Sunday, September 12, 2010

GETJAR - Get Apps

Ilja Laurs
GETJAR | U.S.

Rebecca Marshall for TIME.

GetJar, based in San Mateo, Calif., offers more than 70,000 free downloadable mobile applications to cell-phone users of all stripes. It has quickly become the second largest mobile application storefront, behind only Apple's iTunes mobile-app store in terms of downloads. "You don't even have to know the name of your phone," says Ilja Laurs, the 34-year-old brain behind the site. GetJar detects the phone, model and platform of your phone and then offers the apps that are compatible. (Owners of iPhones and other closed platforms are out of luck, though.)

An economist by education and a mobile-games programmer by trade, Laurs conceived the idea for GetJar while developing games from his studio apartment in Vilnius, Lithuania. "Consumers spend much more time with mobile phones than their desktops, so it was easy to see that mobile as an industry would take off and be really big," he says. With less than $10,000 in his pocket and the help of his cousin and three friends, he launched a beta site in 2005. There, developers could try out their latest mobile apps on a variety of handsets. But Laurs soon discovered an avalanche of interest from developers wanting to distribute apps to consumers as well. He opened the doors to consumers, and the site exploded. "It was a crazy time. Traffic would double every two weeks until the end of the year without any marketing. It was purely viral promotion," he says. About 300,000 developers in 200 nations have signed up to submit apps; another 130,000 have registered as beta testers. The site now offers 73,000 apps, can handle 2,500 kinds of phones and has seen 1.05 billion apps downloaded to date. Laurs expects to hit 100 million downloads a month before the end of the year.

Read more: http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,2017050_2017049_2017039,00.html#ixzz0zKYriKAJ

The Gramateller ATM - Time Magazine

Lakshminarayan Kannan and Vijay Babu
VORTEX | India
Jyothy Karat for TIME.

When Lakshminarayan Kannan set out to design a low-cost ATM to help deliver banking to the rural poor, he had never used one before. When he was growing up in India, ATMs were a convenience of the wealthy. "I had seen ATMs from a distance through glass doors but had not gotten near one," he says. Kannan teamed up with Vortex CEO Vijay Babu to turn his inexperience into his advantage in creating an ATM that is everything traditional ones are not: low power, low cost, low maintenance and highly robust. The Gramateller ATM was designed not to be fussy. "Our thinking was, if a person can count and issue notes by a flick of the fingers, then it shouldn't consume a lot of power," Kannan says. The machine uses about as much electricity as a 70-watt lightbulb. Backup batteries and solar panels can keep it online if the grid fails. Vortex installed a biometric touch pad to combat fraud and assure villagers new to banking that their money is safe. The Gramateller is built to dispense soiled notes without a hiccup in villages where crisp bills are often suspected of being counterfeit. The company estimates that the sales potential of the $7,000 ATMs (vs. $20,000 for conventional ones) could be as high as 40,000 a year worldwide. "Developing countries' ATM market is highly underserved," says Babu.

Read more: http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,2017050_2017049_2017042,00.html#ixzz0zKW17GuU

NEURONETICS

Bruce Shook
NEURONETICS | U.S. View All
Colin M. Lenton for TIME.

For a good portion of the 15 million Americans fighting depression, the available treatments of counseling and medication bring scant relief. The next step — electroshock, or, as it has been rebranded, "electroconvulsive" therapy — bears a gothic stigma and has frightening side effects. But research into the brain's complex wiring is yielding new therapeutic avenues. Neuronetics, a Philadelphia-based start-up, has tapped that deepening vein of knowledge to develop a therapy called transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS). It uses a device that generates electrified magnetic impulses to stimulate the prefrontal cortex of the brain, the area that controls mood. That ultra-targeted tweak, channeled through a coil placed against the scalp, sparks a small arc of electrical activity in the brain, which in turn sets off chemical changes that elevate a patient's state of mind. Approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in 2008, TMS won't cure depression, but it may be a big step toward tamping its terrible impact. "I've seen what depression and the side effects of drug treatment do to people," says CEO Bruce Shook. "That painted a very vivid picture for me of how serious and debilitating a disorder this can be." TMS doesn't require anesthesia or sedation. It's usually administered in a doctor's office in a surprisingly relaxed 40-minute procedure. The patient remains awake, free to read or watch TV. There's a tiny risk of scalp burns, headaches and seizures. Some 200 doctors and institutions have each spent $70,000 to buy treatment stations. Dr. Martha Koo, a psychiatrist in Hermosa Beach, Calif., is seeing positive responses in about 70% of her TMS patients. "I certainly think it's an excellent tool to have in the psychiatry toolbox," she says. A typical patient undergoes 20 to 30 treatments over a six-week period. Cost: $8,000. Insurance won't cover the sessions, but that could change as adoption rates and demand increase. Says Dr. Philip G. Janicak of Rush University Medical Center in Chicago: "We are in the nascent stages of TMS playing a quite crucial role in psychiatry as a whole."

Read more: http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,2017050_2017049_2017044,00.html#ixzz0zKUUPOsn