Algorithms/Data vs. Ana...

Quick, what’s the second most traded commodity in the world, after oil? Sorry, no: it’s not coffee . In fact, while hard data is scant, it may well be — of all things — carbon. No, really. According to the World Bank (PDF) , the global carbon market was worth a whopping 1.42 Facebooks US$142 billion in 2010. Mind you, it’s not like container ships weighed down to the gills with graphite are crossing and recrossing the Pacific every week. What we’re actually talking about here is the trade in carbon offsets , ie, the absence of carbon. Very Zen, no? Techies should be comfortable with this notion; I seem to recall spending less time studying electrons than I did “holes,” ie their absence, while acquiring my EE degree… Anyway, where there’s a $twelve-figures market, there are startups fighting for a share. In particular, there’s a battle on to see who will be the primary aggregator of carbon-market data. On one side, dominating the market, I give you the Goliaths Point Carbon , a tentacle of the Thomson Reuters kraken, providing “independent news, analysis and consulting services for European and global power, gas and carbon markets,” and Bloomberg New Energy Finance , doing much the same. On the other, I give you plucky little David eCO2Market , a Paris-based startup with an algorithmic sling. Point Carbon and BNEF crank out tomes and tomes of research analysis and offer subscription-based information tools. eCO2Market dispenses with weighty reports, and disintermediates analysts and researchers. Instead it tries to build up the biggest, most thorough, and most up-to-date database of carbon-market information, and then gives its users algorithmic tools to search, slice, dice, and organize that data themselves. The more users pay, the better the tools. (They have a free tier, too, if you’re a data geek who wants to play with what they’ve got.) “It’s our job to take this incredibly convoluted carbon area and put it into a nice little package for investors, environmentalists, everyone, and make it as easy as possible to find projects and their participants, buy credits, or make an investment,” says Chris Draper of eCO2Market. For instance, solar-power company ToughStuff uses eCO2Market’s data to find early-stage solar projects who might be ideal ToughStuff customers. It’s anyone’s guess whether they’ll thrive. The carbon market is in something of a fraught state right now: aside from the embarrassing theft of millions of dollars worth of carbon credits by hackers a year ago, what the World Bank delicately refers to as “regulatory uncertainty” — ie the stalled attempts to cement a successor to the Kyoto Protocol — means that the near-term future is at best uncertain. On the other hand, this year should see the launch of the Western Climate Initiative , a cap-and-trade system involving California, Manitoba, Ontario and Quebec; and in the long run, though, cap-and-trade carbon markets are probably a growth bet. Either way, eCO2Market is an interesting example of a small startup disrupting an information market by replacing human-written research and analysis with big-data aggregation, algorithms, and visualization. The optimal solution probably features both…but it says here the scale will tip further towards the latter with every passing year. Image : Global bubble map of carbon projects, from eCO2Market .

Why Social Media is Lik...

The Integer Group and the Coca-Cola Retailing Research Council understand the importance of social networking in marketing. That’s why they’ve dedicated themselves to making sense of it all, beginning with a five-part series called entitled  Untangling the Social Web: Insights for Users, Brands and Retailers . The first part is available right now (it’s free) and right off the bat you’ll find this little gem. Comparing social media to high school isn’t an original concept, but I do like the way they’ve phrased it. It’s funny. It’s all true and it explains why social media is such a fickle beast. Here’s another gem: 40% of social networkers log on to a social site before they get dressed in the morning. No wonder General Mills is so set on making cereal boxes digitally interactive. The report goes on to explain the history of social media, which is fun and fascinating. You should read it if you have a few minutes to spare, but I’m going to jump down to the next part, the forces that shape the web. First off, we see that social media development works in a loop. Sometimes apps create behaviors and sometimes behaviors create apps. Facebookers write their location in the posts, so Facebook makes location a post option. Twitter takes microblogging to the next level, now everybody Tweets. This two-way street is an important concept. Look at how your customers are using your tools and social pages then tweak where needed. The study talks about two large chains that have Facebook pages just for their most popular products. Doesn’t matter if you sell all types of clothing and accessories, if a large portion of your customers are coming for the shoes, make a page for the shoes. All of this is meant to get customers to engage and have a good feeling about a brand. Now how about this fact: 60% – 65% of social networkers are more likely to buy your product if you answer their Twitter questions. Funny how far you can get with a small amount of recognition. Other important factors, simplicity and personalization. Social networkers want relevant content and they want to be able to act on that content in one or two steps. Marketing Pilgrim’s Social Channel is proudly sponsored by Full Sail University, where you can earn your Masters of Science Degree in Internet Marketing in less than 2 years. Visit FullSail.edu for more information. Think of the social web as a huge, high school lunchroom. People come in and they want to sit where they feel the most comfortable. Some will choose the cool table, others hang with the jocks and for many, the geek table is the place to be. Which table are you? And more importantly, is that the table your customers would want to sit at? You don’t have to be the most popular, you just have to be the best fit for your crowd. You can read the full report for free when you click this link: Untangling the Social Web Part 1

Part Health Tracker, Pa...

Parenting is already an extremely hard job, let alone the myriad issues tired parents find in trying to track down the best local babysitter and daycare services, schools, and more. Meanwhile, the brain-melting technology that we see employed every day focuses mainly on photo sharing, friend finding, and money managing, but parents are often left holding the short end of the stick. This is according to Dr. Carol Peebles, a co-founder of WeSprout , a graduate of the first batch of startups from healthtech-focused accelerator, Rock Health . Dr. Peebles, a neuroscientist in pediatrics at UCSF, spends much of her residency coaching parents through the different phases of their children’s development and has found that, while doctors are always eager to help, it’s parents themselves that are often the best coaches for other parents. So, in founding WeSprout, Dr. Peebles wanted to ensure that parents have their child’s medical history whenever they need it, can use that information to find the answers they need, both medical and non-medical — and the current services aren’t solving the issues surrounding this need. The co-founder says that parenting sites today are, for the most part, noisy, cluttered, and hard to use. Combining her medical expertise with the product experience of her co-founder (and fiancee) M. Jackson Wilkinson (formerly the head of UX at Posterous) as well as Keith Muth, who worked with Jackson at Viget Labs, WeSprout has been incubating and iterating at Rock Health, and is emerging into the public sphere this week. WeSprout’s goal, beyond giving parents the tools to make better choices for their children, is to find the sweet spot between personal health records and community; in other words, a service that provides a reason to keep your children’s health records up to date, and a community that becomes a multi-purpose tool by leveraging those records. WeSprout wants to make it easy for parents to track their children’s health by way of easy recording of health information, be it medical issues, immunization records, developmental milestones, height, weight, and so on. While those familiar with the space may see some similarities with venture-backed (and TechCrunch Disrupt alumni) like MotherKnows , or another Disrupt alumni like Avado , or AboutOne , Wilkinson tell us that these sites can all be complementary, catering to different parts of the space. And even so, he says, relevance in parenting communities is sorely lacking, and there’s no real reason to keep a stand-alone health record up to date, so that bridge between the two — community and health records — is the secret sauce. WeSprout wants to be a community that takes privacy seriously, while helping parents actually find information that they’ll find useful. No more aimless sifting through the endless content sources on the interwebs for relevant parenting data. It’s not about experts, Wilkinson says, it’s about facilitating parent-to-parent communication, providing advice from the people who are going through the same thing as you. Thus, for WeSprout, it’s about bridging the gap not only between community and health records, but between people and data. When I asked the co-founder about the so-called “health graph,” he said that it’s going to be a big part of where the startup goes next, and the WeSprout team wants to be involved in that data exchange — in pediatrics — going forward. The most relevant Q&A networks provide multiple perspectives from peers and people who are going through the same experiences as you, thus lending the network a P2P credibility and relevancy, which makes them sustainable. WeSprout aims to be both crowdsourced and datasourced in an effort to make its parent-to-parent network more credible and relevant, with parents being a big part of it, and the information shared about their children being the other. Most EMR platforms focus on adults and parents, who clearly have different needs than their children, so WeSprout is focusing not only on the pediatric context, but also on making record-keeping and data entry as simple as possible. Having a strong UX background, the team is trying to reduce the clutter in what is traditionally a friction-saturated activity. And best of all? It’s free. Which means that, in terms of monetizing, WeSprout will launch a premium offering in several weeks that will enable its users to go beyond tracking and simply community, and extend into sharing records, with loved ones, doctors, create groups, and even take advantage of some scrapbooking. (This is where we may see WeSprout begin to move into AboutOne’s territory.) For those TechCrunch readers looking to get early access to WeSprout, head over to the landing page here , where you can get access to the invite-only launch. Just sign in. Once inside the product, readers can invite as many people as they’d like. The team will open all doors by the end of the week. For more, check out WeSprout at home here , and learn more about Rock Health’s most recent batch here .

Salesforce Launches Ass...

Last September, Salesforce bought social customer service SaaS startup Assistly for $50 million-plus to help expand its service cloud offerings to small businesses. Today, Salesforce is debuting a brand new Assistly-inspired social and mobile customer service platform for small businesses, called Desk.com. As you may remember, Assistly helped companies collect and organize all of their customer conversations into a prioritized actionable list and equips support staff with the tools to respond to customers. The application allows businesses to filter conversations, access customer histories, automate processes and even tap into social media conversations on Facebook, Twitter and other sites. And Assistly provides users with key metrics and analytics, such as case volume, interaction volume by channel, response time, service levels, agent performance and more. Desk.com includes much of the same help desk functionality as Assistly but with a few changes. As Assistly co-founder and vice president and general manager, Desk.com, Alex Bard and explains, the customer service platform has been completely rebuilt from the ground up, including the infrastructure and back-end. There’s a new user interface, new APIs, a new HTML5 mobile client, and a new reporting service. Additionally, Desk.com is launching with an in-depth integration with Salesforce’s CRM Sales Cloud, so you can see customer service cases in the CRM product and more. Built with social at its core, Desk.com allows small businesses work with and respond to customers over Twitter, Facebook and more. Basically, Desk.com integrates Twitter and Facebook customer service comments with other channels like email, phone and web within the agent desktop. Agents can also see data on how many cases customer service agents have opened, resolved, replied to, reassigned, or reopened—regardless of who was assigned the case. Desk.com includes twelve pre-built reports providing data for average handle time, time to first response, first contact resolution rate, and more. Salesforce is also touting the simple deployment of Desk.com for small businesses. With only four required fields, a company can register for its own social help desk in a matter of seconds. Desk.com also provides a checklist to help companies get started, and each task that a company works through earns the company flex hour credits that anyone in the company can use. Clients can use the Desk.com HTML5 mobile app to respond to customers on the go from a variety of devices, including iPhones, iPads and Android devices. Users respond to support cases using the same filters from their desktop client and access the entire macro library without having to type long replies. Users can also re-assign, change groups, change status, change priority for cases, and modify customer information associated with cases. Pricing starts at $49 per full-time agent, per month, for unlimited usage. Salesforce says there is flexible pricing is also available for $1 per part-time agent, per hour. Desk.com already has a number of well-known web companies using its customer service platform including Yelp, Square, Spotify, Vimeo, Pandora, and One Kings Lane. At the time of the acquisition, Salesforce’s CEO and founder Marc Benioff said of Assistly: Salesforce has spent over a decade democratizing enterprise applications in the cloud…The Assistly acquisition doubles down on that strategy by putting us at the heart of the new trend of customer service help desk applications that have instant sign up and zero-touch onboarding, expanding the potential reach of the Service Cloud to millions of companies around the world. Salesforce already offers the Service Cloud to companies, which helps businesses connect with customers across both traditional and social channels, and counts customers such as Southwest Airlines. For Salesforce, this is a way to aggressively go after the small to medium-sized business community who needs a simple and mobile SaaS for help desk support. Desk.com will face competition from another popular customer service app for small to medium-sized businesses, Zendesk. And unsurprisingly, social and mobile are central to how Salesforce is positioning Desk.com to be the premier (yet cost-effective) customer service alternative for businesses and companies. Next up for Salesforce’s new products— leveraging the Rypple acquisition with the launch of a human talent management SaaS Successforce.

Codecademy Becomes A Pl...

One of the most buzzed-about startups over the last few months has been Codecademy — a site that looks to make programming accessible to just about anyone, with a variety of interactive, web-based courses that have users writing their first lines of code within a few seconds. The site’s ‘Code Year’ program, which invites users to receive one programming lesson each week, racked up a whopping 100,000 signups in only 48 hours — and it even has the White House  on board . But, as anyone who has spent much time on the site can attest to, Codecademy has had one big problem: there just aren’t that many lessons available. And the ones that are on there sometimes seem to be moving too quickly, without many practice exercises to explore and reinforce what you’ve just learned. Today, the company is launching a feature that will go a long way toward fixing that. Meet the Codecademy Course Creator . Cofounder Zach Sims says that as soon as Codecademy first launched, the site was inundated by requests from teachers and programmers who were eager to contribute their own lessons. To date that hasn’t been possible — all lessons on Codecademy were written in-house, or by special guest contributors. Starting with today’s launch, which the company is considering a beta, anyone will be able to write their own interactive lessons using the site’s tools (with documentation available explaining how to use them). Sims says that these tools are essentially identical to what the team uses to craft their own in-house courses, so it’s possible to make lessons that are just as good (or better) than the ones that are already on the site. And the tools suport both Ruby and Python in addition to JavaScript (which has been the site’s focus so far), so we’ll be seeing lessons covering more languages very soon. There’s no approval process involved in publishing a lesson — you write it, and Codecademy will give you a link that you can distribute as you wish. However, there will be a screening process that’ll determine which lessons Codecademy will feature on the site. In other words, users won’t be presented with lessons that aren’t any good, but if you want to create a lesson that’s applicable to a class you’re teaching, or to explain an internal company tool to coworkers, you can use Codecademy’s platform to do it. The site doesn’t have any current plans to pay contributors, but to help incentivize users to write high-quality courses, Codecademy aims to provide significant exposure to the best lesson creators. I also asked Sims if Codecademy has any plans to make the site friendlier to users who have no programming experience — in my use of the site I’ve noticed that there isn’t much hand-holding after the first few lessons, and I’m pretty sure I’d be lost if I hadn’t previously been introduced to these concepts. Sims says that the startup is indeed hoping that these additional lessons will help fill in the gaps, and that Codecademy is also introducing new features to help with this: for example, you’ll now be able to click on certain keywords (like ‘Variable’) to jump to the lesson where that concept was explained, in case you need a refresher. Above all, this is a very important shift for Codecademy. With only six employees, the company would have had to to go on a hiring spree if it wanted to keep up with demand and produce a comprehensive collection of lessons addressing both the basics and more advanced concepts. By turning to the community, it can sidestep that problem — it’ll still have the challenge of identifying the best lessons (and incentivizing the best teachers to write them), but given how much traction the site has already, I suspect it won’t have too hard a time collecting an impressive array of course materials in the coming months.