A Boston-based company is creating a system to make the workforce more accountable and eliminate inefficiencies, starting with the restaurant industry. Objective Logistics works through a restaurant's point-of-sale system to create data points. These are fed into a cloud to make your waiter or waitress more accountable and make the restaurant more money.
Google Ventures thought it was a good idea. Along with Atlas Ventures, Objective Logistics raised a $1.5 million seed round this morning to further expand its reach and capabilities. The use-case scenarios are endless.
Boston-based health and fitness application RunKeeper made big news on Monday with $10 million in funding from a variety of venture capital companies. RunKeeper needs no introduction: it was one of the first health apps in the Apple App Store, has six million users and growing and has a CEO in Jason Jacobs that is full of energy and enthusiasm in building his company and a community of fitness geeks.
Fitness geeks may be the most appropriate term to use when describing RunKeeper and its staff. The startup is fundamentally a data driven company and service. It is also a grassroots community built upon users pushing each other to be healthier, happier people. RunKeeper may be the perfect example of how to build a lean startup through and app, grow it from the ground up and be successful.
PayPal predicts that the real spike in holiday shopping won't happen on Black Friday or Cyber Monday, but rather on Thanksgiving Day right after dinner. And this shopping will all be online, from the couch. PayPal says that shoppers will participate in "couch commerce," otherwise known as sitting on a couch and shopping from smartphones and tablets. A new report from Nielsen concurs with the idea of "couch commerce," indicating that 80% of consumers will be skipping the stores on Black Friday. TechFlash.com takes this idea one step further, calling Thanksgiving Day the new Black Friday.
In a blog post today, Klout announced that Google+ influence will become part of the Klout Score. Users were given the opportunity to connect their Google+ accounts to their Klout Scores back in September, and now that connection will pay off in the form of - you guessed it! - a higher Klout Score! What this really means is Klout wants you to connect all of your social networks to its service, and if you do the reward is a higher Klout Score. Like any rewards system, if you give a little more, you get a little more back. And Klout, like any other social media marketing tool, means business.
Today we're beginning a series exploring the world of cloud services from a consumer's point of view. The word "cloud" refers to an online repository for your software, applications and data. Steve Jobs called this a "digital hub" and, as he explained to his biographer Walter Issacson, "over the next few years, the hub is going to move from your computer into the cloud." Even if you're not an Apple user, the move to a cloud hub is coming your way no matter whose hardware you use. It's going to be a big transition.
We have a special channel devoted to exploring the Cloud from a business point of view, called ReadWriteCloud. But over the past year it's become increasingly apparent that cloud services will soon rule the lives of consumers too. Which cloud service, or combination of cloud services, is right for you?
Today Klout released a new scoring model for its social media influence service. According to a blog post, this project "represents the biggest step forward in accuracy, transparency and our technology in Klout's history."
Klout Score is based on the PeopleRank algorithm, which gathers information about how many people you influence, how much you influence them and how influential they are.
Daphne Oram was the first woman to direct an electronic music studio, the first woman to set up a personal studio and the first woman to design and construct an electronic musical instrument. This happened back in the late 1950s when she used sine wave oscillators, reel-to-reel tape decks and other electronics that most of us vaguely remember. She went on to invent a machine in 1965 called Oramics that used hand-drawn patterns that were converted to music that would be stored magnetically.
So, what just happened at F8, the Facebook developer's conference? In a word, Facebook has promised a re-imagined content and personalization platform for the Web.
If you believe the F8 conference hype, on Sept. 29 when Timeline opens to the public, Facebook is the place where every single inch of your life can be displayed, from the time you were born, to the time you die. It's also going to be the place where every single piece of media you share and consume will be distributed to everyone you know.
Facebook allows users of its social networking site to comment on its pages without Liking them now.
This is a step in a direction that might make advertisers, brand managers and marketing people feel a little uneasy, because it means they may have to start thinking deeply for their brand rather than just counting hits.
American Web tech companies trying to gain a share of the massive Chinese market bend too easily to government authorities, who demand tighter censorship and self-policing on the Internet, say analysts in a new report.
Voluntary attempts to conform to government demands while maintaining the freedom of speech found in their originating culture, have proven unsuccessful for companies like Google, Cisco, Microsoft and Yahoo, who have made the push into China and other rigidly-policed tech environments. The analysts say the problem is getting worse.
