Electric Cloud Closes $12M Series E Round For Its Continuous Delivery Service

Electric Cloud, a company that offers continuous delivery products, services and support to businesses that want to adapt this software design practice, today announced that it has closed a $12 million Series E round with participation from Siemens’ Venture Capital, US Venture Partners, Mayfield Fund, RRE Ventures and Rembrandt Venture Partners. The company previously disclosed this as an $8 million round in September 2013, but today announced that it has added an additional $4 million to this over-subscribed round.

Steve Brodie, Electric Cloud’s CEO, said in a statement announcing the funding that closing the over-subscribed Series E round will help to accelerate company growth and create new ways to help customers deliver better software more efficiently.

The company says the additional funding reflects its “continued growth and market leadership.” Electric Cloud’s services are currently in use by a wide variety of businesses, ranging from Shell Oil to Epic Games, Panasonic Automotive Services, Splunk and SpaceX. Its staff has now grown to 120 employees, and its products include services for agile software development, Android life-cycle management and automotive software.

Continuous integration (that is, ensuring that all developers are synced up by checking on their code regularly) has been commonplace since the 90s. Continuous delivery, however, which goes beyond integration and focuses on the deployment pipeline, is only now really catching on in the enterprise. Already, though, it is a surprisingly competitive field; incumbents like HP to ThoughtWorks and startups like CloudBees’ Jenkins and the increasingly popular Chef are vying for users.

The Proper Way to Wash an Electric Blanket

When it's time to put away the electric blanket for the season (or starts to smell funky), it's time to clean it. Clean an electric blanket using a washing machine and a few simple steps.

The key is to make sure you don't leave it in the washing machine a full cycle, but a quick 2-3 minute agitation along with a full rinse and spin (and, obviously, unplug all cables before you put it in). You can dry it on low for a few minutes, but you'll likely have to hang it for a day or two to completely dry out. Then, when you pull it out next season, you'll have something nice and clean.

How to Wash Electric Blankets | Housewife How-Tos

Photo by Spider.Dog.

View the Original article

The JiveBike Is A Fold-Up Electric Bike With Style

We’ve seen more personal e-vehicles sprout up in the last year than I care to remember, but today yet another joins the fray.

Meet the JiveBike.

Unlike one category of e-bikes that look and feel just like a regular bike, the JiveBike’s appearance is a bit different. It has a low center bar, which holds the batteries and the Raspberry PI CPU that’s running the show. But, at the same time, the JiveBike doesn’t look so different from a traditional bike that you will turn into some spectacle on the road.

Oh, and it folds.

We’ve seen e-vehicles that fold down to compactness before — the Urb-E, in particular, comes to mind — but not very many e-bikes maintain the appearance of a real bike and still fold down to something more manageable.

The JiveBike can last 20 miles on a two-hour charge, with a maximum speed of around 15 miles per hour.

You can choose between three driving modes: electric, manual or assisted pedaling.

Plus, it also comes with a mount for your smartphone, and Bluetooth connectivity so you can pair with the JiveBike app, letting you see how many miles are left on the bike and charging status. And if that weren’t enough, you can plug in your route on maps and have easy-to-read directions while riding around.

There’s just one caveat. The price on this bad boy is sky high. You can pre-order a JiveBike now by paying half of the full price, which is just north of $2,000, and then pay the second half of the pre-order after receiving your JiveBike and testing it out.

Pre-orders are available here.