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.
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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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.
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.
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.
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.
