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Russian Health Advice Site VitaPortal Merges With Local Medical Platform ZdorovieOnline, Gets $1.35M Funding Injection
A spot of consolidation in the Russian online health services space today. Health advice portal VitaPortal, which raised a $2 million Series A last October from Prostor Capital and Esther Dyson, has merged with ZdorovieOnline.ru, a smaller medical platform and electronic medical records portal, backed by Runa Capital.
The pair said they are hoping to create the single largest entity in Russian’s online health services space. Currently VitaPortal has more than 700,000 registered users of its health services but they said investor forecasts factoring in the merger suggest they can increase this figure to 5 million users next year.
Azamat Ulbashev, VitaPortal’s CEO and CoFounder, told TechCrunch the two main reasons for the merger are “technology acquisitions and acqui-hire”.
“After the merger, only VitaPortal.ru will remain; ZdorovieOnline.ru will be closed,” he said via email. “Their great technology for storing medical data will be implemented into VitaPortal platform. All our services (weight loss management, diabetes control, fitness and Q&A) will use their technology.”
According to Ulbashev, VitaPortal’s main competitors are now: “health.mail.ru (10M unique users per month, Mail.ru Group), medkrug.ru (2M unique users, Q&A platform) medportal.ru and others.”
The merger also brings new money to the table, from ZdorovieOnline investors – in order to ”maintain the balance of shares” in the new entity, and to fund the development of “a number of additional services”, the pair said.
A total of $1.35 million is being invested as Series B funding into VitaPortal, with $1 million coming from Runa Capital and $350,000 from Aleksey Kandikov, founder of Zdorovie Online.
Ulbashev would not confirm the total funding to-date that VitaPortal — which also counts Fastlane Ventures as a founder investor — now commands, but he said that even only factoring in its previously announced Series A and the new Series B round, it is now the “most funded digital health startup in Russia”.
To date, VitaPortal has provided online and mobile tools designed to help its users make healthier life choices — offering articles and tips on health issues, forums and Q&A sections, health measurement tools and more.
Regarding the development of new services, which the merger is intended to expedite, Ulbashev said VitaPortal plans to release an Open API to connect to health tracker services — such as FitBit, MyFitnessPal, BodyMedia and RunKeeper — so that the personalised content it offers users becomes “more precise”.
New services in its pipeline also include a weight loss management system called SlimSmile; a service for people with type II diabetes called DiabetesControl (due for release in November); a home fitness online video service called FitnessMaster (due in December); a Q&A platform for users to ask doctors questions called VitaDoctor; and an electronic medical records service called VitaClinic.
All these new services will be ported to mobile, as well as being incorporated into the VitaPortal website.
Commenting on the merger and new funding in a statement, Gaidar Magdanurov, investment director of Runa Capital, said: ”The deal with VitaPortal and merger with Zdorovie Online will form the largest online medical information portal and provide quality technology solutions for users.”
“The need for ‘digital medicine’ among users is growing rapidly. The global investment in IT startups in the sphere of health totalled approximately $1.5 billion,” Magdanurov added.
While Ulbashev said VitaPortal will exclusively focus on its home market of Russia (and CIS countries/former Soviet Republics) next year, it does have plans to look slightly further afield for expansion opportunities in future. ”At the end of 2014 we will test the Eastern European countries, as they are very close to Russia,” he added.
Hopster, The Netflix For Pre-Schoolers, Hits UK App Store In November With Babar, Madeline, SuperWhy And More
London-based startup and Netflix for small children Hopster is on the verge of launching its unlimited TV content app, the company announced today, with a UK iOS App Store debut planned for November. The app will provide subscription-based all-you-can-watch access to shows aimed specifically at the 2 to 6 set, spanning 800 titles and including some of the most iconic kids characters ever created.
Hopster is announcing its partner arrangements ahead of the launch, which include deals with Nelvana, DHX Media and Millimages. These partnerships bring streaming video on demand rights to Hopster for a number of popular preschooler titles, including Babar, Max & Ruby, SuperWhy, Madeline, Paddington Bear and 64 Zoo Lane. That’s just the start, according to Hopster, which will reveal additional content over the course of the next few months.
While Hopster has a Netflix-like content distribution and access model, it also incorporates a key educational platform angle that sets it apart from other online streaming video services. That’s what makes Hopster more than just a competitor for a subsection of Netflix’s or LOVEfilm’s larger library; it incorporates interactive learning games which are tailored to a child’s viewing habits and history. Those games and activities comprise a curriculum that Hopster says develops along with the child, which has been created in line with guidelines set out by the UK Early Years Foundation and built by educators.
“We believe that kids and families are different so there is a need for services, like Hopster, that are designed just for kids,” Hopster CEO Nick Walters explained via email. “For example, Hopster has defined a user experience just for preschool kids – easy to navigate, very little text, full of surprising and delightful activity. We also make really smart use of interactive games through a ‘two screens in one’ experience, making it stimulating and active like no other TV service does.”
All Hopster activity is also funnelled into “smart reports” that are made available to parents of children using the app, though the app itself is designed to be able to be used by a child completely independent of any adult. It’s a completely ad-free service, and the only payment throughout the app is the one for the recurring subscription, which means kids can’t accidentally rack up in-app purchase charges.
Hopster’s founding team includes Walters, a former Nickelodeon executive, as well as Sander Striker of Vdio and Joost, Mahesh Ramachandra off Galleon Entertainment and Bradley Archer, also ex-Nickelodeon. The team has ample experience with kids content and with streaming media services, and is backed by an advisory board which has experience in kids educational publishing and preschooler content.
The entire concept of Hopster is based on the realization that kids are inevitably drawn to the digital devices in or lives, and that they’re also very much interested in streaming content. Walters and his team wanted to find a way to scratch that itch for kids with a guilt-free solution that would also provide useful, genuine education value instead of just mindless (or haphazardly educational) entertainment.
Drawing audiences away from kid-friendly sections of prevailing streaming giants like Netflix will be tough, since parents get something additional out of that subscription, too, but there might just be room for a solution aimed specifically at the preschool educational vertical, and Hopster definitely has the right content to see if there is.
Siri Ex-Product Lead Who Quietly Sold Another Startup's Assets To Apple Raises $1M For Unsilo, A Semantic Search Engine
Apple’s acquisition of Siri in 2010 gave the company the technology it needed to build a voice-activated personal assistant for its iPhone and iPad devices. A year later, Mads Rydahl — one of the first employees at Siri as its director of product design — sold something else to Apple: a set of patents, nine in all, from a startup he founded before joining Siri. (Considering how closely the media monitors Apple news, that acquisition hasn’t been reported until now.) Today, Rydahl is working on a new startup: a semantic search engine called Unsilo, which is now preparing for a launch in November backed with $1 million from Danish incubator Oei and Scale Capital, a small VC firm co-headquartered in the U.S. (Palo Alto) and Denmark.
Not quite Wolfram Alpha, and not quite like Enigma, Unsilo gives users — initially enterprise customers in areas like scientific research — the ability to find answers to their questions by aggregating data from dozens of disparate sources. The idea behind Unsilo is that the right answers may not be related to the keywords in your search query, but in how those keywords, juxtaposed laterally as they would be in a human’s mind, might help you think of the right answer, essentially applying the concept of natural language processing to search.
“We’re investing quite a bit [of processing power] in NLP of the content we index,” Rydahl tells me. “We have a statistical and semantic approach. We’re not trying to go for Q&A like Wolfram Alpha, nor facets and filters in the way that Enigma does, and although we also index patent data, we’re quite different from Lens.org,” he says. “They are all, in the end, traditional technologies for indexing and clustering. We have an idea that we can do a completely different type of matching than what’s been done before.” He describes it as extensive query expansion to pick up variations in phrasing and terminology. “Then we detect semantic patterns around the terms that match the user’s query.”
The end result are pages that give users not just lists of documents, but results analogous to the query, grouped by approach, i.e. how they provide answers to the original question posed by the user. You’re allowed to drill down further through the interface, to see refined results.
There is also a cunning, animated visualization that looks like a floating flow chart or organigram, which gives you an idea of how all the different concepts, are literally strung together. The visualization is interactive: if you are searching for common cold vaccinations, and you definitely do not want to see any of the homeopathic-related results, you can remove that concept. Or if that’s what you want to give priority to, you give precedence to results that mention it. The search results reorganize accordingly.
Rydahl says that fields like scientific, medical, or legal research, specifically around intellectual property, “are a perfect market to for their technology.” Specifically, he pinpoints the information publishing industry that traditionally makes a business out of providing data research. “That industry is coming apart at the seams, so we are trying to add a new type of value for them,” he says. “They have an opportunity now to make sweeping changes.”
Unsilo is in talks with Elsevier, Thomson Reuters and Wiley, which might become some of Unsilo’s first paying license holders (none have been revealed yet). The medical focus is also helped along by the fact that last year, Unsilo launched MedQL.com, a research tool that helps geneticists discover hidden relationships between genes and diseases, based on evidence extracted from the 20M+ articles in Medline.
Longer term, the idea will be to take the Unsilo framework and apply it to more consumer ends. “Google does a great job on keywords, page rank, source authority, and personalization, but we believe Unsilo can help users move beyond the keyword or the most popular link,” he says. That’s especially apt in areas like research and legal, where you are “not at all interested in personalization.”
The founder, and his Apple story
It’s not often that you come across an entrepreneur who has been involved with not one but two startups that have ended up with Apple. Rydahl is that guy. (And yes, there are others.)
Originally from Denmark, where he is now based again, Rydahl’s resume is a walk through some of the more interesting developments of the Internet, from the early days of publishing making its first transitions to the computer screen, through to core technologies in search and information design, and snagging in consumer games and apps along the way. (In a way, you could argue that what Rydahl is exploring with Unsilo is a combination of all of these: helping publishers migrate their businesses online, gaming elements with the animated category widget, and of course the search technology itself.)
It was the middle part of that experience spectrum, in search and information design, where Rydahl found his life intersecting with Cupertino.
Sublinks, founded by Rydahl in 2000 and closed down completely by June 2012 (after Apple transferred the IP), was one of those under-the-radar companies focused on developing technologies that were potentially more interesting to other technology companies than to consumers or other kinds of enterprise businesses. It’s hard to find much on Sublinks today, but one person who had been on its board as far back as 2000 described it like this:
“a nascent search technology and innovation company which holds patents for a number of novel methods within the fields of recommendation systems, knowledge management, and information search and retrieval. The company manages a family of patents in The US and The European Union to protect the rights of its inventions.”
Rydahl described its technology to me as akin to what Amazon does in its product searches. “Recommenders are what Amazon uses when it says, ‘if you like this we’ll suggest that to you.’”
In the early days, he says, this relied on overlaps on items of what two people both bought, which later turned into classes of items that were used to build profiles similar to degree-of-interest trees. Presumably, this is an area that his patents covered as well, and is something that Apple could use, for example, in its App Store searches (among other products).
While Rydahl said that this acquisition was completely unrelated to Siri (it happened about a year later), he also added that, under the terms of that deal, he would not and could not talk about how and if Apple implements that technology today. (And before your imagination runs wild, remember that Apple, like others, holds a number of patents that are not related to any products at all but can be used defensively and for other purposes.)
The Sublinks technology, while perhaps never transformed into a fully implemented application of its own, gave back to Rydahl twice, in fact. Apart from eventually selling the patents to Apple, Rydahl says that it was his work on Sublinks that made him approach would-be Siri CTO Tom Gruber (who is only Siri co-founder who we understand is still at Apple, with Adam Cheyer and Dag Kittlaus both moving on).
Rydahl was employee number-three at Siri, where he reported to Gruber as Senior Director of the team that designed and developed “all user-facing aspects of the product, from concept and early prototypes to a polished, robust and well tested product” — the product that Apple acquired just months after it emerged from stealth.
Although Unsilo has several patents pending on its technology — and Rydahl clearly knows something about how to leverage IP — he says there is a higher purpose: helping people solve problems whose answers may lie in what it already known today, just waiting to be discovered in the right combinations.
“We want to make the world a better place, by building the ‘Google of innovation and discovery,’” he says. “No one else is doing search this way. We have a unique mix of approaches that leverage the best of natural language processing, traditional data mining approaches, and long memory-based linear indexes, and we believe we can leverage this to accomplish lofty goals.”
Apple Could Bring Artist-Signed Copies Back To Digital Movies, Books And Music
Apple is working on a way to renew the autograph for the digital age, with a technology that would allow authors, artists and musicians to “sign” their work for customers via a dedicated iOS app as described in a new patent application(via AppleInsider). The signature would be unique, and tied specifically to the user’s own digital copy of that content, complete with authentication certificates that are transferred to the cloud so the user has access on whichever device they move that content to.
The bulk of the patent focuses on ebooks, describing how an author could use their own device to virtually sign content resident on another’s. There might be a specific hotspot where the signature can be issued, so that it could be arranged for a bookstore appearance, for instance, and help to ensure the authenticity of the signature thanks to its associate with a specific time and place.
Different methods account for different kinds of signing. In some, an author has created a signatory page specific to their ebook, and in others, the ebook owner can specify exactly where they want it. An author’s device carries an electronic certificate verifying the author’s identity, and the transfer of the signature then takes place using Bluetooth or Wi-Fi.
There are some cases where the signing can take place remotely via the Internet, with ID keys transferred along with the autograph, and autographs need not be limited to actual signatures – the patent offers examples of other original content that might be transferred, including soundbites or a photo, which can also carry authentication certificates.
The tech has a number of potential applications: It could be used to add additional value back to digital copies for resale, if used in tandem with Apple’s multiple patents on resale of virtual goods purchased via online stores like iTunes. And it could also simply act as an incentive for purchases to begin with, and a way for artists and creators to make additional revenue on their own content.
Digital signatures used in this manner could be yet another way to add value to items for sale in digital storefronts, like “enhanced” and “deluxe” versions of iTunes albums and movies, so it’s very possible we’ll see Apple introduce something like this down the road. It’s still quite narrow in terms of focus and appeal, however, so I’d expect this to be rolled up into a larger product re-imagining for digital goods, if implemented.
Charge It With Fire! FlameStower Turns Your Campfire Into A USB Phone-Charger
Charge your gadgets with fire! FlameStower, a startup that came out of Stanford’s StartX Summer 2013 class, has launched a Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign to get its alternative charger to market.
The gizmo lets you harness the heat from a campfire/gas stove/naked flame heat source to add some juice to a phone or other USB-charged device. It has a max power output of 3W and an average output of 2W, which its makers say can yield between 2 to 4 minutes of phone talk-time per minute of charge
The team behind FlameStower are targeting outdoorsy types, first and foremost, but also reckon their device could be a reliable back-up option to keep in store for use in power outages and storm scenarios.
In keeping with camping kit, the FlameStower folds down to a fairly flat profile so you can chuck it in your backpack.
And unlike the other outdoorsy/back-up option of solar-powered chargers, this bit of kit can work at any time of day — provided you have access to FIRE!
How does FlameStower work exactly? It creates and harnesses a temperature differential to generate electricity using its Thermoelectric Generator. The user exposes its metal blade to a flame to heat it up, while the other side is cooled by a small water reservoir that they fill with water. So really you need both fire and water for this to work. Oh and air, to fuel the fire. It’s elemental.
The hotter the fire, the more charge will be outputted. Albeit, the amount of energy generated is never going to match what you get from a wall outlet. FlameStower’s makers liken its output to charging via a laptop USB port. Which is to say slow and steady, giving you time to appreciate the great outdoors scenery.
The East Palo Alto team behind the device are hoping to raise $15,000 on Kickstarter to get the charger to market — and are around half way there, with 28 days left to run on their campaign.
They are offering the FlameStower to early backers for $70 ($10 off its expected retail price) and are aiming to ship in December.
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