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LAUNCH Blog

Tagged with: KK

Cool Ripples from the Dalai Lama to Kevin Rose (Three Degrees of Uber-shares)

It's hard not to love the Ripples feature Google+ added yesterday, though the most impressive graphics come from those with hundreds or thousands of public and recent reshares.

We dig the list of cool Ripples Google+ Product Marketing Manager Louis Gray posted -- which itself got reshared hundreds of time to create the Ripple you see above.

For kicks, we followed the trail of best resharers, starting with the top Ripple from Louis's list, the post about the Dalai Lama and Archbishop Desmond Tutu Hangout. A handful of Google execs saw their shares about the Hangout rehared, but

Big Question for Google+: How to Deal with Multiple Profiles for the Same Person?

[ Share a circle from your personal self to your App self if you can't wait for the migration tool. ]

The launch of Google+ for Apps accounts raises a number of questions that we're not sure Google is ready to answer just yet (we've asked and are waiting).

The big one: if you have a Google+ account for work (e.g., launch.is) and one linked to your personal Gmail account, how will they interact?

We know a migration tool will be out in a few weeks so that power Google+ users don't have to rebuild everything. We can't believe Google didn't have this ready from day one...anyway, you don't need the migration tool to transfer your circles, arguably the most important part of your profile after your posts/photos.

Once you've created a Google+ profile with your Apps account, go back to to your personal profile and add your "App self" to the list of people you follow. Next, share a circle to your App self. Now your App self can add that circle. Repeat as necessary.

One tip: choose a different profile photo for your App self so you can easily figure out which profile you're working with.

The follow-up questions to how these accounts interact: how many versions of people will we

Finally -- Google Lets Apps Customers Build Google+ Profiles

[ Google Apps account administrators can read these tips for rolling out Google+ here. ]

Since the day Google+ launched in late June, we've wanted Google+ profiles linked to our Google Apps accounts, and now we can.

The process took nearly four months because "It took more technical work than we expected to bring Google+ to Google Apps, and we thank you for your patience," according to the official post on the Google Enterprise blog.

Tweetsheet Turns Your Tweet Activity into a Pretty and Sharable Infographic

We do love a pretty infographic, especially personalized ones like Tweetsheet that present your Twitter data by monthly activity for the past 12 months, most retweets, geographic impact (U.S. only), best followers and favorite themes. Each bar in the total tweets chart "above ground" shows in green the chunk of tweets replied to or retweeted.

Tweetsheet will only load your last 3,200 tweets (a Twitter-API limitation), so extremely prolific users may not see a full year of data. Also, we noticed it can take a bit for all your data to load and the sections to populate. You can only create Tweetsheets for your accounts, though anyone can see a Tweetsheet the owner has shared.

Clever bonus: click the bird on the left side of your Tweetsheet and it will hop into a slingshot, Angry Birds-style. You rack up points for knocking down the bars in your chart (yes, you can hit replay and tweet your score).

Tweetsheet is a teaser product from

Good Geek Fun: GitHub Makes Campfire Bot Hubot Open Source

Any company that relies on the group-chat service Campfire to manage workflow could use a chat bot to automate everyday tasks like finding images -- or fun things like giving a quote from a movie.

GitHub, where millions of developers store and share code, loved its Campfire bot Hubot so much the company rewrote the code and just made it open-source.

Anyone can host Hubot for free on Heroku. The bot comes with some scripts although GitHub's Corey Donohoe is encouraging developers to write their own (in CoffeeScript or Javascript) and contribute to the repository.

Corey tells LAUNCH, "Many of our employees have been

Tag Cloud of Steve Jobs Tribute Messages

Investor and finance blogger Paul Kedrosky used the messages that developer Neil Kodner had retrieved from Apple's official Steve Jobs memorial site to create the tag cloud shown above.

The most prominent words are "thank," "world" and "family" along with the Mac and iPhone -- the most mentioned Apple products as Kodner explains in his post.

Dispatch Promises to Become your Front Door to the Cloud

WHAT: Dispatch brings together an individual's cloud services into one place. When the service launches, it will support Dropbox, Google Docs, and Gmail, allowing you to drag and drop things between services, preview files, launch into different Google Docs accounts, and send packages of things from your different services to anyone in your social graph.

LAUNCHERS: Jesse Lamb, CEO; Nick Stamas, Gary LosHuertos and Alex Godin.

WHY: Non-techies don't have one easy place to store all their data in the cloud or move that data from one cloud-based service to another. Existing cloud storage services are not social.

WHEN/WHERE: Oct. 18, 2011 / New York [ beta expected to launch in about 10 weeks or early January 2012 ].

BACKSTORY: "We've been interested in the cloud for a while," Jesse tells LAUNCH via email. "We were one of the early developers to use

Ordr.in Gives Restaurants One Platform to Bring Orders from Any Website, App or Device

WHAT: Ordr.in is an API for online food ordering. Participating restaurants receive orders from any website, app or device connected to Ordr.in's national network. Developers can embed the Ordr.in API on their website orapp and get a cut of orders they generate.

LAUNCHERS: David Bloom, CEO, and Felix Sheng, CTO.

WHY: Many restaurants don't yet take orders online, and those that do are probably not available on relevant apps or devices. Online restaurant orders is a $170B market opportunity in the U.S. alone.

WHEN/WHERE: 2011 / New York.

BACKSTORY: "I ran the restaurant business development team at American Express for five years." David tells LAUNCH via email.

How to Use Quora Infographic -- Not Just for Newbies

Leave it to a scientist to break down Quora into a color-coded flow chart that not only explains how the social Q&A service works but how to follow its etiquette.

Kent Cavender-Bares, founder of the Minnesota-based environmental nonprofit Dialogue Earth, tells LAUNCH he has used Quora since May 2010 and made the graphic "to help new expert collaborators that I plan to bring to Quora in the coming months as part of Dialogue Earth's "EarthQ" project."

Kent wants the general public to better understand environmental issues, and he sees Quora as the right place to have such serious conversations.

"These are very polarized issues, and I believe

Mynd's Discovery App: Find and Recommend Entertainment, Eventually across All Devices

We've all seen variations on the app for app discovery, but it's hard to beat the App Store itself when you want something new.

Just-launched Mynd is betting you'll want an app focused on finding entertainment (games, music, books and film/tv) and that giving you three types of opinions -- those from the Mynd staff, your friends and the crowd -- will make it indispensable for your smartphone, tablet and any other connected device.

"Every 'like', 'review', and 'share' you make will help us perfect what we hope will ultimately become the most personalized cross-category entertainment recommendation engine ever built," co-founder and CEO Greg Martin explains in an email to its early adopters.

[ Screen shots after the jump. ]

Want a 360-degree Panoramic Photo? Toss the Ball Camera

If only every thesis was this cool: computer engineering student Jonas Pfeil made a patent-pending throwable panoramic ball camera as his final project at the Technical University of Berlin.

All you have to do is throw the foam-padded ball in the air and its 36 fixed-focus 2 megapixel mobile phone camera modules will snap photos when the ball reaches its highest point (as measured by the ball's accelerometer). Once the ball is back in your hands, you can download the photos via USB and immediately see them as one image on your computer.

As Jonas explains on the Ball Camera website, "It can capture scenes with many moving objects without producing ghosting artifacts and creates unique images." The promotional video [ embedded above ] shows panoramic images of a city square and the great outdoors.

[ Screen shots after the jump. ]

Super-Scaling Server NGINX Raises $3M, Plans SF Office & "Fruitful Relationship" with Dell

Less than two months after forming a services company based on its open-source, high-performance web server, Russia-based NGINX has raised $3M in a Series A and will open its San Francisco HQ before the end of 2011.

Investors are BV Capital, whose global portfolio includes Sonos and Angie's List, Russia-focused Runa Capital and an entity affiliated with MSD Capital, the private investment firm of Dell CEO Michael S. Dell.

NGINX co-founder Andrew Alexeev tells LAUNCH the latter is "very interesting to have because Dell has been very proactive in regards to combining open source with offering of their core product" and he hopes NGINX will have a "fruitful relationship" with Dell.

NGINX servers are known for helping companies scale to billions of pageviews with modest resources. The company's first product -- a commercial-grade connection processing and optimization software platform -- will debut in mid-2012. NGINX already has customers but is not releasing names just yet.

Cool Dot-Com Flashback: The Deleted City Brings Back Geocities (video)

If you were around for the dot-com boom, you probably built a free personal homepage on Geocities, a pioneering and popular community site in the late 1990s that Yahoo bought for over $3.5B in January 1999. And you probably forgot about Geocities until just now.

But enterprising Dutch designer Richard Vijgen has now created The Deleted City, a data-visualization "map" of Geocities' neighborhoods from data the Archive Team rescued before Yahoo wiped out Geocities for good in 2009 despite pleas to save it. The Archive Team is a group of volunteers committed to "saving our digital heritage."

Nifty Email-Counting T-Shirt Shows People You're Too Busy to Talk (video)

Is your inbox overflowing? You might want to make an email-counting t-shirt like the one Boston-based developer Chris Ball and his biophysicist wife Madeleine Price Ball put together.

The components: a t-shirt preprinted with numbers along the Y axis, an Arduino LilyPad micro-controller, LED lights, a power supply that requires one triple-A battery, conductive thread, a bluetooth dongle, and an Android phone with open-source software just for the email-counting shirt. Chris wrote the code, and Madeleine, who works on the Personal Genome Project at Harvard, did the sewing.

[ See screen shots after the jump. ]

Exclusive: Mark Suster Considering Office Space for LaunchPadLA

VC Mark Suster of GRP Partners told LAUNCH that he's "considering the possibility of office space" for his two-year-old program LaunchPadLA, which selects and mentors entrepreneurs in the Los Angeles area to strengthen the local startup scene.

He says he will have a decision on office space in the next 30 to 45 days and noted that Accel Partners is not involved [ see our previous story ].

Mark acknowledges that taking on office space would change LaunchPadLA's approach because

Flickr Launches Photo Session--Google Hangouts for Photos--and New Android App

Flickr has just launched Photo Session so up to 10 people can look at photos together, draw on the photos and chat about them in real time from their desktop computer, iPhone or iPad.

The new Flickr app for Android has Instagram-like filters and allows sharing to Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr and WordPress.

See screen shots of Photo Session after the jump.

Digerati Who Ordered the Kindle Fire Today

Plenty of people are asking "Will you buy a Kindle Fire?" the 7" color touch-screen tablet Amazon debuted this morning. But we are most interested in who among the digerati are paying the sweet price of $199 for it.

In addition to our founder Jason Calacanis (who has ordered two), angel investor Bill Lee confirmed on his Google+ post about the Kindle that he's ordered his already. That same post is where we learned that Georges Harik, angel investor and advisor to the Google Ventures team, said he was going to get one. Georges called the $199 price "pretty compelling."

We saw that GDGT co-founder Peter Rojas added the Kindle Fire to his GDGT "want" list.

Where Can You Find the iPad before the iPad? "Star Trek: TNG" and "2001" (videos)

We loved seeing the 1994 version of the iPad so much that we decided to look into who had an iPad-like tablet first.

A number of "Star Trek: The Next Generation" episodes included tablets -- why are we not surprised -- but the earliest one had to be in an episode from 1989. In this clip, a boy watches a video on a flat, thin gray tablet with weird black buttons/strips at the bottom [ see above]. Note that he doesn't touch the screen.

However, some could argue the first iPad debuted in 1968 in "2001: A Space Odyssey." The movie shows a familiar scene of watching a video while eating.

Another video and screen shots after the jump.

Zeo Launches Smartphone Version of Sleep-Management System at Price for the Masses

WHAT: Zeo Mobile ($99) is a lightweight, wireless headband that measures brain waves to determine sleep quality and uses bluetooth to communicate that data to the iPhone, iPad and select Android devices. Data from headband is 90% as accurate as data from clinical sleep lab.

Alarm on the smartphone app wakes you at the optimal moment (when you're in and out of REM sleep) so you feel refreshed when you awake. [ REM sleep restores the mind, deep sleep restores the body. ] Use the Zeo Mobile app or Zeo website to analyze sleep patterns, add notes/journal entries and learn ways to improve your ZQ (sleep) score. Link sleep data to those in wellness/fitnees apps like DailyBurn and RunKeeper [ see our story ].

Existing product, Zeo Bedside (new price of $149), uses a headband with a proprietary alarm clock. Both Mobile and Bedside products include an email-based coaching program.

Zeo Mobile ships Oct. 26. Best Buy, an investor, is making Zeo products available in all stores. Launching in the U.K. in October and mainland Europe in time for holiday shopping.

LAUNCHERS: Ben Rubin, CTO, and CEO (not a founder) Dave Dickinson, whose background is in biotech. Other co-founders are Jason Donahue, former VP of brand management (now at Harvard Business School) and Eric Shashoua (in medical school).

WHY: Sleep is critical to overall health, and most Americans don't get enough or enough quality sleep. Sleep clinics are only for those with serious sleep problems. Consumers have no reliable products for sleep management. The smartphone product needed to appeal to a larger audience that includes health-conscious people, not just frustrated sleepers.

WHEN/WHERE: Zeo Mobile: Sept. 26, 2011 / Newton, MA. Company: 2004 / Providence, RI.

BACKSTORY: While taking a basic psychology class at Brown, the founders learned that if you wake up at the right time, you feel more refreshed. As sleep-deprived students, they were

How to Get Facebook to Surrender Its Data about You

[ A blacked-out excerpt of a Facebook user's data. ]

Facebook members in Europe, listen up: European Union and Irish data-protection laws mean you have the right to get a copy of all the personal data Facebook has on you -- not just the data you uploaded but everything. The laws apply to Facebook because of its Dublin-based international HQ.

Austria-based Europe-v-facebook, which started its campaign in August, explains here how to request your data and which laws to cite [ listed below ]. Interestingly, you need to give Facebook a copy of your government-issued ID so the company knows it's giving the information to the right person. Facebook has 40 days to deliver a CD with your data.

The organization includes four examples of received information with sensitive information -- from check-ins to photos to chats -- blacked out. However, no one who has requested their data via