Shoppers with iPhones will be able to discover Nike products in a virtual way at Finish Line stores today, thanks to technology from GoldRun in New York. GoldRun raised $1.2 million in a seed round in April with a plan to conquer an emerging field: augmented reality, which is technology that adds images, sounds, or contextual information to content viewed on mobile devices. The company’s idea is to help brands virtually insert their products into consumers’ lives.

GoldRun CEO and co-founder Vivian Rosenthal says her company’s technology put virtual Nike Air Max shoes inside Finish Line stores for the new promotional campaign that shoppers can only see by using the cameras on their mobile devices.

It’s an idea that’s quickly gaining traction in the advertising and media industries. GoldRun has already landed work with Ford, HBO’s True Blood series, and retailer H&M, among others. With the help of GoldRun’s technology, these brands are creating virtual experiences for their customers and fans.

For example, viewers of True Blood can download the free GoldRun app from Apple’s iTunes App Store and use it to insert the characters in the show into photos they take with the smartphone’s camera. “Fans can be watching the show and take a photo with one of the characters on their couch,” says Rosenthal.

Users can also search their own surroundings with their iPhone cameras for images placed virtually in designated geographic areas on behalf of GoldRun’s clients. That could include shoes, dresses, or other objects. The app also lets users superimpose a product they may want—such as a new car—in a photo taken of an empty driveway.

Rosenthal says augmented reality offers marketers a way to reach customers in the real world that goes beyond the check-in model made popular by Foursquare. “A check-in from a brand or advertising perspective doesn’t bring that much value because it’s not visually driven,” she says. The limitations of other technology, she adds, motivated her to create GoldRun. “I realized advertising agencies and brands needed a platform where they weren’t spending tons of money and time developing one-off apps,” she says.

With augmented reality, Rosenthal says, brands can connect the social experience with a visual experience. “It can be any kind of product, message, or content as a virtual layer on top of reality,” she says. GoldRun, she says, can also tie the images to rewards such as discounts or the option to buy products.

GoldRun charges each client by the number of “hot zones” it establishes. These are … Next Page »

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User-generated videos are getting a new perspective, thanks to Kogeto’s Dot, a lens attachment that lets the iPhone 4 family of smartphones shoot panoramic footage. Jeff Glasse, founder and CEO of New York-based Kogeto has been busy in his offices in the Soho neighborhood developing what he calls an “ecosystem” for users to share videos taken with his company’s device.

Kogeto’s Dot iCONIC lenses, which went on sale in late October, fit over the camera lenses of iPhone 4 and iPhone 4S smartphones, and let users shoot videos with 360-degree perspectives. They can hold their phones or lay them down and let Dot capture the surrounding area for them. The lens is paired with Kogeto’s free Looker app. Viewers can pan around the video, changing the vantage point of the footage. Glasse demoed the device at the NY Tech Meetup on Nov. 29, a monthly showcase for startups that typically brings out some 700 techies and investors.

Dot users can share their videos on Facebook, Twitter, and Kogeto’s website. It’s sold through select Apple Stores, Amazon.com, and other retailers and is priced at about $80 depending on the seller. Dot is the second product from the company; the first is a larger desktop-mounted panoramic video camera called Lucy, which Glasse says has been used backstage at the Ellen Degeneres Show.

Glasse is a veteran of startups and the video production industry. In the 1990s, he founded a company called DIGIT New Media, which produced videos used in museums. Teachscape, one of Glasse’s clients, acquired DIGIT. Glasse remained with the company, and while developing video capture equipment for observing classrooms, he says he saw an opportunity to pursue the consumer market.

Founded in June 2010, Kogeto raised $120,000 this summer through New York’s Kickstarter, a funding platform for inventors, artists, and filmmakers. Though he already has some commitments from private investors to … Next Page »

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Mellmo began life on the move. Now the Solana Beach, CA-based startup is going global.

Mellmo, as we’ve explained before, provides business intelligence for mobile users. Its flagship product, Roambi Analytics, is a Web-based service that converts mind-numbing business data from spreadsheets and databases into simple-but-compelling graphic displays—pie charts, bar charts, list views, card index views—for iPhone and iPad users.

Since mid-September, when Mellmo secured $30 million in its first round of institutional funding, the four-year-old startup has announced the opening of a new London headquarters to oversee business in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, as well as new offices in France, Spain, and Italy. The company also established a beachhead in Shanghai, and formed strategic partnerships with Hitachi Consulting, and Deloitte China Consulting—businesses that provide IT services to big companies in Asia.

“Before we even opened our office in London, we had five or six customers in Europe who had purchased our product through the [Apple] app store,” says Mellmo co-founder Quinton Alsbury. “The realization we came to was that the opportunity was much larger than we had anticipated ourselves.”

Mobile business intelligence is an idea that suddenly took off, Alsbury says, especially among the businesses listed in the Fortune Global 500 annual ranking of biggest companies in the world. “The concept of mobile BI in general just exploded after the iPad came out,” he says, adding that tablets are expected to surpass PCs as access points to business intelligence data by 2013. Instead of making business decisions from a desk, executives can access data on the factory floor, warehouse, or while traveling.

Mellmo enables customers to upload data from their corporate database (the company supports SAP, IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, and others) to the Roambi website. Customers can select the graphic views they want to use, add customizations, and make the information available internally to their workforce. Under Mellmo’s freemium business model, a basic personal account is free, and the service can be upgraded to Pro or Enterprise subscriptions, depending on customer needs.

I met with Alsbury last month, during the CTIA’s annual Enterprise & Applications conference at the San Diego Convention Center. As Mellmo’s president of product innovation, Alsbury leads the interactive design, user experience, functionality, and art design of Roambi. He was at the CTIA to demonstrate Roambi Flow, a wholly new software as a service that enables corporate customers to wrap text around their Roambi graphics to produce print-like reports. With Roambi Flow, users can embed their graphic displays in documents to create a platform that publishes much more comprehensive reports for the iPad.

“Imagine what The Wall Street Journal would be if it showed up on your doorstep with just the charts and graphics,” Alsbury says. “Roambi Flow enables customers to add editorial copy with their graphics to create an iPad-style magazine.”

“It’s the first thing I’ve seen in which the output is optimized for the iPad instead of a pdf,” Asbury says. Mellmo has some customers, such as the financial services giant Primerica, that are looking at Roambi Flow as a platform for their external communications.

Aside from Primerica, Alsbury says Mellmo now has about 160 enterprise customers, including San Diego’s Life Technologies, Novartis, and Dow Corning.

Mellmo also has expanded its workforce to roughly 100 full-time employees, and moved its corporate headquarters from Del Mar, CA, into a distinctive building in Solana Beach that was previously occupied by ServiceNow—which is now an established Web-based services provider on a fast-growth track. Alsbury says that’s good karma for Mellmo, and a sign of things to come.

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Yesterday we told you about The Eatery, a new iPhone app from San Francisco-based Massive Health. The app lets users snap photos of their meals, rate how healthy they are, and get a reality check on those ratings from other users. While the app is designed to be fun, it also has a serious point—if people are more aware of what they’re eating, they’ll eat better (at least in theory).

Well, The Eatery is shaping up as a viral success story. In just the first 48 hours since the app’s debut in the iTunes App Store, users have shared 200,000 meal ratings, according to Massive Health intern Andrew Rosenthal. “It’s addictive,” Rosenthal says. “That means we have a big data set about what people are eating, and what they and other people think of those meals.”

Along with the photos and ratings, Massive Health collects location data, which means it’s already gleaning some interesting insights about where people are when they submit meal photos, and how those locations correlate with the ratings. Specifically, it’s looking like people eat less healthy meals when they’re at work.

The heat maps below, shared with Xconomy by Massive Health, show ratings from people in New York City and San Francisco. Unhealthy meals are in red and healthy meals are in green.

See all those red areas in the SoMa and Financial District areas of San Francisco, and the mid-town and downtown areas of Manhattan? It’s a sign that people are loading up on burritos, potato chips, and soda at work.

That’s not the most surprising finding in the world, perhaps, but it’s interesting that Massive Health was able to gather a data set like this in just two days. “With people from around the world rating meals, it turns out that we have some data that nobody else has,” comments Rosenthal. And as the data piles up, who knows—it could make interesting fodder for nutritionists, epidemiologists, or marketers.

The maps are interesting for a second reason as well. They illustrate exactly where early-adopters in the mobile app world—the people who are likely to download and use an app on the first day or two after its release—tend to congregate.

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Do phones, food, photos, and fitness mix? Massive Health is hoping they do. The San Francisco mobile health startup, which debuted last spring with $2.25 million in seed funding from Felicis Ventures, Greylock, Andreessen Horowitz, Charles River Ventures, and Mohr Davidow Ventures, has come out with its first consumer app. It’s called The Eatery, and it’s designed to get iPhone owners to think more carefully about how they stuff their faces.

Introduced yesterday, The Eatery invites you to use your iPhone’s camera to take a picture of your meal—before you eat it, ideally—and then to rate it from “Fat” to “Fit” on an 11-star scale. The app will track your entries, and on a daily and weekly basis it will send you summaries intended to help you discover patterns and make healthier eating choices. There’s also a social element: you can connect with Facebook friends who also use The Eatery, and they’ll rate your meal photos too, providing a sort of reality check on your own ratings.

It’s all wrapped up inside a user interface that’s on the far slick-and-elegant end of the design spectrum. Noticeably absent: any way of quantifying what you’re eating, in terms of ounces, calories, or fat or carbohydrate content. “There are a bunch of apps in the App Store that are more about recording what you ate rather than helping you eat better,” says Massive Health CEO Sutha Kamal. “They are asking the wrong question. What you really should care about is how you are eating day to day or month to month.” The idea, Kamal says, is that simply paying more attention to what you’re eating and getting feedback from friends will prompt you to start eating better.

When Massive Health came out of stealth mode back in February, the team of ex-Mozilla, ex-Linden Lab, ex-gaming entrepreneurs declared that they wanted to bring great user-centered interaction design to the healthcare sector. They said they intended to build mobile apps that used crowdsourcing, game mechanics, social networking, and data analytics to help people deal with chronic health conditions.

True to that promise, Kamal says the startup is developing a diabetes app that’s still in alpha testing. But the company decided to bring out The Eatery first, as a way to get something into consumers’ hands faster and start testing its thesis that health apps will have more uptake and impact if they deliver what Kamal calls “delightful experiences.” With some pride, he describes The Eatery as “the most beautiful app in the Health part of the App Store…you don’t feel like there is a lot of work being done on your part, but a huge amount of value is being delivered.”

The startup isn’t planning to make any money on The Eatery, Kamal says. In fact, it’s presenting the app as “Massive Health Experiment 01″ rather than a full-fledged product. “This is a place where we are expecting to learn a lot,” Kamal says. The revenue opportunities will come down the road, when MassiveHealth introduces apps that help employers, insurers, and patients lower healthcare costs, he says.

In a phone chat yesterday with Kamal, I asked where the idea for The Eatery came from, how he thinks it will fit with existing social and mobile usage patterns, and where MassiveHealth is going from here. A summary of our conversation follows.

Xconomy: What’s the big idea behind The Eatery?

Sutha Kamal: If you step back and think about Massive Health as a macro thing, what we’re trying to do is build a lot of enduring value around helping people change their lives and stay healthy. We have another alpha [product] going in the diabetes space, and we have concluded that if you are thinking about getting and staying healthy, you care about four things: diet, exercise, medication adherence, and lastly … Next Page »

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Doctors can now immediately tap the wisdom of remote experts with just the click of a button, thanks to new mobile technology from Cambridge, MA-based Sermo. The company, which operates the largest online network of doctors in the U.S., today unveiled its Sermo mobile application for Apple’s iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch. The app includes iConsult, a feature where doctors can snap a picture of a physical finding, X-ray, or laboratory result, and shoot it off to other doctors in the Sermo network, who can give their advice in real-time.

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Offering what it says is a different spin on location-based services, four-year-old New York startup Hotlist is pursuing more funding and plans to expand its staff to fill its new offices. Billed as a social discovery engine, Hotlist lets users see where their friends and acquaintances plan to be, rather than where they have already checked in.

“When you think about Foursquare, it’s more about declaring where you are for the sake of an incentive to get a deal,” Hotlist CEO and co-founder Chris Mirabile says. “There is no emphasis on the social aspect.”

Coordinating plans for a night out even among close-knit friends, Mirabile says, can be tedious. Text messages and photos from the venue are often shared too late for their fellow revelers to join in the fun. “The problem was being able to stay in touch with everybody and figure out what they were doing without having to text, call, or e-mail everybody every day,” he says.

From that personal frustration emerged Hotlist, which aggregates information from Facebook users who RSVP to public events. Mirabile says Hotlist collects that public information from more than 110 million people’s social plans. Hotlist only shows first names and profile photos of the expected attendees. While users of Hotlist must sign up through their Facebook accounts, information is gathered from all Facebook users who make their plans public even if … Next Page »

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A mobile app developed by a pair of former UCSF medical students could help doctors collect more accurate medical histories from patients, even if they don’t speak the same language. Called MediBabble, the free, donation-supported iPhone app lets doctors play common medical questions aloud in five languages: Cantonese, Haitian Creole, Mandaran, Russian, and Spanish. Patients can respond via yes/no answers, gestures, or scrolling on the device. Alex Blau, who began developin the app three years ago with fellow medical student Brad Cohn, says the app can help doctors get through the crucial medical history portion of a patient encounter faster and more accurately despite language barriers. “Ninety percent of diagnoses come from the patient’s self-reported medical history, so the ability to communicate is critical,” Blau says in a feature posted this week at UCSF’s website. “Time is not an asset doctors or patients have. You need that information when you need it,”

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We’ve been seeing some big life sciences deals in recent weeks, the latest being Nestlé’s acquisition of San Diego’s Prometheus Labs. Here’s our wrap-up of the past week.

—Switzerland’s Nestlé Health Science agreed to acquire San Diego’s Prometheus Laboratories in what one analyst estimated as a $1.1 billion deal. The Nestlé subsidiary has been on a buying spree, acquiring CM&D Pharma, which is focused on cancer and inflammatory bowel diseases, in February; and Vitaflo, which develops treatments of inherited metabolic diseases, last August. San Diego’s Prometheus, which has been in registration for an IPO since late 2007, also is a specialty pharma and diagnostics company focused on cancer and gastrointestinal disorders.

—San Diego-based Trius Therapeutics (NASDAQ: TSRX), which is developing a new generation of antibiotics for treating multi-drug resistant infections, surprised me yesterday by disclosing plans to raise $30.2 million through a private stock placement. I recently talked with Trius CEO Jeff Stein about the company’s travails in raising capital through an IPO last year, and how government R&D contracts are supporting the biotech’s early stage drug development.

—La Jolla Pharmaceutical has been an icon of San Diego’s biotech community, but preliminary data from a preclinical study of a compound the company has been studying for repairing scar tissue could spell the end of the company’s 21-year run. In a statement Monday, the biotech says its LJP1485 compound will not show a statistically significant improvement compared to a placebo. CEO Dierdre Gillespie told me in an e-mail yesterday that it will still be a few days before another update is available. The biotech has raised $428.1 million without producing any commercial therapies, according to The San Diego Union-Tribune.

—San Diego-based ResMed ( NYSE: RMD), which provides technology for treating … Next Page »

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Is software-as-a-service provider Service-now.com be poised to become San Diego’s next big thing? We’ve got that and the rest of the local tech news, and our roundup starts now.

—San Diego-based Service-now.com co-founder Fred Luddy told me he expects the company’s revenue to double every year for the foreseeable future. So it’s hard to underscore the importance of the company’s decision last week to hire enterprise software veteran Frank Slootman as CEO. Service-now provides Web-based IT management services for the 2000 largest companies in the world, and Slootman has experience as a fast-growth CEO at Santa Clara, CA-based Data Domain. Luddy, who was the founding CEO, is moving to chief product officer.

—San Diego’s Fallbrook Technologies, which filed for an IPO in February, 2010, withdrew its registration to go public on Friday. The company, which has developed a continuously variable transmission that offers greater energy efficiency without gears, last updated its IPO filing last August. I confirmed the news, which was on the Renaissance Capital website, with Fallbrook CEO Bill Klehm, who tells me he’s prohibited by SEC rules from commenting on the move, but adds, “stay tuned.”

—We’re watching for more details on the local impact of Nokia’s decision last week to eliminate 7,000 jobs around the world, which amounts to the largest cuts in the wireless company’s history. Nokia is moving some 3,000 of those jobs to Accenture. In the United States, the Finnish wireless giant plans to reduce 500 positions at its sites in San Diego and White Plains, NY. Nokia CEO Stephen Elop is scheduled to be a keynote speaker in San Diego next month at Qualcomm’s Uplinq conference.

—VoxOx, the San Diego startup that provides free communications service based on voice over Internet (VoIP) technology, launched a … Next Page »

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While venture capital activity increased nationwide during the first quarter that ended in March, VC investing in San Diego fell to its lowest level since the first quarter of 2009. Our roundup of that and the rest of last week’s tech news begins now.

—Data on first-quarter venture capital activity arrived separately from New York-based CB Insights and the MoneyTree Report, which is put together by the National Venture Capital Association, PricewaterhouseCoopers and Thomson Reuters. CB Insights found that venture investors sunk $7.5 billion into 738 deals throughout the country, while the MoneyTree Report said $5.9 billion was invested in 736 deals. Both reports say the dollars invested were up sharply from the same quarter a year in 2010—27 percent in CB’s case and 14 percent, according to MoneyTree.

—In the San Diego area, VCs invested just over $100 million in 22 startups during the first quarter, a 55 percent drop in capital and a 29 percent decline in deals from the first quarter of 2010, according to the MoneyTree Report. CB Insights does not break out regional data on venture capital investing.

—The Ford Motor Company is targeting San Diego for the initial launch of its 100-percent electric vehicle later this year. In an exclusive interview, Ford’s Mike Tinskey told me how Ford used its popular Focus model compact as the automotive package for its all-battery drive train in order to leverage its existing economies of scale, since Ford has been selling about 2.6 million Focus compacts a year. Ford also hopes to differentiate itself from rival EV carmakers by developing its own charging stations, which it says are capable of recharging an EV twice as fast as other chargers.

—San Diego’s Mushroom Networks has developed HD video capability for the Teleporter technology it launched a year ago. Mushroom Networks said that makes its Teleporter the first cellular-based high-definition live video streaming technology, enabling a TV crew to transmit real-time HD video from any location where … Next Page »

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If you have an iPhone, an iPod Touch, or an iPad, and you’re active on Facebook and Twitter, and you like to watch videos from places like YouTube, Vimeo, and TED, and you have a Wi-Fi network at home with a fast broadband connection, and especially if you have an Apple TV, then there’s a new app out today that you will love. It’s called ShowYou. If you don’t meet this description, you won’t see the point of the rest of this article, so you can stop reading now.

I’m kidding. You should keep reading, because ShowYou is important. It’s likely to accelerate a bunch of changes that are already underway in the way we think about Internet video—and about television itself.

ShowYou is a mobile, social video browser. As the name implies, it shows you the Internet videos that your friends have been sharing lately on your social networks. At launch, the videos all come from YouTube, Vimeo, and TED, and the social networks include Facebook and Twitter. Over time, more sources and more networks will be added.

What could be so momentous about all that? After all, you can find the videos your friends are talking about online simply by following the links in their tweets or their wall posts. Well, the point is that ShowYou—which comes from Remixation, the same San Francisco company that created the video curation site VodPod—isn’t Facebook or Twitter or a Web browser. It’s a slick, simple iOS app, designed from the ground up for one activity: finding, watching, and commenting on videos. And it does that so well that I think it will quickly be classed alongside Flipboard as an app that redefines what’s possible on touchscreen devices. ShowYou puts the Apple devices’ touchscreens to elegant and original use, and in the process it dramatically raises the bar for other video-centric apps. It puts Google’s native YouTube iOS app to shame, just to name one.

I interviewed Remixation CEO Mark Hall about the new app in late March, and I’ve spent the last couple of weeks as a ShowYou beta tester. (You can follow me on ShowYou under the name waderoush.) From my experiences so far, I’ve noticed a few key qualities that make ShowYou stand out from the dozens of other new apps I see every month.

One is that it lifts Internet videos out of environments that weren’t designed to showcase them and puts them on devices that feel like they were made expressly for video. This is especially true on the iPad 2, the device I used to test ShowYou.

A second point is that ShowYou incorporates a lot of little user-interface decisions that, cumulatively, make it not just frictionless but fun to use. For example, when you click on a video in the app’s lineup, it starts playing right away; there’s no need for an extra click on the play button, the way there is with videos embedded in websites. And the iPad version of ShowYou includes a nifty navigation trick: a “grid view” holding up to a thousand video thumbnails in all. To explore this enormous grid, you … Next Page »

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Orin Herskowitz, executive director of Columbia Technology Ventures, is sipping gourmet coffee at a bistro across the street from the Manhattan Mall, but he hardly needs the caffeine to amplify his excitement about the innovation scene at his college. Columbia Technology Ventures—the Ivy League university’s main technology-transfer initiative—has chalked up an impressive list of accomplishments ever since Herskowitz joined the office in 2006. “We get 300 faculty-submitted inventions a year,” he says, about 60 percent in life sciences and the rest in other technologies. “I like to say we have everything from iPhone apps to cancer drugs,” Herskowitz says.

Herskowitz has good reason to boast. The former management consultant has spent the last few years whipping Columbia’s tech transfer efforts into shape, instituting a host of new processes designed to speed good ideas to market. It’s working: In 2009 (the most recent year for which data is available), Columbia pulled in $154 million in licensing revenues—more than any other university—according to the Association of University Technology Managers (AUTM). Columbia’s tech-transfer arm now spawns about a dozen startups a year. “Over the last two years, the whole university has come together around entrepreneurship in a way that feels new and energized,” Herskowitz says.

Columbia is one of the pioneers of technology transfer. The university began a formal initiative to spin out its inventions into the business world back in 1982—just two years after the passage of the Bayh-Dole Act gave academic institutions the right to patent and commercialize inventions. Over the years, technology transfer in New York has become much more collaborative, Herskowitz says. Not only are Columbia faculty members from different departments working together on inventions, but the university is now actively collaborating with nine or so other academic institutions in New York, including New York University, Rockefeller University, and Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center.

Many famous products rely at least in part on inventions shepherded to market by Columbia Technology Ventures. Among them: DirectTV, iPod Touch, and the biotech drugs epoetin alfa (Epogen), etanercept (Enbrel) and omalizumab (Xolair). As for that iPhone app, it’s EarthObserver, created by the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia. The app, released in December for $2.99, allows users to view detailed renderings of the ocean floor, icecaps, mountains and coasts. “It’s like Google Maps for the whole earth,” Herskowitz says.

But like most universities, Columbia has faced some challenges transferring good ideas into marketable products. The college was often slow to attract … Next Page »

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Path, the San Francisco-based startup offering an iPhone app that allows users to share photos and videos with small groups of friends, announced in a blog post Tuesday that it has collected $8.65 million in new venture funding, on top of approximately $2.5 million already raised. Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Index Ventures led the round, which was joined by Digital Garage Japan; Kleiner partner Chi-Hua Chien and Index partner Mike Volpi have joined Path’s board. Path also announced that users can now share photos they snap from within the app via e-mail.

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It’s a universal urban experience: You’re zigzagging around the crowded city streets in your car, looking for an empty parking spot. The person in the passenger seat tells you to go right. You think you’ll have better luck if you go left. An argument ensues—as pointless as it is bitter, since neither of you has any actual data.

That’s exactly the situation that a new iPhone app called Parker attempts to eliminate. A San Francisco startup called Streetline unveiled the app today in Los Angeles, where it’s tied into an existing network of sensors embedded in city streets and parking meters in the Hollywood area. As you cruise along Hollywood Boulevard, Parker can show you a real-time count of the number of empty parking spots on each nearby block, helping you find a precious empty space faster than you otherwise would.

Streetline launched the app in a ceremony this afternoon with Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and city council president Eric Garcetti. “Sometimes it feels like more movie stars have been discovered in Hollywood than parking spaces,” Garcetti said in a statement issued before the event. “This app will help drivers save time, reduce traffic and air pollution, and make visiting Hollywood even more enjoyable than it already is.”

For now, the $1.99 app only works in Tinseltown, and only on the iPhone. But the four-year-old startup has already built sensor networks in other parts of Los Angeles, as well as three other cities, and Streetline CEO Zia Yusuf says he hopes the debut of the Parker app will inspire more cities to ask for the technology, which was originally designed to help with parking enforcement.

Cities like Streetline’s system because it can tell parking officers how long a car has been in a given spot—which, for better or worse, means they can be more efficient about giving out tickets. The added revenue from writing more parking tickets more than makes up for the cost of installing the system, Yusuf says. But sharing the sensor data with consumers “is going to add a whole new dimension to the value of this information, and that is going to start accelerating [deployment],” he predicts. “I hope citizens will say, ‘I would rather go to a city where I can get real-time parking information than a city that doesn’t.’”

The 30-employee company, which has backing from Palo Alto, CA-based Sutter Hill Ventures, is part of a global “smart cities” movement organized around the idea that metropolises could function far more efficiently if infrastructure such as roads, bridges, water mains, and power lines were loaded with sensors that spit out real-time data. (In fact, IBM named Streetline the “world’s smartest startup” last month at Smartcamp, an entrepreneurship competition in Dublin.) The company’s parking sensors contain magnetometers capable of sensing a car’s presence, along with cellular radio equipment that uploads the information to a mesh of nearby repeaters and gateways, which pass it along to servers on the Internet. The sensor packages fit inside reflectors that can be glued to the pavement, or placed in recessed cans for snow-prone areas. There’s also a version that fits inside coin-operated parking meters.

Streetline has long pitched the sensors primarily as a way for traffic and parking departments to get smarter about enforcement; in a live webcast demonstration last week, I watched as the number of open parking spots in the area of Hollywood and Vine started out at 328, then dropped to … Next Page »

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Boston-based FitnessKeeper, the developer of mobile app RunKeeper, announced today that is has wrapped up a $1.1 million financing, led by Bryce Roberts at O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures. The funding round also involved full participation from the startup’s existing investors, who include LaunchCapital, Will Herman, Dave Balter, and Don McLagan. They backed FitnessKeeper for its $400,000 seed funding in November 2009. The RunKeeper app for iPhone and Android tracks the distance, speed, and routes its users run, and recently rolled out virtual fitness classes to help users train for specific road races.

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Consumers may love the convenience of self-checkout stands while shopping, but getting those machines into stores carries a hefty price tag for retailers. Boston-based startup AisleBuyer is looking to bring that same convenience to customers without the installment cost to retailers, with its iPhone and Android mobile app, the latter of which went live today.

“The retailer is putting a cash register in the pocket of potentially every person who walks in the door,” AisleBuyer CEO Andrew Paradise says.

That’s assuming they have a smartphone, of course. The AisleBuyer app, which enlisted its first partner store in August, enables shoppers to scan in-store items with their phone’s camera. Once scanned, consumers can read product reviews and opt to purchase the physical item right then and there from their phone, avoiding lines at the register. They then show store employees their receipt on their mobile screen when they walk out of the store with their purchase in hand. “You get the best of the online experience and the best of the offline world,” Paradise told me when we talked about the iPhone app launch this summer. AisleBuyer, which is free to consumers and charges stores a fee per transaction, is also hitting the Android app marketplace today.

Boston-area toy and children’s store Magic Beans is AisleBuyer’s first retailer customer, but the company has signed up brands that bring with them more than 8,000 stores across the country, Paradise says. It will be rolling out those installments throughout the first half of next year, he says.

Paradise didn’t reveal the number of customers and transactions the AisleBuyer app has garnered since going live in Magic Beans, but said, “We’re seeing numbers that are multiples of what we expected.”

The store could also entice some new AisleBuyer users with incentives for using the app this holiday season. Up until Christmas, each Magic Beans shopper who uses AisleBuyer to check out will spin a virtual wheel—à la the game show The Price is Right—and get $1, $3, or $5 off their purchase. And at least one consumer will get his or her entire purchase for 99 cents, as part of the mobile raffle.

The big focus for AisleBuyer, which incorporated last December, is beefing up its retailer customer base, and it has brought in some money to do just that. Earlier this month the startup announced it had raised $4 million in Series A financing, with a line of credit from Silicon Valley Bank and an equity investment from Richard Heise, Jr., a founding investor in Groupon and public companies InnerWorkings and Echo Global Logistics. AisleBuyer is looking to make use of his experience in helping ventures grow big, Paradise says.

The company, which is up to 25 employees, is also developing features for social shopping and check-ins, but that’s not its first priority, Paradise says. “We’re focused on being a utility application for retailers,” he says.

So don’t expect AisleBuyer to become the next Foursquare or SCVNGR. “There are a lot of different apps out there about the check-in. AisleBuyer is all about the checkout,” Paradise says.

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AisleBuyer, a Boston-based developer of apps for mobile checkouts at retail stores, announced today that it has raised a $4 million round of equity- and debt-based funding. The financing comes in the form of a line of credit from Silicon Valley Bank, and an equity investment from InnerWorkings founder Richard Heise, Jr, also the founding investor of Echo Global Logistics, Mediabank, Forseva, and Groupon. The funding will go to new hires in the Boston AisleBuyer office, and expanding the footprint of its iPhone app, which is currently used by Boston-area retailer Magic Beans and enables consumers to scan and purchase store items from their phones to avoid waiting in line.

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Physio-Control has made some unhappy headlines the past few years because of quality control problems that temporarily caused it to halt shipments of its heart defibrillators. But at the same time it was trying to fix that short-term issue, it has been investing for the long-term in wireless infrastructure that it hopes could save precious time for emergency personnel as they bring ailing heart patients to the hospital.

Today, Redmond, WA-based Physio-Control, a unit of medical device giant Medtronic (NYSE: MDT), is unveiling its latest step toward this vision of smooth wireless transmission of data on heart patients. The company has received FDA clearance to start marketing its Lifenet 5.0 system, and is also announcing it has struck a partnership with a San Antonio, TX-based company, AirStrip Technologies, that makes an app that provides a high-resolution picture of an electrocardiogram that a doctor can read on an iPhone or tablet device.

Physio-Control is hoping to make a splash today at the biggest annual confab of heart doctors, the American Heart Association’s Scientific Sessions in Chicago. The company, which was dogged from January 2007 until February by questions about manufacturing problems with its defibrillators, is hoping to regain momentum and build a competitive edge over Philips Medical Systems and Zoll Medical in the market for defibrillators and wireless data networks that transmit heart information from the ambulance to the hospital in real-time. The Physio-Control unit isn’t a huge driver for a company like Medtronic with $15.4 billion in annual revenue, but the Physio operation has bounced back a bit, seeing its contribution grow from $343 million a year ago, to $425 million in the most recent fiscal year. Physio’s ability to continue the momentum will depend on whether it can take advantage of its recent investments in wireless technology, says Cam Pollock, Physio’s vice president for global marketing.

“There will be a day when a physician sitting in an office will see everything the EMS person sees on their screen, in real-time,” Pollock says. “We believe what we have now is the best remote data capability in the business.”

Since 2007, Physio-Control has been building relationships with cellular companies, and investing in server farms as part of a wireless infrastructure push to transmit the vital information that comes from its Lifepak defibrillators, Pollock says. The idea is to transmit data-rich files from things like electrocardiograms so that a cardiologist in a hospital can see in real-time … Next Page »

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These days, the simple act of going to the grocery store is a fraught and anxious affair. Americans are being told that what they choose to eat isn’t just a personal decision, but has major economic, political, and moral implications. For one thing, there’s the spiraling cost to society of food-related health conditions, from obesity and diabetes to heart disease and hypertension. Then there are books like The Omnivore’s Dilemma and Eating Animals and movies like Supersize Me, Food Inc, and Our Daily Bread, which expose the unsavory sides of a food economy dominated by supermarkets and fast-food joints and the factory farming system that’s grown up to serve them. And, of course, there are the burgeoning organic and local food movements, which argue that foods produced locally and without the use of pesticides or antibiotics are healthier and more sustainable—even if they’re beyond many consumers’ price range.

Into the middle of all this steps ShopWell, a Silicon Valley Web and mobile startup spun off last year by the design consultancy Ideo. The company’s proposition to consumers is simple: tell us a little about you, and we’ll tell you which products on the supermarket shelves best fit your nutritional needs.

It sounds great, given the difficulties ordinary mortals face with the very first step of responsible shopping and eating: trying to figure out how ingredient lists and nutrition labels relate to their own lives. But the company’s plan for making money is a bit more complex. It wants to be an advisor and information broker to food producers, who supposedly lack good data about how consumers make buying decisions in the grocery store and therefore have a terrible record when it comes to launching new products. To collect useful intelligence for its food-industry clients, ShopWell will need lots of users. And to sign up lots of users, it will have to provide non-obvious product recommendations in a usable format.

But frankly, it’s not there yet—which isn’t surprising, given that the company launched its beta site in September and its iPhone app even more recently. So in this third and final installment in our ShopWell case study, we’ll look at the product development challenges the company has ahead of it, and the business-model hypotheses it has yet to test.

[Editor's Note: This is the third article in a three-part series on ShopWell. Part 1 appeared Monday, November 1 and Part 2 appeared on Tuesday, November 2.]

What makes ShopWell worth following, and sets it apart from the scores of Silicon Valley startups launched every month, is not just that it’s trying to validate two premises at once (i.e., that consumers want an easier way to identify healthy food, and that food producers will pay for fine-grained data about consumer preferences). It’s also that the startup’ fate will reflect on Ideo’s ability to launch successful companies. Is the consultancy’s fabled user-centered design philosophy an effective tool in the real rough-and-tumble of startup life? Do good designers also make good entrepreneurs? Such questions may not be answered until ShopWell itself exits the startup market and its venture cashiers ring up the totals.

The Google of Food?

Whatever else it may mean, the “user-centered design” philosophy espoused at Ideo and many other creative hotbeds is about listening to people and creating things they’ll want, rather than force-feeding them products that don’t fit with their existing behaviors. But one of the interesting things about food and wellness, according to ShopWell CEO Jasmine Kim, is that many people only start thinking about the subject once they’re forced to give up their old behaviors. “A big insight from user-centered design”—that is, from the stories people have told Ideo and ShopWell—”is that when you are starting a transition, that is when you need nutrition advice,” Kim says. “You could be told by your doctor, ‘You have type 2 diabetes, eat less sugar,’ but people are left to their own devices to go figure out what they could eat.”

That’s why ShopWell has put a lot of energy into allowing users to filter its database of foods based on health needs—there are simple “preselects” on each users’ account page that will … Next Page »

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