Aereo CEO Chet Kanojia Explains The Broadcaster Battle In His Own Words

In the past year, Aereo has fought legal battles in three different states with broadcasters looking to get the streaming TV service kicked off the air, if you catch my drift.

Tomorrow, the case goes to the main stage in front of the Supreme Court, where lawyers from both sides will make oral arguments before the SCOTUS.

The case itself is highly complex, with broadcasters alleging that Aereo has no right to stream its copyrighted content, and Aereo arguing that the consumer itself has control over the content and its recording, and that Aereo simply provides the antenna from a remote location.

Many legal precedents go into the case, including the Sony Betamax ruling which gave consumers the right to record broadcast television to a VCR. A more recent Cablevision precedent also comes into play, that said consumers who legally acquire copyrighted content have the right to stream and record it as they choose, whether the content itself is stored in the box in their living room or in the cloud.

Then there’s the potential effects on cloud storage services like Dropbox and Google Drive.

With so many moving parts, we thought it was smart to sit down with Chet Kanojia, Aereo CEO, and have him explain the terms of the case in his own words.

If you’d like to get a closer look into Aereo’s technology, check out our rooftop tour of their Boston facility. Tomorrow, we’ll be covering the court case closely so be sure to stay tuned.

Cognoa’s App Will Evaluate Children’s Risk For Autism From Videos And Other Data

There are life-changing technologies that are being developed at the intersection of health evaluation and diagnosis. For example, Neurotrack has developed a cognitive test to predict and diagnose the onset of Alzheimer’s Disease. And a new startup, Cognoa, is launching to help evaluate children’s risk for Autism.

As CEO Brent Vaughan explained to me, the incidence of autism has risen to 1 in 68 children in the United States, and the incidence of all learning delays in children is now close to 1 in 5. Families are faced with enormous individual challenges to navigate through the complex healthcare ecosystem to understand their child’s risk and how to take action. And the average lag time between an initial warning sign and a diagnosis of autism or other developmental condition is around 13 months, with the average waiting time to see a specialist who can provide a clinical diagnosis around 1 year. By the time children get through the system to the clinical professionals, they’ve lost the time to benefit from intervention programs, which are known to be more effective in younger children. Once the child receives an official diagnosis, families are often left to determine alone how to manage their child’s care and therapy.

Cognoa’s test on the iPhone evaluates the risk for developmental delay and autism for children before the age of 3. The app asks parents set of questions around your child’s behavioral tendencies (i.e. will your child play with peers when in a group with two or more other children), and the app also allows parents to take a home video under 5 minutes showing a child in a simple set of activities.

With this data, Cognoa’s test analyzes the video and answers to the questions and will provide an assessment on whether the child has a risk for autism. The technology on the back-end was developed by Dr. Dennis Wall, Associate Professor of Pediatrics and Psychiatry at the Stanford University School of Medicine, where his lab is developing statistical approaches to decode the complexity of autism spectrum disorder and related conditions. It’s important to differentiate that Cognoa isn’t actually diagnosing, but instead just evaluating whether there could be a developmental risk.

It’s still early days to determine the efficacy of the test but Cognoa has been tested in several studies and over 20,000 times, and is showing accuracy of evolution at and above 90% in children under 4 years old and as young as 13 months.

Ask A VC: Next World Capital’s Ben Fu On Engineer Recruiting Challenges

In this week’s episode of Ask A VC, we hosted Next World Capital’s Ben Fu in the studio to talk about big data, recruiting and more.

Fu, who has backed Datameer, Datastax, and Good Data among others, talked about the talent crunch, and the challenges founders face when recruiting engineers, especially in the enterprise world.

Check out the video above for more!

In Just A Few Minutes, SpaceX Will Attempt To Launch A Reusable Rocket — Watch Now!

Quick! Tune in!

SpaceX is about to attempt something pretty historic: launching a rocket in such a way that much of it can be reused in later launches.

If successful, this launch will head up to the International Space Station, drop off a bunch of supplies, then a controlled fall will bring it back to earth with a set of extendable legs deployed.

Even if the legs deploy properly, the landing is aimed for the water… which the legs can’t actually stand up on. This is more about testing to make sure the process works than trying to actually get this thing to make a perfect landing, but it’s still damned neat to watch.

I’ve embedded both NASA and SpaceX’s stream below, because each offers some pretty amazing angles and insight. If you watch both simultaneously, you probably want to mute one or the other.

Update – 12:26: The rocket launched on schedule at 12:25 p.m. pacific, and is currently en route to the ISS.

NASA’s Stream:

Live streaming video by Ustream

SpaceX’s Stream:

About.com CEO Neil Vogel Discusses The Challenges Of Evolving An Established Brand

About.com has never been the coolest website on the internet. With a grayish background and an ugly logo, it was the place you landed when you searched for help with something, but you rarely went there on your own.

This is the product that Neil Vogel took over one year ago, when he was made CEO of About.com. Not much has changed on the outside, save for a few subtle design tweaks and the addition of social buttons (that’s right — there were no social buttons on About.com a year ago). But in a couple of months, the work that About‘s team has done for the past year will go public.

In the last year, the company has nearly doubled its staff, from 100 employees to 176, and has added about 20 percent more experts delivering content. We sat down with Vogel to discuss the challenges of rebranding and redesigning a site that still gets a tremendous amount of traffic (Vogel says that About.com is the 12th most trafficked site on the internet).

The last year has been spent updating the backend technology so that it’s capable of handling the front-end plans for the site, which will include a much more interactive element, according to Vogel. There has also been a huge focus on responsive web, as nearly 40 percent of About’s traffic comes from mobile devices and tablets.

But perhaps the most important challenge lies in the brand itself.

“We are an information resource and a database, but nobody wants to use a database or an information resource,” said Vogel. “People want to go to a beautiful place where they feel they can trust the advice they’re given. So our mission is to focus on helping people, as much as we can, and keep it as simple as that.”

Zola Debuts Its iPhone App To Allow Couples To Manage Their Wedding Registries On The Go

Zola, the new wedding registry startup emerging from Gilt And AlleyCorp founder Kevin Ryan, has launched an iPhone app to allow couples to create and manage their Zola registries from anywhere.

Zola, led by former Gilt employees Shan-Lyn Ma and Nobu Nakaguchi, is trying to reimagine the wedding registry for couples. It’s part content, part Pinterest-like inspiration sharing, and part wish list/registry. The result is a well-designed, easy-to-use wedding registry that tells a story of a couple. The startup recently raised $3.25 million in Series A funding led by Thrive Capital.

The iOS app includes a lot of the functionality of the web app, but is tailored for an immersive experience. With the Zola app, couples can create and edit their registries while on the go, and scan any product onto their registry using the barcode scanner. The app also includes a feature called Blender, which allows couples to browse the entire Zola selection of items (i.e. kitchen tools), one at a time, swiping right to add to their registry or left to pass. Other features of the app include the ability to upload photos from your iPhone, create new collections for gifts, and track and manage gifts.

While there are many startups aiming to disrupt the wedding registry, Zola’s growth has proved that many couples are craving something new. Since Zola’s launch in October 2013, over 10,000 couples have created a registry on Zola.com, with registry growth accelerating every month. There are now 3,000 products/experiences available on Zola.com, with experiences available across four cities and plans to expand into at least four more within the next six months.

Optimizely Brings Its A/B Testing Platform To iOS Apps

Optimizely, the popular service for testing out different variations of your website, today announced the launch of Optimizely for iOS.

The company says its new mobile tools allow customers to try out different interface and content changes to their iOS apps in real-time, without going through App Store approval. Thanks to the Optimizely Visual Editor, no coding is required to make these changes.

While Optimizely is the big name in A/B testing on the web, we’ve written about a number of other services that have launched on mobile, including Apptimize and Taplytics. One of Optimizely’s selling points is the idea that you can run your web and mobile app tests from the same place.

“We believe that website and mobile app testing are no different from each other in the sense that data enables our customers to deliver the best possible experience to their visitors, regardless of device,” said CEO Dan Siroker in the product press release.

Optimizely made today’s announcement as part of OptiCon, its first customer conference. The company says it has more than 6,000 customers, including Starbucks, Disney, and CNN.