A company tapping into the power of a distributed mobile workforce is Quri, a retailer analytics and intelligence company whose software has been adopted by half of the top twenty-five CPG (consumer packaged goods) brands around the world, including Tyson, Nestle, Dannon, Procter & Gamble, Unilever and others. And it’s only been on the market for 15 months.
Extreme Reality, an Israeli startup backed by SV Angel, has been at work for eight years on building motion capture technology.
Now they’re opening up the kimono with a platform that can turn any basic webcam or laptop cam into something like a Kinect, with the power to capture a three-dimensional range of movement.
“We’re aiming to give people a console-like experience without the user having to buy additional hardware,” said Asaf Barzilay, who is Extreme Realty’s vice president of products and research and development.
Como cada inicio de mes, repasamos las inversiones más importantes que se han cerrado en el sector de las startups tecnológicas durante el mes anterior, en este caso el de septiembre.
Startup Sun Catalytix is designing a flow battery for grid energy storage that uses custom materials derived from inexpensive commodity chemicals. It joins dozens of other companies seeking to make a device that can cheaply and reliably provide multiple hours of power to back up intermittent wind and solar power.
The MIT spinoff, which hopes to differentiate itself with a novel chemistry and inexpensive mechanical systems, is testing a small-scale five-kilowatt prototype. It projects that a full-scale system, which it expects to make in 2015 or 2016, will cost under $300 per kilowatt-hour, or less than half as much as the sodium-sulfur batteries now used for multihour grid storage.
With the enforcement of the HIPAA Omnibus final rule starting this week, health IT companies face liability for breaches of patients’ protected health information that they may never have faced before. It’s also making issues like Bring Your Own Device even mores stressful for CIOs as they figure out how to make any instances of PHI on these devices secure enough to withstand an audit if the devices get lost or stolen.
As more and more retailers continue to set up shop online, producing a lot of customer and other actionable data along the way, it follows that those businesses that are able to become data-driven will likely develop a competitive advantage. Larger e-commerce companies have known this for a long time and have the internal IT muscle to build out their own Business Intelligence systems or buy in expensive off-the-shelf Enterprise solutions — an option that isn’t available to the majority of online shops.
Fitocracy, the fitness gamification network with over 1 million users andmore user engagement than Twitter, is today launching a group fitness pilot in a big move towards monetization.
A big part of Fitocracy’s core offering is a community-driven encouragement platform. At first, users come to the app and get hooked because of the gamification and quantification of the user’s own fitness data.
When Grockit first emerged back in 2008, it had set its sights on building a full-service, social learning service that would give students a better way to study for standardized tests, among other things. It enabled students to study solo or in groups by connecting with live instructors or perusing its library of video content.
Barcelona-based Restalo, an online restaurant reservation service similar to OpenTable, has raised a $10 million Series B round from Seaya Ventures, and existing investor Active Venture Partners. Having previously raised $1.3 million in 2011, this takes the total funding to date to $11.3 million.
