UQ Life was founded to create a smart platform for self-discovery and personal development, and it’s designed to help kids learn through collaborative games. Today, as part of TechCrunch Disrupt NY’s Startup Battlefield, the company launched with a couple of apps for child learning and development by personalizing games to match individual skill sets.

According to founder and CEO Maureen Dunne, these games are created to improve and reinforce skill development, especially in areas such as math and science. But the platform can also be used for games that help kids develop social skills.

Founder Dunne is a data scientist and educational program director, working with children to improve their learning and development. She’s spent the last several years studying developmental science and cognitive science, and hopes to apply some of that expertise to the collaborative gaming space.

There are a few advantages to using the UQ Life platform. For one thing, the platform provides users with built-in, closed social features that can be used so that students can collaborate with family members, teachers and tutors.

It allows them to co-participate in games for coaching and mentoring children. Parents act as administrators and decide who gets invited and is approved to join in gameplay. In addition to providing opportunities for mentoring, Dunne says that the social aspect also can help bring families closer together. Like for instance, by enabling grandparents to participate in the games.

Games are also multi-platform, which means that kids can play them on any number of devices — whether they be PCs, tablets, or mobile phones. The adults that participate with them can as well. So a kid can be playing on a tablet, while their grandparents are on a desktop at their homes.

In addition to the collaboration and mentoring aspects, UQ Life’s platform is also designed to enable more personalized skill development. While we usually think of recommendation engines that provide content that we would prefer based on past videos we’ve viewed or content we’ve listened to.

But UQ uses personalization technology to better understand students’ specific skill sets, as well as their needs. By doing so, it helps them develop new skills in a more targeted fashion. It’s that technology that is at the center of what UQ has built and how its platform differentiates itself from others.

At its base level, the games built on the UQ platform will provide basic educational tools to first-time users. As with any technology of its kind, the more a user interacts with it, and the more users there are on the application, the bigger the data set and the better it will be at personalization.

The team has already built a few applications for the platform, including an interactive story with six mini-games, as well as a couple of other games and toolsets for collaborative activities. But the ultimate goal is to make its platform available to third-party developers to build their own personalized skill development apps.

In fact, while the UQ Life platform is currently focused on childhood education, it can also be used in other vertical markets beyond childhood educational games. For instance, Dunne said that the same kind of personalized skill-development technology could be applied to job training or therapy.

UQ Life has raised $1.4 million in seed funding from a syndicate of institutional investors, as well as a couple of angels. The company has six full-time employees and is based in San Francisco.

Judge Q&A

Q: What’s the difference between your platform or another gaming platform?

A: It works on all devices. A big part of it is bringing together a community to support child development.

Q: Is this algorithmic, or how do you help, with experts?

A: Every aspect of the design is based on translational research and the way we structure the data is to really help a particular skill set.

Q: This feels very top-down.

A: We’re releasing our own games, but this was a platform built from the ground up to add features that aren’t available now.

Q: You could work with third party developers to get them to use your platform.

A: We’ll work with developers to make sure that they take advantage of the features we built into the platform.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Well, it looks like the carpooling race in Europe continues. BlaBlaCar, the European carpooling marketplace and competitor to Carpooling.com, has announced that it’s reached the milestone of 3 million members, almost double from this time last year. It’s also expanding to Germany, giving testimony to being a truly pan-European player.

In January last year, the Paris-headquartered company raised an additional $10 million from Accel Partners and existing investors ISAI, and Cabiedes & Partners, specifically for European expansion. Since then its carpooling communities have extended beyond the UK, France and Spain, to include Benelux (Belgium, Netherlands, Luxembourg), Poland, Portugal, Italy (via an acquisition), and now Germany, of course.

The launch into Germany, including opening an office in Hamburg, also puts the heat on ten year-old Carpooling.com, which is based in neighboring Munich and targets most of Europe, including 7 language-specific websites. In comparison, Carpooling.com claims 4 million members.

Founded in 2006, BlaBlaCar taps into the collaborative consumption phenomenon — long before anybody called it that — by offering a carpooling or ridesharing marketplace to connect drivers with empty seats and paying passengers, helping to offset long distance travel costs.

Drivers can charge passengers through BlaBlaCar or directly, while there are a number of security mechanisms, such as phone number authentication and user ratings of members, which form the basis for being blacklisted, if necessary, In other words, along with the network and marketplace aspects, it’s building a trust platform.

Accessible on the web and via mobile apps, BlaBlaCar says it’s currently seeing around 500,000 passengers every month.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Y Combinator-backed Firebase is expanding the infrastructure that it offers to app developers with its first module — Firepad, a Google Docs-style text editor that allows you to collaborate with others.

To a consumer, that might not sound very exciting. After all, we’ve already got Google Docs. However, co-founder and CEO James Tamplin said that those kinds of capabilities are limited to big companies with “a ton of Google-quality engineers.” With Firepad, however, developers can add text editing and document collaboration to their own apps without too much extra work.

To build Firepad, Tamplin said his team had an advantage, because “we’ve got most of the pieces in place already.” Building on top of the existing Firebase platform made things “significantly easier,” but he added, “It still wasn’t trivial.” Firepad is a full-featured text editor, with capabilities like conflict resolution, cursor synchronization, user attribution, and user presence detection.

Firepad is an open source project, so developers can download the code and customize it as they please.

And there are apps already using the technology — initially for code editing, though you can imagine other uses as well. For example, Atlassian is launching a free Firepad plugin for Stash, its tool for Git repository management, so that different team members can edit or review code together. (You can see a screenshot of the plugin below.) Atlassian developer advocate Rich Manalang said the plugin was created during one of the company’s ShipIt employee hackathons, and that he could “see [Firepad] being useful in a wide variety” of Atlassian products.

Similarly, Action.IO is using Firepad to enable collaborating code editing in its web development environment.

“Firepad is great because we don’t have to worry about building the backend in order to support real-time synchronization of a document’s state,” CEO Andrew J. Solimine told me via email. “It enabled us to build our collaborative code editing in just a few days, where it might have taken us weeks otherwise.”

Tamplin added that he plans to expand Firebase’s capabilities by releasing more modules in the future. Firepad is included in the Firebase pricing plan — the platform is currently free, but when the public beta ends, the company will charge based on bandwidth, storage, and the number of users.

To see collaborative editing in action, you can visit the Firepad site and play around with the group document on the front page.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Google just announced the launch of its Google Drive Realtime API, a new tool for developers that will allow them to bring the same real-time collaboration features that power Google Drive to their own apps. The API, Google writes, “handles network communication, storage, presence, conflict resolution, and other collaborative details so you can focus on building great apps.” Google partnered with three-developer focused tools, the collaborative code editor Neutron Drive, the project scheduling tool Gantter and the diagraming tool draw.io to test and launch this API.

To show off the power of the API, Google also developed a cube puzzle that uses the Realtime API, as well as a Drive Realtime API Playground for testing the API. Developers, of course, also need to sign up for the Drive API before they can use the Realtime API, too.

The API, Google writes, provides “collaborative versions of familiar data objects such as maps, lists, strings, and JSON values and automatically synchronizes and stores modifications to these objects.” In addition, developers can also add custom objects and references.

Because the API tracks the collaborators’ presence, developers can alert users when others join, leave or make changes to a document.

Just like on Drive, the Realtime API also ensures that local changes are immediately reflected in the local document thanks to Google’s use of operational transformation (OT) at the core of the system. This means your local app will continue to feel responsive, even on high-latency networks.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Rally Software has acquired Flowdock, a real-time collaboration service designed for developers. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. Flowdock received $650,000 in seed funding in October 2011 from investors that included IDG Ventures, CrunchFund and a number of individuals including Eucalyptus CEO Marten Mickos.

Rally Software, a SaaS provider of application lifecycle management (ALM) tools, already uses Flowdock to add enhance AgileZen, a project management software. Rally acquired AgileZen in 2010. The Flowdock acquisition will put Rally in more direct competition with competitors such as Atlassian, a collaborative development platform. Rally’s more traditional competitors include enterprise giants such as IBM and HP, which for the most part offer on-premise software tools.

Flowdock, based in Helsinki, is known for its “shared team inbox with group chat.” The service brings activity from project management tools such as Pivotal Tracker and JIRA, version control systems such as GitHub, BitBucket and Kiln and customer feedback channels that include Zendesk, email lists and other collaborative networks. All the data is fed into one consumable stream.

Founder Otto Hilska wrote on Quora last year that Flowdock’s real-time capability comes from a messaging backend that also acts as a SMTP server accepting incoming emails in realtime, connecting to the different services. Messages are stored in MongoDB, the NoSQL database.

Rally will use the acquisition to create a new R&D facility in Helsinki. All nine employees will join Rally, bringing its total to 379 people. Rally, based in Boulder, also has offices in Raleigh, North Carolina and Bellevue, Washington.

Rally raised $20 million in 2007 from Meritech Capital Partners. According to Wikipedia, the company has 144,000 paid users and more than 1,000 customers in 115 countries, including 35 of the Fortune 100 companies as of September 2012.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Over the last several years, the idea of collaborative consumption has really taken off. Thanks to startups like Airbnb, Getaround, Taskrabbit and others, people are making more efficient use of their assets or time. The idea that anyone with an extra room to share, or a car they barely use, or spare time or skills that can be better utilized by others — all of it has created a whole new group of marketplaces built on connecting “those who have” with “those in need” on a short-term basis. That’s what the sharing economy is all about.

In a lot of ways, the sharing economy is helping to reduce peak demand for goods and services. That guests can rent rooms on Airbnb during SXSW is a more efficient use of resources than if the Austin hospitality industry decided to build a whole bunch of hotels just to deal with one week of visitors. And Getaround or Relayrides renters are helping to make use of cars that otherwise go unused most of the time.

But the thing about the sharing economy is that, at least when it comes to marketplaces like Airbnb or Getaround, it still relies on a lot of people owning a lot of things. And if we’re talking about true efficiency, it seems to me that we’re going to need to go a step beyond just the owner-renter model for the collaborative consumption market, and into an area that’s based on fractional ownership of goods.

Fractional ownership is not a new idea — vacation time-shares have been around forever, for instance — but it could be applied more broadly and more efficiently in more markets. One prime example is in the way people own and use cars: It’s no surprise that most vehicles go unused 23 or 22 hours out of the day. And the various car- and ride-sharing services are getting users one step closer to not needing their own vehicles, at least in urban areas and at least part of the time.

But what if, instead of most people on my block owning a car that sits parked the vast majority of the time, each of us shared ownership of a vehicle or group of vehicles in the neighborhood. Sure, I can rent nearby neighbor’s cars today on an a la carte basis, but that still requires a person to purchase, pay insurance for, and maintain that vehicle for himself, me, and anyone else who wants to use it. For those of us who don’t own our own vehicles, there’s also the tricky matter of insurance, and who’s to blame or who will cover for an accident that happens in someone else’s car.

On-demand car rental services like Zipcar have gotten us one step closer to answering at least some of those questions. But the infrastructure around Zipcar has its own inefficiencies: It has built its fleet to handle peak demand, and so it’s cars, also, go unused a lot of the time. As a result, it tends to be more expensive than the real sharing economy of car rental startups.

Anyway, I don’t want to rent a car by the hour or by the day, whether it be a neighbor’s car or one from Zipcar. What I really would like is to be able to share a car along with other people in my neighborhood and find a way to finance, manage insurance, and manage booking in a single dashboard. I want to be able to subscribe to a service where I’m paying for access to get around when I want, with insurance (and maybe gas) built in. Where a car sits in a shared lot and is maintained by someone else.

Ultimately, I think this is where the auto industry is headed — or at least where it should go. At some point, U.S. auto manufacturers will likely find that people are buying fewer cars and hopefully holding onto them longer. That sharing economy companies are allowing those who previously owned a car to be able to go without. And when that happens, I think it will make more sense for automakers to set up their own Zipcar-like lots in major cities and to lease access to their vehicles rather than sell them outright.

Of course, the same efficiency model could be applied to other goods: Why should everyone in the suburbs buy their own lawnmowers when they could all use the same, jointly owned piece of equipment? Why build an Airbnb for boats when you can build a platform for fractional ownership of a boat? And the old standby — why Airbnb a vacation home to others when you could have ownership of it with a group of others?

We know that these models can work as long as we have the right tools to manage them. The question is, who’s going to build us this future based on fractional ownership?

[Photo Credit: Shockingly Tasty via Compfight cc]

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

A couple of weeks ago I reported about the upcoming launch of Moxtra, a new tool from a group including many former WebEx folks that was starting a private beta for its virtual binder-based social collaboration and collection product. Moxtra is now officially launching, debuting its iPad app to the public today and also launching the web-based version for general use.

This time around, I didn’t just get a demo of Moxtra, I was actually able to use it via a pre-release preview build. And the experience really was quite unlike Evernote or any other similar types of tools, as Moxtra VP of Marketing Jan Sysmans had indicated. For one, while Moxtra can also be used completely independently of anyone else to organize movies, images, notes and other content into binders, complete with audio notes and more, it’s a lot more comfortable with use as a social tool, for sharing contents among teams and groups.

Sharing with Moxtra is as easy as sending email invites from within the app, right from a dedicated bottom interface bar button that appears in every binder you have. You can also invite friends through Facebook, view contact info for everyone participating in the binder, and change their role from Editor, to Viewer (can look but not change anything), or remove them altogether. It’s actually a lot simpler even than setting up FTP shares, which is a common way for groups of people to collaborate on a set of media files or documents. And there are notation and markup tools built-in, unlike in FTP environments.

All binders have activity streams, which display a thumbnail of any media added or changed by binder members, along with a date for the activity and a text description of what kind of change was made. It’s a little like a social feed on Twitter or Facebook, but without the noise, so you can focus on the practical changes that have taken place in your collaborative workspace.

Another nice feature of Moxtra is that you can record audio on any page in your binder, and save it as a new Moxtra Note. That makes it incredibly easy to put together brief audio/visual presentations, say for explaining how a piece of software works or walking someone through your latest design proposal. You can share these out via the web using unique URLs, too, so your collaborators don’t necessarily have to be on Moxtra to participate. And if you’d rather do it live, there’s a built-in meeting tool, Moxtra Meet, that lets you instantly set up web conferences from your iPad or the web-based app with everyone sharing the binder.

“Moxtra Meet is basically the equivalent of a WebEx meeting,” Sysmans said in an interview about the launch. “It’s a real-time meeting that anyone can schedule within Moxtra. That will allow you to start a real-time meeting that includes VOiP, and you can invite anyone to your binder meeting, so you can selectively share the contents of your binder with anyone, and they don’t have to be on Moxtra – it can be all browser-based.”

In terms of potential usage, Sysmans had a few use cases to share, including a home improvement project, wherein home owners could share plans with designers and contractors, make notes, keep track of receipts and purchase orders, meet to discuss plan changes, and more. That’s an example that blends home and professional uses, but you can see how it might be effective in both realms.

“That’s where we’re playing right now – it’s that intersection between digital project management and project collaboration,” he said. “It’s something that very few applications do well, and by combining the binder concept with the remote access to all of your files from your iPad, with Moxtra Cloud, with Moxtra Note and with Moxtra Meet, we believe it’s a strong combination.”

Moxtra is free for the time being, with the company mulling paid premium plans down the road to generate revenue. The company now has 25 employees, most of whom are engineers, and is headquartered in Cupertino. For the first time, the company is revealing via TechCrunch its CEO and co-founder, too: Subrah Iyar, former co-founder and CEO of WebEx. A strong founding team is likely why Moxtra is so solid out of the gate, despite the many moving parts that make up its overall vision. Moxtra is a product with a lot of room to run, and I can’t wait to see how it grows from here.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Over the past few years, we’ve seen all sorts of peer-to-peer marketplace startups pop up: There’s GetAround and RelayRide for cars, Zaarly and TaskRabbit for skills, and then there’s Airbnb — the granddaddy of them all — for apartment rentals. It’s all part of this collaborative consumption/sharing economy/whatever you want to call it do-goodie idea of making unused assets or skills available to those who need them, and making a little bit of extra cash in the meantime. So why not one for bikes?

We’ve been following bike-sharing startup Spinlister for a while now, but now it’s coming out with a whole new brand — although the service will more or less stay the same. The young company will now be calling itself Liquid, you know, to highlight the whole idea of creating a “liquid marketplace” for sharing your assets — like bikes!

I talked to co-founder Will Dennis about the new brand identity yesterday, because I was puzzled about the whole thing. After all, Spinlister is just a fine name for a startup focused on listing and renting bikes. I mean, why something as boring and generic as friggin’ “Liquid”?

“We think it better represents what we want to do, to allow people to get what they want when they want it,” Dennis told me. “It’s a more tangible idea of what we’re trying to accomplish.”

Ok, sure, but does this mean that Spinlister Liquid is looking beyond just being a marketplace for bikes? That’s kind of what moving to a generic new name kind of suggests to me. After all, you could create a “Liquid” marketplace for nearly any damn thing — backhoes, DVD copies of The Blind Side, whatever.

Not necessarily, says Dennis. For now, the startup is focused just on bikes. “We’re really excited about what we’re doing with bicycles. There’s no point in trying anything else, if we’re not succeeding at that,” he told me.

Spinlister Liquid has also opened up access to anyone who wants to rent a bike, anywhere in the U.S. After launching in New York and San Francisco in the spring, the startup announced a nationwide rollout late last month. But there was just one catch: To rent a bike, you also had to list a bike. It did that to boost inventory, but has since taken away that sort of listing pay wall to new users. Huzzah!

Since opening up nationwide, Spinlister Liquid has seen its available inventory increase by about 30 percent, and is seeing revenues increase week after week. In all, it’s seen more than 10,000 bike rental hours since it first became available.

Anyway, the startup is announcing the new name and brand at the GreenStart Demo Day today, after spending the last few months as part of the incubator. GreenStart is focused on startups in the cleantech space, and so Spinlister Liquid — and its plans for making bike-sharing more accessible to all — certainly fits the bill. Spinlister Liquid now has five full-time employees, and is now based in San Francisco, after being founded in New York City.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Podio, the collaborative work platform that was acquired by Citrix earlier this year, just launched its first iPad app. Podio already offered native apps for Apple’s iPhone and Google’s Android platform, but today’s launch marks the company’s first foray into the tablet world. As tablets become increasingly common in companies and as employers allow more of their employees to bring their own devices to work, adding a tablet app to the company’s portfolio was probably a no-brainer for Podio.

The app brings all of the service’s collaboration and sharing services to the iPad, including Podio’s app platform for handling project management, sales leads, recruiting and other common business tasks. The company’s iPad users will also be able to use more than 700 pre-built apps from the company’s app market.

“Podio for iPad completes our vision of empowering people to work from anywhere, with anyone, on any device, using a tool that perfectly fits the way they want to work,” said Tommy Ahlers, a VP of social collaboration at Citrix in a canned statement today. “Bringing Podio’s all-in-one work platform to the iPad makes it easier and faster to collaborate while on the go with the convenience of a lightweight mobile tablet, but without sacrificingPodio’s functionality or sophistication.”

As expected, the app also gives users access to their tasks, Podio’s file management system (including access to your files on third-party cloud-storage services), social activity stream, and calendaring features. According to Podio’s own data, its service is currently being used by over 40,000 companies in 170 countries.

Collaborative work platform Podio, the Danish Yammer and Basecamp competitor that was acquired by Citrix earlier this year, launched two new features today that are meant to help businesses and small teams cut down on internal emails. Starting today, you will be able to connect all of your Podio workspaces with unique email addresses. This, the company says, allows you to get “those important emails out of your inbox” to share them with the right people in your organization and attach them to the right projects and tasks while also allowing you to keep track of a given conversation in one place. According to Podio, this new email tool isn’t so much about “killing email” as about “building the right bridges between your inbox and your collaborative work platform.”

As a Podio spokesperson told me earlier this week, “this feature is designed to offer another easy way to get content into Podio, recognizing that most people still receive a lot of important emails that need to be connected to special projects, shared and discussed with teams in an open collaborative setting, or linked to ongoing tasks or meetings.”

In addition, Podio also launched @mentions for workspaces today. This feature, which is also meant to cut down on internal emails, allows you to quickly notify everybody in a given workspace (your marketing or developer team, for example) instead of having to copy everybody on an email.

The idea behind Podio is to bring together all of your workflows and the people you work with in one place. Because Podio allows you to quickly build specialized apps for your needs with just a few clicks, it’s definitely one of the more flexible collaborative work platforms on the market today. As quite a few of these workflows are organized around files, Podio supports virtually all of the major cloud storage services. The service also offers mobile apps for iPhone and Android.

Today’s expanded email integration combines Podio’s apps and workspaces by allowing you to set rules for how incoming email should be interpreted. An email to your CRM app and workspace, for example, could use the subject to identify the name of a potential customer and the body could be an email address and/or phone number

The company counts numerous large enterprises among its customers, including Alcatel-Lucent and BMW, but it is also positioning itself as a solution for small businesses and startups. Indeed, the company is now specifically reaching out to startups to introduce its product to them. During Vancouver’s GROWtalks event last week, for example, the company offered all attending startups free access to its premium version for a year.

Podio is free for teams with up to 5 members and after that, you have to pay $8 per month per employee.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch