Tiburon, California Entrepreneur Jon Fisher’s latest venture, Crowd Optic, signs two of the largest sports and live entertainment companies in the world for real-time tagging and tracking moving objects in using only the native smartphone environment…

Full Story at VatorNews>>

vatornews: the trusted source for emerging tech

Moon Express Deploys CrowdOptic to Enhance Launch and Tracking of Lunar Lander

San Francisco, CA (April 19 2011) -Moon Express Inc., a privately funded lunar transportation and data services company, and CrowdOptic, a revolutionary new technology that places text “captions” on objects in real time while they’re in motion, today announced that Moon Express has deployed CrowdOptic to enhance the launch and tracking of its lunar lander technology tests carried on the Airship Eureka. 

The CrowdOptic application, currently available on the iPhone, will allow spectators at the live launches of Moon Express Moon missions to view the ascent of the rocket through their camera viewer along with descriptive captions describing the ascent in progress, captions such as “Moon Express Launch at altitude 500 meters.” The captions will update in real time as the rocket blazes upward and photos taken of the rocket will include the captions, enhancing their value for sharing with friends and posting to online social networks. 

“We are pleased that live spectators at our launch will be able to experience a (rocket) launch in this new way, visually enhanced by technology that provides every spectator with the same up- to-the-moment status updates that we see through our own communications equipment,” said Dr. Robert Richards, CEO at Moon Express. “With CrowdOptic, every spectator can receive a picture of our rocket the moment it breaks a launch milestone.” 

“I cannot think of a more spectacular venue to debut our technology than this one, in support of a team that is quite literally shooting for the Moon,” said Jon Fisher, CEO of CrowdOptic. “It is a privilege to work with the MoonEx team, to help advance this important development in commercial space.” Moon Express is utilizing the Eureka Airship, owned and operated by Airship Ventures, Inc., to test a new mini-radar system that is essential to the company’s mission to build and launch spacecraft capable of completing explorations on the Moon. 

At the first successful Airship launch of the mini-radar system completed April 9, 2011, CrowdOptic successfully tracked and tagged the airship with altitude information during the live launch, performing the feat from the spectator gallery on the tarmac of Moffett Field, part of the NASA Ames Research Center, without prior integration with Moon Express systems, purely through its own proprietary software on native cell phone platforms. “We demonstrated today that our software can track and tag any moving object and can be set up virtually on the fly,” said Fisher. 

About Moon Express
Inspired by new White House policies supporting increased government partnership with the commercial space sector, Moon Express, Inc. was formed as a privately funded lunar transportation and data services company to establish new avenues for commercial space activities beyond Earth orbit. Moon Express emerged quickly onto the commercial space scene in October when announced by NASA as one of six U.S. companies selected for its “ILDD” commercial lunar data program. Moon Express received further notoriety when announced by the X PRIZE Foundation as a new contender in the $30M Google Lunar X PRIZE competition. For more information about team Moon Express, Inc., please visit www.moonexpress.com. 

About CrowdOptic
CrowdOptic is a geo-location and events-based photo sharing company. 

CrowdOptic is developing useful and innovative ways for people to connect and engage with events. Our proprietary technology enables people watching an event to simply point their smartphone at a moving object and have information broadcast back to them, thereby enhancing the experience. 

CrowdOptic is a privately-held company based in San Francisco, CA, and co-founded by [Tiburon] entrepreneur Jon Fisher. For more information, visit www.crowdoptic.com. 

Press Contacts:

Daven Maharaj
Moon Express
650-646-5356 begin_of_the_skype_highlighting 650-646-5356 end_of_the_skype_highlighting
media@moonexpress.com

Danielle Cole
CrowdOptic
media@crowdoptic.com
650-291-3440 begin_of_the_skype_highlighting 650-291-3440 end_of_the_skype_highlighting

CrowdOptic is a geo-location and events-based photo sharing company.

We’re developing useful and innovative ways for people to connect and engage with events. Our proprietary technology enables people watching an event to simply point their smartphone at a moving object and have information broadcast back to them, thereby enhancing the experience.

Moving objects such as sailboats, baseball players and race cars are tracked in real time and tagged with relevant, real-time information. This information travels with the photo as it is shared across social networks.

What is that sailboat’s speed and heading? What is that baseball player’s On Base and Slugging Percentages? Point your phone and find out. Take a picture and share.

For advertisers, CrowdOptic takes display advertising beyond the realm of fixed physical inventory, such as athletes’ jerseys and billboards, and makes any object in view of a live audience a potential advertising vehicle. What’s more, CrowdOptic makes it possible to craft a campaign and message on the fly during the course of a live sporting or entertainment event, based on the action itself, as it’s unfolding.

Our Team
CrowdOptic is a privately-held company based in San Franisco, CA and co-founded by serial entrepreneur Jon Fisher. For more information, visit www.crowdoptic.com.

President Obama had 5.8M Twitter followers at last glance. A Twitter post released this evening read “It’s time for Democrats and Republicans to focus on our shared responsibilities to work together and deliver results” that was viewed 15.6k times. That is a viewer rate of .003 assuming all traffic is from Twitter that is certainly not the case. The next post, “We’ve got to keep fighting for every job, for every new business, for every opportunity to get this economy moving” posted 2 days ago was viewed 16k times for the same viewing rate. Scanning 3 weeks ago to “There’s no reason why our tax code should reward businesses for creating jobs overseas” was viewed 22.5k times that is still only .003 even assuming the President had fewer followers.

Make no mistake my criticism is of Twitter and not the President in this context.

SEE MORE AT JON B FISHER’S BLOG

From Bloomberg: The problem for anyone trying to analyze Bank of America’s $2.3 trillion balance sheet is that it’s largely impenetrable. Some portions, though, are so delusional that they invite laughter. Consider, for instance, the way the company continues to account for its acquisition of Countrywide Financial, the disastrous subprime lender at the center of the housing bust, which it bought for $4.2 billion in July 2008.

Goodwill Purchase

Here’s how Bank of America allocated the purchase price for that deal. First, it determined that the fair value of the liabilities at Countrywide exceeded the mortgage lender’s assets by $200 million. Then it recorded $4.4 billion of goodwill, a ledger entry representing the difference between Countrywide’s net asset value and the purchase price.

That’s right. Countrywide’s goodwill supposedly was worth more than Countrywide itself. In other words, Bank of America paid $4.2 billion for the company, even though it thought the value there was less than zero.

Since completing that acquisition, Bank of America has dropped the Countrywide brand. The company’s home-loan division has reported $13.5 billion of pretax losses. Yet Bank of America still hasn’t written off any of its Countrywide goodwill.

Dubrowski, the company spokesman, declined to comment when I asked him why not. In its latest quarterly report with the SEC, Bank of America said it had determined the asset wasn’t impaired. It might as well be telling the public not to believe any of the numbers on its financial statements.

SEE MORE AT JON B FISHER’S BLOG

Government can get things done by mandate. The success of my last business venture was due in large part to a 2005 government demand that banks upgrade security by end of 2006. In a Gartner study it was reported that to meet this mandate banks spent three million dollars on average and created thousands of jobs. Government can get businesses to hire immediately in areas where they have some regulative control.

The government should mandate that all hospitals place medical records online by the end of 2011 and should offer start-ups assistance with a levy of zero capital gains on stock sales. Fortune 500 vendors will get 80% of this business creating some jobs and the 20% to start-ups translates to thousands of new jobs. Similar efficiency formulas applied to other regulated vertical markets including online insurance claims, legal arbitration and purchasing enables a government fueled technology boom.

We need to build and rebuild online, not only offline, infrastructure and the stimulus required is mandates, not quantitative easing.

SEE MORE AT JON B FISHER’S BLOG

In The Battle for the Soul of Capitalism, Bogle argues that our current system has undergone ” ‘a pathological mutation’ from traditional owners’ capitalism to a new form, managers’ capitalism.”

I couldn’t get our garbage cans out this morning so the (owner) of Mill Valley Refuse Service picked them up so we could avoid the weekend rains. Most small businesses in this country are actually owned by someone/entity that is the reason they’re run well like Mill Valley Refuse or at least run well enough to survive. Most big businesses, owned by mutual funds instead of management, operate accordingly.

SEE MORE AT JON B FISHER’S BLOG

Funding Your Startup – the Art of Strategic Entrepreneurship with Jon Fisher
Columbia Business School

SEE MORE AT JON B FISHER’S BLOG

TechColumbus and the Ohio TechAngel Funds invite you to join us for a luncheon and engaging discussion with entrepreneur and best-selling author Jon B. Fisher.

The basic idea behind Strategic Entrepreneurism is simple yet vital: to convince the start-up entrepreneur to refocus his or her vision for their venture. Fisher’s methods envision conceiving and designing a company that is attractive enough for a more dominant company to consider as an acquisition.

SEE MORE AT JON B FISHER’S BLOG

You have the dual option of growing or being acquired. Your company still has the chance to become that one in ten that survives long enough to become a leader in its industry. But if your company falls in with those nine out of ten that never survive long enough, you’ll still have a way to make money. Setting up your company to be acquired is nothing more than setting your company up for success in whatever form that requires, and that should be the goal of every entrepreneur no matter what business you’re in.

SEE MORE AT JON B FISHER’S BLOG