Benton Pena @ technology + culture + life and everything in between

The 2012 Super Bowl has come and gone, while you’re left to clean up the beer cans, wash off that face paint, and get back to planning your next pivot. The game itself provided more than enough excitement, with the New York Football Giants eking out a win over the star-crossed Tom Bradys and Bill Belichicks. This year’s Big Game also marked the first time that a Super Bowl was streamed live, legally, and for free on the Interwebs. While online viewers met with a number of shortcomings, the streaming was — for the most part — a success. (Read our review here.)

The Super Bowl also proved to yet again be the catalyst of rabid activity on social media channels, especially Twitter, which, at its most active, saw more than 10,000 tweets per second. A record for sporting events (even though this record seems to be broken every three months.)

While some watch the Super Bowl for their love of a good game of pigskin, others flip on the game for the halftime entertainment or the slew of “creative” commercials airing for the first time in front of a ready-made audience of millions.

The ad content this year left much to be desired (in my humble opinion), though there were some highlights, like an appearance by some faces familiar to the tech industry, thanks to Best Buy’s spotlighting of a few mobile innovators, among them Philippe Kahn, Ray Kurzweil, Instagram Founder Kevin Systrom, and the guys behind Shazam, and Words With Friends, and so on.

Of course, in the wrap up of every Super Bowl, the people want to get a taste of which commercials were the most popular. This morning Hulu released its list of winners, and it looks like nostalgia took the blue ribbon. Of the ads that ran during game time, Honda’s “Matthew’s Day Off” (a Ferris Bueller tribute) just narrowly edged out Volkswagen’s “The Dog Strikes Back,” with the “most liked” ad on Hulu AdZone being Volkswagen’s “The Bark Side” preview ad.

Below, you can find the top results across categories, including “Overall Most Liked Ads” and “Funniest Ads.” For more of Hulu’s categories, check out their release here.

Overall Most Liked Ads

1. Volkswagen: The Bark Side Teaser
2. Honda: Matthew’s Day Off — Extended
3. Volkswagen: The Dog Strikes Back
4. Skechers: GOrun Mr. Quiggly
5. Dannon Oikos: The Tease
6. Chevrolet: 2012
7. MM’s: It’s That Kind of Party
8. Audi: Vampire Party
9. E*Trade: Fatherhood
10. Acura: Transactions — Extended

Funniest Ads

1. Acura: Transactions
2. Hulu Plus: Hulubratory
3. Chevrolet: Happy Grad
4. Honda: Matthew’s Day Off
5. Chevrolet: 2012

Of course, Hulu is not the only service/company to track this year’s most popular commercials. This morning, TiVo also shared it’s commercial results, which is of note as it claims to be the “only second-by-second audience research service to rank the top ten commercials based on actual commercial retention and viewership” relative to the Super Bowl’s viewership numbers. Interestingly, while many brands like to preview or tease their ads days before the Super Bowl actually airs, the top three did not preview their commercials online before the big game. Take that, Internet?

Though it may not come as a surprise, it’s disappointing not to see many tech companies (or tech-related ads) in either of these top ten lists, with the exception of Hulu and E*Trade. It seems that the Super Bowl came and went without the same controversy (or negative reaction) stirred up by GoDaddy, Salesforce.com, and Groupon last year, the former two ranking high in the “Most Disliked” category last year.

But, without further ado, here are the top ten according to TiVo:

1. Doritos: “Man’s Best Friend”
2. MMs: “Ms. Brown”
3. Doritos: “Sling Baby”
4. Pepsi: “King’s Court”
5. Volkswagen: “The Dog Strikes Back”
6. NFL New Fantasy Game: “Win a Million Bucks”
7. Acura NSX: “Seinfeld”
8. FIAT 500: “Supermodel”
9. Chevy Camaro: “Happy Grad”
10. E*Trade Baby: “Fatherhood”

What do you think? Weigh in with your favorites.

• HULU
• TIVO

Founded in March 2007, Hulu is operated independently by a dedicated management team with offices in Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, Seattle and Beijing. NBC Universal, News Corporation, as of April 2009, Disney, Providence Equity Partners and the Hulu team share in the ownership stake of the company.

Hulu is an online video service that offers a selection of hit shows, clips, movies and more at Hulu.com, numerous destination sites online, and through the ad-supported subscription service, Hulu Plus.

Hulu…

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Tivo is a brand of digital video recorders (DVRs). Tivo devices provides users with the ability to save television programs for later viewing (“time shifting”), an electronic television programming schedule, and recording options based on that schedule.

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It’s hard not to love the Galaxy Nexus, even if you’re not a Fandroid. With a 4.65-inch 720p display, a 1.2GHz dual-core processor and Android 4.0 ICS to boot, what’s not to love?

Well, if you’re being picky, perhaps you’re yearning for a white GalNex, in which case I have good and bad news. Which do you want first?

The good news is that the white Galaxy Nexus is indeed an official product and it will be available on February 13, which gives you a whole day to use a combination of Google Wallet and Fab to find your sweetheart a nice Valentine’s Day gift.

The bad news is that, according to TrustedReviews, the white GalNex is only available to the UK this week. (Bad news for us, anyways.)

Wait, there’s one extra bonus bit of good news: If you have enough dough, the white GalNex is has a pentaband HSPA+ radio, meaning it will work on both ATT and T-Mobile’s networks. And by “enough dough”, I specifically mean at least £496.79 ($770), which is what the 16GB model seems to be going for over at UK online retailer Handtec.

Past it’s pale appearance, all the specs will remain the same between the black and white models. However, if you happen to remember when we first noticed the white Galaxy Nexus, you’ll recall that the render within the post showed an all-white bezel. That isn’t the case with the official version, as the front bezel of the phone is still solid black and the back portion of the phone is white.

• GOOGLE
• SAMSUNG

Google provides search and advertising services, which together aim to organize and monetize the world’s information. In addition to its dominant search engine, it offers a plethora of online tools and platforms including: Gmail, Maps and YouTube. Most of its Web-based products are free, funded by Google’s highly integrated online advertising platforms AdWords and AdSense. Google promotes the idea that advertising should be highly targeted and relevant to users thus providing them with a rich source of information….

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Ridejoy, a YC-backed startup that brings people together via ridesharing on long-distance trips, has raised $1.3 million in seed funding led by Freestyle Capital
with Lerer Ventures, Start Fund, SV Angel, Founder Collective, Y Combinator, Ben Ling, Owen Van Natta and Joshua Schachter participating.

The service allows drivers who are already planning to take a roadtrip to ‘sell’ their extra seats to other users. Drivers earn money on trips they were planning on taking anyway, and Ridejoy passengers get a door-to-door lift, in some cases for less than they’d pay for a bus ticket.

For now, Ridejoy is focused on long-distance trips. Drivers and passengers can locate others going to the same destination online in advance of the trip. To find travel companions, Ridejoy members simply post rides offered or rides needed and can be paid via cash or credit card. Ridejoy will take a small cut of the credit card payments.

In terms of safety, users are required to provide relevant work and education history, a photo, and with Facebook integration, a list of mutual friends. Ridejoy also implements a a user review system, so that drivers and passengers can check community feedback from previous rides; as well as a user reference system, which allows for friends to vouch for community members.

Last year, Ridejoy debuted its service with BurningManRides.com — a site that helped people coordinate their trips out to the Nevada desert. 1600 people signed up, 1150 rides were posted, and 400 rides were completed over a three-week span. In a neat twist, five pilots offered rides-by-air, completing a total of ten plane trips.

Ridejoy faces competition from Zimride. Ridejoy will use the new funding to increase design and engineering capacity and expand operations beyond the West Coast.

Article source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/2KFRkCWdp8I/

The Occupy movement, or rallying cry, or whatever you want to call it, is by its nature decentralized. By refusing to come together under one banner other than the word “Occupy,” they’ve both diluted their message and allowed it to spread more quickly. You don’t need an Occupy license to occupy a bank’s lobby in Kansas City, but at the same time there’s a natural question of whether one occupation is related to another.

Political considerations aside, the point is that Occupy might benefit from a recognizable face. On this front, some faction of the movement has decided to do a little branding, but in keeping with the democratic, bottom-up nature of the organization (or rather disorganization), they’ve opted to run a contest and let the “official” logo be selected by popular vote. It’s a great application of web technology to an interesting problem, and will probably prove to be a memorable case study in an increasingly common phenomenon: the necessity of branding an emergent movement or pattern on the internet.

It’s something that has already been faced by, for example, Anonymous. Like Occupy, Anonymous is necessarily decentralized and in a way leaderless — but there are obviously leaders and centers, like @anonops and a few other “official” sources. But then there’s the Guy Fawkes mask and the empty suit, both certainly symbols of Anonymous by common consent, though whether they emerged naturally or were simply in the right place at the right time (and whether there’s any difference between those two) isn’t clear.

Or think about the SOPA/PIPA protests. While everyone seemed to figure out a good way to express the concept of censorship on their site or avatar, the lack of a single unifying phrase, graphic, or general “brand” (loosely speaking) was conspicuous, considering the extraordinary cross-cultural and cross-community agreement on the issue.

Which brings us to Occupy. The logos being submitted are the usual mix of free fonts, corporate-looking nonsense, and the occasional good idea. For the record, I like the one at top left, and these:

But I’m suspicious of the whole concept. The problem to me is not Occupy-specific. It’s simply that emergent phenomena don’t respond well to efforts to define them. The reason no single visual metaphor appeared for SOPA was because there was no naturally propagating icon around which people could gather. There was no burning monk, no Kent State photograph, no graphic or sketch or person that naturally expressed and associated itself with the movement. The closest thing was the censor bar or redacted text, which was sort of good enough but didn’t adequately encompass the ideas behind the opposition.

With Occupy as well, I think that efforts to create an identity for it will fail, because identity only emerges from collective action. It happens naturally or it doesn’t happen at all. I think this will be demonstrated more frequently over the next few years as activism, social change, and more everyday things as well become memetic and emergent. A logo will be picked for @occupy and for use on “official” communiques, whatever that might mean to them. But what Occupy and Anonymous and STOP SOPA and all the rest need isn’t a logo, it’s a symbol. Those aren’t quite as easy to come by.

[hat tip to GigaOm for setting me thinking]

Article source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/kVHtn0iIapQ/

Facebook is testing a new photo viewer layout that mounts engagement buttons and comments to the right rather than beneath images. See, Facebook doesn’t want you to just view comments, it wants you to start a conversation. Apparently the company doesn’t care about being accused of copying Google+, since the viewer’s layout is very similar to that of its competitor.

The fact is that this is good design, though, so it makes sense for Facebook to integrate whether or not it has appeared elsewhere. Currently when Facebook users view photos, they see a big blank space on the right but can’t see the comments below with scrolling past the fold and away from the image. That makes users more likely to leave the photo viewer before engaging. The blank space is better filled with comments that lend context to a photo, as a small percentage of Facebook users are now seeing.

Facebook hasn’t been shy about taking inspiration from other products. In the months since Google+ launched, Facebook has added features found in Google+, including an asymmetrical Subscribe option, video chat, enhanced friend lists, and near-infinite post length. Facebook’s goal is the best user experience, and Google got a lot of that right. Google+ certainly wasn’t shy about using Facebook’s design as a starting point.

Facebook employees have repeatedly assured me that product teams aren’t thinking about ad revenue when they design products. Still, convenient repercussion of the tested photo viewer design may be an increase in ad clicks. Rather than displaying ads beneath photos, the tested design shows them more prominently in the comments sidebar. Finding these types of synergies between business and user experience will be key to Facebook honoring the interests of its future investors.

So why does this small change matter? First, encouraging conversation aligns with Facebook’s goal of driving connections between people, such as friends of a photo’s owner who might interact in its comment reel for the first time. Second, these comments drive notifications for all other commenters, which inspire more return visits and time on site. I bet the test will show increased engagement, and Facebook will implement some version of side-mounted comments.

[Thanks to our anonymous tipster for the screenshots]

• FACEBOOK

Facebook is the world’s largest social network, with over 500 million users.

Facebook was founded by Mark Zuckerberg in February 2004, initially as an exclusive network for Harvard students. It was a huge hit: in 2 weeks, half of the schools in the Boston area began demanding a Facebook network. Zuckerberg immediately recruited his friends Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes to help build Facebook, and within four months, Facebook added 30 more college networks.

The original idea for the term…

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Halfway to living up to its moniker with over 250 startups, 500 Startups held a series of demo days this week and last, where a group of 33 scrappy startups presented their wares to investors in both New York and San Francisco. As we are wont to do with these things, we visited the 500 Startups offices in Mountain View and interviewed the seven that we thought were the most interesting, from both an investor and consumer standpoint.

The startups chosen spanned all sorts of market territory, from a novel take on media-based eCommerce to an SaaS for farmers, but what they all had in common was a unique approach to the problem they were trying to solve as well as inkling of that other indeterminate thing that makes a startup great.

Also, I’m pretty sure Switchcam, a startup that allows for a combining of different camera angles on video, should be on here.

Most amazing moment: When ‘Love With Food’ founder admits to following me into the bathroom to tell me about her food related startup, of all things!

72Lux

Ever wish that you buy whatever product/outfit/gadget/whatever as you were reading about it online. Well you’re one step closer with startup 72 Lux, which provides publishers with a widget that allows readers to shop directly from whatever web page they’re reading, without taking them off the page. Nifty.

Tiny Review

“Instagram for reviews” Tiny Review allows people to express what they feel or think via mobile in three lines or less.  After a little over three weeks in the iOS app store, the modest startup has about 25k users, and that’s with almost no coverage from press. Hmm … wonder what will happen when they do finally get some coverage.

HighScore House

Definitely one of the buzziest startups at Demo Day, HighScore House gamifies the process of doing chores, giving kids parent-set rewards like “ice cream for breakfast” whenever they complete assigned tasks. This just smells like the future. 

SafeShepard

SafeShepard logs who is tracking your data (like browser cookies) across the web and then acts like an intermediary, asking them to remove it from their database — Saving you hassle at the least. Hence the name.

Fitocracy

Fitocracy cofounders Brian Wang and Richard Talens used to be total chubs. Now they’re both buff and ready to bring a bunch of out of shape nerds with them on their quantified fitness platform Fitocracy (which has so much reach online it was the subject of a XKCD cartoon). Props to Wang for taking his shirt off after the demo.

Farmeron
Farm management startup Farmeron helps farmers track their livestock and livelihood, charging by the animal. “Main Cowboy in the Saddle” Matija Kopić came from a family of farmers in Croatia, but ended up going up against his parents wishes and became a coder. Enough said.

LoveWithFood

At first glance LoveWithFood seems like a Foodzie clone.  Luckily founder Aihui Ong chased me into the bathroom to explain to me how exactly they differ; For every box of bite-sized gourmet food samples you receive, LoveWithFood donates a meal to a homeless shelter. And yes, I wish the name was FoodWithLove, but you’ll take what you can get, especially if it’s for a good cause.

Article source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/pd9jFzQQNok/

Android malware has been an issue over the past year. Granted, most of the numbers we see out of security software companies are inflated — including malicious apps from third-party sources and ignoring small download figures — but that’s not to say that we can just brush that dirt off our shoulders.

Google knows this, and has for a while. Despite the fact that downloads of malicious apps are down 40 percent between the first and second half of 2011, seeing that 14,000, 30,000, or even 260,000 devices have been affected by this or that malicious app requires action. That said, Google is adding a new security layer to the Android Market: codenamed Bouncer.

Originally, the Android market implemented three different methods for ridding the market of malware: sandboxing, permissions, and malware removal. Sandboxing keeps one app from infiltrating another, with one very important exception: permissions. Google sees its permissions system as a layer of security in and of itself, but permissions can actually be seen as a vulnerability. In some cases, the reasons behind the permissions a developer asks for aren’t immediately obvious to the user, and it can be tough to check everything, especially to the novice user.

Past that, Google’s always been good about removing malware from the market as soon as the company becomes aware of it, and in some cases, has even remotely wiped affected devices of malicious apps. The tool is a useful one to say the least, but it’s not enough.

Bouncer adds another level of security to the platform, automatically scanning new and existing apps for known bits of malicious code. Google has actually been scanning apps whenever new malicious code is discovered, but Bouncer will automate the process, scanning for known spyware and trojans, too. Bouncer runs every new application on Google’s cloud infrastructure and simulates how it’ll run on a device. That way, Google can see straight away whether an app is misbehaving and flag it accordingly.

Another smart feature is that Bouncer isn’t 100 percent automated. Once something is flagged, there’s a manual process for confirming the app is indeed malicious, reducing the risk of false positives.

To be quite honest, the Android platform is way more secure than most people think. I spoke with Android VP of engineering Hiroshi Lockheimer, and he seems to feel the same way. “There’s this impression that Android is a huge target for malware, and I really don’t think that’s the case,” said Lockheimer. Google polices the Market, scans for known malicious code (though most instances of flagging in the past have been from users notifying Google), and is quick to act when an issue pops up. But where the platform has fallen short (in one respect), is the developer registration process.

Becoming an Android developer is as easy as pie. I actually did it myself just to see how easy it is, and it literally takes five minutes and $25. After clicking accept a few times, you’re good to go. In fact, developers can register under pseudonyms if they’d like.

From a certain perspective, this is amazing. It allows young entrepreneurs to offer a product to millions of users for a very low cost, lowering the bar for developers who can’t afford to jump through Apple’s hoops. At the same time, it makes it easy for malware writers to get the ball rolling.

Sophos blogger Vanja Svajcer said it best:

The requirements for becoming an Android developer that can publish apps to the Android Market are far too relaxed. The cost of becoming a developer and being banned by Google is much lower than the money that can be earned by publishing malicious apps. The attacks on the Android Market will continue as long as the developer requirements stay too relaxed.

With Bouncer, Google is recognizing this issue without making things difficult on developers. Devs will still be able to submit an app and see it in search results within minutes — Bouncer’s scanning process only takes seconds — and they’ll still be able to register for $25 and a few clicks on “Accept.”

But… now that Bouncer is in place, previous offenders will have a much more difficult time sneaking back on to the platform by registering under a new name. According to Google’s blog post, the search giant will be “analyzing new developer accounts to help prevent malicious and repeat-offending developers from coming back.”

This is what I believe will make the biggest difference when it comes to the threat of Android malware, and I’m more than thrilled that the company is making it a priority moving forward.

• ANDROID

Android is a software platform for mobile devices based on the Linux operating system and developed by Google and the Open Handset Alliance. It allows developers to write managed code in Java that utilizes Google-developed software libraries, but does not support programs developed in native code.

The unveiling of the Android platform on 5 November 2007 was announced with the founding of the Open Handset Alliance, a consortium of 34 hardware, software and telecom companies devoted to advancing open standards…

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A video detailing the new features of Windows Phone 8 Apollo — originally intended for Microsoft’s smartphone partners — has leaked into the hands of PocketNow editors.

Yay!

In my opinion, Windows Phone Mango is a solid platform that’s quicker and smoother than anything I’ve seen on Android. Still, when looking at devices from Microsoft, Apple, and Google side-by-side, the Windows Phone always seems to lose in the spec department. That said, WinPho boss Joe Belfiore has plenty in store for us come Q4 2012 (the rumored release date of Apollo).

As far as hardware is concerned, Microsoft is ready to take it to the next level, adding support for multiple cores, NFC, and full microSD card storage. Apollo will also support four different screen resolutions, though Belfiore apparently wasn’t very forthcoming with specifics on those.

Developers are going to love this next part. According to PocketNow, developers will be able to use most of the same code when porting a Widnows 8 app over to the Windows Phone platform. Of course, both platforms will share the same Metro-style interface, and that NFC radio will allow for tap-to-share capabilities between various Windows 8 devices.

Microsoft used to tout its Tango video chat app, but it would seem as thought that Skype acquisition isn’t going to waste. Windows Phone 8 will have Skype baked right in, taking video chat and VoIP calls to a much higher level of audio/visual quality. Redmond expects at least 100,000 apps in the Marketplace by the time Apollo launches, at which point developers will have native code support and the ability to implement app-to-app communication.

Now that most of our data plans are no longer unlimited, keeping track of data consumption is more important than ever. That said, Apollo will offer up a live tile for data usage called DataSmart. According to PocketNow, the feature will give precedence to WiFi connections. IE10 will include built-in server-side compression, which should reduce data usage, and the Local Scout tile will eventually hook you up with real-time locations of nearby hotspots.

Windows has always been a powerhouse in the enterprise, and it’s about time the same was true for Windows Phone. That said, Apollo will bring with it BitLocker encryption support for full-disk encryption, along with the option to deploy company-specific apps behind enterprise firewalls.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Windows Phone is on its way people, and with such a hearty update on the way, I’m only that more confident in my prediction. I’m in good company, too.

• WINDOWS PHONE 7

Windows Phone 7 is the successor of the Windows Mobile 6.5 mobile operating system in development by Microsoft, scheduled for release by October 2010. Microsoft’s goal is to create a compelling and predictable user experience by redesigning the user interface, disallowing partners to modify or replace it, integrating the operating system with other services, and strictly controlling the hardware it runs on.

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Parenting is already an extremely hard job, let alone the myriad issues tired parents find in trying to track down the best local babysitter and daycare services, schools, and more. Meanwhile, the brain-melting technology that we see employed every day focuses mainly on photo sharing, friend finding, and money managing, but parents are often left holding the short end of the stick. This is according to Dr. Carol Peebles, a co-founder of WeSprout, a graduate of the first batch of startups from healthtech-focused accelerator, Rock Health.

Dr. Peebles, a neuroscientist in pediatrics at UCSF, spends much of her residency coaching parents through the different phases of their children’s development and has found that, while doctors are always eager to help, it’s parents themselves that are often the best coaches for other parents. So, in founding WeSprout, Dr. Peebles wanted to ensure that parents have their child’s medical history whenever they need it, can use that information to find the answers they need, both medical and non-medical — and the current services aren’t solving the issues surrounding this need.

The co-founder says that parenting sites today are, for the most part, noisy, cluttered, and hard to use. Combining her medical expertise with the product experience of her co-founder (and fiancee) M. Jackson Wilkinson (formerly the head of UX at Posterous) as well as Keith Muth, who worked with Jackson at Viget Labs, WeSprout has been incubating and iterating at Rock Health, and is emerging into the public sphere this week.

WeSprout’s goal, beyond giving parents the tools to make better choices for their children, is to find the sweet spot between personal health records and community; in other words, a service that provides a reason to keep your children’s health records up to date, and a community that becomes a multi-purpose tool by leveraging those records.

WeSprout wants to make it easy for parents to track their children’s health by way of easy recording of health information, be it medical issues, immunization records, developmental milestones, height, weight, and so on.

While those familiar with the space may see some similarities with venture-backed (and TechCrunch Disrupt alumni) like MotherKnows, or another Disrupt alumni like Avado, or AboutOne, Wilkinson tell us that these sites can all be complementary, catering to different parts of the space.

And even so, he says, relevance in parenting communities is sorely lacking, and there’s no real reason to keep a stand-alone health record up to date, so that bridge between the two — community and health records — is the secret sauce. WeSprout wants to be a community that takes privacy seriously, while helping parents actually find information that they’ll find useful. No more aimless sifting through the endless content sources on the interwebs for relevant parenting data.

It’s not about experts, Wilkinson says, it’s about facilitating parent-to-parent communication, providing advice from the people who are going through the same thing as you. Thus, for WeSprout, it’s about bridging the gap not only between community and health records, but between people and data. When I asked the co-founder about the so-called “health graph,” he said that it’s going to be a big part of where the startup goes next, and the WeSprout team wants to be involved in that data exchange — in pediatrics — going forward.

The most relevant QA networks provide multiple perspectives from peers and people who are going through the same experiences as you, thus lending the network a P2P credibility and relevancy, which makes them sustainable. WeSprout aims to be both crowdsourced and datasourced in an effort to make its parent-to-parent network more credible and relevant, with parents being a big part of it, and the information shared about their children being the other.

Most EMR platforms focus on adults and parents, who clearly have different needs than their children, so WeSprout is focusing not only on the pediatric context, but also on making record-keeping and data entry as simple as possible. Having a strong UX background, the team is trying to reduce the clutter in what is traditionally a friction-saturated activity.

And best of all? It’s free. Which means that, in terms of monetizing, WeSprout will launch a premium offering in several weeks that will enable its users to go beyond tracking and simply community, and extend into sharing records, with loved ones, doctors, create groups, and even take advantage of some scrapbooking. (This is where we may see WeSprout begin to move into AboutOne’s territory.)

For those TechCrunch readers looking to get early access to WeSprout, head over to the landing page here, where you can get access to the invite-only launch. Just sign in. Once inside the product, readers can invite as many people as they’d like. The team will open all doors by the end of the week.

For more, check out WeSprout at home here, and learn more about Rock Health’s most recent batch here.

• WESPROUT
• ROCK HEALTH

Parenting is tough. Whether you’re facing a fever or potty training, WeSprout helps you make great decisions. We safely monitor your child’s health records and give you access to resources, useful data, and a community of parents who’ve been there before.

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Rock Health is a seed accelerator targeting health-related mobile and web applications. By bringing together the brightest minds in technology and health, Rock Health provides crucial funding, mentorship and operational support to selected high-potential, early stage start-ups, nurturing the next generation of the digital health ecosystem.

Founded in 2011, Rock Health is funded by top health, technology, venture capital and consumer product companies, and is backed by a wide network of mentors, advisors and partners, including leading hospitals. Together,…

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There is something to be said about the serendipity of shopping in a brick and mortar stores, especially when you’re buying fashion. The dilemma with clothing is that you don’t know what you’ll like until you get to the store and are presented with an array of options, and that perfect thing you never though you’d like. Perhaps this is why people stock up sartorially in actual stores — Part of the fun of shopping is the sense of discovery involved in finding and loving items IRL.

Attempting to bring some of this spontaneity back, startups like Stylemint and Birchbox are trying to make the online shopping experience as novel as the offline. A new addition to the spontaneous online shopping club today is startup Little Black Bag, which takes off on the Japanese shopping concept of fukubukuro, or “lucky bag sale,” where shoppers buy a mystery bag of fashion products and the trade those items with friends.

Taking off on this concept, Little Black Bag attempts to apply this model to the Internet. To get started the app asks you questions about your style preferences, allowing you to choose options like “Hipster” or “Classic” to questions like “What are your favorite styles?” The site then presents you with a virtual “bag,” revealing one item and keeping the other two a mystery.

A user can purchase their bag for $59.95 or $49.95 for a monthly subscription and, if they don’t like the products, can trade their items with other Little Black Bag users resulting in modest savings on brands like Betsey Johnson, Z Spoke by Zac Posen and others. The company turns a profit on its resale margin.

“I’ve been fascinated for years by how cold the Internet is when it comes to eCommerce,” writes co-founder Dan Murillo, “And this gap has only gotten bigger as new social media sites have emerged (Pinterest, Path, etc.)  When I came across this idea, I thought it would be the perfect starting point from which to build a truly interactive community around eCommerce.”

To execute on its vision, Little Black Bag has just raised $2.75 million from investors like GRP, DCM Chamath Palihapitiya, Tim Kendall and David Tisch. Murillo will be using the money to build out his product and team.

Article source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/2RcyeMEji-Y/

We learned a lot of things about Facebook today from its IPO filing. But there is one detail that sticks out for its improbable exactness: The $1.000 billion in profits Facebook reported for 2011.

The number wasn’t $998 million. It wasn’t $1.003 billion. It was $1.000 billion right on the dot.

Is this just a happy coincidence, or did Zuckerberg “manage” earnings to make a statement? Companies have many different accounting levers they can pull to slightly adjust their reported earnings.

With that very precise number Zuckerberg is telling Wall Street that number is completely under his control. Investors like companies with that kind of leeway because it signals predictability. It is also nearly ten times Google’s profits of $106 million the year before its IPO.

I am not sure where it ranks in terms of profits for an IPO, but I would not be surprised if it the highest of any tech company ever.

And, of course, it’s a lesson in what’s really cool. It’s the ultimate comeback to Hollywood’s caricature of Facebook.

• FACEBOOK

Facebook is the world’s largest social network, with over 500 million users.

Facebook was founded by Mark Zuckerberg in February 2004, initially as an exclusive network for Harvard students. It was a huge hit: in 2 weeks, half of the schools in the Boston area began demanding a Facebook network. Zuckerberg immediately recruited his friends Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes to help build Facebook, and within four months, Facebook added 30 more college networks.

The original idea for the term…

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Tucows is probably best known for their slew of web services and their extensive reseller network, but CEO Elliot Noss sees room to grow in another space: mobile. After spending months conducting a private beta for a few hundred users, Tucows has officially opened up their Ting wireless service to all comers. The goal? To offer wireless customers “a whole different type of carrier relationship.”

“Big name carriers have services meant to maximize their profitability, not their service to customers,” Noss told me.

That customer-centric vision extends from Ting’s selection of voice plans (there are six, with minute buckets ranging from 0 to 3,000) to customer service (there are no tiers, and all reps can provide “geek-powered” support) to their handling of overages.

Like I mentioned earlier, Ting has six tiers of voice plans. If you’re signed up for the 500 minute plan and go over on your allotment, you’re automatically bumped up to the next plan. While thoughtful, it can at times be worse than the standard overage model imposed by other carriers, especially if you only tiptoe over your limit. Even so, Ting attempts to make up for this by having it work in the opposite direction too — you’ll automatically be bumped into a lower plan and credited accordingly if you use fewer minutes than the month before.

Just for kicks, I threw my own Verizon bill into the Ting savings calculator to see how much I could potentially save should I decide to make the switch. For my two-person 700 minute Verizon family plan with 2GB of data and 1,000 messages per person, Ting estimates that I could save nearly $436 each year.

Maybe not the most impressive savings I’ve ever seen, but it’s certainly enough give me pause. There are more savings to be had if you or your loved ones aren’t huge data hogs (like me), as their data packages are easily the priciest parts of the Ting formula.

At this stage in the game, hardware choices are a bit limited. Ting service uses Sprint’s mobile network to provide the actual connectivity, so most of the handsets in Ting’s lineup should seem familiar to Sprint customers and phone enthusiasts. The newest device in the lineup is Motorola’s angular Photon 4G, while mid-range Android devices, flip phones, and mobile broadband devices fill out the rest of their roster. In typical MVNO fashion Ting doesn’t bind users to long-term contracts, but that leaves those users paying the full retail price for their hardware.

While it’s still usually a better deal that getting a subsidy on a phone and paying higher bills each month for two years, people could get (understandably) gun-shy when it comes to taking the plunge on an unknown entity like Ting. Even so, Ting may be able to drive adoption thanks to some help from its parent company.

MVNOs historically haven’t had much sticking power, but Ting could potentially lean on Tucows prodigious list of reseller partners. According to Noss, Tucows resellers will also be able to offer Ting wireless service to their own customers, while Tucows handles payment processing and billing. If reseller reception of Ting is positive — and Noss tells me that so far, it is — then Ting’s lack of a physical retail presence could be offset by leveraging existing Tucows affiliates.

Noss’s plan for Ting is to start off small, with their first promotional efforts slated to begin in the middle of this month. Frankly, I wish them all the best — while Ting isn’t a perfect service, their twist on wireless service has some facets that I think every carrier could benefit from absconding with. In the meantime though, Noss is content to keep his expectations pretty grounded.

“If in one year, we were known as the carrier that sophisticated users were using, that’s fine by me.”

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