CluelessMBA

Estate Planning Must-Haves For Unmarried Couples

Admin — Thu, 23 Feb 2012 06:00:20 +0000

The estate-planning process should be an integral part of everyone’s financial plan. The benefits are obvious, including tax savings, efficient disposition of assets, end-of-life decisions, financial security for heirs and general peace of mind.

For married couples, the planning rules are fairly straightforward. For unmarried couples, however, whether same-sex or opposite-sex, the issues concerning financial and estate planning are often quite complex, and the rules cumbersome. This article will highlight some key planning strategies that unmarried couples should consider in order to protect both partners.

Background Statistics On Unmarried Couples
According to the 2000 U.S. Census Bureau, it is estimated that there are more than 5.5 million unmarried couples living together in the U.S., up from 3.2 million in 1990. Of the 5.5 million, it is estimated that 600,000 are same-sex couples, who for the most part can’t get hitched even if they wanted to.

For the increasing number of couples unable to or unwilling to get married, financial planning is crucial to avoid unpleasant surprises. After all, when it comes to taxes and other financial benefits, we live in a society that provides benefits to those who wed and punishes those who don’t. Until the system changes, here are a few tips you can use to protect not only yourself but your loved one as well in these four areas of your personal finance:

1. Account And Property Titling
The legal ownership of property or accounts can affect how they are distributed in the event of the owner’s death. Each type has its own benefits and drawbacks.

Tenants in Common
Tenants in common allows ownership of property by multiple parties with varying percentages of ownership. Upon the sale of the property or asset each party receives their specific share of the proceeds. Similarly, when a tenants-in-common owner dies, their percentage of ownership becomes part of their estate. If there is a will in place the property will pass to the heirs listed in the will. In the event that there is no will, the property, asset or account will be distributed in accordance with the rules in the deceased’s state of residence.

Unless your intent is to leave the asset to someone other than your partner, this is not a good option for unmarried couples. If however, your intent is to distribute the bulk of your assets to someone other than your partner, then this may be a good choice.

Joint Tenants With Right of Survivorship (JTWROS)
JTWROS is one of the best forms of ownership for unmarried couples. The main difference from owning assets as tenants in common is that with JTWROS the property or asset must be split 50/50 between the owners. When one of the owners dies, the property automatically transfers to the surviving owner.
It is important to caution readers that assets must read “with rights of survivorship”; in the absence of this wording the ownership of the asset or property will be deemed to be owned as tenants-in-common. The other important consideration when titling assets as JTWROS is that the order in which the asset, property or account is titled is important. Income, gains and losses will be reported under the Social Security number (SSN) of the first owner. This can prove advantageous when it comes to tax planning if one of the owners is in a significantly lower tax bracket. On the other hand, the owner with the higher tax bracket could use the deductions when filing their taxes.

It is important to note that while it is pretty straightforward to own property titled JTWROS, the Internal Revenue Service will take the entire value of the asset and include it in the gross value of the estate of the first person to die, unless the surviving partner can prove that he/she made contributions to the asset. Therefore, accurate record keeping and paper trails are critical. This is not always easy to do, and it may also create a potential for major federal – and estate-tax liability for the surviving partner if the estate exceeds the federal respective exclusion amount per individual.

Trusts
A trust is another option for owning property. Each individual can create a trust and place his/her individual assets inside that trust. The trust will spell out the legalities of what would happen if the trustee (the owner of the trust) dies, becomes disabled or becomes unable to transact on his/her own behalf. The owner of the trust can designate his/her partner as the successor trustee allowing the partner to manage the couple’s affairs.

While setting up a trust can be costly, it may make sense if you have significant assets and would like to protect not only your partner but other family members. For example, you may wish to take care of your partner when you die, but after your partner dies you would like other family members to receive the remainder of your assets. It is important to note that assets and accounts must have the trust named as the beneficiary or be titled in the name of the trust.

A trust is sometimes the best vehicle for non-married couples to use since a trust generally can withstand the challenges brought on by family members better than probate.

2. Retirement Plans
Unmarried couples have to take special care to ensure that the right person receives retirement benefits and that they are not subject to avoidable taxes.

Beneficiary Designations
To ensure that your partner receives the assets from your retirement accounts (IRA, 401(k), 403(b), pension plan, etc.) you must fill out a formal beneficiary designation form with the administrator of the retirement plan. Just as important as having a beneficiary designation is keeping your beneficiary designation up to date. More times than not, people forget to update their beneficiary designation and the wrong person receives the money – and, in such a case, there is nothing your partner can do about it.

A beneficiary designation takes precedence over any will. The same holds true for life insurance policies, so make sure you update the beneficiary of those policies as well.

Rollover/Distribution Options
As a non-spouse beneficiary of a retirement plan you have few options when it comes to distributing the assets from a retirement plan. Don’t assume that in the event of your death your company will allow your partner to roll over the assets into an IRA. In many cases companies discriminate against unmarried couples by forcing the non-spouse beneficiary to take a taxable lump-sum distribution of the entire amount. This, as you can imagine, will eat away a lot of the balance, and you will not have the ability to stretch out the account. Surviving spouses can rollover the entire balance into an IRA that doesn’t have to be tapped until age 70.5.

This is one of the reasons why you should consider rolling over the balance of the retirement account into an IRA when you leave an employer. If you do this, you can name your partner as beneficiary of the account without worrying that your partner will be forced to distribute the balance of the account as a taxable lump-sum distribution.

Legislative Impact of the Pension Protection Act
The Pension Protection Act of 2006, commonly known as the PPA, amended many rules relating to IRAs and pension plans, including the rule that allows retirement plans to roll over corporate retirement-plan funds directly into a Roth IRA. One of the most significant changes the PPA made is that non-spouse participants now have the ability to roll over the inherited retirement-plan assets into an inherited Roth IRA, something that they were not able to do before. This is significant because beneficiaries cannot convert inherited Traditional-IRA funds into a Roth, but they can now convert inherited retirement-plan assets into an inherited Roth.
In order for the non-spouse beneficiary to take advantage of the Roth IRA, a direct transfer is necessary. If the beneficiary receives the distribution (a 60-day rollover), then they will not be able to rollover those assets to any inherited IRA, whether Traditional or Roth. Not only that, but the beneficiary will owe taxes on the distribution and will miss out on the ability to stretch out the account. Again, this is why it so critical for the plan participant or beneficiary to request a direct rollover or trustee-to-trustee transfer.

But before you attempt to rollover the funds into a Roth IRA, you should make sure that the employer plan allows non-spouse beneficiary rollovers into an inherited IRA – a lot of plans do not. If they do, some restrictions still apply. Here are two of the major ones:

The beneficiary is subject to the same adjusted gross income (AGI) and marital restrictions as any other owner converting IRA funds into a Roth, but only for 2008-2009.

If the beneficiary does the conversion from the employer plan, they will have to pay the taxes upfront and will not have the ability to defer distributions and taxes over his/her lifetime. This really limits the tax-free compounding benefit of this type of account.

3. Life Insurance
Insurance is especially important for unmarried couples because they are not afforded the same legal protection as their married counterparts. They are not entitled to receive Social Security survivor’s benefits or corporate pensions. Life insurance is a great way to protect your partner by providing them with income substitution when you die, and also with assets to cover any potential inheritance tax they may have to pay as a result of receiving your assets.
It is important to shop around with different companies since some insurance carriers make it difficult for unmarried partners to designate each other as beneficiaries of life insurance. They will question whether a nonfamily member has an economic or “insurable interest” in the life of the insured. If the couple owns a home together and carries joint debt (ex. a mortgage), then this issue can usually be overcome.

Irrevocable Life Insurance Trust
An irrevocable life insurance trust (ILIT) is an irrevocable trust created for the purpose of owning a life insurance policy. Just like with any other trust, the insurance trust is a contract between a grantor and a trustee to administer certain property, in this case an insurance contract, for the benefit of the beneficiaries. The caveat with this type of trust is that once the grantor contributes property to the trust, they cannot later reclaim ownership of the property or change the terms of the trust.

Estate-tax considerations are the biggest reasons for creating this type of trust. If an ILIT is properly structured, the death benefits paid to the trust will be free from inclusion in the gross estate of the insured. In order for this planning to be valid, the grantor must live three years from the time of the policy transfer, otherwise the policy proceeds will not be excluded from the grantor’s estate.

4. Wills, Healthcare and Power of Attorney
The following are also important documents unmarried couples should have to protect each other in the event of health, disability and death:

Wills
A will helps unmarried partners provide for a partner or other loved ones. A will details how you wish your assets to be distributed after you die. This does not include pension accounts, IRAs or life insurance. Remember that these are distributed according to what the beneficiary-designation form says. It is important to note that a will can be contested in court by family members which could end up leaving your surviving partner without property.

Healthcare Directives
A durable power of attorney for healthcare (or a healthcare proxy) is one of the most important documents you can have. This document will specify the individual or individuals who can make healthcare decisions for you if you can’t make them for yourself. If something happens to you and you do not have this document, your partner will be left out when making decisions about your healthcare at a hospital. Unmarried partners may even be denied visitations since they are technically not family.

Living Will
Along with a healthcare directive, you should also have a living will documenting the circumstances under which you do or do not want your life prolonged. You should discuss this sensitive issue with your partner in advance and have the document drafted so it outlines the details of your wishes.

Financial Power of Attorney
A financial power of attorney is important so your partner or another person can make financial decisions on your behalf. This document will dictate how the person is to make decisions when managing your financial affairs.

When it comes to powers of attorney, just because you have one does not mean that it covers both healthcare and financial decisions, unless it specifically says so. This is not a concern for married couples since they automatically have the right to make decisions for each other based in the legal system.

Conclusion
As the number of couples deciding not to tie the knot (and same-sex couples who cannot) increases, it is important that these couples understand how important it is to plan for unexpected events. The laws and tax system do not offer the same types of protections and benefits afforded to those who marry; therefore, if they are in a long-term committed relationship they need to take action to avoid expensive and unpleasant surprises. Because some laws vary from state to state and the issues are often very complex, especially when it comes to estate planning, couples should invest the time and money to visit a financial planner or estate planning attorney that specializes in unmarried couples to help them achieve their goals.
More From Investopedia

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Article source: http://finance.yahoo.com/news/estate-planning-must-haves-unmarried-235608199.html

WinZip iOS App Tops 500K Downloads In 8 Days

Admin — Thu, 23 Feb 2012 06:00:16 +0000

The WinZip iOS app, which lets you crack open .zip files from your iDevice, has only spent a short time on the App Store (and by short, I mean, like, a week). But there’s already plenty to brag about.

The app saw over 30,000 downloads on Day One, and nearly 150,000 on Day Two. As of last night, WinZip has blown by the 500,000 download hurdle with approximately 512,000 installs.

Let’s put this into some perspective, yes?

Social to-do app Any.DO saw over 500,000 downloads in its first thirty days of availability on the Android Market. Meanwhile, Kevin Rose’s micro-recommendation app Oink clocked in at 100k downloads in its first three weeks or so on iOS.

Who knew Apple loyalists needed a way to open .zip files so desperately? (Other than WinZip, of course.)

I spoke with WinZip president Patrick Nichols to see just how these crazy numbers came to be, and surprisingly there wasn’t much to it.

“It was really organic,” said Nichols. “The reality is that we just wanted to build a good application and get the word out.”

And apparently it worked: 500,000-strong on the download front, and more to come. Nichols said that an Android version of the app will be available around spring.

Article source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/furAAH0Y2NI/

New From The Makers Of Nosh: NoshList, A Free Waitlisting App For Restaurants

Admin — Thu, 23 Feb 2012 06:00:16 +0000

Firespotter Labs, makers of the food photo-sharing app Nosh (and more recently, the hilarious spoof app Jotly), is launching its latest creation today called NoshList, a new waitlisting application for restaurants. The app, designed for the iPad, ties into to the company’s consumer-facing Nosh mobile app, which allows users to rate and review restaurants and dishes from their mobile phones.

While the integration between the two apps (Nosh NoshList) is limited – customers just receive text messages about their reservation with links to download Nosh – it would make sense for deeper integrations to arrive in the future. NoshList’s venue analytics are calculated in real-time, for example, and could be integrated into the Nosh consumer app to provide current wait times. Consumers could then see those wait times and add their name to the waitlist within Nosh, which could tie back into the iPad app.

Those features aren’t live yet, but given Firespotter’s background, it would be right in their wheelhouse to move down this path. The company was started by GrandCentral co-founder and CEO Craig Walker, and GrandCentral, as you may recall, was acquired by Google in 2007 where it became Google Voice. Walker left the Google Voice team in late 2010, and later founded Firespotter Labs. In other words, this team knows a thing or two about telephony, and keeping costs low.

Currently, when a customer’s table is ready, they’re alerted by either text or phone through the NoshList platform.

The app also allows the restaurant to easily manage parties – adding, seating and removing them as necessary – just by pushing a button. To add walk-up customers, NoshList users simply enter in a name, phone number and tap a button for the party size. There are even different icons for gender and age groups (i.e., blue for boys, pink for girls, and an icon that looks sort of like Darth Vader for “unknown”).

At the bottom of the screen, NoshList shows the current wait times by party size for at-a-glance information, as well as the number of total guests waiting and the total seated.

NoshList has a lot of competition in the restaurant customer management space – besides OpenTable, there are startups like Livebookings, Timeview, Tableista, NoWait, DinerConnection, WaitList Manager, TurnStar and dozens (dozens!) of others. But Firespotter is offering its app for free for now, with monetization to come later on. Although the company isn’t talking about forthcoming features, things like improved analytics and 2-way paging (meaning customers could text back to the restaurant) are obvious next steps.

Prior to today’s launch, the company has been testing the app in several restaurants in the San Francisco Bay area, like Unami Burger, for example.

The app is live now on the iTunes App Store here.

FIRESPOTTER LABS

Firespotter Labs is not a company. Of course we’ve got all the fancy papers and rolling office chairs to make it seem like a company, but at the end of the day we’re just a room full of crazy people dying to make an impact on people’s lives. None of us go to “work” anymore.

Then what do we do here at the lab? We make things people like. Simple. If people don’t like what we make we throw it…

Learn more

Article source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/jjB2Z2rXF80/

As Journalists And Video Bloggers Are Killed, SyriaPioneer Lives On

Admin — Thu, 23 Feb 2012 06:00:10 +0000

It goes without saying that the death of veteran Sunday Times war correspondent Marie Colvin and the French photographer Remi Ochlik – after an artillery shell hit their makeshift press centre in the Syrian city of Homs – is tragic. It’s also testament to the lengths to which journalists often go to get the story. But equally, the use of new technology by ‘citizen journalists’ has been equally significant in documenting the deadly acts of the Syrian government against its own people.

Among those killed in yesterday’s attack on the journalists’ position were three activists. One of those was video blogger Rami Ahmad al-Sayed, who was also known as “Syria Pioneer“. Ahmad al-Sayed had uploaded over 200 videos to various platforms of the killing and destruction in his area. We wrote about him and his video only this week when the Syrian government blocked Bambuser, the live video platform he was using.

Colvin was a decorated foreign correspondent. Ochlik had won a World Press Photo award. Obviously al-Sayed / Syria Pioneer had not had the chance to win such accolades. But his live broadcasts, using the startup video platform Bambuser did their part in showing the world what was going on in Syria.

His footage of the bombing of Homs was aired all over the world by BBC World, SkyNews, Al Jazeera and many more. Live video from the roof where Rami and his friends positioned their camera was broadcast all over the world. A collection of some of that output is contained in a tribute at Storyful. Be warned, much of it is harrowing to watch.

We know from Bambuser that Rami was accompanying three people to a civil hospital when he died. The car was believed to have been the target of mortar fire. While the others died instantaneously, Rami was badly injured but died from his wounds later in the hospital.

Born in 1985, father of a little girl aged a year and a half called Marym (pictured), his last message for his friends was sent to Bambuser:

“Babaamr is facing a genocide right now. I will never forgive you for your silence. You have all just given us your words but we need actions. However, our hearts will always be with those who risk their life for our freedom. I know what we need! We need campaigns everywhere inside Syria and outside Syria, and now we need all people in front of all embassies all over the world. In a few hours there will be NO place called BabaAmr and I expect this will be my last message and no one will forgive you who talked but didn’t act.”

But although a family has lost a husband and father, Syria Pioneer lives on, bringing live footage from inside Homs: because Rami’s friends and colleagues have resumed using the account.

Rami’s pioneering work, using the platforms of the new technology world, will not have been in vain.

You can get Syria Pioneer’s live channel on Bambuser right here.

BAMBUSER

Bambuser is an interactive mobile video streaming platform, enabling users to quickly and easily stream and share live mobile video with all of their favorite social networks, including Facebook, Twitter, Myspace, WordPress, RSS and Blogspot. Used by both professional broadcasters and consumers worldwide, Bambuser is the easiest and most dynamic video streaming solution available for 3G and Wifi devices. Featuring geo-location tagging, integrated web storage, and one click social sharing, Bambuser is the smart mobile video solution.
Bambuser is…

Learn more

Article source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/FpsLUwBQdAw/

Browser Shootout Shows Minor Variations In Performance – It’s Still A Matter Of Taste

Admin — Thu, 23 Feb 2012 06:00:09 +0000

The browser wars are in a tense state of suspension right now. The once-obvious advantages of one and disadvantages of another can’t be counted on as much as they could a year ago, and fast-changing standards and interaction methods have produced a sort of uneasy détente while everyone awaits the browser equivalent of the Manhattan Project to catapult them into the atomic age.

Tom’s Hardware just did a nice, thorough examination of the available browsers on Windows 7 and Ubuntu, and the findings are really mixed. It used to be that Firefox always won, and we could all make fun of IE. Then Chrome came and won all the speed benchmarks. And then there was Opera. Now it’s a mess. How do you pick the browser that’s best for you? Easy: you flip a coin.

The benchmarks are what you’d expect: standards compliance, HTML5 stuff, Javascript speed, hardware acceleration. It’s such a mixed bag of victories and losses by various parties that you can barely draw any conclusions. In the end, the winner (Firefox) is far from decisive, and is often “weak” in things at which the runner-up, Chrome, excels. And vice versa. Meanwhile Opera takes a few wins home, IE is the best at memory management (but little else), and Safari cleans up in page load times (but little else).

So why do I say you can flip a coin? Because first of all, don’t use Safari. It’s just not good enough, and unless you are compelled to use it for some purpose, it has no advantage over the rest and plenty of disadvantages. And don’t use IE (except for testing), because it still has trouble rendering properly, despite some interesting features. You can use Opera, but if you are, you’ve already made that decision and aren’t likely to go back on it any time soon. But for “regular” users who want to use popular plugins, ensure compliance with various webpages and apps that may or may not be built properly, and be sure of a very regular update schedule, Firefox and Chrome are really your only options.

And which should you choose? If you really don’t know, flip a coin. If you try to argue against it when it lands on Firefox, install Chrome. If you don’t like it, install Firefox. Or use both. The fact is right now, for the average user, it doesn’t matter much, and both browsers are great. I use Firefox for reasons that are trivial, yet nonetheless more important than performance or under the hood differences. But I wouldn’t recommend it over Chrome for anyone but myself.

Don’t get me wrong: there are differences between the browsers, and the results are worth going through if the browser is a mission-critical item for your work or you are seriously worried about a certain type of performance. Of course, in a couple months, all these positions might be reversed. So you’ll have to take that coin out again.

Article source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/ldv0ZxiilbE/

OnLive Adds “Cloud-Accelerated Browsing” To Its Streaming-Desktop Stable

Admin — Thu, 23 Feb 2012 06:00:08 +0000

You’re probably familiar with OnLive, the company that made its mark by streaming brand new console and PC games to whatever devices could support a high-bandwidth video stream. Many doubted its technology to begin with (including yours truly – Is OnLive OnCrack?) but they’ve more or less delivered on their promises, and have also been expanding the services they offer. Most recently they introduced OnLive Desktop, which streamed a Windows 7 desktop to your iPad.

That was mainly focused on productivity – Office apps and such. Now they’ve added web browsing to the table. Yes, they will stream live video of a web browser running in a datacenter to your device, which almost certainly already has a web browser.

If that sounds crazy, it’s probably because it kind of is. But maybe it’s crazy like a fox. Their accelerated browser is a full-on desktop browser running on a gigabit connection. It can load files and display them to you in the video stream faster than you can load them on your own device. And of course it has Flash. It’s certainly more capable than, say, Safari on iPad, but is it really better?

The problem is that the average consumption experience doesn’t really benefit from being streamed. Flash is rarely critical to use from a tablet (though it can be nice), and big attachments are often virtualized already – big PDFs and video files can be viewed or streamed online without a tedious download process. The few cases where a window into a high-speed but generic browser is better than the built-in one are probably overshadowed by the inevitable downsides of interacting with a virtual, video desktop: lag and occasional poor image quality.

You’ll have to shell out to give it a try; the iOS app is free and you can access productivity tools (if they have the spare bandwidth for you), but for the browser and desktop you’ll need to drop $5 per month. Soon you’ll also be able to pay $10 per month for extra space and custom desktop apps. It’s the beginning of something cool, but at the moment it seems a hard sell.

ONLIVE

Onlive develops server-based video game processing, allowing games to run without game consoles or high-end computers, moving away from a system in which games are purchased and downloaded.

Learn more

Article source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/mYWRBIEFo_4/

San Francisco Launches The 2012 Innovation Portfolio, From Open Taxi Data To Beta Tests In City Hall

Admin — Thu, 23 Feb 2012 06:00:07 +0000

San Francisco may not have intended to be become the startup mecca that it is today, but now the city government is working hard to make itself as friendly as possible to tech entrepreneurs. Makes sense, considering that there are 1,539 tech companies and 30,000 tech jobs in the city now — a number that’s been growing fast as older industries like high finance continue to suffer through the recession.

What that means is this. Mayor Ed Lee, who came to power last year with heavy support from the local tech scene, is announcing a new initiative today at the TechFellow awards ceremony, that has some intriguing ideas for making the city itself more relevant to the booming industry within it.

Broadly, the so-called 2012 Innovation Portfolio is trying to do everything from helping founders making it easier to complete the paperwork for creating a company, to giving developers new access to city data, to introducing new ways for citizens to share their opinions with the city, to actually testing out tech products at City Hall itself. A number of other cities in the US and around the world have been working on similar initiatives, so as a resident I can personally say that I’m happy to see this happening.

Especially because the city’s awful taxi system is getting opened up to innovation.

Here’s a closer look at key pieces of the portfolio, based on documents provided to me from the city — plus my own editorializing.

Business One-Stop: Having been through the awful state and federal paperwork for founding a company myself, this one sounds very helpful. The city will launch an online service that allows businesses to “answer simple step-by-step questions and be presented with a clear roadmap of the required steps and forms to complete” founding paperwork online. It’s not clear if this is only for companies that make California their federal home — that might be an issue for tech companies, which normally federally incorporate in Delaware due to its business-friendly bureaucracy. The city is aiming for at least one section of the new site to be online by the end of this year.

ImproveSF: Slated for this spring, the site will let any citizen provide answers to major civic problems — budget savings (which the city has struggled to make happen), and revitalization plans for the middle part of Market Street are two examples.

Open Taxi Access: “In our City, 50% of taxis sit empty, many concentrate downtown and at SFO, and central dispatch doesn’t work, so we want to work with you in solving this problem,” the city states frankly in its presentation on the initiative. Exactly. In fact, this type of problem has helped Uber’s town car service become a hit with residents. To kick this effort off, the city is planning an event for February 24 and 25 “to help the City redefine taxi access and help us define next steps.” Look for TechCrunch to be all over this project.

Hackathons 2.0: Similar to the taxi initiative, the idea here is to bring “hackathon” developer events put on by tech organizations to specific city issues. It promises “user-centered” hackathons for civic topics like veterans services, payments, and transportation. Events are already planned with the California College of Art, Black Founders, Mozilla and GAFFTA.

Open Data: In addition to taxis and the hackathons, the city is more generally trying to make all sorts of other data available to developers — it says it already has 60 apps built on its data, according to its presentation. The broader data plan includes working for legislation that will make information more easily available to the public, and providing more than 200 of its own data sets online. “As part of this effort, the City is moving to a cloud-based data sharing service for launch in March” — I’m not sure what that means, but I guess a central online repository for the data sets? I’ll update if I find out more.

SmartPDFs: In parallel with the open data efforts listed above, the city also wants to make paperwork easier for all of its citizens. This means moving paper-based processes online so you don’t need to print and fax and mail everything. The pilot launch has started and look for deployment across city agencies over the year.

Separately, the city says it’s beginning to test out new technology at City Hall — including Yammer, and Cozybit and 802.11s mesh networking.

You can find more details on the city’s “Innovation” site, here. Partners include sf.citi (which we covered more here), along with Code For America, CCOL, the San Francisco Office of Economic and Workforce Development, and SPUR.

[San Francisco cityscape photo via Mr. Thorngren's social studies blog.]

Article source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/glY9XLC8ow4/

The Winners Of This Year’s $100,000 TechFellow Awards Are…

Admin — Thu, 23 Feb 2012 06:00:06 +0000

Tonight, Silicon Valley’s heroes gave competition a rest and joined together at the third annual TechFellow Awards to celebrate the spirit of innovation. An all-star committee of industry moguls carefully considered your nominations of visionaries in the fields of engineering, product design and marketing, general management, and disruptive innovation. They chose 5 leaders per category and awarded them each a $100,000 grant to invest in a startup of their choice.

Supported by Founders Fund, TechCrunch, and New Enterprise Associates (NEA), the awards ceremony was hosted by Jim Parsons, the Emmy-award winning star of nerdy television comedy show The Big Bang Theory at San Francisco’s Museum Of Modern Art. Mayor Ed Lee spoke, Facebook engineer Mark Slee DJ’d, and past winners toasted the future of our industry.

Thanks to everyone for submitting your nominations. Here are the 5 winners for each category of this year’s TechFellow Awards:

Engineering Leadership
Presented by: Sandy Jen, co-founder of Meebo

Ruchi Sanghvi, former Product Manager (NewsFeed) at Facebook

Amitt Mahajan, co-creator of MyMiniLife (Farmville)

Scott Marlette, former Product Manager (Photos) at Facebook

Hilary Mason, Chief Scientist at Bit.ly

Brian Totty, Senior Vice President of Engineering at Groupon

Product Design Marketing
Presented by: Dave Morin, co-founder and CEO at Path

Craig Mod, former designer at Flipboard

Dustin Mierau, co-founder and Chief Designer of Path

Wilson Miner, designer at rdio

Dan Cederholm, co-founder of Dribbble

Joe Hewitt, former Product Manager (iPhone) at Facebook

General Management
Presented by: Aaron Patzer, founder of Mint

Joe Greenstein, founder and CEO of Flixster

Heather Harde, former CEO of TechCrunch

Andrew Siegel, SVP, Strategy and Corporate Development of Conde Nast

Clara Shih, CEO of Hearsay

Victoria Ransom, founder CEO of Wildfire Interactive

Disruptive Innovation
Presented by: David Friedberg, CEO at The Climate Corporation

Diego Berdakin, co-founder and President of BeachMint

Marco Arment, creator of Instapaper

Leilah Janah, founder and CEO of Samasource

Matthew Prince, co-founder and CEO of CloudFlare

Perry Chen, co-founder and CEO of Kickstarter

Tom Preston-Werner, co-founder and CTO, Github

Article source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/p_vznDuJt5s/

Clothes Horse Wants To Solve The Biggest Problem With Online Shopping: Finding Clothes That Fit

Admin — Thu, 23 Feb 2012 06:00:02 +0000

Clothes Horse, a fashion technology company based out of New York, is publicly launching its platform today in an attempt to address one of the biggest challenges facing online shoppers: buying clothes that fit. Through the use of a customizable widget that merchants add to their own websites, Clothes Horse can determine within just 30 seconds how the retailers’ items will fit any customer. The goal is not only to decrease shopping cart abandonment, but also the rate of returns due to ill-fitting clothes.

The problem with shopping for clothes online is that customers have gotten burned by their past experiences. “Instead of being excited about this great new thing you’re about to buy,” explains Clothes Horse co-founder Vikram Venkatraman, “you think about the last time you had to return something, or you start wondering if it’s really going to be as nice on you as it looks in the picture.”

It’s those points of hesitation that cause 70% of shopping cart abandonment, he says. Not only that, but 60% of the time customers return clothes they bought online, it was because of fit issues.

Retailers, of course, know the challenges surrounding fit – it’s why they provide measurements and size charts for all their clothes on their websites. But just because you can zip something up, that doesn’t necessarily mean it fits well. To address these issues, Clothes Horse provides a quick, user-friendly product that helps online shoppers determine, in about thirty seconds, whether something will actually fit in real life.

The product is a white-labelled QA system that enables shoppers to build a profile based on their answers to questions, which don’t have to involve measurements. Although retailers can customize the system to suit their needs, the idea is to go beyond things like height and weight, and find out about a customer’s body type, preferred brands, comfort in a given brand, and more.

For example, a men’s clothing site might ask “What brand’s dress shirt fits you best?” to which the shopper could choose “Ralph Lauren,” “Calvin Klein,” “DKNY,” etc. They could also describe how well that brand fits, answering “it’s perfect,” “it fits well,” or “it doesn’t fit very well.”

After a handful of questions like this are answered, the Clothes Horse widget then tells you what size to buy, and, most importantly, how it will fit (e.g. “tight around the chest,” “just right in the collar”).

“Now you know what trade-offs you have to make, if any,” explains Venkatraman. “You know what to expect given your lifetime of shopping. It lets you put this new thing that you’re shopping for in a context that you’re used to, so you know a little bit about it,” he says.

In early tests with Clothes Horse beta customer Bonobos.com, use of the new system delivered a 13% sales boost, results which the retailer has called encouraging. Heck, it may even be able to help you find jeans that fit!

Behind the scenes, Clothes Horse has a large database of human measurements which they’ve combined with measurement data from around 50 brands, six of which are live now on the web (Bonobos, Modus Man, Duke Winston, Five Four Jeans, Frank Oak, and one undisclosed customer). The startup is also in talks with several large retailers, who are reportedly very interested in the platform.

Finding fit is really only phase one of Clothes Horse’s grand scheme. Further down the road, it plans to support Facebook integration to help users build a shopping profile based on brands they “like” and what their friends like. This profile will function as a portable identity that moves with you from site to site. A mobile experience that ties offline shopping to the online profile is also in the works.

Besides Venkatraman, a former Deloitte consultant, entrepreneur and author, the other two co-founders are V Bespoke co-founder Dave Whittemore and software engineer Will Charczuk. The team has an undisclosed amount of seed funding from Contour Ventures, and angel funding from Mark Wachen, Ben Ling, DreamIt and others.

CLOTHES HORSE

ClothesHorse solves the problem of “what clothes will fit me?” when shopping online. At the point of sale on third party e-commerce websites, shoppers are told what size will fit them based on their own unique body. At our destination website, ClothesHor.se, shoppers can discover new brands that will fit them based on their body and current favorite brands, akin to Pandora for clothing. Our data-driven platform is licensed by online apparel retailers and enables them to increase conversion…

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Report: Video Accounts For Half Of All Mobile Traffic; Android Biggest For Mobile Ads

Admin — Thu, 23 Feb 2012 06:00:00 +0000

Mobile video now accounts for half of all mobile traffic; and on some networks, that number is as high as 69 percent — a testament to the rise of smartphones and tablets as the mobile devices of choice for consumers, and their growing interest in using these devices to do a lot more than just make phone calls.

The data, from quarterly report on mobile data usage out today from mobile analytics firm Bytemobile, also found that Android is generating more mobile ad volume than iOS devices, and that Google now accounted for 75 percent of ad-generated data across all platforms.

Bytemobile says it has collected this data from a cross-section of its mobile carrier customers. It focuses on usage of two main platforms, Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android.

As many have already suspected, tablets are driving significantly more data traffic than smartphones. On Apple’s iOS platform, an iPad user generates three times as much traffic as someone using an iPhone; while on Android, the figure is twice as much when comparing Android tablets and handsets.

This is not too surprising: tablets’ bigger screens are that much more conducive to consuming video and other content than the smaller screen of a smartphone; and in the case of something like video, those tablets will require higher resolutions, which also translates to heavier data use.

Indeed, video, along with other streamed services, are proving, once again, to be bandwidth hogs. The most-used application on iOS, for example, is Safari, accounting for 61 percent of all transactions. But when it comes to what takes up the most data volume? Bytemobile says it’s the Media Player, with 47 percent of all volume:

The same goes for individual applications. Although users spend slightly more time per session on Facebook than they do YouTube — 9.06 versus 8.51 minutes, respectively — YouTube generates, on average, 40 megabytes per session, compared to 120 kilobytes for Facebook or 170kb for Twitter. Twitter’s average session usage is 4.57 minutes.

Bytemobile also took a look at where mobile advertising is sitting in the mix. As ad networks have also been demonstrating for the last several quarters, Android devices are edging out over Apple’s iPhone and iPad in terms of generating mobile advertising traffic.

Yes, part of that is because collectively there are more Android devices on networks than iPhones — Android now accounts for half of all smartphones worldwide, says Gartner.

But perhaps just as importantly, those Android devices appear to be generating more ad impressions and engagement — collectively called “transactions” by Bytemobile. On Android, some nine percent of all data transactions were ad-related, while on iOS the proportion was five percent.

Why is that? It could be down to the fact that Android generally has less paid apps in the Market than Apple’s App Store, and those more popular free apps are pulling more ads down from networks when they get used.

But if you are reading this and starting to worry about how mobile ads are draining your monthly data allowances on your contracts, save your worries for the future: Bytemobile notes that ads accounted for only two percent of data volume on Android, and only one percent on iPhone.

As with online, Google dominates the mobile ad space with its owner of AdMob, AdSense and DoubleClick holdings. Together, these accounted for 75 percent of all ad data. But when it comes to the single-most consuming ad network, that dubious honor goes to Apple’s iAd: its video-rich ad units generate nearly 16 MB of data per transaction, while the lowest were AdMob’s display units, which generated less than 4MB.

BYTEMOBILE

Bytemobile provides Smart Capacity(TM) solutions to operators of mobile networks delivering video, web and multimedia services to their subscribers. Fundamentally, Smart Capacity solutions enable operators to improve the utilization and performance of their existing network capacity as subscriber data traffic continues to escalate.

Numerous operators worldwide have experienced increasing pressure on capacity as a result of traffic congestion caused by faster networks, more sophisticated devices, richer content, and consumer demand for bandwidth-intensive applications such as high-definition (HD) video, streaming media,…

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