www.adpub.info: 07/22/14

Smart Hat Puts Your Head in the Game

man wearing a diy head mounted display

[Arvind] has dropped his hat in the game of head mounted displays. With Google Glass pushing $1,500, it’s only natural for hackers to make a cheaper alternative. [Avind's] $80 version might not be pretty, but it gets the job done.

Using a Raspberry Pi loaded with speech recognition software, a webcam, 2.5 inch LCD display and a handful of other parts, [Arvind's] hat mounted display allows him to view email, Google Maps, videos or just about anything he wants.

An aspheric loupe magnifier lens lets him see the display even though it sits around 5cm from his eye. No outside light is allowed in. Only the guts of the webcam were used to give him the video and microphone. We’ve seen other head mounted displays before, and this one adds to the growing collection. Be sure to check out [Arvinds] site for a tutorial on how to build your own, and catch a video of it in action after the break.

Filed under: Raspberry Pi, wearable hacks

HOPE X: Creating Smart Spaces With ReelyActive

When we hear about the Internet of Things, we’re thinking it’s a portable device with a sensor of some kind, a radio module, and the ability to push data up to the Internet. There’s nothing that says a device that puts data on the Internet has to be portable, though, as [Jeff] from ReelyActive showed us at HOPE X last weekend.

[Jeff]‘s startup is working on a device that turns every space into a smart space. It does this with radio modules connected to a computer that listen to Bluetooth and the 868, 915 and 2400MHz bands. These modules turn every place into a smart space, identifying who just walked into a room, and who is at a specific location. Think of it as the invisible foundation for any truly smart house.

The radio modules themselves are daisychained with Cat5 cable, able to be plugged into a hub or existing Ethernet drops. The software that makes the whole thing work can run on just about anything; if you want a Raspi to turn on the lights when you enter a room, or turn off a thermostat when you leave a building, that’s just a few lines of code and a relay.

The software is open source, and [Jeff] and his team are looking at making the hardware open. It’s a great idea, and something that would be a good entry for The Hackaday Prize, but ReelyActive is located in Montréal, and like Syria and North Korea, we’re not allowed to run a contest in Quebec.

Filed under: radio hacks

Food-delivery startup SpoonRocket’s site isn’t down. Demand is just off the charts

Above: SpoonRocket

Image Credit: Larry Zhou/VentureBeat

Last night SpoonRocket's website couldn’t hold up to a crazy traffic spike for its food deliveries in the San Francisco Bay Area — 100 orders every 10 seconds at one point. Tonight, the second night of the promotion, the site is buckling under demand once again.

"Our site is not down," SpoonRocket co-founder and chief technology officer Anson Tsui said in an interview with VentureBeat. "We are just limiting demand."

Some orders couldn’t get through as early as 5:03 p.m. Pacific, three minutes after the four-hour “dinner party” offer began. Error messages popped for some orders that didn’t go through. And for those not in the middle of orders were told that SpoonRocket was “experiencing astronomical demand.”

It’s a tough spot to be in for a startup that aimed to do something zany to stand out in the food-delivery business in the Bay Area, with competitors like Sprig taking on funding alongside competitors like Chefler and Munchery. But that’s how things have turned out.

So how does traffic look on the back end?

"We are basically having the same traffic as yesterday," Tsui said. It seems $1 per meal is just so tempting that yesterday's down time didn't turn too many people off.

At least SpoonRocket patched up the website from yesterday so the site didn't go down in the first 10 minutes of the dinner party. "Yesterday our site was down. Today our website is good to go," said Tsui. According to him, once SpoonRocket fulfills this round of orders, customers will be able to place orders again. And the price will still be $1.

The best thing hungry San Franciscans can do now, Tsui said, is to "check our social media.”

Our upcoming GrowthBeat event — August 5-6 in San Francisco — is exploring the data, apps, and science of successful marketing. Get the scoop here, and grab your tickets before they're gone!

SpoonRocket, Inc. has expanded its services to downtown Oakland and the Lake Merritt area. SpoonRocket serves up two dishes a day -- one vegetarian option and one meat-based meal -- and delivers for free to certain parts of the East Ba... read more »

Taulia gives businesses discounts for paying their invoices early, gets $27M

It’s a tough economy out there, financing and managing supply chains can be challenging for some business, but one startup is providing them with an alternative means to keep the balance sheets going.

Taulia is a San Francisco-based provider of software for helping suppliers manage their financing, and today it announced raised $27 million in new funding, the company’s fourth round.

In short, the company’s suite of products includes cloud-based invoicing, dynamic discounting, and payment tools to help customers’ cash flow, so they need not resort to loans if payments don’t come in. To do this, Taulia encourages buyers to pay invoices early in order to get discounts.

"If you look between 100 years back and today, payment terms have stayed the same or even stretched out," said chief executive Bertram Meyer in a 2011 interview with VentureBeat. "A supplier has three ways to get financing. The first is bank loans, the second is credit-card borrowing (similar to the first) and the third is factoring. Taulia is replacing all three."

The company is thus providing a win-win situation for both buyer and seller through its software solutions.

QuestMark Partners led the round, with additional participation from Matrix Partners, Trinity Ventures, Lakestar, and DAG Ventures. The company will use the new funding to continue growing its customer base and team. This year, it added offices in Austin, Texas, and Sofia, Bulgaria.

It counts Coca-Cola Bottling Co. Consolidated, Pfizer, Pacific Gas & Electric, and Hallmark among its customers.

Taulia was founded in 2009 by Bertram Meyer, Markus Ament, Martin Quensel, and Philip Stehlik, and is headquartered in San Francisco. The company previously raised a total to $35.7 million in funding.

Taulia Inc. is offering global companies something new: a way to turn their corporate treasury into a supplier bank in a risk free, hassle free manner- and earn 20% APR instead of .3% on t-bills. By offering a SAP certified add on,... read more »

Privacy Analytics raises $3.5M for health data anonymization

Above: Your health may be Apple's next project.

Image Credit: Shutterstock

The privacy of health data has slowly crawled into the crosshairs of both investors and startups as health systems go digital.

Several new companies, like Medable, offering to help health providers make their data private have appeared on the scene. One of them is Canada-based Privacy Analytics, which today said has raised a $3.5M in new funding in a round led by Vanedge Capital. Vanedge joins BDC IT Venture Fund and the Ontario Institute for Cancer Research (OICR) as the main investors in the company.

Privacy Analystics’ software makes health data safe for analysis and research based on the situational and intended use of the data, also making it HIPAA-compliant. The software then applies risk thresholds to the anonymization of personal data residing in standard database tables, text and other document formats.

So customers get quality individual-level data for analysis while simultaneously protecting personal information, the company says. The anonymized data can work for secondary purposes, such as research, quality and safety improvement, public health, payment, certification or accreditation, software testing, and other business applications with an automated, enterprise-standard process that saves substantial time and money.

"We believe Privacy Analytics is well situated to become the de facto standard for automated risk-based anonymization in healthcare and other industries," says V. Paul Lee, the managing partner for Vanedge.

"As organizations gather more data, they'll need enterprise solutions to manage and monetize sharing of information to avoid the costly breaches of personal information that have dominated the media as of late."

The company's customers represent half of the Fortune 50 healthcare companies, as well as some large academic and research organizations, such as The Center for Clinical Excellence at Mount Sinai in New York City.

HealthBeat — VentureBeat's breakthrough health tech event — is returning on Oct 27-28 in San Francisco. This year's theme is "The connected age: Integrating data, big & small." We're putting long-established giants of the health care world on stage with CEOs of the nation's most disruptive health tech companies to share insights, analyze trends, and showcase breakthrough products. Purchase one of the first 50 tickets and save $400!

Privacy Analytics provides organizations with enterprise software to safeguard, operationalize and enable data for secondary use. It is the only company to offer its customers software, peer-reviewed methodology and valued-added servic... read more »

Forever™ Launches Award-Winning iOS App for iPhone and iPad

Funding Daily: Tracking apps, security intelligence, & the anti-Snapchat

Above: The money is flowing to big data startups in a big way.

Image Credit: Judy Baxter/Flickr

Get all the tech funding news of the day delivered straight to your mailbox! Sign up for Funding Daily and never miss a deal.

Here's our roundup of all the notable funding news of the day:

AppDynamics takes $120M

AppDynamics, a company with software for tracking the performance of applications, can keep spending money on product development and sales amid a competitive market thanks to $120 million in fresh financing. The company announced the new money, which includes $70 million in growth funding and $50 million in debt funding. That way, AppDynamics can hold off on an initial public offering as stock traders still lack the enthusiasm they had for cloud-computing stocks just a few months ago.

LogRhythm nabs $40M

Security intelligence startup LogRhythm has closed a new $40 million round of funding, the company announced. The startup’s security intelligence platform helps companies monitor potential risks to avoid and minimize security breaches.

Taulia closes $27M

Financing startup Taulia raised a new $27 million round of funding, the company’s forth to date. The round was led by QuestMark Partners with participation from Matrix Partners, Trinity Ventures, Lakestar, and DAG Ventures.

Icix raises $25M

Icix, a startup that makes it easier to track and test consumer products, has raised $25 million in a third round of funding. The San Francisco startup helps companies form business networks that share information with trading partners. Over the past four years, the company has been working on Direct Test, which ties together data from 300,000 product safety testing laboratory sources around the world. Icix wants to be able to verify test records for millions of products.

Sviral grabs $20M

Silicon Valley tech startup Sviral has raised an estimated $20 million in an unusual transaction aimed at boosting its method for creating distributed data centers. Sviral takes unused computing power from household devices and uses it to build a power-efficient, distributed data center.

Timehop closes $10M

Amid the current ephemeral-messaging craze, one company is actually all about documenting people's social media history for ever and ever. Timehop, an app that shows people what they were up to on their social media accounts on that day in previous years, is not only charging on despite the Snapchat trend, but it's also announcing that it's picked a new $10 million in funding to keep growing. "We see ourselves as the place where your digital history can be written," Timehop cofounder and chief executive Jonathan Wegener said in an interview with VentureBeat.

Read more on VentureBeat: Timehop gets $10M to be the anti-Snapchat

Tyto Life gets $7M

Tyto Life, a "stealth" startup that loftily aims to "improve human experience related to the Internet of things," has raised a $7 million funding round, according to an SEC filing released today. Tyto publicly describes itself as "a stealth Silicon Valley company dedicated to building consumer products that improve the human experience related to the Internet of Things."

Sunrise takes $6M

Sunrise has closed a $6 million Series A round of funding led by Balderton Capital with participation from existing investors. Sunrise makes a smart calendar service that’s attempting to stand out among the crowd of competitors.

Privacy Analytics raises $3.5M

A wave of companies offering to help health providers make their data private has appeared on the scene. One of them is Canada-based Privacy Analytics. Privacy Analytics' software makes health data safe for analysis and research based on the situational and intended use of the data, and makes it HIPAA-compliant. The company has raised $3.5 million in new funding led by Vanedge Capital.

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LogRhythm nabs $40M

Taulia closes $27M

Sunrise takes $6M

Privacy Analytics raises $3.5M