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.

Health Startup Healthberry Soft launches Beta To Measure Patient Feedback

UK-based health startup HealthBerry has soft launched its beta.

Pitched as a “better way to engage with patients” the startup uses social media as a way for national health services to measure patient feedback and thus inform improvements to services. It’s trailing with the UK’s National Health Service.

The platform engages with patients, monitors programmes, syndicates content and push out real-time alerts via push notifications, email and SMS to any device.

Fired Yahoo COO Henrique De Castro’s Severance Totaled $58M

When Yahoo removed Henrique De Castro as its COO, it wasn't clear how much loot he was going to take with him. The final tally, revealed today in an SEC filing that also detailed Yahoo's board nominations, has the figure: $58 million. Read More

Online Dating Site Zoosk Files For $100M IPO, With $178M In Revenues And A $2.6M Net Loss In 2013

Online dating site Zoosk just filed its S-1 registration statement with the SEC, announcing its plans to raise $100 million in an initial public offering. The company, which has offers up a website and apps for daters around the world to find each other, posted a net loss of $2.6 million in 2013 on revenues of $178 million.

Zoosk uses big data and a bit of algorithmic recommendations technology to help its users find partners. With a “proprietary Behavioral Matchmaking engine,” the company learns from clicks, messaging, and other actions of its members to produce matches that are supposed to find better matches.

As part of the filing, Zoosk provided details of its global business, which includes 26 million members worldwide and 650,000 paying subscribers across 80 countries at year-end 2013. That’s up from the 18 million registered members and 483,000 paying subscribers a year earlier.

At the same time those subscriber numbers grew, revenues increased 63 percent from 2012 to 2013, rising from $109.1 million to $178.2 during that period. It’s net loss also decreased significantly, from $20.7 million in 2012 to $2.6 million at the end of 2013.

BofA Merrill Lynch, Citigroup, and RBC Capital Markets are acting as joint bookrunning managers for the proposed offering, with Oppenheimer & Co. and William Blair acting as co-managers.

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Aereo Shows Off Their Rooftop Antenna Farm Ahead Of Supreme Court Ruling

A lot has been said about Aereo‘s technology — so much, in fact, that there are hundreds of pages worth of legal documents discussing the matter as it relates to the law.

That said, we thought it would be helpful to take a closer look at how Aereo actually works when it lets customers rent out remote DVR antennas and watch what amounts to live television on any device.

Once Aereo establishes itself in any new market, the team brings in what they call an Antenna Farm, or internally, a Raz-12.

This is essentially a small box, that sits on a platform on a data center roof, and is fully insulated, air-conditioned, and lightning proof. It also has one wall that is made entirely of RF transparent material, meaning that the equipment inside is capable of communicating with signals coming from outside the box.

Inside each Raz-12, there is essentially a wall full of technology. Within 12″ x 18″ cubes lies multiple antenna boards, each of which can hold up to 160 antennas. Within one cube, between 7,000 and 10,000 customers can receive service using their own individual antenna.

Once the antenna grabs the signal, which Kanojia constantly reminded us was of the volition of the customer and not Aereo, the little thumb-sized antennas change to pick up the requested frequency. Then, the transmission is sent over a fiber connection down into the data center, where Aereo transcodes the file from an MP2 to an MP4, and handles the storage of that recording on the remote DVR service.

Each rooftop array can hold about 12 cubes, thus the name Raz-12. In total, Aereo can serve around 120,000 customers with each rooftop installation, and the company purposefully buys out surrounding real estate when one antenna farm is established to add another Raz-12 whenever the market is ready for it.

Varsavsky Bets On The Gramofon As A New Take On Social Music

Today, crowd-sourced Wifi network operator Fon launched its new Gramofon device on Kickstarter. This offers a simple Fon-like Wi-Fi sharing functionality via a simple Facebook log-in, can be plugged into an music speakers and comes with a year’s subscription to Spotify. With such a mash-iup of services, it’s quite a new concept on the market/

The device could be a game-changer for Fon, which although it’s still growing like a weed, could use a little sexiness around its product. Then again it may turn out to be a pet project which was a ‘nice to have’ not a must have’ for Fon. Remember, this is launching on Kickstarter, so it’s not as if Fon is putting all its potential muscle behind it.

But whatever happens, it’s all gravy for Spotify, which is now bound to gather some interesting data on how much people are into these kinds of hardware devices liked to its service.

We spoke to CEO Martin Varsavsky in London on the launch of his new pet project.

Fon Launches Gramofon, A Router With Facebook And Spotify Built-In

Today, crowd-sourced Wifi network operator Fon launches its rumoured new product, the Gramofon. But unusually for a large tech company with healthy revenues, it’s launched the product with 30-day crowd-funding campaign on Kickstarter at a discounted price, starting at $30.

This device offers simple Fon-like Wi-Fi sharing functionality after you log in via Facebook, an audio out to speakers (no internal speaker) and an in-built Spotify app. What is it? Well, it’s rumored the social music router they’ve been building and Martin Varsavsky, founder and CEO of Fon, thinks its going to be a game-changer both in the market and for the company, which also happens to be the world’s biggest wifi network.

He says they started by building prototypes out of open source hardware and open source software like the Raspberry Pi, with a small team in New York. They’ve now locked their first production run for 6,500 units, set to ship in July, but more are planned if this takes off.

Eventially the Gramofon will have an API so it can integrate any music service with Gramofon and can support as many different providers as possible. It comes with WahWah built in, this is a free radio service that works with Gramofon (the service will start in the USA, Spain and Brazil, and expand over time).

How does it work?

You connect your Gramofon to the sound system or speakers of your choice. Then connect it to the Internet via ethernet or on your current WiFi. Then you connect any Android or iOS phone to the Gramofon’s WiFi signal and plug in any speaker. Thus, yo can now stream Spotify or listen to the Gramofon free radio service powered by WahWah.

Unsurprisingly Gramofon uses the Qualcomm Atheros AR9341 chipset, following its $14 million investment round in Fon earlier this year.

The black square cube features two Ethernet ports, one for connecting to the network and one to connect a PC. Gramofon works over WiFi not Bluetooth, and allows several users at once. Built with the same core technology as the Fon WiFi routers, is also acts as a WiFi hotspot.

So here’s the scenario: When someone visits your house, they simply log-in to the Gramofon WiFi via their Facebook account, and then they can play Spotify through Gramofon using their smartphones as remotes. Any visitor could therefore ‘play the DJ’ and control the music.

People who pledge to buy a Gramofon via the kick-starter campaign will get Fon membership (meaning access to over 12 million Fon hotspots) in return for sharing their WiFi at home, as is the usual Fon deal.

If you’re early you’ll get it in white at $30, or for $40 in black. The remaining units will be offered for $50 and $60 respectively. Other “perks” include getting invited to Gramofon “listening parties around the world”, some of which may feature Varsavsky and celebrities (but you’ll pay around $1,000 for those).

“Our goal is to bring music back into the living room,” says Varsavsky. “We have been working on this for a year now— what started as a passion project is now a living, breathing, incredible product that will transform the music experience, making music social and enjoyed by all involved.”

But why use Kickstarter? Well, Fon COO Alex Puregger says, it’s because “crowdsourcing is a principle Fon was founded on”.

Clearly this will compete with other products like networked speakers from Sonos. But where Sonos must send music around a home with speakers connected to one WiFi Signal, the Gramofon plays music across multiple units so each additional router works as a repeater, thus boosting Wi-Fi coverage across a home.

So we have a router that also plays music that also supports a massive music service, and intends to support others. Not a bad combination if you were going to take on both Sonos and other home automation players like Nest and many others.

A crucial point of the Gramofon is to “cloud enable” your existing sound system. Given that it can connect to music speakers via 3.5mm audio or RCA output, you could say this is a sort of ‘Apple TV for your sound system’.

It means of course that those great speakers you have from an old Hi-Fi system don’t need to be replaced by Bluetooth or wireless speakers after all.

Could Spotify be Fon’s trojan horse into the home? Maybe. But a spokesperson poured cold water on my view that this might be a route into a home automation as they believe the music implementation is alluring enough as it is.

Given the Fon people call this their “most important product since the first Fonera” they are clearly hoping this will be a trojan horse at least for Fon’s WiF service itself.

Social TV App Zeebox Relaunches As Beamly

Zeebox, the app co-founded by former BBC iPlayer exec Anthony Rose, has rebranded and relaunched its social TV app for consumers as Beamly. The new version of the app still has all the same live-chat functionality and screen sync technology that came with Zeebox, but the team has enhanced Beamly to be relevant to users even when they’re not watching their favorite shows.

To do that, Beamly incorporates a wider range of content discovery and social functionality designed to keep users interacting with the app all day long. That includes news feeds and social conversations about their favorite shows throughout the day, giving them the ability to read reactions and discuss topics after an episode is over.

For the company, doing so will hopefully drive up engagement with the app, even in times when users aren’t watching live TV.

Fly Or Die: Omate TrueSmart

In a year, we've gone to having one or two startup smartwatch companies to a sea of offerings before us, from companies as big as Google all the way down to Omate, a startup looking to make your wrist as brilliant as possible. At its core, the TrueSmart is likely one of the most powerful smartwatches on the market. Powered by Android 4.2, the TrueSmart has its own SD card and SIM card, complete… Read More

SeedInvest Raises Series A On Its Own Crowdfunding Platform, $2M Committed So Far

SeedInvest, the equity crowdfunding platform based in New York that helps other startups (like Vengo Labs) raise rounds, is today launching a campaign on its own plaform to complete an intended $3 million Series A round. The startup has already had $2 million committed from VCs Scout Ventures, Great Oaks Venture Capital, Avenue A Ventures, Archer Gray and Krillion Ventures.

The funding will be used to expand the kinds of services that SeedInvest offers both to startups and investors, and comes in advance of a change later this year, courtesy of the JOBS Act, where non-accredited investors will also be able to make investments on the platform. “As soon as the final portion of the JOBS Act kicks-in, we will open SeedInvest to 240 million Americans who will be able to invest in startup companies for the very first time,” Ryan Feit, CEO and co-founder of SeedInvest, said in a statement. Feit tells me that the fundraise “will enable us to grow our team in order to support our rapidly growing investor base.” SeedInvest aims to double its employee base over the next six months.

There have been a number of crowdfunding platforms for startups that have sprouted up in the wake of the JOBS Act, with others including AngelList and InvestPrive in Europe (which played a part in AdQuantic raising money prior to telling to Criteo, from what we understand).

The feature that Feit says differentiates SeedInvest from the others is that many rivals keep 20% of any returns through carried interest, while SeedInvest is completely free for investors. SeedInvest was founded by former professional investors and “we choose only the best quality startups to crowdfund through our platform,” Feit tells me. “Historically, just 3% of all companies that have applied to raise capital on SeedInvest have been published for fundraising.” He says that these differences allows SeedInvest “to attract larger, more sophisticated investors, as evidenced by an average check size of $23,000 last month and investments as large as $550,000.”

Since opening for business in February 2013, SeedInvest has reported $1 million in backing for itself, and helped startups raise $15 million in total, although it claims a much more lofty $128 million+ in “collective investor interest,” which I believe refers to how much money potentially there is for investment on the platform, given the right opportunities. It makes money from offering more premium services for startups listing on the platform, as well as investors investing in it; Feit hasn’t broken down for me how many typically take premium services from SeedInvest today. A typical month, say March, saw 60 investments made on the platform, with the number growing 350% in the first quarter of this year over a year ago.

Feit says that to help vet both startups and investors, especially as its net widens later this year, SeedInvest will conduct “background and bad-actor checks on all issuers to ensure they are legit.” Each company will require a “substantial amount of detailed disclosure.”

As part of this round, Bradley Harrison, managing partner at Scout Ventures, is joining SeedInvest’s board. “SeedInvest has both the right team and vision to capitalize on one of the largest shifts of economic power to retail investors that we have experienced in our lifetime,” he said in a statement. “Their results clearly prove that they are addressing a huge problem for both investors and entrepreneurs.”

More on the company in this video.

Entrepreneur First Thinks It Can Grab The Talent Long Before YC

The world of tech startup accelerators has become an ocean of choices. “Batches”, “programmes”, “mentor networks” are thrown around from one organisation to the other. What sets them apart has become difficult to define. Perhaps it’s geography, such as proximity to investors in a big city? Or perhaps its a programme in a vertical, like fashion or fintech? Whatever it is, the sheer number of accelerators has started to pose a question: if, as some think, the best tech accelerator in the world is Y Combinator, does that mean everyone else is an ‘also-ran’. If you wanted to be incredibly harsh about it – does that mean every other accelerator is taking YC’s ‘rejects’, the ones who didn’t create Dropbox? So if you want to do acceleration, how can you be different? And how can you be successful?

Matt Clifford of Entrepreneur First thinks the answer is “pre-acceleration”. Grab the talent before they have even worked out what startup they are going to do. And that means hitting them early.

What would happen if you took university graduates and suggested they try entrepreneurship FIRST, before joining that bank or that big company?

Essentially, that’s Entrepreneur First’s idea.

There’s clearly a need. Smart graduates flood out of university with a choice – do a startup or (as is often the case often) get a high-flying job, such as in the world of finance or management consultancy.

But creating a startup from scratch with no experience is hard and their ideas can be flimsy.

Clifford says they therefore take people purely on talent, pre-team. They then spend 12 months allowing them to form teams, develop their ideas and get to the stage of creating an actual product/startup. His view is that there will be two accelerators left in the world – YC and the few that manage to survive on investing in startups created by the people who didn’t take it into YC.

EF emphasises technical skills, product, speed and iteration. And it prefers people who had an attempt at a startup already, perhaps while at university.

EF – which is backed by private investors who are mostly in London – invests on similar terms as other accelerator, £20k for 8%. They mainly recruit in universities and this year are doubling from 30 to 60 people in their latest batch intake.

So far EF says it has helped create over 10 startups in each batch and says that those companies are now worth over $50million. These include AdBrain (raised $7.5m), Echobox and Blaze bike lights.

Clearly EF is walking its talk. And now it’s expanding to draw in more applicants from Europe.

Can it take on YC? It looks like it won’t need to if it can grab the talent long before anyone has heard of YC.

PayPal Debuts Its Biometrics And Smartwatch Integrations With Samsung

After announcing integrations with the Samsung Galaxy S5 at Mobile World Congress In February, PayPal is finally debuting the integration today, allowing users in 25 countries to login to PayPal with their fingerprint.

The partnership allows allow fingerprints to enable payment verification on PayPal and partner ecommerce sites for making purchases. It’s an interesting move for both Samsung and PayPal when using biometrics for verification on payments, especially because Apple hasn’t opened up its fingerprint sensors from the iPhone 5S to developers. PayPal is also debuting its previously announced app for Samsung’s Gear 2 and Gear Fit to allow wearables and smartwatch users to check their PayPal balance, get payment notifications and access offers from local businesses.

Twitter Makes In-Browser Notifications Official

Twitter today officially announced that it would start to offer in-browser notifications — as we wrote yesterday, noticing a test of the feature.

“When you’re logged in on twitter.com, you will receive notifications if someone has replied, favorited or retweeted one of your Tweets. You can also receive notifications for direct messages and new followers,” Michael Ducker of Twitter writes. “They’re fully interactive, so that you can reply, favorite, retweet, and follow right from the notification. We’ll be rolling this feature out over the coming weeks.”

A reader in Holland alerted us to the feature being tested yesterday, and we wrote a full look at what the implications of the feature were.

Twitter says it will be rolling it out in the coming weeks.

Transportation Aggregator App RideScout Launches In San Francisco

With the launch of new transportation options popping up in many cities around the country, as well as the digitization of public transit schedules, there are more apps than ever for citygoers to use when they want to get from Point A to Point B.

RideScout seeks to simplify those options, with an app that aggregates multiple options for getting around a city all in one place.

So far, the app has been available in Austin and Washington, D.C., but it’s launching in San Francisco today to give users a view of public and private transit options in the city. In the Bay Area, RideScout highlights options that include Sidecar, Silvercar, Muni, BART, Caltrain, Golden Gate Transit, AC Transit, Blue & Gold Fleet, Baylink Ferry, SamTrans, Flywheel, City CarShare, Bay Area Bike Share, and Scoot.

With those partners on board, users can find transportation options for going between points by bus, train, or car — whether that’s one that’s rented or one that’s been hired. The app allows users to search based on speed and price, among other filters.

RideScout also provides walking or driving directions, and it even integrates with Parking Panda to enable users to get a view into nearby parking options when they arrive.

RideScout might not have all the available options in any given city — it’s still looking to sign up big on-demand transportation providers like Uber and Lyft, for example — but it’s a near-comprehensive look into the real-time availability of many public and private transport services.