They were app developers; the transformation into systems engineers was just a necessity of growing the business. A website that looked pretty and worked smoothly was little more than veneer if the real product — the AWS virtual servers running Heroku’s customers’ applications under the covers of the hip samurai-themed web service — didn’t work. At one point, Lindenbaum joked during a recent call, Heroku had to do a UX refresh “and we literally didn’t have anyone in the company who could build web apps anymore.”

After leaving Heroku and ultimately its parent company Salesforce.com , Lindenbaum is back in the public eye with a new effort called Heavybit Industries that aims to save other startups from Heroku’s early growing pains. The idea came after so many fledgling companies came to Heroku looking for help, and after Lindenbaum got personally involved with some as an adviser or investor. He eventually realized that there’s a lot of institutional knowledge out there about how to build business that serve developers, but there’s also a lot of duplicated effort because the people starting these businesses often don’t know their peers exist, much less what they’re up to.

How Heavybit works

Heavybit is like a co-working-space-meets-incubator-meets fraternity, and Lindenbaum has recruited some of the biggest names in venture capital, application development and developer-focused startups to make sure Heavybit delivers on its promise. It works like this: Companies that have raised some money, gained some traction among developers, and now have to deal with the difficult problems of scaling their code or monetizing their business come to Heavybit. Once accepted, they’re in the “active period” for nine months, which includes a curriculum of weekly talks on technology or entrepreneurship; office hours with experts and investors; and meeting/work space in a building in San Francisco’s SOMA neighborhood.

James Lindenbaum at Structure 2009. (c) Pinar Ozger

Membership in Heavybit is in exchange for equity, and the community has space for between 10 to 15 companies at a time, Lindenbaum said (although it’s really a “membership for life” situation). The first batch of startups includes some more-established ones — Zencoder, Stripe, PagerDuty and Meteor — that will serve as mentors as well as receive mentorship. Other inaugural Heavybit members include Treasure Data, Kodowa, Iron.io, CircleCi, CloudConnect, Keen IO, Codenvy and Backlift.

Early Heavybit expert advisers include Derek Collison (Apcera/VMware/Google), Adam Gross (CloudConnect/Salesforce.com), Jesse Robbins (Opscode/Amazon), Javier Soltero (Acompli/VMware/Hyperic), and Lindenbaum’s Heroku co-founders Adam Wiggins and Orion Henry. Among  Heavybit’s early investor partners are Ping Li (Accel Partners), Chris Sacca (Lowercase Capital), John Connors (Ignition Partners) and Matt Ocko (Data Collective).

Bringing “bad-ass” engineers back from mobile apps

One of Lindenbaum’s goals when putting together the advisers — and one of his continuing goals with Heavybit — is to to put member companies in touch with people who really understand the business and architectural complexities of distributed, multitenant applications. “The reason [these developer-focused] products are so great is because they’re built … by app developers for app developers,” Lindenbaum said. But, like the Heroku team early on, the founders aren’t always skilled in building systems designed to scale.

“The scale curve is much steeper for these companies,” he explained, because the way it usually works is these businesses attract customers who also have their own customers to serve. So rather than handling data for one company, they might be handling data for 20 of that company’s clients, as well.

In order to put his companies in touch with the best of the best of distributed systems engineers, though, Lindenbaum first has to walk those guys back from the Instagram edge. Once you prove yourself at a place like Google or Facebook, Lindenbaum said, “[E]veryone thinks you’re a bad ass. As soon as you say you’re going to build a thing, VCs line up to give you money.”

Unfortunately, he added, many of these people are chasing the past rather than future, trying to cash in their lottery tickets on building the next photo-sharing app rather than on the hairy enterprise-grade systems problems where their skills would really be valuable.

But he has a plan to bring them back to the enterprise side. He intends to push the message of how hard these problems are and how much the cloud services and developer-focused products industries are becoming analogous to traditional heavy industries in terms of the complex but mature supply chains involved.

Essentially, he wants to do the “Got Milk?” ads for the cloud services industry, educating the market so the individual companies don’t have to. It’ll be like a trade association, he joked, “only the non-evil version of that.” Once you shine a light on the difficulty of the problems, Lindenbaum said, the really good engineers come running back to solve them.

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Earlier today at London’s Le Web conference, coworking rental space management startup Breather debuted at the hands of founder Julien Smith, according to Venturebeat. The concept is pretty straightforward: simply register, book a “private quiet space” nearby, unlock your room with your phone (utilizing Lockitron), and use the space at your own discretion. All for around $20/hour.

Marketed as the “Zipcar for rooms,” Breather is a sign of the times: as urban cities become more crowded, the demand for working spaces is forcing the market to mature and develop collaborative niches in a way that could make securing a space more difficult (and expensive).

Breather isn’t the first company to offer hourly bookings for coworking spaces — LiquidSpace allows coworking spaces to put up their unused space or conference rooms up for drop-in users — but it is the first to rely on an hourly-only model and use its own space to do so. The attempt at commodifying quiet space in urban areas like New York or San Francisco highlights a unique problem for startups: when space is valued at a premium, finding a way to meet in a professional, quiet setting without bringing someone into a home or renting an ultra-expensive office space is becoming increasingly more difficult.

In an independent report by our own Ki Mae Heussner, the priciest coworking space in this burgeoning cottage industry tallied around $650 and none dipped below $300 per month, which is nothing to sneeze at for a startup looking to secure a few desks. In rough math, an occasional jaunt to a high-profile Breather space could roughly cost around $160 per month for a two-hour meeting twice a week, but long-term meetings or something remotely regular can start to add up. But it’s not exactly used for that, in a way, and that’s the beauty of Breather: one-off spaces for one-off uses when you (or your company) needs it.

Breather’s impact on the traditional coworking space really isn’t major — none of these rooms are worthwhile enough to park your company or do long-term work. But there is a special niche for a basement startup to appear considerate and high-end among flashier investors, potential partners or power clientele, and Breather can thrive in providing that kind of one-off thrill.

Just don’t go looking for that kind of thrill — naughty members will get banned.

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The startups are focusing on all kinds of issues – from using big data to accelerate cancer care to creating an online community for patients and caregivers to using sensors to lower stress and boost productivity.  But a few of the companies have already attracted a bit of attention.

Augmedix, for example, is building a service for doctors powered by the ever-buzzy Google Glass. The company, which is led by a former employee of sensor company MC10, has only said that it’s creating an app for medical doctors. But it’s already raised $55,000 in seed funding on Upstart, including from SoftTech venture capitalist Jeff Clavier.

Another startup worth watching is Smart Patients, founded by Google’s former Chief Health Strategist Roni Zeiger. The startup, which we covered back in April when it launched at TEDMED, is creating an online community for cancer patients and caregivers that incorporates social networking and search technology.

Given booming interest in sensor technology, it’s also little surprise that Rock Health tapped wearable sensor startup Spire to be a part of its newest class. A recent graduate from StartX, the accelerator for startups founded by Stanford students, Spire tracks breathing patterns as an indicator of stress.

In addition to revealing the members of its newest class, Rock Health said that its roster of corporate supporters had grown with partnerships with life sciences real estate and venture firm Alexandria Real Estate Equities, pharmaceutical company Boehringer Ingelheim, and Ogilvy Public Relations. The accelerator also said that later this year it will move out of its digs in San Francisco’s Chinatown to a new space closer to UCSF’s new Center for Digital Health Innovation and SoMa.

Here’s a full list of the startups in the accelerator’s new class:

Amplify Health – As the health care system shifts from “fee for service” to “fee for value,” Amplify Health wants to offer physicians software for managing their patient populations and improving outcomes.

Anapsis – The young (or very stealthy startup) doesn’t appear to have a website up but Rock Health says it’s building a “research platform and marketplace for scientific and statistical computing.”

Augmedix – Augmedix is one of the first startups creating a Google Glass-powered application for medical doctors.

CancerIQ – With a goal of bringing better intelligence and big data to cancer care, CancerIQ is a web-based application that helps researchers and physicians access and understand a wide range of relevant data.

CRIXlabs – Using predictive software, the startup aims to help pharmaceutical companies in their research process to develop safer and more effective drugs.

Fluid – The startup enables patients to diagnose themselves with the flu in minutes, without taking a trip to the doctor.

Lift Labs – For people with Parkinson’s disease or other conditions that cause tremor, Lift Labs is developing a range of tools, including a spoon that makes eating more comfortable.

Sensentia – The company is developing tools for healthcare administration and operations, including a product that enables health insurers to more efficiently handle the volume of real-time inquiries from care providers.

Smart Patients – Launched in April, Smart Patients is creating an online community for cancer patients and caregivers.  

Spire – The wearable sensor tracks breathing patterns to help people monitor and control stress.

ThriveOn – A mental health-focused startup, ThriveOn offers customized care programs for individuals.

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Between smartphones, social networks and the easy access to a steady stream of pop culture and general news, teachers have never had more competition for their students’ attention. But instead of helping teachers keep the real world out of the classroom, a few smart startups are building tools that invite the real world in.

NuSkool brings pop culture icons into classroom lessons

“We’re in a student engagement crisis right now. There’s a lot going on and students want to be engaged, they want to learn but they’re having trouble being taught,” said Abran Maldonado, president and co-founder of startup Nuskool.

About 8,000 students drop out of school each day, with 50 percent saying that they’re bored and that the content isn’t relevant to their lives, he added.

Through Nuskool’s site, teachers can find lessons for students in grades 6 through 12 that use references from television, music, video games and other pop culture genres to teach a range of lessons aligned with Common Core State Standards.

English teachers can find journalism lessons based on interviews with Jay-Z or teach persuasive essay writing through the lens of Law & Order and science teachers can help students calculate Hollywood’s carbon footprint or explore the future of 3D printing. The contextual lessons could keep students from tuning out and, ideally, help students bring more awareness and critical thinking to their daily lives.

My one issue with the startup has to do with its business model: the company plans to rely on “branded entertainment,” or digital content built around the brands on its site — an arrangement that might not sit too well with parents worried that marketing is exposing their kids to unhealthy behaviors. Maldonado is aware of the sensitivity and said the company is careful to avoid brands selling caffeinated beverages and other unhealthy foods, for example. But even though more schools see advertising as an answer to slashed budgets, parents and public advocates may not warm to the idea of speeding the commercialization of schools.

Boosting literacy through current events

PenPalNews, another Socratic Labs startup, is bringing the real world into the classroom in a very different way. Led by a former producer for NPR’s “On the Media,” the startup wants to enable kids in different parts of the country, or even different parts of the world, to communicate around current events.

Like a modern-day pen pal program, the startup matches up classrooms for six-week stints. It prompts students to read and answer questions about news events — from the war in Afghanistan to national elections — and then share their thoughts with their pen pals. Since it all takes place through PenPalNews’ site, teachers can read the correspondence and assess students’ literacy and critical thinking skills. And it’s in line with the new Common Core State Standards, which require that by 2014, 70 percent of the texts high school students read come from nonfiction sources.

While several newer ed tech companies tend to focus on the STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) subjects (and not without good reason) I love that PenPalNews is giving teachers needed support around literacy.

“Teaching kids to read and write is hard,” said Michael Bernstein, the startup’s CEO. “Only a third of 8^th graders in the U.S. are at grade level in reading and writing.”

And, as a New York Times article this week pointed out, teachers are finding it more difficult to help struggling students improve in reading than they are in math, partly because reading roadblocks tend to be more complicated to overcome.

Programs like PenPalNews and Nuskool, which target middle schools and high schools, can’t tackle all of the obstacles standing between a student and academic success, many of which start in early childhood. But they’re part of a growing group of startups tying real-world examples to standards-based lessons (Mathalicious is another one worth watching) and I think they’re on the right track.

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Tandem said on Tuesday it has opened an office in India’s tech-hub Bangalore and plans to fund between 10 and 20 new startups on the subcontinent over the next year. Partner Rohit Bhagat will lead Tandem’s global push, but the accelerator has also brought on two new Bangalore-based partners, Indian entrepreneurs Ranjan Pai and Mohandas Pai (unrelated).

As with its U.S. investments, Tandem will continue to focus on mobile startups, but said it would look for companies that have a cross-border outlook rather than companies targeting just the local Indian market.

Tandem raised $32 million for its second fund last June. Typically it has invested in three or four companies each quarter, but the accelerator also claims to take a much more hands-on approach – an approach it calls “muscle capital” — to the companies it backs, moving beyond mentoring to day-to-day operational and strategic support. That approach had kept its portfolio small, but now that its partnership ranks have nearly tripled, Tandem plans to grow the size of its accelerator classes.

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Earlier this year, Mayor Michael Bloomberg and the New York City Department of Education kicked off a first-of-its kind competition, called the Gap App Challenge, inviting developers around the country to submit ideas for apps that could help close achievement gaps in middle school math.  On Tuesday, Schools Chancellor Dennis Wolcott announced that, out of more than 200 applicants, the department — which overseas the largest school district in the country — had picked their winners.

The startups, which included adaptive learning company KnowRe (Best Instructional App), Google Apps management startup Hapara (Best Instructional/Engagement App), video-based math lesson website Mathalicious and behavior tracking software company LiveSchool, won a total of $100,000.

“Our students are really into technology – they know it like the back of their hands,” said New York City Schools Chancellor Dennis Wolcott. “If we can find better ways to engage them [around learning] that’s to the benefit of the entire community.”

While the amount of money itself isn’t huge (the top winners won about $15,000 each), the competition – along with the city’s broader Innovation Zone (iZone) program – holds a lot of promise for more cross-pollination among educators and entrepreneurs.  Launched in 2010, the iZone includes about 250 of the city’s 1,700 public schools and is focused on finding ways to personalize learning through new tools, technology and ideas.

It remains to be seen how much traction these apps will actually get among teachers and students, but the hope is that iZone schools will partner with the winning developers to refine the apps and implement their use in classrooms.

While plenty of ed tech startups partner with individual school districts and schools to beta test their products, New York’s iZone is among the most ambitious attempts to blend the worlds of education and tech innovation. While the app challenge isn’t expected to become an annual event, the program is planning a series of hackathons, challenges and workshops.

Here’s a little more on the winning startups:

KnowRe: One of the growing companies in the increasingly hot adaptive learning space, KnowRe, which focuses on math, aims to personalize learning process by determining a student’s strengths and weaknesses. As students progress through a series of questions, it figures out where the student is struggling and its algorithms adapt to the student to help them master the necessary skills.

Hapara: As Google’s Apps for Education gain traction worldwide — at last count they were in use by 25 million schools — Hapara helps schools and teachers optimize the tools with easy-to-view intuitive dashboards.

Mathalicious: Instead of teaching kids math with boring old word problems with little bearing on reality, Mathalicious creates and licenses lessons for teachers that helps students learn math through real-life examples related to sports, music, technology and more.

LiveSchool:  In an effort to record information about students’ classroom behavior, some teachers might spend up to two or three extra hours a week filling out paperwork. To help them save time and more effectively communicate with peers and administrators, LiveSchool offers subscription-based software that enables teachers to track and share classroom behavior information in real-time.

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In contrast to startups like ZocDoc or HealthTap, which help patients find any doctor available in their area or online, ConsultingMD bills itself as service that offers access to only the doctors in the top echelon of the medical world. These physicians – who encompass the one percent of their profession – tend to be the chiefs or chairmen of the department, with publications in the top medical journals, the company says.

“The core problem is that in the highly elite world of academic specialists… access to these people is difficult [and] patients don’t know how to find them in the first place,” said CEO and co-founder Owen Tripp, who was previously COO and co-founder of Reputation.com. The company’s other co-founder is Dr. Lawrence Hofman, chief of interventional radiology at Stanford Hospital.

Through the site, patients in need of second opinion spend a few minutes describing their case, disclosing where they’ve already received care and authorizing ConsultingMD to access their medical history. Then the startup digitizes and indexes the relevant medical records (an often frustrating and dragged-out process for patients) and delivers it to the appropriate specialist on ConsultingMD.

While it can take the company an average of seven or eight days to aggregate all the records, once the doctor receives the information, Tripp said, they the doctor  can turn around a second opinion in an average of 48 hours.

For individuals coming to the site, the pricing is steep, emphasizing ConsultingMD’s positioning as an elite service – the company’s website says a second opinion costs $3,750. But the company believes its bigger opportunity is by offering the service to employers looking for a way to help their employees get better outcomes (and therefore boost productivity and lower costs).

For an additional $200, the company will also locate and schedule a priority appointment with a top specialist in a patient’s area, as well as deliver all of the necessary medical records.

For doctors, the site offers a chance to interact with other top-tier medical professionals (doctors are only admitted to the site by peer recommendation), see more cases that match their research interests and, of course, earn a little more cash. For patients, the opportunity to reach the one or two leading experts in a given field may be attractive — especially in very specific or rare medical situations. But even though the company says that outcomes for elite doctors differ substantially from outcomes for less pedigreed professionals, it’s unclear that the research backs that up.

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Tech Cocktail was cofounded in 2006 by former blogger and AOL product strategist Frank Gruber and former Feedburner employee Eric Olson. The site, which has its headquarters in downtown Las Vegas, said it will use the funding to hire more employees, including VegasTech organize Gabriel Shephard and DC Tech organizer Justin Thorp.

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That idea isn’t going to work.

Why? In a nutshell, social network-based communication is primarily organized around the concept of a “pull” medium — that is, a medium where individuals subscribe to whichever information sources they prefer and find useful. Traditional business processes, on the other hand, use “push” communications, where whoever created the information gets to decide whom it’s most important to. Simply put, the two parties don’t gibe.

Perhaps more importantly, the nature of work in our era has changed. Most people now have jobs based on non-routine work, where the predefined and fixed roles of business process do not reach.

I recently wrote a report as part of my activities in GigaOM Research, entitled “Social networks will displace business processes, not socialize them” (subscription required). In the report, I argue that we are drifting away from a business-process defined culture and towards a social network-shaped, cooperative one.

Source: Stowe Boyd/GigaOM Research

Above we see the variance between process-oriented organizational cultures and network-oriented ones. I consider this part of the transition from post-modern (1970-2005) to what I’ll call post-normal (2005-present and beyond) economic eras. These cultures also differ in the nature of social affiliation, with a loosening of the bonds that tie people together in cooperative cultures contrasted with collaborative ones. People in cooperative organizations will have a higher number on connections, but the proportion of those that are strong ties decreases relative to collaborative cultures.

Source: Stowe Boyd/GigaOM Research

Some corporate cultures are stuck even farther back in time because they are based on competition. I don’t mean competing with others in the marketplace, like Toyota competing with BMW. I am talking about a corporate culture based on zero-sum competition among workers, where one person’s advancement is someone else’s demotion. These are cultures strongly based on authority-based decision-making, and really are a holdover from the late modern era: the late industrial era.

Source: Stowe Boyd/GigaOM Research

In the report, I discuss the “fit” of different psychological profiles, or archetypes, in these cultures. For example, the Entrepreneur archetype (see above) fits well in collaborative and competitive cultures, and fits the entrepreneurial culture perfectly. But Entrepreneurs won’t like working in a purely traditional, “cooperative” culture, because they like to lead collectives that are managed through consensus. A cooperative organization is too loose for them: It’s a connective, and is based on laissez-faire decision making.

Source: Stowe Boyd/GigaOM Research

This is the debut of the 3C model — competitive, collaborative, and cooperative. It’s a psychosocial model of organizational culture, and I hope it helps address some key issues in organizational dynamics in organizations today as social technologies and practices are being adopted. Marshal McLuhan said, “we make our tools, and they shape us.” Keeping that in mind, we see the change that social network-based communication is causing.

Businesses are not making these changes on a whim or because individuals are made happier by cooperative work relationships. The fast-and-loose business is most in sync with the digital realities of today’s world, although most companies are still operating principally in a more traditional mode, and may even have a healthy dose of the “frozen-and-immobile” at the core. Nonetheless, businesses must move towards a more cooperative work environment because in doing so they will successfully compete in today’s fast-paced, digitally focused world. Older cultures that cling to traditional business processes will not.

To read the full report, click here (subscription required).

Thumbnail image courtesy of flickr user ShellVacationsHospitality.

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For technology to make meaningful improvements in health care, it has to penetrate communities across the country — so it’s a positive sign that digital health hubs are popping up nationwide (even though it could intensify the much-discussed “Series A crunch.”)

In total, April was an off-the-charts month for health technology funding, according to data from Startup Health. The sector raised a total of $322.72 million, which is an increase of 404 percent over the same period last year.

Here’s a quick look at last month’s activity:

• Sensors again attracted a great deal of investor interest. In addition to the funding raised by Watermark, a company behind sleep monitoring technology, companies including MC10, which is working with Reebok on skullcap-like head impact monitor, and fetal monitoring system Sense4Baby raised funding.
• While it wasn’t among the top three sub-sectors to receive investments, telehealth also had a strong month in April, with companies like HealthSpot, PresenceLearning and Remote Medicine receiving healthy amounts of capital. That tracks with recent research indicating that the market is expected to grow 53 percent this year and six-fold by 2017.

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