Innovation Now
Highlighting Innovation Around The U.S.
Shopkick is on a mobile shopping tear with 3M users, over 1B offers viewed
Shopkick, the app that lets you earn rewards and deals simply by walking into a retail store, is doing really well. The company announced today that it has over 3 million active users since it launched over a year ago, and that over a billion of its in-app deals and offers have been viewed. Shopkick’s app communicates with a patent-pending device in stores, letting customers seamlessly earn rewards simply by strolling into a store and looking at products. All you need to do is have the app open to earn rewards — there’s no hunting and pecking for locations (and praying that GPS functionality works) with something like Foursquare.
The success of the app shows that Shopkick is certainly on to something. Consumers love earning rewards and free stuff, and retailers get a simple way to target specific customers. Not surprisingly, the app saw a big bump in usage over the last holiday season, with 5 million walk-ins to Shopkick-equipped stores in December 2011 alone. That was double the amount of walk-ins from four months prior. During the holidays, Shopkick users interacted with stores over 3.1 million times a day, up from just 1 million in August.
Shopkick’s technology has now been deployed in over 4,000 stores and 250 malls cross America. Recent partner brands include Old Navy, Disney, and Levi’s. Other notable stats: The company has seen over 150 million interactions with retailers since it added Old Navy in November. Sixty four percent of Shopkick users are women (more than half of which have kids), and the average user is 30 years old.
Palo Alto, Calif.-based Shopkick has raised a total of $20 million from Kleiner, Greylock, Hoffman (investing as an individual before he became a partner at Greylock), Citi Growth Ventures & Innovation Group, and Ron Conway’s SV Angel.
Visa certifies NFC-equipped Android, BlackBerry smart phones for payWave
NFC-enabled smartphones from Samsung Electronics, LG Electronics, and Research In Motion approved for use with Visa payWave, Visa’s mobile application for payments at the point-of-sale
SAN FRANCISCO–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Jan. 10, 2012– Visa Inc. (NYSE:V) and Visa Europe today announced that NFC-enabled smartphones from Samsung Electronics, LG Electronics and Research In Motion (RIM) have been certified for use with Visa’s mobile application for payments at the point-of-sale, Visa payWave. The Samsung Galaxy SII, LG Optimus NET NFC, BlackBerry® Bold™ 9900, BlackBerry Bold 9790, BlackBerry® Curve™ 9360 and BlackBerry Curve 9380 have been added to the list of Visa compliant payment products available for commercial deployment by financial institutions.
All the new devices certified by Visa host the Visa payWave application on a secure SIM card and feature NFC (Near Field Communication) technology, the short range communications standard that enables mobile phones to securely transmit payment information to a contactless payment terminal.
“This is an important step for Visa, its financial institution partners and the mobile industry,” said Bill Gajda, Global Head of Mobile Product, Visa Inc. “In addition to issuing plastic magnetic stripe or chip-enabled payment cards, financial institutions can now consider offering their accountholders a way to transform their smartphones into fully functional mobile payment devices.”
Visa’s certification of these smartphones paves the way for mobile device manufacturers, mobile operators and retailers to partner with financial institutions to offer Visa mobile payment functionality to consumers globally.
See full press release here.
Andreessen Horowitz, Salesforce Put $1.4M In Real-Time Messaging Infrastructure Startup Flotype
Flotype, a startup that offers a suite of technologies that simplify real-time messaging for cloud and mobile applications, has raised $1.4 million in seed funding from Andreessen Horowitz, Ignition Partners, Yuri Milner, Salesforce, and Y Combinator.
Flotype, which was part of Y Combinator’s Winter 2011 class, is announcing that its first product is Bridge, a technology that enables real-time communication between any server, any device, on any platform. Bridge is essentially an API that developers can use to avoid the complexity of building real-time messaging into their applications, and help push more data faster between servers, web browsers, mobile phones and other devices.
Founder and CEO Darshan Shankar explains that as he and his co-founders were studying engineering at UC Berkeley, they realized that the infrastructure behind real-time communications platforms like Facebook and Twitter needed to be democratized.
For companies that want to build complex real-time applications, Flotype provides a simple API that can be deployed within minutes by developers to enable these communications. As Shankar explains, these developers don’t need to spend millions (or billions) of dollars on building this infrastructure in-house, and can get to market faster.
For example, developers can build massive multiplayer video games like World of Warcraft for smartphones, or create the communications architecture behind a large-scale social data platform. While Shankar declined to tell us how much the use of the API costs, companies can test out the technology for free.
Full TechCrunch article here.
Code For America Receives $1.5M Grant From Google To Help The Government Harness Technology
Code for America, a non-profit which tries to bring the people and the power of the internet into government, has received a $1.5 million grant from Google.
Code for America launched this year to help governments become more transparent, connected, and efficient by connecting web developers with people who deliver city services. Earlier this year, Code for America debuted its inaugural fellowship program, which pairs technologists with leading cities to help them innovate.
In 2011, 19 fellows worked with 3 cities to develop over 21 applications, which are now being reused across the country and around the world. And the non-profit has also brought on Greylock Partner and former Mozilla CEO John Lilly and Tumblr VP and former White House and Google staffer Andrew McLaughlin to its Board of Directors. Other backers include the John S and James L Knight Foundation, the Ford Foundation, and the Open Society Foundation.
With the new funding, the organization is also launching two new programs (a Civic Startup Incubator and a Volunteer Engagement Platform). The seed accelerator, which has raised initial funding from Kauffman Foundation, will launch in the Spring of 2012 to help foster sustainable businesses that can become the next generation of government vendors.
In 2012, Code for America will also roll out an online platform to connect civic hackers and others with each other locally, and to reuse and remix civic apps in their cities.
Silver Spring Networks raising $30M, despite planned IPO
Smart grid company Silver Spring Networks is raising a $30 million round of debt and options, according to a filing. The company, which filed to go public this summer, has closed $24 million of that planned round and is looking to bring in another $6 million.
The company, which sells wireless networking products to utilities for smart meter deployments and other smart grid services, has seen a lot of growth in 2010 and 2011. According to Silver Spring’s latest amended S-1, the company brought in revenues of $175.72 million for the nine months ended September 30, 2011, with a $76.20 million net loss for the same period. In 2010 Silver Spring generated revenues of $70.22 million, $3.30 million in 2009 and just $58,000 in 2008. To date Silver Spring Networks has contracts for 17 million connected smart grid devices and has utility customers like Pepco Holdings, Constellation Energy, Florida Power & Light and PG&E.
Full Gigaom article here.
Applied Materials, launches a breakthrough tool to reduce chip power consumption
Applied Materialshas announced a new tool for reducing the power chips consume, enabling a new generation of powerful new gadgets with longer battery life.
The innovation is built into the chip equipment manufacturer’s newest tool, the Applied Producer Onyx film treatment system, announced today. Semiconductor chips serve as the brains of electronic gadgets from laptops to iPhones. And each chip has miles of microscopic electrical wiring built into it these days. The new Onyx effectively wraps those wires in a layer of insulation that can be accurately built at tiny dimensions.
“This is a big breakthrough,” said Bill McClintock, vice president and general manager of Applied’s Dielectric Systems and Modules business unit, in an interview.
He said that interconnect accounts for a third of the power used in a chip, and improving its power consumption results in higher performance and longer battery life. With Onyx, Applied Materials will enable the most power-efficient and strong interconnects in the industry.
Santa Clara, Calif.-based Applied Materials is the world’s biggest chip maker. The new Onyx fits in line with its other chip-making chambers, which process wafers and move them to the next machine. Eventually, those wafers are sliced into individual chips and used in electronic devices.
Chip makers who buy the new system would introduce it in a chip factory (which can be built these days for $4 billion) as one of many machines in a manufacturing line. The Onyx would handle eight to 16 processes, which would be followed by as many as 150 other processes before the chip is finished.
TechNet member, Tesla, opens showrooms to show off its electric Model S cars –
Black Friday shoppers on the market for an electric car might want to drop by a Teslashowroom this weekend. The company has put its vehicle technology on display, with prototypes of the new Model S Beta electric sedan appearing in stores around the U.S. and Canada.
The technology tour will be rolling out in selected cities across the country, showing off the vehicle’s drive train and electric motor, as well as the battery pack, front suspension and rear drive unit.
The idea is to let people get up close and personal with the new car, and experience an electric car not as some luxury toy, but as something they might one day own.
“Tesla stores are designed to let people explore and learn about Tesla’s technology for themselves,” said vice president George Blankenship, in a statement. “You’ll never see a ‘Don’t Touch’ sign in a Tesla store. We want everyone — from kindergartners to grandparents — to come in and see for themselves why driving electric is the future.”
Blankenship was hired by Tesla to design its retail facilities after successfully contributing to the signature look of Apple’s retail stores. He was Apple’s vice president for real estate from 2000 to 2006.
The Tesla Model S Beta is the first mass-market electric car produced by the company, whose headquarters are in Palo Alto, CA. The first Model S Beta units will be on the streets in 2012, and the company has taken orders for more than 6,500 pre-orders, selling out completely. VentureBeat recently visited the Palo Alto facility, and they got to test ride the new Model S.
What makes the Model S different from the company’s earlier vehicle, the Tesla Roadster, is that it looks like a regular sedan, and is built to seat seven people, five adults and two kids. It’s also priced like a normal car, starting at about $49,000. By contrast, the Tesla Roadster was a two-seater sports car and had a sticker price of $112,000 and up.
Even with a price tag that makes owning Tesla Model S more affordable, don’t expect any Black Friday madness at the Tesla store. VentureBeat
Intel unveils 1 teraflop chip with 50-plus cores
The chip attains its high processing speeds by making use of multiple processors, or a Many Integrated Core – MIC architecture; in this case, more than 50, which pretty much puts to shame the quad-core technology being advertised for use in computers used by regular people. The new chip will first be installed in a machine at the Texas Advanced Computing Center, which expects the system to run at 10 petaflops.
The announcement of the chip has industry insiders marveling once again at the progress being made in systems architecture. It was just fourteen years ago that Intel showed off its first computer capable of running at 1 teraflop, a machine that required almost 10,000 Pentium chips and took up all of 72 cabinets. Putting all that power in one new chip reduces power consumption dramatically.
The new chip isn’t meant to be used as a CPU though, instead it’s to serve as a coprocessor, taking on specific, highly computational routines, helping to bump up the overall speed of a computer, much the same way graphics processors are used in desktop PC’s.
And speaking of graphics processors, the announcement of the Knights Corner means Intel is taking direct aim at Nvidia and AMD, two companies that make graphics processors but who have also branched out into making their coprocessors a useful component in superfast computers. Thus, the stakes have just been raised.
Intel says its product is a better fit for most current systems due to its being based on x86 architecture, because adopters won’t have to port their applications to a new technology, unlike its competitors. Full article here.
Accel Partners announces $155M India fund for mobile, enterprise, and more
Showing that there’s plenty of untapped potential in the Indian startup scene, Silicon Valley venture capital firm Accel Partnersannounced its $155 million Accel India III fund today for seed and early-stage investments in the country.
Accel, which already has 34 companies in its portfolio in India, said the fund would be focused on hot opportunities like mobile, digital media, enterprise and software-as-a-service companies, and Internet services. The firm already manages $80 million in India across two earlier funds — this latest addition brings its total funds in India to $235 million.
“While traditional venture capital and growth equity have been increasingly drawn to India over the past several years, the true seed and early stage markets are still underserved, attracting relatively smaller amounts of capital,” said Accel partner Subrata Mitra in a statement today. “We have seen a significant increase in entrepreneurial activity in the last few years, and in particular, we are pleased to see strong momentum from Internet companies in India.”
Accel, best known for its early stage investments in Facebook and Groupon, has partnered with Indian companies like Myntra and Flipkart, which is India’s Amazon-equivalent and one of a handful of Indian outfits said to be close to $1 billion valuations.
Accel currently manages $8 billion globally, $3 billion of which is for later stage growth investments. The firm says its India team will also be evaluating Indian companies for later stage opportunities.
Thomson Reuters Names World’s 100 Most Innovative Companies
TechNet Member Companies include: Apple Inc., Applied Materials Inc., Hewlett-Packard Company, Intel Corporation, Microsoft Corporation and Synopsys, Inc.
A comparison of market data for 2011 Top 100 Global Innovator companies (those that report such data) shows they added more than 400,000 new jobs in 2010 over 2009, three percent more than the prior year and greater than the percentage increase in growth experienced by the S&P 500 for the same period. “The jobs created by the Top 100 Global Innovator organizations are a significant indicator of the impact innovation can have on driving economic growth,” said Mr. Brown. Additionally, the 2011 Top 100 Global Innovator organizations had a 12.9 percent increase in market cap weighted average revenue over the prior year, whereas the S&P 500 market cap weighted average revenue grew by just 7.2 percent.
Thomson Reuters 2011 Top 100 Global Innovator companies are geographically dispersed. Forty percent of them are from the U.S., 31 percent are from Asia, and 29 percent are from Europe. Asia’s representation is split between Japan and South Korea, with 27 percent from the former and four percent from the latter. Europe’s representation is divided between France (11 percent), Germany (four percent), the Netherlands (four percent), the Principality of Lichtenstein (one percent), Sweden (six percent), and Switzerland (three percent). France is the European leader in innovation. Despite China’s lead in patent application filing volume, it is absent from the top 100 list as global influence and application-to-grant ratios are important aspects of the methodology.
The Thomson Reuters 2011 Top 100 Global Innovator methodology is based on four principle criteria: patent approval success rate, global reach of patent portfolio, patent influence in literature citations and overall patent volume. The peer-reviewed methodology was executed using the Thomson Reuters Derwent World Patents Index® (DWPI), Derwent Patents Citations Index™, Quadrilateral Patent Index™, and Thomson Innovation®, the IP and intelligence collaboration platform. Comparative financial analysis was done using the Thomson Reuters Eikon platform, the single source for turning financial information into action.
To view the full report on the Thomson Reuters Top 100 Global Innovator program, go to www.top100innovators.com.