SAN MATEO, Calif. — Biolite founders Alec Drummond and Jonathan Cedar were working at a design firm in New York when they had the idea to combine a thermoelectric generator with a wood-burning stove.

The result: The CampStove, a portable, $130 stove that can boil a liter of water in about 4.5 minutes while recharging your iPhone — just by burning a handful of twigs. What’s more, its internal fan produces a very efficient reaction, so the fire is very hot and nearly smokeless.

Source: Dylan Tweney/VentureBeat

BioLite Campstoves turning sticks into electricity at Maker Faire Bay Area 2013. Photo: Dylan Tweney/VentureBeat

“We started to do the CampStove because it was a really good exercise in understanding how the technology worked,” said Drummond. It also encouraged them to build the device as compactly as possible.

But the company has bigger aims in mind than helping well-heeled backpackers go green. Its big project is the HomeStove, a larger stove meant for use in the developing world, and it is using sales of the CampStove to fuel (ha!) development and testing of the HomeStove.

“The company follows a model that we call ‘parallel innovation,’ where we have one technology that has near-term application in an accessible market recreation and emergency preparedness, and take the revenue to incubate longer-term markets in emerging companies,” said Jonathan Cedar, the company’s CEO.

It’s a model that, Cedar says, gives them the large-scale infrastructure and resources needed to bring their technology into the developing world effectively — something that nonprofits often lack.

Open fires: More lethal than malaria

According to BioLite, about half the human population — 3 billion people — cook their food over open fires, creating 1 billion metric tons of CO2 each year and killing 2 million people annually from smoke inhalation (twice as many as malaria). Of those 3 billion, about 1.3 billion lack access to electricity.

The HomeStove gives these people a way to cook more cleanly and efficiently: It consumes about half as much fuel as an open fire and produces only 5 percent as much smoke. Plus, by producing electricity, it can recharge a cellphone and small LED lights, helping these people get access to the Internet, communicate with others, or help their children stay up a few more hours at night so they can study for school.

Cedar says the company is currently market-testing the HomeStove in India and Ghana to find out what kind of prices and marketing are most effective. The goal is to make the HomeStove cost about the same as a feature phone in the local markets, or about $50; the fact that it can recharge those phones helps win the acceptance of men, even though it is a tool that will mostly be used by women for cooking. NIH and USAID projects are helping with the testing of the HomeStove.

BioLite is venture funded: It took a $1.8 million Series A investment led by Clay Christenson’s Disruptive Innovation Fund in Boston in 2011, with additional investments from angels and from Toniic, a network of “impact investors” in the Bay Area. It is based in Brooklyn, NY, and currently employs about 21 people.

Makers to world-changers

BioLite’s founders have deep roots in the maker community, which is one reason the company was exhibiting at the Maker Faire here.

“I think makers are really kind of our roots. Some of the first prototypes I built in TechShop here in Menlo Park,” Cedar said. He’d moved here temporarily from New York to learn about stove technology, for which U.C. Berkeley is apparently a real hotbed of innovation, and found that TechShop was a good place to work on his own stoves.

“We like to see science and technology applied to real-world problems, and I think that’s a lot of what makers are all about,” said Cedar. “Also, from a customer standpoint, the intersection of technology and outdoor exists pretty well here at Maker Faire.”

Both Drummond and Cedar were industrial designers, creating things for HP, Oxo, and Flip, before striking out on their own.

Cedar was always a tinkerer: “I was the kid who broke everything in my parents’ house,” he told me.

The initial idea for the stove came to them in 2006; by 2009 they were working fulltime on the project, and funding followed in 2011.

The company launched in June 2012 and has been profitable and cash-flow positive since then. Its CampStoves sell in REI and other mainstream outlets for $130 each, and the company has sold “tens of thousands” to date, Cedar said, predicting that they will have sold 100,000 units by the end of 2013.

Top photo: Alec Drummond (left) holds a cutaway model of BioLite’s HomeStove, while Jonathan Cedar holds a flaming CampStove, which is recharging the iPhone in his other hand. Photo credit: Dylan Tweney/VentureBeat.

SAN MATEO, Calif. — 3D printers haven’t quite made the leap to mainstream — they’re still a bit too finicky, unreliable, and expensive for most consumers — but they’re getting close. Next month, you’ll be able to buy a 3D Systems Cube printer at Staples for about $1,300.

We got a look at the 3D-printed future at Maker Faire Bay Area here.

At least a dozen companies are offering consumer- and hobbyist-friendly 3D printers now. They range in price from about $800 to $3,000 or more. Some, like the earliest models, can only make small plastic objects no larger than a few inches on a side. The biggest can (or will soon be able to) print objects up to two feet on a side out of a variety of materials, including ABS plastic, PLA plastic, nylon, ceramics, Play-Doh, cupcake frosting, and even hot liquids. (The days when you can tell your replicator you’d like a cup of “Earl Grey, black” — well, that’s not quite here yet, but will be soon.)

And if you’re not ready to make the leap to running your own 3D printer, you can work up 3D printing files on your computer (using software like Autodesk’s 123D app, an easy-to-use 3D design studio) and send them off to service providers like Shapeways.

There are so many makers of 3D printers and 3D-printed gadgets that the organizers of Maker Faire gave them an entire section of the main expo hall. The gallery here is far from an exhaustive look at this budding field — but it should give you a sense of how many options there are for 3D printing enthusiasts today.

Top photo: Makerbot Industries has done more than any other company to kick off the home 3D printing market. Its printers are looking more polished and professional than ever: Instead of the plywood look of the early models, this fourth-generation Makerbot has a black powder-coated steel chassis and decorative purple lighting on the inside that give it a futuristic look. The new MakerBot Replicator 2 can print objects in PLA plastic up to 11.2x6x6.1 inches with a resolution of 0.1mm. It costs $2,199.

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

For hotels, a technology glitch can result in unhappy tourists and millions in lost revenue.

HotelNinjas, a Barcelona-based startup with a vision to be the Salesforce.com for the hospitality industry, is launching this week. Cofounder Avi Meir said he was inspired to start the company after realizing that most hotels still relied on “expensive, outdated, server-based technology.”

HotelNinjas cofounder Avi Meir

HotelNinjas offers property management and channel management tools (through an integration with WuBook), a customer relationship management service, and a booking engine for hotel websites. Meir says 30 hotels are lined up and are “ready to make the switch.” The company is charging its first customers $4-9 per room on a month-to-month basis.

Hotels can sign up directly or via AppExchange, Salesforce’s app marketplace. Meir told me he recently made a trip to Salesforce’s San Francisco headquarters to form a partnership with the cloud giant. He claims the startup is the first hotel technology provider developed on top of Salesforce’s platform as a service offering Force.com.

HotelNinjas was founded in September 2012, and has grown to seven employees. Meir is the former vice president of product at BudgetPlaces.com, an online travel agency.

To continue its momentum, the company will need to win over customers from more established vendors in the space, including Micros.com’s Opera Property Management software and Medallia.

But Meir believes that HotelNinjas has an edge over its competition with its customizable CRM and integration with hotel booking websites. “At the end of the day, the one thing that matters to hotel owners is how they can increase occupancy and revenue,” he said.

The founders have poured their own money into the startup, buttressed by grants from the Spanish government. In total, they have raised about $100,000. 

Top image via Shutterstock

SAN MATEO, Calif. — The maker movement has helped start many companies. This year, the Maker Faire is giving them a place of their own, with a “Startup Pavilion” that highlights 20 new maker-centric companies.

It’s part of a growing recognition that the do-it-yourself spirit is not just a fun hobby, it’s a rich source of economic potential.

“There is a kind of maturation happening to the maker movement,” said Maker Faire organizer Dale Dougherty, when I spoke to him last week. It’s still dominated by hobbyists, but now there are an increasing number of startups, entrepreneurs, small companies, and even big corporations looking to get involved with the DIY spirit.

Related: Google embraced the DIY spirit last week with more than 400 Arduino-based sensors at its Google I/O conference. Find out how Google made the sensors and integrated all the data.

“At the very first Maker Faire, they really were all amateurs,” Dougherty said, of the exhibitors. After a few years, the Faire started hosting vendors — primarily makers of parts and components, like Arduino boards, used by makers. Now, the Faire is highlighting maker-inspired startups. Here’s a selection of the 20-odd startups at Maker Faire:

• SeeedStudio, an “open hardware company develops and brings to market innovative and cost-effective prototyping solutions for hobbyists and aspiring inventors.”
• RedBearLab, which makes a wearable BlueTooth 4.0 board you can use to interface with an iPhone or Android device.
• Formlabs, makers of a high-resolution 3D printer aimed at engineers and design professionals.
• Deezmaker, another 3D printer vendor, this one aimed at making an affordable printer called the Bukobot.
• BioLite, a company that aims to reduce third-world pollution with a small wood-fueled stove that converts heat from the fire into usable electricity, improving combustion while allowing users to charge small devices.
• BlinkM, makers of multicolored, programmable LED lights for use in your electronics projects.
• Smitten, a maker of handmade “artisan truffles.”

Big companies are getting into the act, too. Autodesk, for instance, has a fruitful partnership with 3D printing pioneer Makerbot. Autodesk makes an easy-to-use set of 3D design tools called 1-2-3D, and the 3D files created by those web-based tools can easily be printed on a Makerbot. This year, Autodesk’s large booth at Maker Faire includes a 3D scanning station, where you can get your head scanned and turned into a 3D digital file suitable for printing.

General Electric is also a sponsor of Maker Faire, and has been working with O’Reilly Media (the parent company of the Faire) on the Faire as well as the two-day Hardware Innovation Workshop that preceded it earlier this week.

“It’s a long, slow process of a company trying to understand the maker movement and engage with it,” Dougherty said. GE wants to encourage its own engineers to think more entrepreneurially, but it also sees the value of DIY, maker-type activities for encouraging and education the next generation of engineers.

Even Motorola, the phone manufacturer now owned by Google, is starting to embrace the maker spirit, Dougherty said, by making phones that are easier than most phones to hack, modify, extend, and repair.

“What would the maker community want to do with a cellphone as a platform, not just a fixed device?” he said.

Photo: Makerbot CEO Bre Pettis holds a bunch of 3D-printed heads at a recent New York event. Photo credit: VentureBeat/Ricardo Bilton

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SAN MATEO, Calif. — Sean Riley, the host of National Geographic show “World’s Toughest Fixes,” has a message for kids today: Learn a trade.

Speaking with BoingBoing editor Xeni Jardin at Maker Faire yesterday, Riley pointed out that it takes four to six years to learn a trade, such as plumbing — about the same amount of time it would take you to get through college.

Yet plumbers, especially in big urban areas, will make far more money than the average college graduate. In other words, if you’re smart and ambitious, and you can’t get a Thiel Fellowship to help kickstart your startup idea, you might consider another alternate path: Getting your hands dirty.

In Riley’s case, his trade — rigging — led him to work with a wide range of interesting projects. He mentioned that he recently helped hang the 50,000-pound lighting equipment at the upcoming Rolling Stones show in Oakland, Calif., for instance. But it also led him to become the star of one of television’s more amazing reality shows. In each show, he travels to a different part of the world to watch (and sometimes help) as engineers, crane operators, riggers, and deep-sea divers help fix a wide range of massive problems, from replacing the engine on an cruise ship to swapping out the gate in a big dam lock.

Even if you’re not interested in the trades, Riley thinks more people should know about the massive amount of infrastructure that it takes to make the modern world possible. There’s a lot of redundancy built into systems like the power grid, he says — but that redundancy is diminishing, since we’ve spent less and less on upgrading and maintaining this infrastructure over the past 40 years.

Repairability is also a disappearing quality in many gadgets we own today. “If you can’t open it up and fix it, you don’t own it,” was one of the themes Jardin and Riley discussed onstage.

Learn how to fix things, and you’ll be more in control of the world around you. And, you will be in a better position to build the next great thing.

Riley revealed that, after four seasons with the show, he would not be continuing for a fifth. “I traveled 350 days out of the year,” he said, and said that while it was an amazing experience, it was exhausting, and took a personal toll. Also, he added, “a show like this is incredibly expensive to produce.”

Photo: Sean Riley with a young fan. Photo credit: Dylan Tweney/VentureBeat

AllThingsD reported this morning that Yahoo’s board approved a $1.1 billion all-cash acquisition of microblogging site Tumblr.

ATD had earlier stated that the board would be meeting on Sunday to consider the acquisition. Yahoo plans to announce the acquisition on Monday, according to “numerous sources” contacted by ATD.

“We don’t comment on rumors or speculation,” a Yahoo spokesperson told VentureBeat this morning.

Yahoo has scheduled a mysterious event for Monday morning in New York, to announce “something special.” If that “something” is the Tumblr acquisition, it would be quite surprising, since the event was announced before the board reportedly confirmed the acquisition. But it would also be a convenient venue to announce a major deal like this.

If it pans out, this would be Yahoo’s largest and perhaps riskiest acquisition since former Google executive Marissa Mayer assumed the chief executive job. By one metric, Tumblr is massive: It hosts 51 billion blog posts, a number that grows by 74 million new posts each day. It draws 216 million visitors globally each month, who collectively generate 16 billion monthly pageviews. That kind of monster traffic puts Tumblr in the ninth position among the most-popular U.S. websites.

However, it generated just $13 million in revenues last year, its first year of revenues, as it slowly began integrating ads into its content stream. The company anticipated making $100 million in revenues this year.

As with Facebook’s acquisition of revenue-less Instagram, the acquisition is less about bringing in a new source of revenue and more about capturing growth and traffic. Yahoo’s traffic, while enormous, has stagnated. It desperately needs a faster-growing property, along with a younger, hipper demographic, and Tumblr would seem to provide both.

That is, if Yahoo doesn’t kill it off or stifle its growth through negligence and mismanagement, as it has done with so many previous acquisitions, including Flickr, Delicious, Geocities, Upcoming, and more.

Top photo: Tumblr founder David Karp is about to be a very rich man. Source: Sean Ludwig/VentureBeat.

President Barack Obama is known for running one of the most tech-savvy political campaigns in the history of US politics. The chief scientist of the Obama campaign’s data analytics team, Rayid Ghani, shared some insights on how that campaign worked at the TiEcon 2013 conference Friday, an event aimed at entrepreneurs.

Ghani said he and his team applied advanced data-mining and machine-learning techniques to create new tools for voter turnout, fund raising, advertising, social media outreach, and email campaigns.

You’d think the team would have worked with huge amounts of data to come up with simulation models that would shape the outcome of an election, but Ghani said “it was the smallest dataset,” he’d ever used in a real problem.

The key data points were voter registration data – information that is publicly available – and data around people who supported Obama by either volunteering or making contributions to the campaign.

With a year and a half to put the data to work, Ghani didn’t have the luxury to recruit and train a team of engineers on a new technology, or for that matter “install, figure and implement a new technology.”

“We were heavily focused on open source, did a lot of coding ourselves, used a lot of databases, used Hadoop, R, Strata and worked with 20 different vendors,” said Ghani.

The campaign also used Facebook’s social graph search function in a big way, Ghani said.

Based on experiments, the team came up with predictive models that became the basis of a $300 million TV ad-spend and five billion emails sent out by the Obama Campaign.

A machine learning graduate from Carnegie Melon, Ghani worked with Accenture for 10 years before joining the Obama for America campaign.

After helping to get the president re-elected, Ghani now works as chief data scientist at University of Chicago. He’ll be running a three-month summer program on “Data Science for Social Good” at the university for which he’s currently accepting applications from students across the country. Ghani is also working on a social good analytics startup called EdgeFlip.

Photo Credit: Chitra Rakesh/VentureBeat

All the usual writing crew have abandoned me (what, it’s the weekend?).

So instead of yelling at the staff and helping with the odd headline, I’ve actually got to do something useful around here. In other words, I’m going to write a few posts.

But it’s also the weekend that Maker Faire happens in San Mateo, where I live.

Now, I’m not much of a maker, but I do like to get my hands dirty. I’ve got a bunch of half-finished projects all over my house, including two half-finished cigar box guitars, an unfinished Drawdio kit, and an old Nintendo DS that I disassembled in an effort to replace its broken case and could never get to work right again.

You might say I’m more of a breaker than a maker. But I love going to Maker Faire to see what other, more talented makers have come up with.

So I’m going to make lemonade out of this pile of lemons known as the “weekend shift.” We’re going to make VentureBeat into a temporary makers-only zone just for today.

Don’t worry, you’ll feel right at home here. Along with SaaS startups, iPhone apps, and photo-sharing sites, one thing that the technology world is discovering is that making hardware is a pretty good business after all.

It’s easier than ever to make things. There’s a ton of information  online about how to make everything from sauerkraut to sensors. Hundreds of hackerspaces, as well as for-profit workshops like TechShop, make tools and knowhow available to anyone who wants to learn. And once you have a solid idea, electronics manufacturers (in China or even in Oregon) make it easier than ever to go into mass production.

Somewhere between the self-driving couches, the flaming sculptures, and the Arduino-powered blinky light projects, I think we’ll catch a glimpse of the future of tech.

Stay tuned. And if you don’t like maker day on VentureBeat, please send me smoke signal or drum signal stating, “I don’t like learning about people who make things, so I have disassembled my laptop, smartphone, and tablet and am living on a diet of nuts and berries.”

A full 7.5 million years later, it arrives at the answer: 42.

Google appears to be referencing that bit of geek cult humor in a new device, the H2G2-42, that it is currently submitting to the FCC for regulatory testing. H2G2 is a Wikipedia-ish guide to “life, the universe, and everything” inspired by Adams’ books.

There’s little data available about the device, but Google does say it is a “media player,” and a “fixed base station” with 802.11b/g/n Wi-Fi, which would make it almost certainly a replacement for Google’s failed Nexus Q. The Q was Google’s ”first social streaming media player” that met with almost universally negative reviews, underwhelmed users, and is no longer for sale.

Source: FCC

Google device H2G2-42 is in FCC testing

One change that seems likely: It appears that the H2G2-42 will allow users to plug in external monitors via provided USB ports:

Source: FCC

Google’s H2G2-42 may be connectable to external monitors

As The Verge notes, Google’s new streaming music app broke compatibility with the Nexus Q. The Google Play Music All Access product is impressive, enabling personalized “radio stations” and inexpensive streaming music. Google calls it “radio without rules,” and it seems reasonable that Google would want a shiny new device to go with this major new music push.

Photos are not yet available and more details will have to wait until 45 days after certification. And it’s unlikely that a music streaming device will be the ultimate answer to the ultimate question.

But meanwhile, enjoy:

Image credits: Google, FCC

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

More than 20 million students currently use Google Apps, and another 10 million are soon to join, thanks to a deal with Malaysia.

As students and schools are increasingly storing more of their data and documents in clouds of Google’s servers, Backupify recently announced that it has tripled its education user base, with more than 40,000 new education users since January of this year. Schools are using the cloud-based backup service to ensure critical data is archived and safe, even if it would be accidentally deleted or lost on Google’s servers.

Education is a notoriously slow adopter of technology, but Google Apps is growing quickly, if not virally, doubling over the last two years. And the current 20 million users include seven million inside the U.S. alone — led by Oregon that adopted Google Apps in all K-12 classrooms in 2010.

And sometimes, they’re using Backupify because they have to:

“Millions of students and educators around the world are currently using Google Apps to enhance collaborative learning,”  Backupify CEO Rob May said in a statement. “The education sector is ahead of other industries in this regard, but faces unique compliance requirements for data privacy and retention that demand an effective backup strategy.”

To celebrate the recent growth of Google Apps for Education — and their own growth — Backupify put this infographic together:

Image credit: John Koetsier/Venturebeat

The new TrackingPoint sniper rifle doesn’t fire when you pull the trigger. Rather, it fires when it knows it will hit the target you’re aiming at. And then streams video to the included iPad mini to allow you to share your hunting or sharpshooting experience with Facebook, YouTube, or maybe even Al Jazeera.

Now, the company says, everyone can be an expert marksman.

“With TrackingPoint, even a novice shooter can become an elite long-range marksman in minutes, accurately and effectively engaging targets out to 1,200 yards,” the company said in a press release.

That’s good, if you’re a hunter and you want to “ethically harvest” game by making immediate kills shots. But it’s also incredibly dangerous, since now inexperienced shooters can be as accurate — or more accurate — as trained military snipers from almost a mile away. The potential for terrorism and targeted assassinations is obvious.

The shooter simple tells the rifle what he or she is aiming at by locking a laser on the target. The gun’s built-in laser range finder, compass, environmental sensors to gauge wind speeds, inertial measurement unit, ballistics computer, and networked tracking engine then engage. But the rifle only fires when you’re holding it in exactly the right direction to hit the target, ensuring that even the unsteadiest and untrained hands can deploy death from a distance. And every shot is recorded and streamed to your nearby iPad.

“Think of it like a smart rifle. You have a smart car; you got a smartphone; well, now we have a smart rifle,” company President Jason Schauble told NPR.

Hunters are excited by the possibilities, apparently.

Source: TrackingPoint

XS1 is the largest-caliber Precision Guided Firearm (PGF) available today.

“When I first saw this system, I knew immediately that I had to have one,” said the first owner of a TrackingPoint rifle. “As a sport hunter and professional marksman, I see the TrackingPoint technology as an excellent way to ensure more ethical harvesting of game and to share the thrill of the hunt with anyone. I cannot wait to make amazing shots of my own.”

The Austin-based company that makes the TrackingPoint rifle calls it a “Precision-Guided Firearm (PGF),” carefully avoiding any reference to “snipers” or “sniper rifles.” But the size and weight of this deadly weapon — 27″ long, over 20 pounds loaded — make it a very unusual hunting rifle. I’m no firearms expert, but several sites I’ve checked indicate that average hunting rifles weigh in at 6-12 pounds, and that a rifle of 20 pounds or more is “just too heavy for general purposes.”

Ergo, it’s a sniper rifle.

TrackingPoint has made some efforts around safety. The sophisticated tracking scope that makes the rifle “smart” is password-protected, according to the company’s CEO, so while the gun will still fire without an authorized user, it won’t allow access to all the intelligence that could make a weekend warrior into an instant Marine sniper.

The company made its first deliveries this week, and due to “overwhelming demand,” has set up a web-based application process to get on the waiting list. We can only hope that the application process doesn’t allow any deranged individuals to access this type of deadly weapons.

And, no matter how smart these rifles are, the question is: are they wise?

Google’s I/O developer conference is over, and we’ve learned quite a bit: Devs just can’t get enough of Google Glass, design is a bigger focus for the company than ever before, and Larry Page is kind of sad about a lot of things. It’s been a whirlwind ride, but honestly we’re just glad to be out of San Francisco’s Moscone Center.

Check out our highlights from I/O below:

• Google I/O 2013 keynote live blog
• Larry Page is sad, hopeful, and frustrated in his heartfelt Google I/O speech
• Google Glass apps are easy to develop, but brutally difficult to design well
• What hardware is Google making after Glass? Mary Lou Jepsen knows
• What’s next for Google Glass: More units, more apps, more colors
• How cognitive science and user empathy powered Google’s design breakthrough
• OK, Google, your conversational search is awesome as hell
• Maps rebuilt from the ‘ground up,’ iPad version coming this fall
• Google Play for Education could kill the iPad in schools
• Major design overhaul makes Google+ look a whole lot like Pinterest
• Google announces its Spotify competitor, Google Play Music ‘All Access’ — ‘radio without rules’
• Hangouts, the best part of Google+, gets standalone iOS, Android, and Chro

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Big Data and Predictive/Real-time Analytics startups: Are you looking to jumpstart development & accelerate market traction? Sign up for the SAP Startup Focus program to receive technology, support, resources and community to help you develop new applications on SAP HANA, a cutting edge database platform. Get started here, and enter promo code “VB2013″ on the form.

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The popular and fast-growing blog service is mulling a $1.1 billion acquisition offer from Yahoo. But while the massive blogging powerhouse only pulled in $13 million in revenue in 2012, and raised $125 million at a lower $800 million valuation, Tumblr CEO David Karp feels $1.1 billion is too little.

I guess it depends what yardstick you use.

If you look at an Instagram-style deal, which was originally around a billion dollars but eventually, due to Facebook’s stock market woes, came in a little lower, he might be right. But that deal had one thing going for it that Tumblr does not.

Instagram chief executive and co-founder Kevin Systrom had multiple suitors, while Tumblr only has one.

That’s because, as Forbes reveals, Yahoo is currently negotiating under a lockup. So even though Facebook, Microsoft, and potentially other acquirers are interested, Yahoo has at least a period of time in which it is the only one on the dance card.

In addition Tumblr, which famously hates advertising and only started trying to make money after five years in existence, is in a bit of a pickle, as its $125 million in funding is running out, giving the service only a few-month window in which to raise a new round or find a sugar daddy.

That’s likely a strategic error on Karp’s part, who has said that advertising “really turns our stomachs.”

Tumblr only started to get serious about ad revenue in mid-2012, and is only planning to roll out its third major ad product — pay per view, in which you pay to get others to view — sometime later this year. Being more aggressive on monetization would have given Tumblr more runway to make a leisurely decision about an acquisition, or made the company more attractive to investors if it tried to raise another funding round.

There’s no question, however, that Tumblr is a traffic powerhouse. It ranks ninth on the list of most-popular U.S sites, and with 217 million global monthly unique visitors and 74 million million posts each and every day, the site is both huge and fast-growing. Few companies could monetize its 108 million blogs, 51 billion posts, and 16 billion monthly pageviews as well as Yahoo.

So while Yahoo is likely to come up a little, Karp could pick worse partners. And he might do well to finalize a deal sooner rather than later.

Cameron Peron is VP Marketing at Newvem

When was the last time you went to a tradeshow?

How did you measure the impact that the event had on your business or personal goals?  Attending tradeshows is more than just cruising the aisles and looking and exhibitor booths. Understanding the inherent mechanics of trade shows, executing a well-defined game plan, and measuring the results in your professional life can make the difference between a useless visit and a game changing trip.

And, of course, going to interesting shows and great places more and more often.

Attending a trade show is an investment

We exhibited at AWS re:Invent in November 2012, making a major investment to meet Amazon Web Services (AWS) users in order to help them improve and optimize their cloud infrastructure.

For an attendee the ticket price cost $1,000 just to set foot in the door. Put airfare, hotel room, and a decent expense budget into the picture and an attendee could easily spend $4,000 – $5,000.  For a show attendee justifying an investment like this, both in terms of hard cash and time, is hard if not impossible to achieve.  Especially when managers and other staff see an empty desk for a few days.

Or is it?

Break down the expectations from the event and consider an active game plan (both during and after the event) to measure the time and money ROI the event cloud potentially deliver. Let’s take a closer look.

There are two main areas that a trade show can show a valuable impact on the company: knowledge and deals.

Gaining knowledge

Many tradeshows offer breakout sessions to learn from experts in a specific field of work, industry or vertical.  Think of an accelerated course to capture knowledge that could improve your ability to solve specific issues, learn best practices, and improve workflow analysis and overcoming issues as they come along.

But breakouts are not limited to your direct line of work.

For example if you’re on the sales and marketing side, attending breakout sessions of an IT, cloud, or IT operations event can help improve your knowledge of the everyday flow your customers and prospect are experience. Leveraging this knowledge cloud have a direct impact on your day to day operations (e.g., improving cloud availability for DevOps) or give you added insights on how to engage your customer base (e.g., understanding what factors are important for DevOps to address when improving availability).

Deals, deals, deals

The objective here is to show measurable value in starting new deal flow, accelerating conversions in the pipe, and improving value from existing business. There are a few methodologies to include in your in-event game plan to ensure you allocate the optimal amount of focused time:

• Reach out to everyone related in your industry and start booking meetings
  Take an assertive approach and book 15-30 min time slots based on the objective you want to achieve.  Don’t stop until you get an answer.Total time investment: 50%
• Book sessions with exhibitors in advance
  This is important. Randomly cruising show floor booths is not a preferred strategy unless you’re open to discuss partnerships. Consider that each booth potentially represents months of planning and budget negotiation, meaning that each staff member at the booth is focused on building new business themselves.   Booking time in advance will ensure a decent amount time to carry out your main objective rather than randomly pulling someone out of their booth.Total time investment: 40%
• Cruise the show to understand the landscape.
  Some of your time must be invested in cruising the show to better understand the landscape, identifying potential partners, keeping tabs on competitors (both future and current), and staying in touch with associates.Total time investment: 10%

Understanding the underlying mechanics of a trade show and putting the right game plan to harvest the value at the show — and execute when you return to the office — can help you win budget each and every time you hit a new show.

Cameron Peron is VP Marketing at Newvem, a cloud operations optimization service designed for Windows  Azure and Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud users. Offering a business view into a company’s public cloud operations, Newvem actively tracks cloud health in order to help reveal and solve cloud irregularities related to cost, security, utilization and availability.  Follow Cameron at @cameronperon.

photo credit: fidelramos via photopin cc

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Twenty-four hours after Google released three location tools for its app developers, startups are already integrating the APIs into their products.

The founders of Valet stayed up all night to get the new API into their app as quickly as possible. Valet launched in April in the Google Play store to help people remember where they parked. It tags your parking location with a pin and reminds you when to pay the parking meter. You can set a timer for your meter and share the location on social media. There is, of course, no guaranteeing you will avoid fines, but it does cut down on the “human error” often responsible for the tickets.

Founder Will Roman recently relocated to San Francisco from Austin, Texas, to work at another startup. After “losing” his car a few times in the unfamiliar city and getting slapped with multiple parking fines, he recruited cofounder Josh Deffibaug, and the two set out to build Valet.

The app received mention on Gizmodo and a couple of Android blogs for its “simplicity and beauty” and was attracting a good number of users through word-of-mouth. But when Roman and Deffibaugh heard the news about Google’s new location APIs, they saw an exciting opportunity.

“Everyone who drives can appreciate this,” Roman said in an interview. “Parking tickets suck, and so does forgetting where you parked on a busy day, when visiting a new city, or after a night of drinking. With integration of the new Google Play Services location API’s, all features can be automated on over 95 percent of Android devices thereby preventing you from ever loosing your vehicle or getting a parking ticket again. We’re the only parking app in the world to integrate the Google Play Services location API’s.”

The location application programming interfaces (API) are part of Google Play Services, a tool kit for Android developers. Integrating location-sensing features to your app can be challenging and Google’s fused location provider “intelligently manages the underlying location technology” to make building location-aware app easier and less energy-intensive.  The technology combines GPS with on-phone sensors like the gyroscope, accelerometer, and barometer to collect your movement data and deliver a more accurate, immediate, and power-efficient application.

Using “Activity Recognition,” your phone can figure out whether you are walking, cycling, or driving which has clear applications for fitness apps. The Valet founders realized that the same technology could be used to tell when a car goes from driving to park mode, and can automatically drop a pin in your parking spot without you having to push a button.

“The new location APIs are more accurate, simpler to integrate, and back ported,” Roman said. “They solve a lot of the fragmentation issues of Android and enabled us to cater to the broadest market possible with even better reliability than previously possible.”

Competitors include iCarPark, Car Finder AR, Find My Car Smarter, Car Locator, Where Did I Park. Valet is based in San Francisco, where parking does in fact suck.

That means that yes, at some point you’ll be able to run your little WordPress-powered blog on the biggest server farms on the planet. But it also means that major companies will be able to use Google’s famously reliable services to run their enterprise-scale “big data,” backend, and, yes, consumer web projects, all in the PHP language that that is increasingly penetrating corporations.

I talked to one of the three founding fathers of PHP and current Zend CEO, Andi Gutmans, about the implications for PHP.

It’s a busy time for the Gutmans, the open-source programming language, and Zend, the company Gutmans formed to offer commercial support and tools for PHP. Engine Yard just recently added PHP to their Platform-as-a-Service as well. And Zend is expanding quickly in the enterprise as it has recently released integrated development tools for cloud-enabled mobile applications.

But Gutmans, though busy, is thoroughly upbeat.

And for good reason: The biggest web company on the planet just added support for the most widely used programming language on the planet. And in that support is a massive implied compliment to PHP — the first non-Google programming language to be supported by Google App Engine — and a potentially major boost to Zend’s business.

VentureBeat: Did Google talk to you before adding PHP to Google App Engine?

Source: John Koetsier

Andi Gutmans at ZendCon 2012.

Andi Gutmans: I don’t know how to answer that. I was aware that they were going to make that announcement … I’ve worked with the product manager on the project before.

VentureBeat: Google didn’t formally brief you?

Gutmans: Let’s put it this way: It’s not a surprise that a platform-as-a-service (PaaS) player that’s serious about gaining market share added PHP support. Google App Engine was almost a science project for the first few years, only supporting languages that Google used internally.

But in the past few months, there’s been a real attitude from Google that we’re going to go and compete with Amazon and with Microsoft, and we’re going to do it all fronts. They’ve become very aggressive on differentiating on performance and billing.

VentureBeat: What does this announcement say about PHP?

Gutmans: We have internal jokes about PHP’s web penetration and have used the stat that PHP runs 39 percent of the web because it was the only number we could get from Netcraft.

But I love Google’s stat, that 75 percent of the web runs PHP. No one knows the web better than Google.

If they’re trying to gain market share and gain it quickly, there’s no other language to do it with. And this is the first non-Google language they’re supporting.

VentureBeat: How’s that feel? And how are your customers reacting?

Gutmans: I’m definitely excited about it.

When any player does something like this — especially Google — it’s a huge validation. We got emails from some of our largest customers, saying this is great … it gives our enterprise customers a higher sense of confidence. And that stat that 75 percent of the web runs PHP is great for Zend – anything that is good for PHP, by proxy is good for Zend.

In addition, they said that PHP was their top-requested feature, which means the developer community was very supportive of us.

VentureBeat: Will you offer Google App Engine Support within Zend Studio, so developers can publish to Google right from within their Zend development environment?

Gutmans: We don’t know yet … it’s early and we’re exploring what kind of relationship we can have with Google.

We do support Google Compute Engine — that’s a full integration and some of the larger companies who run PHP already use it — but Google App Engine is just launched, it’s still in experimentation mode.

VentureBeat: What took Google so long to add PHP support?

Gutmans: I can’t speak for Google, but my assumption is that I felt that Google App Engine in the first few years was something they knew they wanted to do really well but … they kinda went down the simple easy route.

But we’ve seen a significant acceleration in the past 12 months. This will be a $20 billion market by 2016, and they moved from testing the waters to being very very aggressive right now.

We recently surveyed 5,000 PHP developers, asking them where in the cloud do you think you’ll deploy. Fifty-one percent said Amazon Web Services, but Google was 21 percent … and we just support Compute Engine right now.

It wasn’t even on the list last year, so that’s a big jump.

VentureBeat: What does this mean for the little guy building in PHP or hosting a WordPress blog?

Gutmans: I think it gives another option for the guys who do the small stuff, who are using shared hosting for $20/month.

What’s really great for the small developer is that it’s a nice value proposition — you can start at a lower cost. And, it’s a modern platform versus shared hosting, which is quite constrained.”

VentureBeat: So what does this mean for PHP overall?

 Gutmans: The number of requests that Google got from developers was very very significant. It exemplifies what we’ve been talking about … that PHP is very broadly adopted, but also by enterprise.

And that is driven by web, mobile, and cloud, which is where PHP’s sweet spot is. We’re seeing a strong tailwind behind us.

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Big Data and Predictive/Real-time Analytics startups: Are you looking to jumpstart development & accelerate market traction? Sign up for the SAP Startup Focus program to receive technology, support, resources and community to help you develop new applications on SAP HANA, a cutting edge database platform. Get started here, and enter promo code “VB2013″ on the form.

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Readers, I think we need to talk. Communication is really important, and I’m just feeling like I need more ways to connect with you.

Good thing investors dumped millions into communications-based companies today. We saw $10 million go to a texting app that competes with companies such as WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger. Texting over anything but data is so passé anyway.

On the flip side of communication, Skyword got $6.7 million to communicate your brand through stories. PR through content is wildly popular now-a-days, but do people actually trust what they’re reading?

For more funding news as it happens, subscribe to our Deals Channel feed. You can also follow VentureBeat on Twitter, @venturebeat, to view funding news as it’s published.

Check out more about these companies below:

MessageMe nabs $10M from Greylock, Google, & others to take on WhatsApp

Better watch out, WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger. Hot messaging app MessageMe has just raised $10 million in its first round of funding, the company confirmed today. MessageMe offers iOS and Android apps that send rich messages to friends, family, and groups. The app also lets you share YouTube videos, iTunes tracks, voice recordings, emoticons, and other things you might not share over traditional text messaging. MessageMe has risen quickly in status; it only just raised seed funding about a month ago. At that time, the service said it had one million users. Read the full story on VentureBeat.

Skyword takes off with $6.7M for content marketing

Consumers these days expect their favorite brands to tell a story, and Skyword helps them tell it. Skyword has announced closing $6.7 million in growth financing for its content marketing solutions. This Boston-based startup provides agencies, brands, media, and retail customers with a platform to publish content and tools to distribute it effectively. It has a database of more than 20,000 professional writers that publishers can use to recruit and manage freelancers and keep track of workflow. Read the full story on VentureBeat.

Doc talking via Shutterstock

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Bang With Friends’ newborn iPhone app no longer appears in the Apple App Store, leaving “down to bang” iPhone users wondering why.

The company’s chief executive Colin Hodge told Valleywag that the app recently passed over one million users, but it’s been removed from the store.

Bang With Friends matches you up with people in your network who are, well, interested in having the sex. You sign up for Bang With Friends using your Facebook account. The “service” will only match you up with those willing to service you; otherwise, your activity remains anonymous.

The company only launched its iOS and Android apps last week, bringing the action off the computer and into the mobile world. You’re now able to find out if someone wants you when you’re on the go, but not if you’re an iPhone user, evidently.

It might not be the subject matter that’s giving Apple pause. If the company found Bang With Friends violating any privacy guidelines, or taking data in a way that Apple doesn’t approve of, it would pull the app. We’ve reached out to both Apple and Bang With Friends to figure out what is behind this removal and will update the post upon hearing back.

BangWithFriends’ website only offers that it will “be right back” and is trying to work with Apple to restore the app.

It was also recently uncovered that you can discover just which of your friends use the app on Facebook. All you need to do is type a special URL into your address bar and it will call up all of your friends who match a certain app identification number. This goes against what Bang With Friends claims, which is that your use of the app will remain anonymous.

via Valleywag; Bang With Friends image via Bang With Friends

Nevahold is a platform where people rally together to get the attention of large companies. Users compose a “shout” and share it with the community to rally support for their cause. Other members of the community can join in the action by sharing on their social media accounts. The ultimate goal is that enough people participate to elicit a response.

“In today’s culture of huge, faceless companies, chances are high that you’ve hit the hair-pulling, mind-numbing, high-pitched-screeching frustration of overpaying for services, buying cheap quality products, being hit with hidden fees, dealing with the worst of customer service skills, or not even getting through to customer service and staying on an endless elevator-music hold cycle,” said cofounder Kena Amoah to VentureBeat. “Nevahold allows consumers to crowd source their social media accounts to harness their power and increase their influence when reaching out to a company.”

Consumers are increasingly turning to social media as a means to express their gripes, grievances, and appreciation for products and services. On the other end, businesses across the board are using social media to connect with consumers and for customer service support. Nevahold’s goal is to give consumers as much efficacy as possible when reaching out to these companies and is based on the principle of “strength in numbers.”

On Nevahold, people send their shout to a company’s social media contact and wait 30 minutes for a response. A shout can include photos, videos, or be a simple comment. If the company is radio silent, then advocates start to retweet an share the shout until the company responds. If the company still doesn’t respond, the question is shared one all of Nevahold’s 12 social media channels.

Nevahold gives each company a customer service score based on their response rates and time. The compare tool helps consumer see how different companies fare side-by-side. There is also a campaign feature that consumers can use to petition for a change in the company’s policy or service.

Amoah said that during beta testing, Nevahold has helped resolve 23,990 questions and complaints in the airline, wireless, and consumer electronics industry and had a 91.5 percent response rate. It recently helped students traveling to a conference stand up against American Airlines and against Barclays U.K.

The three founders met at the Meltwater School of Technology in Ghana. Meltwater Foundation has invested $90,000. Competitors include Gripevine, Gri.pe and Publikdemand.

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July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Nonprofits are waking up to the benefits of having a mobile and social media strategy.

Cure.org raises money for children in need, and it’s experimenting with a suite of mobile apps to draw attention to the cause.

Launching this week, the company’s new iPhone app features profiles of kids in developing countries who desperately require surgeries. You can donate directly through the app and receive real-time updates on the patient’s progress.

Cure was founded in Kenya in 1998 when it opened a new hospital. Since then, the nonprofit has served 1.9 million patients and provided over 138,000 life-changing surgeries in 27 countries. Along with medical treatment, Cure has a spiritual mission, but it says it will treat patients regardless of their religious affiliation.

CTO Joel Worrall, who joined the company over three years ago, was one of the first technology hires. “My goal is to show donors that when they give $1,000, it’s really changing someone’s life,” he told me.

Inspired by crowdfunding sites, the new app features a progress bar on each patient’s profile page [below] to show how much money has been raised to date. Once the target is reached — typically a few thousand dollars — the surgery is scheduled, and donors will be regularly updated on the patient’s recovery.

Once you’ve made a donation, the app invites you to send a get-well message. If there’s a language or literacy barrier, Cure.org claims its on the ground team will translate the messages and ensure they’re received.

Cure.org’s technology is cloud-based, so Worrall can quickly fix any issues. He said the company is using application performance service New Relic to monitor the app’s performance.

Cure.org hopes that by adding a personal, human touch to its app, more people will be inspired to make a donation. For instance, Allan [above] has clubfoot, a condition he was born with that left him feeling alienated from his peers. The app includes detailed information about his family life, schooling, and upbringing.

“This technology is doing a great thing for the kids that we are serving,” said Worrall. “Our goal is to make you feel close to someone on the other side of the world.”

Top image via Cure.org

Yahoo invited press today to a product event in New York saying only that it will “share something special” soon after reports that the company is going to buy blog platform Tumblr.

It seems Yahoo has been very product-focused in the months since Marissa Mayer both took the chief executive corner office and demanded that critical employees not work from home. It has done a lot on the mobile front, releasing apps for the weather as well as Yahoo mail, which VentureBeat’s Jolie O’Dell called gorgeous.

The company also recently integrated Summly, a content summarizing technology, to its mobile homepage, providing a summary of a story to help people decide if they want to read it.

In the past month Yahoo has also acquired a number a companies including GoPollGo and Milewise, a polling app and frequent flyer app respectively.

Yesterday, rumors broke out about what would be the biggest acquisition for Yahoo next — a $1 billion deal to buy Tumblr. We may hear more about this deal at the event, which is set for 5 p.m. Eastern on Monday.

Photo credit: earcos via photopin cc

Google has gone from a company that approached design through cold, hard data to one that’s employing gorgeous, user-centric interfaces.

Design was a big theme at this year’s Google I/O developer conference, with over a dozen sessions exploring design in some fashion. And you can see Google’s new aesthetic focus in plenty of its products — like Gmail’s slight redesign and the upcoming Google Maps refresh — but Android serves as the fastest example of Google’s design turnaround.

Perhaps it’s because design matters all the more on a small smartphone screen. With Android, Google also had to do something about Apple’s head start with iOS. To get Android to look as good at the iPhone, Google had to radically reshape how it thought of design, and fast. Android 4.0 “Ice Cream Sandwich,” released in 2011, was Google’s first attempt to emphasize design in its mobile OS. Its aesthetic has only become more refined since then.

Google being Google, it’s also obsessively focused on the function of its design. Unlike of the old days, where Google went with the design most people liked through rigorous testing, usability is front and center now, with a new focus on cognitive science and user empathy.

Designing to delight on Android

Users brought up a slew of design issues in Android’s first few versions, and Google saw the need for a new direction. Enter Android’s new design principles, co-authored by Google’s Rachel Garb, head of interaction design for Android apps, and Helena Roeber, who previously headed up Android’s user experience research team.

“We thought, what if we turned this long list of shortcomings that bum us out into something that actually inspires us to create beautiful and usable designs,” Garb said during a Google I/O panel yesterday.

Enchant. Simplify. Amaze. With Android 4.0 two years ago, those three seemingly simple principles became the cornerstone of Android’s design.

“We all respond emotionally to every moment we experience, and we experience around 20,000 of these moments every waking day,” Garb said. Negative emotions are so powerful they have the ability to shorten your lifespan, while positive emotions are essential for daily life.

Garb’s goal: to make sure Android serves as a fount of positive experiences. That was a big departure from Android’s earlier days, when it was complicated, technical, and far from user friendly.

As one example, Google developed a subtle animation in the Android home screen to tell users when they’ve reached the end of their available screens. If there was no indication, users could get frustrated. The new animation delighted users so much that they ended up playing around with it just for fun.

“Not only did it tell them they did everything right, it also kind of helped establish the virtual spaces and provided the feedback in an elegant, subtle, and non-disruptive way,” Roeber said.

Google also added a full-time writer to the design team to take charge of all of the user-viewable text in Android. With short words, active verbs, and common nouns, the writer helped transform Android into an environment more suited for typical, non-technical users.

For example, a setting that used to read “Use tactile feedback” was changed to the more human-readable “Vibrate on touch.” Similarly, a warning that used to read “You didn’t insert a SIM card” now simply prompts “Insert SIM card now.”

You can see all the new design principles at work in Google Now, Android’s predictive search virtual assistant. Enabling it simply takes one click on your Android phone (Simplify), and afterwards it simply presents relevant information when you need it (Enchant). Its interface is sparse, consisting of only the cards you need to see at any particular time. Google Now also learns from your behavior to get better over time (Amaze).

Better design through science

“All of our evolution has been optimized for the types of things we’re likely to see,” said Alex Faaborg, a Google designer with a background in cognitive science and machine learning. Speaking at an I/O panel focused on cognitive science and design, he discussed a few examples of how tiny decisions take advantage of human perception to create a better user experience.

Gestalt psychology principles play a significant role in Google’s designs. For example, Google is using white space more liberally across its products to group items (consider that bit of space between Google search results). In Android, it’s taking advantage of our ability to automatically complete shapes for things like form entries (boring rectangular boxes are out, now you just see the bottom portion of a text entry line). Similar objects, like the stars and check boxes in Gmail, are grouped together to make them easier for us to scan.

Even those small notifications you get in Google Docs along the side of the edges of your screen are backed by cognitive science. Faaborg pointed out that we see peripheral motion faster than what we’re looking at directly, so it makes sense to keep your notifications along the edges of the screen.

About half of Faaborg’s talk focused on vision, while the other half focused on attention, focus, and memory. Google learned that repetition may be a better way to teach simple concepts to users, instead of just offering a single tutorial up front. For example, a repeated alert in new Android phones tells users where they can find all of their apps. Previously, users would skip through the short introductory screen.

“Consistency is not critical — you don’t need to build products identical to what’s on the marketplace,” Faaborg noted at the end of his chat, in a takeaway that also tells us a lot about how Google views design now. He urged developers to build innovative designs and trust that their audiences will be able to understand them. “People are smart,” he said.

Is it enough?

While Google’s design breakthroughs have led to some major changes internally, its competition hasn’t been sitting still.

Apple, a company practically synonymous with excellent product design, will likely see a major style evolution now that Jony Ive is in charge of design company-wide. According to rumors, this year’s iOS 7 could be a major overhaul more in line with Ive’s aesthetic (a love of simple and flat designs).

With Windows 8, Microsoft made a radical design shift as well, bringing elements from its slick Windows Phone operating system to the desktop. Microsoft just announced that it sold 100 million Windows 8 licenses in its first six months on the market, which is in line with Windows 7 sales. With its support for tablets and traditional computers, Windows 8′s design could continue to pay off for Microsoft as personal computing trends change over the next few years.

No matter what Google does, it can’t please everyone. But now, at least, Google is trying.

Photos: Devindra Hardawar/VentureBeat: Top image: Google

When people run into major problems with the health industry — trying to get money from insurance companies or to get access to an experimental drug, for example — they’re no longer just turning to lawyers. Increasingly, they’re turning to online petitions.

One petition website, Change.org, has already seen over 7,000 health-related petitions come through — with some big successes.

Chief executive Ben Rattray, who is speaking at VentureBeat’s HealthBeat conference next week in San Francisco, explained that that he has seen people successfully take on big-name organizations like the USDA and insurance providers — and those successes inspire him. Indeed, healthcare companies are often quite inaccessible despite the fact that they’re involved in such a sensitive and critical aspect of life.

Change.org isn’t focused exlusively on healthcare or health tech. The company helps people petition specific leaders on any issue. But health-related issues have quickly become one of the most popular topics on the site.

We chatted with Rattray to see just where his company fits into the healthcare conversation:

VentureBeat: What role does Change.org feel it plays in grassroots health activism?

Ben Rattray: Our role is to empower people everywhere to create the change they want to see. We’re an open platform and therefore don’t advocate for campaigns ourselves, but we are a place where parents and siblings and friends who haven’t been able to make their voices heard are starting petitions on behalf of their suffering loved ones. We think people deserve to be part of the decisions being made that affect their lives, so we’ve created a tool that gives them a voice in that conversation.

VentureBeat: How many campaigns has Change.org hosted and what kinds have you seen?

Rattray: More than 7,000 people have started health-related petitions on Change.org, covering every health topic imaginable. One of the most popular topics is around medical coverage from major insurers. For example, last year a young man from DC named Jason Warren successfully petitioned Blue Cross Blue Shield to cover his father’s recovery from a heart attack after gathering 190,000 signatures — a shift we have seen many insurers make in response to petitions. Another popular topic is healthy food; in one campaign last year, Bettina Siegel, a mom in Texas, successfully petitioned the USDA to stop packing “pink slime” in school lunches in just one week with more than 250,000 signatures –  after health advocates had been working on the issue for 10 years.

VentureBeat: Why is this, in today’s digital age, more powerful than picking up the phone and talking to your representative?

Rattray: There’s still value in many types of civic action, including picking up the phone. But on a phone call, you’re just one person with an opinion. On a petition, you’re a member of a collective movement, and your voice is shared publicly for everyone to see. Even if they want to, there’s no way a government official or company can ignore your comment – it’s like a highly visible time capsule of public sentiment.

Take Jenn McNary, the mother of two boys with a rare, lethal disease, Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy. One of her boys had access to a medical trial for a new drug, and his condition improved dramatically. Her other boy doesn’t have the trial drug, and his muscles are deteriorating rapidly. Soon, he’ll lose all upper body strength, and he won’t be able to eat or drink on his own.

Jenn’s petition asks the FDA to approve the medication through the Accelerated Approval Program, which expedites approval of drugs that treat serious diseases. Jenn could have picked up the phone – and trust me, she has, many, many times. But it was her petition, with its 179,000 signatures, many from parents of other DMD-afflicted kids, that got her a meeting with senior FDA officials. Jenn just sent us an email a few weeks ago saying they were “extremely supportive, engaging, and receptive” to her ideas – so things are looking up. That’s the power of the Change.org platform.

VentureBeat: Do you believe Change.org is really making a difference? Can you point to any successful campaigns?

Rattray: We’ve seen hundreds of health-related victories. The 28-year-old UC Davis student whose radiation treatment was finally covered by Anthem after four long weeks of appeals. The 21-year-old severely disabled student who got Medicare to continue her nursing care through the end of college, when she could move back home for support from her family. The Ohio woman who got Governor Kasich to add autism benefits to the state’s essential health benefits package. The list goes on and on. The question of whether petitions can have an impact is by now clearly answered – they can and do every day.

VentureBeat: Do you see spikes in health petitions around current events?

Rattray: We may see a small spike around, say, the Affordable Care Act — people who want it passed, people who don’t want it passed — but in general, it’s pretty consistent. That’s because our platform is really built for micro-movements: small, personal petitions replicated hundreds or thousands of times over across cities, states, even countries. At Change.org, we deeply believe in the power of starting local and building movements from the ground up instead of jumping on huge national problems and trying to tackle them from the top down.

VentureBeat: What role can social media sites play in health activism? Are they too unorganized to make a real difference?

Rattray: Social media sites can play a crucial role in raising awareness about health issues. Where they sometimes fall short, though, is translating that awareness into effective, coordinated action. That’s where Change.org comes in; because our platform is built explicitly to make changing the world intuitive and easy, it’s generally more effective than social media sites not structured for that purpose.

VentureBeat: Why should people use Change.org for health-related issues over creating a White House petition online?

Rattray: We’re big fans of the folks working on We the People, the White House’s petition platform. Over the past few months, we’ve actually worked with them on building out their API.

The Change.org platform is unique not only because it lets anyone start a petition about anything they care about, but also because people can target whichever decision maker has the power to do something. If the issue is political, sometimes that’s the Obama administration, but more often than not, it’s the director of a smaller government agency or the head of a specific task force. For non-political issues — say, an insurance provider who won’t cover a loved one’s medical treatment — you can use Change.org to petition the right people there, too. And it works — thousands of people have won their petitions using our site.

VentureBeat: If you could ask tech companies for any one thing to help Change.org health petitions get more attention, what would it be?

Rattray: Send us your engineers — we’re hiring.

Ben Rattray photo via Chrissy Farr/VentureBeat

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HealthBeat 2013 is a new conference showcasing how technology is transforming health care. We'll explore how IT is driving out inefficiencies on the hospital, practice, and patient levels. Check out full event details here, and register here.

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This Boston-based startup provides agencies, brands, media, and retail customers with a platform to publish and effectively distribute content. It has a database of more than 20,000 professional writers that publishers can use to recruit and manage freelancers and keep track of workflow.

“The art of content marketing is in the beauty and quality of the writing itself – its voice and ability to speak to an audience in a personal and compelling way,” the company said on its site. “To excel at the science of web content creation, you need a technology framework to adhere to the 3 Ses of successful content.”

The three in question are “searchable, snackable, and shareable.” Once content is created, Skyword recommends keywords and suggestions for SEO and provides built-in tools for sharing across social media. Skyword also includes analytics so publishers can track marketing and writer performance, social media metrics, and search engine rankings and make editorial decisions accordingly.

Clients include IBM, MarketWatch, and AutoTrader.com. Cox Media Group led this round which will expand the team and help the company meet increasing customer and partner needs, “as content marketing becomes an integral part of brand marketing initiatives.” Skyword was founded in 2010. This brings its total capital raised to $12 million.

Photo Credit: Mike Cogh/Flickr