Chicago. With a few minutes to spare between meetings, you walk into the mail room to retrieve your mail and get a quick cup of coffee.

“Hey, David, how are you?” one of the senior partners at the firm asks you.

“Good, thank you, Dr. Greer,” you reply. You’ve really been wanting to make a connection with the senior leadership at the firm, and this seems like a great opportunity. But as you start to think of something to say (secretly worrying whether it’s actually appropriate to say anything at all to a senior partner), your American colleague swoops in to steal your spotlight.

“So Arnold,” your colleague says to your boss, in such a casual manner that it makes your German soul cringe. “So what’s your Super bowl prediction? I mean, you’re a Niners fan, right? Didn’t you do your MBA at Berkeley?”

The conversation moves on, and you slink back to your desk with your coffee. You know how important small talk is in the U.S., and you feel jealous of people like your colleague who can do it well — and with no remorse.

There’s nothing small about the role that small talk plays in American professional culture. People from other countries are often surprised at how important small talk is in the U.S. and how naturally and comfortably people seem to do it — with peers, subordinates, men, women, and even with superiors like Dr. Greer. You can be the most technically skilled worker in the world, but your ability to progress in your job and move up the corporate ladder in the United States is highly dependent on your ability to build and maintain positive relationships with people at work. And guess what skill is critical for building and maintaining these relationships? Small talk.

When searching for a job, the ability to make effective small talk is essential for creating a quick sense of rapport with potential employers. Once you secure a position, small talk is essential to bond with colleagues, create a positive relationship with your boss, and win the trust and respect of clients, suppliers, and people in your extended professional network. What is also crucial in the eyes of a potential employer, boss, or client is whether they feel they can trust you — and whether they like you and want to work with you. The ability to forge connections and relationships through small talk is a critical tool for achieving this purpose.

This is certainly true in formal situations such as an interview or a meeting, where small talk is often used as a friendly, lighthearted precursor to the main, “serious” portion of the discussion. It is also critically important during more unpredictable and unscheduled moments of organizational life, such as that impromptu chat you happen to have in the elevator with your boss or on the subway home. Or the discussion you have with a colleague or client seated next to you at a corporate event.

In all these situations, small talk is a critical tool for creating a personal bond. Although ultimately you will likely be accepted or rejected based on more concrete aspects of your work, the fact of the matter is that these interpersonal impressions matter a great deal along the way and can even shape how people judge your more technical production.

The problem, of course, is that small talk differs across cultures, not only in how it’s done, but also in terms of its role and importance in business communication. In many cultures — especially those with more formal rules for communication and with a strong emphasis on social hierarchy — it’s considered inappropriate to engage in casual conversation with superiors. In addition, it can also feel impolite and even dangerous to openly express your opinion during small talk, especially if it could potentially conflict with the other person’s opinion. For example, if you express your allegiance toward a particular team or a point of view about any other topic without knowing that of your colleague, you might put them in the uncomfortable position of having to either suppress their own preference or express something that conflicts with yours.

In many cultures, it can also be particularly inappropriate to make small talk with strangers or to share any personal information with someone you don’t know. America may be one of the only countries in the world where it’s common to strike up a personal conversation with a complete stranger.

Finally, the way that Americans ask others how things are going or how they are doing can feel superficial to people from other cultures who are used to providing an actual, elaborated answer to such questions. They might understandably assume that if someone is asking them how they are doing, the person is genuinely interested in the answer, when in the U.S., this may just actually be a ritualized way of greeting that doesn’t really actually demand a long answer — and, in fact, a long, elaborated answer to the question of “How’s it going?” would likely be inappropriate for most people in the U.S.

What can you do if you are from another culture and want to learn to use small talk in the U.S. to build relationships and establish trust? First, work hard to hone your own version of American-style small talk. Watch how others do it — the topics they cover, the tone they use, their style of verbal and non-verbal communication. You don’t have to mimic what they do; in fact, that would likely backfire because people would see you as inauthentic. But if you can develop your own personal version, that can go a long way toward making you feel comfortable and competence.

Second, as you are honing your style, also work hard to appreciate why Americans make small talk as they do from their cultural perspective. Yes, from your point of view, American small talk might feel superficial or irrelevant or unnecessary, but is that how Americans see it? The more you can appreciate the new culture from that culture’s own mind-set, the more legitimate you will ultimately feel adopting their norms.

So the next time someone asks you, “How’s it going?” or “What do you think of the weather?” don’t think of it as an imposition. See it as an opportunity! Use small talk just like Americans do — as a way to build and establish connections and to set the stage for potentially deeper relationships.

Amazon is changing a policy on affiliate links to free Kindle books, and the changes are likely to have a big effect on the way some self-published authors achieve success online.

In the last few years, entire websites aimed at promoting free Kindle books have sprung up. Their business model is primarily referral fees: When a visitor to one of these sites clicks on a link to Amazon to download a free ebook, but then buys other products on Amazon within 24 hours, the original site gets a percentage of those unrelated paid sales.

Amazon is now cracking down on this. The company notes on its website that as of March 1:

“Associates who we determine are promoting primarily free Kindle eBooks and meet both conditions below for a given month will not be eligible for any advertising fees for that month within the Amazon Associates Program. This change will not affect advertising fees earned prior to March 1, 2013.

1. At least 80% of all Kindle eBooks ordered and downloaded during Sessions attributed to your Special Links are free Kindle eBooks

2. 20,000 or more free Kindle eBooks are ordered and downloaded during Sessions attributed to your Special Links.”

The new policy will primarily affect the largest free Kindle book sites — Ereader News Today, BookBub, eReaderIQ, Pixel of Ink and Free Kindle Books and Tips. Some self-published authors fear it will also affect downloads of their titles. Self-published authors who make their books available to the Kindle Owners’ Lending Library are also allowed to run special promotions where they can give their books away for free for a day, to drive sales. And many self-published authors use the free Kindle bestseller lists to gain publicity for their books.

“This is definitely going to make life for Indies [self-published authors] much much tougher,” one author writes on the Kindle Boards. “After all, we depend on these free runs for the ranking and therefore sales boosts. Without the free book sites, how will we reach those people who want to download free books?”

Is Amazon starting to emphasize paid Kindle books?

The self-published author David Gaughran sees a trend in Amazon’s attitude toward free Kindle books. He wrote to me in an email:

In mid-March last year, Amazon began trialling new versions of the algorithms which decide the ranking on Popularity Lists before settling on one iteration in May which no longer counted a free download as a paid sale, but as one tenth of a paid sale. This had the instant effect of greatly reducing the “post-free bounce” which many self-publishers had been witnessing after a KDP Select free run.

On top of that, towards the end of last year, Amazon began experimenting with hiding the Top 100 free behind a tab (they are usually listed beside the Top 100 paid books which gives tremendous visibility). They haven’t decided to make that change permanent yet, but the very fact they are experimenting with it is a possible sign of things to come.

But Gaughran isn’t too worried: The existing free Kindle sites “will need something to feature, and we could see the 99-cent price point become hot again as self-publishers move from free-pulsing to price-pulsing.”

Big free book sites plan to change their policies

Michael Gallagher, who runs the site Free Kindle Books and Tips, writes in a blog post that he expects a lot of free Kindle book sites will have to shut down. While he notes that Amazon’s new 20,000 free Kindle book-per-month threshold sounds like a lot, he estimates that clicks on his site’s affiliate links result in about 50,000 or so free ebook downloads a day.

Gallagher’s not shutting down his own site: He’s changing its name to Kindle Books and Tips and will focus more on tips and bargains on “quality” content and less on free content. He’s also going to start accepting advertising from self-published authors. ”I am lucky in the fact I didn’t quit my day job, but there are many other individuals and companies out there who have built a business around the promotion of free Kindle book offerings,” he writes, and “this move by Amazon will put many of these people out of work starting next week.”

Greg Doublet, who runs the site Ereader News Today, told me in an email that he thinks Amazon’s changes will be good in the long run: “it will get people not to rely on ‘free’ to get their books. It was a matter of time before something like this was bound to happen.” He says he’s been making changes to Ereader News Today in order to comply with Amazon’s new rules, and like Gallagher is emphasizing more bargain books and fewer free books. “Maybe 99-cent books will become the new free,” he said, “and authors will start to earn more money for their efforts.”

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
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• How consumer media will change in 2013
• What the shift to the cloud means for the future EPG
• Research In Motion: future scenarios for its fate

Leap Motion today announced that its innovative motion controller for PCs will start shipping to pre-order buyers beginning May 13, and will launch in the U.S. at Best Buy locations on May 19. Full retail price for the Leap Motion Controller will be $79.99, the company announced, $10 more than the pre-order asking price.

If you’re looking for an earlier release date than the official retail launch, Leap Motion continues to accept pre-orders for the controller through its own website, for both international and U.S. customers, and American buyers can now also pre-order Best Buy as of today. Pre-orders direct from Leap will be shipped out to customers based on their spot in line. So far, Leap Motion has had pre-orders in the “hundreds of thousands,” the company tells me, though it isn’t releasing more specific numbers.

Leap’s controller ships with built-in support for Windows 7 and 8, as well as Mac OS X 10.7 and 10.8. It is bundled with Airspace, Leap Motion’s dedicated app store, where it will offer partner titles that incorporate Leap Motion controls, including games, utilities, art apps and more. Leap is also finally revealing some of those partners, including Autodesk, Corel Painter, Disney games and Double Fine’s music title Dischord. The Weather Channel will also field a Leap Motion compatible app, and ZeptoLabs has made Cut The Rope ready to work with the 3D input device.

“We’ve talked about our app store as a key way to distribute software that our developers are creating,” Leap Motion VP of Marketing Michael Zagorsek explained in an interview. “We’re not going into it too much right now, because we didn’t want to overshadow the launch date news, but we realize that we really need to shift the narrative of the company more and more to the apps that we’re working to create.”

The app store is a crucial one for Leap Motion to tell. It has managed to secure immense pre-launch consumer and tech industry attention thanks to some very impressive demos of Minority Report-style interaction with the computers we already know and love, but sustaining the momentum it has built will depend on making sure early adopters feel there’s a strong reason to keep using the Leap Motion Controller, rather than forgetting it in a closet. The Airspace software marketplace, which will be both a standalone downloadable app itself, as well as a web-based storefront, will be a big part of achieving that goal.

I should be very early in the Leap Motion Controller pre-order queue, and can’t wait to get my hands on (or floating in the air above, as the case may be) this device. For now, this demo of Realmac Software’s Clear for Mac to-do list being controlled by a Leap Motion Controller will have to suffice.

As the high-end smartphone market begins to slow following a period of breakneck growth, the companies that drove much of that growth are starting to broaden their strategies. Apple (AAPL) is eyeing emerging markets, while Samsung (005930) is looking to boost its enterprise presence while also increasing tablet sales. Samsung Mobile EVP Y.H. Lee recently told CNET that the company hopes to double tablet shipments in 2013 to about to about 40 million units. The 40 million-unit mark is also being eyed by LG (066570), which told The Wall Street Journal it hopes to cross that threshold with smartphone sales this year, representing 51% growth over 2012. “The market is saturated, but with good products, [we] can take away others’ share,” LG’s mobile boss Park Jong-seok said.

Nexenta Systems, a developer of software-defined storage technology, has closed a $24 million Series D round. The company also named Mark Lockareff as chief executive officer. Four Rivers Group led the round, with participation by existing investors Menlo Ventures, TransLink Capital, Javelin Ventures, Sierra Ventures, Razor’s Edge Ventures, and West Summit Capital. In addition to Four Rivers, new strategic investors Presidio Ventures and UMC Capital participated.

PRESS RELEASE
Nexenta® Systems, the world leader in Software-defined Storage, today announced that it closed out 2012 with business growth that exceeded the company plan in terms of revenue, partner growth, partner sales, and customer adoption. Faced with this growth and opportunity, the company has secured $24 million in Series D financing. Nexenta also announced the appointment of Mark Lockareff as chief executive officer, with former CEO Evan Powell assuming the new role of chief strategy officer. With 25 years’ experience growing, leading, and investing in disruptive technology companies, Mark Lockareff will drive Nexenta’s next stage of growth as Software-defined Storage rapidly changes the dynamics of the IT technology market.

Nexenta’s over-subscribed Series D financing is being led by new investor Four Rivers Group, with participation by existing Nexenta investors Menlo Ventures, TransLink Capital, Javelin Ventures, Sierra Ventures, Razor’s Edge Ventures, and West Summit Capital. In addition to Four Rivers, new strategic investors Presidio Ventures and UMC Capital participated.

This round of investment is testament to the momentum and growth that the company has experienced in the last 12 months and to the company’s leadership of the transformation of the storage industry. Key highlights include:

The number of Nexenta-powered storage deployments of one petabyte or greater grew by a factor of 10.
Revenue growth doubled year-over-year; the company has experienced triple digit growth for three consecutive years.
Adoption of NexentaStor exceeded the 5,000 customer deployment milestone, while follow-on sales to existing customers expanded by 475 percent.
Total storage under management now exceeds 660PB and Nexenta has enabled an estimated $400 million in hardware storage sales for its reseller partners.
The company’s global reach continues to expand with active partners growing by 75 percent since January 2012. Nexenta has established official subsidiaries and teams in the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, China, South Korea, and Japan.
Nexenta expanded its product portfolio with the launch of NexentaVSA for View for managing and deploying virtualized environments.

New CEO Lockareff has led or invested in a number of enterprise infrastructure, software and internet companies during their key growth stages including: ParAccel, Agiliance, Softricity, Model N, Riverbed, Acopia, ProofPoint, and Facebook.

In addition to Lockareff’s appointment, Bridget Warwick is joining Nexenta as chief marketing officer. Warwick previously held senior marketing positions at BlueArc Corporation (acquired by Hitachi Data Systems) and NetApp. These strategic additions to the executive team follow the October 2012 appointment of Rick Martig as CFO, and reflect Nexenta’s transition from a disruptive and explosive start-up to the trusted and innovative storage partner for thousands of companies all over the world.

“Nexenta provides the ideal storage to support Hosting.com’s cloud hosting services and our customers’ mission-critical applications. No other technology can match Nexenta’s price-to-performance, which has helped us offer competitive and differentiated services to companies all over the world. We look forward to a long and mutually beneficial relationship between our two companies,” said Hosting.com CTO Matt Ferrari.

“Our task at Nexenta is simple: we must build a company that is up to meeting the enormous opportunity of leading the transformation of the storage industry. The transition to Software-defined Storage is accelerating because customers must have greater flexibility, performance, and savings in their storage if they are to compete. I’m confident that Mark and Bridget will help us do an even better job for our customers, resellers, and strategic partners,” said Powell.

About Nexenta Systems
Nexenta Systems is the world leader in Software-defined Storage. Its flagship software platform, NexentaStor, delivers high-performance, ultra-scalable, cloud- and virtualization-optimized storage solutions. Built upon ZFS technology and running on a broad choice of industry-standard hardware, NexentaStor eliminates vendor lock-in and provides open, unified storage management at significantly less cost than legacy systems.

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