With the support of Sequoia iPad Inkling updates E-textbook platform with joint study groups and more

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With the support of Sequoia hint, startup that develops innovative digital textbook platform release 2.0 is the technology that comes with increased collaboration and sharing functions.

As we wrote in the past, a hint of technology provides Interactive tutorials that include the ability to cooperate and communicate within the add multimedia content. Start adds another level of online textbooks by adding 3-D objects, videos, quizzes and even social interaction in content. Hint on synchronization technology allows students to collaborate in real time by sharing their notes and highlights with one another. And students can see the comments from his friends and professors of law, together with their own notes.

The latest version of the platform has been established "study group" in tectbooks, where students can ask questions and add comments anywhere in a book with classmates, teachers and others who are reading the same books, using the hint. Hint also added "expert" notes in the book that allows students to access their observations and comments.
All notes, highlights, bookmarks, and links created by students is now being saved to a designated Notepad. And search results within an allusion to the platform from Wikipedia or Google directly in your book, which can also be saved in Notepad.

Inkling is currently taking 50 educational institutions requiring e-textbook platform. And the company announced financing and partnership from some of the best educational publishers, including Pearson and McGraw Hill.

Of course e tutorial space competitive with Chegg, Kno, Amazon and many others all competing in the arena. But Inkling founder and Executive Director Matt Macinnis not too worried. Although he acknowledged that some competitors have more content, he believed that hint at the platform the most interactive, dealing with technology on the market. Currently, Macinnis is the iPad as an allusion to the platform of choice, but will eventually be expanded to other devices.

The company also attracts big venture money, a few weeks ago, hint announced 17 million Australian dollars, start the overall financing of $ mln., including its seeds, and a series of shots, as well as the influx of millions of dollars from publishers.

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Engine Yard takes Orchestra to add PHP support to its PAAS

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Engine Yard, provider solutions platform as a service (PAAS) this morning announced that it acquired developer platform for Orchestra, deployment, scaling and managing PHP applications.

Engine Yard, which is based on the investors as benchmark capital, new Enterprise Associates, and Amazon.com, decided not to disclose the financial terms of the acquisition.

San Francisco company is best known for his PAAS for Ruby on Rails applications, but the acquisition will allow the company to add support for PHP applications.

Engine Yard statement said will continue to develop PHP platform and the Orchestra continue to invest in both Ruby on Rails and PHP open source communities and projects. There are no plans to discontinue support or development of any Orchestra's offerings.

The Orchestra is echolibre, an Irish company avid contribution to community PHP and the creators of the open API framework FRAPI, source (among other projects).

The whole team will be joining engine yard Orchestra due to the acquisition.

To date, engine yard was raised $37,5 million in financing. The company competes with other venture-backed startup Heroku, which was acquired by Salesforce for 212 million dollars in cash at the end of last year), among others.

Announcement-August 23, 2011 Orchestra from the Orchestra on Vimeo.

Engine Yard provides infrastructure services and support to customers to scale their Ruby Rails applications quickly and effortlessly. Engine Yard services are open, cross-platform and available ...

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With the support of the YC Vidyard is YouTube for business

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Many businesses put YouTube videos on their sites, but one of the sore points using YouTube as a platform is that visitors can click through the video on YouTube and off site brand — and those videos include YouTube advertising and branding. Brightcove and Ooyala offer professional Web-hosted enterprise video platform, but it can be expensive. Enter Y Combinator support Vidyard, which starts today as an affordable way for businesses to host videos that can be viewed on a page or through the embeddable player.

In principle, Vidyard offers a service that is very similar to YouTube, but without the link to the portal by third parties. Start also offers instant, detailed and real time analytics with embedded video performance. Co-founder Michael Litt said that at present 3.5 million enterprises receiving YouTube videos to your site and there is a huge opportunity to offer better, more simple, easy-to-use product video hosting companies.

Here's how Vidyard works. Firstly you can choose to download the video file or video from YouTube. You can then add custom thumbnail, choose from 10 different player skins customize size and color, viral share on Twitter and Facebook and HD content by default, if you want.

In terms of integrating video on the site Vidyard offers a simple code that can be embedded on any site (users can have video in-line or that appears as a pop-up window). Or you can choose to send people to the main page with links to video that Litt said, ideal for email marketing. Users can also leave comments on these pages via Twitter and Facebook.

After the business uses Vidyard, it can also access detailed analytics on the performance of the video. Run allows businesses to find out how many people watched the video, the amount of attention minutes watched, the most popular time in the video, where people are located geographically, and much more.

Monetization, Vidyard uses a freemium: startups and companies with less marketing budget can create a hosted video via Vidyard for free with some of the features above (including Analytics). For $ 20 to $ 50 per month they can add branded players, real time analytics and other additional features. And Vidyard also has plans for large-scale video hosting.

Startup uses RTMP streaming, which means that you can go to the middle of the video without waiting for the buffer to catch up. You can also implement chaptering, which means that the overlay links to more videos on the upper part of the observed. Each plan includes a 101 GB bandwidth, and Litt said no business goes beyond that amount. Running the tweaked it a hosting technology effective bandwidth and only buffers ten second beforehand so business not to waste bandwidth to customers who didn't watch the whole video.

Vidyard has not yet finished Y Combinator incubator (what's happening this week), but is already caught the eye of some well-known companies and investors. Ernst and young, Adchemy and TheBizMedia (digital video agency, represents coke and Maxwell House) use hosting platform Vidyard's. And in addition to launch and fund Y Combinator financial support Vidyard is additional funds from former RIM COO Dennis Kavelman and SV Angel.

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With the support of the YC Opez, Yelp, Facebook, is responsible for

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Yelp provides a compelling platform for small businesses to connect with consumers through transactions, reviews, reservations, information and much more.

But independent workers as stilizatory hair, bartenders and DJs have a problem: if they move from one institution to another (which is quite common), they have a difficult time taking their clients with them. Enter Y Combinator backed Opez, platform, which aims to help professionals maintain contact with their customers on a long-term basis, making it easy to keep them abreast of any changes in the job or hot deals they offer.

Of course, Facebook is already offering Facebook page that can be used for similar a similar purpose. But there's co-founder Chris said workers wanted to be able to attract clients, but also to keep at a distance, which is the problem with using Facebook page as their central business page. It adds that this product is built specifically for professionals in certain industries, such as DJs, bartenders, models, hairdressers, personal trainers, chefs and waiters.

Employees can create a profile, upload photos galleries and videos, showcasing work, create vanity domain for your profile and much more. Then they can encourage their clients to go to their profile Opez and follow them. Professionals can also send status updates and email their followers, but without any of the parties seeing with another e-mail address.

So if a professional switches work, he can send his follower list and keep people updated on where he works on. He also can publish updates to Twitter and Facebook directly from Opez.

On the client side, who sees the professional profile Opez, but to follow someone, you need to create a profile for yourself. Then you can post feedback on the page professional.

The idea of Opez can be powerful because it gives employees a platform that combines part of Twitter, Facebook and Yelp — and this is clearly necessary. At this point the question is whether this is sufficiently different from Facebook pages that industry professionals will be willing to create a profile on another new network.

Initial results are encouraging: there said that the site is already seeing traction among bartenders, models, hair stilizatory and others. And he adds that the mobile application is under development.

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Google Enterprise support with legal Q&A LawPivot opens platform to the public

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Google Enterprise support LawPivot mix Q&A platform for legal advice for businesses and allows technology companies and startups confidentially to request legal expert lawyers. But so far, LawPivot retained legal links on his site private so that only the lawyer and business can get access to this information. Today run produces publicly available Q&A platform enables businesses to also publicly ask questions and receive answers from the LawPivot community of users throughout the country.

For the background, LawPivot was founded by a group of lawyers and tech execs, including Jay Mandal, a mergers and acquisitions lead to Apple; Nitin Gupta; lawyer litigation intellectual property; and Steven Kam, engineer and architect with experience as an attorney in litigation intellectual property.

The LawPivot public Q&A of legal experts on subjects such as corporate, intellectual property, contracts, employment, tax and immigration law, you can share their knowledge and understanding of the business of answering publicly legal issues raised by the LawPivot community.

Of course enterprises still can ask private questions, but it creates a way for lawyers to publish their legal advice (and possibly get more business) and allows startups to build a resource for other businesses to use when searching for answers to such questions. For example, many entrepreneurs strapped boot can use public product has the ability to receive advice on issues, not necessarily harder.

As we wrote in the past, run calls upon lawyers to build comprehensive profiles on LawPivot, companies know where their legal advice. LawPivot will also connects companies to appropriate lawyers to answer your legal questions. How companies interact with LawPivot over time, technology site will use past and present user data and trends to ensure the best lawyers to answer your question, based on the specific needs of the company.

The company has also released an infographic detailing the most popular legal topics at LawPivot, including word cloud visualization shows the relative frequency of some of the topics raised by the company at LawPivot in the description of the nature of the issues on the site. Most popular legal issues on the LawPivot are located in areas or corporate law, intellectual property, contracts, and Internet law.

Online legal space is growing rapidly, and companies like rocket lawyer and raise hefty funding rounds of LegalZoom. While LawPivot focuses on more niche community site still has the ability to disrupt the legal space for the business world.

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Mark, with the support of the Cuban AskMen JungleCents Ushers in space daily deals

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During the grinding operation, the transition in the digital era publishing industry grasping at straws to find ways to grow its revenue models. Even when the time marches on, publishing companies, in General, continue to struggle with most effectively monetize their content and add more (or even primary) income. JungleCents, Mark Cuban support for the launch, with a men's lifestyle magazine, AskMen in daily transactions space in an attempt to help publishing to use additional sources of revenue — all thanks to the vouchers.

As the TC Alexia Tsotsis wrote back in October, a la Commission Junction, JungleCents intends to attack the acquisition of customers, taking the vouchers from companies in lieu of cash and execution of these transactions on your site, as well as affiliate sites — in limited quantities for a limited time.

In connection with AskMen JungleCents offers discount on men's goods from bonobos, which offered on JungleCents but also AskMen.com. With bonobos deals customers pay $ 48 to $ 100 voucher to spend on Bonobos.com, with the deal, essentially acting as a gift card as the user does not have spent $ 100 voucher for once.

Of course AskMen is not exactly the New York Times, but the daily transactions can potentially allow content sites such as AskMen monetization in more measurable approach when you add more value to their readers, says JungleCents cofounder and CEO Samir Mehta. Sites like JungleCents could actually be good for niche publishing sites, because they can serve more targeted deals, which are relevant to the readers of the site. For example, if the reader is positioned on AskMen, men in publishing and is serviced by bargain for cheap jeans, the reader is likely to click on, say, someone else perusing the News on the New York Times.

These transactions at the bottom of this post may even go so far as to add value to content (gasp!) and give publishers a trigger for monetization. JungleCents testing this theory, the set in which they proposed a 50 per cent of the readers of Nooka watches. The deal netted a set of 9 per cent of the rate and success gave JungleCents the motivation for the other secondary niche publications.

Mehta, said that he thinks that this model is not only useful for publishers, but offers up the brands as they get access to their target demographic. He also brings their custoemr acquisition cost down because these clients (based on how they find transactions) are not deal-hungry coupon clippers, they are more likely to be brand ambassadors. Thus for brands, who are not interested in gold leaf or Groupon, AskMen bonobos model seems a better fit.

As to how the redemption of the vouchers work? Once a consumer buys a bargain at JungleCents, they get an email with a unique redemption code, which they then used to retrieve and brand in the online store. Mehta, said that he thinks that this allows brands to own their new client, unlike Flash sales that run off last season, when the consumer has no contact with the trade mark.

This is an interesting model. Check it out and let us know what you think. Please click here.

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