DuckDuckGo: A Look at the Truly Private Search Engine

From Fast Company

When Gabriel Weinberg launched a search engine in 2008, plenty of people thought he was insane. How could DuckDuckGo, a tiny, Philadelphia-based startup, go up against Google? One way, he wagered, was by respecting user privacy. Six years later, we’re living in the post-Snowden era, and the idea doesn’t seem so crazy.

In fact, DuckDuckGo is exploding.

Looking at a chart of DuckDuckGo’s daily search queries, the milestones are obvious. A $3 million investment from Union Square Ventures in 2011. Just prior to that, a San Francisco billboard campaign. Inclusion in Time‘s 50 Best Websites of 2011. Each of these things moved the traffic needle for DuckDuckGo, but none of them came close to sparking anything like the massive spike in queries the company saw last July. That’s when Edward Snowden first revealed the NSA’s extensive digital surveillance program to the world. The little blue line on the chart hasn’t stopped climbing north since.

Dreamit Health Announces Inaugural Class

You may think that today is all about accelerators and healthcare, well we didn’t intend it to be that way but there’s major startup news on the accelerator and healthcare front.

DreamIt Ventures, the multi-city startup accelerator brand, announced late last year that they would be teaming up with Independence Blue Shield and Penn Medicine to hold their first medical focused startup cohort. They announced that cohort on Wednesday.

For the first DreamIt Health accelerator they put out an application call for startups seeking to develop tools for healthcare providers to speed up diagnoses and improve outcomes.

“At IBC, we believe that innovation is the key to bringing fresh ideas into health care, and are working to transform the Philadelphia region into a national magnet for health care innovation, investment, and employment,” said IBC CEO Daniel Hilferty in a company statement.

The first cohort includes big data startups, mobile startups, devices, and even fitness startups aimed at curbing childhood obesity. Each team will receive what MedCityNews called a “stipend” of $50,000 and of course access to the DreamIt, IBC and Penn Medicine entrepreneur and mentor network. The program will end with an investor demo day showing the progress these early stage teams made in the program.

The 10 companies selected are:

AirCare: A mobile startup to help hospitals prevent readmissions and improve patient outcomes using telenursing and patient-specific analytics.

Biomeme: A mobile molecular diagnostics device to help point-of-care clinicians and epidemiologists diagnose and track infectious diseases in realtime with smartphones.

Fitly: The company wants tohelp health plans deal with the childhood obesity epidemic by engaging and motivating at-risk families with gaming and convenient delivery of healthcare.

Grand Round Table: Its application helps clinicians rapidly diagnose complex cases by matching the patient’s electronic record against millions of other cases drawn from around the world.

Medlio: The mobile app aims to help physicians get paid faster and get rid of paper-based registering forms with a virtual health insurance ID card to sync the right information among patients, providers and payers at the point-of-care.

OnShift: Helping hospitals improve patient outcomes through instant communications between clinicians caring for the same patient is the goal of this healthcare communications system. It also wants to remove obstacles to effective care delivery and care transitions.

Osmosis: The learning management system helps medical institutions develop clinicians who better retain and apply knowledge through a Web and mobile platform that uses cutting-edge cognitive techniques.

MemberRx: A solution intended to improve the way pharmaceutical costs are controlled by enabling selection of the best generic or on-formulary branded drug for a specific patient through an electronic medical record system.

SpeSo Health: The online analytics platform identifies and accesses medical expertise in rare and complex diseases.

Stat: The Web and mobile app helps providers and payers make patient transport more efficient and lower costs by matching and dispatching idle transportation resources.

The application deadline for Memphis’ highly successful ZeroTo510 medical device accelerator is tomorrow.

Philly Startup: Perceptual Network Completes An A-List $1M First Round For People Connecting

Perceptual Networks, a startup proud to from Philadelphia Pennsylvania announced today the completion of their first round of funding. The startup was founded by Jim Young founder of Hot or Not and I/O Ventures and Cheyenne Ehrlich who’s credits include taking two startups from 0 to 30 million plus users.

This round of funding for Perceptual Networks has one of the most impressive lists of backers to come from any startup based outside of Silicon Valley or New York. Venture firms First Round Capital and Bullpen Capital participated in the round. The list of angels is like a roll call of some of the top A-List players in the startup world:

Max Levchin (founder of PayPal and Slide and Chairman of Yelp),
Steve Chen (founder of YouTube and AVOS),
Michael Birch (founder of Bebo and Monkey Inferno)
Richard Yoo (founder of Rackspace and ServerBeach)
Shawn Colo (founder of Demand Media)
Joshua Schachter (founder of Tasty Labs and Delicious)
Alexis Ohanian (founder of Reddit)
James Hong (founder of HotOrNot)
Philip Kaplan (founder of Fandalism, Blippy, AdBrite, TinyLetter and many, many more)
Naval Ravikant (founder of Epinions and AngelList)
Tikhon Bernstam (founder of Scribd and Parse)
Garry Tan (founder of Posterous and Partner at Y-Combinator)
Gabriel Weinberg (founder of DuckDuckGo and NamesDatabase)
Jameson Hsu (founder of Mochi Media)
Bob Ippilito (founder of Mochi Media)
Ken Keller (founder of IGN.com and Cadence)
Paul Bragiel (partner at I/O Ventures)
Tom McInerney (former COO at Klout)
Bill Lee (founder of Remarq and Social Concepts and investor in Tesla)
Nils Johnson (founder of Beautylish)

One of the best parts about this news as that not one of the investors required the startup to move away from Philadelphia. After speaking with Ehrlich we’re not sure that they would have taken money from an investor that asked them to relocate. In regards to Philadelphia Ehrlich told nibletz.com:

“Jim’s wife is from here, and he had moved here about three years ago. That’s why it was on the list initially. But there are a lot of great things to be said about Philly:

Great engineering schools
Lower cost of living (relative to SF or NYC) and better quality of life
A great food and arts scene
As an employers, we see great talent here and limited competition for that talent, which results in a more stable workforce

Plus, the people are nice, friendly and open here. It really is a lovely place.”

Perceptual Networks takes people discovery to a new level by adding in the connection piece. Perceptual Networks is developing a suite of products that make it easy for people to find the people they best connect with, whether they are looking for the right co-workers or employees, the right relationship, the right friends and activity partners or the right community to live in.

“Over the last 7-8 years, Jim and I have been having a long series of conversations about how random the process is by which people meet and get to know each other. Finally, it just became obvious that we should work on this problem that was a central part of our thinking and dialogue for so many years.” Ehrlich told nibletz.com

“This is something that Jim and I have been talking about since the day we met,” said Cheyenne Ehrlich, founder and CEO of Perceptual Networks. “Your community, friends, co-workers and life partner, if you have one, collectively have such a huge impact on the quality of your life. We want to make the process of finding and developing that community of people as easy as possible, for everyone.”

While most discovery apps are about discovering someone right now, wherever you are, the tools provided by Perceptual Networks are looking for a more long term effect.

Investors in Perceptual Networks are confident they have a win. Young’s HotOrNot was founded in 2000 and sold for $20 million in 2008. HotOrNot is even featured in the movie about Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook in a scene where Zuckerberg and his roomates are combing through HotOrNot and adapt it to Harvard.

Linkage:

For more on Perceptual Networks visit their website here

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Drexel Students Launch Philly Startup: Tagitbest

Nicholas Pirollo, a self proclaimed serial entrepreneur and an undergraduate student at Drexel University and his team have launched a new and exciting SEO product. Sure you’re saying what’s new and exciting about an SEO product? Well first off Tagitbest is about Twitter and Instagram, moving SEO to two of the hottest spaces on the planet right now.

Rather than search engine optimization Tagitbest is a “hashtag optimizing engine”. Tagitbest is actually solving a huge problem for people. Take the DNC for instance. We’re on the ground in Charlotte NC operating out of Startup Hub “Packard Place” at the PPL blogger/online journalist lounge. Now in a room full of 500 journalists no one could tell us the “official” hashtag for the DNC on Monday morning. Some are using #DNC2012, some are using #DNC12, Some are just using #DNC and then some are using #obama and #4moreyears.

If you head upstairs to the official Politico convention studios and hub they use their normal tag #Politico and then a different tag for each event that they’re hosting which has been a minimum of 4 events per day. All of these various tags can get a bit confusing, and that’s just for this one event.

Tagitbest will optimize your content, whether it be a picture, tweet or other piece of media and tell you what tag will be best to get your content in front of the most people.

Tagitbest comes in three flavors, web, iOS and Android and you can find their app in both the Google Play Store and the iTunes app store.

The interface is easy to use and as long as you know what a hash tag is you’re in business. Now if you’re a developer they do offer an API as well so that developers can embrace their new backend technology.

Linkage:

Check out Tagitbest here

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DreamIt Ventures Expands South To Austin Texas

DreamIt Ventures, the Philadelphia based accelerator, that was recently ranked one of the top the incubators in the country by Forbes magazine, has announced that they’re expanding into Austin Texas.

DreamIt is Philadelphia based, which is where they set up their initial accelerator program. They then expanded to New York City. Last year they also opened up shop in Israel with a program that currently feeds into New York but could feed into their Philadelphia program next year.

Kerry Rupp, a Philadelphia transplant from Austin Texas was overseeing the DreamIt program in Philadelphia. They recently announced the appointment of Karen Griffith Gryga as national director based in Philadelphian which frees Rupp up to return to Austin and launch their Austin program.

Austin is a great place to expand for DreamIt. There is a lot of innovation happening in Austin and the other DreamIt locations will be able to leverage their Austin based program to show off other DreamIt startup graduates at South By Southwest Interactive next year.

“We’ll be able to use it to showcase all of the other DreamIt companies that are out fundraising” when SXSW is held, Rupp said to the Austin Business Journal

As of April 2012 65 companies have successfully gone through the DreamIt program. DreamIt also has a program targeted towards minorities called DreamIt Access, that first class has 15 startup participants.

DreamIt Ventures New York program finishes with a Demo Day on August 8th. Philadelphia’s program kicks off the weekend of September 6th and 7th. The Philadelphia class will hold Demo Day December 5th. Austin’s program will start on December 14th which times the ending right up against SXSWi 2013.

Linkage:

Check out DreamIt Ventures here

Source: Austin Business Journal

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Philly Startup: Real Food Works Launches, Finds Out They’re Finalists In IBX Game Changer Challenge

Real Food Works, a startup launched in Philadelphia by entrepreneurs from both Philly and New York, has applied the subscription based model to healthy, plant based, cooked dishes. The startup is up and running and beta testing in the Philadelphia area. If all goes well they will expand to New York City.

The dishes are made by local restaurants, chefs and catering companies and delivered ready to eat and fresh.

Real Food Works is kicking off with a pilot program which is up and running now. For $75 per week you get five entrees delivered to your door. Each member can pick their own menu from the selections provided.

Last Tuesday’s menu included: Lemony Quinoa, salad with grilled tofu over a bed of spinach;Tempeh-Walnut Sliders with Roasted Beet Slices, Cashew Cream Cheese & Arugula, Steamed Shiitake and Tofu Dumplings with Bok Choy & Lemongrass Sauce, Vegetarian Enchiladas with Spinach Salad & Tahini Dressing, Black Bean Burger, Moroccan Spiced Root Vegetables, & Green Beans with Maple Syrup. Even for a meat lover those sound wonderful.

The startup was founded by Lucinda DunCalfe who had a successful exit with ClickEquations a marketing and advertising company that developed a powerful pay per click software which helps agencies manage paid search campaigns more effectively and efficiently. That company was sold to Channel Intelligence in June 2011.

Real Food Works found out Monday that they are one of 15 finalists in the IBX Game Changer Challenge. The challenge is a health and wellness focused startup challenge for a grand prize for up to three startups with $50,000 in funding, mentoring support and access to a network of health care decision makers.

The team from Real Food Works will present next Tuesday to a panel of judges in a 10 minute presentation with 5 minutes of Q&A and the winners will be announced on July 30th.

Linkage:

Check out Real Food Works and their delicious food here

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Philly Startup: Interview With The Student Founder Of Neo-Cover

Every once in a while we come across some great tangible goods startups, either ideas that are just full of awesomeness and win or ideas that are being grown in the US. Neo-Cover is one of those ideas. Add that to the fact that it’s founded by a college student and designer in Philadelphia and it makes it an even better story.

So what’s a neo-cover? Well the idea is so damn basic you’ll be asking yourself why didn’t I think of that? Well the reason you didn’t think of that or I didn’t think of that is because 22 year old Jake Frey did. Neo-Cover is a magnetic light switch wall plate. Don’t go and try and steal it this 22 year old has his ducks in a row and has the patent. Once he bulks up his sales Kevin O’Leary and the sharks on Shark Tank would gobble this idea up.

A magnetic light switch plate, what would I use that for? Well for starters you could hang your keys, a mini flashlight, a dog leash, a money clip anything that you often forget can go right up on the light switch. Presumably you turn your lights on every now and then, and now it’s easy to find. The magnet is so powerful it can hold a decent sized hammer, or a screw driver. I told you this idea is both basic and genius.

So let’s meet the 22 year old behind neo-cover…

Interview after the break
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