Grockit Hires A Badass Boy Scout From Google As CEO
Online learning site Grockit is scaling up its leadership team after raising $7 million last May. Today it is announcing that it is hiring Roy Gilbert as CEO. Gilbert is Google’s director of user operations and policy, in charge of many non-advertising operations. He helped set up Google’s India operations and grew it from 20 people to 1,000, and was the first business manager for Gmail.
Founder Farb Nivi recruited Gilbert, who will also be taking a board seat. Nivi will be president, chief product officer, and chairman. “I kind of look at him as our Eric Schmidt,” says Nivi, who came back getting hit by a minivan last year to keep his startup going and growing.
Gilbert served in the military driving nuclear submarines, and yes, he was a boy scout. But he also comes from a family of teachers, and he and his wife started a school in Hyderabad while he was in India for underprivileged children called the Rainbow Primary School. So he has education chops as well. “I pretty much can’t believe we landed him,” says Nivi.
Nivi also recently hired a chief marketing officer, Chris Strausser, who created the Jamba Juice brand, and previously worked at PepsiCo and Kaplan. Knewton, another online education startup, also recently made a top executive hire. The whole education space is definitely heating up.
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Chartbeat Raises $3 Million From Index, Conway, Sacca, Clavier, Lerer, And Dixon
In a short amount of time since its launch in April, 2009 and its redesign a year later, realtime analytics startup Chartbeat has gained an impressive following of more than 2,500 paying corporate customers. All of this was done so far with 5 employees, led by general manager Tony Haile.
Now, the betaworks-incubated company has gained an impressive roster of investors in a $3 million Series A financing. The round was led by Index Ventures, and includes some serious superangels such as Ron Conway’s SV Angel, Chris Sacca’s Lowercase Capital, Chris Dixon’s Founder Collective, Lerer Ventures, O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures, Freestyle Capital, betaworks, Jeff Clavier’s SoftTech VC, and Jason Calacanis. With the funding, Chartbeat will be spun off as its own separate company, just as betawork’s bit.ly was before it.
Chartbeat gives you a realtime dashboard that shows you the activity on your Website as it happens: what stories, pages, or items are hot; where traffic is coming from, how fast your pages are loading. “Understanding what is going on with your business in realtime and being able to respond to that, we believe is the future of online business,” says Index partner Saul Klein.
Chartbeat is especially popular with publishers and retailers. We use Chartbeat at TechCrunch every day. I always have a tab open to see what stories are gaining the most traction. Other publishers who use it include the New York Times, AOL, Starbucks, and Groupon. Gawker is testing a beta site where feature stories are determined by their Chartbeat stats.
Today Chartbeat helps people monitor their sites, but the next step is to help them take actions based on the realtime data. Giving businesses actionable data and helping them take those action sis where the real value in this business lies—whether that is tying Chartbeat into an ad server throw more ads at hot stories, or linking it to a realtime merchandising and inventory systems for retailers.
A month ago, Chartbeat passed one million concurrent active visitors across all the sites using the service. That number is now regularly past 1.5 million. The dial below shows the cumulative active visitors across all Chartbeat-enabled sites.
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Heaps of Fossils From Evolutionary ‘Big Bang’ Discovered
One of paleontology’s most revered fossil sites now has a baby brother. Scientists have discovered a group of astonishing fossils high in the Canadian Rockies, just 40 kilometers from the famous Burgess Shale location.
A paper describing the find appears in the September issue of Geology.
Since its discovery in 1909, the Burgess Shale has yielded many thousands of fossils dating to 505 million years ago — a period often called “evolution’s big bang,” when animals were exploding in diverse body plans. These soft-bodied critters scurried around on the sea floor, then were buried in mudslides and exquisitely preserved.
Burgess fossils appear in several outcrops, all within about 60 kilometers of Field, British Columbia, and all occurring in shale deposits of the Stephen Formation that are 270 to 370 meters thick. Now, a team led by paleontologist Jean-Bernard Caron of the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto reports finding Burgess-like fossils in the valley of the Stanley Glacier in Kootenay National Park, where a much thinner part of the Stephen Formation that ranges from 16 to 160 meters thick is exposed.
“This new locality adds to our knowledge of the environments where these organisms lived and died and thus adds important context,” says Peter Allison, a geoscientist at Imperial College London.
About half of the animal groups found at Stanley Glacier, such as trilobites, are found at other Burgess sites in different abundances. But the creatures unearthed also include eight taxa previously unknown to science. They include an unnamed worm; Stanleycaris hirpex, a segmented shrimp-like critter known as an anomalocarid; and an arthropod with big eyes dangling on stalks from its head shield.
Until now, paleontologists had thought one reason the Burgess fossils were so well preserved was because they settled in thick deposits at the bottom of an ancient ocean protected by a submarine cliff. But the Stanley Glacier fossils weren’t formed in the presence of such a cliff, suggesting that creatures can be fossilized in amazing detail in other environments.
“We consider it likely that future exploration and study will continue to yield new taxa from the ‘thin’ Stephen Formation, which is exposed over a broader area regionally than the ‘thick’ Stephen Formation,” the researchers write.
New discoveries are still emerging from the classic Burgess localities. In May, after studying new Burgess fossils from one of the original sites, Caron and colleagues reported new details on a creature that may be one of the earliest known relatives of octopuses, squid and other cephalopods.
Image: Looking towards Stanley Glacier, site of the new fossil deposit. Flickr/judemat.
See Also:
- Behind the Scenes at Harvard’s Museum of Natural History
- Gravity Lows Mark Burial Sites of Ancient Tectonic Plates
- Primordial Sperm Gene Found
- Early Life Didn’t Just Divide, It United
- 2-Billion-Year-Old Fossils May Be Earliest Known Multicellular
- Life’s First Spark Re-Created in the Laboratory
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Local-Activity Site Zozi Lands $3 Million Series A From 500 Startups And Zig Capital
Last April, adventure travel marketplace EkoVenture, relaunched as Zozi, with a focus on a local activities instead of exotic travel. Shifting the focus to promoting deals on local activities such as kayaking in San Francisco Bay, cocktail classes in Atlanta, or floating down the Delaware river in an innertube is aimed at reaching a broader class of consumers.
The company just closed a $3 million series A investment. ZIG Capital, Dave McClure’s 500 Startups, LaunchCapital, and individual angels including Larry Bock and Dave Dolby.
While Zozi isn’t limited to deals, it does work with local activity vendors to give Zozi members a discount. Right now it is giving away $500,000 worth of activities as a promotion. But Zozi wants to differentiate itself from general daily local deal sites like Groupon by zeroing in on activities and vetting them. It offers a 100 percent money back guarantee if you don’t enjoy the experience.
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Cheaper, Better Satellites Made From Cellphones and Toys
MOUNTAIN VIEW, California — Instead of investing in their own computer research and development, engineers at the NASA Ames Research Center are looking to cellphones and off-the-shelf toys to power the future of low-cost satellite technology.
The smartphone in your pocket has about 120 times more computing power than the average satellite, which has the equivalent of a 1984-era computer inside.
“You can go to Walmart and buy toys that work better than satellites did 20 years ago,” said NASA physicist Chris Boshuizen. “And your cellphone is really a $500 robot in your pocket that can’t get around. A lot of the real innovation now happens in entertainment and cellphone technology, and NASA should be going forward with their stuff.”
The biggest challenge of sending cellphones and toys into space is whether the parts can get up there without shaking apart and work in a vacuum at extreme high and low temperatures.
To do some preliminary testing, two Nexus One cellphones caught rides on two rockets on July 24 that launched 30,000 feet into the atmosphere at a maximum speed of mach 2.4 (about 1,800 miles per hour). One of the rockets crashed into the ground after its parachute failed, but the other made it back with the cellphone unscathed.
Both cellphones were able to record the acceleration of the rocket using their built-in accelerometers, and the undamaged phone captured 2.5 hours of video of the event through a hole in the side of the rocket.
Intimidator 5 rocket launch
Retrieving the Nexus One cellphone from the rocket post-launch
“Everything that didn’t break is a piece of data,” said volunteer engineer Ben Howard. “We know that the batteries didn’t break and that the computer worked the whole time.”
If the cellphones ultimately get used to power satellites, they will probably be sent up without a screen and with a different battery to make them lighter. The screen and battery make up 90 percent of the Nexus One’s weight.
Next, the team will build a stabilizing mechanism for the satellite using the cellphone, $100 toy gyroscopes and parts of the Mindstorms Lego, so the satellite can orient itself in space. By installing three spinning gyroscopes and getting them to spin at different velocities, a satellite can move in any direction. The same technique is currently used on many satellites, but requires multimillion dollar technology.
The project will likely use CubeSat’s as a standardized carrying case for their cellphone-powered satellites, because the boxes have already been tested and are known to hold up in the journey. Often companies who are sending up satellites on rockets have extra space on their rockets, which is how most amateur satellites will likely get into space, and the people paying like to be sure that nothing will break and damage the rocket on the way up.
The whole goal of the project is to make satellites cheap and affordable, so that anyone with bit of time and a couple of thousand dollars can send their own satellite into space.
Upgrading the computing power of satellites using cellphones would mean increased satellite capabilities, possibly including artificial intelligence.
“We’re not sure yet exactly what people will want to do with their satellites, and that’s the point,” said NASA education specialist Matt Reyes. “What can you imagine doing with your phone in space?”
NASA team members Matt Reyes (left) and Chris Boshuizen with a Nexus One phone
Images: 1) Toy satellite parts, and the two cellphones that were retrieved from the rocket launch/ Stefan Armijo/Wired.com. 2) motorbikematt/Flickr. 3) motorbikematt/Flickr. 4) Stefan Armijo/Wired.com.
See Also:
- Tiny, DIY Satellites Get NASA Boost
- Apollo-Era Crawler Carries Test Rocket to Launch Pad
- Satellite Photos of Haiti Before and After the Earthquake
- Google Releases New High-Res Satellite Images of Haiti
- Tracked From Space: Gulf Oil Slick Approaches Land
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Help Key: Watch Netflix From Outside The U.S.
You Americans have all the good stuff. Stuff like BP pumping oil in the Ocean and guns, lots of guns. And then you have Netflix and we people outside the U.S. are wondering what could it feel like to have a service like that. Now I know.
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