TechCrunch
Flywheel Launches A Premium WordPress Hosting And Management Service For Designers
Flywheel, an Omaha, Neb.-based startup, is launching a new WordPress hosting and management service today that was built specifically for web designers, freelancers and agencies.
WordPress has come a long way from being “just” a blogging tool to being the go-to content management framework for designers and web developers who want to set up a web presence for their clients. But for many of them, managing their servers and fine-tuning them to make WordPress run fast is neither what they want to spend their time on, nor what they specialize in. Also, once they have everything up and running, they still have to get their clients to get a hosting account and transfer their WordPress install, content, plug-ins and themes over to a new server.
Flywheel aims to take all of this complexity out of the process. It handles all of the server management for its users and then allows them to easily transfer billing to their clients once the site is up and running. The service also allows its users to collaborate with others by making it easy to grant and revoke access to the hosting account and SFTP server for uploading files. The service, which runs on top of Digital Ocean’s servers, can spin up a new site in about 20 seconds. The service provides all users with a free demo account and doesn’t charge until the site goes live. Free sites, however, are protected with a password.
As Flywheel CEO Dusty Davidson told me, the team believes that WordPress has evolved to the point where most of the people who are creating sites with it are not technical and aren’t interested in managing hosting environments themselves. The team handles all of the caching, security hardening and other hosting aspects for its users. The actual WordPress user experience, it’s worth noting, remains unchanged on Flywheel and users can install their own plug-ins and themes and make other modifications as needed.
Paid Flywheel hosting plans start at $15 per month for small sites with fewer than 5,000 visitors and go up from there. The company says its most popular plan is its $30 per month account for sites with up to 25,000 visitors, 10GB of storage and 500GB of bandwidth. All of these include malware monitoring, but unless you opt for the $75 per month enterprise plan, you will have to pay extra for CDN and SSL support. The company also offers bulk pricing for agencies that work on 10 or 25 sites at the same time.
Google Earth Meets The Body: BioDigital Gets $4M To Bring Its 3-D, Virtual Anatomy & Health Platform To Every Browser
While the film is extremely compelling, it turns out that there’s actually a better way to learn about and visualize the human body than by watching Osmosis Jones on repeat. It used to be that students and the anatomically curious had to turn to pictures in textbooks or plastic models (Gasp! I know) to get a virtual tour of the human body. Well, thankfully, it turns out that some graduate students are learning with a better, more tech-savvy interactive map — as if the human body were being given the Google Earth treatment.
A New York-based imaging startup, called Biodigital, emerged early last year with an ambitious mission and product: Animate, map and display the human body in 3-D through any browser. Co-founders Frank Sculli and John Qualter created their free technology by combining advances in CAD, HTML5, WebGL and other cool acronym-ed web technologies to push browser-based virtualization forward and perhaps finally replace your dog-eared, dusty old anatomy textbook.
Since launching a year ago, “Human,” Biodigital’s fittingly-named, 3-D virtual body that displays thousands of medically accurate health conditions and anatomy objects through an interactive web-based platform, has attracted over one million members. Sculli tells us that students in over 2,500 schools are using it to learn anatomy, and consumers have begun taking tours of the virtual body to investigate and better understand their health, fitness — and, of course, how babies are made.
Thanks to partnerships with schools and a handful of healthcare providers, hospitals and clinics are beginning to introduce Biodigital’s virtual body into their practices to help patients understand their illnesses, afflictions and maladies. But, the big, long-term vision, the Biodigital founder tells us, is to develop a powerful set of APIs that enable developers and engineers to tap into startup’s imaging technology — using to build new applications and expand on existing ones.
Putting its tech in the hands of smart builders and creators, Sculli hopes, could “improve healthcare in crazy ways we’d never have imagined” over the long-term. And, of course, there’s the other benefit of launching APIs, which Paul Graham summarized neatly, dubbing them instant, self-serve business development tools.
With traction slowly mounting and the scope for Biodigital’s technology beginning to expand, the startup today announced that it is taking on $4 million in series A financing, led by FirstMark Capital, with participation from NYU Venture Fund and a handful of angel investors.
The funding, in essence, validates the founding mission of Biodigital, Sculli tells us, considering that the company has in some form been hacking away at this problem (and the use of 3-D tech to simplify health concepts) for about a decade. But, really, the funding validates the problem that has existed for years now — throughout both health and education — that the traditional means of communicating and presenting critical health information do not reflect the huge strides innovation and technology has made on the technical side over that time. With some 80 percent of adults having searched for health information online at some point, the Consumer demand for health information is clear, and the demand for better ways to visualize that health information have begun to catch up.
After all, as Sculli explains in a blog post today, 3-D technology is already changing the face of games, movies and is has become familiar to the Average Joe through geo-browsers like Google Earth. As the founders correctly (in my humble opinion) surmise: “Nowhere does this 3-D technology make more sense than in representing the human body.” Once browsers began to natively support this technology, alongside the meteoric rise of cloud and API-based businesses, Sculli writes, the founders had the missing piece. They could not only develop this product for healthcare providers, but use universally available tools and supported web technologies to bring their virtual body explorer to the public.
With its new funding, Biodigital finally has the capital backing it needs to expand its team and spread the word about its virtual body, building on the organic growth it’s captured over the last 12 months. Not only that, but it will be able to put the finishing touches on an API that will potentially result in some mind-melting applications and utilizations. The startup’s virtual body is free for anybody to use and can be found here, thought Biodigital will also be offering premium (paid) version of its service to both providers and businesses.
For more, check out Johnny Johnny Biggs’ video demo of the early product and interview with the founders last year, right …. here. Or just see the video below:
Senators Demand Answers On NSA Snooping - By The End Of 2014
This week nine members of the Senate Judiciary Committee sent a letter to the inspector general of the Intelligence Community, I. Charles McCullough III, asking him to conduct a full review of U.S. intelligence operations, and to “make public the findings.”
This almost sounds compelling: A bipartisan group of Senators demanding that the intelligence wing of the United States government take a hard look at itself and report its findings to the public. Of course, asking a consummate intelligence insider to vet his own team isn’t exactly exciting.
Mr. McCullough III is a former FBI agent, helped draft the intelligence portions of the Patriot Act, and worked in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. So the guy has friends throughout the agencies that he has now been asked to both vet and then publicly discuss. What do you want to wager that this report comes out milquetoast?
Here’s what the senators want the inspector general to focus on:
- The use and implementation of Section 215 and Section 702 authorities, including the manner in which information – and in particular, information about U.S. persons – is collected, retained, analyzed and disseminated.
- Applicable minimization procedures and other relevant procedures and guidelines, including whether they are consistent across agencies and the extent to which they protect the privacy rights of U.S. persons.
- Any improper or illegal use of the authorities or information collected pursuant to them.
- An examination of the effectiveness of the authorities as investigative and intelligence tools.
That’s actually quite a fine list. While asking the inspector general to grade the law he helped to write and vet the performance of his friends in an unbiased fashion is humorous, the senators’ final request is my favorite:
Please proceed to administratively perform reviews of the implementation of Section 215 of the USA PATRIOT Act and Section 702 of FISA, and submit the reports no later than December 31, 2014.
So the report can come out more than a year from now, and meet expectations. Assuming that the good inspector complies with the request, he has 15 months to produce something that says nothing. Empty attempts at oversight are worse than doing nothing, as they provide cover for parties that otherwise would be easier to excoriate.
Ars Technica has a good take on the situation at hand: “As more and more has come out about the scope of American surveillance programs, lawmakers are realizing that they don’t know very much about what exactly is going on.” Yes, and the rest of us don’t know enough either.
But asking Mr. McCullough III to educate us next year about what is going on now doesn’t even pass the laugh test. I’m not sure if the good senators understand how anemic their attempt at controlling the intelligence apparatus in fact is, and that alone is depressing.
Top Image Credit: Chuck Hagel
Twitter Launches Personalized Recommendation Notifications Based On @Magicrecs Experiment
Twitter has announced a new push notification in its twitter apps for Android and iPhone that will deliver personalized recommendations for tweets and accounts to follow. The new notification is based on the long-running @magicrecs experiment, which monitored the people you follow to see who they followed and what tweets they were re-tweeting.
The new notification will leverage the unique data that Twitter has at its fingertips to recommend you new accounts to follow, and if the @magicrecs experiment is any indication, it will be scary accurate, fast and genuinely useful. I’ve been a follower of the account for some time now, which is run by a special department at Twitter which creates experiments on the platform. Nearly every recommendation of a tweet or user account has been spot on, and I’ve felt no hesitation telling folks about it. It’s so scary good that I learn about new hires at companies within seconds, sometimes even before the official announcements. And i’ve yet to unfollow any accounts that I’ve followed because of it.
I’ve felt for some time now that the best way to leverage the @magicrecs magic was to weave it into the fabric of Twitter’s apps themselves, and it appears that Twitter agrees.
“We built this feature based on an experimental account, @MagicRecs. As its bio notes,@MagicRecs “sends instant, personalized recommendations for users and content via direct message”,” says Twitter’s Venu Satuluri, part of the team that built the account. “Over time, we’ve been tweaking the algorithms –– based on engagement and your feedback –– in order to send only the most relevant updates.”
The notification will roll out to users of the apps soon and can be switched on and off in Notification Settings using the toggle ‘Recommendations’.
This kind of experimentation — which leverages Twitter’s data set around the people you follow and how you interact with the service — is exactly what the company needs to continue to do as it strives for ways to keep users engaged and interacting with the service. Especially as it preps itself for IPO and has to begin to answer hard questions about user retention and growth.
As I explained in a piece taking a look at Twitter’s first seven years, one of the primary strengths and weaknesses of the service is that it really is only what you make of it. If you follow quality or interesting accounts that provide relevant content, then you’ll get a decent bit of usability out of it. If you follow crap, you’ll get crap.
At the time, Twitter’s ‘who to follow’ sections were (and are) still buried in the mobile apps, making it difficult to encourage people to follow new relevant accounts:
I make the suggestion to move the who to follow section (especially on mobile) to a more prominent location, or a more organic one. Being able to surface those suggestions subtly in context feels, to me, to be a more effective way of reminding people that there are other people out there producing content that they should see.
All he’ll say is “I really like that idea.”
That idea was crap, I’m sure Sippey was just being diplomatic. But a programmatic push notification based on @MagicRecs does a lot more than surfacing a quasi-random list of people to follow. It provides personal, intelligent recommendations that feel valuable and worthwhile. From the same piece:
But the best recipe for a good Twitter experience isn’t just ‘your friends’ anymore. Sippey says that Twitter has found that the most successful on-boarindg experiences happen when people partake of a ‘balanced diet’ of follows.
“You want to have some humor, you want to have some interests and you want some of your friends. And if we can actually help you craft that well-balanced diet for your home timeline you’ll be a more satisfied user and a happier user.”
This new push notification based on a very clever and effective experiment might be the key it needs to help users develop that well-balanced diet.
Image Credit: William Andrus/Flickr CC
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