Online Attorney Marketplace UpCounsel Raises $1.5 Million, Opens Its Patent Practice To All

UpCounsel has spent the last year building out its marketplace to provide its clients with affordable legal services. After serving more than 1,000 startups and small businesses, the company has raised $1.5 million and is announcing a few new products that should lower the cost of patent and real-estate transactions for clients.

The company was founded to connect startups and small businesses with legal help from independent attorneys. Businesses get the help they need without having to shell out big bucks to a law firm, attorneys get connected with new clients and additional work, and UpCounsel gets a small percentage for making the connection between the two. Everyone wins.

A few things have happened since we first wrote about the company. For one, UpCounsel has raised $1.5 million in seed funding from investors that include Homebrew, Bobby Yazdani, SV Angel, Collaborative Fund, Haroon Mokhtarzada, and other angels.

The funding comes as UpCounsel has seen growth not just in the number of attorneys on the platform, but also in companies using the service. Since launching 14 months ago, the marketplace has been used by more than 1,000 small and medium-sized businesses.

But as with all marketplace companies, UpCounsel needs to balance demand with supply. On that front, it has been busy getting more attorneys on board, in California and elsewhere. UpCounsel CEO Matt Faustman says that its roster is large enough to rival some of the largest law firms out there. In fact, he believes that the number of attorneys it has on the platform will be equivalent to one of the top 20 law firms in the world within the next six months.

UpCounsel has also been providing its attorneys with tools to better help each other out. While those in law firms can get guidance and help from others in the office, most independent attorneys are on their own. By building out its community, UpCounsel enables attorneys to network, get professional support, and even hire one another when they need additional help.

In addition to its funding, UpCounsel has opened up its international patent practice to companies in any jurisdiction. While most of its legal services are limited to California attorneys and clients, the patent practice had received enough interest that it made sense to make it available to clients elsewhere.

By making patent help avalable to all, UpCounsel is giving startups an opportunity to better compete with large incumbents, while also protecting themselves from patent trolls. According to Faustman, customers can save about 50 percent on patent work done through its platform compared to going through a firm. So far,

UpCounsel is also piloting fixed-fee legal services in its real estate practice. Given the number of jobs done through its system, it's been able to streamline certain processes and determine how much they should cost. By normalizing the cost structure of certain transactions, UpCounsel believes that it's able to significantly speed up the process.

For commercial real estate transactions, for instance, the company says that leases are typically processed three times faster and cost 40 percent less than if a company had to choose its own lawyer and have a lease reviewed.

Postmaster's Shipping API Now Helps Retailers Pack Their Boxes Smarter, Adds Free Tier

Postmaster, the Austin-based shipping API startup that helps its users send and track FedEx, UPS and USPS shipments, announced a number of new features and a new pricing model today that will make the service free for its users who make fewer than 50,000 API calls and send fewer than 5,000 packages per month.

Customers who send more pay $0.05 per shipment (with discounts for high-volume shippers) and the service now also features discounted rates for shippers who use USPS.

That's good news for the company's users, but the new "Box and Bin" packaging feature the company announced today is actually quite a bit more interesting. While being able to compare shipping prices and create labels is great, after all, that doesn't help users maximize the amount of good they can pack into a box - and the more boxes you send, the more expensive your shipment will be. To help businesses pack as much as possible into their boxes, the company now allows them to optimize their shipments by looking at the boxes in their inventory and creating a 3D diagram that shows them exactly how to best utilize the space.

"One of the problems that a high-volume retailer faces when fulfilling an order is determining the right size box to fit all the items in the order," said Jesse Lovelace, CEO and cofounder of Postmaster today. "If the retailer uses too big of a box, they will be charged more for their shipment due to the way parcel carriers calculate volumetric pricing. We're committed to helping ease the pain associated with shipping and logistics today, and are excited to offer even more value to retailers with the new Box and Bin feature, as well as our new pricing levels."

Tesla Takes A Breather Passing $184/Share Due To Outstanding Convertible Debt, Warrants

Tesla has been on a tear in 2013, showing its first quarterly profit, raising $1 billion in cash, paying off its government loan, and enjoying a more than 400% gain in its share price year to date.

Today, however, Tesla slipped 6%, settling around the $180 per share mark. After having risen to a 52 week high of $191.83, Tesla has eased. A good portion of the slip can likely be attributed to some early terms that got outdated quickly due to Tesla's meteoric rise.

There actually appear to be a few factors, including declining institutional investment and its stock price reaching levels that impact the convertible notes and warrants that Tesla sold in May. At that point in time, Tesla traded for under $100 per share.

In its August 7th investor letter, Tesla spelled out its fundraising activity during the quarter, including the sale of 4.5 million shares and the raising of $660 million in convertible debt. About 45% of those funds were used to repay a Federal loan, and a fee for repaying the debt ahead of schedule.

The convertible debt carries a 1.5% coupon rate, which is quite low, and on the lower end of expectations set at the time of sale. As the Wall Street Journal notes, the size of the convertible note offering was increased twice to $600 million, a figure that could rise to $660 million if "underwriters purchase additional shares."

They did. So, the full tally of new cash for Tesla tipped past the $1 billion mark.

Then its stock continue to rise. Here's Tesla on how it raised the set up the convertible debt to avoid potential dilution. Recall that Tesla traded for under $100 per share at the time of its issuance:

To mitigate the potential dilution impact from the issuance of convertible debt to our common shareholders, we also entered into a call spread to increase the effective conversion price from $125 to $184 per share. The call spread allows us to avoid incremental dilution from the convertible debt until our common share price climbs past $184.

Tesla recently went past the $184 per share mark, and then saw its stock fall. The company also issued warrants this May - the time of the share sale and debt issuance - that had a strike price of, you guessed it, $184.84. Those warrants are for 5.3 million shares, or around $1 billion at current valuation.

So, it seems that Telsa didn't anticipate its stock to perform as it has, and therefore the financial controls - likely set up for the long-term, given that the convertible debt were not due until 2018 - became somewhat moot. Crossing the $184 mark, Tesla's stock unlocked investor agency, pushing its share price down.

Add to that the fact that Tesla has had an incredible run over the summer that some are citing as perhaps too optimistic and we could be seeing more pullback over the next few weeks.

For more on the potentially dilutive effects of the convertible debt, which have been hedged, this chart is for you.

Image Credit: Wendell Oskay / Flickr CC

How Microsoft Built The Cameras In The Upcoming Kinect

Earlier this week I traveled to Microsoft's Mountain View campus to play with the company's new Kinect sensor. While there I met with a few of the team's engineers to discuss how they had built the new device.

Up front, two things: The new Kinect sensor is far cooler than I expected. Also, I touched an Xbox One.

The story of the Kinect device, both its first and second generations, has been a favorite Microsoft narrative for some time, as it fuses its product teams and basic research group in a way that demonstrates the potential synergy between the two.

The new Kinect sensor is a large improvement on its predecessor. Technically it has a larger field of vision, more total pixels, and a higher resolution that allows it to track the wrist of a child at 3.5 meters, Microsoft told me. I didn't have a kid with me, so I couldn't verify that directly.

It also contains a number of new vision modes that the end user won't see, but are useful for developers who want to track the human body more precisely and with less interference. They include a depth mode, an infrared view, and new body modeling tools to track muscle use and body part orientation.

When in its depth image mode, acting as a radar of sorts, each of the 220,000 pixels that the Kinect sensor supports records data independently. The result is a surprisingly crisp mapping of the room you are in.

The new Kinect also contains a camera setting that is light invariant, in that it works the same whether there is light in the room or not. In practice this means you can Kinect in the dark, and that light pollution - say, aiming two floodlights directly at the sensor - doesn't impact its performance. I did get to test that directly, and it worked as promised. No, I don't know the candlepower of the light array we used, but it was enough to suck staring into directly.

So, developers can now accept motion data from the Kinect without needing to worry about the user being properly lit, or having their data go to hell if someone turns on the overhead light, or time sets the sun. The new Kinect also supports new joints in its skeletal tracking, in case you need to better watch a user's hands move about.

The smallest object the first Kinect could detect was 7.5 centimeters. The new Kinect, while executing a 60 percent larger field of view, can see things as small as 2.5 centimeters. And it can track up to six people, from two before.

The first Kinect device became the fastest-selling consumer device in history. Its existence helped keep the Xbox 360 relevant, even as the console aged. Microsoft is releasing a new Kinect sensor with its upcoming Xbox One. Both go on sale November 22 and will compete with Sony's soon-to-be-released PlayStation 4.

Origins

For a one-year generational update, I feel like the new Kinect is worthy progress on its predecessor. I sat down with Microsoft's Sunil Acharya, Travis Perry, and Eyal Krupka to track the origins of how the new hardware was designed. It's a short story of collaboration, akin to what came together for the original Kinect device.

Most basically, Microsoft wanted to place a "time-of-flight" camera into the new Kinect. Such a device works by measuring the time it takes for light that it emits to return. Given that speed is a bit quick, and the new Kinect wanted to absorb a massive field of data in real-time, challenges cropped up.

Two of our aforementioned Softies, Eyal from Microsoft Research's Israel group, and Travis from the mother corporation's Architecture and Silicon Management team, collaborated on turning time-of-flight from a more academic exercise into a commercial product. Input came from what Microsoft described to me as "multiple groups" to improve the camera.

Working as a cross-team group, the time-of-flight problem was essentially solved, but it led to another set of issues: data overload and blur.

In short, with 6.5 million pixels needing processing each second, and a requirement to keep processing loads low to ensure strong Xbox One performance, the Kinect group was pretty far from out of the soup. Algorithms were then developed to reduce processor hit, 'clean up' edge data to prevent objects in the distance from melting into each other, and to help cut down on motion blur.

According to Eyal, executing those software tasks was only made possible by having the camera "set" earlier in the process. If the hardware hadn't been locked, the algorithms would have learned from imperfect or incorrect data sets. You want those algorithms to learn on the final data, and not on noisy data, or beta data, he explained.

That hardware is multi-component, including an aggregation piece (Microsoft was vague, but I think it is a separate chip) that collects the sensor data from the Kinect and pools it. Microsoft declined to elaborate on where the "cleaning" process takes place. I suspect that as the firm noted on its need to keep processing cycles low for the incoming data, it at least partially takes place on the console itself.

The end result of all of the above is a multi-format data feed for the developer to use in any way they wish. Microsoft spends heavily on the more than 1,000 developers and Ph.D.s that it employs at Microsoft Research who are free to pursue long-term research that isn't connected to current products. But it does like to share when those lengthy investments lead to knowledge that it applies to commercial devices, such as the Kinect.

What to take from this? Essentially that even before the re-org, Microsoft had at least some functional intra-party collaboration in place. And, that a neat device came out of it.

The next challenge for the team? Make it smaller.

Iran's foreign minister in hospital after being 'misquoted' over US phone call

Mohammad Javad Zarif says on Facebook he has back pain after newspaper reports him describing contact as 'inappropriate'

Iran's foreign minister has admitted himself to hospital complaining of back pain and spasms he says he has suffered after a hardline newspaper misquoted him on the subject of the president's contact with the US.

Mohammad Javad Zarif posted a comment on his Facebook page saying he had cancelled his appointments and gone to hospital late on Tuesday having become upset after Kayhan daily "misquoted" him as saying Hassan Rouhani's recent telephone conversation with President Barack Obama was "inappropriate".

Although Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has backed Rouhani's decision to open diplomatic contact with the US, he has hinted that some aspects of those efforts were "not appropriate". This was understood to refer to the Obama-Rouhani phone conversation during the Iranian president's visit to the UN general assembly in New York last month.

iPad Mini 2 And iPad 5 To Feature 8 Megapixel Cameras

Apple are expected to announced the new iPad Mini 2 and iPad 5 at a press event later this month, the event is rumored to take place on the 15th of October, this has yet to be confirmed by Apple.

The iPad Mini 2 and iPad 5 will come with a range of new features, both devices are rumored to feature the new Apple A7 64-bit processor and will come with the latest version of Apple's mobile OS, Apple iOS 7.

P-I-N-G-O And Pingo Was Its Name-O

What is Pingo you ask? Well it's an addictive and fun game that is a poker, bingo hybrid. Pingo uses a standard 52-card deck, on a 5 5 grid. Points are generated by getting poker hands within the grid in any direction, including vertical, horizontal and diagonal. Pingo's early inception includes two game-play modes, Casual that will let you play through all cards without the restraint of time and Speed Mode which will garner more points and multipliers the quicker you play them. If you are like me and aren't the best with poker hands, fear not, there's also a few tutorial levels to point you in the right direction.

Pingo was developed by Eve Park and her 1-Pup Games developing team for the OUYA. If you are unaware of the OUYA it's the upcoming Android based console that not only boasts a low-cost for consumers but is also very indie-developer friendly. The mobile games we love so much will finally make their way to the big screens of our TV's through OUYA. There will also be the added bonus of having a controller.

Pingo is also currently a contender in the OUYA Create Contest. Pingo is one of 166 games vying for the title of OUYA Create Contest winner. Please check out the video after the article, it will help Eve (AKA The Girl With The Blue Hair) and her developing team at 1-Pup Games in bringing one of the most addictive games better and more content.

I was able to test out the Pingo Demo and was immediately hooked. Growing up one of my early gaming addictions was the AOL game Slingo, I continue to play Slingo to this day on my smart phone. Pingo is a game that bears a few similarities but yet still manages to be fresh and unique. Fans of Windows Solitaire games and of course Slingo will love Pingo.

So go ahead and check out the video below. Not only will you be helping out a fellow Geek but I think you might just enjoy learning about a game that everyone will be playing in the near-future.