www.adpub.info: 06/12/14

Chrono raises $32M to develop its ‘stop smoking’ bracelet

Image Credit: Chrono Therapeutics

Chrono Therapeutics‘ wearable, called SmartStop, injects a tiny bit of nicotine into the wearer’s bloodstream at timed intervals.

In this way it’s similar to the patch, but SmartStop gives the wearer some control over when that happens. Timing the introduction of the nicotine can help the user deal with cravings, the company says.

And some big names in the venture capital and healthcare world believe it. Waltham, Mass.-based Chrono said today it’s taken a sizable $32 million funding round to further develop the device.

The funding round was led by Canaan Partners and 5AM Ventures, with Fountain Healthcare Partners, Mayo Clinic, and GE Ventures also participating.

Chrono says it will use the funds to complete product development and clinical studies for the company’s “SmartStop programmable transdermal drug delivery system and real-time behavioral support program for smoking cessation.”

Wende Hutton, general partner with Canaan Partners, Jim Young of 5AM Ventures and Aidan King of Fountain will join Chrono’s board of directors.

Previous to the current funding round, Chrono was operating with the help of $500,000 in debt financing.

Apple’s iPad cover could get smarter and start showing you notifications

Image Credit: U.S. Patent and Trademark Office

How can you leverage mobile to increase profitability for your company? Find out at MobileBeat, VentureBeat's 7th annual event on the future of mobile, on July 8-9 in San Francisco. Register now and save $200!

Last week, Apple announced that iOS 8 will have interactive notifications, making it possible for people to interact directly with these before opening the apps that are calling for their attention.

Now, according to a newly filed patent application, Apple might be looking at making iPad covers with notifications on the top and/or inside of the cover, as Patently Apple spotted. The iPad cover would light up in real time with alerts and messages using various colored LED lights. If Apple does incorporate this into the iPad cover, it would be the first time its cover does more than just protect the iPad’s screen.

The LED lights would be able to even display designs and shapes, such as an envelope to signal a new email. It could also have a transparent section, showing the iPad’s screen to notify the owner of various alerts or information. The patent application also details various other ways and combinations of displaying alerts.

The cover would be connected to the iPad for power and information transfer.

This is not Apple’s first foray into patents for a smarter iPad cover. Two years ago, Apple filed another that would include additional displays such as playback controls and status notifications on some of the panels.

Some Android tablets also already sport covers with this type of “smart” feature. The LG G3′s Quick Circle case has a circular cutout that shows various notifications from the screen.

Of course, this patent doesn’t mean the iPad cover will carry these capabilities. Apple and other companies frequently file for patents they never end up incorporating. But it could add a new level of functionality without compromising the screen’s safety.

Apple designs and markets consumer electronics, computer software, and personal computers. The company's best-known hardware products include the Macintosh line of computers, the iPod, the iPhone and the iPad. Apple software includes t... read more »

LinkedIn: We’re (a little) better at hiring women & minorities than Google is

Image Credit: Ben Scholzen/Flickr

Taking a cue from fellow Silicon Valley tech giant Google, LinkedIn today disclosed statistics on gender and race for its employee base. And at least for now, it gets points for having a higher share of women and minorities than Google.

Of the more than 5,400 people that the social network for business employs, 39 percent are women, compared with 30 percent at Google, according to the data in a blog post from Pat Wadors, the vice president of global talent at LinkedIn.

Bottom line: Men outnumber women at both companies — just as they do at Hewlett-Packard (see page 65 of this PDF for the latest figures), one of just a handful of tech companies that have revealed figures like this in the past.

LinkedIn also broke out race for its employees in the U.S. — 53 percent, compared with 61 percent among Googlers.

Like Google, LinkedIn doesn’t provide global stats on race. “That's because legal complexities prohibit us from asking about the ethnicity of employees in many countries outside of the U.S., so accurately reporting that data is not currently possible,” Wadors wrote.

LinkedIn wants to do more to improve diversity, and Wadors highlighted several ways in which the company has been trying to do that, including an annual hacking day for women.

Even so, the numbers validate something Google pointed out when it released its numbers last month.

“Minority groups are underrepresented in tech and in the U.S. education system,” the search giant said at the time.

LinkedIn is the world's largest professional network on the internet, with more than 259 million members worldwide, including executives from Fortune 500 companies. Founded on May 5, 2003, by Reid Hoffman and founding team members f... read more »

Google's innovative search technologies connect millions of people around the world with information every day. Founded in 1998 by Stanford Ph.D. students Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Google today is a top web property in all major glob... read more »

Applications now open for the GrowthBeat Innovation Showdown

Image Credit: Orange Leap

GrowthBeat, VentureBeat’s brand-new event on the data, apps, and science of successful marketing, is coming up on August 5-6 at Hotel Nikko in San Francisco.

Today we’re excited to announce that nominations are open for the GrowthBeat Innovation Showdown, a lively startup competition on day two of the event.

We're looking for companies — from young startups to more established players — with the very best new ideas in marketing tech. Is your product or service providing marketing tools to help businesses effectively grow revenue and/or reduce costs? Then this is your opportunity to showcase your company, product, app, or service in front of more than 500 business and marketing execs, IT decision makers, venture capitalists, investors, and press.

NOTE: Get one of the first 50 GrowthBeat tickets and save $300. We anticipate these being gone by early next week. Grab yours now!

We'll pick 10 finalists, broken into two groups: Early-stage companies (late seed to Series A funding) and mid-stage companies (Series A to Series B funding). They'll each have four minutes to showcase live at GrowthBeat.

The winners will be announced onstage and will receive VentureBeat coverage, introductions to investors, and/or relevant potential customers in our network, and other prizes to be announced.

The application deadline is Tuesday, July 8, at 11:59 p.m. Pacific.

To apply for the Innovation Showdown, please fill out the application here.

For full event details, check out the GrowthBeat website. We’ll also be announcing a bunch of program and speaker updates over the coming weeks, so stay tuned!

Special thanks to the following industry leaders for supporting GrowthBeat: Demandbase as Gold Partner.

The Onion’s viral news site, Clickhole, is as funny as it is smart

Despite the growing backlash against clickbait hyperbole overtaking our social media feeds, viral media sites find new ways to crawl their way back into our lives.

Now, parody news site The Onion has its answer to viral news madness: A new site called ClickHole, which just launched today.

“ClickHole prefers to think of you and every other person on earth as nothing more than an empty vessel existing purely to share content with other empty vessels. If every vessel does its part, we can make sure our children inherit a world free from non-viral content,” explains the site’s editor in a launch post.

To be sure, Clickhole has got the funny part down pat:

What’s more fascinating is how oddly addicting the site is. Even though I know it’s full of transparent clickbait fluff, I still felt compelled to take the “Which Hungry Hippo Are You?” quiz.

Sure, these silly quizzes are an obviously lazy mix of insider jokes and speculation; they are not windows into the soul. ClickHole reveals how it’s the immediate feedback and mystery that makes them so appealing.

Cilckhole is deceptively insightful. It’s not just viral news sites like Buzzfeed and Upworthy that are guilty of clickbait: The pundit rage machine is its own version of clickbait.

“The longtime McDonald's spokesclown is everything wrong with child-targeted marketing crammed into one yellow jumpsuit and the damage he has already done to our society is immeasurable,” reads the fake outrage from a self-proclaimed children’s health advocate, perfectly parodying the blind rage leveled at fast food restaurants.

In fairness, the Daily Show has had fun with this fact for about a decade:

Truth is, the media industry is struggling under declining ad revenue and the incentive to inflate stories is growing.

The Onion has called the industry on its sins and the jokes are spot on.

Here’s how to defend yourself from Facebook’s new browser-spying campaign

Image Credit: Jolie O'Dell/VentureBeat

CLARIFICATION: Facebook, through its PR firm, contacted VentureBeat to point out that the data it collects from its users’ browsers is never actually given to its advertiser partners. Rather, Facebook uses the data to target its partners’ ads at consumers who have betrayed an affinity for the subject matter of the ads.

Facebook sent out a notice Thursday about its intention to begin sharing the browsing data of its members with its advertising partners.

It’s a move that most observers saw coming, but one that Facebook has always denied — with vigor.

Facebook can’t capture data about you visiting just any site, only those that have partnered with it. Basically, any site that has a “like” button (such as this one) or that permits you to log in with your Facebook credentials will store data about your visit in your browser, which can later be read by Facebook.

Here’s how Facebook describes it in its Terms of Service:

“We and our affiliates, third parties, and other partners ("partners") use these technologies for security purposes and to deliver products, services and advertisements, as well as to understand how these products, services and advertisements are used. With these technologies, a website or application can store information on your browser or device and later read that information back.”

Facebook also released a video to advertisers and users Thursday morning explaining the company’s targeting practices. A common mantra among web marketers is that they’re actually doing consumers a favor by collecting the information they need to serve more relevant ads.

What to do (and not bother doing)

If you don’t want Facebook to collect and transmit your browsing data, you can take some steps to prevent it from doing so.

But first, here’s what not to do.

The advertising industry has put up a site called Your Ad Choices, which offers consumers a way to “opt out.” But the site lets you opt out of receiving ads that have been targeted at you based on your browsing data. But it will not let you “opt out” from companies harvesting your browsing data.

Nor can you expect to get any real relief by trying to tweaking your Facebook Privacy settings. Facebook announced today that it would be rolling out “ad preferences,” a new tool accessible from every ad on Facebook that “explains why you're seeing a specific ad and lets you add and remove interests that we use to show you ads.” Of course, Facebook is not offering you a way to stop them from collecting your browsing data in the first place.

Several browser plug-ins will block sites like Facebook from dropping lines of code into your browser allowing it to track you.

One of the good ones is Do Not Track Me from Abine.com. This is a Washington, D.C.-based firm that focuses on building browser tools to secure browsing data and other personal information.

Other solid recommendations that will work on Chrome and Firefox browsers are Ghostery and Disconnect.

And there more basic things you can do.

Use a unique email address to log into Facebook. This prevents Facebook from easily connecting your browsing activities to your real identity.
Avoid the temptation to log into any site or mobile app using your Facebook credentials. This is an invitation to that site or app report to Facebook when you visited and what you looked at.

Abine CEO Rob Shavell says he isn’t surprised by the news about Facebook.

“I think you’re going to see a lot more companies doing this,” Shavell told VentureBeat. “Having worked at a venture capital firm in Silicon Valley, I think there’s a data bubble going on. There’s been so much money invested in ad tech companies, including Facebook, and so much hype around them, they are going to have to collect more and more personal data. There’s just too much pressure to make all that money back.”

Shavell says investors have put $6.5 billion behind advertising tech companies in the past two years.

Facebook did not respond to a request for comment on this story.

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Facebook is the world's largest social network, with over 1.15 billion monthly active users. Facebook was founded by Mark Zuckerberg in February 2004, initially as an exclusive network for Harvard students. It was a huge hit: in 2 w... read more »

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