Category: Tech news

Oscar, the New York-based startup in the decidedly unsexy world of health insurance, has just picked up an additional $30 million in funding.

Why? Promising numbers in the product’s first 90 days since launch. The company debuted last October just as the federal government and states unveiled new health insurance exchanges where consumers can pick and choose plans in compliance with the Affordable Care Act.

Oscar has since enrolled “thousands” of customers and has “tens of millions” of dollars in annualized revenue. While the federal government’s exchange had an embarrassingly messy launch, state programs in places like New York and California rolled out more smoothly.

That’s where Oscar has picked most of its new clientele. Apparently, the numbers were good enough that Founders Fund, which had been a minority investor in the company, decided to increase its stake at a $340 million valuation. Other firms including Khosla Ventures, General Catalyst Partners and Kushner’s firm, Thrive Capital, also participated. Founders Fund put in $25 million, while the other firms added the remaining $5 million.

Oscar tries to marry many of the design and user experience lessons from the consumer web and mobile world with health care.

They have a clean and clear sign-up flow and they offer amenities like telemedicine or the ability to talk to a doctor within one hour of making a request. Generic drugs and primary care visits are also free.

The company has a notable team behind with it Thrive Capital’s Josh Kushner, Vostu co-founder Mario Schlosser, Kevin Nazemi and Fredrik Nylander, who ran engineering and operations and Tumblr. That’s just on the tech side. They also picked up executives with about 1,000 years of health insurance career experience behind them. On the company’s board is Charlie Baker, who ran insurer Harvard Pilgrim out of Massachusetts, the only state with an insurance exchange before the Affordable Care Act was passed.

Oscar’s timing was incredibly lucky. The team looked at the healthcare space before they really understood what the full impact of the Affordable Care Act (or Obamacare) would be. But the act fortuitously offered them a window to pick up customers just as the U.S. government enacted an individual mandate, or a requirement that people buy insurance or face penalties. That has meant a host of previously uninsured customers have come online the last several months.

In total, Oscar has raised $75 million, about $29 million of which has gone toward a capital reserve that the state of New York requires for health insurance providers.

The company only caters to customers in New York and has no immediate plans to expand outside of the state (although that is the goal long-term).

Medium, Evan Williams’ clean and beautiful attempt at revamping the way people write and read online, is considering raising a venture round according to the rumor mill. We’re hearing that the company, which has been subsisting on angel money apparently, is thinking about finally taking money from VCs.

One number we’ve heard tossed out is a $20 million raise, and one venerable firm name that’s also been tossed around is Greylock Partners, though it’s unclear whether Williams, who became a billionaire in the Twitter IPO, needs to raise money to support his fledgling company.

Nothing is set in stone quite yet.

Newly anointed Greylock general partner Josh Elman was a Williams loyalist amid the executive tumult between Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey and current CEO Dick Costolo. So it wouldn’t be that surprising to see Elman reel in a deal like this. I have reached out to Elman, Williams and others at Greylock for comment, and have not heard back from anyone.

Like Blogger and Twitter, Medium has ambitious goals. And it might be Williams’ third home run in a row, aiming to be the place on the web where thought leadership and high quality content thrives. It’s getting there, despite quite a few ill-advised posts from a couple of tech founders.

Raising a venture round would make sense for the company, which has grand plans and may need to make even bolder acquisitions to succeed. The company acquired Matter in April, and continues to iterate on its product, with its latest redesign coming right before the holidays.

It would also mean a continuation of the fat-content movement, where innovative new media companies like Vox and Buzzfeed require hefty amounts of venture capital in order to support more in depth, curated content.

Yahoo’s Tumblr buy has made Medium a tempting bet for VCs — if Medium will have them.

Some folks out there really, really, really like any app that Yahoo puts out. At least, that’s the picture we get from looking at the recent reviews of its Yahoo News Digest app, introduced yesterday.

The app is currently flying high in the charts, and features a 4.5 star rating with 282 massively positive reviews. Taking a closer look at the review listings, many of the people leaving positive notes about the app appear to make a very strong habit of reviewing Yahoo apps, and only Yahoo apps.

Some of them have only ever reviewed Yahoo News Digest, and others have only reviewed the catalog of internal products and recent acquisitions like Tumblr.

Some of the Yahoo employees leaving reviews on the app appear to (from simple user name identification) include Jonathan Raspaud, a Mobility Architect at Yahoo and Yahoo India employee Rahul Aneja. There are most likely others.

John Hermann and Charlie Warzel at Buzzfeed also note that new Yahoo Tech runner David Pogue and Summly acquisition Nick D’Alosio were certainly aware of the very positive reviews. And that awareness raises questions about how easy it was for them to skip over mentioning the origins of many of those reviews in their ‘interview’ today.

Is this a crime? No, not really. If I was part of a two-man company I’m sure that both my co-founder and I would be calling everyone we know to rate our app. But Yahoo is a big firm, with over 12,000 employees. And, as Hermann notes, a flood of positive ratings from a large company like this could certainly tip the scales in favor of one product over another.

And, in fact, this is not the first time we’ve seen this kind of behavior from Yahoo employees on apps. In May of 2012 it released its Axis browsing tool, which met with a fairly poor reception in the press. But the reviews were surprisingly positive. When a deeper look was taken, sure enough, Yahoo employees were weighing in enthusiastically.

We’ve reached out to Yahoo for comment, but it has already issued a statement to Buzzfeed saying that its employees ‘were not instructed to write reviews’. Yahoo-er Raspaud’s review of the Yahoo News Digest app? “Perfect.”

Update: A Yahoo spokesperson has also told TechCrunch that it does not ask its employees to write reviews, and chalked it up to ‘a case of enthusiasm’.

Image Credit: Eric Hayes

If you’re reading this, then you either have very little to do right now, or you care about the inner workings and staffing decisions here at TechCrunch. (I’m sure there could be other reasons, but let’s stick with those two).

I’m hoping it’s the latter – that you care about this site and the goings-on around it. In fact, I’m sure you do. The community of authors, commenters, contributors and readers that is the beating heart of TechCrunch is a passionate, committed, and engaged bunch… and I’m happy to join you.

My name, if you didn’t read the byline, is Jon Shieber. I spent the last several years writing about venture capital, private equity, energy and technology from New York and Shanghai for Dow Jones & Co. and the Wall Street Journal. And now I’ll be doing it for y’all.

Here at TechCrunch, and over at CrunchBase, I’ve been tasked with helping everyone find the signals on where venture capital investment – and technology development – are heading through the noise of daily funding announcements, new product launches, new product updates, add-on acquisitions, new hires, etc. etc. etc.

There’s a massive amount of useful data that we have on CrunchBase and we’re going to try and use it to provide more context for you around the day’s news.   Hopefully you, the TechCrunch community, will lend a helping hand (I’m lazy and y’all are way smarter than I am).

Anyway, it’s nice to be here. I hope I get to stick around for a while.

Feel free to reach out and follow me on Twitter at @jshieber , or shoot me an email [email protected] or [email protected].  I’m looking forward to hearing… and learning… from all of you.

Dick Costolo, the CEO of Twitter, says that it’s easy enough for consumers to opt out of tailored ads on Twitter, but he does not know how many actually go through the process of doing so. “You can opt out of tailored ads and content,” he told an audience today. But asked how many percentage-wise have done so, he would not say: “I do not know how many people have opted out of tailored ads.”

The comments were made on the keynote stage at CES in Las Vegas, where Costolo spoke alongside Maurice Levy, CEO of ad giant and Twitter business partner Publicis, on the subject of advertising in the age of social media.

While the words may simply be a measure of an exec caught off guard, or just not wanting to reveal specifics, they are interesting in light of Twitter’s falling share price on the back of stock downgrades (the most recent one today), because analysts believe the company was too overvalued when it first started trading publicly in November.

Twitter’s main source of revenue these days, and therefore a key source of hope and valuation from investors, comes from advertising on its platform. And a good part of that has to do with inventory served to the most relevant users.

Update: It looks like the CES appearance did little to reverse things for now.

In any case, Levy came to Costolo’s support with a stat from Europe, where even though users have had the abilty to opt of ads, hardly any have done so.

“What we are seeing in France and Europe is that the opt-out rate is below 5%,” Levy said. He says that’s because advertisers are more cautious of what they present to users in the first place because of the stronger data protection rules.

“You have to put yourself in the shoes of the consumer,” he said. “They don’t want to miss the relationship with the brand or an offer, but they don’t want to be overloaded with a lot of information or the wrong messages.”

Levy, whose company in April inked a deal with Twitter, was strong on the role of privacy in advertising in the age of Edward Snowden, the computer specialist who went rogue and revealed the extent to which the government — specifically the U.S. National Security Agency — has been monitoring internet users. The process of data collection has now been laid bare for consumers to see just how much third parties are tracking what they do online, which had already been a sensitive issue where advertising is concerned even before Snowden.

“Privacy is a serious issue and we should not take it lightly,” he said in a conversation with MediaLink CEO Michael Kassan and Costolo. “We should think about the consequence of using private data to universalize a product. We have to be extremely cautious and take it very seriously.

“The problem is that today the issue is more complicated thanks to Mr Snowden. People have discoverd the NSA and the access they have. People understand the security aspect and are extremely mindful of information flowing.”

He said that Europe, and his native France in particular, have taken a leadership position when it comes to how how data is used. France created its data protection agency CNIL back in 1978. One of the key enforcement positions, he says, has been providing ways for consumers to opt-out of data services.

“This is to avoid tons of information floating around. All of this is working extremely well and there is no issues,” he said — partly because the regulator remains very proactive. In fact, just today it fined Google over a privacy violation.

The French system has been adopted in Europe, and “we do hope that we find consensus between Europe and the U.S.,” Levy said. “Otherwise [consumers] will get frustrated with spam,” he said. Costolo agreed that clear policies that let people opt out, and systems to give users more relevant information, were the way forward.

The two also provided a few (but really only a few) more details about the deal between them — which was never formally announced by either although confirmed by both and reportedly worth hundreds of millions of dollars and covering “multiple” years.

So what did we find out? It sounds a bit like they are still trying to work out the full extent of what they will do together. “This may sound cliche but I couldn’t mean it more sincerely,” said Costolo. “It’s about really trying to develop a partnership rather than a transactional relationship. To do that you have to start thinking about how you work together. How customers understand everyday moments.”

In more practical terms, it likely involves Publicis division Starcom Mediavest ushering its key clients onto the Twitter platform, and creating ways of being able to analyse and use Twitter’s firehose and corresponding metadata, via partners like DataSift, to provide more context to make sure ads are as effective as they can possibly be.

Levy, meanwhile, got a bit existential.

“Everything is blank,” he said of how Publicis views the best strategy for advertising in the future (it sounds much better in a French accent). “We cannot say we can build a platform for advertisers on only one platform. It’s a complex system that requires much more information and knowledge….that is where we and the ad agencies are in our way of thinking.” It’s “imporatnt not to work in silos,” he noted too.

Google, a company that reported $14.89 billion in revenue last quarter, was fined 150,000 euro (just over US$200,000) today by France’s digital privacy watchdog CNIL. Google was also ordered to publish a notice about the decision on google.fr within the next eight days.

In early 2012, Google consolidated its multiple privacy policies into a single document, which prompted the working group of all EU data protection authorities to look into these changes. The EU decided that Google wasn’t in compliance with its legal framework and asked the company to make a number of changes to the policy, which Google never made.

France asked Google for a relatively small number of changes to the document, define retention periods, limit the combination of user’s data and to “fairly collect and process passive users’ data.”

CNIL, as well as other EU data watchdogs, then started its own enforcement proceedings and issued this rather small penalty on January 3.

Given Google’s size, 150,000 euros aren’t exactly going to hurt the company. Indeed, the amount may be smaller than what Google would have to pay its lawyers to work on these documents. In the U.S. the FTC recently settled with Google for a full $22 million after it discovered that the company bypassed Safari’s privacy settings. Spain recently fined it 900,000 euros (about $1.2 million) for mishandling users’ personal data.

In France, however, the maximum fine the CNIL could levy is apparently 150,000 euros now and another 300,000 if Google still refuses to comply in the next three months. According to CNIL, it is also the highest fine the committee has ever issued.

Richard Dawkins likened memes to genes, but a new study by Facebook shows just how accurate that analogy is. Memes adapt to their surroundings in order to survive, just like organisms. Post a liberal meme saying no one should die for lack of healthcare, and conservatives will mutate it to say no one should die because Obamacare rations their healthcare. And nerds will make it about Star Wars.

Facebook’s data scientists used anonymized data to determine that “Just as certain genetic mutations can be advantageous in specific environments, meme mutations can be propagated differentially if the variant matches the subpopulation’s beliefs or culture.”

Take this meme:

“No one should die because they cannot afford health care, and no one should go broke because they get sick. If you agree, post this as your status for the rest of the day”.

In September 2009, 470,000 Facebook users posted this exact phrase as a status update. But a total of 1.14 million status updates containing 121,605 variants of the meme were spawned, such as “No one should be frozen in carbonite because they can’t pay Jabba The Hut”. Why? Because humans help bend memes to better fit their audience.

In the chart below you can see how people of different political leanings adapted the meme to fit their own views, and likely the views of people they’re friends with. As Facebook’s data scientists explain, “the original variant in support of Affordable Care Act (aka Obamacare) was propagated primarily by liberals, while those mentioning government and taxes slanted conservative. Sci-fi variants were slightly liberal, alcohol-related ones slightly conservative”. That matches theories by Dawkins and Malcom Gladwell.

As I wrote in my Stanford Cybersociology Master’s program research paper, memes are more shareable if they’re easy to remix. When a meme has a clear template with substitutable variables, people recognize how to put their own spin on it. They’re then more likely to share their own modified creations, which drives awareness of the original. When I recognized this back in 2009, I based my research on Lolcats and Soulja Boy, but more recently The Harlem Shake meme proved me right.

Facebook’s findings and my own have signficant implications for marketers or anyone looking to make a message go viral. Once you know memes are naturally inclined to mutate, and that these mutations increase sharing, you can try to purposefully structure your message in a remixable way. By creating and seeding a few variants of your own, you can crystallize how the template works and encourage your audience to make their own remixes.

As you can see in this graph from my research paper, usage of the word “haz” as in the Lolcat phrase “I can haz cheezburger” grew increasingly popular for several years. Meanwhile, less remixable memes often only create a spike in mentions for a few days. I posit that high remixability — or adaptability — keeps memes popular for a much longer period of time.

For social networks like Facebook, understanding how memes evolve could make sure we continue to see fresh content. Rather than showing us the exact copies of a meme over and over again in the News Feed, Facebook’s algorithms could purposefully search for and promote mutated variations.

That way instead of hearing about healthcare over and over, you might see that “No one should twerk just because they can’t avoid hearing Miley Cyrus on the radio. If you agree, sit perfectly still with your tongue safely inside your mouth for the rest of the day.”

For more of my Cybersociology work, check out “The Science Behind Why The Harlem Shake Was So Popular“

According to Verizon, a new Nokia phone is set to land in the United States. Dubbed the “Icon,” the Lumia handset sports a 5-inch screen, a 20-megapixel camera, a quad-core processor, and a 2420 mAh battery.

The device looks, as The Verge’s Tom Warren correctly points out, like a smaller version of the Lumia 1520, a phone already in the market. The Icon name appears to be final. As WPCentral uncovered here at CES, cases labeled for the Icon can already be found.

Windows Phone has seen strong success in the past year selling lower-priced handsets. But the platform, what you could call the combination of Microsoft software and Nokia hardware, has struggled to find market share in the United States and the upper-tiers of the maker globally. The Icon, provided that it is well-priced, could help ameliorate that stress point.

Pricing isn’t clear for now. The Verizon website has the phone pegged at $777 both off, and on contract. So we’ll have to wait for official figures. Tip: It won’t cost $777 with a new two-year contract.

The upper end of Windows Phone hardware is now quite diverse, with the Lumias 925, 928, 1020, 1320, 1520, and Icon each battling for share of a still-small pie. But, more and better hardware has never been a recipe for unit volume decline, so perhaps the muddle can be excused.

Current market news has been positive for Microsoft, but not groundbreaking. The company recently indicated that it saw “record sales of Windows Phone this holiday worldwide, nearly doubling phone sales during Christmas.” But as Microsoft will admit, doubling from a small baseline is only so strong an achievement.

For now, another Windows Phone looks set to land. If it can turn heads in the United States is a fair question. The comments are yours.

Top Image Credit: Flickr

Back in August, I wrote about Closing Time, the new service that was launched to simplify the process of buying a house. It does so by creating a comprehensive list of things that the home purchaser needs to do in the month or so between signing a contract and picking up the keys.

The company recently closed on a $2.7 million round of funding that will help them expand the service and maybe, in the future, attack new verticals. (But that’s a long way off.)

Along with Accel Partners, the list of investors in this round reads like a ‘Who’s Who’ of former Yahoo execs. That includes Yahoo founder and former CEO Jerry Yang, former SVP and treasurer Gideon Yu, former SVP Vish Makhijani, former CTO Zod Nazem, and former CPO Ash Patel. Oh yeah, Rob Chandra, formerly at Bessemer Ventures, and Owen Van Natta, former COO of Facebook, Myspace, and Zynga, are also investors.

The investor list makes a lot more sense when you consider that Amitree founders Jonathan Aizen and Paul Knegten sold their last company, display ad startup Dapper, to Yahoo in 2010. So there’s some confidence among that group that whatever these guys do, it’s probably going to be good.

The funny thing is that the Amitree guys didn’t really know very much about real estate when they started. But you know, one of them was going through the process of buying a house and then realized how much it sucked and how there needed to be better tools for completing the process. So they built that tool.

(They didn’t know much about ads either when they started Dapper either, Aizen tells me, but that worked out ok.)

Anyway, in the process of building Closing Time, the two founders spent a significant amount of time educating themselves and talking to agents and brokerages to figure out what their needs were and how the product could help their clients through the home-buying process.

Aizen tells me that a big reason for that is that they wanted to be a partner to brokerages and agents, you know, something that helps them out, rather than compete with them. And that, in turn, will help Closing Time get better distribution, as it’s a tool that agents can offer up to their clients.

To enable that, the company has created a way for brokerages to create their own branded Closing Time portals, which shepherd the home buyer through the process. In that way, agents can provide a smoother transition, increasing customer satisfaction and hopefully increasing referrals. With that in mind, it’s partnered with some brokerages — like Zephyr in the San Francisco Bay Area — to offer it to clients.

Amitree’s seeing pretty good traction among active users, with most opening its emails and going to the site every day. It’s also getting good feedback, with 85 percent of users who went through the process saying that they’d refer their agents to other buyers.

Amitree is still pretty lean at just three employees. Aizen and Knegten recently brought on former Dapper coworker Tony Novak as their CTO, and are looking to double in size thanks to the new funding.

For now the team is focused on real estate but they see huge opportunities to expand into other verticals with the abstract rule engine that they’ve built. And hey, they’ve now got some money to play around with.

No one is more concerned with health than the mother of an infant, and with the rising availability of wrist-worn fitness tracking devices, it only makes sense that a baby-sized health tracker would pop up.

Meet Owlet, one of our hardware battlefield companies.

Owlet is an ankle-worn health tracking device for your baby, with an accompanying app that gives you a readout on your little bundle of joy’s health at any time.

Owlet tracks heart rate, oxygen levels, skin temperature and even provides rollover alerts during sleep.

It all works with a system called Pulse oximetry, which has been used in hospitals and in pediatrics for years. By using red and infrared lights, the “smart sock” as they call it, can measure heart rate and oxygen levels without being invasive.

The smart sock then transmits the information its recording to a smartphone app via Bluetooth 4.0. If you don’t have a smartphone, you can plug in the smart sock via USB to see metrics on your computer, or connect the smart sock to your home Wifi network to see readouts on any connected device.

The sock is hypoallergenic, wireless, and all the electronic components are housed in a resistant silicone case to make sure no one gets electrocuted.

Battery on the Owlet smart sock lasts up to two full days, with notifications letting you know when it’s running low on jive juice.

The company claims that the Owlet helps in more ways than just tracking your baby’s health, as it offers peace of mind for an often times stressed and restless mother.

Owlet is in the process of crowdfunding to bring the device to market, with a retail price of $250. If you’re interested in reserving a unit for yourself, head over to the Owlet website.

The Eye Tribe, which took the stage today at TechCrunch’s CES Hardware Battlefield, is developing hardware that allows users to control technology with the motion of their eyes.

In fact, co-founder and CEO Sune Alstrop Johansen told me that the company has started shipping its first units and software development kits (they’re available for $99), and that the initial users should be receiving them now.

Johansen said The Eye Tribe has also raised another $1 million in seed funding, bringing its total seed/angel funding to $1.8 million. (It  also received a $1.3 million grant from the Danish government.) The money comes from “primarily existing investors, board members and key individuals from the US,” he said — new backers include former semiconductor executive Richard Sanquini.

CES marks the first time that the finished product, not just a prototype, has been demonstrated publicly, he added. And although the initial version was built for Windows, he said the company is unveiling a Mac version too. As for the iOS and Android versions that the company has mentioned in the past, Johansen said they’re still on the product roadmap but declined to get specific.

I didn’t get a chance to try the product out for myself, but if you’ve ever wanted to see someone play Fruit Ninja with their eyes, well, watch this video.

As you can probably guess from the fact that an SDK is included, the company is currently focused on recruiting the developers that it hopes will actually build applications that take advantage of these capabilities. In fact, when a prototype of The Eye Tribe Tracker was demonstrated in our Hardware Alley at last fall’s Disrupt Europe conference, the company said it was also going to provide free trackers to developers with the best ideas.

Those ideas also help answer the question, “Why the heck would I want to control software with my eyes?” — they give a sense of what people could potentially do with the technology. The winners include an idea for a device combining eye tracking and EEG technology to help those with ALS (Lou Gehrig’s Disease) communicate, as well as ideas for driver assist applications, breast cancer detection, drone control, and improved reading on tablets.

Last fall, a company representative told us that users don’t have to train themselves to act differently. Instead, they claimed that after the initial calibration, users could just let their eyes interact normally with applications and the software should respond accordingly.

The company has also said the eventual goal is to partner with hardware makers who want to integrate these capabilities — so in the future, you could get a tablet with eye-tracking capabilities built in, rather than having to buy a separate to device. In fact, Johansen told me this week that the company is setting up an office in Palo Alto “as we believe this will be the best place for us to engage” with the manufacturers.

You can see the specs of The Eye Tribe Tracker here.

Boston-based Mobee, the mystery shopping app built by former Googlers aimed at leveraging mobile to collect real-world data from inside stores and other businesses, has acquired local shopping app Kickscout, created by RunKeeper co-founder Michael Sheeley. Sheeley, who left RunKeeper in 2012 after helping grow the service to 10 million+ users, will now become Mobee’s Chief Product Officer and work with the team in Boston.

Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but it is a combination of cash and stock. Kickscout had not taken in outside investment. Mobee, meanwhile, has $1.1 million in seed funding, and growing revenue, its founder and CEO Prahar Shah tells us.

Sheeley says that, with Kickscout, he was interested in exploring how mobile could be used to disrupt offline retail, an industry that had yet to change much over the years. He had been testing a number of ideas with the service, initially having users taking photos of things they think their friends might want to buy while in stores.

Later, Kickscout began to connect offline purchasing behavior with Pinterest – that is, if you had pinned a product on Pinterest, the app could alert you as you were shopping that the wanted product was nearby.

This idea began to gain some traction, with Kickscout growing to 50,000 users, around half of them actives. Now at Mobee, some of the technology Kickscout was using will be integrated into the Mobee mobile platform, starting with the piece that can help identify behaviors indicating a user is likely shopping, as well as other location-based information. Mobee isn’t moving into the same areas that Kickscout focused on, though, so the Kickscout apps on Android and iOS are being shut down immediately.

According to Mobee CEO Prahar Shah, the interest in acquiring Kickscout had a lot to do with Sheeley – because of his experience with RunKeeper, and growing a user base.

“There’s a potential for all these shoppers who are going into grocery stores, going into retail stores, and shopping every day. The idea with Mobee was to turn them all into data collectors,” he explains, referencing how Mobee’s users can take on “missions” where they check for stock, or a product’s placement on store shelves, among other things.

“Mike had really figured out at RunKeeper – and he was figuring out at Kickscout – how to make a user base grow, and how to make a social, viral app,” says Shah.

The social element comes into play at Mobee because the company wants to stand out from competitors like Field Agent, GigWalk, EasyShift and others by offering users an experience which is “more fun,” more social, and more like gaming, Shah explains. He notes that in Boston, where Mobee is headquartered, many users are the local Lyft drivers – a company known for its more fun-loving culture.

The CEO declined to provide Mobee’s revenue numbers or detail its growth, but would say that Mobee saw 500,000 missions completed in 2013, and has customers visiting stores like Walmart and Target to collect data for CPG clients, as well as places like McDonald’s, Panera Bread and other restaurants, plus grocery stores and other retail locations. One of the company’s top users made $6,200 last year off Mobee, Shah also mentions.

Mobee is now expanding for the first time outside of Boston to be available to users nationwide, and is thinking of raising an additional round in 2014. Now at Mobee, one of Sheeley’s first tasks is growing the development team. Today, the company has 15 employees, and will soon be 20 with the addition of more engineers.

French company and 2014 Hardware Battlefield contestant Alima thinks people want to know what makes up the air they breathe, and they previously launched a successful Indiegogo campaign to prove that it is indeed something consumers want. Once known as AirBoxLab, the Paris startup ran an Indiegogo campaign in 2013 to fund its cylindrical home air quality monitor, which measures and reports on the volume of carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide and volatile organic compounds (VOC) in the air where you live.

Now rebadged as Alima, the startup is looking to move from its initial small production run to a much broader wide consumer launch. The Alima will refine the design of its hardware somewhat, but the eye-catching cylindrical tower perforated with holes designed functionally to collect air samples and aesthetically to look clean and fresh will remain the same.

Alima is designed to be a whole-home solution, with a single unit covering a house. Alima co-founder Jacques Touillon explained that it can provide accurate readings for a large, open-concept dwelling without the need to move it around, but also says that by flipping it upside down and right-side up again, you can prime it to measure another room, so that you can do spot checks even on broom closets, bathrooms or other enclosed spaces that might not be represented by a centrally placed unit.

Of course, Alima’s real value is in the data it collects, so presenting that information to users in a way that’s easy to understand is key. The Alima manages to do this with an app-based dashboard that lets you view readings from the sensor in easy-to-understand graphs and charts, complete with warnings and notices that prompt you to act if things are going wrong. It could suggest you open a window, or prescribe more drastic solutions like installing a professional air filter into your home’s air circulation system.

Touillon notes that the Alima is different from other air quality sensors because there will be an emphasis on developing predictive algorithms. The idea is that you can tell in advance when you’re going to experience hazardous air levels, and provide you with steps to prevent that from even happening at all. Also, it’s designed to be a way for everyone to work together collaboratively to improve their air quality experience.

“It’s a community device,” he said. “The community will be strong around the device, because your best practice will help me, and my best practice will help you, so that’s why we thought it’d be a good thing to do a crowdfunding campaign, to bring that community together.”

The Alima is launching on Indiegogo to drive that community interest. Pricing during the campaign for backers will be $199, and then going up to $249 for a single unit, and the retail price after that will be $299, Touillon says. Turning inside air into the next frontier for quantified self-measurement seems a likely area for potential growth, it’s just a question of whether Alima’s take is the right one.

Access to clean water is something that most us probably take for granted — after all, it just comes out of taps and faucets and hoses and shower heads with little more than the twist of a spigot. Using all that water can cost a pretty penny (especially in certain foreign countries), but Monterrey, Mexico-based Driblet wants to make sure that people can easily track how much water they’re using in their homes with a device they’re showing off at our Hardware Battlefield here at CES.

The Driblet is a smart water meter that connects to both your pipes and your Wi-Fi network. Meanwhile, a slew of sensors baked into the Driblet box itself constantly keeps tabs on the rate of water flow and all the foreign particulate bits floating around in that water, all of which gets phoned home to the Driblet backend.

Speaking of the backend, the team has made some crucial progress on the software side of things — all of that water quality information can be accessed through a revamped mobile app that also allows users to get water usage goals and forge social connections to see who can be the most environmentally conscious. A bit of a peculiar approach, sure, but a little personal accountability couldn’t hurt.

The TechCrunch historians among you may notice that the Driblet team aren’t strangers to our stage — they showed off a very, very rough prototype of their device at the Disrupt SF 2013 Hackathon to a pretty receptive audience. So what happened from there? Well, the team launched a crowdfunding campaign on Dragon Innovation because of its greater focus on hardware projects, but it couldn’t manage to raise the requested $98,000 to get the Driblet monitor manufactured en masse.

That led to a trip back to the drawing board — the new chassis (seen above) is more attractive and more robust than the 3D-printed prototypes that came before it — and along with it came a pretty savvy shift in vision. The ability to monitor and dig into water consumption tickled some consumers’ fancies but the process of installation and occasional maintenance meant that the end user would have to be at least a little comfortable with getting their hands dirty. This time around though, Driblet is focusing on bigger fish — specifically businesses and buildings that have a vested interest in keeping their hefty water bills low. That’s not to say that they’re giving up on the consumer market though, as there’s room for both approaches to exist. We’ll soon see if this new direction gets Driblet where it needs to be, but the combination of some truly smart hardware and a more refined focus on potential customers means that there’s plenty to like here.

If you require ridiculous amounts of processing power and like the look of shiny, futuristic waste bins, the new Mac Pro is for you.