"Rockingham held big expectations for Canvas, and I've been extremely pleased with its performance and the reaction of our teachers," said Dennis Frye, Director of Instructional Technology and Media at Rockingham County School District. "Our implementation process has been a huge success. We're looking forward to a long future with Canvas."

 

Instructure launched Canvas to post-secondary institutions in February 2011. Since that time, more than 100 institutions have chosen Canvas as their learning platform, including Brown University, Auburn University and the Maricopa Community College System.

 

"The missing ingredient in K-12 technology initiatives is a modern education platform to virtually extend the classroom for teachers, students, administrators and parents," said Josh Coates, CEO of Instructure.  "Canvas K-12 will make teaching easier, save teachers time and improve learning."

 

For more information on Instructure, Inc., please visit Instructure’s website or read the entire article on PR Newswire.

 

"There's a lot of wonderful information locked up in video, and 40 million security cameras in the U.S. collecting it, but it's data that's not been available," says Steve Russell, cofounder and CEO of Prism, based in San Francisco. "We want to free up that information."

 

Prism's software can count people that come into a business, measure the length of the line at checkout, and produce static or animated visualizations showing how people moved around a store. It is designed so that it cannot identify or track individuals. One national wireless carrier is already using Prism's technology to generate heat maps of where visitors go in their showrooms, to compare the level of interest in different devices—valuable data to them and to the device makers.

 

Prism's software can also be used to turn security footage into a live version of Google's Street View, says Ron Palmeri, Prism's president and other cofounder. "We give the ability to go beyond the facades of businesses and show you the inside and even how busy it is, using very effectively privacy-protected imagery."

 

That imagery can show people blurred into anonymous ghosts, in what Russell calls "Predator vision" (a pixelated image), or have people disappear altogether to be replaced with a "heat map," on which colors signal the density of people. One gym in San Francisco trialing the technology plans to use it to show customers a live view of how busy it is.

 

For more information on Prism Skylabs, Inc., please visit Prism’s website or read the entire article on Technology Review.

 

Evidently, the downs haven’t dampened their ambition. Just two months after officially launching Science, an L.A.-based “technology studio” founded by Jones, Pham, and three of their former colleagues, the team says it has launched a number of companies that are meeting with outside investors. More telling, they say they already have plans to replicate what they are building internationally.

 

Yes. Internationally.

 

It’s incredibly audacious. Then again, Science is modeled strongly after New York-based Betaworks. And Betaworks, which develops its own ideas, acquires companies and invests in nascent startups that it views as strategic to its network of companies, has done just fine in its five-year history. (Among other things, Betaworks, which helped hone both Summize and Tweetdeck, sold both to Twitter in mostly stock deals.)

 

For starters, Science, like Betaworks, is also structured as a company. When investors – including Rustic Canyon Partners, Tomorrow Ventures, and Siemer Ventures – gave Science its first $10 million back in November, they bought stock, not partnerships in the company. There are no management fees. And when Science makes an investment, it comes from an annual budget.

 

Like Betaworks, some of Science’s team focuses a little more on external deals while others are more dedicated to creating companies internally, “though we’re not really public about how we come to our decisions,” Jones told me in an interview yesterday.

 

Still, there are plenty of differences. Betaworks doesn’t incubate outside ideas. Science will. Though it’s baking up ideas inside its Santa Monica offices, the firm will “also look at external teams and think about concepts they’re going after and see if we can help them out,” says Jones.

 

Unlike Betaworks, Science is also willing to work with “later-stage [outside] teams on the challenges they have. So we’ll work with a larger company that’s public traded and looking to innovate on how they reinvigorate their business. We might come to them with what we can do or what ventures we think they should be exploring.”

 

For more information on Science Media, please visit Science's website or read the entire article on peHUB.

 

Details on the company’s product have been scant until now. But we’ve got some exclusive details — and beta codes for TechCrunch readers who will be among the first to try out the product.

 

First off, an updated roster of the company’s investors: Backplane is currently raising a round that includes many of technology’s top-tier VCs, including SV Angel, Google Ventures, Founder’s Fund Angel Investments, Eric Schmidt’s Tomorrow Ventures, Lerer Ventures and Menlo Ventures.

 

And the company says it is aggressively hiring, with a strong emphasis on attracting the Valley’s top engineers. That’s hardly unusual for Silicon Valley startups, but Backplane has significant tech cred to pique plenty of interest: Cofounder Joey Primiani is an ex-Googler and creator of Cortex. Cofounder Alex Moore was former Director of Operations (and the first employee) at Palantir Technologies, one of the most tech-heavy companies in Silicon Valley. And Joe Lonsdale, who cofounded Palantir, is the Chairman of Backplane’s Board of Directors. Rounding out the roster are former employees of Google and Facebook.

 

But what exactly is Backplane?

 

Last night I got early access to the site — or, rather, to LittleMonsters.com, the first portal that is powered by the Backplane platform. From my limited usage, the site seems to combine some of the key features of Pinterest, Tumblr, Canvas, and Ning to produce a community platform that’s both highly visual and potentially highly engaging, too.

 

Little Monsters is going to be a new online community for Lady Gaga and her fans, but Backplane has much bigger ambitions: it aims to help power community sites for a wide range of interest groups, covering everything from celebrities to niche topics.

 

After initially logging into LittleMonsters, I was presented with a grid of tiles in an arrangement reminiscent of Pinterest. Pictures of Lady Gaga made up most of these tiles, though there was a smattering of other content — including a photo of me somewhere in there (the site creates a new post whenever someone joins the site). Clicking on one of these photos would bring it up in a larger size, and, in some cases, links to an accompanying article or video.

 

Perhaps more important than the content itself, though, is the community aspect. Users can click one of those increasingly ubiquitous heart icons to ‘Like’ a post, which makes it appear more prominently in the grid, and they can leave comments beneath each post as well. The platform is also borrowing a feature from Canvas: you can take any photo and modify it using a built-in, easy to use image editor, then share your new creation with the rest of the community.

 

There are plenty of more advanced features, too — the platform aims to become a calendar for your various interest groups, and supports integration with both Google Calendar and Gmail. And as more communities spring up on the Backplane platform, they’ll become more intertwined, with users able to bounce between each portal.

 

For more information on The Backplane, Inc., please visit The Backplane's website, or read the entire article on TechCrunch.

 

I made heavy use of Ness‘s restaurant-finding iOS app during a recent trip through the East Coast, because lots of places are still sadly short on Yelp reviews, and I wanted a quick way to find the best local spots to eat. While I got some good results, I would have been all over a new feature that Ness has just pushed out in an update today: maps.

 

Yeah, another restaurant app with a map. You’re not shocked, I know, but you should take a closer look because of the quality of results that Ness offers. It uses machine learning technology, deriving results from a variety of social signals that you provide it from Facebook, Foursquare and Twitter, as well as your behavior and other data, to figure out which places you’ll like the most. The result is often what you’re hoping for — suggestions for great places that you might not have seen on other restaurant discovery apps, or heard about anywhere else for that matter.

 

Anyway, on to the update, which builds on the socially-focused release I covered back in December. Ness already lets you select your cuisine of choice, then few a list of results based on a percentage relevance score drawn from its data analysis. The mapping feature builds on this by showing each suggested place as a pin that’s color-coded to match its percentage ranking. A flat 50% is yellow, orange is 75%, and a full 100% is pink-red. Click on any pin and you’ll see an overlay with the percentage score, some basic details like whether it’s open or not, and whether any of your friends have reviewed it.

 

“We’re just getting started here — I want to make it even more at-a-glance,” says Ness designer Scott Goodson, who knows a thing or two about this because he was an original member of the iOS team at Apple, and worked on apps including Maps, Stocks, Calculator, Safari, YouTube, and Game Center. ”We chose color-blind safe colors, and a few other subtle but important features…. A lot of people need this type of mapping view to really get a lot out of this type of app. But there’s a lot more to do.”

 

Some of future additions, he says, could include a better way to more easily view pins for restaurants that are close together on the map, as well as include the specific ranking score on the pin for each location within the map view. Also, the company’s larger plan to is to offer its technology for other verticals besides restaurants, and I expect to see the map interface travel along with any such expansions.

 

For more information on Ness Computing Inc., please visit Ness’ website or read the entire article on TechCrunch.

 

Additionally, Sharecare also acquired The Little Blue Book (TLBB) from Galen Partners and a group of other investors in exchange for Sharecare common stock. TLBB has been the leading physician practice reference for over 23 years with over 400,000 physicians and 180,000 physician practices in TLBB’s database. People will soon be able to access TLBB’s physician practice information on Sharecare in order to locate physicians, practices, and hospitals in their area, as well as make informed decisions about which caregiver can best address their specific health issues and needs. Sharecare plans to quickly migrate TLBB’s physicians to its digital platform, providing each physician access to Sharecare’s suite of provider-focused products to enhance their practices, such as digital business cards, lead generation and search optimization tools and access to SharecarePro, Sharecare’s upcoming expert membership product.

 

The company’s Board of Directors also announced that the Chairman and Chief Architect of Sharecare, Jeff Arnold, will formally expand his role as CEO to steward the continued growth and success of the company. As part of the transaction, David Jahns, Managing Partner of Galen Partners, will join Sharecare’s Board of Directors.

 

For more information on Sharecare, Inc., please visit Sharecare’s website or read the entire article on peHUB.

 

Amplify will provide portfolio companies with four months of intense collaboration and mentorship with each startup receiving up to $50,000 in seed capital, office space, weekly mentor meetings with entrepreneurs and a 3-year hiatus on city taxes.

 

Here are the five startups chosen (out of over 100 applications):

 

GetBonkers is a game publisher and aggregator building a large suite of fun and engaging mobile learning apps for children.

 

Look IO overlays live chat support with visual feedback into mobile apps that allows customer service agents to view and support mobile users in real-time.

 

TidePool is a gamified psychometrics platform to assess and track the characteristics of job seekers.

 

Invested.in allows users to create and customize interactive fundraising campaigns. Invested.in also offers licensing and partnership deals to larger entities for their own customized “crowdfunding” platforms.

 

StackSocial is a white-label eCommerce platform enabling technology-focused publishers to generate additional revenues by offering exclusive flash sales on software, apps, video tutorials, and other digital tools.

 

Amplify’s backers include Mark Burnett (Apprentice, Survivor), Brian Grazer, Jarl Mohn, Accel Partners, BV Capital, Greycroft Partners, Rustic Canyon, Tomorrow Ventures (Eric Schmidt), Tim Draper, Gordon Crawford, Vivi Nevo, Paige Craig, Diego Berdakin and Tom McInerney.

 

For more information on Amplify.LA, please Amplify’s website or read the entire article on TechCrunch.

 

Michelle Crames: SkuLoop is a solution that lets retailers create and measure their own, branded shopping frenzies. It takes mobile, email, and retail into a single engine, which increases the value of new and existing customers.

 

Michelle Crames: It's a platform where retailers can do their own, private label versions of something like Gilt Groupe, Groupon, or a curated event. Those are all different models which combine the excitement and passion of consumers with new formats, in ways that get them excited to buy and to tell their friends. We're experiencing tremendous success with this, and even recently did a control test on one of our clients' websites, where we saw a 3X increase in conversions. Another client was able to do a week's worth of revenue in just an hour. We're seeing that we are able to create tremendous excitement and amplify that using social.

 

Michelle Crames: We're focused exclusively on retailers and brands, although we prefer multi-channel retailers. There is a lot of commerce that still happens in stores, with more than 90 percent of sales in physical retailers. We like working with those retailers who are excited and want to try new ways to target their customers.

 

Michelle Crames: We are focused on driving revenue, and driving long term value with both new and existing customers. We're different than social agencies, because our focus is on real transactions. We're linking online and offline. We are different than e-commerce platforms, because we are truly multi-channel, amplifying the value of what retailers are doing from a marketing perspective, with new and exciting formats, and the ability to personalize and customize offers.

 

Michelle Crames: We started as Giiv.com, and were primarily focused on mobile gifting. Around last summer, we realized that by doing these flash events, we were driving much more value for us. We started to see the growth of some of the new models and thought, we're serving these retail clients, what do we think about this bigger market opportunity and possibility of rapid growth? Companies like Gilt literally went form zero to 500M in revenues in less than three years. Zulily, in the children's space, just launched last year and now has over $100M in revenues this year. We thought it was a logical extension. Although mobile is exciting and is still part of our platform, we saw a broader opportunity to help retailers with these new ways of marketing, which are growing so quickly. We thought we'd provide a bigger impact for our retailers, and help them in a more dramatic way.

 

Michelle Crames: Retail is about letting retailers take control. Instead of participating in Groupon or LivingSocial, they can utilize those exciting new techniques to get to customers. It's just not sustainable for a retailer to sell $50 worth of product for $25, especially when they're only getting $12.50 back. Instead, we let retailers control what they are offering customers, and ultimately own the customer data around that, too. Retailers can control and own the experience, without having to build up staff. They can create their own events, whether those are flash events or curated offerings, in just minutes.

 

Michell Crames: We have an awesome investor, and are really lucky. It was a group effort to shift into this tremendous growth opportunity. Because we had an amazing group of investors backing us, and we also have a world class technology and social team, we felt like that we could be successful in this much larger business, and be much more impactful for our clients–by helping them to drive not just 2 or 4 percent increases in sales, but potentially 10, or 20 percent additional through these new categories.

 

For more information on SkuLoop, please visit SkuLoop’s website or read the entire article on socaltech.com.

 

Now, it seems that some of these investors want to more than double down on DailyWorth, as the startup announced that it has closed a $2 million series A round led by Joanne Wilson and StockTwits Co-founder and CEO Howard Lindzon‘s Social Leverage, along with contributions from former investors as well. The new round of funding brings DailyWorth’s total to just over $3 million.

 

BetaBeat initially broke the story yesterday, and last month blogger and angel investor Joanne Wilson told O’Reilly’s Radar what excited her about DailyWorth, saying that the startup has already “created tremendous traction and sells advertising at lightning speed” — to the point, apparently, that the startup was running low on inventory.

 

Investors and advertisers find the startup appealing because of the intelligent, no-nonsense way it is creating a community around financial literacy and money management — for women. It’s a targeted play by DailyWorth Founder and CEO Amanda Steinberg, already a six-time entrepreneur, who has set out to create a resource for women (already the money managers) that breaks down essential financial concepts and makes them easy to consume (on-the-go) for busy moms and female professionals.

 

For more information on DailyWorth, Inc., please visit DailyWorth’s website or read the entire article on TechCrunch.

 

Getting a CX account takes little more than a trip to CX.com and signing up with an email address and password. New users start out with a generous 10GB of space, although CX states that this amount is = a limited-time offer. Still, it's absolutely worth snagging if you're in the market for a syncing service, as it doubles SugarSync's 5GB, which is itself more than double the 2GB offered by both Dropbox and Syncplicity.

 

CX's online dashboard, which is where most users start their experience, is extremely easy to understand and navigate. The elegant online dashboard shows a list of recent activity, all time-stamped. Tabs for files, groups (for collaborating), favorites, and your profile are as straightforward as they seem. If you're new to file-syncing, the website is by far the simplest place to get started syncing and backing up your files.

 

Perhaps the feature that most sets CX apart from its competitors is commenting. If you use a cloud-based syncing service for collaboration, commenting on a file to discuss it, rather than allowing multiple people to alter the file, may be a considerable part of your workflow. Comments only appear in the online version of CX, further highlighting the utility of the website version. Comments are even more effective when users upload their profile pictures, as each comment appears alongside the profile photo and username of the person who wrote it.

 

For more information on CX, Inc., please visit CX’s website or read the entire review on PCMag.com.