A Tech Company Once Valued At $1 Billion Is About To Sell For $15 Million

Ailing e-commerce site Fab is reportedly in talks to be acquired by PCH International for $15 million.

TechCrunch reports that Fab's contractual agreements are in the early stages with PCH, an Irish company that sells product development supply chain management services.

The $15 million price tag is a low selling price for Fab, which was previously valued at over a billion dollars in July 2013 when it raised $150 million in funding. Fab declined to comment on this story.

Speaking on stage at TechCrunch Disrupt in October, Fab founder Jason Goldberg said that "e-commerce is a b**ch," before explaining that Fab was burning through $14 million every month.

Fab has tried to turn itself around in recent years. It launched a new business, Hem, which lets people design and order furniture online. It also underwent several rounds of layoffs, reducing the number of staff from 750 to 185 employees.

Goldberg seemed to suggest last month that Fab was not up for sale, instead hinting at the company's future. "We have years and years of cash left," he said, "I didn't start it to sell it, I started it to build a great e-commerce business."

Google rolls out 'smart' spoon

MOUNTAIN VIEW: Google is throwing its money, brain power and technology at the humble spoon. 

But these spoons (don't call them spoogles) are a bit more than your basic utensil: Using hundreds of algorithms, they allow people with essential tremors and Parkinson's disease to eat without spilling. 

The technology senses how a hand is shaking and makes instant adjustments to stay balanced. In clinical trials, the Liftware spoons reduced shaking of the spoon bowl by an average of 76 percent. 

"We want to help people in their daily lives today and hopefully increase understanding of disease in the long run," Google spokesperson Katelin Jabbari said. 

Other adaptive devices have been developed to help people with tremors — rocker knives, weighted utensils, pen grips. But until now, experts say, technology has not been used in this way. 

"It's totally novel," said UC San Francisco Medical Center neurologist Dr Jill Ostrem, who specializes in movement disorders like Parkinson's disease and essential tremors. 

She helped advise the inventors and says the device, which has a fork attachment, has been a remarkable asset for some of her patients. 

"I have some patients who couldn't eat independently, they had to be fed, and now they can eat on their own," she said. "It doesn't cure the disease — they still have tremor — but it's a very positive change." 

Google got into the no-shake utensil business in September, acquiring a small, National of Institutes of Health-funded startup called Lift Labs for an undisclosed sum. 

More than 10 million people worldwide, including Google co-founder Sergey Brin's mother, have essential tremors or Parkinson's disease. Brin has said he also has a mutation associated with higher rates of Parkinson's and has donated more than $50 million to research for a cure. But the Lift Labs acquisition was not related, Jabbari said. 

Lift Lab founder Anupam Pathak said moving from a small, four-person startup in San Francisco to the vast Google campus in Mountain View has freed him up to be more creative as he explores how to apply the technology even more broadly. 

His team works at the search giant's division called Google(x) Life Sciences, which is also developing a smart contact lens that measures glucose levels in tears for diabetics and is researching how nanoparticles in blood might help detect diseases. 

Joining Google has been motivating, said Pathak, but his focus remains on people who are now able to eat independently with his device. 

"If you build something with your hands and it has that sort of an impact, it's the greatest feeling ever," he said. "As an engineer who likes to build things, that's the most validating thing that can happen." 

Pathak said they also hope to add sensors to the spoons to help medical researchers and providers better understand, measure and alleviate tremors. 

Shirin Vala, 65, of Oakland, has had an essential tremor for about a decade. She was at her monthly Essential Tremor group at a San Ramon medical clinic earlier this year when researchers developing the device introduced the idea and asked if anyone was interested in helping them. 

As it was refined, she tried it out and gave them feedback. And when they hit the market at $295 apiece, she bought one. 

Without the spoon, Vala said eating was really a challenge because her hands trembled so hard food fell off the utensils before she could eat it. 

"I was shaking and I had a hard time to keep the food on a spoon, especially soup or something like an olive or tomatoes or something. It is very embarrassing. It's very frustrating," she said. 

The spoon definitely improved her situation. "I was surprised that I held the food in there so much better. It makes eating much easier, especially if I'm out at a restaurant," she said.


Source:The Times of India

Dropbox’s Mobile Apps Are Now Integrated With Microsoft Office

Earlier this month, Dropbox and Microsoft announced a partnership that would see Dropbox offer better support for Microsoft’s Office Suite, including the ability to edit Office docs from the Dropbox mobile app among other things. Today, those integrations have gone live for users of both the Android phone and iOS Dropbox applications.

Explains Dropbox in a blog post announcing the news, users can now edit their Office files when they’re “on the go,” editing them directly from the Dropbox app and accessing the files directly from the Office apps. To use the new feature, you’ll first need update your app to the latest version, then open any Office document, spreadsheet or presentation that’s stored in your Dropbox.

From here, a new “Edit” icon (see above picture) will be available that will allow you to switch over to the new mobile Office apps to make changes to the file. When you’re finished working, those changes will be saved back to Dropbox automatically.

The Dropbox/Microsoft partnership is an extensive deal aimed at increasing collaboration between the two firms, and may have surprised some given that the two companies offer competing products. Microsoft has a Dropbox-like service called OneDrive, but Dropbox’s larger service reaches hundreds of millions of users, including 80,000 businesses.

The agreement announced at the beginning of November included four parts, as reported: the ability to quickly edit docs from Dropbox on mobile, accessing Dropbox docs from Office apps, sharing Dropbox links of Office apps, and the creation of first-party Dropbox apps for Microsoft’s mobile offerings.

Source:Techcrunch

Grand Theft Auto: Madrid Teased in Live Action Fan-Made Trailer

Grand Theft Auto: Madrid, huh? Sounds exotic! If only it were as real as the people in this amazing and dead accurate fan parody created in live-action.

Zapruder Pictures, based in Madrid, Spain, have used their city as the backdrop for their recreation of the Grand Theft Auto V announcement trailer. Frame for frame, this is dead on accurate with very little help from CG or other tricks.

I mean, yeah, they made a CG jet, but where are they going to find a real one? And who’s gonna fly it kid, you?

Why just a fan made project? Watching this trailer makes the obvious about the real series so much more noticeable: Grand Theft Auto needs to move beyond the borders of North America. There are so many other fascinating cities in the world which could provide gorgeous architecture and very unique crime worlds. London, Tokyo, Rio de Janeiro, Stockholm, Johannesburg, Mexico City. Take your pick.

We went to London in an extremely early GTA; why not again?

We’re waiting, Rockstar North. I’d even settle for Edinburgh! You can’ find a game setting in this lovely place? 

Celebrate your European heritage with a Grand Theft Auto straight from your own continent. I’m more than willing to bite.

SOURCE ZAPRUDER PICTURES

Samsung Launches Terrain Home Android Launcher With Google Now-Like Features

Samsung has released a new home screen app dubbed Terrain Home: Sidebar and Search on Google Play, a launcher that brings some features that are similar to the Google Now launcher.

The beta version of the Terrain Home app comes from a Samsung-backed startup, Terrain, which is funded by Samsung Accelerator. The Terrain Home app brings three main feature according to the Google Play listing, namely - sidebar, search, and apps drawer. The app essentially lets users swipe in different directions to access the sidebar (right), search (up), and apps drawer (left).

The Terrain Home sidebar is where users can organize their favourite apps, tools, contacts and news content. Users can pick content from the library and add them in the form of cards.

The apps drawer on Terrain Home is meant for quick navigation, with a search function and alphabetical indexing.

The Terrain Home search feature functions as a local phone search, enabling users to find content such as contacts or apps on their phone quickly.

"Search with Android is Web first," stated Dwipal Desai, founder and CEO of Terrain to Recode. "We wanted search that is phone first."

The Next Web notes that the Terrain Home cards, like Google Now cards, can be stacked in any order. It has been also noted that developers who want to add a card to Terrain, can sign-up now for an SDK, which is said to arrive in coming few weeks.

Developers will continue work on the Terrain Home screen app after it gets a decent fan base. Desai further added that in order to reach out to more users, Samsung might make distribution deals to ensure the app doesn't remain unknown. The beta version of Terrain Home application is sized at 7.4MB and requires Android 4.1 and later OS versions to run.

Alleged iPhone 6 Compared With Samsung Galaxy S5 in Leaked Image

Apple's much-anticipated next iPhone, expected to be called the iPhone 6, has been speculated about and leaked in images several times over the past few months. And it seems there's no stopping till the date Apple officially reveals its next-generation iPhone devices - leaks have been tipping there will be two display size variants - 4.7- or 5.5-inch.

After being compared with the Apple iPhone 5 on Thursday, a new leaked image posted byGSMArena shows the alleged iPhone 6 pictured beside the Samsung Galaxy S5.

The alleged wider, thinner iPhone 6 seems to feature a 4.7-inch display, and is slightly shorter than the Galaxy S5 (which sports a 5.1-inch display) in side by side comparison. The alleged iPhone 6 in the leaked image also appears to be thinner than the Galaxy S5 , which is 8.1mm thick.

Apple's rumoured iPhone 6 is widely anticipated to sport curved edges, doing away with its currentstraight-edge design. Further, the next iPhones' sides are said to house the power button positioned on the right panel of the device, instead on the top panel seen on current iPhone models. Meanwhile, the side panels are likely to include a slightly modified volume buttons.

A Taiwanese celebrity named Jimmy Lin on Thursday posted an image of the alleged iPhone 6 compared alongside iPhone 5 and also shared his first-hand experience with the unannounced iPhone. According to Lin, the alleged iPhone 6 with 4.7-inch display had a great display and was easy to grip despite of its large display size.

A recent report claimed that Apple's next iPhone would hit the shelves on September 19.

The Cupertino-based company has been rumoured to be testing a higher screen resolution on at least one of the two iPhone models likely to debut this year. An earlier report suggested that one of the two alleged iPhone 6 models would come with a 960x1704 pixels resolution screen, compared to the 640x1136 pixels resolution found on the current iPhone models that sport 4-inch displays.

We remind readers however, that nothing is official yet, and that all such leaks must be taken with a pinch of salt.