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Posts Tagged ‘london’

Maps are among the more invaluable travel tools. Android/iPhone apps are nice, but sometimes analog is just the best way to go.

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Indestructible map is indestructible

Email marketing software giant ExactTarget has agreed to acquire CoTweet, a young company that offers a tool that enables multiple people to communicate on Twitter through corporate accounts.

CoTweet will continue to operate from San Francisco as a business unit of ExactTarget, essentially taking charge of the company’s social media product development. CoTweet co-founder and CEO Jesse Engle will lead the San Francisco operation and head ExactTarget’s new “social media lab”.

Terms of the agreement have not been disclosed, but we’re digging.

CoTweet was founded in 2008 and offers a browser-based collaboration platform that allows companies to manage multiple Twitter accounts from a single dashboard, support multiple editors, track conversations, assign roles and create follow-up tasks. Its high-profile customers include Whole Foods, McDonald’s, Microsoft, Ford, Dell and Pepsi, among others.

The company raised just over $1 million in seed capital from Ron Conway’s SV Angel fund, The Founders Fund, Baseline Ventures, First Round Capital, Maples Investments and Freestyle Capital.

Twitter COO Dick Costolo also managed to squeeze in a quote in the official press release, saying that he sees the acquisition as a “strong validation that valuable, sustainable businesses are emerging from the Twitter ecosystem”.

ExactTarget claims annual contracted revenue of around $114 million for 2009, a year in which it raised a staggering $145 million in venture capital. The company employs more than 600 people, recently opened an office in London and counts Nike, Best Buy and UMG among its clients. You can read the company’s letter to its customers here.

Today, Google is testifying in front of the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Human Rights and the Law to address internet freedom and censorship, particularly calling attention to the recent security and censorship issues in both China and Iran. Google’s Deputy General Counsel Nicole Wong is presenting testimony on behalf of the search giant, which we’ve embedded below.

Much of the testimony outlines the background on what happened in the China security breach, where the Gmail accounts of human rights activists were breached by hackers in China. The attacks were systematic and also extended to 20 other companies, including Intel. Google is unwilling to shed light on who initiated the attacks because the investigation is ongoing.

Of course, Google has dealt with censorship and security issues with many countries in past. Wong says that over 25 governments have blocked Google services in the past. YouTube has been blocked by 13 countries including Iran, China, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. Blogger and Blog Spot have been blocked by India, Pakistan, and Spain. Gmail was recently banned in Iran. And Orkut has been blocked by Iran and Saudi Arabia.

You can watch the hearing live here.

What do a trucker, an Israeli entrepreneur, Al Gore and Richard Branson all have in common? Proof that the real goldmines are old, neglected industries.

The name of that proof is GreenRoad. While so many entrepreneurs bang their heads against a Web and social media advertising brick wall, GreenRoad has applied common technology to an industry technology has largely passed by and—voilà—they’ve got a business that’s growing and saving lives, money and the environment.

Driving is the third most deadly profession after deep sea fishing and working in a coal mine. Not only does driving more safely save lives but research shows it can also save 10% on annual fuel costs, and alleviate a good chunk of the $230 billion professional fleets spend on crashes each year. Enter GreenRoad: a system that helps professional drivers drive more safely and as a result save their company a lot of money.

The GreenRoad system looks simple from the outside: There’s a two-inch device on the dashboard that starts the day with a green light. If a driver brakes hard, swerves or turns recklessly, the light turns yellow. If the driver continues to drive erratically the light stays yellow. If it gets worse the light turns red. That’s it. But like a lot of apparently simple ideas, there’s a lot more going on under the hood.

GreenRoad was the brain-child of an Israeli entrepreneur who was run off the road one night by some wild kids. “If only their parents knew how they were driving…” he muttered to himself – and the work on the company began. It morphed over the years from a consumer product to one aimed at commercial fleets. While the device is made up from mostly off-the-shelf products like a GPS chip, accelerometer, a CPU, mashed up with Google maps and a dashboard-like management portal, it took a good three years of hardcore R&D to build.

While you want the system to work well enough that aggressive driving tactics are caught, avoiding false positives are a must if drivers are to trust GreenRoad and accept its results. The algorithms can crunch more than 120 different driving maneuvers and the map on the dashboard helps provide context, both for the driver, and for a supervisor looking at the results later. For instance, a lot of harsh right turns could be the result of a hairpin turn in the road, not carelessness on the part of the driver.

There’s also a good deal of psychology worked into the device. Drivers don’t want to feel spied on, so video and audio surveillance products haven’t been popular. It’s also not a good idea to have something distracting, which is why early models that had icons to describe the offending aggressive move were nixed for the three simple lights. The dashboard, too, helps pull natural competitive levers by showing your performance, relative to your peers. And don’t underestimate things as simple as starting each day with a green light: The key is holding drivers to a high enough standard, while letting them know they can succeed if they work at it and concentrate as well.

GreenRoad has raised less than $40 million to date from Richard Branson’s Virgin Green Fund, Balderton Capital in London, Benchmark and DAG Ventures. On Monday the company will be announcing another $10 million from Generation, a fund started by Al Gore and Goldman Sachs.

Sound like a lot of money? Consider how much the company saves. Fuel savings just from driving less aggressively can save a company some $300 per vehicle per year, and the costs saved from accidents are double that amount. That makes it a very easy ROI sale for a company’s CFO, environmental officer or safety officer.

Now consider how much GreenRoad makes. It has 80 customers so far, and more than one of those customers have installed the technology in 20,000 of their cars. The three-year license goes for $1,000 per car, which the fuel savings alone cover. That’s right: We’re talking about $20 million contracts. And there’s more where that came from. CEO Eric Weiss says there are 80 million professionally driven cars in the US and the EU. That puts GreenRoad in the middle of a $80 billion market. I haven’t seen many companies like these since the good old days of enterprise software. And GreenRoad doesn’t have a lot of competition.

Weiss himself came from the enterprise software and mobile space. At first he wasn’t sure about a tech company in such a weird, forgotten market, but pretty soon he got excited. “There are very few problems left of this size to solve,” he says. “Besides, the world doesn’t need another gadget for my phone or another ERP company.

And he’s right. GreenRoad proves what a lot of smart investors have been saying for a while now—the best tech deals are no longer in a much picked over “tech sector” per se; they’re in applying technology to old-world industries.

Over the past several years, there’s been no shortage of talk about alternative energy, and its potential to change the world. The problem is that most of it is just that — talk. But tonight, a report that aired on 60 Minutes showed one alternative that is not only real, it’s already being tested by companies such as Google and eBay. You simply have to watch this.

Bloom Energy are producing tiny fuel cell boxes they call “Bloom Boxes.” Two of these can apparently power a U.S. home (and only one for homes in countries that use less power). So how small are they? Look at the picture above, each device isn’t much bigger than a standard brick. Of course, they need to be surrounded by a larger unit that takes in an energy source (such as natural gas). But still, these units look to be about the size of a refrigerator and can easily fit outside of a home, providing it with clean, cheap energy.

Currently, these boxes cost some $700,000-$800,000, but eventually, founder K.R. Sridhar envisions one in every home — and he thinks he can get the cost below $3,000 for a unit to make that happen. And he’s talking a 5 to 10 year timeframe for this.

Naturally, there are plenty who are skeptical of something like this ever working. There have been no shortage of fuel cell ideas over the years, but none get their own segment on 60 Minutes showing working units. And none get to highlight the fact that they’re already installed at companies like Google, eBay, FedEx and others. In fact, four of these Bloom Boxes have apparently been powering a Google datacenter for the past 18 months. eBay says their five boxes have saved them over $100,000 in electricity costs over the past nine months.

Bloom Energy also has former Secretary of State Colin Powell on its board of directors, and he talked up the Bloom Boxes on 60 minutes tonight also. And the company has something in the neighborhood of $400 million in funding from the likes of Kleiner Perkins and others. Kleiner’s John Doerr is also featured heavily in the 60 Minutes segment, talking about why he thinks this company can change the world perhaps even in a more profound way that another company he backed, Google, has. Bloom Energy was Kleiner’s first green tech investment.

Again, just watch the video and decide for yourself whether to be skeptical or amazed at this point. Right now, I’m definitely in the latter camp considering this thing is already being tested out. Apparently, Bloom Energy is due for a big formal public unveiling on Wednesday in San Jose (they have a countdown up on their site) —expect to hear a lot more then.

There’s a certain irony that TechCrunch’s in-house satirist Paul Carr is currently slaving over the sequel to his book about his failure to launch a startup. Fridaycities was to be a site which allowed anyone to swap information in real time about London, and eventually other cities. The site failed, Paul wrote his book (and a few other things, let’s admit) and the rest is history, including our little run in, thankfully.

If only he’d done it in the era of Facebook rise into the mainstream. Because today, two weeks after launching, the Secret London Facebook group has 182,010 members and counting and is poised to propel it’s 21 year old creator into her first startup.

Bristol university graduate Tiffany Philippou originally set up the group in response to a competition from ad agency Saatchi & Saatchi to win a mere summer internship. However, it seems unlikely that Tiffany will be too bothered. There’s now a holding page and Twitter account (@secret_london) as Secret London morphs into a full-blown startup.

The website Tata Consultancy Services, India’s largest software vendor, has been hacked. The hacker has posted a “For Sale” message on the site, which is written in both French and English. Ironically, the company produces security systems software.

The hack is believed to be a DNS hijack, which is similar to the breach that Twitter succumbed to last year. TechCrunch was also recently hacked earlier this year.

You’re certainly familiar with those full body scanners , installed at airports to prevent bad guys from bringing bad things aboard airplanes. They scan your body, producing a fairly clear 3D image of your naked body . It’s controversial because, really, who wants their naked body on display so some goon in a uniform can try to see if you have a knife taped against your leg

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For your protection: In the UK, if you refuse body scan you won’t be allowed to board airplane

Hello, beautiful. The Olympus PEN E-PL1 isn’t supposed to be official until tomorrow, but that didn’t stop good ol’d Engadget from posting the full press release along with all of the product shots early. Well done, boys.

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The Olympus PEN E-PL1 finds a damaged Internet tube, leaks everywhere

If you’re looking for a middle-of-the-road desktop replacement without breaking the bank, you may find that Sony’s new VAIO E Series suits your needs.

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Sony VAIO E Series: Core i3 CPU and 15.5-inch screen starting around $800