A $1 paper-based test can detect the Zika virus in around two hours

“For our group it’s become an interesting case study in how quickly a group can mobilize in the face of an outbreak,” Dr. James Collins explains over the phone. The MIT biomedical engineering professor has been fielding press inquiries all day, in light of a newly published paper detailing the cheap, fast and effective tool his team developed to diagnose the growing threat of the Zika virus.

“In late January, MIT sent out an email asking who was working on Zika,” he adds. “We were not. I turned to my team and former team members and asked them what we could do here. Could we use our synthetic biology platforms in a meaningful way and create a diagnostic test? The collective response was that we could, and everybody basically dropped what they were doing and turned their attention to coming up with this novel test, and in about five to six weeks, we did it.”

In record time, the team — comprising members from Harvard, MIT, University of Toronto, Arizona State University, Cornell, University of Wisconsin-Madison and Boston University — built upon a technology developed by Collins’s team at Harvard’s Wyss Institute to create a simple, paper-based test that can be deployed to limited resource areas, detecting the disease in a fraction of the time and money of existing models.

“We were trying to address a few needs,” explains Collins. “The need for a low-cost test and a need for a faster test and a need for a test that can be readily deployed in the field with little resources. I think this platform addresses each of those challenges nicely. The sensors themselves cost pennies to make. The development cost is also quite inexpensive. You’re talking probably less than a buck each for the test.”

A drop of blood from the patient is boiled to release the RNA genome from the virus, followed by a bit more processing, at which point it’s applied to the paper.

“What we’ve got is a really nice paper-based synthetic biology platform,” Collins says. “What we showed is that you can take the inner workings of cells, take a few dozen enzymes, and you can spot them on paper, freeze dry them, store them and distribute them at room temperature with very little loss of activity. That’s really at the heart of the innovation of the platform.”

The whole process takes around two hours and can be performed entirely in the field with low-cost equipment, meaning it doesn’t need to be shipped to a big lab like the CDC for further testing. At present, the system is capable of detecting Zika and dengue, along with Ebola, the original target for the system.

Collins believes that it will be applied to a wide of pathogens in future applications.

“We’re looking to use the test for the flu. We’re looking to use the test for HIV. We’re looking to develop the test for Lyme disease. We’re looking to use it for leprosy. And in a completely different form, we’re looking to see if we can use the platform to develop rapid and inexpensive cancer diagnosis.”

In the meantime, the team’s primary focus is finding the best and quickest way to deploy the Zika test to the areas hardest hit by the outbreak.

“We’re in discussions with groups in Brazil and Colombia to explore how we can get this into the field and into the hands of patients,” says Collins. “More testing is needed, but the platform holds great promise, and when we couple that with the right folks, I think this can be moved quickly for deployment.”

Thingthing takes $400k to turn a productivity keyboard app into a services platform

Messaging apps like WhatsApp and WeChat have become the platform giants of recent years, scaling huge user bases powered by the momentum of network effects. But might there be another location on the smartphone that’s potent enough for an app to transform into a platform in its own right? Barcelona-based startup Thingthing reckons there is. And their bet is that it’s the Qwerty keys that live under smartphone users’ fingertips that could be the next big thing on mobile.

Thingthing has built an iOS keyboard app focused on amping up user productivity by decreasing the amount of app switching users have to do by loading productivity-focused additional functionality into the keyboard — just tap on one of the command keys above the Qwerty keys to summon your camera roll, or a stack of trending GIFs, or a list of your recent Dropbox files, or a multi-day view of your calendar, and so on. The select slice of data is displayed in the place where the keyboard was just before you hit the icon.

Third party accounts that can be linked to Thingthing’s keyboard at this point include Dropbox, Box, Google Drive, Facebook, Instagram, Flickr, Pocket and Todoist. The app can also be connected to your phone’s camera roll and calendar. And of course, as must be the case for any self-respecting keyboard app, there’s an icon to shortcut to your emoji — and emoji suggestions built into the keyboard’s next word prediction tech.

With linked third party apps/services Thingthing is plugging into the relevant APIs to support the particular functionality being offered — such as, for example, the ability to view and share files from your Google Drive. It’s also thinking a lot about designing the options it offers users. It’s not pulling everything into such a tiny space; just what it thinks someone with something to type quickly really needs to see/grab. Plante dubs these “contextual actions”.

Examples include the ability to select and paste a photo into the message you’re typing. Or to select and send a few possible calendar dates. The core idea here is to allow the user to gain swifter access to information siloed away in a third party service at the moment they are tapping out a message — and without needing to tap away to that other app — to speed up related communications, whether someone is trying to arrange a meeting via email. Or chatting with friends on WhatsApp.

A few taps on the Thingthing keyboard and you can grab the right calendar dates or fire a photo right into your chat without needing to tap away from whatever messaging app you were using.

What’s really interesting here is that the keyboard cuts across different services, and can therefore act as the connective tissue linking multiple services — doing away with the need for users to visit another app directly for simple use-cases (like grabbing a file).

And while a keyboard might not appear, at first pass, to have the massive network pull of a social or messaging giant, there’s a clear sub-set of pro-users who will appreciate the immediate productivity gains in the short term. And potentially a wider audience beyond that — if even more compelling short-cuts can be loaded right into the keyboard in future, as Thingthing is hinting will be its direction of travel.

It’s not the only one zeroing in on keyboard apps as a potential platform either — witness Microsoft with its productivity services focused push, as just one other example.

Thingthing is today announcing it’s closed a €350,000 ($400k) seed round, led by Simile Venture Partners. Other investors in the round include Saatchinvest, Pioneers Ventures, Seedcamp (with the team having recently gone through their winter bootcamp program), plus some business angels.

It’s also talking about having secured partnerships with “leading brands” — although it’s not specifying exactly who or what those partnerships entail at this point. More details will be shared on this in the coming year, co-founder and CEO Olivier Plante tells TechCrunch. An Android version of the keyboard is also in the works.

“They’ve seen the opportunity in a keyboard being a platform,” says Plante of Thingthing’s investors. “Being something transversal everywhere, that can provide much more than just productivity tools.”

Commenting on the funding in a statement, Tatiana Kim, managing partner at Simile Venture Partners added: “Mobile has become the primary channel of communication and messaging is an essential part of our user experience. Thingthing is tackling a problem of efficiency in users interaction in a novel and intelligent way. We appreciate that the team is focused on user-centered design, has clear vision of development strategy and ambition for global coverage.”

Of the six brand partnerships Plante says that some are “leaders in productivity” and others are “leaders in services”.

“We’re working on something where the vision is ‘just type’ — so where people only type and while they’re typing they can access other services,” he continues. “This is something that we call contextual information. So depending on the context you can access services that go beyond just productivity.”

“Facebook is trying to do something around messaging around these lines but we believe that the keyboard is extending everything,” he adds.

TechCrunch last covered Thingthing back in September, soon after it had launched the first version of its app — which did not initially include an actual Qwerty keyboard, requiring users to toggle to use the native iOS keyboard (or another keyboard app of their choice). At the time we lauded the clean design and the strength of the core idea.

Since then the rather large missing piece that has been locked down by Thingthing is an actual keyboard of its own, with the team building next word prediction tech (currently just for English), and using public data sources such as Twitter and Reddit to train its learning algorithms, according to Plante.

“We built our own keyboard, with our own algorithms,” he says. “We built that from scratch. And at the speed we’re going we’re at the level where — SwiftKey did something in eight years, we can do what SwiftKey did in about three years and a half.

“The algorithm was built by our CTO who has been doing work around machine learning and AI. He was able to in opposite to what SwiftKey has built — because SwiftKey needs your data to be really intelligent, so the more your connect things the more it is intelligent, we were able to create a machine learning AI from public data.”

At this early stage Plante says Thingthing has around 20,000 monthly active users. “People have typed a lot of words!” he adds, estimating it at between three to four million words at this point. “This is an aggregated data. Pure analytics. We don’t see any words, we just infer.”

A compact, three-day on-screen calendar view is a new feature in the latest update to the app, plugging in a useful, at-a-glance overview of your availability for the current and two following days. Flick a finger back or forth to go back in time to check where you were, or scroll further into the future week. Want to suggest three possible appointment slots for a meeting? Tap on the times on the relevant day/s and then hit the transfer button that pops up at the bottom corner as slots are selected and the graphical data wings into the message you were typing — but now in text form, specifying the day, date, time and timezone. Truly delightful design.

Thingthing will be working next on ways to simplifying sharing group meeting info via the calendar, according to Plante. “We’re going to create experiences that are solving complex problems. Not life threatening problems but things that help. And where Thingthing becomes the hub of everything — you can do so much more stuff with this,” he adds.

With third party keyboard apps there can of course be very sizable privacy concerns, given how much data a user is potentially handing over to an outside entity when they agree to grant them ‘full access’. And Thingthing is also asking for access to a raft of additional services — so there are potentially hugely magnified privacy concerns here. And Plante knows it. Which is why he stresses “privacy by design” as a core principle for the team, noting, for example, that ThingThing stores all data relating to users locally, on their device (in the shell app), not on its servers.

That said, whatever additional data partnerships Thingthing is cooking up to power its future services push may, inevitably, clash with a privacy first ethos. Or at very least open up some fresh privacy concerns, depending on the entities that are being plugged into the keyboard and how Thingthing goes about informing users about the privacy trade-offs they might be making as they type.

“We don’t rely on your private data for now, and if we rely on it in the future it’s because there’s really a reason for it — it will be better for you as a user,” is how Plante squares this future circle.

Microsoft acquires Italian IoT platform Solair

Microsoft today announced that it has acquired Solair, an Italy-based IoT service that was founded in 2011 (and not the U.S.-based company that makes retractable awnings).

Solair already used Microsoft’s Azure cloud computing platform to offer its services, so it’s no surprise that Microsoft plans to integrate its technology into the Azure IoT Suite. For now, though, it’s unclear what exactly Microsoft’s plans for Solair are beyond the company saying that it is “excited about their technology and talent – and delighted to welcome them to the Microsoft team.”

The financial details of the transaction were not disclosed.

While Solair is not exactly a household name, the company has already worked with a wide variety of clients, including Italian espresso machine manufacturer Rancilio Group and food processing machine company Minerva Omega Group.

“Solair shares our ambition for helping customers harness their untapped data and create new intelligence with IoT, and this acquisition supports our strategy to deliver the most complete IoT offering for enterprises,” said Sam George, Microsoft’s Partner Director for Azure IoT, in today’s announcement.

Solair offers a full suite of IoT products, including a gateway for collecting data and anenterprise platform for custom deployments and integration with existing services.

Digital magazine company Issuu is now a collaboration platform, too

Digital media company Issuu has been trying to offer a better way to present content online. Now it’s a promising a better way for teams to work together on creating that content too, with the launch of a new product called Collaborate.

Issuu, for those of you who don’t know, allows publishers to create digital publications. They may resemble glossy magazines, except freed from the limitations of print, with support for multimedia and interactive content.

The company said that in a survey of more than 1,300 publishers, it found that 64 percent of publishing teams work in different locations, and they rely on everything from email to spreadsheets to Google Docs to InDesign to coordinate. Collaborate is meant to replace many of those tools, creating a central location where a team (particularly a small to medium-sized media team) can create a digital publication together.

When you build something in Collaborate, you start with a flatplan, where you can create the layout of your publication and move different pages around. You can also pull layouts from Indesign, if you prefer.

Naturally, you can invite other users to participate, so they can upload images and add their own content. There’s an approval system, as well as the ability to track the status of each piece of the publication as it inches towards completion. You can even place ads.

Once you’re done, you can just publish directly to the Issuu platform, which the company says reaches 100 million readers each month.

Collaborate is currently available to customers of Issuu’s Optimum subscription plan. Oh, and you even need to be on a desktop computer to use it – it works on tablets, too.

GoPro launching new virtual reality camera, online platform

The race to create both the hardware and the software that will drive the emerging virtual realitymarket is heating up, and now GoPro has unveiled its latest plans to support VR filmmakers and fans.

At this week's NAB (National Association of Broadcasters) event in Las Vegas, the company will unveil a new VR camera and launch a new VR platform for sharing immersive videos.

First, GoPro will show off its new Omni VR camera, which features six synchronized cameras in what the company calls a spherical array, but the housing itself looks more like a rounded square.