The BMW Group founded a venture capital firm in New York City, BMW i Ventures, with an investment totalling $100 million. Focus: mobile and sustainabliity.
Caplinked, a free online platform for private companies to network with investors and advisors, raised $525,000 in angel funding led by Peter Thiel and others.
Dynamic Signal, a stealth-mode enterprise social media startup founded and led by former Adify CEO Russell Fradin, raised $8 million in equity-based financing from a group of 30 investors, according to a regulatory filing.
VBrick, provider of enterprise IP video solutions, acquired Fliqz, also a provider of video hosting solutions. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Gilt Groupe, a private sales site for luxury items, is raising $80-$100 million from private market investors, according to anonymous sources, valuing the company at $1 billion.
MyHammer.com launched to connect contractors with homeowners who need work done on their houses.
Paydiant, a Boston-based mobile payments venture, closed a $7.6 million round of funding led by North Bridge Venture Partners and General Catalyst Partners.
Online music service Spotify has raised new financing from investors Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and DST that values the startup at more than $1 billion, according to anonymous sources.
Twitter restored API access to the creators of twidroyd and UberSocial for BlackBerry (formerly UberTwitter). UberMedia still waiting for review.
Today's featured entrepreneur is David Saad, CEO and founder of Braintec, In-D-Pocket, Calibra, Clupedia, and Luristic.
Advances in technology, like in vitro and microfluidics, have helped advance research
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Steven Loeb
Robots are taking over the heavy lifting work inside warehouses
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Anna Vod
The company also expanded access to 12 different provider types for male fertility care
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Steven Loeb
Startup/Business
Joined Vator on
Luristic is a pioneer and a leader in Rich User Experiences (RUE) for websites, web applications, desktop applications, mobile applications, embedded applications, and games.
RUE is a complex yet very exciting field which requires the precision of a software engineer, the analytics of a computer scientist, the heuristics of a cognitive behaviorist, and the creativity of an artist. In short, that’s all the left and right brains that any single normal brain can handle.
Luristic is a new breed of firm that combines the technical skills of an innovative software company along with the creativity of an avant-garde agency. While one skill set alone is difficult enough to master, we are raising the bar and doing the hard work so that you don’t have to.
What interests us at Luristic is the extraordinary. So whether we are your short-term hired guns or your long-term partner, we produce killer applications for you. We are particularly apt at turning the complex simple, and the simple powerful. We get motivated by demanding customers who want it all – from functionality to efficiency, from reliability to scalability, from flexibility to security, from usability to beauty, from function to form, from art to science, from intuition to analytics, from quantitative to qualitative, and everything in between.
As a result, we take a holistic approach by offering a comprehensive set of products and services that deliver world-class, award-winning, and state-of-the-art applications and websites with very rich user experiences that lure, attract, engage, convert, and retain users with extensive features, robust architecture, logical taxonomy, flexible workflow, intuitive navigation, and stunning graphical user interface.
While on one hand we consider ourselves progressive in our craft by often finding ourselves pushing the envelope on the design and the engineering fronts, yet we are rather conservative when it comes down to work ethics.
In short, RUE is all we do, and we do it right.
Startup/Business
Joined Vator on
MyHammer is the leading online marketplace to connect consumers with relevant contractors. MyHammer is operating in 4 countries and has more than 6 million searches per month, and 3,000 new projects posted on its sites around the globe every day. At MyHammer, both private and commercial customers can get quotes quickly and easily from contractors, builders and service providers that have been rated by previous customers. Customers can connect with contractors by either posting a short description of their job online, or by searching for specific contractors according to qualifications, area of expertise and locality. MyHammer USA launched in December of 2010. For more information on the MyHammer services, visit http://www.myhammer.com.
Startup/Business
Joined Vator on
Cox bought Adify for $300 million on April 28, 2008. http://www.vator.tv/news/show/reports-say-cox-buys-adify-for-300-million
It’s a fragmented Web out there. Fortunately,
networks powered by Adify deliver the voice, choice and control you’ve been
waiting for. Are you an advertiser targeting niche audiences? A publisher
seeking higher revenue for high-quality content? An entrepreneur looking to
transform market insights into profitable vertical ad networks? Adify’s unique
platform provides the simple, turnkey support needed to make it all possible.
Truth is, when it’s easy to build a vertical network, it’s easy to reach a
passionate audience.
Washington Post, The Guardian, ComputerWorld. These
are just a few of our recent success stories – partners who trusted Adify to
extend brands, increase reach and grow revenues. After all, every single Adify
Network is built by an experienced expert with a unique market insight. Like
HotChalk, who used our Build Your Own Network platform to aggregate
high-quality, brand-driven education content. The moral? With Adify, the power
of online advertising is finally where it belongs. With you.
Startup/Business
Joined Vator on
Clupedia is the encyclopedia of Clues from crowds. Clues consist of people’s opinions about anything and everything, from products to politics and everything in between. What Wikipedia is for words, Clupedia is for clues. While Wikipedia collects from the crowds the definitions of words, Clupedia collects from the crowds their opinions. If you have an opinion about something (and who doesn’t), Clupedia is the ultimate platform that allows you to express your opinion either at any point of interest anywhere on the World Wide Web using Clupedia Toolbar, or from a centralized location using our web site. Essentially, it is the ideal “expression engine” that propagates your clues, diffuse your ideas, and spreads your opinions like brushfire from anywhere to everywhere. It is no longer about just rating, reviewing, or even blogging, but rather, it is about influencing. You may write a review at any of the popular reviews sites, or you may write an editorial column in your magazine, or you may write an article in your blog, in all those cases, people have to go where your opinion resides. So you might be vocal, but are you being heard?!! Clupedia expands the walls of your web site, your magazine, or your blog to the whole World Wide Web by bringing your opinion to the people wherever they are at. In short, why limit yourself by hoping that they will come to you. With Clupedia you can go to them with just one click. That’s compelling!!! On the other hand, if you want to get the inside scoop about something (because what you don’t know might hurt you), Clupedia Toolbar sits eagerly in your browser ready to serve you with just one click from wherever you might be – no need to go anywhere or search for anything. Clupedia is where word of mouth travels and buzz hums so that you no longer need to hear it through the grapevine. It will forever change your surfing habits, leaving you wondering how you ever surfed the web without it. Clupedia brings you on a silver platter the wisdom of crowds - the collective opinions of people, which is often smarter than the opinion of a single expert. In his eloquent book entitled “The Wisdom of Crowds”, James Surowiecki explains why the many are smarter than the few and how collective wisdom shapes businesses, societies, and nations. Whether using our web site or our browser toolbar, Clupedia allows you to generate new clues or retrieve existing clues for free and with great ease, classic elegance, trendy style, and unparallel convenience. So if you think that YouTubing, MySpacing, or Starbucking with a “1/3 decafe triple grande sugar free vanilla white chocolate non fat stirred carmel Macchiato” are addictive, then wait until you start generating clues or peeking through people’s clues!!! Clupedia includes comprehensive features, advanced functionality, high usability, robust scalability, and very rich user experience. It combines the best computing paradigms found on the desktop, the web, and mobile devices.
Types of Clues
Clues can be ratings, reviews, pros, cons, suggestions, recommendations, notes, referrals, blogs, links, and favorites. You can select one or several of those different ways of expressing your opinion in a single clue. Thus, you can be very brief by just rating, or you can be elaborate by reviewing, recommending to others, and suggestiing to the manufacturer. Like unified messaging where different types of messages such as voice mail, e-mail, or fax messages are saved in a single inbox, Clupedia supports a single integrated clue that includes one or several types of opinions in a single transaction.
Formats of Clues Clues can be expressed in text, audio, or video. Clupedia lets your imagination and creativity wonder by supporting rich text format which can include all kinds of formatting, highlighting, alignments, bullets, fonts, illustrations, icons, emoticons, backgrounds, sound, animation, special effects, etc.
Privacy & Security Clues can be:
Markers
When an item in a web page is clued, a marker appears next to it as shown in the screenshot below. In order to avoid cluttering with markers the web page that you are visiting, you can be selective by specifying in your settings the types of markers that you would like to have displayed. For example, you can choose that only markers about a specific category or by specific Clupedians ought to be displayed. When you hover your mouse over a marker, a pop-up appears with a list of categories of clues that have been assigned for the selected clued item. For example, if the word “Bonds” has been clued, the pop-up will include:
The corresponding average rating and the number of clues are displayed next to each category. If the list does not include the category that you are interested in, that would mean that there are no clues for the desired category. In such case, you can create a new clue with a new category that interests you. If you click on a particular category, then you will get the corresponding list of clues, which you can then search, sort, group, and filter. Standard filters include top rated clues, most visited clues, most recent clues, clues that were generated by specific Clupedians who belong to your trusted circle, etc. , etc.
Pages & Items Clues can be about either a web page or an item in a web page. An item in a web page can be any word or a combination of up to 10 words that can be highlighted using the highlighter located in Clupedia Toolbar. Hence, a highlighted item can be a person, company, product, service, activity, pet, idea, social issue, politics, religion, education, or anything and everything displayed on the web. Once you highlight an item to be clued, you must then select its category from a folksonomy (i.e., a collaborative taxonomy of categories created by the crowd – a term coined by a technology blogger Thomas Vander Wal). Such folksonomy allows you to handle homonyms. For example, the word “Bonds” can be tagged as a name of a person, a relationship, or a financial instrument. Furthermore, in order to avoid clutter, common words or prepositions such as if, then, than, the, a, and, else, and the like cannot be clued without permission.
Propagation & Aggregation of Clues Clues are instantly propagated and aggregated. For example, if you create a clue about a product from one web page, your clue is instantly propagated to all web pages that include that product. Vice versa, if you go to any web page and click on the marker of that clued product, all its clues from all sources from all Clupedians are brought to you with just one click at that point of interest.
Grading, Voting, & Censoring A valid clue is a good clue which includes a positive, neutral, or even negative opinion. On the other hand, an invalid clue is a bad clue which includes incomprehensible, illogical, irrelevant, bashing, libeling, slandering, insulting, disparaging, vilifying, defaming, offensive, profanity, slur, smear, or pornographic material. In addition to our own internal editors, we rely on our Clupedians to police clues by reporting invalid clues, grading clues, and voting for Clupedians. As a result, a meritocracy system establishes the merit, status, and reputation of Clupedians which helps safeguard the integrity of Clupedia.
Referring & Blogging Once you create a clue, you can refer it to your friends as well as post it onto your blog. In doing so, you increase your probability of diffusing or spreading your opinion around beyond the walls of your blog.
The Meta Web The World Wide Web consists of millions of web sites with billions of web pages that describe companies, people, animals, products, services, activities, ideas, politics, etc. Some of it is good but a lot of it is not. We’re drowning in a sea of irrelevant information. Fortunately, here comes our savior - the meta web - the web about the web built by the people for the people. The meta web consists of the opinions of people about what is displayed on the web. The meta web is a shortcut that cuts through all that clutter. However, the meta web can’t be built without you. By sharing your wisdom and your experience with others, you will contribute to this ambitious endeavor which will make the web much more informative, collaborative, connected, and convenient. While the web has introduced democracy by leveling the playfield, the meta web is about meritocracy (i.e., who has merit and who doesn’t). You deserve to rely on information that has merit which can be delivered with style to you through the wisdom of crowds by Clupedia – the encyclopedia of clues from crowds.
Benefits
By generating clues, you will:
Earn some cash
By retrieving clues, you will:
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