Chrome On Windows To Start Rejecting Extensions From Outside The Chrome Web Store In January

Starting in January, Google's Chrome browser will not allow you to install extensions that aren't hosted in Google's own Chrome Web Store. While Google had recently increased its security measures for keeping malicious extensions out of Chrome by adding additional warnings and disabling silent extension installs, the team clearly felt that it had to go a step further to keep Windows machines safe. The leading cause of complaints from its Windows users, Google says, is still due to malicious extensions that override browser settings and change the user experience in unexpected (and undesired) ways. Given that these malicious extensions are virtually always hosted outside of the Chrome Web Store, the team has decided to simply shut down the ability to install extensions from third-party sites. Users will still be able to do local installs during development and admins can use their Enterprise policy settings to allow their users to pre-install and allow certain extensions. This move also won't affect Chrome Apps. For developers who need to migrate to the Web Store now, this move should be pretty straightforward. Most Chrome extension developers are probably using the store already anyway, so this shouldn't be too hard for most of them. The one thing they do have to do, though, is pay a $5 fee to sign up.

Boombotix Develops Sync Tech For Concurrent Playback Over Bluetooth, Seeks Funding On Kickstarter

Boombotix, a startup based out of SF building rugged speakers for active lifestyle use, today launched a new Kickstarter campaign, this time for a new technology it's building to complement it hardware products. The Boombotix Sync tech manages to synchronize audio from multiple mobile devices over 4G and Wi-Fi, allowing those to output to Bluetooth speakers and have the playback match for surround sound results. The tech was developed in response to user input – many asked the Mission-bases startup for a way to sync up a number of units for output to multiple endpoints at once. That's not something that's possible over Bluetooth, and I've seen other Kickstarter projects attempt and fail to make it happen with a custom-coded solution. But Boombotix saw another possible way: Building a protocol that allows multiple apps on multiple devices to playback audio simultaneously, so that more than one speaker can join in on the action. It works a bit like FM radio, Boombotix VP of Product Management Chris McKelroy says, so that more than one user can tune in at once and here the same feed played back at the same time. It's not a perfect solution (they're building in TrueWireless for two speaker, single device connections), but it's one that will help users reach “critical mass” according to McKleroy, which means a whole team going out for a mountain bike race, or a group of kayakers, for instance, can all bring their speakers and listen along to the same stuff at the same time, as you can see briefly in the video. McKelroy says it's amazing witnessing huge groups of people riding by, with “Boombots in perfect sync pumping 90+ db.” Also, you can flashmob with this pretty perfectly, if that's what you're into. McKelroy says that this tech is going to be kept proprietary to Boombotix products in the short term, rather than being made an open protocol, for instance. “we're planning on keeping this proprietary, focused on creating the best experience for our users as we continue to improve the speed and scale of our syncing technology,” he said. “The next hurdle we face is aligning with key content providers in the music space, to increase the availability of content and enhance the user experience further.” And this is just the first step in terms of networking hardware. Boombotix is keenly aware that users want to use one device to broadcast to many speakers at once. “A fully networked device ecosystem is paramount to our goals,” he says, and suggests watching for more hardware developments from the startup to help make this a reality in the coming months. For now, the Kickstarter project for the music sync app is seeking $15,000 to help finish development, with Boombot speakers available to backers starting at the $55 pledge level.

Behavioral Health Startup Sessions Launches To Provide Personalized Fitness Programs To All

Fitness isn't a one-size-fits-all proposition, and there are few apps that are tailored specifically to the needs of individual users. After all, everyone has different exercise interests, goals, time, and patience - not to mention, everyone has a different “starting point” when it comes to how fit they are or what they're able to accomplish. A new startup called Sessions is seeking to provide a more personalized approach to fitness, by connecting users with individual trainers who work with them to set realistic long-term goals and follow up to see how things went day-to-day. By finding out more about a user - including fitness goals, relative starting level of fitness, schedule, exercise interests, etc. - the health coach can work to develop a personalized program for each person. That is, rather than having users attempt to fit a program into their lives, a Sessions health coach builds realistic, achievable goals around a user's lifestyle and then gradually refine that over time. The end goal isn't a short-term change in someone's relative level of fitness, but a sustainable change in behavior that they can carry forward over time. As someone who has struggled with his own fitness for a long, long time, I decided to try it out for myself. The onboarding process included me filling out a detailed initial survey providing general health and fitness information - what I hoped to accomplish, what types of exercise I enjoy, what my day-to-day schedule is like, what has worked in the past, what hasn't, etc. That was followed by a consultation with my personalized health coach, Glennis, who further talked through my goals and expectations and created a schedule of exercises to perform over the next week. Once that week is complete, things get re-evaluated for the next week on Sunday, which is considered a user's “anchor day.” On that day, coach and client review the progress of the previous week and plan for the following week, adding new or longer sessions over the coming days. The coach also keeps track of your progress during the week, texting or emailing users to nudge them to complete workouts or asking them how it went afterward. All communications actually get fed into your Sessions timeline, so you can keep track of your communications along with workouts all in one place. In addition to having workouts tracked within the Sessions site, users can connect their calendars to get reminders there. They can also connect activity trackers and apps like Fitbit and Runkeeper to provide another layer of activity data to the system and improve the feedback that they get. For me, the opening fitness regimen was just about scheduling a couple of runs over the course of the week and then augmenting them with a light home strength training session during an off-day. My coach followed up each day a workout was scheduled to see how it went and then marked them completed. Users also do follow-up phone calls with their health coaches to reevaluate things over time. Depending on how much they're paying per month. Users can pay between $69 or $199 per month, depending on the level of contact they require with their coach. While it's early days - Week 1! - I have pretty high hopes for the program to enact some actual change in my activity level. I'm not exactly self-motivated, but having someone on the other end to nudge me to work out will likely get me off the couch more often. Sessions was founded in 2012 by Nick Crocker and Ben Hartney, who had both attended the University of Queensland in Australia. Crocker previously co-founded We Are Hunted, and was a product manager for Boxee in New York. The startup was incubated out of Rock Health, and has raised less than $1 million from SV Angel, Collaborative Fund, Blackbird and Joshua Kushner.

Healthcare.gov Could Only Handle 1,100 Users On The Eve Of Launch

Recently released documents reveal that the failed federal insurance e-commerce website, Healthcare.gov, could only handle 1,100 users the day before it launched [PDF]. It has long been suspected that the White House prioritized politics over technical realities in the launch of the healthcare website, but this is some of the best proof that officials were burying their heads in the sand. “Currently we are able to reach 1100 users before response time gets too high,” noted a technical report to the website team. Eventually, the document notes, they hoped the website could handle 10,000. On its first day, healthcare.gov was visited by 2.8 million people. According to the USA Today, the administration expected 50-60,000 concurrent users, and received as many as 250,000. Let's review: Capacity: 1,100 Expected: 55,000 Actual: 250,000 So, on launch day, only six managed to enroll, threatening America's consumers with higher premiums. The administration's team was completely unprepared. “They were running the biggest start-up in the world, and they didn't have anyone who had run a start-up, or even run a business,” Harvard Professor David Cutler told The Washington Post. “It's very hard to think of a situation where the people best at getting legislation passed are best at implementing it. They are a different set of skills.” How? How does a website launch on a day when the technical team thinks it can handle less than one-tenth of the demand? This kind of incompetence is why startups should have handled the task of building the e-commerce experience.

Ibotta Expands Beyond Mobile Coupons, Now Lets You Earn Cash Back From Restaurants, Fast Food & Home Improvement Stores

Denver-based mobile couponing application Ibotta, which pays you cash back for items you buy in grocery stores by simply scanning your receipt, has today debuted its iOS 7-optimized version 2.0 that now brings its shopping discounts to a number of new stores, including home improvement stores like Lowe's and Home Depot, as well as national restaurant chains like Chili's, Burger King, Smashburger and more. Coupons For The Mobile Generation The company first debuted its app last year, with a new take on mobile couponing designed to reach those who don't subscribe to newspapers, clip from circulars, or print coupons from the web. Instead, Ibotta lets you do everything from your mobile phone. And instead of just “clipping” coupons, Ibotta has users actually interacting with the consumer packaged goods brands themselves in order to earn their discounts. Those interactions can be in the form of answering a trivia question, watching a video, or posting about the product to social media. In exchange, Ibotta rewards users with cash for each action taken – typically $0.25 to $0.50 apiece. The app has been surprisingly successful, despite the time it takes to work through these interactions in order to earn the cash back. According to founder and CEO Bryan Leach, there's friction in every channel – that is, if you're clipping coupons manually using scissors, it's even worse, for example. And printing coupons from the web isn't much better, either. What the company found was that the app appealed to those who do neither. 60% of its audience rarely or never uses coupons, and most are millennials, ages 25 to 35. Most are also female. They don't subscribe to newspapers, but they always have their smartphones. Since Ibotta's launch a little over a year ago, the company has grown to 1.9 million regular users, 70% of whom are monthly active uses – a figure that's extremely high for mobile. Leach says that Ibotta's users are active, on average, 25 out of every 30 days, citing data from Onavo Insights. Those numbers make it more popular, in terms of engagement, than deal-finding competitors like Groupon, Coupons.com, or Shopkick, he adds. Research from Business Insider released this summer also showed Ibotta as one of the most-used apps on people's phones. (Score one for the “normals,” I guess.) To date, Ibotta users have viewed 1.5 billion offers. This includes 45 million “pre-shopping media engagements,” which is a fancy way of saying the brands were able to catch users' attention before they went actually to the store – a metric brands like. “We've got the ability to influence more in-store transactions in the grocery CPG channel than any other mobile technology in the United States,” says Leach. “We've proven that people are very willing to have a more interactive experience on mobile that's not just taking a coupon and putting it on the phone,” he says. Of course, Ibotta's user numbers could also be skewed by its more obsessed user base. Though it doesn't necessarily cater to the serious couponing crowd, the extreme couponing sites I visit (ahem, aspirationally) often mention Ibotta's deals to their users. These can sometimes be combined with manufacturer coupons and other in-store deals to significantly bring down the cost of food, drinks and other household items when shopping. That being said, the app's attractive design and simple user flow make it conductive to killing downtime by earning cash back. My one complaint has been that with some stores – like those without loyalty cards to link, for example – the receipt-scanning process has to also be combined with scanning UPC barcodes on the products themselves. This depends on the store, though, and how detailed its receipts are in describing the specific item you purchased. (So your mileage may vary, as they say.) And Leach adds that the company is now working directly with retailers to move away from the receipt-scanning process entirely. Ibotta 2.0 Expands Couponing's Reach With Ibotta 2.0, out now, the company is expanding from grocery stores, Target, Walmart, drug stores, and the like, to new categories. As noted above, the company has begun working with home improvement stores, restaurants (including fast food), and will soon add a major health nutrition chain and a big box electronics retailer to the fold, allowing users to save on other kinds of purchases. In these cases, you'll usually just have to snap a photo of your receipt to earn the cash back. Ibotta is also now introducing the option to have you earn gift cards from places like Starbucks, iTunes, or Redbox, instead of cash through PayPal, if you choose. The company has over 300 partners currently, up from around ten it had when it first launched. And while they won't discuss revenue, Leach would say that it uses a pay per performance approach to earn commissions on sales. Ibotta previously disclosed it had raised $3 million in angel funding, in a round closed earlier in 2012. Since then, it has raised more. The company declines to discuss its funding events, but SEC filings show a $1.7 million round in 2012 followed by $7.9+ million in early 2013. Leach says those numbers are not current, however, and that Ibotta's financings have come from angel investors, not VC's. The updated Ibotta app is available on iTunes or in Google Play.

Twitter's Strong IPO Leaves The Company More Richly Valued On A Per-User Basis Than Facebook At Its Debut

If you were holding Twitter stock yesterday, congrats. You can now afford an extra bedroom in your house in Pacific Heights. Or maybe a baby. But not both. Anyway, Twitter's IPO pop has the world losing its collective marbles, so let's take a look at how the market is currently valuing Twitter in comparison to a few analogs. The question is simple: Does Twitter's valuation at its current levels make sense? Twitter initially stated that it would sell its stock as low as $17 per share. Demand for the 70 million offered shares was so strong, Twitter finally priced itself at $26 per share. Shares started the day at $45. There is some quibbling that Twitter left money on the table, but the company went public at a massive delta to what it deemed an acceptable range, and managed to have a stunningly successful first day. If you think the company is crying into its hashtag soup, you're wrong. For this post, we'll use Twitter's initial trading level of $45.10, and market capitalization - at that price point, using fully diluted shares – of $31.8 billion. Facebook, by comparison, priced its IPO at $38 per share, but started trading at $42.05, valuing the firm at $115 billion, again using a diluted share count. At its first-trade valuation, Twitter is worth $137 per monthly active user (It has 232 million). That figure will decline if Twitter's valuation decreases, or its monthly active user count increases. The former could happen, the latter most certainly will. At the time of its IPO, Facebook had 901 million monthly active users. Using its first-trade valuation, Facebook was worth around $127 per monthly active user. So Twitter is only slightly more richly valued at the time on a first-trade basis than Facebook was when it finally made it to the public markets. Does that make Twitter investors batty? Perhaps not, but it's worth noting that Facebook stock suffered from large declines from a discounted starting point in the months following its debut. The lesson would therefore appear to be that investors are pricing Twitter as if they expect it to grow more quickly than Facebook did in its first year as a public company. Missteps could be very costly for the social firm. For reference, to calculate its diluted earnings per share, Facebook uses a combined Class A and Class B share count of 3.23 billion. (Google Finance et al. use its basic share count of 2.43 billion, if you were curious.) Therefore, at its current market price of $47.87, the company is worth $154 billion. In its most recent quarterly report, Facebook reported 1.19 billion monthly active users. So, Facebook is currently valued on a diluted-share valuation basis, at $129.41 per monthly active user. We have to ask ourselves again, is the market overvaluing Twitter, Facebook, or both? I want to hazard a guess towards both. Facebook took a hammering when it became readily apparent that its mobile advertising efforts were puny, and its revenue growth could slow as it matured. Its stock fell as low as $18 per share at rock bottom. It then turned its mobile its business around, and the market responded by bidding up its shares back on a per-monthly-active-user basis to where it IPO'd. Facebook only came back in the market when it proved itself to be perhaps the most adept monetizer of mobile yet, eliminating what was then the key concern surrounding its business. But through these comparisons, it's important to keep one thing in mind: Facebook's valuation includes implicitly its ability to generate profit off of its users. It was also a more mature company when it went public, so the comparison is somewhat apple-orange, but it does imply that the market expects Twitter to be worth more on a per-user basis when it is profitable – if it's willing to value Twitter more per-user when it loses money, it is certainly logical to presume that when Twitter does turn a profit, that figure will rise. Profitable companies are worth more than companies that lose money. Facebook's five-year expected PEG ratio is nearly two, which worries me. That Twitter is valued in some ways more richly than Facebook now, with a far less mature business model, makes me fret. Investors are currently betting that Twitter's revenue growth will continue at impressive rates. As I reported recently: According to its newly refiled S-1 document, Twitter has lost $133.8 million to date in 2013. That compares negatively with its equivalent loss of $70.7 million in 2012. Both loss figures include the results of the first 9 months of the calendar year. [...] The other side to all this is that Twitter's revenues are rapidly expanding. The company posted third-quarter revenue of $168.6 million, which compares favorably to its collected $253.6 million in the first half 2013 revenue. The gist of the above is that Twitter is in a high-growth, high-cost moment. The stakes of that are simple, now that it is public: Keep the revenue growth in high gear, and start to trim the losses. If Twitter continues to grow both its losses and its revenue, its ability to enjoy high margins in the future will be called into doubt. And you can't say that investors don't expect Twitter to not enjoy the margins that Facebook commands. This all comes down to a simple point: Investors are betting that Twitter will perform at nearly herculean levels in its first few quarters. Can it?

Espresso Logic Raises $1.6M To Make APIs Using The Data Logic That Comes With Reactive Programming

Espresso Logic received $1.6 million in seed funding today for its backend as a service to connect web and mobile applications to external databases including MySQL, Oracle Server and Microsoft SQL Server. Inventus Capital led the funding along with angel investors including Gokul Rajaram, lead product engineer at Square and one of the creators of Google AdSense. The service uses reactive programming for IT to create business logic that developers can then convert to JSON and make available through an API. The programming model lets the computer manage dependencies that ordinarily a programmer would be required to do. Reactive programming is not a new concept but recently it has come into fashion as a way to quickly build front-end apps by companies like Facebook and Netflix. But on the backend, reactive programming is something that is still in its infancy. CEO Paul Singh said in a phone interview today that the concept of reactive programming is analogous to a spreadsheet. For a spreadsheet sum, as an example, the user can make changes without having to rewrite the spreadsheet. The formula manages the data flow and propagates the changes that need to be made. A programmer recreating the process would have to write the code to do the sum and then also manage the dependencies. With the new reactive programming model using Espresso, a database manager can create a data flow, which the developer then uses to build an API that connects to third-party apps. An API management provider can manage the API once it is created and a mobile back-end as a service provider like Kinvey or Parse offers data in the cloud. Kinvey does also offer capabilities to manage data from third-parties but Singh said the Espresso service focuses on providing the business logic, the security and the connectors to a JSON. Espresso Logic is seeking to close the gap between the database administrator and the developer. IT needs to move faster, and reactive programming may be a way to accomplish that.