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Elemental Technologies Lands Stanford for its Sports Replay Solution

January 25, 2012 by 1 Comment

Elemental Technologies, a startup developing an array of technologies including instant replay for mobile devices, has signed a deal with Stanford University’s athletic department to show replays for events played at the school’s Maples Pavilion and Stanford Stadium.

Stanford is using the Elemental Live product as the basis for its Wi-Fi Instant Replay system that it is deploying on campus. The system will enable fans at events to view an instant replay immediately after the play occurred.

The solution takes input from four different camera sources that is continuously encoded in real time and immediately stores them on a local web server where clips are created and then pushed to fans within seconds after the play. Stanford fans can access the replays on their mobile devices via the school’s Stanford Gameday Live website.

This is just the latest in a line of strategic partners the company has signed deals with, but the first where its technology will be put in front of a cadre of experienced sports fans that have been weaned on instant replay and will know if it meets their needs or not.

The Portland, Ore.-based company was founded in 2006 and has had several rounds of venture funding. The first was in Dec. 2007 when it received $1.05 million from the Oregon Angle Fund. The Series A round of funding closed in July, 2008 with $7.1 million being raised in a round led by General Catalyst Partners and Voyager Capital.

The second round, in July, 2010, raised $7.5 million in Series B funding with Steamboat Ventures, a venture capital firm affiliated with The Walt Disney Co., joined existing venture funds General Catalyst and Voyager Capital in round.

The company is led by a trio of co-founders starting with CEO Sam Blackman. Blackman had previously has held a variety of positions in the industry including designing integrated circuits for Pixelworks and engineering positions at Intel and Silicon Graphics

Jesse Rosenzweig, the second co-founder, serves as Elemental’s chief technology officer. He also is a former Pixelworks employee and worked on developing software applications at that company. To fill out the triad of co-founders is Brian Lewis, who is the company’s chief architect. He also hails from Pixelworks and previously, he worked as an engineer and team leader at Rockwell Collins developing navigation, guidance and sensor control software for military transport aircraft.

The company has tested its technology with a range of companies in the high tech space and has a number of big-named partners including Amazon Web Services, Intel, nVidia, Adobe, Hewlett-Packard, Apple and Microsoft. Apple has been an important partner in helping with the live streaming technology.

Just as important it has a growing range of big name corporate and media customers that now number over 100. In that group are ABC, CBS Interactive, BTN, National Geographic, PBS, Oceanic Time Warner Cable, Comcast, HBO, and ESPN.

Filed Under: Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, NCAA Football, PBS, Startup

4iiii Delivers Feedback System for Bikers and Runners

January 13, 2012 by 3 Comments

A new product from startup 4iiii Innovations could prove to be a boon for every jogger that has run into someone looking down to check their time or for every bicyclist that has hit a pot hole checking their heart rate monitor.

The company has debuted Sportiiiis (pronounced Sport-Eyes) it is a display technology that attaches to glasses to enable an athlete to check monitors for instant feedback.

Designed to be used with a heart rate monitor and other sensor technology, the Sportiiiis attaches to any set of glasses a user wears, be they sunglasses, prescription glasses or anything in between by using the device’s universal attachment points.

A user first configures the device using software that can be used on a range of smartphones as well as PCs and Apple computers, setting performance goals and ranges within which the athlete wishes to work.

The device provides feedback that can be read off a multi-colored LED boom that runs across the bottom of the glasses between them and the user and can be followed by a user’s peripheral vision without taking their eyes off of the road. The feedback can come from a rage of user-supplied monitors or sensors including heart rate monitors, speed monitors as well as power meters, via a wireless transmission.

The projection shows current and recent performance and has a red light to indicate that the user is going too hard, green if just right and orange and yellow to show that they are in between. The Sportiiiis also include built-in speakers that provide audio feedback using either a male or female voice. Both the volume of the speakers and the intensity of the LED colored lights are adjustable.

To control the Sportiiiis a user accesses its Tip-Tap technology that allows a user to tap once to get audio feedback including current heart rate or cues related to the current workout while a double tap switches between sensors and can switch between power, cadence and speed.

The company is led by Kip Fyfe who has had previous success in related sports feedback development. He was the founder of Dynastream Innovations, a company that developed a variety of technologies and products, possibly the most notable being a sports sensor that was mounted in running shoes that featured speed and distance sensors and was first used by Nike.

The company also developed ANT +, an ultra-low power wireless protocol that is increasingly finding its way into a wide variety of athletic devices (including Sportiiiis) that provide real-time feedback. In 2006 he sold the company to Garmin for $46M CAD.

He said that he realized that it was inconvenient and even dangerous for athletes to take their eyes off the road to get feedback, and being an avid runner even during Canada’s cold winters, we wanted to see his heart rate, speed and other information easily and simply, which gave both to the idea of Sportiiiis.

The device is expected to be on sale within the next month and will have a MSRP of $199.

Filed Under: Android, Apple, Apps, Cycling, Startup Tagged With:

Mobile Sports Report TechWatch: Who likes Motorola’s Xyboard?

December 19, 2011 by 2 Comments

BlueSprig lands $10 million investment round
Mobile security software startup BlueSprig has secured $10 million Series A funding and has debuted a beta version of its forthcoming app for Apple iOS and Android devices. The funding came from IDG-Accel’s China Growth Fund.

The beta app, AirCover, is designed to protect users from a wide range of issues including malware, viruses and even theft. Aversion can be downloaded at its web site-www.bluesprig.com. Among the features the software offers are cloud backup, and system security. The company has also released full versions of its system utility tools, JetBoost and JetClean.

The company has offices in both San Francisco and Chengdu, China and is headed by CEO Jason Johnson who has a history of successfully launching companies and then selling them to larger concerns such as Global IP Solutions which Google purchased and InterQuest Communications which was purchased by Darwin Networks.

Nielsen study tracks smartphones rise
In “State of the Media: The Mobile Media Report”, one of its latest studies market research firm Nielsen has tracked the rapid rise of smartphones in the United States and highlights the growing impact they have on the consumer market.

Among the interesting facts is that the number of smartphone subscribers using the mobile Internet has grown 45% since last year and that 87% of app downloaders have used deal of the day websites such as Groupon.

In a related report it is noted the impact that teens are having on the mobile data market, tripling mobile data consumption and showing that teens between the ages of 13-17 use an average of 320 MB of data a month, a 256% increase over last year.

Saudi Prince invests $300m in Twitter
Saudi Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal has continued his history of major investments in high tech companies this week with a $300 million stake in social micro blog company Twitter, Forbes has reported.

The investment was lead by Kingdom Holdings Co. an investment firm that he owns 95% of and which has invested in companies such as Apple, GM and News Corp. According Forbes the Prince is the 26th wealthiest billionaires’ in the world with a estimated fortune of $19.6bn.An interesting note is that he does not use Twitter.

Did the iPad kill the Netbook?
That is the point of a recent piece by Business Insider that says that Dell’s recent decision to kill off its Inspirion Mini line of netbooks is a sign that the netbook market segment is dead, and said that it sees the iPad as having killed the platform.

Dell has also recently killed its Streak tablet business but has indicated that it will most likely rejoin that space at some future date, for the time being it wants you to buy a notebook.

A look at Motorola’s latest tablet
Motorola is replacing its Xoom tablet, one of the original entrants into the current tablet market with a second generation product called the Droid Xyboard. There is two distinct models are the 10.1 a fast powerful model for the Enterprise and power users and a scaled down version called the 8.2.

Reviewers are pretty positive about the devices, with the one failing possibly being price. You can go to eWeek or Cnet for a look at the 10.1 review and to Engadget for an 8.2 review.

This and that
Amazon reports that it is selling 1 million Kindles a week.
Rumor has it that Apple is planning to release a 7.85-inch version of the iPad for release later this year?

Filed Under: Amazon, Android, Apple, Apps, Dell, iPad, Nielsen Ratings, Startup Tagged With: , , ,

Intel the Latest to Create Mobility App Fund

November 17, 2011 by 2 Comments

The company has a strong history of focusing funds on specific markets

Intel has created a $100 million investment fund called AppUp Fund that invests in a range of mobile companies and has already helped provide financing to two startups, 4tiitoo and Urban Airship. The fund will invest not only in app developers but also middleware, mobile infrastructure, and digital content.

Intel has created several funds such as this over the years including its $500 million Communications fund formed in 1999 and its recently formed $300 million Ultrabook fund. The funds are managed by Intel Capital.

Of course Intel is not just investing in any company. The ones that will get its blessing, and funding, are ones that advance the Intel architecture, something that is increasingly important for the company as it continues to see important platforms and products being built using processors from rivals such as ARM.

Just One of Many Players in Fund Space

There are other efforts at funding startups, and the number is growing with companies seeking to fund everything from efforts to create apps for a specific operating system like Android, or social media platforms like Facebook, and increasingly just to push the overall market.

There is the App Fund from VezTek that seeks to bring investors and inventors together, United Holdings Group’s Mobile App Fund that offers between $5,000 to $500,000 for developers in a range of mobile spaces from Enterprise, small business, B2B as well as social media and collaborative entertainment.

The Founders Fund and Accel Partners, original funders of Facebook, launched a $10 million fund in 2007 called the FBFund, although it is run a bit differently than others with Facebook executives participating in the vetting process.

First two Investments

One of the first two companies that have received undisclosed funding from Intel is Urban Airship, a Portland, Ore. developer of a platform that enables developers and publishers to target specific market segments with push notifications, subscriptions and geo-location info.

The second, with the snappy name of 4tiitoo, was founded in 2007 in Germany and is an open source developer that already has experience working with Intel. It developed the WeTab OS that is based on the MeeGo technology that was jointly developed by Intel, Nokia and the open source community. It is currently working on software solutions across all system layers from kernel development up to application development.

The amount of funding shows just how important major companies and venture capital firms see the emerging mobile app and social app markets. Expect this to lead to new innovations and a new generation of programs that can enhance all aspects of the user and business experience as related to the mobile space.

Filed Under: Android, Apps, Google, Startup, Tablets Tagged With: , , , , ,
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