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Eclipse Foundation Adds New Internet Of Things Projects To Help Push M2M Standards Forward
The Eclipse Foundation is probably best known for its work on the Eclipse IDE, but the project is also home to more than 250 open-source projects that are hosted on the group’s servers. One major goal of the foundation has always been to bring together industry players to work on standards and their implementation together, and one of the latest areas Eclipse has become involved in is the Internet of Things.
As Ian Skerrett, the foundation’s Vice President of Marketing and Ecosystem told me, most of today’s Internet of Things products are still built on top of proprietary solutions. As an open-source community, the Eclipse Foundation hopes to change this by working on open standards for machine-to-machine (M2M) protocols and tools for making an open Internet of Things a reality. The Internet, Skerrett noted, was built on top of these kinds of open standards, and for the Internet of Things to really take off, it also needs to run based on the same principles.
Currently, IBM, Sierra Wireless, Eurotech and Axeda have come together under the umbrella of the Eclipse Foundation to work on specs and implementations, but Skerrett told me he hopes that more companies will join them over time. Already, he stressed, there are a number of individuals and academic projects that are contributing to the M2M open-source projects hosted by the foundation.
To push this idea forward, the Eclipse Foundation is adding four new open-source projects to its stable today. The Ponte project, for example, aims to create a REST API that makes it easier for developers to read and write data from sensors and actuators via M2M protocols and to exchange data between protocols. Also new are Eclipse SCADA, an open source project for monitoring and controlling large-scale industrial projects on the scale of solar farms, and Concierge, an implementation of the OSGi core specs for small embedded devices. The fourth new project is Kura, a framework for M2M gateways. Most of these gateways today tend to be proprietary, but the idea behind Kura is to abstract these complexities away to make it easier for Java developers to build M2M applications.
The focus right now, Skerrett said, is to build a community around these projects, as well as the existing ones the foundation already hosted. Thanks to the maker movement, Arduino and the Raspberry Pi, open-source developers are taking a stronger interest in hardware-centric projects. And while we’re still in the early days of the Internet of Things, Skerrett hopes that this interest will also translate into more interest in the foundation’s work in this space.
Backup Service IDrive Now Ships 1TB Hard Disks To Users Who Want To Back Up Large Amounts Of Data
Online backup service IDrive today announced a new service that allows its users to back up large amounts of data to the cloud. Instead of waiting around for days to upload what are often hundreds of gigabytes of data, IDrive now ships hard disks to its users so they can back up to a terabyte of data to the cloud. The users then ship the drive back to IDrive and the company enables the data on their account. After this, users can continue to use the company’s regular online backup service to send incremental updates to IDrive and, of course, restore their data from their cloud backup.
The service, called IDrive Express, is available for a one-time fee of $59.99. IDrive Pro users, whose paid accounts start at $99.50 per year for 100GB of backup storage, can use the service once per year for free.
The idea to use hard disks and FedEx or UPS to back up data is, of course, not new. Mozy, for example, also offers a similar service (though for the higher price of $275 for up to 1.8 terabytes), and both Google and Amazon allow developers to send in drives to enable large amounts of data in their respective clouds.
As IDrive’s CEO Raghu Kulkarni told me, the company originally thought that it would target this service at business users, but the team quickly realized that most personal users now also have very similar storage needs. Most of us, after all, store huge amounts of photos and videos on our local hard disks now.
The process to get started with IDrive Express is pretty straightforward. Users request a drive and it gets shipped to them. The drives include IDrive’s backup software, so starting the backup is just a matter of plugging the drive into your computer’s USB port (Mac and Windows are supported), waiting for it to finish and returning it to the company. IDrive will then upload it to your account in one of the four California data centers it has a presence in. All of the data is automatically encrypted during the backup process (in case the drive gets lost), and users can also use private key encryption to ensure that nobody at iDrive can see their data, either.
The whole process, Kulkarni says, should take less than a week. It’s worth noting that users do, of course, have to pay for the extra storage these backups need on iDrive’s servers. The service’s pricing plans start at $49.50 per year for personal use and $99.50 for business users who, in return, get support for multiple accounts and backups from Windows Server. IDrive, the company tells me, currently has about 2 million users, and about 250,000 of these are on a paid plan.
Nara Gets First Telco Customer As SingTel Tries To Fend Off Content Competition
SingTel has licensed Nara Logics‘ restaurant recommendation engine, in a bid to give its Digital Life assets a shot in the arm.
SingTel is Singapore’s largest telecoms provider, and one of the largest in Asia, with 434 million mobile customers in 25 countries in the region.
The deal will see SingTel license Nara’s “Pandora for restaurants” algorithm, that is aimed at creating personalized lists of eating places for users.
Nara currently lists about 250,000 restaurants across the US and Canada, and this deal with SingTel marks the first time the Cambridge, Massachusetts startup is working outside North America, and with a telco.
The value of the deal was undisclosed, but Nara Logics’ CEO, Thomas Copeman, said it will span several years, and that the revenue from it is “financially significant” to Nara.
Nara, founded in 2010, came out of stealth mode in 2012, raising $4 million in June, and another $3 million at the end of that year.
SingTel will use Nara’s technology for its Digital Life portals, in particular its crowdsourced restaurant reviews sites, Hungrygowhere and Eatability.
Last year, it acquired Singapore’s Hungrygowhere for $9.4 million and Australia’s Eatability for $6.2 million.
It remains to be seen whether the inclusion of Nara will it make a difference for SingTel.
Since the telco bought Hungrygowhere, it hasn’t really done much with the site other than mash some of the food-related editorial content from its news portal, inSing.com, onto Hungrygowhere. (It’s also slapped a whole bunch of ads on the site, too, in recent months.)
The site currently has a fairly rudimentary search engine, and throws up search findings by keyword or tagged category.
Copeman said the new search will allow SingTel users to input personal preferences, tastes and interests. The aim is to shorten search time and find results more relevant to users, he said.
SingTel’s head of Digital Life’s local operations, Loo Cheng Chuan, said the aim for Digital Life is to be in the “hyperlocal” space, in particular serving food, lifestyle and e-commerce content.
The telco also recently launched a restaurant booking site called TableDB, similar to OpenTable.
As SingTel gets its arms deeper in the business of providing content, it faces some strong competition from existing local players. In Singapore, for example, Chope.com.sg and Reserveit.sg also provide table reservations, and in the “lifestyle discovery” portion, Yelp made Singapore its first destination in Asia last November.
Still, SingTel has deep pockets and will be able to compete, at the least based on aggressive acquisitions.
Last month, the telco announced that it has set aside $1.6 billion between 2013 and 2015 to shop for startups.
The Digital Life arm was formed just last year, when SingTel performed a major restructuring of its business, in a bid to be lifted above the ranks of a “dumb pipe”.
Digital Life is intended to compete with over-the-top competition, and provides digital content such as TV and magazines to SingTel subscribers.
In order to collect more content assets, SingTel went on a buying spree in 2012, acquiring Hungrygowhere and Eatability, as well as photo aggregator Pixable for $26.5 million.
Mobile ad platform Amobee was a big ticket purchase of $321 million in March 2012, to augment its own mobile advertising business.
Outside of acquisitions, last year it launched a news reader called Newsloop, and a meet-up app called Loop & Meet.
Apple Patents Triple Sensor, Triple Lens iPhone Camera For Better Resolution And Color Accuracy
Apple has been granted a new patent related to camera tech by the USPTO today (via AppleInsider), which uses three different sensors and three different lenses to improve color capture accuracy and image resolution for photos shot with an iPhone or other mobile device. The system is similar to the two sensor Apple patent around mobile cameras the company applied for recently, but solves a different kind of imaging problem.
This sensor arrangement would improve upon most mobile camera designs by using two chorminance sensors, each of which is placed to one side of a luminance sensor. The luminance or light sensor would determine light levels of the image, while the chrominance sensors would be responsible for accurately capturing color data. Two chrominance sensors arranged in that manner would be able to compensate for blind spots in each other’s field of view, ensuring accurate color rendering for all scenes.
If color info is missing from any part of the scene, as can happen with traditional combined sensor arrangements, then overall photo resolution suffers too because of a lack of data, so this would improve not only color rendering but overall image quality. And the information drawn from the two chrominance sensors would also be useful in automatically correcting for distortion caused by the camera lens.
Last week, as mentioned, Apple patented dual-sensor imaging for iPhones, that would automatically combine two separate images to correct for flaws in either. Combined with this sensor design, it begins to be apparent that Apple is doing lots of work on the imaging side of its mobile offerings. The iPhone has long been held up as an example of the best cameras in smartphones, but competitors are starting to focus innovation on their own phone camera designs, the Lumia 1020 being probably the most recent memorable example.
Apple probably doesn’t have much to fear from Windows Phone devices, feature rich as they may be, but a significant camera improvement is a good way to attract customers with something new. Don’t expect changes like these to iPhone cameras coming in the next update this fall, but definitely consider this an area to watch over the next few years.
Viber Updates Android App With Doodle Feature, iOS Update Coming In Next Few Weeks
Viber is today announcing an update to its Android app with a few new features, including a doodling feature that lets you draw or paint over photos or on a blank page and then send those doodled up pictures to friends.
Doodling on photos has become a huge trend lately.
First made notable by Snapchat, users can draw on selfies before sending them as self-destructing photo messages. More recently, Mavensay launched an app called Rithm, which focuses on music messaging, but includes the ability to add photos to the Rithm and draw on top of them.
Along with Viber’s Doodle update, the new version of the Android app will include a few smaller upgrades including the ability to know when your messages have been viewed by the recipient, with a “seen” status. Users will also find a slew of new emoticons, as well as better support for Viber Desktop integration on both Windows and Mac, and various bug fixes.
Plus, the Android version of the app is now available in 16 new languages, including Croatian, Czech, Danish, Finnish, Greek, Hindi, Hungarian, Indonesian, Malay, Norwegian, Polish, Romanian, Slovak, Thai, Tagalog and Ukrainian
Here’s Viber CEO Talmon Marco’s official wording on the matter:
Viber is a feature rich platform that gives our users multiple ways to communicate freely. We are constantly working to expand and enhance that functionality to give users complete freedom over the way they communicate. We think the new doodle feature will not only prove to be incredibly fun for Viber users, but will also make Viber that much more useful as a communications tool.
In terms of bringing this functionality over to iOS, Viber reports that Doodle will come in an update in the next few weeks.
Pick up the Android update here.
Olapic Raises $5 Million Series A To Merge Photo-Sharing With E-Commerce
Olapic has today closed a $5 million Series A round led by Fung Capital USA and Longworth Venture Partners, with participation from existing investors including Great Oaks and Scout Ventures.
Olapic lets brands leverage our current obsession with photo-sharing by taking user-generated photos and putting them within brand partners’ ecommerce experience.
When we last heard from Olapic, the ecommerce-based photo-sharing platform was focused on tapping publisher brands, such as Conde Nast and NY Daily News, as well as brands like Pepsi, as the main customers for its service.
Now, however, Olapic believes that ecommerce brands are the key to success, as user-generated photos can almost act as a visual review of various products.
Here’s how it works:
Olapic partners with retailers and then scours the web for various related hashtags and keywords. Then, that brand can insert photos sourced from this hunt directly into the ecommerce experience, either on a product page or within a gallery. Brands are in complete control of the photos used on the website, and can see user submissions in real time. Plus, it comes with tools to stay connected to the users submitting photos and, according to co-founder Pau Sabria, ultimately increases e-commerce conversions.
Not only can brands use these photos creatively within the ecommerce pages, but they can track the ROI there with an analytics dashboard.
“Customer-inspired e-commerce is a market we are pioneering,” said Sabria. “We will use the funding to invest a significant effort into creating awareness for this type of marketing and ecommerce experience.”
Olapic currently has around 20 live brands on the site, including but not limited to Lululemon, Nasty Gal, Steve Madden, Threadless, New Balance, Jet Blue, and Coach.
The latest round of funding will go toward scaling the service, as well as hiring out more sales staff and investing in marketing for the first time.
VC Firm YL Ventures Raises $27.5M For Second Fund
YL Ventures, which backs SaaS companies such as ClickTale and Seculert, has announced the raise of $27.5 million in its second fund (YLV II). The VC firm says the fund was oversubscribed, and increased its hard cap by ten percent to accommodate interest. Managing partner Yoav Andrew Leitersdorf declined to disclose any previous funding information.
Founded in 2007, YL Ventures focuses on early-stage Israeli startups with SaaS models and proprietary technology. Other areas of interest for the firm’s second fund include cloud computing, big data, cyber security, mobile technology and related fields. Investments usually range from $1 million to $2 million for seed-stage startups, with capital reserved for later rounds.
“SaaS is a relatively new business model, and few investors have true domain expertise in it. The belief at YL Ventures is that SaaS is the perfect model for selling software to enterprises while maintaining capital efficiency,” Leitersdorf tells TechCrunch.
YL Ventures’ interest in the Israeli market is due to an increase in Israeli startup acquisitions in the past few years, such as Google acquiring Waze and Facebook acquiring Face.com. YLV II is aimed to invest in eight portfolio in three years. Previous investments also include AcceloWeb, which was acquired by Limelight Networks in 2011, Upstream Commerce, 6Scan and BlazeMeter.
LinkedIn Expands The Influence Of Its Influencer Program With Search Functionality And Threaded Comments
LinkedIn today is adding some new features into its “Influencer” program, the company’s Klout-inspired network of experts and leaders in different fields launched in October 2012, who regularly publish posts that get extra special syndication on LinkedIn’s network. Now, users can start conversations around Influencer posts with threaded comments. And now more than 300 people in the Influencer program — some like Richard Branson with nearly 2 million followers — users can now search for them and their posts specifically through LinkedIn’s search box.
The expansion of the Influencer program is an example of how LinkedIn continues to roll out new services on its platform to get people using the site more as a social network and information hub, and less as just a place to check in only when they are looking for new jobs or people to hire. The company, at its last quarterly earnings in May, noted 225 million users but slowing revenue growth, so any more movement it makes to increase time spent on the site — either to boost advertising sales or to promote more premium, paid products — is a positive.
Other recent examples of that are the company’s enhanced infographics service on SlideShare, announced last week, as well as the many changes LinkedIn has made to its home page, and bigger acquisitions like that of newsreading app Pulse, to make the site more focused around news streams and information discovery.
The new features. Today, LinkedIn is starting to roll out threaded comments — meaning that users who reply to a post by an Influencer will now be able to start conversations and debates with people who are also reading that post. This will include the ability to mention other people to draw them into the mix, and notifications when a comment of yours has received a response. This is not unlike what Facebook introduced in March of this year with threaded comments earlier this year on Page posts, and is therefore an example of how LinkedIn is also hoping to get more people spending time in these posts and on the site in general. It will also make for a more useful experience for those interested in debating things like the strongest leadership qualities.
Then, taking a page from the mammoth power of Google, search is another area where social networks see some of their biggest potential for more discovery (and therefore engagement on the site). The company earlier this year revamped all of its search algorithms and at the time told me that this was laying the groundwork for introducing a lot more features. Today’s expansion to be able to search by Influencer is an example of that. Now, LinkedIn says that users can search by Influencers, and they and their most recent posts will appear in the results. This should also help get more Influencers, who by their nature are probably not shrinking violets, interested in posting more to the site.
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