With all of the options available to drivers, and the multitude of fuel efficiency claims, finding the greenest option can be difficult. But?Ford is offering prizes of $50,000 to software developers to come up with a smartphone app that helps people make sense of the barrage of information.
A Ford logo is seen on a car during a press preview at the 2013 New York International Auto Show in New York. Ford is offerering cash prizes to app developers who can make sense of the wide array of information on fuel-efficient cars.
Mike Segar/Reuters
EnlargeLife can be confusing for those motivated into greener cars with the aim of saving money.
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With all the options available to today's buyers--more efficient gasoline, diesel, hybrids, plug-in hybrids, electric cars, biofuels and more--it's hard to know what is really best. Throw in the multitude of fuel efficiency claims, electric range and more, and, well, it gets pretty tough to understand.
That's why, says Earth Techling, Ford is offering prizes of $50,000 to software developers to come up with a smartphone app that helps people make sense of the barrage of information.
The Personalized Fuel Efficiency Apps Challenge asks software developers to design something that helps consumers better understand and improve their personal fuel efficiency. The service they provide will be highly personalized, taking into account the various factors that can see a car's fuel economy stray from official figures.
There's an element of irony in this of course, which is that Ford's recent Fusion and C-Max Hybrid models are particularly susceptible to driving style, resulting in many customers missing EPA numbers by a significant margin.
Using these as an example, one of the contest's successful apps might give consumers a better idea of how their driving style and typical use would impact upon fuel efficiency--perhaps leading to fewer disappointments.
Apps will be based on the OpenXC platform,?an open-source platform developed by Ford for research applications. A software and hardware development kit gives developers access to a wide range of vehicle data. By using both real-time data from the car, and historical data, an app could offer a truly tailored service.
Interested parties can register with Ford via the contest's website, and submissions for apps open on April 24.
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A seminar on international artist, rights and music management has been held at the Ghana-India Kofi Annan Center of Excellence in ICT in Accra. The seminar was a collaborative effort between the Musicians Union of Ghana, MUSIGA and the British Council of Ghana.
As a mechanism for payment, the credit card remains just as hardy as ever. It has so far defied the threat of mobile phones, and less plausibly, QR codes, among many other forms of payment. One YC-backed startup is betting that fingerprints and other forms of biometric identification may be the payment method of the future though. Called PayTango, they’re partnering with local universities to offer a quick and easy way for students to use their fingerprints to pay instead of credit cards. The four-person team is basically almost fresh out of Carnegie Mellon University. The co-founders, Brian Groudan, Kelly Lau-Kee, Umang Patel and Christian Reyes, graduating later this summer and have experience in human-computer interaction and information systems. They built an initial prototype with a fingerprint scanner and credit card reader with off-the-shelf parts for between $1,500 and $1,700. They’re bringing the costs down after iterating on it for 10 weeks and they have a working version of it at three locations on the Carnegie Mellon campus. “The very earliest product was just basic,” said CEO Umang Patel. “But it was a great product to get out there and users responded to it very early on.” The on-boarding process for users is really easy. They touch the fingerpad with their index and middle fingers and if they’re not in the system already, PayTango automatically detects that. It will ask them to swipe a card to associate with their fingerprints and then enter in their cell phone number. That sign-up process made it fast enough for 100 students to sign-up within four hours on campus. The reader plugs right into a merchant’s existing point-of-sale terminal and software. “We developed a way to integrate with the major systems and users don’t have to worry about these complex software integrations,” Patel said. Of course, like all point-of-sale offerings, PayTango faces a huge chicken-and-egg problem. How do you handle outbound sales to small and medium merchants? How do you make sure sales employees are trained well enough to use the hardware and software? It’s a fairly difficult model to scale. That’s why Patel said the company is focused on very dense networks of merchants and consumers — like the kind of you might see on a college campus where students repeatedly go to a few places for lunch. Gyms are another target market since the same small group of consumers have to quickly![[ Back to EurekAlert! ]](http://www.eurekalert.org/images/back2e.gif){kind=small}
Public release date: 26-Mar-2013
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While the number of seed financing deals has ballooned over the last few years as the cost of starting a company has fallen, the pace of Series A venture deals hasn’t kept up. Now it looks like the bottleneck between the seed stage and the Series A level has gotten even tighter, according to a survey from Fenwick & West, one of the best-known law firms for startups in Silicon Valley. In their annual survey of companies they work with, they tracked 61 transactions from last year, 56 the year before and 52 in 2010. What they found was that even fewer companies had raised Series A rounds by the end of the year after their seed deals closed. Only 27 percent of companies that raised in 2011 were able to pull a Series A round by the end of 2012. In contrast, 45 percent of companies funded in 2010 were able to secure a Series A round by the end of 2011. What’s interesting is that follow-on financings are picking up some of the slack here. More companies are relying on follow-on seed financings if they can’t get to a full A round. Twenty-three percent of companies funded in 2011 did follow-on seed rounds, compared to 12 percent of companies in 2010. Basically, the path from seed to proving you’re worth a Series A round is just getting longer. At the same time, traditional VC firms are getting more active at the seed level, and led about 34 percent of seed deals in 2012, compared to 27 percent in 2011. You can see that the average size of investment for VC funds in these seed deals rose slightly, while the average investment size from professional angels declined. Not only that, the deals themselves are starting to look more conventional. The use of preferred stock structures rose to 67 percent last year, from 59 percent in 2011. “It says two things. The leverage is changing a bit,” said Barry Kramer, a Fenwick partner in the corporate group. “Last year, the entrepreneur had a bit more leverage than they have right now to get the terms they want. But it’s also a reflection of how more sophisticated investors like venture capital groups are getting involved with seed financing and they’re saying — ‘This is how we do it.’” That said, it’s not all black and white. He pointed out that the