Category: Tech news

The shift to mobile is sucking the money out of e-commerce, but BloomReach thinks big data can save the day. Today it brings its big-data content optimization SaaS to the small screen to add smart product recommendations, predictive search, a trending section and cross-device personalization to the mobile presence of any business. BloomReach makes your app more relevant to boost sales with data science.

It’s already working on the web. The startup crawls the web learning what people search for, click on, and share. It then uses the information to improve a business’s ads, point them to personalized landing pages for each visitor, and show potential customers the products they’re most likely to buy.

After some prying, BloomReach CEO Raj De Datta admitted the company earns “in the several tens of millions of dollars of revenue per year.” That builds BloomReach’s $41 million in funding led by Bain Capital Ventures. Its clients include top e-commerce brands like Neiman Marcus, Pottery Barn, ModCloth and Shutterfly, as well as sites like Yahoo.

De Datta (awesome big-data CEO name, by the way) tells me his clients were having trouble with mobile. Dollars on the web were turning into dimes on phones and tablets. “A bunch of customers said they were seeing rapid increases in mobile traffic, but it wasn’t monetizing the way the desktop does.”

Design was at the center of the problem. “They were re-skinning the website for the mobile phone. Our perspective is that the mobile user is totally different. They don’t have the attention span, they don’t have the screen real-estate, they don’t type. They use a tap interface. A user on mobile shouldn’t see the same content.”

So BloomReach built a subscription suite of four premium mobile APIs that businesses can hook into to bring the intelligence of big data to their mobile design. De Datta demos the product in this short interview:

Here are the important features:

What’s Hot adds a trending products section to a site or app. It looks at which product pages are getting the most referral traffic from sites like Facebook and Pinterest to offer real-time product recommendations.

Predictive Search analyzes an app/site plus 150 million websites and 1 billion consumer interactions to predict what visitors will search for from just a character or two. It then lets them pick their query from a typeahead so they can type less while finding what they’re looking for.

Visual Browsing suggests “more products like this” so potential customers can discover items similar to what they’re looking at. BloomReach analyzes navigation patterns of other users and on-site signals to know which products to suggest.

Cross-Device Retargeting is a big step toward unified identity, allowing businesses to know if a web and mobile visitor are the same person even if they aren’t logged in. It analyzes every available signal, including browsing patterns and network locations, to match your devices and use what a site knows about you to personalize its mobile experience.

Here’s what that all means. You open a shoe store’s mobile shopping app and see a What’s Hot section showing the most shared shoes on Facebook and Pinterest. You see one pair you like and click “more like this” to get an array of shoes in similar colors, styles and price ranges. You go to search for a specific make and as soon as you type in “D” it pre-fills the search box with “Nike Dunks.” And since someone from the same Wi-Fi network browsed Nike Dunks on sale at the same time yesterday on their desktop, the app knows you’re the same person, and shows you the shoes on sale at the top. All of this is powered by BloomReach.

The big-data service can’t do everything, though. These are only APIs so businesses have to build their own branded design on top. If skinned poorly, the features could seem awkwardly shoe-horned in. BloomReach is not helping with driving new mobile traffic like it does on the web. It can unlock a brand’s latent potential on mobile, but it won’t turn a no-name brand into a hit.

There’s also no way to opt out of its cross-device tracking, identification and retargeting. The data will make a mobile site or app more relevant, though in a way that might make some feel uncomfortable.

We may need to get used to that. The identity disconnect between mobile and the web is costing companies too much money to remain unsolved. Startups like BloomReach are willing to push the frontier of tracking if it gets people buying on mobile.

Gojee, the site that began as a recipe destination in July 2011 and expanded to high-end clothing last December, has made its first move toward serious money making. The company is launching a new app today with a shopping platform, Gojee NY, which sells clothing exclusively from up-and-coming New York designers.

The shop is Gojee’s first foray into owning the sale. The food vertical, which provides recipe suggestions based on what a user has in his or her pantry, is free. The existing Pinterest-like fashion vertical links through to global luxury brands and takes a cut of each purchase, but given the high price tag of most items, it was clearly never meant to drive sales.

The new version of the app, called Gojee Fashion, still has food and luxury verticals in the “Discovery” section, but the emphasis has shifted to the local marketplace. Gojee CEO Michael Lavalle told us that Gojee NY solves two problems: one, people want to discover rising fashion stars but don’t know where to find them, and two, there are no stores that sell based on geography, although each city has its own distinct aesthetic.

The shop could be compared to a quality controlled Etsy, although Gojee is hoping to cast it as a cooler, higher-end version of the site.

Gojee NY is launching with clothing and home wares from over 50 designers, discovered at local award shows, trade shows, and by referral from other designers. Prices range from $80-500.

Gojee also seems set on becoming an advocate for young local designers, who have a failure rate not unlike tech start-ups. In late June, the company held a fashion show for 15 up-and-coming New York designers in its office space, and has plans to host another in a larger venue before fashion week in September.

This makes Gojee a good candidate for support from the city of New York. Indeed, Lavalle said that Gojee has plans in the coming months to reach out to groups like Made in New York, the mayor’s office, borough governments, and the Council of Fashion Designers of America, all of which have an interest in sponsoring the local design scene.

With the introduction of the shop, Gojee will also begin more aggressive marketing campaigns, having relied on word-of-mouth thus far.

The company has moved slowly across verticals, staying in food for a full year before expanding, and Lavalle said that they plan to work on fashion and home decor for 1.5 years. There are dedicated food and fashion apps in the works, but it wouldn’t be surprising to see Gojee’s local shops expand to other cities,  or to other industries within New York.

The company raised a first venture round of $2.8 million last July and is currently not raising.

Privy, a Boston-based local marketing startup that was also one of the standouts from the 500 Startups Demo Day this past February, has raised $1.7 million in seed funding from Atlas Ventures, 500 Startups, and others for its end-to-end solution for small businesses.

Also participating in the round were John Dais (VP Finance at Wildfire), Mike Volpe (CMO of Hubspot), Justin Kitch (founder of Homestead), Ralph James (former COO of First Marblehead), Jere Doyle (founder of Eversave) and other angel investors.

Founder Benjamin Jabbawy explains that building a startup in the local marketing space was a natural fit, as the child of small business owners himself. “Having been technical my whole life, I was the son that both of my parents would say, ‘hey, I need a website for my business. I need Facebook, Google Ads, etc.,” he explains with a laugh.

Privy was started in 2011, originally with the focus of serving the small, independent small business owner/operator, as well. But after participating in the 500 Startups program, the company shifted more of its resources toward another sector within the small business market: the multi-unit regional and national chains which already have a marketing manager or team in place.

Jabbawy notes that it was important that Privy had begun small, because it helped inform the design and feature set of the product, which aims to be simple to understand and easy to use. Today, interested businesses can now get started using the service in about 20 minutes or less.

A marketing manager, upon first login, uploads the information about the business, including the names of the managers at each location and the addresses. They then authenticate with all the different channels where they have assets, including Facebook, Twitter, email (Constant Contact, Mailchimp, e.g.) and more, as well as at their website and mobile site.

Afterwards, they can then use Privy by entering their “chalkboard specials” — the limited-time offers they run for a specific time frame, plus a photo and description of each. Marketing teams can do this as the offers come up, or they can load them up to a year in advance if they’re better organized and prepared. Privy then automates the distribution of those campaigns to the various services and sites the company uses.

From an online dashboard, businesses can see at a glance which sites are driving customers, and drill down into customer info, data on redemptions, reviews, claims, and more. Customer data can also be both imported and exported to Mailchimp and Constant Contact and CSV, to allow for more personalized targeting of the audience segments.

With the additional funding, the company is planning to double its team of eight over the next few months and further develop the product. On the latter front, more integrations are in the works, including for services like Yelp, Foursquare, and Open Table, as well as within the “offline world.” Though Jabbawy couldn’t get into specifics on this, he did say the plan includes point-of-sale system integrations, in order to track conversions from online to off.

“In addition to proving ROI,” he says, “it’s really about one of the big challenges we have: the segmentation and the re-marketing. We focus all of our distribution efforts on behalf of our merchants on finding really high-intent customers,” he explains. Jabbawy says it’s not about using huge discounts to convert customers, it’s about getting the right people at the right time.

“Seventy-eight percent of consumers turn to the web before deciding on buying locally,” he says. “Yet, local businesses struggle to capture this interest, the moment of a consumer’s highest intent, and convert it into real, in-store customers.” That’s where Privy aims to help.

Currently the pricing for Privy’s system is custom (on demand). Jabbawy declined to provide the customer count, saying only the company had “enough to make it interesting.”

Ken Lerer, a co-founder of Huffington Post, Chairman of BuzzFeed and Betaworks, and founder of Lerer Ventures, is starting another new media business, a website called The Dodo, launching this fall. The site, a combination of “content and commerce” exploring the topic of humans’ relationship with animals, is being jointly run by Kerry Lauerman, former editor-in-chief of Salon.com, and Lerer’s daughter Isabel, who’s currently wrapping up her doctoral studies on the subject.

Prior to taking the role of CEO at soon-to-launch The Dodo, Lauerman had spent over a decade at Salon.com, one of the pioneers of Internet journalism, where for the last two and half years he served as editor-in-chief.

Though the name of the site may make you laugh, its mix of content will not always be as light and fluffy as the YouTube videos of cats and lists of cute puppies which may help it get clicks and go viral through social channels. Entertainment will be part of the site’s mission, but its larger focus is hinted at by the name: the dodo – a bird whose extinction helped the world recognize how humans can impact our ecosystem, sometimes to devastating consequences.

“Look at the front of The New York Times — they have a significant animal story on the front page every week. It’s our plan to launch a site to try to own that topic.” — Ken Lerer

In addition to lighter fare, The Dodo will also feature stories related to humans’ involvement with animals, including advice for the nearly 70 percent of households that include a pet, tips on healthy and sustainable eating, news on endangered species, as well as stories about animal rights and exploitation, like that which is found in puppy mills and circuses, for example.

According to Lerer, whose firm is backing the new media startup and providing it with office space, there’s a huge movement toward this subject matter today. “Our thinking is that the topic of animals, animal rights and the relationship between animal and people is an issue that’s on the cusp of exploding,” he says. “Look at the front of The New York Times — they have a significant animal story on the front page every week. It’s our plan to launch a site to try to own that topic.”

Though The Dodo is not in any way “inspired” by the hugely viral BuzzFeed, Lerer did admit that BuzzFeed served as proof that people are obsessed with animals online. In addition, he believes that the model BuzzFeed uses — the combination of lighter content that helps fund the more in-depth reporting — is something that can make sense for sites like The Dodo, which plans to also work off of that same 75/25 split between the lighter, faster content and the deeper stories.

“When I started The Huffington Post seven years ago now, that really was the model, and it’s certainly the model of BuzzFeed,” Lerer says. “I believe that’s the necessary model within certain parameters. I think a site should be informative, engaging, entertaining, and fun — all that at the same time.” He says some sites that haven’t broken through a certain ceiling is because they’re too heavy and don’t appeal to the general population. “I’d like the content sites that we do to have a broader appeal,” he adds.

And what could be broader than animals? After, all the web is filled with them – from sites like BuzzFeed itself, to CuteOverload, I Can Haz Cheezeburger, and more. But with the latter in that list amid layoffs, there’s a question about whether being purely entertainment-driven can lead to continued success.

Today, our obsession on the subject of animals is often surfaced through clickable, shareable “awww”-like posts, but that’s only scratching the surface of the potential in this space, The Dodo’s creators believe. It’s a symptom of humans’ desire to understand and think about our relationships with animals, and therefore, the world at large.

That deeper interest in all things animal is also the passion of Lerer’s daughter Isabel, who, though never having been a “tech person,” her father says, will be joining The Dodo’s founding team in roughly nine months, after earning her PhD. This mix of investment, work and family is something the Lerers are already familiar with, of course — Ken’s son Ben’s startup Thrillist is also backed by Lerer Ventures.

The Dodo is still very much an early-stage project at this point — the startup won’t raise its seed round until later this year. There’s no editorial team outside of Lauerman yet. Nor is there a logo, landing page or solidified design. Even the “commerce” side of The Dodo’s business model is still being worked out. But what the site’s backers can say today is that, in addition to ads, The Dodo will feature products that carry The Dodo’s “stamp of approval,” something that will allow for a different revenue stream, which is exciting, Lauerman says. (Notably, Salon had struggled as a business despite the quality of its reporting.)

Outside of Kerry and Isabel, The Dodo’s other confirmed team member is designer Eve Weinberg, who previously led art direction at another Lerer portfolio company, NowThisNews. Says Lauerman, who will serve as CEO, Weinberg isn’t being constrained to any form or prototype for the website, whose technical underpinnings include the content management system and (yes, yet another Lerer investment) RebelMouse.

“We’re fascinated, compelled to care about the animals in our lives and the animals that are out there – in some cases, surviving precariously because of us.” — Kerry Lauerman

For Lauerman, joining The Dodo after all those years with Salon was sparked by a personal interest in the space. And though some of the subject matter could lend itself to slightly more liberal leanings, he insists that the site won’t have a political mission. “As a culture, we’re moving much closer to concern on these issues, so I’m thinking of it as capturing a movement that’s happening already, rather than pushing some sort of agenda,” he explains.

“Our interest in animals goes much deeper. We’re fascinated, compelled to care about the animals in our lives and the animals that are out there — in some cases, surviving precariously because of us,” Lauerman adds.

Lerer and Lauerman aren’t just professionally interested in the business potential of such a site, or a general interest in the topics. Their own lives are also influenced by the nature of their thoughts on the subject of humans’ relationship with animals, too. Both describe themselves as “mostly” vegetarian eaters, though neither have made radical commitments. Jokes Lerer, “when people don’t look, I might sneak a pastrami sandwich,” and Lauerman admits he’ll never be able to fully escape his midwest-influenced diet.

But their approach here, one of being thoughtful, but not militant on this subject, speaks well to what The Dodo could become — a place to be entertained, learn and maybe even shop, without a polarizing agenda that could alienate readers.

[Images here and here]

On-demand transportation Uber unveiled another new feature this morning that will make its rides even more affordable: With its latest software update, users will have the ability to split fares with other passengers. That could not only lower the cost of riding with friends, but it could also increase its potential user base over time.

After requesting a ride, customers with the updated app will be able to access the “fare split” feature. They can then invite other friends from their contact list or enter the person’s mobile phone number manually. The app will then send a text to the other passenger, with a link that will either open the app (if they have it installed) or prompt them to download it and enter their payment information.

For Uber, the new fare-splitting feature will make its rides more affordable in a marketplace that is becoming increasingly commoditized based on price. For its few years, Uber competed mainly against taxi street hails and car service dispatchers, offering rides that were fast and guaranteed to show up. But it charged a premium for that convenience and reliability.

Now, Uber is seeing increasing competition from low-cost options from ride-sharing startups like Lyft and SideCar. In response, Uber previously had lowered prices for its uberX service in San Francisco dramatically. Now fare-splitting will make riding with Uber even more affordable for multi-passenger rides.

A side benefit is that it could get the app installed on the smartphones of passengers who have yet to pay for their first Uber ride. And that could mean more potential passengers down the line.

Since being founded in 2009, Uber has raised a total of $57 million from investors that include Menlo Ventures, Benchmark Capital, Goldman Sachs, Jeff Bezos, CrunchFund, First Round Capital, Lowercase Capital, Founder Collective, and a whole bunch of angels.

Disclosure: CrunchFund, Arrington, TechCrunch. You know the drill.

Once hailed as the nicest guy in tech, Engadget’s Tim Stevens is no longer Editor In Chief, with gdgt’s Marc Perton taking over as Engadget head while a new EIC is found to round out the management structure. Perton will be taking on the Engadget Executive Editor role permanently, we’re hearing.

It’s not clear whether Stevens resigned or was terminated, according to different accounts from sources, with Aol (our parent company) asserting the former.

Aol’s boilerplate confirmation: “Tim’s leadership enabled Engadget to become the leading voice in the consumer electronics media. We are extremely grateful for Tim’s stewardship and wish him well. Marc Perton will become Executive Editor of Engadget and we will launch an immediate search for an editor-in-chief to ensure Engadget continues to deliver the high quality and respected content our fans expect.”

Perton has donned many hats in his tech news career, from Senior Editor at Engadget to Executive Editor for Consumer Reports, and then Director of Content for gdgt. Engadget will begin searching for a new EIC (to whom Perton will report) immediately.

Aol seems to have a hard time keeping its tech blog EICs at the top (gulp), with Stevens joining a long line of high-profile Editor outs, including Josh Topolsky’s, Erick Schonfeld’s and Michael Arrington’s.

Matt Mazur’s Lean Domain Search launched on Hacker News in January 2012. Today, Mazur announced that the tool, which makes it easy to find available domain names based on a keyword, was acquired by WordPress.com parent company Automattic. At Automattic, Mazur will help the WordPress.com team to make it “even easier for WordPress.com users to find and register great domain names for their websites and blogs.”

Lean Domain Search will continue to run and, as Mazur writes, “it’s also now completely free to use.” Previously, Lean Domain Search also offered paid accounts ($79 for two months or $199 for yearly access). The service already offers the option to register a domain name directly through WordPress.com.

WordPress.com always offered a domain registration service as part of its premium features. For $13 per year, users can register a .com, .net., .org or .me address. Until now, however, the service didn’t offer any additional tools for finding good domain names.

Given WordPress.com’s push into more niches as it looks for more business users to see it as a tool to host full-blown websites – and not “just” blogs – we will likely see it add more premium features like Mazur’s tools over time. One of the latest features Mazur added to his service was a Brandable Domain Names section that helped startups to find business names with available domains, something that looks to be a perfect fit for WordPress.com’s target audience.

Update: Lean Domain Search actually closed the brandable domain name section a few weeks ago (though there’s no reason to believe WordPress.com couldn’t resurrect this feature).

Startup renaissance man Elon Musk has spent the past year or so not-so-subtly dropping hints about yet another ambitious transport project of his, and it seems he’s getting ready to describe it in more detail. Amid plenty of speculation, Musk revealed in a tweet earlier today that he plans to publish his tentative designs for the Hyperloop system by August 12.

But let’s back up for a minute first — what is he even talking about? Musk first started talking up the Hyperloop project at a PandoDaily event held almost one year ago to the day, where he elaborated on the vision of a “fifth mode” of personal transport inspired by California’s troubled bullet system that will “never crash, is immune to weather,” and can travel “twice as fast as what an average aircraft can do.”

Until the 12th rolls around, we’re left with a somewhat vague (if totally awesome-sounding) description of how the Hyperloop system will work — Musk has referred to it at AllThingsD’s D11 conference as a sort of “cross between a Concorde and a railgun and an air hockey table”. That snippet has prompted more than a few pundits to ruminate on how the system will actually work, with the favored interpretation being that Hyperloop will consist of vacuum sealed tubes (to negate the impact of wind resistance) through which magnetically-propelled capsules are hurled at high speeds. If we’re being honest that’s hardly a new concept — it’s been fodder for science fiction since for over half a century and at least one U.S. company is already working on something similar — but we’ll soon see how (or if) Musk’s vision diverges from the pages of an Asimov story.

On some level, one has to wonder just how much energy Musk be able to devote to all of his pet projects, but he seems open to the notion of letting others run with his Hyperloop vision.

He noted at last year’s Pando event that he was considering making the concept available to anyone who could feasibly make it happen, and he tweeted again earlier today to confirm that he will “publish Hyperloop as open source” since he’s “averse to the notion of patenting things unless they’re downright critical to a company’s survival.”

Google shares are on fire. Since June 24, 2013, shares have jumped 7.32 percent to reach an all-time high price of 926.47 shortly after the NASDAQ opened. As earnings are coming up on Thursday, expectations are now pretty high. After a mixed Q1 2013, the company could beat analyst expectations on revenue this time around.

Google shares closed at a price of 765.91 after Q1 earnings. Today’s all-time high represents an impressive 20.96 percent increase over a period of roughly three months. In other words, Google’s market capitalization of $304 billion is now $50 billion higher. Again, this all happened in just three months.

At the time of this writing, the stock is slightly down to 917.59 (-0.59 percent compared to yesterday’s closing price). As Google isn’t making an announcement today, this all-time high is probably due to large financial decisions. Google shares could end up in more portfolios than it used to be.

Yet, as earnings are right around the corner, today’s news is a good opportunity to take a step back and look at Google as a whole. Recently, Google has been a more focused company. It has been killing underperforming products, even if it means shutting down beloved service Google Reader. When it comes to acquisitions, Google isn’t as reckless as it used to be. This year, the company didn’t “pull a Motorola.” Instead, it is closing smaller and more strategic acquisitions. It still has to pay $1.1 billion for Waze, but it’s small compared to Motorola and its thousands of employees. Ads still represent the vast majority of Google’s revenue.

The 2013 edition of the Google I/O developer conference was a great example of the company’s new focus. Instead of showcasing bold products that turn into failures, such as the Google TV or the Nexus Q, Google chose to talk about APIs and core products, such as Google+ or Google Maps.

While Google+ isn’t yet a definitive success, people can’t say that the company isn’t putting enough resources at work on the social network. But it isn’t Google’s only product. At the same time, Android, Chrome, YouTube, Google Maps and of course Google’s search engine all remain very important on Google’s roadmap. Now if only the company could find a way to diversify its revenue, investors would certainly appreciate it.

If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it — just build it in a variety of sizes for profit. Duh!

That seems to be the thinking over at HTC, as MobileGeeks has surfaced some new information regarding HTC’s One line. According to the rumors, HTC will unveil a giant-sized version of the flagship HTC One with a 6-inch 1080p display, dubbed the One Max.

This follows some other recent rumors that point to a smaller version of the HTC One, as well, likely to be called the HTC One Mini. While the One Mini is expected to debut in July, based on rumors, MobileGeeks has the One Max pegged for September.

The guys also nailed down some specs, which include a 2.3GHz Snapdragon 800 chip, 2GB of RAM, a 3200mAh battery and either 32GB or 64GB of internal memory. Plus, you can expect the phone to look quite a bit like its stylish predecessor the HTC One.

However, not much else is known about the device, though some have been speculating we may see some sort of stylus input on the device, considering it’s clearly aimed at competing with the Galaxy Note 3.

Samsung has dominated the phablet market with the Note series, which must be hard news for HTC as the Taiwanese phone maker failed to enchant the market with a 7-inch tablet called the Flyer, which offered text input via an $80 stylus. Unfortunately, the Flyer didn’t fly at all really.

Perhaps leveraging the One branding alongside new device sizes will yield better results.

[via TheVerge]

A couple of engineers who used to work for About.me have launched a new service called Finally.io in private beta. That service is designed to help other developers and engineers to keep tabs on their cloud server infrastructure and to prevent it from breaking.

The idea behind Finally.io is to monitor the health of cloud server performance, while also providing alerts before something goes wrong, and giving actionable insights into how to fix problems. The service currently works with Amazon Web Services and New Relic, using data provided by those cloud services to create an interactive dashboard to keep track of how they’re performing.

All that users have to do is enter their credentials for the cloud services they use into Finally.io and it will begin tracking the performance of that infrastructure. It then alerts users when it notices something strange happening — for instance, when a server starts to slow down — and recommends solutions for how that problem might be fixed. For Finally.io the key is in providing those recommendations and helping users to mitigate problems before they happen.

“We want to provide suggestions that are actionable,” CEO and co-founder Luke Gotszling tells me by phone. One example is “Just because you’re an expert in databases desn’t mean you’re an expert in AWS.”

Finally.io was founded by Gotszling and Alex Bendig, who were both early employees at About.me. According to Gotszling, the two decided with the spinout of the company from Aol that it was time for them to try something new. So the two have been working on Finally.io since February, recently running the service in private beta with a limited number of users.

Today, the service is launching into a public beta period, allowing anyone to sign up and try it out with their own cloud infrastructure. For now, it’ll be offering that dashboard for free, as it refines the service, collects more data, and starts working out any kinks of its own. But once it begins charging for the service, Gotszling says the two will likely be looking to charge on a monthly basis, with the price being related to the size of the number of servers that it’s monitoring.

While it’s apparently becoming easier and easier to become a developer — judging, at least, by the number of “learn to code!” platforms popping up by the month — the role of a lead developer and engineer within a young tech company has become increasingly demanding over the last five years. The job description now includes an expanding (and diverse) set of responsibilities. While many have focused on the consumer-side, Paul Graham recently wrote that “startups building things for other startups” (and solving their problems in a clever way) have the potential to take off in a big way given the growing pool of potential users — in other words, other startups.

Opbeat, a stealth, Danish startup founded last year, is a startup that’s doing just that — particularly for the many over-worked engineers and developers to be found slaving away at your local startup. Specifically, Opbeat wants to help developers by giving them their own, hosted Control Center for the many web operations they manage on a daily basis — and one that can be set up in a matter of minutes.

By doing so, the young startup has attracted some of the most influential startup developers in recent memory not just as users, by as investors. To wit: Opbeat is announcing today that it has raised two rounds of outside financing from an impressive list of investors, beginning with — most recently — a $2.7 million series A round led by Balderton capital.

The startup also raised a seed round earlier this year from a group of angel investors, which include Instagram co-founder Mike Krieger, Facebook co-founder Andrew McCollum, former Spotify CTO Andreas Ehn, 23 co-founder Steffan Christensen and Thomas Madsen-Mygdal, an early investor in Podio, which was acquired by Citrix last year.

For Krieger, the contribution to Opbeat’s seed financing marks the first investment he’s made since Instagram was acquired by Facebook last year. “When I saw [Opbeat’s] approach to taking on the challenges of life for developers, I immediately wanted to be involved,” Krieger says of the investment. Having been one of the leaders of a small team at Instagram that was tasked with scaling the app’s backend (and later managing that backend at scale) all while simultaneously working on building the product itself, the Instagram co-founder says that he “could relate to the serious pains Opbeat is trying to solve on the developer side.”

Opbeat co-founders and serial entrepreneurs Rasmus Makwarth and Ron Cohen say that the idea behind their new startup was born from the frustration of working at multiple tech companies (including several failed startups), where they repeatedly ran into the same problem. The small teams of developers and engineers at these businesses ended up wasting weeks and months cobbling together internal tools to manage the company’s web operations.

So, they decided to build a collaborative, hosted web operations platform for developers that can be set up in a matter of minutes, so that, instead of scrambling to apply duct-tape-style fixes and focusing on “maintaing,” they can get back to building the actual product. In a post that’s well-worth the read, 23 co-founder and Opbeat investor Steffen Christensen describes how the role of the developer and engineer has changed over the last five years, and why a service like Opbeat is a critical time-saver in light of those changes.

In the age of web tools and development, while the software stack has “become decidedly more varied,” the prevailing mindset is that operations and management should be easy, he says. Many assume that, because entrepreneurs and developers can turn to AWS, Rackspace or Azure — because hosting and dev tools have become cheaper and easier to procure — that anyone can manage web development. In fact, it results in developers “taking over a bigger and bigger piece of operations and, in many cases, all of it,” Christensen explains.

Today, developers find themselves having to deploy code “across several different services and servers, all integrating with each other and third-party services,” he writes, and “meanwhile, they’re responsible for uptime and stability.” In light of this — and their increasingly important role within companies — developers need a control center.

“We didn’t have the build-or-buy option, so we had to roll out our own fix,” the 23 co-founder continues, but, with Opbeat, lead developers and engineering teams now can farm some of that work out to a third-party.

Facebook co-founder and Opbeat investor Andrew McCollum echoes a similar sentiment in his own recent Opbeat blog post, saying that the up-side of the many new tools and cloud platforms available to developers is that it’s now easier “to deploy and scale web than ever before.” As a result, many startups and founders are electing to “forgo a dedicated Ops team for longer,” instead leaving deployment and server management responsibilities in the hands of developers.

McCollum says that he thinks Opbeat can be a “powerful new tool in this burgeoning DevOps movement,” because it enables engineers to “move faster and spend less time fixing things when they break.” In turn, for teams that may not have the same “resources of Facebook,” he concludes, Opbeat can help them “adopt some of the goals of rapid development and empowering engineers” that one usually only finds at larger, well-financed tech companies.

The Opbeat co-founders are convinced that the problem the company wants to solve is one that many startups across the map are currently wrestling with and, as a result, presents a significant market opportunity. For now, the co-founders say that their key focus is on developers in the U.S., where they see the largest need (and opportunity), and that their new capital will help be used to ramp up hiring and help Opbeat do some scaling of its own.

For more on Opbeat, and to sign up for Opbeat’s beta test, find the startup at home here.

The Ouya, the cheap little games machine produced by the little company of the same name, turns out to be great for one thing: little games.

Today the Indiegogo campaign for Scanadu Scout became the highest funded in the site’s five year history. At over $1,378,545 and counting, Scanadu has broken the $1,370,461 record set by Let’s Build A Goddamn Tesla Museum.

The Scanadu is a small, round scanner that takes a person’s vital signs and sends them wirelessly to his or her smartphone. It seems to have hit on an unserved consumer need for medical empowerment. Right out of the gate, the campaign met its initial goal of $100,000 in less than two hours and doubled it in five.

With eight days left and 7,000 funders from 100 countries already invested, it’s hard to say how much higher that number will climb. In the time it took me to write this article, it raised another $4,000 or so.

Scanadu Scout and the Tesla Museum are two of four Indiegogo projects to exceed $1 million. They are also two of a select handful to receive permission to extend their campaigns.

Danae Ringelman, the co-founder and Chief Customer Officer of Indiegogo, said the site places fewer restrictions on campaigns in order to allow them to fully test their market and lower their risk of failure when they enter the market. Owners can add perks to see what features might sell, adjust pricing, and see if their project has the critical consumer mass to work in the real world. Indiegogo does not feature any campaigns on the homepage in an effort to keep the market meritocratic.

Still, this doesn’t explain why Scanadu Scout, which had almost certainly validated its market before its extension date, was granted extra time.

In Indiegogo’s meritocracy, this would mean opening all campaigns up to the possibility of extensions. For campaigns that have already seen a great deal of interest, this would function as an incubator for fine-tuning the product, interacting with consumers, raising still more money, and advertising. For those that haven’t taken off, an extension might simply be a waste of time.

It’s not clear that this is a particularly good or bad thing, but it does change the nature of what crowdsourcing means, at least on Indiegogo.

Scanadu creator Walter De Brouwer told us that the scanner had been developed almost entirely in a vacuum without consumer testing and that he initially had reservations about crowdsourcing the project. But it was ultimately the best way to gauge consumer interest.

The next phase of Scanadu Scout’s production is to develop the educational component of the device. In order for people to take a more active role in their health, they need to not only have the data, but know what the data means and how to act on it. De Brouwer calls this a consumer, rather than clinical, pathway to medicine.

Looks like Flipboard is unhappy with Flowboard, the new “interactive storytelling” app from Treemo — specifically with the app’s name.

In response to Flipboard’s complaints that the Flowboard name could be confusing and infringe its trademark, Treemo filed a complaint asking for a “declaratory judgment of non-infringement of trademark rights” — i.e. it wants a court to say that no trademark infringement is taking place.

“We tried to resolve it amicably, but they continued to threaten us with legal action, so we had no choice but to defend ourselves,” said Treemo founder and CEO Brent Brookler.

When I asked Flipboard about the situation, a spokesperson sent me the following statement:

Flipboard has communicated to Treemo, Inc. concerns about the F logo and the Flowboard name recently adopted by Treemo with the intention to resolve the matter amicably. Treemo has responded by filing a lawsuit against Flipboard. We are concerned about the likelihood of confusion and are committed to protecting our trademark.

Treemo’s complaint argues that Flipboard and Flowboard are “distinct in sound, appearance, and connotation as applied to their respective goods,” and that ending a product name with “-board” is just using a word “which has become generically used in association with tablet computing devices.” (For those of you who need a refresher: Flipboard is a social news aggregator, with the recently added ability to create your own magazine, while Flowboard allows users to create presentations using a tablet-optimzied interface.)

The complaint also notes that Treemo applied to trademark the Flowboard term, and that the application was approved without opposition on April 23 of this year.

[Thanks to Venkat Balasubramani for the tip.]

Treemo v. Flipboard, W.D. Wash (Complaint filed July 11, 2013) by Venkat Balasubramani