It’s tax day, and that means millions of Americans are scrambling to get their financial houses in order. If you’re like me, managing personal finance information is a tedious chore, often placed behind yard work and bathroom cleaning. Luckily, some companies want to help.

One of those is Balance Financial, a Bellevue startup that’s trying to combine elements of the online financial management service Mint.com with the personal brick-and-mortar touch of H&R Block. Balance just closed out a $2 million funding round from Seattle angel investor Geoff Entress, Finsphere CEO Mike Buhrmann and others.

A portion of the new cash was previously reportedby GeekWire last June, and we caught up with CEO Devin Miller this week to get an update on the progress of the company.

Started eight years ago as a personal bookkeeping service, the company has morphed and changed over the years as it added new technology offerings. At this point, Miller said that they are rolling out new services to help financial professionals such as CPAs, bookkeepers and and private bankers attract and engage with clients in new ways.

“Balance is aimed at the 1.2 million financial pros providing $50 billion per year in services to consumers in the U.S.,” says Miller. “The technology market for financial professionals is very fragmented and much of the tech is expensive, antiquated and has lacked innovation for years.”

For example, the 14-person company just unveiled a new portfolio reporting service for financial professionals that helps clients track and review financial holdings. It now offers five different solutions: Portfolio Peporting; Cash Flow Reporting; Bill Payment; Client Portal & File Sharing; and Personal Bookkeeping.

With the new funding, Balance has named Stephan Roche — the chief marketing officer at Memory Lane and a former vice president at ShareBuilder –  and Will Kessinger — co-founder of Vformation — to its board.

We’ve seen other companies in the personal financial services arena raise cash recently, most notably FutureAdvisor which scored a round last month from Sequoia Capital, Square Chief Operating Offer Keith Rabois and Yelp founder Jeremy Stoppelman.

http://www.geekwire.com/2012/balance-financial-lands-cash-names-board-members/

BetaKit

Personalized content discovery engine TrapIt is now delivering almost four million articles to users every day, and has passed four million unique visitors since its launch in June 2011. The service, which features content from over 100,000 sources, had its biggest month in March 2012, with over 700,000 people interacting with TrapIt content.

Several news curation services have launched recently, including Prismaticand Wavii. It seems like startups are jumping at the chance to enter the news curation space, but in TrapIt’s case they have some unique technology to back up their product. The company  was part of the CALO (Cognitive Assistant that Learns and Organizes) project, a research project that spawned Siri, which is now best known as Apple’s smart assistant. TrapIt was the second consumer product to launch from the program, two years after Siri. ”While they were using CALO technology to revolutionize human device interaction on the mobile platform, we’re going to use the same technology to revolutionize content discovery on the web and various platforms like tablets,” TrapIt founder Henry “Hank” Nothhaft, Jr. said in an interview.

Nothhaft started the company because he saw two challenges with personalized content – he believed it was too noisy on the social side, and it was hard to uncover new sources through search engines. Rather than relying on a user’s social graph, or allowing users to follow set topics or outlets, TrapIt revolves around a topic-based model that allows users to create a news “trap” around any keyword, URL or existing article. TrapIt recommends related content to users based on their traps, based on the last 30 days of indexed content on TrapIt. Users can search content without creating a trap, but once they “trap it,” a search becomes persistent, and dynamically updates when new related content is indexed. Traps also update when a user rates an article by giving it a thumbs up or thumbs down. The site also features a real-time activity feed with breaking news, as well as trending traps, and curated traps from an in-house editorial team.

“There are literally millions of pieces of original created each day, so this is kind of like a Tivo for the real-time web in that it learns your preferences and the topics you’re interested in and it listens to the firehose and pulls out the best stuff for you, and then when you’re ready you come back and it’s here waiting and organized in these topic-based traps,” Nothhaft said. Similar to Summify or News.me digests, TrapIt emails every day to notify them about new content added to their traps, and they’re looking to add customized alerts and on-demand notifications for breaking news.

The web-based tool is free for users, and an upcoming iPad app will be free as well (with HTML5 and iPhone versions planned after its release). Nothhaft said the company will offer a premium subscription, and will provide publishers with the ability to advertise and sell premium articles and content within traps. The company raised $6 million in Series A funding in December 2011, led by Horizons Ventures, which also backed Siri.

There is no shortage of competition when it comes to news curation services, and aside from discovery-focused services like Prismatic, there are social readers like Flipboard and Zite, which was acquired by CNN in August 2011. “While Flipboard and Pulse are beautifully designed, really fun applications to interact with, they’re not doing anything to address the issue of discovery, they’re really just the next generation of an RSS reader,” Nothhaft said, adding that users still have to follow a feed from a publisher, rather than following a topic (Prismatic allows users to follow set topics, but not topics based around any keyword). And while he admits that Twitter is a great way to find the news, he believes it’s hard to discover new sources.”What we’ve found that these services are really just an echo chamber. It’s the same sources you see over and over again,” he said. “What we believe is that there’s a whole undiscovered web of excellent content out there that’s being written and produced by people that are very passionate about their hobbies, their work, their interests, and they’re putting together great content that just isn’t being discovered.”

While the competition is fierce, TrapIt has the technology to back up its service, and it offers a unique value proposition to users who want to read content from sources outside of the big publishers and blogs. But finding a way to effectively monetize will likely be the biggest challenge – if traditional publishers are finding advertising to be a dying business model, and if users are increasingly reluctant to pay for content, TrapIt will have to find a unique way to attract revenue and not just traction with readers.

http://betakit.com/2012/04/13/personalized-news-service-trapit-growing-as-competition-increases

A couple years ago, Jay Baer wrote a great blog post called ‘The 39 social media tools I’ll use today’ which was an all-in-one toolkit for social media marketers (and still is).

A lot has changed in the two years since that post was published so here is a ’2012 remix’ featuring 50 (mostly free) tools you can use on a daily basis.

Whether you are just starting out in the social media arena or have been at it for a few years, this will hopefully be a handy resource. So, let’s serve ‘em up!

http://tnw.co/zu9pD3

Posted in: Reviews by: Paul Anthony

Ask any active user of the social web how they find out about topical events and they’ll likely answer the same way.

They don’t. The important news finds them.

Today’s breathing web is a huge melting pot of information, and social media is the cup which delivers the goodness when tasty content bubbles to the top.  Putting the right ingredients in the soup involves following the right brands and influencial people within a topical area to get information faster than anyone else.

Often that’s not easy. In many cases you have to do some research on the “who’s who” within an industry or topic to determine who you keep an eye on. My own personal strategy for this revolves around either watching who is getting retweeted with information that I find relevant; or watching the people who are active bloggers and consistently delivering information faster than everyone else.

If you are a fan of the way social media enhances content consumption – you’ll love Trap.it. Crawling over 100,000 websites with this figure growing all the time, the site uses Natural language processing algorithms to work out the focus of articles on these sites, and subsequently delivers personalised information according to user tastes. There is no concept of crowdsourcing within the Trap.it community for discovery of content- every source site is manually vetted by humans, which has helped to give a certain level of quality to the index and avoid the inevitable spam trap.

As you consume that content within the services, it continues to learn what you like and dislike and further enhances the experience and information suggested to you based on user behaviour and machine intelligence.  With it being increasingly difficult to keep up with the latest topcial trends across multiple sites, Trap.it offers an alternative to services such as Google alerts. Considering it uses the same technology found in Apple’s Siri, it attempts to actually read content which provides a smarter more curated approach to content delivery and enables better recommendations.  Configurable email alerts also allow you to receive content automatically, provided you spend some time teaching the system – but I’m confident once you give it a shot at your chosen topics of interest, you won’t have any trouble coming back to provide more data.

The interface is a visual one, with a grid view of stories available after you’ve done some searches and added topics to your “traps”. Content itself is framed and presented inside Trap.it, which might not sit terribly comfortably with publishers – but that said I understand why. The beauty of the solution is that all of the interface elements are always at your fingertips, which allows you to rate content regardless of whether you’ve wandered off course around the web or not. It kind of reminds me in someways of StumbleUpon in that regard.

Well worth a look for anyone who cares about the quality of content which reaches them daily. Now in public beta, available worldwide.

http://www.webdistortion.com/2012/03/18/trap-it-finding-great-content-from-the-topics-you-care-about/

If you coexist with children and iPads, you’ve undoubtedly discovered they have an insatiable “app”-itite (sorry, couldn’t resist). Here are eight recent noteworthy selections for younger users, listed from young to old.

Harold and the Purple Crayon ($5) hands you the crayon (your finger) and asks you fill in each page by uncovering the hidden images. You finish when Harold is back home, safely tucked under his covers, just like he was in Crockett Johnson’s 1955 book. Ages 2-8.

Toca Robot Lab ($1) lets you mix-and-match robot parts to make a robot that you can fly through a maze. As with other Toca Boca apps, failure is not an option. For ages 2-up.

Cinderella – Nosy Crow Animated Picture Book ($6) raises the bar in children’s ebooks with such touches as an orchestrated sound track and a magic mirror that puts your child’s face into the story, by way of the front-facing camera. For ages 3-up.

Club Penguin: Puffle Launch ($1) is fun, fast and requires quick thinking. And it isn’t Angry Birds. Your task is to aim a set of rotating cannons in order to fire your Puffle (the round pets from the Club Penguin virtual world) through a maze. You can earn coins that are transferred to your Club Penguin account. Ages 6-up.

MadPad ($1 for iPhone, $3 for iPad) from Smule (of Magic Piano and Ocarina fame) turns your multitouch screen into a mix board, with sounds and video (camera required) that you capture from your own environment. Ages 5-up.

Motion Math Zoom (free, with in-app sales) offers proof that a hard math concept can become fun. How? By way of a Silly Putty-like number line that lets you pinch or stretch your way to a particular landing spot, before your time runs out. Along the way, children discover that smaller units like tenths or hundreds are hidden between the ones or 10s. Ages 4-up.

Harry Potter Film Wizardry ($13) can satisfy the curiosity of a Harry Potter aficionado, young or old, with pinch and zoom maps of Hogwarts, movie trailers and artifacts like Harry’s letter of acceptance into Hogwarts. Apps like this help you remember why you spent $500 on an iPad. Ages 8-up.

SAN FRANCISCO, Calif. – September 13, 2011 – Everloop.com, the social media site for kids under 13, today announced partnerships with National Geographic’s Animal Jam and Mattel’s Monster High. These partnerships will allow Mattel and National Geographic to further engage with their young fans within Everloop’s fun, safe and secure online environment by creating customized signature-brand “loops.”

“These partnerships bring exciting content and new adventures to our members,” said Hilary DeCesare, Co-Founder and CEO of Everloop. “This is part of our ongoing strategy to continue to build a robust Everloop community for kids by engaging with the top entertainment and educational brands.”

Animal Jam, the online virtual playground for children who love animals and the outdoors, currently boasts more than 2 million users.  The Animal Jam Loop on Everloop will serve as a complementary platform to the brand’s existing online presence and provide users with tips on the game, allow kids to talk about the game with other players and get exclusive promotional codes to use at animaljam.com.

“We’re thrilled to bring Animal Jam to Everloop,” said Clark Stacey, Animal Jam’s EVP of Strategy & Business Development. “Animal Jam has always been committed to offering kids a fun and safe place to play online, and our partnership with Everloop takes that commitment another step further. With our fast-growing member base, it’s imperative that our players have a safe, social environment to engage with our world that is outside of the game. Everloop provides us just that.”

Mattel’s Monster High™ brand, which targets tween and teen girls, is a global franchise centered on the perfectly imperfect teenage children of the world’s most legendary monsters. Monster High™ empowers girls to express their individuality, embrace their imperfections and form friendships that last beyond a lifetime, with relatable storytelling told through a monster lens.  The official Monster High™ Loop on Everloop will provide users with archived and new webisodes, polls, branded stickers and goobs, gossip on the “ghouls” at Monster High™, and other exclusive content all via a safe, digital hub for the tween audience.

“Monster High is everywhere girls are today with a robust consumer products line, New York Times best-selling book series, engaging online content and rapidly growing communities on Facebook and YouTube,” said Lori Pantel, VP Marketing, Global Mattel Girls Brands. “We are excited that our partnership with Everloop will enable us to continue to deliver engaging content to Monster High enthusiasts who might be too young for some of our other existing social media platforms.”

The richness and depth of the Everloop platform allows partners to show their brand personality through customizable features such as backgrounds, virtual stickers, badges, goobs (virtual pranks) and more.

Everloop was created by parents to offer peace of mind in the social networking community with state-of-the-art privacy protection technologies that block kids from using bad language, bullying or sharing personal information and is Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) compliant. It lets kids connect, communicate and collaborate in a closed “social loop” of their friends and others who share their interests.  Everloop also provides creative applications, music, social games, videos, photos, animation, user-generated content and other integrated online experiences.

For more information on Everloop, visit http://www.everloop.com.

About Everloop

Everloop provides kids under 13 a free, safe space where they can connect with friends, play games, share pictures and music, send messages, discover new talents and learn. Unique patent-pending technology lets kids communicate and collaborate in closed “social loops” of their friends and others who share their interests. State-of-the-art privacy protection and monitoring guard young users against bullying, bad language and sharing private information.  Everloop partners with leading innovators to provide top-shelf entertainment and educational activities.  Kids get to be in the loop and parents get peace of mind.

For more information visit http://www.everloop.com

About Monster High™

In May 2010, Mattel made history by rolling out the Monster High™ franchise across multiple categories simultaneously within its first year. Centered around the fabulously flawed teenage children of the world’s most legendary monsters, Monster High™ encourages girls to “Be Yourself. Be Unique. Be a Monster.™” as to “be a monster” is to be truly accepting of yourself and others. Through humorous content and relatable storytelling, Monster High™ empowers girls to express their individuality, embrace their imperfections and form friendships that last beyond a lifetime. Already a global franchise, Monster High™ has generated tens of millions of video views of its online animated webisodes, earned a spot on New York Times bestsellers list for its Monster High book series, catapulted the doll line to the top of the bestselling new fashion doll list in 2010 and expanded into numerous consumer products categories.

With a large online presence on MonsterHigh.com, YouTube and Facebook, Monster High™ is everywhere tween girls are today.

About Mattel

Mattel, Inc. (NASDAQ:MAT) (http://www.mattel.com/) is the worldwide leader in the design, manufacture and marketing of toys and family products. The Mattel family is comprised of such best-selling brands as Barbie®, the most popular fashion doll ever introduced, Hot Wheels®, Matchbox®, American Girl®, Radica® and Tyco® R/C, as well as Fisher-Price® brands, including Little People®, Power Wheels® and a wide array of entertainment-inspired toy lines. In 2011, Mattel was named as one of FORTUNE Magazine’s “100 Best Companies to Work For” for the fourth year in a row, and also is ranked among Corporate Responsibility Magazine’s “100 Best Corporate Citizens.” With worldwide headquarters in El Segundo, Calif., Mattel employs approximately 30,000 people in 43 countries and territories and sells products in more than 150 nations. At Mattel, we are “Creating the Future of Play.”

MATTEL, MONSTER HIGH and associated trademarks and trade dress are owned by Mattel, Inc. © 2011 Mattel, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

About Smart Bomb Interactive

Smart Bomb Interactive is a Salt Lake City-based development studio whose mission is to combine talent, tools and fun. Founded in 2003 by video game industry veterans, Smart Bomb Interactive has since grown to include parents, educators, online safety experts and children’s media professionals. The company creates interactive entertainment for families with an emphasis on substance and safety, including National Geographic’s Animal Jam. Smart Bomb Interactive is funded by Signal Peak Ventures. For more information, visithttp://www.smartbombinteractive.com.

About National Geographic Ventures

National Geographic Ventures (NGV) is a wholly owned, taxable subsidiary of National Geographic Society. NGV, part of the editorial group National Geographic Global Media, includes oversight of the National Geographic Channel, as well as management of National Geographic Television production and distribution; National Geographic Television International; Digital Media, including apps production and distribution andNationalgeographic.com; and National Geographic Interactive Platforms, including the Mobile, Gaming and digital Maps business groups. NGV creates and distributes content across multi-platforms and media providing outlets for the hundreds of scientific and expedition-based grants awarded each year. For more information, go towww.nationalgeographic.com.

Motion Math, a pioneer of intuitive and interactive mobile math games, is proud to announce its Motion Math Zoom App for iPad is now available on the App Store. Motion Math Zoom teaches children place value – a fundamental concept underlying children’s mental computation, numerical estimation and quantitative judgment. iPad’s large, Multi-Touch display lets children physically interact with the app by simply pinching to zoom in and out of the number line. Different size animals represent numbers, from amoebas in the thousandths to dinosaurs in the thousands.

“To a child learning decimals, the difference between 8, .8, and .08 is confusing,” said Gabriel Adauto, cofounder of Motion Math. “Motion Math Zoom is an engaging and fun way for kids to learn these crucial differences. Mastery of the number line has proven to be an essential foundation for math achievement, and by playing Motion Math Zoom, kids can develop an intuitive sense for the number line and place value.”

Features of the Motion Math Zoom App include: 

• 24 levels of fun. Children can learn numbers up to 1,000. More advanced learners can unlock negatives, decimals, and challenge levels with time pressure and fake outs.

• Learning outcomes: Children will learn the location of numbers (natural numbers, negatives and decimals) on the number line.  Children will master place value from the thousandths to the thousands, and build a strong conceptual model of place value (rather than a purely procedural one).  Additionally, the game allows children to build skill in comparing numbers.

• Free basic levels; unlock all 24 levels through In-App Purchase for an introductory price of $3.99.

The Motion Math Zoom App is available for free from the App Store on iPad or at www.itunes.com/appstore/.

Ron Gutman reviews a raft of studies about smiling, and reveals some surprising results. Did you know your smile can be a predictor of how long you’ll live — and that a simple smile has a measurable effect on your overall well-being? Prepare to flex a few facial muscles as you learn more about this evolutionarily contagious behavior.

Fargo, ND – August 16, 2011 – Intelligent InSites Inc., the leading provider of enterprise RTLS software helping hospitals improve patient satisfaction and operational performance while supporting multiple RTLS technologies, today announced the promotion of Marcus Ruark to Vice President of Marketing.

As Vice President of Marketing, Ruark will lead the company’s marketing and communications strategy, promoting Intelligent InSites’ enterprise-class healthcare RTLS solution for optimizing asset management and transforming patient flow. Previously, as Intelligent InSites’ Director of Business Development, Ruark expanded the company’s opportunities for improving operational efficiencies in healthcare, including working with customers to optimize asset management processes, developing the Intelligent InSites’ asset management methodology program, creating a partner launch program, and managing Intelligent InSites’ lead role in the inaugural RFID & RTLS Showcase at the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) 2011 Conference and Exhibition.

Ruark will continue to report to Doug Burgum, Intelligent InSites’ interim President and CEO.  “Intelligent InSites is helping hospitals make fundamental changes to how they run, enabling them to use real-world, real-time information to improve their operations and their outcomes,” said Burgum. “Marcus’ leadership has been instrumental in helping us solve our customers’ ‘big picture’ challenges, and I’m excited to expand his responsibilities and leadership role to our marketing organization.”  “Our solution enables our customers to achieve hard-dollar cost savings with optimized asset management and transformed patient flow. I’m thrilled to be working with our marketing and sales teams to bring this message to our customers and our industry,” added Ruark.

Ruark’s experience includes over 15 years of starting up and leading companies, including launching new products, forging partnerships, heading up sales and marketing, and building industry-leading organizations. Ruark earned a Bachelor of Science degree in Electrical Engineering and a Master of Science degree in Management Science and Engineering, both from Stanford University.

About Intelligent InSites
Intelligent InSites helps healthcare organizations reduce costs and improve care by transforming automatically-collected data into actionable insights. Through its interoperable, hardware-agnostic, healthcare RTLS software platform, Intelligent InSites gathers data from real-time location, condition sensing, and other systems; then delivers meaningful information to the right person, at the right time, on the right device. Intelligent InSites’ customers gain enterprise-wide visibility and are able to impact continuous process improvements, resulting in remarkable financial and quality of care outcomes. For more information, visit www.IntelligentInSites.com.

By TechCrunch.com, Published: June 12

Everloop, a social network for children under 13 years of age, has raised $3.1 million in funding from vFormation, Band of Angels, Envoi Ventures, Richard Chino, Wayne Goodrich, Deena Burnett-Bailey and additional investors.

Everloop wants to be the Facebook for kids under the age of 13. The site offers a private social network where parents can actually monitor the day to day activities of their children on the network. Everloop combines music, social games, videos, photos, animation, user-generated content and other experiences.

The startup prides itself on a high-level of security within the network, so parents can constantly monitor their child’s interactions on the site for foul language, bullying, inappropriate pictures and more.

The company is also adding Disney exec Sandy Barger as Chief Marketing Officer, AOL’s Tobin Trevarthen as EVP of Business Development and Alan Goodman as Creative Advisor.

Everloop faces competition from Togetherville, which was recently acquired by Disney.