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PBteen Launches New Design Blog Specifically for Teens

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PBteen Launches New Design Blog Specifically for Teens
The Stylehouse aims to help teens gather fresh ideas for their space, their style and their lives. To celebrate the blog's launch, teens are invited to visit The Stylehouse today through March 14th and enter for a chance to win a $ 500 PBteen gift card.
Read more on MarketWatch

Taking Care of Business
Andrew's mom, of course, had kept the star, and when they heard we had revisited the tradition, Andrew's dad made all three of his children their own stars as Christmas gifts. …. Life is like a business, keeping track of things, paying bills …
Read more on Maine Antique Digest

On Academic Labor
That's part of the business model. It's the same as hiring temps in industry or what they call “associates” at Wal-Mart, employees that aren't owed benefits. It's a part of a corporate business model designed to reduce labor costs and to increase labor …
Read more on The Real News Network (blog)

EfficientIP Launches End-to-End Network Design and Deployment Solution

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EfficientIP Launches End-to-End Network Design and Deployment Solution
Network architects are increasingly demanding a more rapid and error-free way to take their infrastructure designs through to deployment, and now with NetChange we provide them with the means to do this." NetChange … Using NetChange, organizations …
Read more on SYS-CON Media (press release)

Are You Hiding Money From Your Financial Advisor?
I can only conclude a few things from that statement, which I'll address shortly. Having a financial advisor or planner create a comprehensive financial plan requires multiple meetings, hours of preparation and analysis, and sometimes considerable expense.
Read more on Huffington Post

The Demise of Mt. Gox
Mt. Gox's bankruptcy, which is similar to Chapter 11 in the United States, means that a bankruptcy supervisor will be expected to develop a restructuring plan and will be responsible for handling any payment of claim distributions to its creditors. The …
Read more on New York Times

Housecall, a New App for iOS that Connects Users with Trusted Home Service Professionals, Launches in San Diego

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SAN DIEGO, CA (PRWEB) November 20, 2013

HouseCall, the app for your house, announced the launch of its services in San Diego today, with more markets coming soon. HouseCall takes the hassle out of home maintenance by connecting users to trusted neighborhood service professionals (Pros) at the push of a button. Homeowners can order everything from an electrician, emergency plumber to tech geek support. This video shows just how easy HouseCall makes it.

HouseCall identifies and then curates independent service Pros in a homeowner’s neighborhood and makes them easy to find, so they don’t have to. No more spending hours reading online reviews, asking for recommendations and then negotiating prices. With HouseCall users select the service they need, view picture profiles and ratings of available Pros in their area, and the fixed-price they charge. HouseCall gives homeowners a seamless way to book and pay for both scheduled, and on-demand, home improvement help from trusted Pros.

“We built HouseCall because we had the same problem that every homeowner has – it’s tough to find good, reliable, local help,” said Ian Heidt, CEO and co-founder of HouseCall. “HouseCall puts reviews and prices in one spot and users are kept up-to-date on the status of a job from start to finish. We are bringing ease and transparency to the world of local home services.”

In just a few easy steps, homeowners can order the following services: Audio & TV, Carpet Cleaning, Electrical, Handyman, Landscaping, Maid Service, Painting, Plumbing, Security System Consultation and Install, Smart Home Setup, Tech Help, Windows & Exterior and Holiday/Seasonal Tasks (hanging Christmas lights). HouseCall is constantly adding new services and taking user suggestions for services they’d like to see.

1) Download HouseCall in the App Store on their iPhone.

2) View the profile, job details, and prices of nearby local Pros.

3) Schedule service or get on-demand help.

4) When a Pro is en-route, users will see them on a map. Once the job is completed to the user’s satisfaction, payment is processed automatically with the credit card they have on file. There is no need to tip.

5) Wrap it up with a rating of the service. Ratings can only be done by people who have actually used a service Pro to ensure they are fair.

There are also many benefits to Pros who use the app. Most importantly, HouseCall makes it easier for Pros to find additional work by connecting them to a marketplace of homeowners and jobs. Pros see nearby service requests and can also get local work during their downtime. It also helps them manage their workflow with easy-to-use scheduling tools, helps them form the connection with new and returning clients, and provides automatic payment and streamlined digital invoices for every job.

“The Pros version of HouseCall allows home service professionals to book more jobs by giving them the mobile tools to do so,” said Roland Ligtenberg, co-founder of HouseCall. “We bring real-time opportunities to our Pros, organize schedules, generate invoices, and process payments so that they can focus on completing jobs and making HouseCall users happy.”

HouseCall was founded by a team of mobile technology innovators who simply wanted a better way to maintain their homes. Prior to founding HouseCall Ian Heidt, Adam Perry-Pelletier, Chris Zwickilton, Roland Ligtenberg, and Reza Olfat pioneered smartphone technologies together as a team at Qualcomm. They also helped found the company’s experimental division, Qualcomm Labs, an incubator focused on leading innovation in new wireless product development and developed the groundbreaking Gimbal platform.

HouseCall is funded by a global venture capital group, e.ventures, who were initial investors in companies such as Angie’s List and Groupon. Their advisors include the San Diego general manager of Uber and former general manager of new products at Service Magic (now HomeAdvisor). HouseCall is also a member of EvoNexus, San Diego’s only community-supported, fully pro-bono technology incubator.

ABOUT HOUSECALL

HouseCall is the app for your house. Launching first in San Diego, with more markets coming soon, HouseCall takes the hassle out of home maintenance by connecting you to trusted neighborhood service professionals at the push of a button. Homeowners can order everything from an electrician, emergency plumber to tech geek support.

Prior to founding HouseCall, Ian Heidt, Adam Perry-Pelletier, Chris Zwickilton, Roland Ligtenberg, and Reza Olfat developed smartphone technologies at Qualcomm. Together they helped found the company’s innovation division, Qualcomm Labs, an incubator focused on leading innovation in new wireless product development and developed the groundbreaking Gimbal platform. HouseCall is funded by a global venture capital group, e.ventures, who were initial investors in companies like Angie’s List and Groupon. Their advisors include the San Diego general manager of Uber and former general manager of new products at Service Magic (now HomeAdvisor).

HouseCall can be downloaded in the App Store on your iOS device, appstore.com/HouseCall.

For more information please visit, http://www.tryhousecall.com.

Connect with HouseCall: facebook.com/HouseCallApp, twitter.com/HouseCall, youtube.com/HouseCallApp, instagram.com/housecall, #housecall.

Download the HouseCall media kit.







Related Venture Capital Press Releases

ConnXus Launches New Subscription Plan for Diverse Suppliers

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ConnXus Launches New Subscription Plan for Diverse Suppliers
ConnXus is a web-based service based in Mason, Ohio, that helps corporations locate, evaluate and engage small, minority- and woman-owned and diverse businesses. ConnXus corporate customers … businesses across the U.S.". ConnXus will continue to …
Read more on SYS-CON Media (press release)

Blackboard Acquires Student Jobs Site MyEdu
Blackboard Inc. – a global leader in education software with a learning management system used nationwide – announced a new acquisition Tuesday, saying that it would buy student jobs site MyEdu. … On the Blackboard Blog Bhatt went on to describe …
Read more on In The Capital

Celebrate Data Privacy Day on Jan. 28th and Empower Others to Protect Their …
EDUCAUSE Data Privacy Webinar – Online Webinar (Jan 30): Privacy expert and publisher of Privacy Journal Robert Ellis Smith will join EDUCAUSE for a free webinar discussing the NSA data collection program. … Intel and Microsoft are Leading Sponsors …
Read more on SYS-CON Media (press release)

Award-Winning Photographer Brett Simison Launches Crowd-Funding Campaign to Create Exhibition

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Vergennes, VT (PRWEB) September 28, 2013

Vermont-based photographer Brett Simison has launched a campaign via the crowd-funding website Kickstarter to create his upcoming photographic exhibition “The Pane in Empty Rooms”, a portfolio of images made in and around poet Robert Frost’s summer cabin in Ripton, Vermont.

“Not only is Kickstarter.com a good way to raise money to get your project off the ground, it’s another avenue to promote your work and have it seen by more people,” said Simison of the popular money-raising website. Typical projects on Kickstarter run for 30 days, and a project must meet its funding goal or else it fails and all pledges are cancelled. Projects offer tiered rewards to backers as a way of thanking them for their support.

Simison’s goal is to create large fine art photographic prints from the portfolio for exhibitions beginning in 2014. “One of the things that makes ‘Pane’ so unique is that it was photographed entirely with film on large and medium format cameras. The image detail and tonality of real black and white film is stunning, and I wanted to make sure the viewer can see it all. Printing large photographs was the obvious choice,” he said.

The project has until October 20 to raise its $ 6,000 goal, and if it succeeds that money will go towards the purchase of equipment and materials to print and mount the exhibition of 20 black and white photographs. Rewards to backers, which include a range of signed fine art archival photographs, are scheduled to ship in December 2013. The first exhibition for “The Pane in Empty Rooms” will open at the Vermont Center for Photography in Brattleboro, Vermont in January 2014.

For more information, please visit http://www.brettsimison.com/kickstarter.

About Brett Simison

Brett Simison is an award-winning editorial, commercial, and fine art photographer based in Vermont. His work has appeared in publications such as Outside Magazine, The New York Times, National Geographic Online, and Backpacker Magazine from assignments throughout the United States and abroad. The native of Citronelle, Alabama now lives with his wife Amy and son Connor in the city of Vergennes, Vermont. His website is http://www.brettsimison.com.







Find More Crowd Funding Press Releases

SmartlockReviews.com Launches New Smart Lock Comparison Chart

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Los Angeles, CA (PRWEB) October 01, 2013

SmartlockReviews.com, a website that offers in-depth smart lock reviews, has just announced the launch of a new smart lock comparison chart. The site is devoted to putting an end to buyer’s remorse, at least when it comes to one techie-gadget in particular—the smart lock.

Wikipedia describes the phenomenon of buyer’s remorse as a sense of regret experienced after making a purchase. Although the feeling is frequently associated with the purchase of an expensive item such as a car or house, it can also be related to electronics, technical gadgets, and other retail items. According to an article by AARP, the average American experiences some level of regret with about 80 percent of the stuff they purchase within the first year of buying it. SmartlockReviews.com is dedicated to solving this problem with smart lock purchases.

Recently, hands free automated smart locks have rapidly increased in popularity. Unikey officially started it all off with their brainchild, the Kwikset Kevo lock. Soon afterward, Lockitron, August, and Goji popped up with their own versions of this remote locking technology.

Smart locks basically allow users to lock or unlock their deadbolt electronically in an automated fashion, by using a smart phone, accessing the website, or by using a key fob or similar remote device. Smart locks not only allow keyless access, but also provide the ability to grant access, or send an electronic key, to an individual without having to go through the trouble of physically handing them a key.

For example, if the in-laws are coming to town, smart lock owners can simply send an electronic key to their phone. The same is true for the plumber who is scheduled to fix that leaky sink—people can just send him or her an electronic key. Users can grant one time access, or schedule an electronic key to expire after a certain amount of time.

So, why would consumers need an entire website devoted to the pros, cons, and explanations of the different smart locks? As the editors of SmartlockReviews.com explain, “The average consumer has the ability to research almost every gadget out there. Just by comparing the features of each brand, they can generally determine which one best fits their needs. With smart locks, the scenario is quite a bit different. All of the brands may seem similar upon first glance, but the details reveal huge differences, which will definitely affect consumer satisfaction, and could potentially affect their safety.”

SmartlockReviews.com has gone, and will continue to go into great lengths to investigate the details of the latest smart lock products, which have taken the gadget world by storm. They lay out the details with insightful articles, as well as the newly-launched easy to read chart, which is the result of weeks of product research and company investigations.

Unique topics covered on this chart include safety, potential for the manufacturer to fail on their production promise, and situations which could leave the consumer wishing they had opted for a different brand.

“Only Unikey has been picked up by a major manufacturer,” the editors of SmartlockReviews.com report, in reference to Unikey’s partnership with Kwikset, a leading manufacturer of residential locks, “and at least one of the companies offering a smart lock is a crowd funded start-up, without any real experience with large scale, retail manufacturing. If the consumer has the facts, they can decide for themselves which product is right for them.”

Currently, the brands covered in the chart include Kwikset Kevo powered by Unikey, Lockitron, August, and Goji. The chart is available at http://www.smartlockreviews.com/smart-lock-comparison-chart/.

About SmartlockReviews.com:

For consumers who are looking to buy a smart lock for their home or business, but don’t know which solution to choose, SmartlockReviews.com is their one stop destination for smart lock reviews. It provides a comprehensive comparison chart, features and benefits of the technology, as well as other pertinent information that will help people when making a purchasing decision. For more information, please visit http://www.smartlockreviews.com/.







Tynker Launches World's First At-home Visual Programming Course for Elementary and Middle School Students

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Mountain View, CA (PRWEB) August 06, 2013

Tynker (http://www.Tynker.com), a leading education startup that enables schools and teachers to help children develop programming skills and computational thinking using a visual approach, today announced the introduction of Tynker™ for Home. Tynker for Home follows the highly successful introduction of Tynker™ for Schools in April of this year. To date, hundreds of schools and thousands of teachers have used Tynker for School in their classrooms to help students create animated stories, physics games, math-based art and more.

“Teachers and parents alike share our vision of enabling children to learn programming so they can become makers for the digital age,” said Krishna Vedati, Founder and CEO of Tynker, “Since launching Tynker for Schools to unprecedented demand, the most common request from students and parents was for a version of Tynker that could be accessed at home. So we significantly advanced our release schedule and are introducing Tynker for Home so kids can begin discovering and learning programming skills in their own homes and share their pursuits in real-time with their parents.”

The at-home edition of Tynker is built on the same visual programming platform as Tynker for Schools, but designed specifically to make self-paced learning at home easy and engaging for children. To launch Tynker for Home, the company partnered with Dave McFarland, author of several programming books from O’Reilly including the highly popular “The Missing Manual” series for Javascript and CSS. Working with Tynker, McFarland created an Introduction to Programming course that children will find challenging and fun to work through. The course’s 16 chapters are filled with self-guided lessons, puzzles, tutorials, quizzes, challenge missions and training videos.

Parents can enroll their children into the Introduction to Programming course at http://www.Tynker.com. The completely self-paced course is designed for children in fourth through eighth grades and costs $ 50 per student. The course never expires, and tuition also includes unlimited use of the Tynker Workshop—Tynker’s unique programming platform, game design tools, character gallery and multi-media library, with more than 5,000 sounds, animations, images and scenes.

The Introduction to Programming course covers basic programming concepts: creating scenes, playing sounds, moving characters, conditionals and repetition, animation, handling keyboard and mouse events, pen drawing, collision detection, keeping score and more. Students are introduced to the concepts in an interactive framework with narration, videos, guided tutorials and projects. Students are also encouraged to innovate and build their own projects, and are assessed when they solve coding puzzles and take quizzes during the course. When students complete the course, they can keep experimenting and using the Tynker platform to program additional apps and games, building on the skills they learned in the course.

“When my 8-year-old excitedly pulled me to the computer last evening and showed me the projects he has created on Tynker, I was totally blown away!” said Brian Guan, parent of a child in the Palo Alto School District. “Being a geek dad, I’ve always wanted to teach my boys how to program, but was afraid that it was too soon. So when I saw my son build a project right in front of me, my jaw dropped. Thanks, Tynker, for showing us this wonderful tool!”

About Tynker

Tynker helps children develop programming and computational thinking skills in a fun, intuitive and imaginative way. Tynker builds a strong foundation in STEM skills (science, technology, engineering and math) and other critical thinking abilities, preparing children for 21st century degrees, careers and lives. Tynker’s innovative visual programming language, interactive self-paced tutorials, and the engaging Tynker Workshop empower children to create complex and creative projects.

Tynker was founded by a seasoned team of technology entrepreneurs who realized what they wanted most now was to give children the critical life skills of design thinking and programming, to become makers for the technologies of tomorrow. Tynker is based in Mountain View, CA and is backed by 500 Startups, Cervin Ventures, Felicis Ventures, GSV Capital, NEA, New School Ventures, and prominent angel investors.

Additional Quotes About Tynker

“Tynker has become one of the most popular activities in my technology curriculum,” said Don Fitz-Roy, Director of Computing at WNS Schools. “Children share what they have learned. The addition of a simple physics engine is a welcome addition for budding game designers. I have seen my students motivated like never before.”

“We believe at the Children’s Creativity Museum that the success of the next generation hinges not only on what they know,” said Michael Nobleza, Executive Director of the Children’s Creativity Museum, San Francisco, “but also on their ability to think and act creatively. Tynker’s interactive and engaging products foster the kind of creative thinking that today’s youth need to be successful as tomorrow’s technological innovators.”







Cleveland Accounting Firm Launches Skoda Minotti Marketing Services

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Cleveland, OH (PRWEB) February 5, 2009

Skoda Minotti, a CPA, business and financial advisory firm with offices in Cleveland and Akron, is pleased to announce its latest service offering: Marketing Services. Skoda Minotti Marketing Services will provide corporate brand development and integrated marketing communications planning along with advertising, creative, media and public relations services.

“We established Skoda Minotti Marketing Services to further complement our firm’s ability to deliver on the promise of business growth for our clients,” said Skoda Minotti chairman Greg Skoda. “Our clients have experienced significant benefits from the addition of other business services such as information technology, telecommunications and financial staffing. We now have clients asking if we can help them market more effectively.”

The new group will be led by managing director, Jonathan Ebenstein. Ebenstein has over 15 years of marketing experience. He has spent 10 years working with advertising agencies, including Malone Advertising, the largest advertising agency in Ohio.

“On the surface, marketing may seem like an unusual service offering from a CPA Firm, but we are more than CPA’s to our clients,” Ebenstein said. “We are their most trusted advisors. Adding marketing services to the mix is really a natural fit that can fill an essential void in their business plans. We can be even more effective at keeping everyone on the same page by ensuring that every decision, marketing included, fits the overall strategic plan of our client’s business.”

To learn more about Skoda Minotti Marketing Services, visit the Skoda Minotti Blog.

About Skoda Minotti:

Skoda Minotti (888-201-4484) is a CPA, business and financial advisory firm. Clients of the firm range from closely-held businesses to public companies, from individuals and partnerships to corporations, trusts and estates. Skoda Minotti is an independent member of the BDO Seidman Alliance. The Alliance offers its vast resources and technical expertise to clients through over 200 firms and 360 locations across the United States and 621 firms in 107 countries globally.

Recognition:

Inc. 500 List of fastest growing private companies
Inc. 500 Fastest Growing Private Companies Hall of Fame
Weatherhead 100 Award for outstanding growth companies in Northeast Ohio
NorthCoast99 Award honoring the best workplaces for top talent in Northeast Ohio
Inside Public Accounting – Recognized as one of the country’s best managed accounting firms
Crain’s Cleveland Business Cool Places to Work Award
Multiple time – NEO Success Award winner for top public, private and emerging companies in Northeast Ohio
Multiple-time World Class Customer Service Award winner
Multiple-time Practical Accountant’s Practice Innovation Award winner
Multiple-time Pillar Award for Community Service winner

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Bay-Area Based KO Websites Launches New Website

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Bay-Area Based KO Websites Launches New Website
KO Websites Unveils new company website, offering two new powerful online marketing products- Mobile Websites and Full Service Social Media Marketing. KO Websites, a Castro Valley-based website design, marketing, and search engine optimization firm, …
Read more on PR Web (press release)

The Future of Social Networks
In the long run, a blog that provides valuable content that's updated frequently is your BEST and most stable social media marketing tool. That's why almost 90% of firms in a recent study by Awareness plan to increase their blogging efforts.
Read more on Business 2 Community

Why You Should Read Engagement Marketing
The second thing I like is the marketing blueprint that the book lays out. Chapter 1 starts with the “engagement marketing cycle” — a framework for growing sales with the help of social media. Think of it as a 3-step process: Step 1 is that you …
Read more on Business Insider