Placester Raises $2.5M For Its "Wix for Real Estate" US Service

Placester, the Wix for real estate, has raised a $2.5 million seed round led by Boston-based Romulus Capital. With its new investment, the company seeks to expand its online marketing offering throughout the United States.

Other investors in this round include David Anderson, TechStars founder David Cohen, Angel Street Capital, Adam Berrey, Bob Mason, Josh Summers, Jennifer Lum, and other Boston investors. Placester?s co-founder and CEO Matthew Barba tells us that he plans on using the new funds to help with customer acquisition and get more real estate agents in the US to use its service.

Romulus Capital?s Krishna Gupta says that he believes Placester is filling a ?huge market opportunity to dramatically improve the way real estate professionals market their real estate.?

While the company isn?t releasing any specific growth numbers, it says that to date, it has ?tens of thousands? of real estate websites built on its platform. Placester is also seeing its revenue growth increase by ?double-digit? percentages every month.

Founded in 2009, the TechStars Boston alumnus functions as a platform that gives real estate agents the means to create their own marketing site using what it calls ?the first vertically integrated solution?. It competes against the likes of IDX Broker and Zillow, but says that there are at least two noted differences.

The first is that Placester consolidates numerous services that provides multiple listing services (MLS) ? the company says it covers 85 percent of all services in the US ? into one spot so that realtors can display property with as much information as possible and not have to deal with more than one service.

Additionally, it allows the creations of sites that are accessible across platforms so that when a potential buyer is interested in the inventory of a realtor, they can pull it up on their smartphone or tablet device.

Barba says his team created the company in order to ?give individual agents the power to market and build relationships online without having to be completely reliant on a few centralized sites.?

Sites can be created in minutes of signing up, according to Placester. The design of each site can be customized to the needs of the realtor and leverages WordPress themes ? something the company feels will help create a much cleaner experience for customers. Other features that Placester provides include a platform built for content marketing and search engine optimization (SEO) and hosting.

Real estate agents can take advantage of Placester?s services either through its free plan or?through?its $45 per month offering. The only difference between the two is if an agent wishes to integrate with MLS data.

Photo credit:?Scott Olson/Getty Images

Source: http://thenextweb.com/insider/2013/04/29/placester-raises-2-5-million-to-grow-its-wix-for-real-estate-service-in-the-us/

ambien wwdc madden 13 cover dalai lama tamera mowry slow jam the news madden cover

Neuroscientists use statistical model to draft fantasy teams of neurons

Apr. 29, 2013 ? This past weekend teams from the National Football League used statistics like height, weight and speed to draft the best college players, and in a few weeks, armchair enthusiasts will use similar measures to select players for their own fantasy football teams. Neuroscientists at Carnegie Mellon University are taking a similar approach to compile "dream teams" of neurons using a statistics-based method that can evaluate the fitness of individual neurons.

After assembling the teams, a computer simulation pitted the groups of neurons against one another in a playoff-style format to find out which population was the best. Researchers analyzed the winning teams to see what types of neurons made the most successful squads.

The results were published in the early online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences the week of April 29.

"We wanted to know what team of neurons would be most likely to perform best in response to a variety of stimuli," said Nathan Urban, the Dr. Frederick A. Schwertz Distinguished Professor of Life Sciences and head of the Department of Biological Sciences at Carnegie Mellon.

The human brain contains more than 100 billion neurons that work together in smaller groups to complete certain tasks like processing an odor, or seeing a color. Previous work by Urban's lab found that no two neurons are exactly alike and that diverse teams of neurons were better able to determine a stimulus than teams of similar neurons.

"The next step in our work was to figure out how to assemble the best possible population of neurons in order to complete a task," said Urban, who is also a member of the joint Carnegie Mellon/University of Pittsburgh Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition (CNBC).

However, using existing methods, scouting for the best team of neurons was a seemingly daunting task. It would be impossible for scientists to determine how each of the billions of neurons in the brain would individually respond to a multitude of stimuli. Urban and Shreejoy Tripathy, the article's lead author and graduate student in the CNBC's Program in Neural Computation, solved this problem using a statistical modeling approach, known as generalized linear models (GLMs), to analyze the cell-to-cell variability. Urban and Tripathy found that by applying this approach they were able to accurately reproduce the behavior of individual neurons in a computer, allowing them to gather statistics on each single cell.

Then, much like in fantasy football, the computer model used the statistics to put together thousands of teams of neurons. The teams competed against one another in a computer simulation to see which were able to most accurately recreate a stimulus delivered to the team of neurons. In the end researchers identified a small set of teams that they could study to see what characteristics made those populations successful.

They found that the winning teams of neurons were diverse but not as diverse as they would be if they were selected at random from the general population of neurons. The most successful sets contained a heterogeneous group of neurons that were flexible and able to respond well to a variety of stimuli.

"You can't have a football team made up of only linebackers. You need linebackers and tight ends, a quarterback and a kicker. But, the players can't just be random people off of the street; they all need to be good athletes. And you need to draft for positions, not just the best player available. If your best player is a quarterback -- you don't take another quarterback with your first pick," Urban said. "It's the same with neurons. To make the most effective grouping of neurons, you need a diverse bunch that also happens to be more robust and flexible than your average neuron."

Urban believes that GLMs can be used to further understand the importance of neuronal diversity. He plans to use the models to predict how alterations in the variability of neurons' responses, which can be caused by learning or disease, impact function.

Share this story on Facebook, Twitter, and Google:

Other social bookmarking and sharing tools:

---

Story Source:

The above story is reprinted from materials provided by Carnegie Mellon University, via EurekAlert!, a service of AAAS.

Note: Materials may be edited for content and length. For further information, please contact the source cited above.

---

Journal Reference:

1. Shreejoy J. Tripathy, Krishnan Padmanabhan, Richard C. Gerkin, and Nathaniel N. Urban. Intermediate intrinsic diversity enhances neural population coding. PNAS, April 29, 2013 DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1221214110

Note: If no author is given, the source is cited instead.

Disclaimer: This article is not intended to provide medical advice, diagnosis or treatment. Views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of ScienceDaily or its staff.

Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/most_popular/~3/UpRHO-B1TAY/130429154105.htm

superbowl recipes super bowl kick off chili recipes carlos condit diaz vs condit super bowl 2012 kickoff time football score

Huffington Post to launch German edition

BERLIN (AP) ? The Huffington Post is expanding its footprint in Europe with a German language edition.

The online news portal says it is partnering with German company Tomorrow Focus AG to launch the site in Europe's biggest news market this fall.

Tomorrow Focus said in a statement Monday that the site will be produced in Munich and cater to readers in Germany, Austria and Switzerland.

The Huffington Post already has international editions in Britain, Canada, France, Italy and Spain. A Japanese version is due to launch in May.

The U.S. version of the site was founded by Ariana Huffington in 2005 and bought by AOL Inc. in 2011.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/huffington-post-launch-german-edition-083452737.html

kyle orton 2012 ncaa bracket john carlson greg smith catamount mike dantoni bulls heat

Deal of the Day ? 27? Dell S2740L 1080p LED-backlit LCD monitor

LogicBUY’s Deal for Friday is the?27″ Dell S2740L 1080p LED-backlit LCD monitor for?$278.99. ?Features: 1920 X 1080 resolution, ultra-wide angle screen 270 nit brightness 1,000:1 contrast ratio 100mm X 100mm VESA mounting VGA, DVI, and HDMI inputs; 2-port USB 2.0 hub $369.99 – $60 savings – 10% coupon code = $278.99 with free shipping. This [...]

Source: http://the-gadgeteer.com/2013/04/26/deal-of-the-day-27-dell-s2740l-1080p-led-backlit-lcd-monitor-3/

slow jam the news madden cover obama slow jams the news metta world peace ron artest gladys knight private practice

Dollar-Cost Averaging Takes Emotion Out Of Investing - Investors.com

Suppose you went to cash during the 2008 market meltdown.

Or you just inherited a bundle from your rich uncle.

What now?

Should you put the whole kitty back to work in stocks and stock funds all at once? Or should you ease back in a little at a time?

The conventional wisdom says that dollar-cost averaging ? which is the Wall Street name for investing fixed amounts at set intervals ? is better than lump-sum investing.

But your results will depend on how the market behaves during your investment period.

Dollar-cost averaging tends to work best in periods that include declines from the starting point.

Bear in mind that this strategy choice between lump sum and dollar-cost averaging basically applies to mutual funds or other portfolios over time. Investors using a proven individual stock strategy should base trades on the rules of their investment blueprint.

At its best, dollar-cost averaging has powerful benefits. One is that it lowers your average cost. Your fixed investment buys more shares when prices are lower and fewer shares when prices are higher.

Another benefit is that dollar-cost averaging provides a routine that keeps you invested. That's what investors do when they invest a percentage of their paycheck each month in a 401(k) plan.

A third benefit is it prevents novices from trying to time the market.

"Investors tend to lag," said T. Rowe Price senior financial planner Judith Ward. "Once they get out, they wait for things to get better, so they miss a lot of the rebound."

Volatile Market

Sam Stovall, Standard & Poor's chief equity strategist, looked at how the S&P 500 fared over various stretches of the tumultuous market after 2000.

Bottom line: Dollar-cost averaging outperformed if an investor started at or near a market high. Lump-sum investing outperformed off lows.

A lump-sum tack benefits from price gains off a trough. It has a low price that dollar-cost averaging can't beat. It also benefits from owning a lot of dividend-paying stocks from the get-go.

And dollar-cost averaging diversifies your investments over time. If you start near a market high, with dollar-cost averaging you lose less in the ensuing decline.

"If you lose less, you have to make up less to get back to break-even," Stovall said.

When you lose 20%, you need a 25% gain to recoup.

When you lose 40%, you need a 67% rally to break even.

"Also, dollar-cost averaging's psychological benefit is often critical," Stovall said. That's because many investors are choosing between it and staying out of the market, not a lump-sum option.

"Dollar-cost averaging feels safer, so it gets people to invest ? which is good," Ward said.

Which approach should investors use in our current market?

Odds are the market will pull back 5% or more some time this year, Stovall says, since that's happened every year since World War II. That means we're probably near a short-term high.

"So if you're trying to decide how to invest a large amount at this point, chances are dollar-cost averaging will be a better way to go," Stovall said.

Source: http://news.investors.com/investing-mutual-funds/042513-653558-how-to-use-dollar-cost-averaging.htm

roseanne barr guy fawkes gary johnson gary johnson where do i vote dixville notch Remember Remember The 5th Of November

Iron Man 3 now available in Google Play

Iron Man 3 flies his way to Android, grab it for free from Google Play

Gameloft has published Iron Man 3 to Google Play this morning, bringing the Marvel hero to life on your Android phone or tablet. Fly your way through this endless runner meets on-rails shooter, fighting against A.I.M. forces in Malibu Shores, New York city, and China. You can even fight some of your favorite bad guys from Iron Man comics, with boss battles against the likes of Crimson Dynamo, Ezekiel Stane, Living Laser and the mighty M.O.D.O.K. All while trying to manage Stark Industries and develop 18 new suits and keep your armor and super powers updated.

At 768MB it's a fairly big install, but the graphics and sound are pretty awesome. And of course, there are in-app purchases at every turn, but hopefully the game can be played without nickel-and-diming its way through your wallet. We'll be taking a good long look at this one, but in the meantime you can check out Simon's hands-on from GDC after the break. The game requires Android 2.3 or higher, and you can grab it from the Google Play link above.

read more

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/androidcentral/~3/BPG278uOnm0/story01.htm

projectglass stock act new york auto show khalid sheikh mohammed masters par 3 gwen stefani overeem

What Kobe won't tweet: Los Angeles is becoming a Clippers town

With Kobe Bryant injured (and tweeting) and the Los Angeles Lakers reeling, the Clippers are making the most of a chance to become the city's top basketball attraction.

By Daniel B. Wood,?Staff writer / April 24, 2013

Los Angeles Clippers guard Chris Paul (2nd r.) scores the game-winning basket against the Memphis Grizzlies during Game 2 of their NBA playoff series in Los Angeles.

Lucy Nicholson/Reuters

Enlarge

?This isn?t supposed to happen, it?s really throwing me off mentally,? says Los Angeles native Peter Vineland, a self-described ?basketball nut? sipping a beverage at Starbucks in Sherman Oaks. ?I?m sorry for Kobe Bryant and the Lakers but surprisingly happy for the Clippers.?

Skip to next paragraph

' + google_ads[0].line2 + '
' + google_ads[0].line3 + '

'; } else if (google_ads.length > 1) { ad_unit += ''; } } document.getElementById("ad_unit").innerHTML += ad_unit; google_adnum += google_ads.length; return; } var google_adnum = 0; google_ad_client = "pub-6743622525202572"; google_ad_output = 'js'; google_max_num_ads = '1'; google_feedback = "on"; google_ad_type = "text"; google_adtest = "on"; google_image_size = '230x105'; google_skip = '0'; // -->

Subscribe Today to the Monitor

Click Here for your FREE 30 DAYS of
The Christian Science Monitor
Weekly Digital Edition

Vineland is talking about the reversal of fortunes that is playing out here at the start of the National Basketball Association playoffs. For years, it has been the Los Angeles Lakers dominating the postseason ? winning 11 championships since 1972, including a three-peat from 2001-03. And the Los Angeles Clippers have usually been in the cellar, the team that Lakers fans such as Vineland didn?t ever watch on purpose and didn?t even want even to admit was from the same city.

This year, the Lakers barely made it to the playoffs as the No. 7 seed and scored a piddling 79 points in losing the first game of their first-round series to the San Antonio Spurs. Meanwhile, the Clippers are leading their playoff series with the Memphis Grizzlies, 2-0, and star guard Chris Paul made the game-winning shot Tuesday night with 0.1 seconds remaining, bringing a bit of Laker "Showtime" to the Clip Joint.

As with the Roman Empire or a Hollywood starlet, sports runs through cycles in which those on the bottom rise to the top and those on the top fall. This is that time for Los Angeles.

?The Lakers have been the shining star for decades, and the Clippers almost the laughing stock of the league,? says Dan Lebowitz, president of the Center for the Study of Sports in Society at Northeastern University. ?Now the Clippers are the darlings of the league, the Cinderella team to watch. This is going to be good.?

Lakers Superstar Kobe Bryant tore his Achilles tendon in a recent game and will be out for the remainder of the season at least ? and the Lakers have yet to figure out how to make up for Bryant?s 27.3-point-per-game average.

Get free daily or weekly news updates from CSMonitor.com delivered to your inbox. Sign up today.

Source: http://rss.csmonitor.com/~r/feeds/csm/~3/Z11EcZo1-2w/What-Kobe-won-t-tweet-Los-Angeles-is-becoming-a-Clippers-town

vernal equinox mr rogers jamie lee curtis spring equinox audacious pollen count mexico city