Category: Tech news

If a startup called Oyster is the Netflix for e-books, then iStoryTime is the children’s alternative. One of the oldest players in the kids’ interactive e-books app market is zuuka (aka iStoryTime), a company founded in 2009 and backed by $2 million in Series A funding. The company has been steadily growing its collection of digital, interactive e-books and apps, now reaching some 200 different applications across all the major mobile app stores and digital book marketplaces. Recently, it made a move to consolidate access to its collection of stories in a flagship application where parents can buy books a la carte, or, as of this month’s version 2.0 update, choose engage with advertisers to earn book credits, or even subscribe to the entire collection.

The company’s name alone may not ring a bell among parents, but there’s a good chance many have at least one of the iStoryTime apps installed on a mobile device somewhere. That’s because iStoryTime works with major studios to license content, including all of DreamWorks’ movies, plus content from Sony, PBS, Jim Henson, Cartoon Network, Mattel, and others. Its collection of apps and e-books offers a ton of recognizable kids’ brands, including Smurfs, Madagascar, How To Train Your Dragon, Kung Fu Panda, Shrek, Ice Age, Barney, “The Croods”, and many others.

Apps are available in iTunes, Amazon’s Appstore, Google Play, and Microsoft Surface’s app store, while e-books can be found on platforms like Barnes & Noble’s Nook, Apple’s iBooks, and Amazon’s Kindle. Basically, it’s a good many of the kid-focused studio brands (which aren’t Disney), in every major mobile marketplace.

“For a long time, we’ve been doing one app, one story,” explains iStoryTime co-founder Graham Farrar, who previously was a part of the founding team at Sonos. “Now we’ve launched our iStoryTime library as the second phase of our strategy – we’ve built the content library, now we’re building the distribution side,” he says.

The one app, available first on iOS, includes all the company’s licensed titles under a single roof. It ships with four free titles (Madagascar, Ice Age, Smurfs and Robin Hood), and then offers up each additional interactive book for sale, priced on average at $3.00 for a full-length narrated book. Many of these books also include animated stills in addition to the narration – a feature now common to interactive e-book apps today.

The company soft launched version 1.0 of the iStoryBook app a few months ago, with the option for parents to purchase books through the app’s included, but child-protected, in-app store. That’s actually a feature which makes iStoryBook stand out from a number of kids’ app makers, which far too often put the in-app upgrades in front of children’s eyes to their great dismay as parents continually tell them “no.” Instead, says Farrar, separating the kids’ side (the bookshelf) from the parents’ side (the store), offers a better experience for both sets of users.

“The freemium business model is great, but there’s a lot of fatigue around every time the kid clicks something, they’ve got to pay for it,” he says.

Children using the app see no ads or prompts to purchase, while parents can browse through the e-book selections in the store, receive alerts and notifications, and even preview the books before buying.

In the recent version 2.0 update, iStoryBook introduced an interesting feature through a partnership with TapJoy. Parents can optionally engage with advertisers behind the parental lock in order to gain points which can be applied to storybook purchases. For example, a parent may be asked to “like” Samsung on Facebook, watch a commercial, try out Hulu, get an insurance quote, and other activities, to earn these points. The points are transferred into the app’s wallet, and can then be used to buy books.

Parents can also purchase books via standard in-app purchases or subscription-based payments, starting at $5/month, with discounts for buying in 6 or 12 months chunks in advance. Farrar declined to provide conversion metrics given the newness of this subscription option, but would say that the app has seen nearly half a million downloads in the three months since launch, and the titles are seeing 2 to 3 times more revenue than they see in iBooks. (Combined, the company’s titles have seen over 6 million downloads to date).

Farrar admits that some of iStoryBook’s stories may be lacking in educational value, in terms of the lessons or morals provided, versus some of the company’s competitors. But, generally speaking, reading is still better than having kids playing video games or watching videos, he feels.

We’ve tried a number of “edu-tainment” in my household – most recently iStoryBook competitors like Speakaboos and FarFaria, as well as combination story/game apps like Hullabalu, and others. And it continues to be a wonder every time my kid launches a simple narrated storybook over the more interactive and engaging content found in apps like Leo’s Pad or PlaySquare TV, for example. But it could be that she, and other kids, are drawn to the variety offered by library collections, while the story/games become tiresome upon repeated viewings. iStoryBook should compete well, if that’s the case, with some 50+ titles available at launch, and plans to grow by at least one more per week. Plus, iStoryBook’s already familiar characters should prove an added draw.

Later this year, the plan is to introduce an “instructional” mode within the app which could help to add more educational elements to these now mainly entertainment-focused stories. That is, the app could pause the story to engage with the child, asking them how the character may be feeling, or augment the material with other content based on the Common Core Standards.

Interested parents can download the new iStoryBook for iOS app here on iTunes.

The Uber app for iOS and, presumably, Android is today getting a couple of new features centered around estimated times of arrival. The app now lets you share your ETA with contacts from the app, letting them know exactly when you’ll arrive.

The app also lets you text a live map of your trip to your contacts, letting them check in on you to see where you are in relation to your destination. Another new option lets you plug in your destination to get an estimate of how long it will take Uber to get you where you need to go.

The convenience factors here are nice, for sure, but there are some interesting things to consider about the data being gathered and how it might be used.

One intriguing possibility here is that if Uber has no doubt been gathering data on ETAs and such from one location to another in a city. Obviously, the company knows exactly when a trip begins and ends. Doing so may be able to help it generate a strong map of inner-city traffic, data that would parallel that which is collected by Waze, the mapping company recently purchased for a bundle by Google. This update is the first time that Uber is making an effort to expose that data to users directly by telling them how long it will take them to get to a location and sharing that data out to others.

That data could also be used to create overall maps of how city traffic and cab traffic ebb and flow. If you factor in thousands of rides a month over a year, that’s a lot of data with a very unique collection vector. The flow of traffic from point-to-point in urban centers follows a completely different pattern than those of cars coming from outside the city or even those going from one location to another. This isn’t “garage to parking spot” traffic, in other words; this is “place to place.”

In fact, Uber already does do some other things with this data, including mapping a detailed network of routes and neighborhoods in cities including San Francisco. Perhaps that’s why they have a professor of Neuroscience on staff.

Anyhow, the app updates are rolling out today, but the data part of it is more interesting. We’ll have to stay tuned to see how Uber or its partners use the information down the road. And, of course, every ETA map shared acts as a nice little person-to-person advertisement for Uber.

Box showed off new versions of its file preview feature and iOS apps at its BoxWorks conference this morning. In doing so, it was also highlighting what recent acquisitions have brought to the company.

The new preview, for example, was built on HTML5 document-viewing technology from Crocodoc, which Box acquired earlier this year, and it was demonstrated by Crocodoc’s Ryan Damico, who is now Box’s director of platform.

In terms of how the file-preview experience has changed, there are a number of new features, including the ability to copy-and-paste text directly from the document, but a big emphasis appears to be on the UI and performance — Damico said it was “redesigned from the ground up.” To illustrate what the new file preview is capable of, Damico opened what he claimed was the longest PDF that he could find on the web, the 750-page SharePoint deployment guide, as well as a PDF with 50 custom fonts. Both opened without any delays or apparent rendering issues.

Meanwhile, the new iPhone and iPad apps were built with technology from French file storage startup Folders, which was also acquired earlier this year. (In fact, both deals were announced in May) and demonstrated by Folders’ Martin Destagnol. Again, performance was a big focus — even thought the Wi-Fi was as spotty as conference WiFI usually is, Destagnol was able to swipe through multiple high resolution photos with delays of only a few seconds. He also pointed to new support for PowerPoint, which apparently doesn’t suffer from the usual bugs that occur when you try to open a PowerPoint presentation on an iOS device.

Both of these new features should go live later this year, the company says.

During the press Q&A after the keynote, CEO Aaron Levie was asked about these acquisitions and how he looks at “build vs. buy” decisions.

“Philosophically, we’re very oriented around building,” he said — that’s the best way to build “deeper” experiences. He added that Box has 160 or 170 engineers working on its platform. At the same time, he said there are companies with teams and technologies that can “extend us further on our core efforts,” and both Crocodoc and Folders are “quintessential examples” of this.

Levie noted that at the time of the acquisition, Crocodoc provided its document viewing technology to around 100 partners, and he said Box will continue to work with those partners — though he (jokingly) guessed that Dropbox won’t be among them for much longer.

During the keynote, Box also announced support for document metadata and a new editing tool called Box Notes.

Best-selling author James Bamford is one of the world’s leading authorities on the NSA. At Disrupt SF 2013, he spoke on a great panel about online security, and afterwards I had the good fortune to interview him. So can we trust Silicon Valley with our secrets, I asked Bamford. Given the NSA’s seemingly infinite appetite to watch and read everything we do online, can we trust the big technology companies to stand up to the snoops?

His response wasn’t particularly reassuring. Once we can develop quantum cryptology, he said, then perhaps our secrets will be safe online. But that technology lies in the future, and so Bamford feels that the best way to control the NSA is through politics rather than technology. “The political will” to manage the NSA is now greater than it’s been in the last 30 years, he said. So, for Bamford at least, the real battles over online privacy will be fought in Washington, D.C., rather than in Silicon Valley.

And what about Edward Snowden, I asked Bamford. Traitor or hero?

A small, Shanghai-based startup called SlideIdea made its official debut at TechCrunch Disrupt’s Startup Alley this past week, with a new take on presentation tools built for iPad first. Though this space is rife with competitors, including not only Apple’s own Keynote app, as well as Prezi, Haiku Deck, Flowboard, and others, what makes SlideIdea interesting is its “smart widget” platform, which lets users add interactive elements to presentations in order to better engage and solicit feedback from the audience.

Like many of the existing presentation apps out there, SlideIdea makes it easy to create slides directly on the iPad. In this case, the app’s so-called smart widgets speed up the process of slide-building by allowing you to quickly add text, shapes, charts and other interactive functions, and drag them around on the screen, resize them with gestures, and more.

“For instance, you could simply slide up a bar chart, edit the numbers, and the chart will be created,” explains Isaac Wagh, SlideIdea’s marketing lead, who spoke to TechCrunch on behalf of founder Jason Li (for whom English is a second language). “Whereas if you used a normal program, you’d have to start with a spreadsheet and go from there,” he adds.

The more interesting element to SlideIdea’s smart widgets is the set of interactive elements that can be added to the presentations. Included at launch are tools for polling the audience via a voting widget, support for messaging, feedback tools that involve animations, and a game. Called “Lucky,” the game lets the presenter shuffle through and choose a winner from the audience of logged-in users — great for handling a raffle at the end of a talk, for example.

The way all this works is that for each presentation created, there’s also an accompanying short URL (e.g. sld.im/12345) provided. You can share this link with viewers however you choose, and by clicking through, the audience can access the presentation online, leave comments, submit feedback, answer questions, and more from smartphone, tablet or PC. Wagh says the plan is to turn the smart widget platform into more of a marketplace in the future, where others can offer various smart widgets for sale, such as those specific to particular industries, perhaps.

This will be one part of the startup’s monetization efforts, while the other will be a subscription-based service targeting schools and enterprise. For the latter, additional security and privacy tools will be included, along with collaboration support, more cloud storage, and potentially a different or expanded set of widgets.

SlideIdea was founded in March 2012 by Li, whose I.T. background and history of guest speaking prompted him to design this service, as it’s something he wanted for himself. Since then, the company has grown to a team of over a dozen, all based in Shanghai. Already, there are a few schools in the area using the platform, following beta tests among some 100 early adopters, mainly teachers.

Today, SlideIdea is offered for free, and there’s no cap on cloud storage. However, the introduction of premium plans in the future may cause that to change. The app quietly launched on the iTunes App Store last month ahead of September’s public debut at TechCrunch Disrupt’s Startup Alley.

As noted above, SlideIdea will go up against a number of challengers, including Apple’s Keynote, and not to mention industry giant PowerPoint and other office apps. But the company is planning to reach all the major platforms, including Android, iPhone, and Windows Phone 8, making it more of cross-platform tool. (Being based in the world’s fastest growing smartphone market doesn’t hurt, either.)

Currently, SlideIdea is entirely bootstrapped and available for the iPad and Windows 8.

Box announced onstage at its BoxWorks conference that it will be making the documents stored in its cloud storage system smarter, thanks to upcoming support for metadata.

At first glance, this might not seem like a big deal (at least if you’re like me and find the word “metadata” to be inherently off-putting) but Chris Yeh, the company’s senior vice president of product and platform, said this is actually “the most important change” to the Box platform in quite some time. That’s because Box documents can now include more context than just a file name and date stamp. It will also allow companies and products using Box documents to create workflows around that metadata.

Ted Blosser from Box’s platform team rattled off a number of examples to show how metadata can enrich a document. With an insurance claim, companies could add the claim number, the policy number, and the status. With a legal document, they could add plaintiff details. And all of that metadata is then searchable.

To show off one of the more meaningful ways that metadata can enrich a document, Box brought Toyota’s Greg Cannan onstage, where he argued that “cars are becoming more and more sophisticated but the manuals aren’t.” Cannan predicted that if the manual keeps getting thicker, it will no longer fit into a car’s glove compartment.

One solution: Bringing the manual to mobile devices. So Box showed off an instructional mobile app that was built on top of documents and metadata stored on its platform. With the app, it was easy to look up how to pair a Bluetooth device with the car, and then with a simple edit Blosser was able to change the image used in those instructions from a red interior to a tan interior.

This functionality will be available in the Box UI and its API early next year, Yeh said.

During the press Q&A, one of the reporters suggested that many users don’t know what kind of additional metadata they might want to add. Levie responded that for now, this is really designed for companies that already know what kind of metadata would be useful and they’d otherwise have to build separate systems to add it. Over time, he said he wants to add “more innovative ways of expressing what’s in the document,” for example by automatically extracting information from a document populating relevant metadata fields.

During the BoxWorks keynote, the company also announced a lightweight editing tool called Box Notes and showed off upcoming document preview and mobile experiences (which I’ll cover in my next post).

If you’re already worried that journalists are writing for robots, it’s time to press the panic button: here’s an algorithm that can apparently rewrite journalists. Israeli natural language processing (NLP) technology startup Ginger Software, which makes a cross-app proofreading keyboard for Android, has added a new feature to its software that rewords entire sentences. It’s claiming this “contextual rephrasing tool” sets it apart from the NLP competition in both the mobile and desktop space. 

Ginger Software, which was founded in 2008 and has raised $20 million in venture capital, was previously focused on providing proofreading tools for Microsoft Office and browsers but says it is increasingly shifting its focus to mobile.

The new keyboard feature, called Sentence Rephraser, draws on Ginger’s NLP platform to rejig sentences to ensure they are grammatically correct, eschew errors and misused words, and use appropriate idioms and local expressions. Or so they claim. To avoid ironing out (all) individual writing quirks — and churning out identikit robo-writing — the software is also apparently designed to adapt to the user’s own way of speaking over time, adopting the proper names he/she uses and even taking on board some of their slang to ensure that at least some of the writer’s voice shines through.

“Sentence Rephraser analyzes text sentence by sentence to identify more linguistically stylized, enhanced ways of getting the original message across,” says CEO and founder Yael Karov. “Enhancement here means that Sentence Rephraser adds synonyms, idioms and missing words to enrich the text, thereby adding more depth to the original message and optimizing communication.”

How does the rephraser feature work exactly? Ginger’s NLP platform draws on an index of more than 1.5 trillion sentences to identify phrases that “have similar context” to the user’s original text, explains Karov. “It then presents the most prevalent phrases to the user as options for rewriting the text.”

The new feature is fully integrated with Ginger’s previous Grammar Checker tool, and can be used in either a live ‘as you type’ mode, for on the fly enhancements, or via a review mode once users have finished composing their text — if he or she wants to feel a little more in control of their own writing.

Isn’t this feature at risk of being a bit annoying — a la Microsoft’s old Clippy Word assistant, which was perpetually noticing you were writing a letter and trying to reword it? Not so, says Karov, stressing that the keyboard’s UX has been designed to prioritise preserving the user’s “natural workflow”.

“Although Ginger identifies corrections and enhanced phrasing while users are actually typing, execution is without auto-correction so that users can focus on their writing,” she says. “Specifically with the rephrase functionality, users are alerted to enhanced suggestions only when the ‘Rephrase’ button becomes highlighted (which happens live, as the user is typing).

“Suggestions are presented only after users opt to receive them by tapping the highlighted ‘Rephrase’ button. This enables users to access the tool only when it is convenient to them, when they are interested in receiving suggestions for enhanced phrasing.”

In other words, it’s not as in-your-face as Clippy, which can only a good thing. If algorithms are going to be rewriting humans, at very least they can do so courteously — without rubbing it in our faces.

Ginger reckons the Rephraser feature will appeal to “anyone who writes English on their mobile device” — non-native English speakers are an obvious target but equally she believes it can be a useful tool for anyone who wants to speed up the business of typing on a touchscreen. In other words, write like a stroppy teenager and let the keyboard convert your street slang to the Queen’s English.

Except… language is a fantastically complex beast. Which is a good thing for those of us who earn a living by (re)arranging words. So with that in mind I decided a quick test was in order. How well did the Sentence Rephraser fare at rewording sentences? Not very well, in truth. Accepting its suggestions on your English assignment would also likely have you pulled in by the teacher for plagiarism.

For example, when I wrote the phrase “quickly come to” it stepped in and suggested the following trio of increasingly bizarre alternative phrases — all of which are a huge leap on from the original sentence (intended to be something colloquial like ‘quickly come to the meeting — it’s starting now’):

• It will quickly come to pass
• The truth will quickly come to light
• You will quickly come to another rotary

In matching a few inputted keywords to its sentence database Ginger’s algorithm is taking a big logic leap by anticipating where the sentence is actually going, and also generating some very formal-sounding suggestions — which can also steer the sentence logic way off course. In the above example it was nowhere near my intended sense. And while formality might be fine in certain contexts, it feels hopelessly tone-deaf in the mobile context of sending a quick SMS or Facebook Message. I mean rotary? Really?

After that episode, the keyboard stopped offering any enhancement suggestions — so it was either malfunctioning, or couldn’t come up with any plausible alternatives to the text I was inputting. It would appear that humans who make a living wrangling words aren’t about to be put out of business by Ginger’s Sentence Rephraser. Not yet anyway. But then, when it comes to good writing/writing good, even an algorithm has to start somewhere — so presumably this feature is only going to get better.

Version 3.0 of Ginger’s keyboard software for Android can be downloaded from Google Play store here.

After months of speculation and quite a bit of skepticism, we’re pleased to report that the ProDesk3D is real, it works, and it really does print in color. How, exactly, is still under question – we weren’t given direct access to the innards of the machine – but we saw it working with our own eyes.

Videographer Steve Long went to a meeting with the company where he reported that the body is four inches wider than the Form 1 printer. It has an aluminum body and two print heads, hidden by a plate, that can print 25 micro layer thickness. When the printer changes color it moves the head to the side and purges the old color and brings in a new one. “Print head will in a single layer print out all parts of a certain color on that particular layer – green, for example- then purge, and go on to the next color and fill in the rest, etc,” he said.

“When I arrived at the location the ProDesk 3D was already in action printing a nautical shell + gear design. The final product you see atop the device in the shot with the orange cover. The print head has a specific noise (almost like a standard paper printer). Part of the noise is due to the speed the head moves along the X & Y axis. It was very agile and quick. I was able to see one colored layer at the base and the printer was working on the second as I was taking photo stills,” said Long.

It will have Mac and Windows apps when it launches and the firmware is configurable so you can set the base leveling routine and control the fan speed. They don’t yet have a community site per se, but they’re thinking of bringing in a community manager eventually. Why is the company so camera shy? We’re not exactly sure. But Martin Warner, co-founder, suggested that their plans were once compromised by a journalist sneaking into their development center with a video camera up his sleeve. Whether this is some Münchausen-esque PR antics or the real deal we’re not certain, but we are certain that this thing works.

Internet Explorer 8, which launched in 2009, isn’t exactly a modern browser by any standards and it’s slowly turning into the new Internet Explorer 6. Google stopped supporting Google Apps on IE8 last year, and today, the company announced that Google Analytics will also stop supporting it by the end of the year.

The Google Analytics team says it made the decision because it wants to be able to “accelerate the pace at which we can innovate new product features” and to “facilitate adoption of newer web technologies in the design of the Google Analytics product.” It’s worth noting that Analytics will continue to measure traffic from IE8.

According to StatCounter, IE8 currently has a worldwide market share of just over 8 percent. The most recent version, IE10, now commands just over 11 percent of the total browser market, while IE9 is just being used by 5 percent of Internet users (in North America, the numbers are a little bit higher). While IE8′s usage stats are pointing down, it’s been a very slow trend (much slower than the adoption of IE10 over IE9). Just a year ago, IE8 was still at over 13.5 percent in StatCounter’s rankings. Because Windows XP users can’t upgrade to anything above IE8, we’ll likely see it it in the rankings for quite a while longer, too.

Google, of course, has long been a proponent of modern web standards, and it said its main reason for launching Chrome was to push web development forward. Old browsers, however, simply don’t support the features that modern web apps need in order to provide the kind of desktop-like experience Google and other developers want to achieve.

Movie and TV recommendations app Luma.tv has been working to solve the “what to watch” problem for years. The company first launched as Inveni.com, a free web service backed by nearly $2 million in founder and angel funding, which helped users create their own “taste profiles” in order to serve up streaming video recommendations. Now the same technology that Inveni once used forms the basis for Luma, a newly launched iPad app that connects users to their favorite shows on Netflix, Hulu, HBO Go, Max Go, iTunes, Crackle, and other TV channels.

The result is a personalized TV guide where, instead of titles and times, you’re offered lists of shows you’ll love, and options as to all the various places you can currently view them.

The Minneapolis-based company was founded by former W3i co-founder Aaron Weber, who explains he’s long been interested in personalization technologies. According to the company’s own internal data, it was taking users on average eight minutes to decide what to watch. “We thought that was ridiculous and there were no tools to actually solve this problem,” he says. “So we’ve spent the last three years working with engineers and creating all these different solutions to the problem.”

When Inveni was first getting off the ground, the personalization problems around TV and movie recommendations were only just being addressed. Netflix, for example, offered a million-dollar grand prize to a team of engineers who could improve its algorithm by 10 percent.

“When I looked at [the Netflix prize] and what people were doing, as an entrepreneur, it became clear that this was not an engineering / science-type problem that needed to be solved. This was a data problem,” says Weber. To improve recommendations, a company really needs more user preference data, he explains. But more importantly, what made Inveni, and now Luma.tv, different is that it does object-to-object recommendations via crowdsourcing techniques rather than pure algorithms.

What that means is that Luma.tv asks workers on a large crowdsourcing platform to manually match up a movie or TV title with other, similar shows or films that a user who liked that title may also like. More crowdsourcers then go in behind those initial recommendations to refine the data. The exact details of the crowdsourcing process are something of Luma’s secret sauce, and the company has filed for a patent on the techniques involved.

“We found that algorithms doing the mapping, or movie genomes – they get you close, but it’s subjective. This is art,” Weber claims. “The crowdsourced group is helping us by confirming things are similar and also by making the connections themselves.”

Today, Luma has around 300 movie experts matching up movies and shows, who have mapped out almost 600,000 connections between items. Algorithms then fill in the long tail, making about 11 million metadata connections.

While Inveni once targeted users streaming videos on the web, Luma is a rethinking of the problem for the multi-platform, mobile-first era. Currently, the iPad app connects users to the other services they have, and in some cases, pay for, like Netflix or HBO, so they can go from Luma directly to the app in question and start watching the show.

But in about a month’s time, the company plans to add live TV into the mix as well, through integration of APIs from cable and satellite partners (like Direct TV), and connections to other platforms, like Google TV. The company plans to talk with Dish and Tivo as well, and says supporting Chromecast on the forthcoming web version of the Luma service is also something that’s now on the radar.

In addition to its crowdsourced-backed technologies, Luma wants to also offer different types of viewing suggestions that haven’t yet been seen before, like the ability to offer multi-person recommendations, for example. That means it could change its recommendations based on whether you were looking for shows to watch with the family versus watching alone by combining taste profiles.

At launch, Luma.tv offers access to over a dozen different video sources, but expects to reach about 40 by year-end. Though the underlying technology differs here, the startup broadly competes with others in this space, including recently launched app Yidio, Peel, Televised, Fan.tv (Fanhattan), and more.

Eventually, Luma.tv hopes to monetize through promoted content within the app, but in the near-term will likely first offer users tools to help them preview and compare streaming services like Amazon’s Prime Instant Video, Netflix and others, then earn affiliate income when users sign up.

The Luma.tv app is a free download here in iTunes.

Wearables aren’t just for adults anymore. There’s a new crop of startups hoping to give parents peace of mind and deliver more insights about young children and their sleeping patterns through wearable devices for babies. Sproutling, a new startup coming out of stealth today, is hoping to raise parenting IQs through a new wearable baby monitor that not only answers the question: ”Is my baby okay?” but also leverages the multitude of sensor data to deliver insights about babies’ sleep patterns and more.

The startup, which is a graduate of hardware incubator Lemnos Labs, is also announcing $2.6 million in funding from First Round Capital, Forerunner Ventures, FirstMark Capital, Accelerator Ventures, Lemnos Labs, BoxGroup (David Tisch) and Shawn Fanning.

Sproutling says that many of the current baby monitors sold are poorly designed with no alerts if the baby is in distress, no real data, and more. Sproutling’s offering comes with a small kidney-shaped wearable, Bluetooth-enabled device, that slips onto a baby’s ankle, a base station, a small camera and a companion app for your mobile phone. The device will not only alert you if your child stops breathing, but will track the child’s heart rate, ambient light level, temperature of the room and of the baby, and more. You access all the information on your phone — and the app will send you an alert in case there are any warning signs with the baby.

Part of tracking the other data besides breathing, such as sleep, is designed to help parents optimize sleep for their children and detect patterns to help children sleep more soundly (i.e. ideal temperature, timing and more). There are features of the app that are parent friendly such as the ability to see the video feed clearly even if you aren’t wearing your contacts.

In terms of design, the actual wearable and camera were designed by the same designers who created the infamous Rolls Royce of strollers, the Bugaboo.

The startup is still in its early days, however, and will likely not ship the system until Q2 of next year. Co-founder Chris Bruce tells us that the vision for Sproutling is to create a variety of devices and services that help use data to raise parenting IQ. This baby monitor is just the first of  a number of smart devices that will be developed.

As a relatively new parent myself, I would have loved to be able to use some of the data from a wearable to help determine optimal sleep patterns for my child. I’m not sure if it would have helped my daughter sleep through the night earlier in her development, but to me as a fledgling parent, knowledge is power.

Box appears on the verge of becoming a publicly traded company. It may not happen until next year but the file storage and collaboration company has as much momentum as any enterprise startup looking to trade on the public exchanges. But the company still needs to prove to the markets that its technology is secure. That’s why the integration with companies like CipherCloud will get a lot of attention this week from Box at its annual conference, BoxWorks.

CipherCloud secures data and applications for the cloud. Its platform works across multiple cloud services such as Amazon Web Services, Office 365 and Salesforce.

Today the company is bolstering its service with AES 256-bit encryption to its existing Box offering. With the new capability, encryption keys are retained by the customer and accessed and decrypted by authorized users on personal computers or mobile devices.

The CipherCloud service connects to Box in the background through Box Event APIs. When new files are uploaded, CipherCloud automatically scans content to enforce corporate policies and block file-borne malware. It also performs encryption driven by policy at user and content levels.

CipherCloud is typically deployed within a corporate network or private cloud. The solution is deployed as software that can be run on physical servers, virtual servers, or on private cloud instances.

The added complexity needed to secure files changes the fluidity of services like Box by creating a layer that has to be navigated when using the service. Customers need the security, as it is not inherently baked in to the degree that customers demand but with it goes some usability. It’s a challenge that Box and all of its competitors face, be it Dropbox, Google Drive or the Microsoft security Office 365.

After raising nearly $20 million and becoming one of the most downloaded mobile apps but failing to find real revenue, Bump Technologies has been acquired by Google. Its namesake app Bump lets you physically tap phones together to share contact info and more, and it will stay open for download. Congratulations might not be the right word, but Bump could have a bright future at the Googleplex.

Bump’s David Lieb writes “We strive to create experiences that feel like magic, enabled behind the scene with innovations in math, data processing, and algorithms. So we couldn’t be more thrilled to join Google.” It appears that the whole 25-person team including Lieb and fellow co-founder Andy Huibers will be coming aboard at the search giant.

Bump and the collaborative photo sharing app called Flock it released last year “will continue to work as they always have for now; stay tuned for future updates.” The blog post doesn’t mention what will happen to the Bump Pay app the startup built on top of PayPal that lets users make peer-to-peer mobile payments by knocking fists.

Terms of the acquisition weren’t disclosed, so it’s hard to tell exactly how strong of an exit this was for Bump and its investors, which include Y Combinator, Sequoia Captial, Felicis Ventures, SV Angel, Andreessen Horowitz, and many angels.

[Update: Sources familiar with the deal say the acquisition was definitely not a home run for Bump, but that it was no acquihire either as we suspected. They didn’t specify an exact sale price but pegged the deal in the ballpark of $35 million. That would be modest premium on Bump’s $19.9 million in funding but not a glowing multiple VC would want to brag to their LPs about.]

Bump gained huge popularity by being an early App Store hit. Instead of having to clumsily type out a new friend or professional colleague’s contact information, you and someone else could both open Bump, bump fists together while holding your phones, and the contact info, photos, audio, video, or other selected files would be shared between you instantly. As of March it had hit 1 billion photos shared and 125 million downloads, up from 100 million in August.

With time, though, other ways to quickly share contact information emerged. Meanwhile, Bump remained free and wasn’t earning any meaningful revenue so paying its strong mobile engineering team may have burned through the $16.5 million round led by Andreessen that the startup raised in November 2011.

Then Apple dropped a bomb on Bump. It announced a new feature called AirDrop for iOS 7 that would make sharing files between nearby phone a native feature. That could have curtailed Bump’s steady growth. It was time for Bump to throw in the towel.

Based on these factors, the acquisition may have been more lucrative than a basic acquihire, but not big enough to be considered a home run.

From one perspective, the sale might be considered a failure. Bump could have minted if it found a way to monetize its huge user base, but couldn’t find a way to go it alone and so instead folded into a tech giant. From a different perspective, Bump’s soft landing could be said to have kept investors from losing money while giving its team an opportunity for greater impact thanks to Google’s resources.

What may have interested Google actually isn’t Bump itself, but Flock. The app uses geolocation to determine which of your Facebook friends you’re nearby, and then offers to create a collaborative photo album with them that includes all the shots any of you took at that party, concert, or day in the park. The idea is that your friends might not broadcast all those photos to social media, but you’d still want to see them as you all shared the experience together. The Flock design philosophy was to strip as much out of the photo sharing process as possible to make it seem almost automatic.

Google might look to turn Flock into a part of Google+ as a way to simultaneously compete with Facebook’s photo sharing and Dropbox’s photo saving services. Google+’s Party Mode was a pioneer in collaborative photo sharing centered around events, but the late-comer social network has still failed to gain serious engagement. Facebook recently launched shared albums, making it more dire for Google to get deeper into the space.

The acquisition also scores Google a trove of mobile communication patents that it could use to help nearby devices sync up. These include an app noticing that sensors on two devices share similar readings to determine that they’re in proximity. Google could use these patents to improve Android and create richer alternatives to near-field communication (NFC).

With Bump and Flock’s features combined with Google’s built in-audience, the ideals of “irreducible” design the startup embodied could make a bigger impact without having to generate revenue directly.

Cambridge-based PushPage is launching its personal homepage and Q&A platform today, backed by $1.7 million in seed funding. The product, live now on both web and mobile, offers users an online presence where they can publicize their likes and interests through a series of interview-like questions PushPage provides, as opposed to the sorts of community-based questions you would see over on a site like Ask.fm, for example.

The end result are personal homepages that are a bit more professional in nature than the likes of Ask.fm, or its Q&A predecessor, Formspring. While those sites tend to appeal to younger demographics — and often school-aged kids gossiping anonymously about their friends — PushPage, then, is the grown-ups’ alternative.

The company was founded in mid-2011 by Harvard grad (and former Facebook intern) Meir Lakhovsky and Cornell grad Jared Jaffe. Lakhovsky explains they were inspired to create PushPage because they realized that even among a group of their friends and co-workers, they really didn’t know very much about each other.

“Meanwhile, when you pick up a U.S. Weekly or Rolling Stone, you can read a piece on Selena Gomez and learn everything about her from her favorite restaurants, TV shows, and outfits to her funniest moments, biggest passions, quirks, pet peeves and more,” says Lakhovsky. “We wanted to bring that idea of a celeb-style rapid fire interview to our friends and peers, as these answers are interesting and spark new conversations.”

The service is now in beta, and already has seen over 5,000 people creating PushPages on the platform, answering questions about their interests, hobbies, recommendations and tastes. When users first sign up, they’re asked several questions to get started, some more practical than others. For instance, you may be asked about your favorite restaurant, TV show or song, or “something interesting about you most people don’t know?,” if you want to dive a little deeper. To keep the content fresh, users are sent a new question to answer each week.

On the site, you can also browse friends’ pages and see all the aggregated answers to a single question. And you can answer questions or find and add friends on the mobile app.

The founders see PushPage as a way for celebrities and other notable people to reach out to their fans (e.g. see author Daniel Pink, TV personality Farrah Abraham, musicians Imagine Dragons, etc.), but also as a way for members in closed communities to get to know each other better. While anyone today can create a PushPage for free, private-labeled versions are available for companies, schools, fraternities or sororities, non-profits, and other organizations. Small “PushPage Communities” up to 15 people are free, then pricing starts at $60/month for small-to-medium sized organizations.

By adding a few links to your bio, the site can serve as an alternative to other personal “about page” providers like About.me or Flavors.me, but it seems that, more often than not, it’s being used as a complement to those sites, or other more robust homepages. Still, the idea is very reminiscent of platforms we’ve seen before, and the startup will have to work hard to carve out its own niche in what’s now a busy space.

Investors in the startup’s seed round include: Rose Park Advisors, Bob Pittman (CEO Clear Channel, founder MTV), Irving Azoff (former CEO/chairman Live Nation), Scott Sperling (President THL Partners), Rothenberg Ventures, Lance Kalish and Ido Leffler (YesToCarrots founders), John Kim (founder, DirectDigital), Howard Wolk (president Cross Country Group) and Meridian Capital.

A new travel platform called OLSET is launching its public beta to streamline the hotel booking process, with an algorithm for matching user preferences to reviews from TripAdvisor. Instead of providing a long list of potential hotels in the area, OLSET finds your three best matches based on how you prioritize location, price, ratings and other amenities.

OLSET was created specifically for the busy business traveler who doesn’t have time to scour the web for the right hotel. Co-founder Gadi Bashvitz tells me about 78 percent of travelers drop off after starting a hotel search online. OLSET speeds up the process by making recommendations based on your specific profile. Unlike other hotel booking sites, OLSET really digs into what users are looking for, and provides a percentage match with a couple different options.

To use OLSET, users first create a profile and outline what they are looking for in a hotel: minimum star rating, minimum user rating, price and max distance from their meeting location. Users can also list a preferred hotel chain. And that’s just the beginning.

Then come the amenities, such as a fitness center, Wi-Fi, continental breakfast and more. Each of these can be ranked from unimportant to mandatory. Throw in travel options, bed and room size, a couple more options and you’ve got a complete OLSET profile. You can also import your travel profile from sites like Expedia or Orbitz in order to consider past hotels you’ve stayed in.

You can then either book from the site by giving a location and date, or through meeting invites on a calendar. OLSET works with Outlook, Google Calendar, iPhone, iPad and Android. The service is also partnering with companies GetGoing and Any.do, so you can book a hotel straight from other apps. After that, the platform gives three of the best vetted options and takes you through exactly why they match your preferences.

According to Bashvitz, OLSET has processed about 1 million TripAdvisor reviews across 120,000 hotels, with has turned out about 4 million sentiments. The platform then takes these sentiments into account when matching users with potential hotels. For example, if a traveler marks “pool” as a mandatory feature, OLSET will include not only whether the hotel has a pool, but also whether the sentiments were good or bad overall, which will result in a thumbs-up or thumbs-down.

The service sends a review to fill out once its user arrives at the hotel, and another after the trip ends. Bashvitz says he wants to use this to build up OLSET’s own data instead of relying only on outside reviews.

Because OLSET is going after the business traveler market, that pits it against two categories of competition: companies like Concur that manage business trip bookings, and popular travel sites like Expedia, Orbitz and Priceline. Bashvitz says the challenge is to change the habits of people who traditionally look for their own hotels and don’t trust an application to do it for them. To mitigate this problem, OLSET lays out exactly what its algorithm looks for when matching travelers with hotels (shown below).