RedEye universal remote launches 'mini' app on iTunes for users who want something simpler

ThinkFlood Releases Dedicated App for RedEye mini

RedEye mini users may now choose from original activity-based RedEye app or new device-based app

Waltham, MA – February 22, 2011 – ThinkFlood (http://thinkflood.com), maker of award-winning RedEye control products for the home, today announced a new application developed as an option specifically for RedEye mini users.

The RedEye mini application is a simpler version of the company's popular activity-based remote control. RedEye mini users can choose to download the original RedEye application (now in version 2.0.1) or the new RedEye mini app, depending on their needs. The RedEye mini app is small enough to download over a mobile network, and enhances RedEye mini's portability.

ThinkFlood representatives say the new RedEye mini application suits casual users who are unfamiliar with activity-based control or those who prefer a more basic device-based universal remote.

"The RedEye mini application is more for people who have simple 2 or 3 component setups," said Justin Nguyen, lead developer for ThinkFlood. "Those who want something to control a more complex home theater may be more comfortable with the original RedEye application."

The RedEye mini application still includes many of the robust features offered in the full RedEye application including a full-color channel guide (US and Canada, with more countries to follow soon) and a database of more than 65,000 infrared control codes.

For ThinkFlood's management team, this new application was about meeting customer demand.

"Although we sell hardware, we have always felt that software is a vital part of our business," said Matt Eagar, president and co-founder of ThinkFlood. "We update our applications regularly – in fact, this is the seventeenth software release we have rolled out over the last year and a half – and the dedicated mini app is just another example of how we strive to respond quickly to customer feedback."

The RedEye mini app is available from iTunes: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/redeye-mini/id418230793?mt=8.

About ThinkFlood

ThinkFlood (http://thinkflood.com/) designs and develops control hardware and software. Its award-winning RedEye line of control products for mobile phones, MP3 players and tablets offers features and functionality previously available only in remotes priced several times as much. ThinkFlood is a privately held company headquartered in Waltham, Massachusetts.

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Google Donates $2.7 Million To Fund Innovation in Journalism

Google announced Wednesday it has awarded $2.7 million to the International Press Institute to foster innovation in journalism.

The Institute, based in Vienna, will use the grant for its IPI News Innovation Contest, which will fund both non-profit and for-profit projects related to the development of digital news platforms, new business models for journalism and training in digital reporting throughout Africa, Europe and the Middle East.

The $2.7 million makes up a significant chunk of the $5 million Google promised to donate to non-profit organizations working to further development in digital journalism in October 2010.

At the time, Google awarded $2 million to the Knight Foundation in the U.S. and pledged to spend the remaining $3 million in international news efforts. Like the International Press Institute, the Knight Foundation funds open-source projects related to innovation in digital and mobile reporting, new economic models for news and community development.

Applications for the IPI News Innovation Content are due June 1, 2011.

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, ProfessorVasilich

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BookRenter Raises $40 Million To Take On Chegg In Textbook Rentals

College textbook rental startup BookRenter has raised $40 million in funding from Adams Capital Management, Comerica Bank, Focus Ventures, Lighthouse Capital Partners, Norwest Venture Partners, and Storm Ventures. This brings BookRenter’s total funding to $60 million.

Similar to Chegg, Bookrenter wants to be the Netflix of textbook rentals. By renting textbooks, Students are able to save money by loaning textbooks for a fixed duration, usually a semester, and end up spending only the fraction of the cost of outright purchases. The system is simple: a student searches for a book (BookRenter now has 5.5 million titles) on the website using a title or ISBN, and places an order by selecting a rental period and delivery option. The book(s) are delivered complete with return UPS labels for easy shipping. And through BookRenter’s RapidReturns service, students can return their rented textbooks at participating college stores, who benefit from increased buyback activity and merchandise transactions.

BookRenter has also made a business of partnering with a number of colleges to set up a virtual rental store on their sites. Partners have access to the same selection of textbooks available on BookRenter’s site (which are electronically sourced from the largest textbook suppliers.)

Since last March, Bookrenter is the official book rental platform for 560 college bookstores in the U.S. serving 6 million students, or 31 percent of the college population (and eight of the ten largest independent bookstores). There are between 6,000 and 7,000 college bookstores nationwide.

For BookRenter, these university partnerships have been a wise move. Not only has the company created an automatic platform for the distribution of content to universities, but it saves students money and has also given universities a way to lure students back into book stores. According to NACS’ OnCampus Research from January 2011, compared to last year, customers of stores that offer BookRenter rentals are 21% more likely to rent from their college store and 10% more likely to shop at the bookstore for items other than textbooks.

And today, the company is announcing a strategic partnership with The National Association of College Stores (NACS) designed to help college stores become the source of affordable textbooks. NACS, through its subsidiary NACSCORP, will begin offering three new BookRenter services to its 3,100 member stores. These services include RapidReturns, Inventory Purchase and Fulfillment, and Warehousing.

BookRenter’s strategy is paying off in a big way. The company is growing like a weed in terms of both revenue and usage, and is quietly catching up to competitor Chegg. BookRenter’s 2010 revenue is expected to be in the range of $20 to $50 million in 2010. Of course, this is still behind competitor Chegg, which is projected revenues in the range of $130 million in 2010.

But the new funding should help BookRenter add more resources and products in the near future. The company is expected to expand by 600 percent this year alone. The new round of funding will used for product innovation, says CEO Mehdi Maghsoodnia. While he didn’t go into details, in the next 18 months, BookRenter will start executing a new digital strategy, which will be an entirely new way for students to consume content and professors to design courses.

The textbook rental space is no doubt a competitive arena and Chegg is a formidable opponent. Armed with $75 million in new venture funding, the textbook rentals giant is expected to pursue an IPO this year, just hired Netflix’s former COO, and has been making quite a few acquisitions.

That being said, textbook rentals are a huge space and just because BookRenter is the underdog, doesn’t mean it can’t continue to give Chegg a run for its money, and possibly overtake the giant in the next year.

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Twitter Starts Hiring Sales People In London – But Stays Coy About A Euro HQ

There’s been a lot of speculation in recent months about where Twitter would put down a European base in its efforts to expand its operation. Certainly I’ve been bugging them in the last few weeks about whether they would come to London. But now we have the answer: London it is – at least for five people whose jobs will be largely about sales and commercial partnerships.

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Let Your Friends DJ a Party Via SMS, Twitter or E-mail

Have a ton of musically inclined friends (read: music snobs) who are always trying to wrest away control of the stereo at parties? Well, now you can let everyone pick the jams with a hack called DJTxt.

“Good music is crucial to a successful party,” says Dan Maynes Aminzade, who created this hack during Music Hack Day this month in New York City. “Every time I hosted a party, I’d spend a long time trying to assemble the perfect party playlist. I thought it would be fun to provide a simple way to crowdsource the playlist creation process and let my party guests select the music.”

You can check out the service pretty easily via a free demo (also see the screencast above to see it in action). Simply visit the website, add the bookmarklet to your bookmarks, surf over to Grooveshark, and click on the aforementioned bookmark. From there, you can either control the playlist via SMS (by texting !demo Your Name to 313-346-5483 and then texting song requests), Twitter (by tweeting @djtxtme Song Request #demo) or e-mail (!demo Your Name to dj@djtxt.me).

You can then add songs to the playlist and skip those you dislike by texting “skip” (texting “oops” will cancel a request).

The general demo is a public session, which means anyone can add music to the playlist if they have the number, but you can also host private sessions with your friends. Free private sessions lack SMS control, so if you want to use text messages as well as Twitter or e-mail to request tunes, you’ll have to shell out $2 per hour for premium service.

Aminzade used a slew of services and APIs to create this hack, including Twilio, TinySong, Grooveshark, Last.fm, Twitter, MusiXmatch and The Echo Nest, and it actually runs pretty smoothly. Granted, it is a hack built in one weekend, but DJTxt is definitely worth trying at your next party.

Image Courtesy of Flickr, Robert Agthe

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Phononic Devices Raises $10 Million To Turn Heat Waste Into Energy

A Raleigh, North Carolina-based maker of thermoelectric coolers and generators, Phononic Devices, closed a $10 million series B investment from Venrock and Oak Investment Partners, the companies revealed today.

Often explained as “solid-state heat pumps,” thermoelectric technology (a.k.a. thermoelectrics) can capture wasted heat, and convert it into power. They can also displace heat and maintain a cool temperature in everything from laptops to refrigerators and lasers. The technology provides an environmental benefit versus compression-based refrigeration and other power generating technologies, because thermoelectric modules don’t use toxic coolants or burn fossil fuels, and generate no noise. They have no moving parts.

Thermoelectric technology has also been around for decades.

President and chief executive officer of Phononic Devices, Anthony Atti, said his company’s particular brand of thermoelectrics are distinct from incumbent varieties because:

“[Existing thermoelectric modules] have used bismuth telluride and bismuth selenide. Our proprietary materials are from a different class of elements [on the periodic table]. They are abundant domestically, low-cost and can be manufactured and integrated with existing operations across semi-conductor industries. Our thermoelectrics are also much more efficient than others.”

Phononic Devices previously attained a $3 million grant from the Advanced Research Projects Agency Energy program (ARPA-E) to improve the efficiency of thermoelectrics in cooling and converting waste heat to power.

According to an ARPA-E press statement on the company:

“In today’s energy landscape [Americans] generate most electricity by making heat, whether it’s through burning coal or splitting atoms. That heat makes steam which turns a turbine and makes electricity…Most of the heat is wasted, a staggering 50-60% according to Department of Energy estimates.

Phononic Devices [devices are projected to] dramatically improve thermoelectric efficiency from less than 10 percent today to more than 30 percent, resulting in a dollar-per-watt energy savings of 75 percent for power generation and 60 percent for cooling, respectively.”

Dr. Atti said his startup aims to bring its thermoelectric modules (image, right: they’re about the size of a matchbox) to the market of electronics cooling, first — which encompasses consumer electronics, military equipment, and medical and laser instruments — and to refrigeration for residential use. Longer term, they should be applicable in air conditioners, he said.

A partner and clean tech investor with Venrock, Matt Trevithick said the company’s highly efficient thermoelectrics — spun out of the University of Oklahoma’s tech transfer program — had disruptive potential, reminiscent of LED lighting:

“Cooling compressors have been refined for a century. They work well enough, despite some known problems, and are cheap enough to be widely deployed. We think Phononic Devices finally has a solid state technology that has the performance metrics necessary to compete directly against compressors.

This is an outlier opportunity. Other technology exists, but does not have the efficiency to compete against vapor compression technology. The story I expect will unfold will be the one that’s now unfolding with solid state lighting, which is just now becoming good enough, performance-wise, and is priced appropriately enough to compete against incandescent lights.”

Dr. Atti said his company plans to grow from about ten full-time employees today to about seventy in three or four years. He would not name specific target customers, but said Phononic Devices will use its new-found capital to develop commercial manufacturing capabilities in the U.S. and build its market. The company is pre-revenue.

Corporations that use cooling technology in their high-tech products— like Siemens, GE, LG, Samsung, HP, JDS Uniphase or Honeywell — could all grace Phononics’ list of prospective customers. For a piece of that robust market, the company faces competition from peers in the field of thermoelectrics like Nextreme and MicroPelt, which have focused on harvesting heat in, and powering or cooling wearable, or low power consuming wireless devices.

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