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.

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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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.”

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.

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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Thanks to technology, we’re watching a revolution happen in education right now.

From the explosion in popularity of language learning apps like Mindsnacks to the media furor about the rise of massive open online courses (MOOCs), companies are being built around the idea that technology can radically reshape our relationship with education.

Educating the well-educated

MOOCs have attracted more attention than any other edtech category, and with good reason. Imagine being able to take a physics class with Stephen Hawking without having to enroll at Cambridge, or learn poetry with Helen Vendler, and explore the solar system with Neil deGrasse Tyson.

The possibilities are seemingly endless — especially for the hyper-literate, hyper-educated communities of bloggers and journalists who typically write about this technology. These platforms started as experiments in distributing high quality education for single classes, and blossomed into fully-fledged companies on the strength of early, massive enrollments.

There’s an amazing amount of potential embedded in the idea of MOOCs, but for now, they are only struggling experiments aimed at the outer edge of enthusiasts of esoteric learning.

Enrollment figures point squarely at largely unfulfilled promises. Katy Jordan, an educational researcher, pulled together published stats, largely from Coursera, and plotted enrollment and completion rates for various popular MOOCs.

Harvard’s computer science class CS50x on edX had an amazing 150,349 enrolled students, of which 0.9 percent completed the course. Attrition rates on that level would instantly doom a college. While MOOC proponents argue that these completion rates are irrelevant because of varied interest levels of participating students at the outset, they’ve set the stage for their own measurement by using enrollment factors as their topline metric in interview after interview.

Education for the rest of us

But let’s say you ignore the massive discrepancy between enrollment and completion. Let’s say you focus, instead, on the stated mission of these companies. Each company states that its mission is access to education. So who is getting that access? Certainly not the millions of elementary and high school students struggling with a crumbling K-12 system in the U.S. Even if these kids have access to computers and broadband at home (which is a big “if”), they don’t necessarily have the skills to teach themselves the material with little or no human interaction.

Educating these kids in the subjects, and with the methods that they need to learn are not directly tied to jobs or expensive credentialing systems — the emerging business models of the biggest players in edtech. These kids are in the thick of the learning bell curve, not the autodidactic wunderkinds taking symbolic systems courses at the age of 12.

Many of the students that we work with at my company Tutorspree fall into this category. They are kids who are still learning to learn. Some are hugely advanced for their age, some need extra help — all want something more than the purely digital options being pushed by media and many government agencies.

These kids and their parents tell us every day that they need a real person to teach them, to learn with them, to react in real time to errors and successes, and to provide the kind of personal warmth and encouragement that computers cannot provide.

The power of people

We’re not the only ones noticing the importance of having real people interact with one another to make education work better. The MOOCs are beginning to hire teaching assistants and tutors to create emotional buy-in and attachment with students.

Sal Khan isn’t pushing for his videos to be the final say in teaching. They are meant as a gateway to unlock significantly higher rates of one-to-one teacher student interaction in the flipped classroom. Codecademy may use a carefully structured system to help people start learning to code, but they also encourage meetups and high school groups to get together to support one another through the really hard stuff.

The media likes to talk about how technology is creating radical shifts in education. Journalists talk about increases in access, tracking, and new mediums for delivery. But none of that is enough.

The real test of edtech is still to come. Companies will have to prove that they are able to actually teach students, not just put lessons in front of them.

We need teachers if we want a system that is effective for the students who really need help, and want real progress.

Aaron Harris is the founder and CEO of Tutorspree, a New York-based startup that finds the perfect tutor for every student.

Follow him on Twitter @Harris. 

Top image via Flickr 

Abbey Post is a plus-size fashion marketplace and community. The company just released a totally rebuilt version of the site, which now features an internal social network and expanded inventory. It takes an Etsy-style approach where anyone, from independent designers to established brands, can sell their wares.

“I chose this model of peer-to-peer commerce specifically because I want to build community,” Schames said in an interview. “Plus-size women feel really disenfranchised, neglected, and left out of conversations about fashion. There are many people who think fat ladies aren’t sexy and don’t care what they look like, even though there are over 100 million plus-size women in the US. If you give them a platform to connect over fashion and buy clothes that make them feel good, that math adds up real fast.”

After leaving her sales job, Schames gained e-commerce experience by founding an online consignment store for luxury accessories. She is a plus-size women herself and was drawn to handbags and jewelry because they are size agnostic. As a professional in New York City, she said it was consistently difficult to find plus-size clothing because a lot of brands are pulling their plus-size clothes out of stores and moving sales entirely online. However, none of the online retailers provided particularly appealing options and none incorporated the social element that makes shopping enjoyable for many women. Schames repeatedly had conversations with women who felt marginalized in the same way and realized there was a bigger opportunity out there.

“I’m not sure who told people that size 14 and up love polyester, but it’s not true,” she said. “Plus-size women are tired of going to the mall and looking through two abandoned racks in the back. Fashion is aspirational and today’s runway model averages a size zero. That does not reflect a majority of women. The fashion industry wants to fetishize thinness and sell us this fantasy, but it’s not real life and it pisses me off. I have a daughter and I don’t want her growing up feeling bad because she isn’t like the magazine. Part of our mission is telling women it is OK to love who you are. I am working hard to bring a positive and accepting and inclusive environment to normal women.”

Social e-commerce and peer-to-peer commerce are trendy right now and changing the experience of shopping online. The e-commerce sector didn’t see too much innovation for many years — brands and retailers put their inventory online and shoppers searched for what they were looking for. Recently, a wave of fashion startups such as Wanelo, Luvocracy, Etsy, Poshmark, and Polyvore have taken various approaches to transforming this experience and finding new ways to browse and buy products online. At a recent media dinner about social e-commerce, Angel List founder Naval Ravikant (who is an investor in Wanelo) said this is the future of shopping.

Abbey Post is using these new models to target an underserved and highly valuable market. It is a passion project that addresses a widespread and unique set of needs. There are other plus-size online retailers out there like Avenue.com, Fashion to Figure, SimpleBe, Jessica London, and OneStopPlus, but Schames said her focus on high-end clothing and her social approach sets AbbeyPost apart. She also said there are products and features in the pipeline that will make Abbey Post an innovative tech company, rather than just a tech-enabled one.

AbbeyPost is bootstrapped and based in New York.

Working with video rental stores in Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, Domino’s stamped DVDs with heat-sensitive thermal ink and scented varnish. Since DVDs and Blu-Ray players tend to get hot during operation, the discs warm up throughout the movie. By the time the movies ends and you pull the disc out, you’re both seeing an image of pizza on the DVD … and smelling what you could be tasting.

And, in thermal ink, a message invites you to enjoy your next movie with a “hot and delicious” pizza from Domino’s.

Here’s the video:

That’s simply a brilliant marketing campaign. And a very savvy mixture of both high and very standard technology.

While broadband has killed the video rental store in North America and much of Europe, Brazil’s Internet is not quite so robust, according to the marketing agency that created the campaign for Domino’s. So unless you’re wealthy or in a neighborhood with good Internet, chances are, you’re still using DVDs.

photo credit: bunchofpants via photopin cc

As the one writing about the funding news AND going to see Star Trek on day 1, does that make me queen of the nerds? Probably not, but a girl can dream.

SAP boosts startup fund by 2.6X to stimulate big data innovation

SAP is betting big on startups. And big data. The business software behemoth is more than doubling its commitment to the SAP HANA Real Time Fund, going from $155 million to $405 million, to support innovation surrounding real-time applications and big data. The SAP HANA fund launched in 2012 and primarily makes investments in early stage venture capital funds and startups building off SAP’s technology. Read more on VentureBeat.

Airwatch adds $25M into its coffers, because $200M isn’t enough

AirWatch, which helps companies manage employee’s mobile devices, raised another $25 million in a follow-on to its first round of funding today because the $200 million it received in February just wasn’t quite enough.  The round was led by Accel Partners. The Atlanta-based company makes mobile security software that manages devices, apps, email, and other content. It’s customers include Delta and Lowe’s. Read more on VentureBeat. 

MicroVentures doles out $16M in investments while it ‘patiently waits’ for the SEC

MicroVentures has a powerful pitch for startups: We’ll help you raise money. The Austin-based company helps accredited investors pool their cash together (usually somewhere between $1,000 and $30,000 per person) to fund early-stage startups like Ribbon and Medigram. For investors, it’s the opportunity to fork over as little as $1,000 but still get in early alongside more seasoned angel investors. MicroVentures has reached $16 million in investments today and claims to have surpassed any other equity-based crowdfunding platform. Read more on VentureBeat. 

Pebble raises $15M, launches SDK update for better smartwatch apps

After raising more than $10 million on Kickstarter, smartwatch maker Pebble announced today that it has received $15 million in first round funding from Charles River Ventures. That’s a pretty heft sum for a company that was initially shot down by VCs, a blow that led to the Kickstarter campaign. After nabbing around 85,000 orders on Kickstarter and successfully kicking off Pebble shipments, it’s not surprising to see investors taking a second look. Pebble says the funding will let it expand its software engineering team, scale for demand, and grow its open development platform. Read more on VentureBeat.

Marqeta raises $14M to bring ‘Starbucks-type loyalty to every merchant’

Loyalty and payments startup Marqeta has raised $14 million and announced that it will power the Facebook Card. Marqeta’s approach to e-commerce encourages consumers to make their purchases online to earn rewards from participating retailers. Marqeta keeps tracks of all that information in one place. Consumers save money and retailers gain loyalty. Existing investors Greylock IL and Granite Ventures participated in this round, along with new investor Commerce Ventures. Read more on VentureBeat.

¡Más dinero! BPM solutions provider BonitaSoft raises $13M

BonitaSoft, the business process management (BPM) solutions provider, announced today it has raised $13 million it its third round of funding thus far. The company’s open source software allows for easy business process modelling and implementation. It is based in Southern France. The Series C was led by the French National Fund for Digital Society (FSN PME), a French government initiative that invests in technology companies. Returning investors Ventech, Auriga Partners, and Serena Capital were also involved. Read more on VentureBeat.  

Luvocracy raises $11.5M in venture capital to power social commerce

Social e-commerce site, Luvocracy has raised $11.5 million in funding from Kleiner Perkins, Google Ventures, RPM Ventures, XG Ventures, CrunchFund, Marissa Mayer, Ali Pincus, Jim Lanzone, and Tony Robbins. Luvocracy is a San Francisco-based startup that lets you buy products you “luv” based on recommendations from the people you trust. You can also earn rewards if someone buys a product you recommend. Read more on VentureBeat.

EdgeSpring launches with $11M in Series A funding to help simplify analytics 

The “big data” and analytics startup EdgeSpring officially launched today with $11 million in financing from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Lightspeed Ventures. The company’s business intelligence and analytics platform enables you to quickly obtain business information from any size, structure or data without having to depend on data analysts or information technology professionals. The platform makes it easy for average users to ask questions about data like financial or user information any time and anywhere across data silos. Read more on VentureBeat. 

I don’t think you’re ready for this Jelly

Biz Stone’s under-the-radar startup has raised money from some very well-known people. In a blog post today, the Twitter founder announced closing a funding round led by Spark Capital with participation from SV Angel. An elite group of individual investors also contributed, including Jack Dorsey, Bono, Reid Hoffman, Steven Johnson, Evan Williams, Al Gore, Greg Yaitanes, and Roya Mahboob. Read more on VentureBeat.

Bitcoin startups get hotter: BitPay nabs $2M from Founders Fund & others

Relatively young Bitcoin startup BitPay has announced it has raised $2 million more in funding to lead the market in Bitcoin payment processing. This follows a $510,000 seed round it raised in January. BitPay specializes in e-commerce, B2B, and enterprise solutions for Becton and it claims processing fees as low as 1 percent with no setup fees. It signed up more than 1,900 new merchants in April, and it claims to sign up about 100 new merchants per day at this point. The new funding was led by Founders Fund, the fund behind the so-called “PayPal Mafia.” Also on the round is Max Keiser’s fund Heisenberg Capital, a London-based fund targeting Bitcoin-focused companies. Read more on VentureBeat.

Ringadoc nabs $700K to bridge the communication gap between doctors & patients

Patients need a better way to communicate with their physicians, and Ringadoc believes it can help. The San Francisco-based startup added another $700,000 to its seed round today, bringing its total funding to $1.9 million.Ringdoc helps doctors separate personal and professional messages, and enables them to triage patients before speaking to them on the phone or in person. Investors include Ryan Howard, CEO of Practice Fusion (Ringadoc is currently incubating in Practice Fusion’s offices), Sharon Knight, cofounder of One Medical, the chain of concierge primary care practices, Siemer VC, Telegraph Hill Group, and Dr. Lyle Dennis, the neurology chief at Bon Secours Health System. Read more on VentureBeat.

TheMadVideo raises $500K for video of Steve Job, among other things

TheMadVideo has raised $500K in seed funding for its platform that brands and content creators can use to make video moments taggable and shareable. The technology indexes moments in a video by people, place, things, topics etc…  so brands can pinpoint moments in videos the feature their products and link them to sale pages. The company was founded in Spain and is now based in San Francisco.

Photo Credit: Edward Beaver/Flickr

Paul Graham revealed in a blog post that Wufoo’s founder Kevin Hale will join YC as a full partner. Wufoo makes an online form building application. The startup participated in one of YC’s first classes in 2006 and was acquired by SurveyMonkey in 2011. Hale spearheaded user experience and design for Wufoo and will join existing partner Garry Tan as a design mentor, which Graham said “partly reflects the increasing importance of design in startups.”

Michael Seibel, Steve Huffman, Dalton Caldwell and Andrew Mason will join the accelerator as part-time partners. Seibel cofounded Socialcam which went through the Winter 2012 YC class and quickly became the most popular application on Facebook with 54.7 million users. It was acquired by Autodesk in 2012 for $60 million. Huffman cofounded popular travel app Hipmunk and Reddit, which both went through Y Combinator.

Not all the new partners are YC alums. Caldwell cofounded App.net and Imeem and Mason cofounded Groupon and held the position of CEO before the board ousted him in February. Harj Taggar, who is currently a full time partner, is becoming a part-time partner so he can travel and then work on new startup.

Y Combinator now has ten full partners and eight part-time partners.

The accelerator program is known as the most prestigious in the world, a “startup machine” that churns out “billion-dollar ideas.” It was founded in 2005 and provides a three month bootcamp, seed funding, and mentorship which culminates in a demo day where the entrepreneurs pitch to a room filled with wealthy and influential investors.

YC has fostered some of today’s most well-known startups like Reddit and AirBnB and achieved some impressive exits. Its summer 2012 class was the biggest yet with 84 startups, but this number caused a “bottleneck” that led the partners to dramatically decrease the size of the next class.

“The reason we accepted fewer applications was that in summer 2012 we grew too fast,” Graham said in a blog post. “We had 66 companies in winter 2012, and that was fine, but for some reason more things than usual broke when we jumped from 66 to 84.”

I covered the summer 2012 demo day and spoke with many of the founders who said the main drawback to the large size was less access to the partners. Part of the value of participating in YC is being able to learn with, brainstorm, and collaborate with experienced and successful mentors who can help guide the entrepreneurs and products towards eventual success. Decreasing the class size helps open up this pipeline, as does adding more partners.

The business software behemoth is more than doubling its commitment to the SAP HANA Real Time Fund, going from $155 million to $405 million, to support innovation surrounding real-time applications and big data.

The SAP HANA fund launched in 2012 and primarily makes investments in early stage venture capital funds and startups building off SAP’s technology. HANA, which stands for High-Performance Analytic Appliance, is SAP’s next generation in-memory database. It can store up to 500 terabytes of data and execute at high speeds.

Big data technology is hot right now as large corporations and enterprises look for better ways to store, process, and analyze their data. SAP’s head of database and technology product marketing Amit Sinha told VentureBeat in an interview last year that “innovation in data management has stagnated” and there is a $2 trillion market opportunity for HANA and related database management technologies. HANA is SAP’s answer to the big data trend.

In an effort to stimulate innovation, SAP began the SAP Startup Focus program which is like an accelerator program for enterprise and IT companies that are working on predictive analytics products. Innovation can be tough in large companies and initiatives like Startup Focus and the Real Time Fund are intended to keep SAP ahead of the curve, or at least keeping pace with it. The company has actively been acquiring startups to this end as well.

The increased size of the fund is a reflection of the strong interest of entrepreneurs and VCs in participating in the SAP ecosystem. Elizabeth “Beezer” Clarkson, COO and Managing Director at SAP Ventures, said it is also indicative of a changing venture capital landscape.

“We believe we have a new model for corporate venture the start-up ecosystem is embracing,” she said. “The additional funding allows us to broaden the scope of what the SAP HANA Fund invests in to include all SAP platform technologies, for example, cloud, mobile or analytic technologies as well as HANA.  We will also be able to extend our investment horizon for the SAP HANA Real Time Fund from 3-5 years to 7-10 years. Further, we will hire a business development staff and develop programs and partnership opportunities with the SAP ecosystem that deliver additional business value, like helping companies to grow internationally and exchange insights with industry experts.”

So far the fund has made investments in three startups — Gild, a recruiting solution that helps organizations find developers skilled in big data, FeedZai, a Portuguese startup that provided real-time fraud detection and prevention, and a third unnamed Israeli company. SAP HANA RTF (enough abbreviations for you?) has also committed funds to ten early stage venture capital funds including SV Angel, August Capital, and Data Collective in the Bay Area, and Point Nine and Magma in Berlin and Tel Aviv, respectively.

The fund is managed by SAP Ventures, which also manages a $353 million direct growth fund that invests in growth-stage IT companies. Over the past 15 years, SAP Ventures has invested in more than one hundred companies round the world including LinkedIn, Box, Violin Memory, and Lithium.

Photo Credit: SAP’s president Sanjay Poonen on stage at CloudBeat/Michael O’Connell

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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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As research indicates that the U.S. is an increasingly difficult place for foreign founders to come and build companies and founders tell horror stories of the massive challenges they faced dealing with byzantine U.S. immigration policies, Canada is burnishing its reputation as open for business — and open for new residents.

Canada’s new startup visa has received a huge amount of attention in the U.S. as the the global war for talent heats up. Senators such as Jerry Moran (R-Kan.) have tried to address the situation via legislation like the Startup Act 3.0, but that’s a slim hope after deaths of 1.0 and 2.0.

Source: Wikipedia

Jason Kenney, Canadian Minister of Citizenship, Immigration, and Multiculturalism.

The Startup Visa provides immediate permanent residency in Canada if a founder meets just three criteria. An applicant must:

1. Secure an investment from a designated Canadian VC or fund
2. Demonstrate English language proficiency
3. Have at least one year of postsecondary education

This weekend, Canadian member of parliament and Citizenship, Immigration, and Multiculturalism Minister Jason Kenney is in Silicon Valley promoting his country’s Startup Visa.

We chatted with Kenney about the visa’s goals, his intentions, and the U.S. immigration system.

VentureBeat: What’s the ultimate goal of the Startup Visa?

Jason Kenney: We want a pathway for the world’s best and brightest to come to Canada and to harness that drive and innovation to be at the cutting edge of the modern economy.

VentureBeat: Why are you coming to Silicon Valley right now?

Kenney: The U.S. immigration system is dysfunctional, and it’s really difficult for talented immigrants to stay in the U.S. permanently. I’m coming to further raise the profile of the program and send the message that Canada’s open for business.

If you’re a young startup entrepreneur having trouble renewing your visa, come here! We offer immediate permanent residency.

VentureBeat: What’s the response been so far?

Kenney: There’s been a great amount of interest, but we only opened for applications on April 4, so it’s too early to tell. We will issue up to 2,500 per year, but I don’t anticipate it will be fully subscribed for the first year because it’s still new.

I know there’s a huge pent-up demand in the U.S., and I think the word is going to spread virally: If you want to stay permanently in NA, think of Canada.

VentureBeat: You’re offering permanent residency to anyone in who secures an investment. What about those who fail?

Kenney: Many countries, such as Australia, only offer temporary resident status. In Canada, we’re going to give you the “green card” right up front.

We know full well the rate of failure in startups is high, but if they come up here and don’t succeed, they have demonstrated they they have high human capital. And in the long run, their chances of succeeding and building a successful enterprise are high.

We want Canada to become a magnet for people like that.

VentureBeat: Why is Canada a good place to come build a startup?

Kenney: We have really strong tech sectors in Kitchener/Waterloo, Toronto, Vancouver, Montreal, and a few other places, an increasingly strong venture capital industry, and very well-run industry associations, angel associations.

Plus, we have the lowest business taxes in the developed world, and the strongest fiscal position in the developed world.

In terms of macro-economic terms, that’s important … Canada weathered the storm of the economic downturn better than any other country.

In addition, we have an immigration system that works, which means you have access to global talent … and human capital is even more important than financial capital.

VentureBeat: Any other message for Silicon Valley?

Kenney: While here we’ll be meeting with the CEOs of many major IT companies just to emphasize what a great place Canada is to invest in.

I think we’re really going to kick this into hyperdrive.

photo credit: PhOtOnQuAnTiQuE via photopin cc

In a blog post today, the Twitter founder announced closing a funding round led by Spark Capital with participation from SV Angel. An elite group of individual investors also contributed, including Jack Dorsey, Bono, Reid Hoffman, Steven Johnson, Evan Williams, Al Gore, Greg Yaitanes, and Roya Mahboob.

Not much is known about Stone’s startup beyond the fact that it is called Jelly, involves mobile technology, and has something to do with promoting social good.

“As mobile devices have taken an increasingly central role in our lives, humanity has grown more connected than ever — herein lies massive opportunity,” Stone wrote. This financing will support advancing Jelly beyond the prototyping stage through hiring and product development of “what we think of as the natural next step for our connected society.”

Jelly has hired former Twitter engineering manager Ben Finkel as CTO and the man behind Twitter music, Kevin Thau.

News leaked that Stone was working on a new startup in March 2013. He and Twitter cofounder Ev Williams left Twitter and founded the Obvious Corporation, which launched in 2011 as a startup incubator and investment vehicle. In August 2012, Obvious announced a new publishing platform called Medium that encouraged medium-length, thoughtful content and was intended as a “better place to read and write about things that matter.” Williams said this would be his main focus. Now with Jelly, Stone has his own pet project and there is speculation about whether this means Stone is leaving Medium/Obvious.

Until we know more about Jelly, we must be content with details about jellyfish themselves. Perusing Jelly’s blog yields interesting information, like the fact that jellyfish brains are decentralized and “more ‘we’ than ‘me’” and a group of jellies is called a bloom.

MicroVentures has a powerful pitch for startups: We’ll help you raise money.

The Austin-based company helps accredited investors pool their cash together (usually somewhere between $1,000 and $30,000 per person) to fund early-stage startups like Ribbon and Medigram. For investors, it’s the opportunity to fork over as little as $1,000 but still get in early alongside more seasoned angel investors.

MicroVentures has reached $16 million in investments today and claims to have surpassed any other equity-based crowdfunding platform. The company issued a press release announcing the news stating that its success is evidence of “significant demand” from smaller investors in this asset class.

The release reads like a strong nudge to the Securities and Exchange Commission, which is taking its sweet time to finalize rules on the provision of the Jumpstart Our Business Startups Act, known as the JOBS Act.

“As we patiently wait for the SEC to enact rules around the JOBS Act…,” CEO Tim Sullivan begins his statement to the press (pictured above, left, with cofounder Bill Clark).

For over a year, we’ve been hearing from founders of crowdfunding platforms how the rules will change sometime in 2013. At this point, entrepreneurs (and Republicans) are only cautiously optimistic that the SEC will come to a decision this year — the deadlines have passed since the JOBS Act came into effect one year ago. A new October 31 deadline was recently proposed by the House.

As IndieGoGo founder Danae Ringelmann democratically put it in a recent article, the SEC is taking “longer to introduce the Act than expected;” still, she says she’s glad they are “taking the process so seriously.”

It’s a tricky process for the SEC — the regulatory body will need to weigh up the interests of investors, entrepreneurs, and crowdfunding execs from platforms like MicroVentures, AngelList, and FundersClub.

“We will continue working hard amid a busy rulemaking agenda to get these crowdfunding rules done as soon as possible, with an emphasis on getting them right,” John Nester, an SEC spokesman, said last month in a statement to Politico.

For now, Sullivan hopes entrepreneurs will continue to open up their rounds to small dollar investors rather than relying on seasoned Sand Hill Road investors. “We may find that the crowd does an even better job at picking winners,” he said.

This sponsored post is produced by SF MusicTech Summit.

Are you an innovator at the convergence of Internet, music, and technology? One of the entrepreneurs, investors, developers, or press who are building a better future for musicians and fans? If so, the 13th SF MusicTech Summit is for you! It takes place on Tuesday, May 28 at San Francisco’s Hotel Kabuki.

With close to 1,000 attendees and 100 speakers, the SF MusicTech Summit is the best place to connect and do business with the industry leaders who are productively moving the music/technology ecosystem ahead.

See old friends, connect with new ones, do business, and have a great time. Participants come away energized and ready to take on the world. There will be dozens of panels and presentations, elevator pitches, speed networking, and an expo hall and all-day lounge where deals will get done.

Parties the night before and the night of the event also offer ample opportunities to make connections.

Our amazing speakers include mega-producer Jermaine Dupri, Ime Archibong of Facebook, Ken Jordan of The Crystal Method, Judy Estrin of EVNTLive, Jack Conte of Pomplamoose, Stephen Phillips of Twitter #Music, Nick Adler of The Roxy, Nate Auerbach of Tumbler, Mahbod Moghadam of Rap Genius, Caroline Burruss of Austin City Limits Live, Larry Marcus of Walden Venture Capitol, Lewis Gersh of Metamorphic.VC, and many more. View the speaker list.

And the conference participants are just as amazing as those onstage. View the attendee list.

Are you a developer or startup? Here is your chance to showcase your work at our next summit! Enter the “Startup Innovators Showcase Challenge” here: Apply now! Winning startups will be invited to do a one-minute live demo in front of our community members, including: investors, marketers, biz dev, and more, which could lead to great opportunities.

For example, the CEO of Boombotix performed during our recent Elevator Pitch Session. Larry Marcus of Walden Venture Capital was in the crowd, loved what he saw, and went on to lead an investment round.

Will you get those same sort of results at the SF MusicTech Summit? Not guaranteed, of course, but if you aren’t there, it’s guaranteed that you wont.

Use discount code “venturebeat” for 20 percent off, and we’re thrilled that VentureBeat’s own Christina Farr will be hosting the Demo sessions! Hope to see you there. More information, please visit www.sfmusictech.com

Sponsored posts are content that has been produced by a company, which is either paying for the post or has a business relationship with VentureBeat, and they’re always clearly marked. The content of news stories produced by our editorial team is never influenced by advertisers or sponsors in any way. For more information, contact sales@venturebeat.com.

JOOR is an online marketplace for wholesale fashion buying. The company is on track to do more than $350 million in transactions in 2013, which is more than three times the amount from 2012. More than 580 brands and designers and 30,000 buyers use the platform including many of the biggest names in fashion. JOOR recently opened up an office in Milan and is opening one soon in Sydney.

This is a prime example of a company applying technology to an industry that is predominantly offline, and succeeding. Founder Mona Bijoor said that most transactions in fashion wholesale happen at trade shows, market appointments, and with handwritten orders. JOOR’s business platform puts the sales process online so retailers and brands can connect in a more efficient way.

“This is a highly fragmented market where retailers can only source products from places they actually go and there is limited data available about the inventory,” she said in an interview. “If online sales of clothing makes sense for the consumer world, why shouldn’t it make sense for wholesale? Our job is to make retailers and brands better, smarter, and faster.”

Bijoor spent most of her career working in fashion with brands like Chanel, Elie Tahari, Cynthia Rowley, and in the buying departments of global retailers. She experienced the pain points on both sides and saw an opportunity to “pioneer wholesale evolution.”

The platform’s core technology connects brands and retailers. Brands create a profile page with marketing materials and retailers put up pages with information about their clients and inventory. Search capabilities are available on both sides using filters like price, trend, region, product etc… and the system finds relevant matches.

Buyers have access to real-time analytics about orders, notes, fulfillment, shipping and billing, as well as lead generation tools. Retailers can look at best selling items, discover new brands, and build and place orders on the platform.

The global fashion industry generates over a $1.5 trillion dollars a year and is growing. Most of the discussion surrounding about fashion tech focuses on consumers, but consumers are at one end of a very long and complicated supply chain that JOOR is  trying to make “less archaic.” This is more important than ever as “fast-fashion” has caused consumers to expect rapid turnover.

Joor’s clients include fashion heavyweights Diane Von Furstenberg, Phillip Lim, Alexander McQueen, Rag & Bone, and Thakoon. Right now the platform is only available for women’s apparel and menswear but Bijoor said she is exploring opportunities in footwear and accessories. Competitors include NuOrder, Balluun, Brandboom, but none have the high profile clientele that JOOR does (although NuOrder raised money from Rachel Zoe).

JOOR is based in New York with offices in LA and Milan and has raised $5.5 million to date from Battery Ventures, Lerer Ventures, Great Oaks VC, Landis Capital, and Forerunner Ventures.

Photo Credit: electric stove/Flickr

Vend’s technology integrates with existing systems like printers, cash drawers, and barcode scanners. It collects data and stores it in the cloud, and it’s accessible on Macs, PCs, and iPads. Business can manage their inventory, monitor and track sales, and look at real-time reporting.

Traditional POS systems are not connected to the Internet, difficult to manage, and expensive. A host of startups have cropped up over the past few years building on developments in mobile technology, cloud computing, and the growth of digital payments to give the POS industry an overhaul.

The most well-known of these startups is Square which pioneered a small piece of hardware known as a dongle that is plugged into an iPhone or iPad to accept credit cards payments. The dongle is accompanied by a suite of software called Square Register that includes checkout customization features, management tools, and data analytics. PayPal and a host of clones such as iZettle and Payleven have similar solutions.

Vend is like Square (or PayPal or iZettle or Payleven) without the dongle.

Vend’s funding news comes on the heels of announcements by Square and PayPal yesterday that could sound the death knell for cash registers. PayPal announced that it would offer free credit, debit, check, and PayPal processing to U.S. businesses that adopt its PayPal Here solution, and Square released a new piece of hardware called the Square Stand that provides a more “elegant” alternative to the cash register.

However, businesses that already have POS hardware may not want to throw them out and start fresh, which is why Vend’s solution is appealing. Vend launched in 2010 and now powers payments in 6,500 stores in 100 countries. Customers include businesses in fashion, sports, tourism, food and drink, and healthy and beauty who pay a monthly subscription fee for the software.

Vend is based in Auckland, New Zealand. Half of the funds came from new investors in New Zealand and Australia, including the Milford Active Growth Fund, and entrepreneurs Craig Winkler, Paul Bassett, and Matt Rockman. Existing Berlin-based investor Point Nine Capital also contributed. This brings Vend’s total capital raised to just under $10 million.

By Dr. Michal Tsur, a serial tech entrepreneur, and 

We live in a world where young, ambitious women will now contend with a new, and sadly pressured life question – are you “leaning in”?

While Sheryl Sandberg, the second in command at Facebook and author of recent bestseller Lean In, and her ambitious following of female professionals have a nuanced understanding of the concept, in common speak, the words “lean in” convey something too simple, intense, and aggressive.

“We hold ourselves back in ways both big and small, by lacking self-confidence, by not raising our hands, and by pulling back when we should be leaning in,” writes Sandberg in the book.

Sandberg, who is trying to launch a social movement to empower women, is admirable and certainly has wisdom to offer. However, the intensity and pressure conjured by her phrase is not the right message we should be sending to female youth. In fact, remember old high school basketball coaches barking at us to lean in? Sandberg’s message is reminiscent. “Lean in ladies! Be aggressive. Run faster. The quarter is almost over. No taking a rest now!”

The words themselves were designed to motivate us to work harder and faster; to win.

Yet, unlike basketball games, careers are not broken into quarters. They are more of an evolving marathon filled with twists and turns. The opposite of a sprint. And while muscling forward may help one win a basketball game, it’s not clear that more energy, effort, and aggressiveness is what will get women into the boardroom.

What we’ve realized in debating the message of “lean in” while looking at the careers of people like Sandberg and Mayer, is that something big is lost in the colloquial phrase that Sandberg is championing. We must redefine the phrase to convey a vision that is as big in spirit and excitement as it is in raw ambition.

As Sandberg herself states, success depends on a fair bit of luck. Both Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer and Sandberg had the good fortune to jump on the Google train in the early days. And Sandberg’s COO role at Facebook has catapulted her into tech godliness that was largely unpredictable.

Yes, smart negotiation, ambition, and sponsors were important. But, what distinguishes Sandberg, and what we’ve learned from our own careers is that success is also about creating, recognizing, and seizing opportunities.  It’s about putting oneself in a position that maximizes luck.

Let’s look at Sandberg. She had the confidence to jump between jobs with the government, the World Bank, and tech companies, following a varied and non-linear path. Mayer grabbed the CEO opportunity at Yahoo despite being pregnant, and knowing that she’d be following a long series of executive failures.

In our own careers, it’s been the opportunities that came from new connections made in school or at a conference, or from invitations to write, speak, or create, that pushed us forward.

And at Kaltura, we look at examples like Becky, one of our key project managers, who, after being told that she didn’t have enough technical experience or background, decided to take a leap, jump into a technical job and learn engineering basics on the side in order to make a career transition.

Or Charly, who, with no degree or any technical background whatsoever, led customer support at one of our competitors and later joined Kaltura as a key account manager.  Yes, these women fought hard to get ahead, but what really sets them apart is that they identified a passion, took risks, and seized new opportunities.

What we see in these examples are ambitious women that “leaned in” to advance their careers and families simultaneously. The message of “lean in” should not be to push harder, as Sandberg argues, “put your foot on the gas pedal and keep it there.”

The key, rather, is to be mindful, intentional and clear-eyed about possibilities that emerge in life and work. It is about not being guided by fear, but rather knowing your passions, being bold, and taking risks. And for women who are nearer to the top, leaning in is about being conscious of setting precedent and shaping institutions in ways that will also create paths for younger women.

So, to women (or men) who feel compelled and inspired by Sandberg but also scared about the implied added pressure to constantly push higher and farther – take a breath.  There is a way to lean in and achieve success with levity and spirit. Lean in to life. Opportunities will emerge.

The key is to be confident and aware enough to see them.

Dr. Michal Tsur is a serial tech entrepreneur, having co-founded online security firm Cyota and open-source video platform Kaltura, where she is currently president. Leah Belsky is a fellow at the Information Society Project at Yale Law School, where she contributes on online collaboration and technology policy, and is currently SVP Operations at Kaltura.

photo credit: Victor1558 via photopin cc

This sponsored post is produced by FoundersCard.

That’s what you might be thinking after you read this article.

If you’re starting the next big thing, building a business or looking for your next venture, likely you could use all the networking opportunities you can get. The challenge is to find a high quality community made up of entrepreneurs and VCs who have the know-how, clout or resources to facilitate your success.

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With the entrepreneurial community hitting its next big wave since the 90s, you’ll be kicking yourself for not trying it sooner. VentureBeat readers can access the preferred membership rate of $395 per year (30% off standard price of $595) using code FCVENTB13 by May 31. Learn more.

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[Disclosure: Stained Glass Labs founder Redg Snodgrass is a consultant for VentureBeat's MobileBeat event. -Ed.]

Google Glass is a controversial device. Some say it is the future of computing, others find it creepy, and no one knows what its true impact will be.

Stained Glass Labs debuted today to support exploration and development of Glass technology. SGL is a group of entrepreneurs, mentors, and early adopters who are forming an incubator program for companies working with wearable computing. The community includes mentors from across the startup sector, including entrepreneurs, angel investors, VCs, and employees from major tech companies. SGL will accept 10 startups into the program, which involves a three-month bootcamp as well as tools, connections, and support to create Glass-based products for the mainstream.

“There is a lot of apprehension and negativity surrounding Glass, but it’s a lot like how people reacted when the iPhone first came out,” said founder Redg Snodgrass in an interview. “Any time you do something new, there is a level of discomfort with it, but Glass is pushing human evolution forward. It is a more natural fit for humanity than a smartphone because its integrated into our human environment. You can look up and engage with other people, and it’s a better way to interact with data in real life.”

By forming a supportive community around Glass, Stained Glass Labs hopes to make wearable computing more accessible to people who aren’t “dorks or doctors.” The device itself is still in the early stages. During her review, VentureBeat writer Jolie O’Dell described it as “nonintuitive and buggy” and without many apps or features. While O’Dell sees it as a distraction from reality, Snodgrass believes it will make people more attuned to it.

“There are no experts yet,” he said. “No one has the answers, and Stained Glass Labs is not like a traditional incubator where we teach you because we know all the answers. Initially its more about a community where everyone can bounce around ideas.”

The name for Stained Glass Labs was inspired by the ancient Romans. Stained glass was considered a luxury of the wealthy rather than an art form until it became popular in churches and accessible to the common people. Artists and craftsmen began experimenting with the medium, and it flourished. Stained Glass Labs hopes the same will happen with Glass.

“Many in our community have spent grandiose efforts to dismiss, denigrate, and deny the urge of promise that is wearable glass technology,” the group said in a statement. “We as a group have stepped up to say that it is inevitable humanity will integrate with technology for the betterment or detriment of society.  We have decided to push Glass to be about this “betterment.”

Startups are already working on applications and products that involve wearable computing. There are wide possibilities for the health care industry, field workers, and multiple news apps have already come out. Snodgrass, however, said that he is most interested in the social possibilities of the technology. Stained Glass Labs isn’t limited to Google and there are other wearable computing devices out there like the Memento camera and a Motorola hands-free computer, but Glass is the main focus at the moment.

Before founding Stained Glass Labs, Snodgrass cofounded Skout, “the first dating app in the App Store,” and Taploid. Cofounder Kyle Ellicott is the cofounder and president of Heavy Cloud Media Group and the creative director at TechZulu.

Photo Credit: Dylan Tweney

Google Glass will likely be immensely useful for doctors, field workers, and other service providers. But for ordinary people, it’s disorienting and nerdy. 

But that hasn’t stopped developers from responding to Google’s request to build applications for Glass. Owners of the device now have a nifty news aggregation app dubbed “Thirst Droplet,” released today by Thirst Labs.

Thirst believes the investment in Glass was worthwhile and will help it reach “Generation C” (the “C” stands for “connected.”) Either way, it reportedly only spent around three days developing features for the app.

Thirst has already unveiled its Android and iPhone apps for personalizing and curating the news. Follow topics on a mobile device and the web, and Glass will send a push notification when it’s trending on social media. Hundreds of thousands of topics — such as “Oprah Winfrey,” “49ers,” or “Google” — are currently available for you to follow.

The Glass app takes the news experience step further, giving you the opportunity to listen to an entire article. You can also flag an article for future reading and email it to yourself straight from Glass. You can also “like” or “dislike” a story.

Thirst has differentiated itself from other news readers with its language processing tools. Rather than asking readers to discover news, the it automatically finds and presents the most relevant content in what Thirst says is an engaging way. The company tracks millions of data sources — blogs, social media, and so on — to determine whether news is trending.

Don’t miss the explanatory video below to see how the app works.

The Thirst news app for iPad

“Under the hood, you don’t read the same feeds as Google Reader. We find the topics relevant to you,” CEO Anuj Verma said in a recent interview with VentureBeat (pictured above), hitting on how Thirst differs from competing news apps like Flipboard and Pulse. “You don’t really have to hunt for the content.”

Similarly to news aggregation app Pulse, which LinkedIn recently acquired, Thirst Labs was formed by college friends. The founders are a pair of University of Berkeley, California grads who share a passion for UI, UX, and developing algorithms.

San Francisco-based Thirst Labs has raised $950,000 in seed funding from BlueRun Ventures, Steve Newcomb, and Jason Krikorian.

Top image // Google Glass