Two of the Country’s Most Active Angel Groups are Located Here in Boston [Data]

In March, I covered the release of the Halo Report on Angel Investing by CB Insights, the Angel Resource Institute, and Silicon Valley Bank. Angel investing is less transparent than VC in terms of the data we have around it, so it was nice to get a breakdown of where the activity was happening and at what scale.

Yesterday, the three organizations released data from Q1 2012 on the angel landscape that includes a few interesting nuggets, including the fact that two out of the five most active angel investment groups for the quarter are located in Boston. I profiled Clean Energy Venture Group in a post here. The other is Launchpad Venture Group.

And looking at the breakdown by sector, it’s internet and healthcare leading the way (with the latter predictably bringing in larger dollar amounts.)

from BostInno http://bostinno.com/2012/07/09/two-of-the-countrys-most-active-angel-groups-a...

GitHub finally raises funding: $100M from Andreessen Horowitz

GitHub is ready to take a huge step forward. After successfully bootstrapping its operation since 2008, the open-source code hosting site is set to announce Monday that it has accepted $100 million in funding from Andreessen Horowitz in order to improve and expand a platform that has become an industry standard for managing and finding code on the web.

The investment is the single largest by legendary venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz to date, and is the first source of external funding that GitHub has accepted since it launched in 2008. Peter Levine, a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, will join GitHub’s board.

The startup will use the funding to hire additional employees and expand to new platforms such as mobile.  CEO Tom Preston-Werner said the company hopes to develop new features but also improve existing ones, such as web applications for different operating systems. The idea is to make GitHub useful for a broad range of clients, from individual hackers to large enterprises, and from software developers to designers or authors.

In a blog post, Levine wrote that “it’s the largest investment we’ve ever made,” and explained why the firm decided to invest in GitHub:

They had a vision for a new way to develop software and created a new kind of company to pursue it. With only a handful of people in sales and marketing, the four grew the company to over 100 people, while growing revenue at nearly 300% annually—and profitably nearly the entire way.

GitHub’s site holds more than 3 million software repositories (co-founder and former CEO Chris Wanstrath once described it as “the Wikipedia for programmers”) and counts more than 1.7 million developers as users. On an average day, 80,000 repositories are updated and 7,000 individuals push their first repository to GitHub’s site, according to the company. Its open-source platform allows developers to work collaboratively on projects without losing any overlapping work, and look at code others are writing that has been posted to the site.

The funding marks a significant change for GitHub, which has prided itself on funding entirely through customers. In March, Wanstrath explained in an interview with GigaOM how this was important to the company’s mission:

“We’ve never raised any outside capital, so everything is bootstrapped. We started charging three months after our beta, so the whole time that GitHub has been alive, it’s been funded by its customers,” he says. “We really believe that the most important thing is making GitHub high quality. It has to be something that people are willing to pay for, because if they pay for it, we can keep working on awesome stuff.”

But Preston-Werner, who took over from Wanstrath as CEO a few weeks ago to lead the company’s new growth and let Wanstrath focus on product development, said the additional money will not change how GitHub operates, it will just allow them to hire the best programmers and develop ideas they already had in the works:

“In general, the money will allow us to take everything that’s already good about Github and crank it up to another level,” he said.

Barb Darrow has written for GigaOM how GitHub has become hugely popular among programmers or individuals looking for open source code online, allowing programmers to take advantage of existing code to create more efficient projects:

In the open source world, instead of writing everything from scratch, developers can mash up applications using code snippets that are already written and tested. That’s great from a productivity standpoint. And cloud computing eases deployment and distribution of those applications. Win, win.

Om has noted that GitHub has changed how programmers get hired, as the site provides an online platform for them to display what they know and how good their code is, a critical development as the war for programming talent in Silicon Valley grows:

I know of a dozen startup founders who regularly spend time on GitHub, looking for engineers and programmers they can add to their team.

GitHub is headquartered in San Francisco, but its workforce is distributed, with many of the company’s employees based around the world, Wanstrath explained to GigaOM in an interview in March:

“For designers and developers building a new creative product, we don’t believe that an assembly-type nine to five really makes any sense,” Wanstrath said. “We built a lot of GitHub at 1 a.m., so why should anyone here be different? It’s all about having high morale. We think that makes better products. If people are enjoying their work, they’re going to be more creative. They’re going to be thinking about it in the shower and it’s going to be a better end result for the people using it.”

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
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from GigaOM http://gigaom.com/2012/07/09/github-finally-raises-funding-100m-from-andreess...

Big Brother Embraces Social TV With New Interactive Platforms [EXCLUSIVE]




Reality television sensation Big Brother returns for its 14th season on Thursday with a new interactive initiative that promises to up the show's social and addictive ante.

Big Brother Connect will aggregate live social streams, feature hashtag-driven polls and will give über fans the chance to see their tweets live during Thursday night broadcasts.

"Big Brother has an insatiable fan base on-air, online and across coil platforms," said Marc DeBevoise, Sr. Vice President and GM of Entertainment at CBS Interactive. "This season, we wanted to give Big Brother fans a true second-screen, social experience, offering even more ways for them to find and interact with not only each other, but…
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from Mashable! http://mashable.com/2012/07/09/big-brother-social-tv/?utm_source=feedburner&u...

Meet the Volocopter, an 18-Blade Chopper [VIDEO]




Now here's something you don't see everyday: a helicopter with 18 rotors.

It's called the "Volocopter." It was created by the inventor and physicist Thomas Senkel. It's described by its creator as resembling a blender. And it's attracting major attention in the aviation world for innovation and sustainability.

Last October, Senkel released a popular video of himself test-flying the Multicopter, a Volocopter predecessor with a piddling 16 rotors. That video had been viewed more than 3.5 million times on YouTube and gained Senkel and his Multicopter widespread notoriety among techies and futurists.

The Volocopter, however, is bigger, better…
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from Mashable! http://mashable.com/2012/07/08/volocopter/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=f...

High-performance graphene transistors made using sticky tape

Peel and stick fabrication of graphene transistors.
Nathan Weiss and Xiangfeng Duan

Graphene could be a useful material for high-performance transistors because it carries electrons faster than silicon. Since graphene transistors can’t be turned off, they’re more useful for RF applications than logic circuits. Now researchers in California have boosted the performance, while simplifying the production, of graphene RF transistors.

A traditional transistor has a silicon or metal semiconductor channel sandwiched between source and drain electrodes. Applying voltage between a gate electrode on top of the channel and the source electrode allows current to flow through the channel. Adding a small RF signal to the gate electrode while the transistor is carrying current amplifies that signal as it comes out of the drain.

Since graphene carries electrons faster than silicon, filling channels with the carbon sheet could speed signals running through the transistor. But high-performance graphene transistors can’t be made using standard fabrication techniques. Building a gate electrode atop graphene damages the carbon sheet and reduces its electron-carrying ability.

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from Ars Technica http://arstechnica.com/science/2012/07/high-performance-graphene-transistors-...

QuicklyChat Is Push-To-Talk Video Chat [Downloads]

Windows and OS X: One of the more cumbersome elements of video chatting is that it isn't always as simple as connecting with another person and talking to them. It can fail to connect and you can often try to reach someone without knowing if they're available since many people just leave their normal status as "away." QuicklyChat aims to solve those problems with a simple push-to-talk process. More »


from Lifehacker http://lifehacker.com/5923844/quicklychat-is-push+to+talk-video-chat

Is Python a Legitimate Data Analysis Tool?

Back in May we discussed using Python, R, and Octave as data analysis tools, and compared the relative strength of each. One point of contention was whether Python could be considered a legitimate tool for such work. Now, Bei Lu writes while Python on its own may be lacking, Python with packages is very much up to the task: "My passion with Python started with its natural language processing capability when paired with the Natural Language Toolkit (NLTK). Considering the growing need for text mining to extract content themes and reader sentiments (just to name a few functions), I believe Python+packages will serve as more mainstream analytical tools beyond the academic arena." She also discusses an emerging set of solutions for R which let it better handle big data.

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from Slashdot http://developers.slashdot.org/story/12/07/06/1830216/is-python-a-legitimate-...

Book Review: Head First Python

Michael J. Ross writes "Veteran computer programmers — adept with languages such as PHP, Perl, and JavaScript — typically have no trouble learning an additional language, often just by reading online tutorials and stepping through sample code. But for those new to programming, that approach can prove difficult and frustrating. Yet nowadays there appears to be growing interest among such people for learning how to write programs in Python, especially as it is seeing increasing use by Google and other organizations, and is often chosen as the primary teaching language in schools. For such budding programmers, one possible starting point is the book Head First Python." Read on for the rest of Michael's review.

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from Slashdot http://books.slashdot.org/story/12/07/06/0016210/book-review-head-first-pytho...

Twitter brings search autocomplete to the web, helps find Biebs tweets in record time

Twitter brings search autocomplete to the web, helps find Biebs tweets in record time

Twitter had been hinting at a big search update today, and that's just what it delivered. Instead of the (quite frankly clunky) search results page, a search box at top now provides autocompleting search results that split into keywords and people. The system is smart enough to check for spelling gaffes and related searches, and results can drill down just to followed users rather than the entire social network. Autocompleting has been a mainstay of the Android and iOS apps for some time, but we're glad to hear that web users can now track down their favorite recently graduated teen pop stars faster than ever.

Twitter brings search autocomplete to the web, helps find Biebs tweets in record time originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 06 Jul 2012 15:32:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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from Engadget http://www.engadget.com/2012/07/06/twitter-brings-search-autocomplete-to-the-...