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Tag: startup

  • Westbee: A Canadian start-up aiming to challenge the “made in China” era

    Westbee: A Canadian start-up aiming to challenge the “made in China” era

    westbee

    Westbee is a Canadian start-up offering to change the way we purchase goods by putting forward products by designers and manufacturers who respect proper working conditions. In a matter of a few clicks, people can be assured of the quality and origin of the products they purchase, and of the ethical standards that had to be respected for their production.

    The website gowestbee.com targets a trendy clientele by putting forth many exclusive and original products. On it, you will find clothing, fashion accessories, kitchen accessories, beauty products, and toys as well as exclusive products from Canada, the United States, France, Italy, and the United Kingdom.

    WestBee donates 1% of sales revenues earned in Canada to Alvéole, a company which contributes to the protection of bees by setting up beehives in urban areas.

    “Western companies, just like bees, produce high quality products that are endangered. The bee is thus the symbol of the fair vision of production and consumption that we wish to convey. Purchasing products that are distributed by WestBee means contributing to the maintenance of local and Western economies, while also promoting the growth and employment of our designers. I invite you all to visit our website!”, said Lorenzo Sterzi, co-founder of WestBee.

  • Pinger Aims to Bring Free Voip to iPod Touch and iPhone

    Pinger, a startup based in San Jose, California, aims to challenge Skype (and others) by offering free voice calls. They are doing so by piggybacking voip on their hugely popular TextFree application, which allows sending free text SMS messages.

    TextFree is unusual in that each user gets its own phone number, thus the 8 million TextFree users are in fact 8 million phone numbers (putting Pinger in the Top 10 US mobile carriers). For comparison, Q3 2010 Pinger distributed 1.7 million phone numbers, AT&T distributed 1.6 in the same time span.

    Their current revenue model is ad-based, showing ads while the user is composing her message. As an indicator of profitability, the startup has already been backed up by venture firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and others by raising more than $11 million.

    Pinger is currently serving 1.2 billion ads and sent 4 billion messages each month and is only expected to raise its numbers. As Pinger’s target audience is between 16 and 26, advertisers are already eager to participate to set buying habits and brand loyalty as these users turn into adults.

    For phone calls, users will have a limited amount of free monthly minutes, which they can increase by downloading other apps, completing 3rd party offers (a model coming from social media games) or by credit card payment. Pinger says that they are aiming to offer a worldwide service, disrupting the mobile industry and profiting from the huge markups phone carriers apply in their prices. Time will tell if they are able to make it.

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    Ruben Berenguel blogs in mostlymaths.net about productivity, time management and a little programming while he finishes his PhD in Mathematics. Don’t miss your opportunity to subscribe to his RSS feed.

  • Cloudera Aims To Capture Data Center Market With Hadoop Cloud Solution


    A startup software dealer is bringing cloud-computing technology used by the likes of Yahoo, Facebook and Google to regular enterprise data centers.

    Silicon Valley-based Cloudera plans to make big data-processing capabilities accessible and affordable for all companies, writes Samantha Sai for storage.biz-news.

    Mike Olson, CEO of Cloudera, said Hadoop is a cloud-computing technology used to store and process petabytes of data on systems consisting of hundreds or even thousands of servers.

    "Processing this kind of big data has been too expensive or too technically difficult for all but the most sophisticated IT organizations until now," he said.

    IDC speculates that the global IT expenditure on cloud services will expand approximately threefold in the next 2-3 years, when it is estimated to total USD $42 billion and account for close to 9 per cent of revenues in five important market sectors.

    IDC also predicts that expenditure on cloud computing will pick up pace throughout the next 2-3 years, and will most likely secure 25 per cent of IT spending growth in 2012.

    This is expected to grow the following year and capture at least a 1/3rd of the market.

    David Smith, Gartner’s vice president, thinks that cloud computing still has some way to go and the competition is just starting.

    "Cloudera is not the only company supporting Hadoop. HP is doing a lot of work with Hadoop, as is Yahoo," he said.

    However, there is a major difference between Cloudera and the others like Yahoo.

    Cloudera is set up as a specific one-stop shop for the free Java software structure that presently sanctions the cloud.

    Christophe Bisciglia, Cloudera’s founder and former manager of Google’s Hadoop cluster, said that listening to the community, he consistently hears that Hadoop installation, configuration, and deployment needs to be easier.

    "That’s the primary reason why we built the Cloudera distribution for Hadoop," he said.

    "But furthermore, a distribution fosters community growth by providing a common platform to share code, experience and, most importantly, innovation."

    Cloudera’s latest Web-based configuration tool will facilitate enterprises to produce custom-tailored packages that meet their exact wants.

    In addition, Cloudera is making a preconfigured VMware image liberally offered for assessment and use with the company’s complimentary online teaching.

    "The Cloudera distribution of Hadoop gives you the same tools you already know to provide standardized packaging and automatic configuration," said Bisciglia.

    He said that Cloudera’s sharing of Hadoop has always been founded on a established code of reliability.

    "We enable users to limit upgrades to major project milestones built on code that is tried, trusted, and proven reliable," he said.

    Finally, there will always be a few users who will need assistance in setting up and using the software for some critical adventures and this is where Cloudera will make up the money.

    "These enterprises need a company to stand behind the package, and help them find and fix problems when they come up," said Olson.