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Thursday, February 13, 2014
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Lenovo may be getting Motorola’s handset business after buying the company from Google for around $3 billion, but it won’t be getting the company’s current CEO Dennis Woodside – the 10 year Google veteran will depart both companies for Dropbox, where he’ll be its new Chief Operating Officer.


Woodside joined Google in 2003, and was in charge of the search giant’s ad sales before being shifted to lead the Motorola team when Google acquired that business in 2011. He oversaw the development of the Moto G and Moto X phones during his tenure, and helped the company spearhead some experimental product development, including around Project Ara, a modular smartphone concept design that’s highly user-customizable.


Thus far, Motorola has been run by co-founders Drew Houston and Arash Ferdowsi, as CEO and CTO respectively. The founding executives both come from a technical background, as the WSJ notes, and Woodside could provide them with some much-needed expertise in managing a large workforce to help the company handle its rapid (but declining) pace of growth.


There’s a high likelihood that a Dropbox IPO is in the works, and Woodside’s appointment could be part of those efforts, too. The company raised $350 million at a valuation of $10 billion, according to the WSJ, which is $100 million more than originally reported when the round was discovered back in January.


Really, it makes a lot of sense that Woodside wouldn’t follow Motorola to its new home – he’s a sales focused executive who was parachuted into the smartphone company to help to try to shape it up after Google acquired the business. Woodside heading to Lenovo doesn’t make much sense, either for the new owners of Motorola, or for Woodside himself. At Dropbox, he has a chance to become part of the origin story of what could become the next big tech giant, if the cloud storage startup can put down the pedal on continued growth.





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Today at the Palais des Congrès, Microsoft held its first demo day in front of investors and journalists. Investors in the room included well-known business angels, such as Xavier Niel, Marc Simoncini and Jacques Antoine Granjon — they took the stage for a short panel and gave advice to the startup teams in the room.


Microsoft started working on its startup accelerator in Paris two years ago. Formerly called Bizspark, it was recently renamed to Microsoft Ventures Accelerator. It’s a three-month program to help early-stage startups in various ways with workshops, a co-working space, a demo day in front of investors and more. Here are the startups that presented today.


Youmiam


Youmiam


Youmiam is an online platform to share recipes, a sort of Soundcloud for recipes. It’s a very visual experience. Youmiam’s take on the recipe website is quite different as many recipe websites bet everything on SEO and content farm strategies. The key differentiating element is that it’s easy to create a recipe, and embed it on a blog. The company plans to localize the product in more languages and work on its recommendation engine next. It recently raised 410,000 (€300,000). More about Youmiam here.


TraxAir


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TraxAir tackles unpaid royalties to electronic music artists. It identifies music played by DJs and live bands. For example, if a DJ plays a set, the club can use TraxAir’s technology to detect all the songs in the mix and report that to collecting societies. The company plans to release a plug-and-play hardware product to simplify the data collection and help collecting societies to redistribute the correct amount to the correct artists. They are looking for $1.1 million (€800,000) to launch in about seven months.


UBQT


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UBQT is a way to follow events online, stitching together tweets, photos, videos, articles and more. At heart, UBQT’s interface is a feed that works on a computer and on mobile — it mixes up different kinds of content from different platforms (Instagram, Twitter, etc.). Instead of targeting attendees, the company targets people that cannot attend but still want to experience the event. Everything is available on a single platform.


Speecheo


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Speecheo is a tool that creates a smart link between speakers and the audience. When you attend an event, you take notes, record the conference and download the slides. But all this information is separated. Moreover, it’s hard to interact with the speaker. Speecheo records everything, you can highlight a part of the talk, highlight tweets and more. At the end, you get a nice summary of the talk. And it provides feedback to the speaker.


Tracktl


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Tracktl is an app to manage the music playlist of your house party. You plug a computer to the stereo, and then everyone can search and add a song with their phones. You can upvote songs, see what’s coming next and more. For now, Tracktl is a web app that works on every phone, and targets house parties only. The company has plans to extend to bars and public places.


Reminiz


Reminiz


Reminiz is a facial recognition startup. For example, you sometimes wonder who this actor on TV is. With Reminiz, you can launch the app and recognize the person by pointing your camera at a TV or a magazine. You get a biography, his or her Twitter account as well as his or her songs or movies. On pre-processed movies, you get a 98 percent success rate. The company currently focuses on entertainment, but plans to offer this technology for home automation or business purposes.


Speekr


Speekr


Speekr allows you to send location-based messages. You can choose precisely where the person will receive the message. This way, your recipient will get your message at the perfect moment. You can send a text, a video or a song. The app only allow you to add 12 people in the app to communicate only with your closest friends and family members. Speekr will sell in-app purchase upgrades to unlock features and stickers. The company is raising a seed round.


Streami


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Streami provides everything you need to oranize an event. With Streami, you can create your event in one unit dashboard, push it directly to Facebook, synchronize RSVP statuses and send messages. The company also provides a video player to live stream your event with relevant information right next to the video. You can also track social network activity. The company is asking for around $540,000 (€400,000).


SmartNotify


SmartNotify


SmartNotify allows you to send the right messages through the right communication channel. You select the group you want to interact with, type the message and hit send. SmartNotify remembers how people like to be contacted. The platform handles text messages, emails, text to call, tweets and more. In the future, SmartNotify is a paid application and targets the healthcare market — these customers communicate a lot. The company is raising $500,000 right now.


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3:54 AM

Today at the Palais des Congrès , Microsoft held its first demo day in front of investors and journalists. Investors in the room included we...

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Infogr.am, which has built a platform for easily creating info-graphics which can be embedded on sites, has secured a $1.8 million (€1.34 million) investment led by Point Nine Capital with participation from Connect Ventures and HackFwd (the accelerator fund which closed last year but continues as an investment vehicle for former Xing founder Lars Hinrichs). The cash will be used for expansion in the US via a new sales and marketing office. The announcement was made at TechChill, the new startup conference for the Baltics in Riga, Latvia. The funding appears to be the largest to date from a company based out of Latvia.


Clearly this is on-trend. . Visually, the startup that’s best-known as an infographic marketplace, raised $8.1 million in Series A funding only last month.


The startup is poised to launch real-time data support and Google Drive integration allowing info graphics to be created based on live data: handy for financial sites. Other plans include developing a video info graphic generator.


Companies that have used the platform include The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, Al Jazeera and Yahoo.


The service has both free and paid-for versions and claims about 1 million users, who have created over 1.7 million ‘infograms’.


Competitors include PictoChart and Tableau though the latter would perhaps be best described as more complex and harder to learn


Infogr.am was founded 2 years ago by engineers Uldis Leiterts, Raimonds Kaze and Alise Semjonova.





1:54 AM

Infogr.am , which has built a platform for easily creating info-graphics which can be embedded on sites, has secured a $1.8 million (€1.34 m...

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Switerzland-based Lemoptix — which develops technology that enables micro-projectors to be embedded in mobile phones, automotive heads-up-displays, and low-powered wearable displays — has raised an undisclosed new round of funding from existing investors and new strategic investor, Swisscom Ventures, the venture arm of the Swiss telco.


Spun off from the highly respected Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in 2008, Lemoptix produces MEMS-based micro-projection technology to enable tiny, low powered projection displays to be embedded in mobile phones, HUDs and other wearables so that content can be displayed on a nearby surface or projected within the device itself, bypassing the typical limitations of physical displays. It then licenses this tech to partners and customers, supporting them through the initial development stages, prototyping, all the way to the industrialisation and production of new products.


Noteworthy, given the recent hype surrounding wearables and Google Glass, Lemoptix says it’s actively developing solutions and collaborating with industry partners in the area of wearable displays for smartglasses-type applications.


“Google Glass (and surrounding hype) has had an incredible effect on the market, which has seriously sparked competing consumer electronics device manufacturers who don’t want to be left behind to take action,” Lemoptix CEO Marco Boella tells TechCrunch. “I don’t know of many of these that wouldn’t in some way or another be looking into or developing these systems.”


He also says that Google Glass-type devices won’t ultimately end up being gadgets, but fit a number of real use-cases for wearable displays, such as in the areas of sport, medical applications, aiding the visually-impaired, security, maintenance, and head-mounted displays for motor cyclists, to name just a few.


“The number of different use-cases eliminates the risks of being dependent on one much-hyped application or another,” adds Boella.


However, he is far less bullish about the smartwatch. “Wearable displays can become the real extension/portal to the smartphone which the smartwatch will never really be in our opinion,” he says.





1:54 AM

Switerzland-based Lemoptix — which develops technology that enables micro-projectors to be embedded in mobile phones, automotive heads-up-...

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Wednesday, February 12, 2014
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The Time Warner Cable sweepstakes might be over. Just a few months after it was first reported that the second-largest cable firm in the nation was looking to be acquired, Comcast, the number one cable provider, has made an offer of $45.2 billion for the company.


According to multiple reports, the deal is set to be officially announced Thursday, with Comcast offering $158.82 per share in an all-stock deal.


The deal will make Comcast, already the largest cable company in the U.S., even bigger. Time Warner Cable has about 12 million subscribers, compared to Comcast’s 22 million. But not all of those customers will be joining Comcast, as the company plans to divest 3 million subs under the terms that the companies have agreed to.


One of the markets it’s expected to hold onto is New York City, where Time Warner Cable is the primary provider in Manhattan. Comcast is already a majority owner of NBC Universal, which has its home base there.



There will be a ton of naysayers who believe that this consolidation would be bad for the industry, will lead to less consumer choice, and would give one company too much control of the market. And to that I say, there’s already pretty much a monopoly in the pay TV market, and one company owning more subscribers in a market it didn’t even compete in doesn’t make much of a difference.


Oh, also: As someone who has been both a Comcast subscriber and a Time Warner Cable subscriber, I think Comcast is actually better positioned to make products and services that people like to use. So it’s not all bad for TWC subs.


Interesting side note: The news popped up on the same day it was reported Apple was negotiating with Time Warner Cable to bring the cable provider’s content onto the Apple TV. So there’s, uh, that.


Photo Credit: MoneyBlogNewz via Compfight cc





7:54 PM

The Time Warner Cable sweepstakes might be over. Just a few months after it was first reported that the second-largest cable firm in the na...

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Uber said today that it has expanded its system for conducting background checks on the drivers in its on-demand ride service network.


In a post published this afternoon on the company’s official blog, Uber said it will now perform federal and county background checks on all new drivers in all American markets. The company will also run federal and county checks on all its existing rideshare partners who have not already cleared them.


These new checks will be performed in addition to the background check system that Uber has used in the past. Up until now, Uber has relied on the background checks already performed by state and local authorities as part of the commercial licensing required for Uber’s black car, taxi and SUV services. Drivers on the ridesharing Uberx service have been screened by Hirease, a third party background check service that uses something called the “Multi-State Criminal Database.”


The changes are key, because Uber’s existing system relying on the Multi-State Criminal Database has not been foolproof. Last month, Pando.com reported that an UberX driver in San Francisco who had allegedly physically and verbally assaulted a customer had passed Uber’s background check system, despite having a criminal record that includes felony and misdemeanor charges and prison time.


In its blog post today, Uber explained the flaws in relying solely on the Multi-State Criminal Database thusly:



“While many counties regularly provide their records to state authorities (who in turn make them available to the Multi-State Criminal Database), some counties do not participate in this reporting the way we and our users expect they should. Similarly, a check relying on the Multi-State Criminal Database may miss records that only exist in the federal database. In our experience, records appearing in one database but not showing up in another is a rare occurrence, but we consider this situation unacceptable all the same.”



Uber has raised $307 million in funding, including a whopping $258 million Series C round led by Google Ventures, since it was founded back in 2009. With this kind of big money comes big responsibility, so it is important to see Uber iterate on its safety processes.





5:39 PM

Uber said today that it has expanded its system for conducting background checks on the drivers in its on-demand ride service network. In a...

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In what should be one of the greatest and weirdest pivots of all time, Jed McCaleb transformed Mt. Gox (short for Magic: The Gathering Online Exchange) from a card-trading platform into what became the world’s one-time leading Bitcoin exchange.


Not wanting the legal hassle of operating a crypto-currency exchange, McCaleb sold Mt. Gox to a few Tokyo-based French entrepreneurs he had never met before in 2011. They presided over Mt. Gox as it went on to dominate Bitcoin trading for more than a year by volume. However, over the past six months, the platform has seen a fall from grace as users have had trouble withdrawing their funds. New troubles emerged in the last couple days again, as Mt. Gox said it was halting withdrawals. The company said it was having problems finalizing transactions because of a perceived flaw in the Bitcoin protocol around “transaction malleability.” Other exchanges also halted withdrawals as the Bitcoin Foundation said it working on a solution to the problem.


In any case, McCaleb has been free of Mt. Gox’s troubles for years.


Now he’s back at work on a new project. And here it is at the mysterious address of secretbitcoinproject.com.


It has just this short message:



When I sold Mt. Gox a few years ago, Bitcoin was trading at less than a dollar. Today Bitcoin exists in a new environment. Mt. Gox is struggling to keep up. Now, I am building something that will be better for Bitcoin and better for you.


I’m looking for alpha testers.


-Jed



We also hear from a source that he’s raised some funding solely through some instant messages and Skype. (McCaleb is a bit reclusive.)





3:39 PM

In what should be one of the greatest and weirdest pivots of all time, Jed McCaleb transformed Mt. Gox (short for Magic: The Gathering Onlin...

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