As medical records move online, doctors are increasingly bringing laptops into the exam room to take notes, write prescriptions and more. But laptops can be cumbersome, and the iPad has emerged as a popular device for medical professionals. In fact, one out of every five doctors in a private practice own an iPad. Enter DrChrono, a Y Combinator-backed startup that produces an iPad app and SaaS for doctors.
The free iPad app allows doctors to schedule patient appointments, write prescriptions and send them to pharmacies, enable reminders, take clinical notes, access lab results, and input electronic health records. The electronic medical records element is key because the Obama administration is currently offering strong incentives for doctors to start moving their health records online. DrChrono will help doctors start, finish and manage this process. → Read More
Type in coupon code 10SALE40 to rock 40% off of SeV this month in honor of ScottEVest’s 10th anniversary. Don’t feel like it? No big whoop. What, we want to fight about it? No. → Read More
Sick of telling time the old way? Spice up your time-telling time with the open-source, hackable and Arduino-based DOTKLOK. Basically, you can get a bunch of different ways to tell time. Different customizable animations will make you proud to show off your hard work the next time someone asks for the time. Speaking of time, it passes in a unique way with numbers and abstract/geometric patterns. It also has classic video games like Pong, Tetris and Pacman, that pretty much makes it sweet in our book. → Read More
Lookin’ to hop on board with T-Mobile? Do you burn through data and texts like no ones business, but don’t really use your phone as a phone all that much? The stars have aligned for you, my friend — but only for a limited time. They’re not saying how long this deal will stick around, but T-Mobile has just put up a new Limited Time promo plan. $80 gets you Unlimited Data, Unlimited Texts, and 1500 minutes. That’s $20 less than their Unlimited Everything plan, and $10 less than their non-promotional 1000 minute, Unlimited Data/Text plan. → Read More
AppSense, which specializes in what it calls ‘user virtualization’ solutions, has raised $70 million in its very first round of funding. Interestingly, the entire investment comes from one backer, Goldman Sachs, whose managing director Pete Perrone will be joining the company’s board of directors.
AppSense says it will use the funds to “capitalize on its position as a market leader” in what it anticipates will turn out to become a $2 billion market in the next few years. → Read More
We’re one week ago from the PC multi-player demo of Crysis 2. Exciting! (It actually is, I’m not sure that came across well.) As the game’s release approaches, its developers have started opening up. First up: the game’s soundtrack. → Read More
It seems we only mention Google Calendar here on TechCrunch anymore when things inevitably go wrong – which means we get to cover the cloud-based calendaring service quite often, unfortunately.
We’ve been getting a ton of tips from people whose scheduled meetings and whatnot have apparently all been eaten by Google (as has The Next Web, which covered the issue of wiped out user calendars earlier this morning). → Read More
SponsorPay, the European provider of advertisement-based payment systems, has raised further investment. This time the funding comes from Nokia Growth Partners, the $350m fund with close ties to Nokia itself and existing investors. It should comes as no surprise then to learn that SponsorPay intends to use the new capital to support its expansion to mobile devices, tapping the Finnish handset maker’s contacts along the way. → Read More
Microsoft released some new mice today with some pretty direct names: Express Mouse and Comfort Mouse. I’d have gone with Magic Mouse, but Apple probably already took that. → Read More
With all this talk of copy-and-paste (or, more recently, talk of failed updates bricking handsets), it’s easy to forget about the other feature of Windows Phone 7′s first big update: CDMA support. In other words, it opens the door to Windows Phone 7-ville to Sprint and Verizon. Based on a handful of tweets out of Sprint and the discovery of a page lingering around on Sprint’s own server, it looks like they’re planning to hop onboard right quick. → Read More
One thing we night owls know about working at night is that lighting is key. Too much or too little can cause some serious strain. That’s why people come up with versatile clip-on LED task lights like the Mantis. The Mantis lights up your workspace by clip mounting the light anywhere. You can also use it as a free standing unit. The Mantis has 11 LEDs in a sort of rocket ship looking case. It’s powered by two AA batteries that run the light for 30 hours. → Read More
Really good news for the small game developers out there. Epic Games has changed the licensing scheme for its free Unreal Development Kit, the end result of which is independent game developers paying less than they previously had to. The way it works now is that developers will have to pay 25 percent of the game’s net revenue once it hits $50,000 in sales. The old threshold was $5,000. → Read More
Meet the man who killed the television industry. In the mid Nineties, while he was looking at a Fry’s ad, Anthony Wood invented the personal video recorder (PVR). From this epiphany, Wood founded ReplayTV in 1997, a PVR company which, for a short while, gave TiVO a run for its money.
But Wood not only invented the PVR, he also helped kill it. In 2002, after leaving ReplayTV, Wood founded Roku, a self-styled “cable killer” hardware company which provides a box for accessing on-demand video.
Almost ten years after founding Roku, Wood really is starting to scare the traditional cable industry. He’s already sold a million Roku boxes and streamed a billion minutes of content from Roku devices. And this year, Wood expects to sell a million and a half boxes, thus making Roku, Wood says, the 10th largest cable company in the US.
Video ahead. → Read More
It looks like the police, at the behest of Sony, have raided the house of graf_chokolo, one of the preeminent members of the PS3 hacking scene. How about that for a chilling turn of events? → Read More
Barnes & Noble’s Nook is a solid ereading device, but it’s hard to wholeheartedly recommend it over the less expensive and arguably superior Amazon Kindle. Still, the Nook is doing just fine and B&N reported recently that they believe it has 25% of the domestic e-book market. That works out to be a larger marketshare that B&N has in physical books although that might change as Borders is in a bit of trouble. There wasn’t any specific numbers in reference to the 25% number, but that number is in line since the Nook is the second most popular ereading device. Not that there’s anything wrong with second place. → Read More
The iPhone is great for gaming… in some ways. The App Store as a distribution model? Fantastic. The finely-tuned development platform? Amazing! The lack of even a single physical face button beyond the one that exits the application? Ehhh, not so great.
While most game developers have learned to make do in this frightfully buttonless world, there are some ideas that simply require buttons. This has lead to a rather staggering number of games that draw their controls onto the touchscreen — which, for anyone who witnessed the control pad’s evolution from the palm-destroying corners of the NES to the pampering curves of today’s consoles, is a fairly terrifying idea. Playing a fighter game on a slab of tactility-free glass? No thanks.
Enter Joystickers’ Classics — they’re removable, reusable, arcade-style buttons built to give the iPhone (or just about any touchscreen device) that little bit of extra game. → Read More
Little Magic Stories from Chris O'Shea on Vimeo. Chris O’Shea makes great stuff using a hacked Kinect. This latest experiment is a performance system called Little Magic Stories. It uses a Kinect sensor and a glass screen to create a “Pepper’s Ghost” illusion. Kids can create and animate their own little characters and then interact with them, catching eggs, smacking bugs, and running wild on stage. → Read More
It isn’t often that you hear about a startup that’s remained in stealth through multiple multi-million funding rounds. But today, we’re meeting a company called Transphorm that’s done just that — and it’s making its debut in style. The company has just closed a $20 million Series C funding round led by Google Ventures, with participation from existing investors Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Foundation Capital, and Lux Capital. This brings the company’s total funding to $38 million since it was founded in 2007.
So what exactly does Transphorm do? The startup is focused on improving energy efficiency, namely in making power conversion less wasteful. CEO Umesh Mishra says that right now, we lose around 10% of the total electricity in the United States to energy conversions — when energy is converted from one form to another. If we could conserve and use that energy, he says we’d be saving more energy than is conserved by alternative sources like wind and solar (see chart). This would lead to billions of dollars in energy savings (the company estimates $40 billion a year in the US alone) and it’s obviously better for the environment, too. → Read More
Southwest Airlines, of Kevin Smith fame, has partnered with Apple to create an in-flight entertainment download store called InAirtainment. Users would connect to the Internet via in-flight Wi-Fi, then download music, movies, and TV shows. Southwest gets a small percentage of the fee. → Read More
Just Monday we were writing about Breakup Notifier, a Facebook app that raked in 100,000 users in less than 24 hours and as of 5 hours ago had a more than modest 3,673,484 users in its database … And then poof! It’s gone, blocked by Facebook.
To the uninitiated, Breakup Notifier sent you a helpful email notifying you whenever the object of your stalking affection changed their relationship status. It’s seems like Facebook has been on a cool app shutdown kick lately, also blocking the Dutch anti-smoking app Blackmail Yourself yesterday. → Read More
Barcelona, Spain
New York City
San Francisco, CA
