When it comes to diagnoses and the possibility of undergoing serious medical procedures, we want second opinions (and trustworthy referrals) whenever we can get them. With 30 to 40 million Americans slated to receive insurance for the first time next year thanks to Obamacare — and with millions expected to experience higher costs and reduced coverage as a result — the system is in for a shock. That’s why one Bay Area startup sees a huge need for trustworthy, affordable online resource for second opinions, and referrals. And, potentially, a huge business opportunity.

Conceived by Reputation.com co-founder Owen Tripp and chief of interventional radiology at Stanford Hospital, Dr. Lawrence Hofmann, ConsultingMD launched in early 2012 to streamline the diagnosis process and help patients connect with top specialists for speedy second opinions. In other words, it wants to be the “Mayo Clinic of the Web,” as The Wall Street Journal intoned in February.

Investors are intrigued; particularly, a firm that has quite a bit of experience investing in Health IT companies. Today, ConsultingMD announced that it has raised $10 million in series B financing from Venrock. While Tripp (like every founder on the planet) says that the company had interest from a range of investors, the company chose Venrock because he sees them as the “leading venture firm” when it comes to healthcare IT, and one that is committed to “advancing patient-centered care.”

Updating

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

References to hashtags in Facebook’s code suggest the social network could be working on bringing the feature — popular on Twitter, Instagram and Tumblr — to its own platform.

Developer Tom Waddington from Cut Out + Keep, who has discovered a number of unreleased Facebook features in the past, today pointed us to a mention of the word “hashtag” in Facebook’s Javascript SDK. He says this likely for an XFBML hashtag plugin, similar to the hashtag tracking widget Twitter offers developers and publishers.

Another mention is in the live source code for Facebook.com. A reference to ”EntstreamHashtagOverlay” links hashtags to Facebook’s hovercard feature. This suggests users will be able to hover over a hashtag to get more information, similar to what they can do for people, apps and pages, as seen below.

Waddington also noticed that Facebook.com/hashtag redirects to Facebook.com, leading us to believe the company could be saving this page for an unreleased feature, otherwise it would lead to a 404 error page.

In March, anonymous sources told the Wall Street Journal, AllThingsD and TechCrunch that Facebook was working to integrate hashtags into its service to help users follow trending topics, search for news and contribute to conversations around a particular issue. That same month, Facebook added a job listing for a data editor to join the consumer communications team “responsible for amplifying the many exciting ways people are using Facebook and connecting with others during global events, holidays and other significant moments in time.”

Shortly after, the company added a multiple listings related to strategic partner development, such as roles focused on entertainment companies and public figures in Brazil and Asia, as well as musicians and athletes in the U.S.  In April, Facebook added a listing for a Public Content Partnerships Analyst to use “quantitative analysis, data mining and the presentation of data to communicate how our partners engage with our product.”

Facebook has not commented on the possibility of hashtags on the platform. Users can already include hashtags in their posts — and many do, often for stylistic reasons — but these do not generate links to more posts with the same hashtags. On other services, hashtags serve to label and group conversations. Although they are most associated with Twitter, they have roots in early Internet chat networks and have more recently taken off on Instagram, which Facebook now owns.

Hashtags could give Facebook users new ways to engage with people and content outside their network of friends. The feature could also lead to better ways of searching posts. With Graph Search, Facebook removed the ability to search public conversations. Hashtag search could replace that and improve Facebook’s existing photo search by letting users tag their contents as they do on Instagram.

Article courtesy of Inside Facebook

Dell shareholders Carl Icahn and Southeastern Asset Management have teamed up to propose an alternative offer to founder Michael Dell’s $24.4 billion leveraged buyout deal.

According to correspondence obtained by the Wall Street Journal, Icahn and Southeastern say they would give Dell shareholders the option to continue holding stock in the company and take an additional $12 a share in cash or stock.

Southeastern is Dell’s largest shareholder with a 8.5 percent stake. Icahn and Southeastern currently hold a combined 13 percent of Dell’s stock, while Michael Dell and his partners hold about 16 percent.

Carl Icahn has sought to overturn Michael Dell’s bid to take the company private since March. The activist investor, who owns a $1 billion stake in Dell, originally said he was open to a partnership with Blackstone Group after the private equity firm made its own separate bid for the PC maker. Blackstone Group backed away from its offers last month, however, citing Dell’s “deteriorating” business. Dell’s operating margins and sales have been hurt as demand for PCs drop.

Michael Dell and Silver Lake agreed in February to buy out shareholders at $13.65 a share. Icahn and Southeastern are among several major investors who say that Michael Dell and Silver Lake’s offer undervalues the company.

In the letter seen by WSJ, Icahn and Southeastern also brought up the possibility of replacing Michael Dell and other members of Dell’s board and management.

“You now have the opportunity to ameliorate the damage we believe you have caused to Dell and its shareholders by following the fair and reasonable path set forth in this letter,” wrote Icahn and Southeastern president G. Staley Cates.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Amazon offers a range of hardware, including its Kindle e-readers and tablets, but now it’s looking to expand the line with two new smartphones and an audio-only device that streams music, according to the Wall Street Journal. The phones include a high-end one with a glasses-free 3D screen, as well as another about which details were not included in the report, which presumably would be a more traditional design.

Amazon has been rumored to have been working on a phone for a while now, and the recent hiring of top Windows Phone evangelist Charlie Kindel also raised alarms that Amazon might be in the smartphone business soon. Natasha wrote about how Kindel had previously discussed Android’s fragmentation problem, and how it provided opportunity for other players to step up and innovate. This could be what he’s attempting at Amazon, and these devices might be part of that project, although nothing about its plans have been officially revealed as of yet.

The rumored 3D device is said to use some kind of retina-tracking technology to present a holographic image that’s viewable without glasses, and that hovers above the screen. It sounds a little like a gimmick to be honest, especially considering how CE devices with 3D have fared so far, like the 3DS, which recently has downplayed its 3D capabilities in recent marketing. Other phone makers, including HTC and Sony, have also dabbled with 3D displays on phones, all of which have essentially failed to make an impact.

Lately, however, a lot of companies have been creating hardware which doesn’t necessarily have an immediately apparent niche. There’s the Chromebook Pixel, for instance, as well as Google Glass and rumors of the Apple smart watch. There’s the Acer Aspire R7 more recently, too, all of which essentially point to a need to have a big, splashy marquee product that isn’t necessarily the hottest consumer device.

Amazon’s other phone could be the more mass-market play, and the dedicated audio player sounds like it might want to become the iPhone of the streaming music generation. WSJ says that some of these devices might launch as soon as in the next few months, though there’s no guarantee that they won’t be shelved, so 3D screens could also just be something Amazon is testing internally.

We’ve reached out to Amazon for comment and have yet to hear back, but will update this post if they provide any official comment.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Pouring $586 million in Sina Weibo gives Alibaba Group several perks, including an inroad into social media and access to the microblogging platform’s data. Not only that, but its new 18 percent stake in Sina Weibo may also give Alibaba Group a leg-up as it seeks to promote its own smartphone operating system Alibaba Mobile OS (AMOS) as a rival to Android.

As the Wall Street Journal writes, Alibaba Group’s investment in Sina Weibo means that it now has access to data generated by the platform’s 46.2 million daily users. This is on top of the 500 million registered users on Taobao, one of Alibaba Group’s e-commerce sites.

“If you are a big Internet company and you are ambitious enough in the mobile space, you have to do more than apps. Otherwise, you are just a small species in an ecosystem controlled by others,” Alibaba chief strategy officer Zeng Ming told WSJ.

Zeng said that Alibaba Group’s target for AMOS is to power 10 percent of all smartphones shipped in China, an ambitious goal considering that AMOS currently only has 1 percent market share. According to IDC data, Android currently holds an 80 percent chunk of the market, while iOS accounts for 10 percent. Though seven Chinese smartphone makers — KONKA, ZOPO, Amoi, G’Five, Little Pepper, Haier, and Beijing Tianyu–have pledged to launch AMOS phones, none of them are major players.

Obstacles standing in Alibaba Group’s way include Google, which in September objected to Acer’s plan to sell an AMOS-powered smartphone because Acer is part of the Google-led Open Handset Alliance. Google said that Acer could not work with a “noncompatible” version of Android and, even though Alibaba insisted that its OS is not an Android variant, the Acer phone was shelved. But Alibaba Group seems optimistic that it will ll be able to get around the Open Handset Alliance. Zeng told WSJ “if quite a few handset companies decide to choose Alibaba’s OS, Google will have to be careful in how far they want to push it.”

Alibaba Group  recently held a press conference in which it outlined its plans to leverage its e-commerce properties to get support from device makers, telecom carriers, and software developers as it creates an ecosystem for AMOS.

Steps Alibaba Group is taking to promote AMOS include subsidies for smartphone makers and a 1 billion RMB ($162 million) funding program for app developers. The company is also striking deals with telecom operators that would allow customers to purchase AMOS smartphones without deposits or down payments by determining their creditworthiness based on transactions on Alibaba Group’s e-commerce sites.

Furthermore, AMOS may stand to benefit from the Chinese government’s push to promote operating systems developed within that country, which has included attacks on foreign developers. For example, in March China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology issued a white paper that criticized the country’s dependency on Android, while Apple issued an apology earlier this month after a series of attacks by state-run media. Other OSes currently being developed by Chinese companies include Smartisan and Ubuntu Kylin.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Mobile device management company Good Technology has raised $50 million, according to a Securities and Exchange (SEC) filing. A company spokesperson confirmed the fundraising but had no comment about the purpose of the raise. The SEC document says the company is seeking a total of $60 million.

Founded in 1996 and headquartered in Sunnyvale, Calif., Good Technology is backed by Oak Investment Partners, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Meritech Capital Partners, DFJ ePlanet Ventures, DFJ Growth Fund, Rustic Canyon Ventures, Allegis Capital, GKM and Blueprint Ventures.

In its E round, investors included Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Benchmark
Advanced Equities, Crosslink Capital and Broadview Ventures.

Good Technology plays in the fast-consolidating MDM market. It provides enterprise mobility technologies across multiple platforms and security and management software. Its product offerings include Good for Enterprise, Good for Government, Good for OEM Device Manufacturers/Carriers and Good Dynamics. Good puts an emphasis on providing a platform that allows enterprise developers and ISVs to create secure mobile applications.

It has been reported that Good is pursuing an IPO. According to the Wall Street Journal, the company  has hired four investment banks to explore the possibility of a public offering. The IPO is believed to be taking place later this year. Morgan Stanley, Barclays PLC, Bank of America Corp., and Citigroup Inc. were hired to help with a deal that the WSJ says is likely to be valued at over $1 billion.

The bring your own device (BYOD) movement has in many ways changed the dynamics for the way people work. Mobile use is accelerating faster than any expected, leading to some interesting issues for IT managers who have become accustomed to managing desktop personal computers and laptops. The shift has forced the CIO to adopt the tools provided by MDM vendors.

Enterprise vendors recognize this budding demand and have been making acquisitions to build out mobile work suites. For example, in January, Citrix acquired Zenprise , an MDM vendor.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Samsung is working on a dust-proof and water-proof Galaxy S4, which will essentially resemble the S4 but with environmental superpowers, says the Wall Street Journal. The paper also reported that Samsung is launching its next-generation Galaxy tablet in June, as well as a compact S4 at “just” 4.3-inches in size (this still seems large to me, but maybe I’m just old). Samsung has always been keen on capitalizing on flagship branding by diversifying its line with a variety of offshoot devices, so the news should come as no surprise.

The ruggedized S4 will take the flagship phone in a brand new direction, however, and one that might actually cut off a key competitor at the knees – Google’s own Motorola. Google CEO Larry Page and Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt have referenced Motorola’s upcoming hardware work, referring to how phones should not break when dropped, or die when submerged in water, suggesting that one of the key features of any Android hardware coming out of Motorola once its existing pre-Google product timeline runs out will be somewhat rugged, too.

Samsung and Google have a complex relationship, and much has been made about how the Korean smartphone OEM might make Google a little nervous, given how much control it has over the Android smartphone market. It’s a theory that Google itself has repeatedly and roundly denied, but Samsung recently went out of its way to highlight its own software and pretty much leave out any discussion of Android itself.

The Wall Street Journal also notes that a rugged version of the Galaxy S4 will help Samsung attract lucrative military and government contracts, something the OEM is trying to accomplish in order to steal share from Apple and BlackBerry. That would definitely be an advantage, but there’s also just a general trend towards building more rugged devices, thanks to smartphones like the Sony Xperia Z. Startups like Liquipel and HzO are also trying to make water-resistant consumer electronics common-place, both before- and after-market. At this point, it’s just a matter of who can do it first.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Chartbeat is launching what CEO Tony Haile told me has been the big “missing piece” from its real-time analytics product for publishers — a video dashboard.

“And not just missing for us, but largely a missing piece for publishers, too,” he said.

By that, Haile means video data is usually stuck in a separate application, and therefore analyzed completely separately, by a separate team, from the rest of the site. Plus, because the analytics can be so expensive, publishers often cut the data that they receive.

Chartbeat takes a different approach by integrating video data into its general analytics tool. So when you look at the traffic and engagement data for your site, videos will be included, and when you look at the data for an individual page, you’ll see how a specific video (if there is one) contributes to the engagement time on that page. Haile said this can help publishers understand how videos fit in to their broader editorial strategy, and whether there are areas where they should be including more videos or promoting videos more prominently.

And there’s unique data that tells publishers about the performance of each video — not just how many people watched a video and for how long, but also how many people dropped off when the ads started, and how each of those metrics compare to videos with similar characteristics (primarily length).

It sounds like some of those features came out of Chartbeat’s early tests with publishers, including the Wall Street Journal and MSNBC. Haile said one tone of the big things he took away from those tests was the need to answer the question “Are we putting our resources to work in the right way with video?” That’s not something you can answer by just throwing a bunch of numbers at a publisher, he said, which is why Chartbeat tries to place the data in context, and even summarizes the engagement data with a single engagement score.

Head of Brand Lauryn Bennett noted that the company is hoping the video numbers, just like all Chartbeat data, are used by the broader company, not just the analytics team or the video team.

“This last part is pretty important,” she said. “It’s bringing together teams. Video content is now everyone’s job.”

Haile added that Chartbeat is offering a “generic SDK” that should work with “most videos.” It has also built a Brightcove plug-in and is working on similar plug-ins for Ooyala and HTML5.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Only three days left to scoop up TechCrunch Disrupt NY tickets! You can get them here. And view our amazing speaker lineup here.

Foursquare’s Dennis Crowley has had a helluva April. The company just closed a $41 million debt round from Silver Lake Partners and Spark Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, O’Reilly AlphaTech and Union Square Ventures, and released a revamped iOS app. Yahoo M&A has also reportedly been sniffing around.

In an effort to foster promising web growth, the company launched a browser-focused redesign yesterday: “Foursquare is quietly breaking through as a place for information about venues,” wrote Drew Olanoff, “its most prized asset.”

The company has 33 million registered users and 50 unique monthly visitors and now has to come up with a plan to compel them to keep coming back. Is its value as a social company or as a massive location-data-review company? And though some, like Valley angel Keith Rabois, are skeptical of Foursquare’s future, existing investors have faith. “This will be a very important public company one day,” says Bijan Sabet, a general partner at Spark Capital. “And I am in no rush.”

Perhaps this is because of the drive and passion of Crowley. His resilience in the past couple of months, let alone this year, is impressive, and we’ve made room onstage at Disrupt NY next week for him to talk about it. Just last and this week alone could fill up a whole conference day, as Crowley himself was also a participant in the Boston marathon, in addition to everything mentioned above .

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Dennis Crowley

Dennis Crowley is a co-founder of Foursquare. Previously, he co-founded Dodgeball, a network of the same nature which sold to Google in 2005.

He has been named one of the “Top 35 Innovators Under 35” by MIT’s Technology Review magazine (2005) and has won the “Fast Money” bonus round on the TV game show Family Feud (2009). His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Wired, Time Magazine, Newsweek, MTV, Slashdot and NBC. He is currently an Adjunct Professor at NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program.

Dennis holds a master’s degree from New York University’s Interactive Telecommunications Program and a bachelor’s degree from the Newhouse School at Syracuse University.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Verizon reported its Q1 2013 earnings today, including revenue for the quarter of $29.4B and EPS of $0.68. The results were mixed, topping expectations in terms of earnings per share, and falling slightly below prediction in terms of revenue estimates, according to Yahoo!’s analyst consensus.

Total revenues were up 4.2 percent from last year, where it reported $18.3 billion in the first fiscal quarter. EPS was up 15.3 percent from last year, when ti reported $0.59 per share. Verizon added 720,000 wireless customers during the first quarter of the year, for a total of 98.9 million customers, up from 98.2 million sequentially.

Verizon dedicated resources to launching Redbox Instant, which was in a beta trial period for most of the quarter before its launch in March. That likely put pressure on margins, while on the wireless side decreased subsidies on some mobile phones seem to have helped it improve the picture there. Wireline ARPU increased to $107.15 in Q1 2013 and wireless ARPA grew to $150.27 per month, up 6.9 percent year over year, and profit totalled $4.8 billion overall for the quarter.

A recent report suggested that Verizon recently made a bid for Clearwire spectrum leases of $1.5 billion, in an attempt to help it continue to push out its network expansion. Originally reported by the Wall Street Journal April 15, this is unlikely to have impacted the carrier’s earnings today, but could have a big future material impact on the business, as Verizon continues to snap up spectrum as it did in its deal with cable companies last year worth $3.9 billion.

FiOS continues to more than offset DSL subscriber losses in Verizon’s wireline business, the company said, and is looking to bring as many as 300,000 customers over to its fiber network away from legacy copper-based networks by the end of 2013. FiOS now reaches 17.8 million customers, reaching 38.2 percent of potential subscribers within reach of Verizon’s current network.

In its wireless business, Verizon reported a total of 7.2 million activations for smartphones during Q1, with 28 percent new customers. 5.9 million were LTE-capable devices, down from 7.3 million during the previous quarter. It’s a sequential drop-off, but one that’s in line with a quarter following the normally very busy holiday sales period.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch