Piccolo Automatically Prints Your Facebook and Instagram Photos for Posterity

If you have a mobile device and social media accounts, then chances are you take a lot of pictures and share them with friends and family online. A newly closed beta launched subscription photo printing service called Piccolo believes that if a picture's worth sharing, then it's also worth keeping – which is why the startup is offering to send prints of your Facebook and Instagram photos to you every month. Starting at $10 per month, Piccolo “prints pictures the same way you share them,” automatically printing the most popular pictures you've shared for the month. You can always choose which photos get printed, though – on the first of each month, Piccolo will send you an email showing the pictures that are about to get printed. You have two days to edit the selection if you're not entirely happy with it. The startup will then send your prints via snail mail.

Piccolo's prints are printed by a professional lab on archival quality paper that will last for generations. After all, isn't that the point of having your photos printed in the first place? You can also have your prints sent to family and friends automatically – just buy them a subscription and all they have to do is confirm their address.

Piccolo was founded by Nicholas Hall and Kate Oppenheim, who came up with the idea for the startup. Oppenheim had been using an IFTTT recipe to automatically save her Facebook and Instagram photos to Dropbox. However, when it came time for her to locate the pictures she wanted to print, she found it “very frustrating” to sort through thousands of files. In addition, existing photo printing sites required her to download her photos and upload them again. With Piccolo, everything is more or less automated. Hall and Oppenheim plan to roll out support for Flickr, Picasa, Tumblr, and other services next.

Wix: Easy, Beautiful Websites for Free

In 2006, Avishai Abrahami, Nadav Abrahami, and Giora Kaplan launched Wix.com to help people without any design or coding knowledge build beautiful and professional websites. Now the world's leading DIY web publishing platform, Wix boasts more than 35 million users worldwide, with 1.3 million new users joining every month. To date, over 31 million websites have been created by Wix users for their businesses, hobbies, causes, passions, and more. Wix is available in nine different languages and has users in North America, Europe, and Australia, among others.

Easy to use and customize, Wix is the only drag-and-drop website editor that utilizes HTML5 technology. With hundreds of designer templates available, users can literally build a website overnight without designing a graphic or writing a line of code. They're not limited to websites, though, as they can also create mobile sites, Facebook pages, and blogs. In addition, Wix provides reliable, top-grade hosting for free. The Wix team believes that everyone deserves to have their own stunning website at no cost.

The Israeli-American company operates on a freemium business model, earning profit through premium upgrades such as increased storage and bandwidth, e-commerce capabilities, Google Analytics, removal of Wix branding, and more. Last October, Wix launched a new app market and SDK, allowing third-party developers to integrate their apps into the platform and distribute them to Wix's user base.

Employing a team of nearly 400 professionals, Wix is headquartered in Tel Aviv, with offices in New York, San Francisco, and Dnepropetrovsk. The company is backed by Bessemer Venture Partners, Mangrove Capital Partners, Benchmark Capital, DAG Ventures, and Insight Venture Partners. Wix recently announced that it has submitted a draft registration statement to the US Securities and Exchange Commission for a possible IPO, which will most likely begin after the SEC completes the review process.

Trunk Club Turns Style-Challenged Men Into Dapper Gents

Men's clothing service Trunk Club was founded in late 2009 to help guys look their best even if they hate or don't have time to go shopping. With Trunk Club, men work directly with a dedicated style expert who will pack their trunk with handpicked clothes that suit their personal style. The garments are sent to the customer's home for free and they have 10 days to try on everything. Customers return any items they don't like using a prepaid FedEx label and only pay for the clothes they keep.

Trunk Club focuses on high-end men's casual wear, carrying over 50 brands including Jack Spade, Eton, and Grant. There are no membership fees, minimums, or long-term commitments, and trunks are only shipped at the customer's request. Headquartered in Chicago, Illinois, Trunk Club employs more than 175 people and is backed by Anthos Capital, US Venture Partners, Greycroft Partners, and more. The service currently has over 30,000 users.

Olapic Puts Customer Product Photos on Brands' Websites

Founded in 2010 by a group of engineers who met at Columbia Business School, Olapic is a social photo crowdsourcing service that allows e-tailers, brands, and publishers to put customer photos on their site. People post photos of products they're using on social networks all the time; however, Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram aren't the best places to share such content, as friends and family don't always have the same interests or brand preferences. This is where Olapic comes in – rather than being ignored on social networks, user-generated product photos have a chance to shine on the business's website.

Brands define hashtags and ask customers to send in their photos. Olapic automatically collects the photos from Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook, and its algorithms help brands curate large amounts of submissions. Businesses have full control over what appears on their site and can see how effective their photo-sharing strategy is via Olapic's analytics dashboard.

Companies that use Olapic include Nasty Gal, Threadless, and Design Within Reach.

Sifteo: Re-Imagining the Building Block

Growing up playing building blocks, board games, and Nintendo, David Merrill and Jeevan Kalanithi longed for the days when playing games did not mean burying your head in a touchscreen. Seeing their own children engrossed in tablets and smartphones and sometimes shutting out the rest of the world, the pair wondered if there was a better way for technology and play to come together. So as graduate students at the MIT Media Lab, they set out to design new physical interfaces that would rethink human-computer interaction. One day they imagined going through a pile of digital data as if it were Legos, and this led to the idea for Sifteo Cubes, the award-winning tactile game system that makes classic play interactive.

In 2009, Merrill was invited to present Sifteo on the main stage at the TED conference. The video of the talk went viral, going on to become one of the “top 5 most engaging TED talks” of all time. Realizing that Sifteo was “more than just a cool research project,” Merrill and Kalanithi seized the opportunity to turn their idea into an actual product. Within months, they had moved to San Francisco and were building a company.


Sifteo Cubes are interactive blocks built on the play patterns of Legos, domino tiles, and building blocks. Ready to play out of the box, they communicate wirelessly with each other and respond to your gestures. As Merrill explains, “It's taking the wooden blocks you grew up playing with and giving them this digital life.”

Sifteo comes with three cubes and four pre-installed games, but you can add more cubes and download additional games for more fun. Sifteo's growing game library currently includes Chroma Splash, Word Caravan, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Ninja Slide, and Code Cracker. The system is available at select e-tailers, retailers, and New York's MoMA Store. According to Merrill, “We really care about building play experiences that are beneficial to kids, that parents can feel good about.”

AltaMed Health Services Corporation Flourishes

When Castulo de la Rocha became one of only 3 paid employees of La Clinica Familiar del Barrio in East Los Angeles in 1977, he brought with him a social conscience informed by his immigration to the United States as a child and his experience witnessing the turbulent 1960s. The free clinic served a mostly Latino population with little or no access to good health care. After three months in his temporary position, the attorney and skilled leader accepted the roles of President and Chief Executive Officer. The company changed its name to AltaMed Health Services Corporation a few years later and has flourished under Cástulo de la Rocha’s direction.

From three employees, the staff has grown to more than 1,200 receiving half a million visits annually at more than 40 clinics and senior-care facilities. AltaMed has become California’s largest FQHC (Federally Qualified Health Center) and one of the nation’s top five. The medical professionals and social workers take a holistic approach to community health, addressing substance abuse, HIV/AIDS, health education, disease management, youth services, and other areas in addition to medical and dental care. In its efforts to reduce the disparities in health care and minimize costs, the AltaMed medical staff emphasizes nutrition, healthy lifestyles, and prevention.

Several years ago, AltaMed volunteers and friends came up with a win-win fundraising event called East L.A. Meets Napa. The annual gala pairs great Los Angeles Mexican restaurants with wines produced by Napa Valley Latino vintners. In its first year, 2006, the gala attracted 200 people and raised more than $12,000. In 2010, 23 restaurants and 30 wineries participated, drawing more than 1,400 attendees and raising $207,000 to support the nonprofit AltaMed’s services and programs. One of the nation’s most influential Latinos, Castulo de la Rocha also has brought esteem to the organization through his multiple professional leadership roles and national recognition, such as his 2011 induction into the Grassroots Hall of Fame of the National Association of Community Health Centers.

You can follow Castulo on Twitter here.

Learn from an Expert, One-to-One, on PopExpert

There's a new startup that promises to help you get better at life, work, and play. Headquartered in San Francisco, California, PopExpert is an online learning marketplace that makes it easy for students to find experts in whatever they want to learn and learn from them over live, one-to-one video. Whether it's nutrition, meditation, music, or language, PopExpert has more than 1,000 experts who are ready to teach a wide gamut of topics. Search for an expert by subject, price, and availability, and schedule a session at the most convenient time for you. PopExpert also handles the payment process, taking a small cut from every transaction.

According to founder and CEO Ingrid Sanders, “We are focused on areas that relate more to EQ development than IQ development, for example meditation vs. Excel training and personalized style vs. photography techniques.” This calls for one-to-one personalized interaction with an expert, which is “by far the most efficient” method.

PopExpert is currently available by invitation, which can be requested on the startup's website.