Cloud-Based Device Management Startup Soluto Getting Acquired By Device Insurers Asurion For Up To $130M

Looks like another exit for an Israel-based startup - this one straddling the worlds of cloud services and hardware control. Soluto, a service that lets users manage PCs and other connected devices remotely, is getting acquired by Asurion, a company that offers device insurance services. The news is being reported as a work in progress by TheMarker and Calcalist. Globes, meanwhile, is reporting this as a done deal. Meanwhile, we have confirmed the sale through two separate sources. We're hearing reports of up to $130 million, specifically between $100 million and $130 million. You can see where a deal with Asurion makes a lot of sense. The latter company, based out of Nashville, Tennessee, partners with carriers like Verizon, Sprint, AT&T, T-Mobile, and Clear to resell its services to consumers. Those services include physical replacement of broken devices - consumers can file and track claims - but there are also a suite of services that are software-based, such as the ability to locate lost devices and back up content. Soluto will help Asurion extend and improve the latter part of the service, perhaps as a way also to offset some of the insurance risk around losing and replacing faulty or broken handsets. It's not clear whether Asurion will keep Soluto, and specifically its R&D operations, intact in Israel, or move everything over to the U.S. We have reached out to Soluto for comment, and are contacting Asurion as well, and will update the post as we learn more. Update: We've now spoken with Asurion's SVP of product management, who says the deal is in an “advanced stage.” He says that he intention will be to keep Soluto's engineering and R&D efforts intact in Tel Aviv. This will be Asurion's first move into Israel, building on the 42 offices it already has worldwide. Tomer Dvir, the CEO of Soluto, is likely to take on a role that will see him working both between Tel Aviv and Asurion's U.S. headquarters. Detter also says that the company plans to keep Soluto's existing business fully operational: while the company is primarily focused on mobile devices for its core business, it also offers support for PCs and so Soluto's existing PC business, which has some 3 million users today, will become a part of that effort. [Original article continues below.] Soluto - which first had its debut at TechCrunch Disrupt in 2010 in the Startup Battlefield; it won - started out life as a cloud-based platform that let ordinary people help each other with managing their own and other people's devices. Tomer Dvir, the CEO and co-founder, has told me that one of the driving ideas behind creating the service was to help his mother with her computer when he was not near her. “I can help her set up and run Skype, Spotify, whatever,” he said. Pretty hip mom, I'd say. That initial consumer and specific PC focus helped the company with getting an early critical mass for its service. Today the company has clocked more than 3 million downloads of its product, and over 15 million “actions” carried out through its platform. More recently the company has expanded to include other connected devices beyond PCs such as smartphones and tablets; and it has expanded into enterprise services - such as its SMB-focused products, launched in April of this year. This has signalled a more formal approach to the kinds of device management you tend to associate with business services - mobile device management; hardware inventory; patch management; boot shortener; remote access, and so on. It has still continued to keep its focus on simplicity - taking a cue from the wider consumerization trend that has been so strong in the enterprise sector. “Ready to enjoy being the IT guy?” the site's homepage asks visitors. There were reports in September that Soluto was getting approached by an American software company, but those were never confirmed. In any case it looks like it's been in exit talks for a little while at least. Soluto has raised some $18 million from investors including Index Ventures, Bessemer Venture Partners and Proxima Ventures. (And CrunchFund, where TC co-founder Michael Arrington is a partner, is also an investor.)

Amazon Wants To Do Good With Its Goods, Launches ‘AmazonSmile' Charity Donation Program

At the beginning of the year, just after Amazon reported a big profit dip for Q4 2012, Slate business correspondent Matthew Yglesias posited (with tongue planted in cheek) that Amazon was “a charitable organization being run by elements of the investment community for the benefit of consumers.” Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos pointedly dismissed that observation in his following shareholder letter, but today one has to wonder if the charity implication didn't have some sort of lasting impact on the company. That's because Amazon has just rolled out a new initiative called AmazonSmile, which will see the e-commerce titan automatically donate 0.5 percent of all eligible purchases to a U.S. charity of the buyer's choosing. And to top it all off, there's no upper limit to the amount Amazon will give away. The high-level message is clear: Amazon wants people to know it cares about people and communities. But there's an underlying message that seems just as apparent: we'll keep giving as long as you keep buying. Let's consider the brass tacks. Starting today, interested users can mosey on over to smile.amazon.com, at which point they're prompted to select a charity for the proceeds of each transaction to go to (naturally, you can change your mind at any time). Amazon says there are nearly a million charities available to choose from, with recipients ranging from prominent projects like charity:water to much more local, grassroots affairs. A quick search for my hometown for instance revealed that I could indirectly donate to the Bahais Of Cherry Hill Township, the local fire department, or (my personal favorite) the Friends of the Cherry Hill Free Public Library. Once all that's done, it's essentially the exact same shopping experience, complete with Prime shipping if you've already shelled out for it. AmazonSmile GM Ian McAllister said that “tens of millions of items” are eligible for the program but there are some notable exceptions. Auto-renewed subscription purchases don't fall under the AmazonSmile umbrella, and neither do digital products like mp3s, video content, and Kindle books (“for now,” anyway). And this isn't just a temporary move meant to reflect the spirit of the upcoming holiday season either - McAllister confirmed that the company intends for the program to be around for the long haul. To hear him tell it, there was no specific moment of inspiration or event that prompted Amazon's brass to venture down this charitable road, just a desire to build things the company thinks its customers will “love”. Love, suffice it to say, is a curious thing in business. Apple aficionados love their Apple products to the point of waiting in line for days, and BlackBerry fans are among the most ardent and vocal I've ever seen in spite of waning fortunes. And if Amazon can entice a larger swath of people to love it because of this new charitable angle, the company won't be seeing hearts as much as it sees dollar signs. The upsides here are obvious. With only a fraction of a fraction of each transaction being passed along to charities, Amazon still stands to make gobs of money, especially if this program manages to lift sales volumes in any appreciable way. And you can bet that Amazon is going to play up this charitable angle over time, a move that should only endear users to the process of buying their, well, everythings from the massive e-tailer. After all, the very thrust of this initiative is to make sure that end users like you and I won't see any functional difference between plain ol' Amazon and AmazonSmile - why wouldn't we donate to charity if doing so didn't impact us in any appreciable way? What are we, a bunch of jerks? And then there are the potential tax implications to consider too. You as a user won't be able to claim these donations the next time you fill out your taxes, as they're all being made on behalf of a foundation established by Amazon. In short, if Amazon plays its cards right, it stands to make plenty of money by giving a ton of it away.

Fantastical 2 Brings Deep Reminders Support, Revamped iOS 7 Look To The Best iPhone Calendar

As my default Calendar replacement app, Fantastical has been on the home screen of my iPhone since its release nearly a year ago. As one of the few pieces of productivity software that I use regularly, I was extremely nervous about how the app was going to change with its iOS 7 update. I shouldn't have worried. Fantastical 2, out today, is one of the best examples of taking the opportunity presented by Apple's iOS 7 update and using it for more than just a visual ‘re-skin'. It's a fitting return for the only calendar app to have ever hit the #1 spot on Apple's paid charts. If you're unfamiliar with Fantastical, its strengths are a natural language parsing engine that lets you dash off regular phrases like ‘meet with Joe at noon on Tuesday at The Crab Shack' and end up with a fully inputted calendar entry without ever typing in any numbers. It's clever and powerful and almost always works exactly how you want it to. This is coupled with a unique layout that places either a ‘day ticker' of 1 week or a monthly calendar above a simple continuous agenda of appointments. For the second time in as many weeks, we've seen a very popular app with a distinctive feel re-imagined for iOS 7 with great results. While it could be argued that Tweetbot had an even more pronounced visual language, Fantastical hit some notes pretty hard that it couldn't have been easy to give up. Flexibits' Michael Simmons says that the decisions made in the re-working of the app went far beyond how to make the visual language of the app fit in with iOS 7. Yes, the staples along the top of the virtual ‘calendar' are gone, but there are also deeper changes that make a real difference in how useful the app is. One of the biggest examples of this is the trademark ‘lens' that sits in the center of the ‘day ticker' in Fantastical. The old design was very heavily influenced by a ‘real' magnifying glass, of the type that you'd slide over a desk calendar or log book to read a certain entry. The new design retains some of the magnification aspects, but gets winnowed down visually so it doesn't punch you in the eyeballs with its cleverness as much any more. But the design changes didn't stop there. "We moved it to position one, so you can see the full week ahead," says Simmons. He notes this as an example of one of the hard decisions that was made to make the app work better, rather than cling to the conventions established in the original. The added context of a couple of extra days ahead in the ticker is welcome, and a good choice. There have been some other additions as well, background syncing is in full effect, making sure that appointments and reminders are at your fingertips when you open the app. Test Expander support has been added for keyboard shortcuts. It supports Apple's dynamic text sizing for the trademark list of items. The customized keyboard in the event creation view now features an additional row of number keys for those times when you want to enter times or dates quickly without having to swap keyboard. There is also now a beautifully expanded landscape week view, which animates in context to give you a bigger eye on your current week ahead. And, at last, there is now extensive reminder support built right in to Fantastical. Deep Reminders Support The reminders support, says Simmons, goes far beyond adding support for ‘to do' actions with tick boxes in the list view. The whole app was re-thought to make reminders an integral part of your calendar. Not only do you get color coded list options for completed and uncompleted reminders, the parser has also been customized, adding thousands of trigger words that let you automatically add items as reminders. You'll notice that the composer now has a toggle to force an item you're creating to be a Reminder, but simply typing a trigger phrase will also create a reminder. ‘To-do, ‘remind', remind me' will all work, and hundreds of others. Of course, all of this is integrated with Apple's Reminders app. And it all supports geo-fencing to trigger on arrival to or departure from a location. One example of how well thought out those reminders are: you don't just get a list of all of you ongoing, undated items in the list. This would clutter up the display and become meaningless over time. Only the items you've attached a date or time to show up here. This retains the list's status as your ‘agenda', only showing you the stuff you must get done on a timely basis. The new iOS 7 background notification support means that you can also now set alarms, using keywords like ‘alarm'. Previously, because of Apple's restrictive backgrounding rules for apps, these would only trigger if they were synced to Calendar and that app sent the alert. Now, you can set alarms right within Fantastical and have them synced to the desktop version and triggered in the background. At A Bargain One of the most powerful things about the original Fantastical - and which gets retained in the new version - is that it was truly a calendar built from the ground up for how we use our mobile phones. There have been some other notable entries since like Sunrise, but the simple swipe-able interface of the app and powerful timeline view still makes it a standout. Fantastical 2 is out on the App Store today as a $2.99 paid upgrade, which fits in with another trend we're seeing. Developers who put in a significant amount of work on an iOS 7 update are charging for the new versions of the apps. Tweetbot did it and had major success on the App Store charts - while receiving a significant amount of blowback from users who saw it as a money grab. As far as I'm concerned, paying a couple of bucks for a productivity app, especially one as essential, and great, as Fantastical is an easy choice. This is an app that I will open thousands of times over the next few years, and rely on heavily to make sure I'm where I am when I need to be. After an initial sale period, the app will go up to $4.99, which is still a bargain.

WebMD Acquires Avado For $20-$30M To Help Drive Its Evolution From Media Company To Patient Engagement Platform

Seventeen years after its inception, WebMD remains one of the go-to resources for basic health and diagnostic information (and hypochondria enablement) on the Web. Born at the height of the Dot-com Boom, WebMD is on a very short list of companies that were able to not only endure the ensuing crash, but go on to achieve profitability, a billion-dollar market cap and maintain their position as a market leader - even today. It's been a bumpy road for WebMD, however, and the potholes ahead aren't getting any smaller. As the transformation of the healthcare industry accelerates, the threats to WebMD's business and its position atop the food chain have begun to multiply. Though WebMD announced today that its health network saw 138 million unique visitors per month and total traffic of 2.95 billion page views during the third quarter - after reporting its first profit in six quarters in July - its popularity has wavered over the last decade. At times, WebMD has been more punchline than pioneer. Adapt Or Die Today, WebMD is primarily known for its consumer-facing health and diagnostic web portal and mobile apps. When you think of WebMD, you think of its classic symptom checker, where you can enter in keywords like “runny nose,” whereupon it will serve you with possible diagnostic matches. However, over the years, the company has been quietly diversifying, adding services that allow it to reach new audiences. Through Medscape, for example, the company offers medical news and information to healthcare providers through its registration-based portal and apps. In turn, WebMD has also begun to target employers and health plans with its subscription-based patient engagement platform and private online health portals, which give employees a secure gateway through which they can access their personal health information, plan data and insurance claims. WebMD 2.0: From Media To Tech While WebMD has build a solid foundation around its flagship health information site, each of these services still live apart from each other. As people continue to adopt and become comfortable using a wide range of digital health tools, the opportunities for patients and healthcare providers to connect and communicate, for patients to take control of (and better monitor) their healthcare will increase exponentially. If WebMD is going to continue to be a part of the conversation in the emergent HealthCare 2.0 Era, it's going to have to step up its game and adapt to these changes. What's more, WebMD has business model that's very much centered on advertising. Where the pharmaceutical industry goes - its primary source of advertising dollars - so goes WebMD. But, as the company looks to close the gap between its consumer-facing apps and services and its provider-facing portal by allowing doctors to push content to their patients' phones, for example, opportunities begin to present themselves. By giving doctors the ability to prescribe educational material and content across apps, stepping into personalized healthcare information services and behavior change, WebMD could be able to reduce its reliance on advertising. Looking forward, WebMD will continue to deliver its core media services, but perhaps more critical to its survival will be the process of redefining itself as a health technology company. To do so, WebMD took its first step in that direction today with the announcement that it will be acquiring TechCrunch Disrupt finalist and the maker of “Patient Relationship Management” (or “PRM”) software, Avado. Avado And Patient-Focused Healthcare Like healthcare itself, WebMD has historically tailored its products to address the two very distinct “worlds” within the system: The consumer world and the professional world. Traditionally, it was as if these two divisions were separated by 30+, New York City blocks. With its first acquisition in five years, WebMD is looking for Avado to both metaphorically and physically become the connective tissue between its offices and between its customers - consumers, patients and doctors. Since launching in 2011, Avado founders and Microsoft veterans Dave Chase, Bassam Saliba and John Yii have sought to do for healthcare and personal health records what Salesforce has done for Customer Relationship Management (CRM). [Disclosure: Dave Chase has contributed a number of articles on the HealthTech space to TechCrunch over the years.] The idea, Chase says, has been to increase the level of connectivity between healthcare providers and consumers to make the delivery of care more efficient and improve patient outcomes. “The timing is right,” WebMD CTO and COO Bill Pence tells us. “Traditionally, patients and healthcare providers have lived in separate silos, but with the growing adoption of electronic health records and mobile devices, coupled with the advance in sensor technology, there are now more opportunities than ever before to connect the two and offer personalized, direct-to-consumer services.” The Road Ahead While the companies aren't yet ready to talk about the new products that are on the roadmap in the wake of the acquisition, Pence did say that these products will directly integrate Avado's technology. Beyond that, as to what will become of Avado once it's folded into the WebMD ecosystem, Chase says that Avado will take up residence within WebMD's technology team, currently a small but growing portion of the company's 1,600 employees. Avado founders Chase and Saliba will be staying on after the acquisition, and will be reporting to Pence. The other members of the Avado team will also join WebMD's tech team and will remain at their company headquarters in Seattle. While the two companies declined to share details in regard to the terms of the acquisition, TechCrunch sources close to the deal said that the price fell in the $20 million to $30 million range and was a positive outcome both for the founders and for its investors. Avado raised $1 million back in March from investors that include The Partnership Fund for New York City and healthcare angels like Andy Palmer and Dr. Daniel Schwartz. Though Avado managed to secure outside investment and attract “hundreds” of healthcare provider customers and “many thousands” of consumers, its traction is minuscule in juxtaposition with WebMD. While WebMD may not be the sexiest brand in healthcare, it reaches the largest audience of health-focused consumers and healthcare providers in the U.S., Chase said. And therein lies the real value of this outcome for Avado - the opportunity to not only help WebMD in its plans to build the “Health Graph” and integrate its technology into a larger suite of connectivity and patient-empowerment services, but reach an audience of (hundreds of) millions. On the other hand, while WebMD finds itself back in the black and holding fast to its position in the market, the online consumer healthcare pioneer is at a crossroads. Yes, they have a long reach, but without talent that can help it build third party ecosystems, WebMD risks missing a big opportunity. WebMD is eager to reposition itself and transform itself from a digital media company to a health technology company, and, in particular, become a true patient engagement platform. Avado believes it can help WebMD shave two years off of that transition. Integrating Salesforce-like patient empowerment software (and APIs) into its portfolio and infrastructure are the first real step in that new direction.

Scringo's Community-Builder SDK Now Lets Developers Add Stickers & Paid Sticker Packs To Any App

Israel-based startup Scringo, which offers a cross-platform SDK to help developers add social elements such as messaging to their apps to increase user retention and boost in-app engagement, has added a new feature that taps into the consumer craze for stickers. From today, developers using Scringo's SDK to add social features to their iOS apps (Android support is due soon) will also have the option to add stickers - and even a sticker shop, so they can monetise the addition by selling paid sticker packs to their app's users. Selling stickers is a strategy that has worked well for Japanese mobile messaging app Line. Close to a third (27 percent) of its $132 million Q2 revenue came from sticker purchases. And stickers are continuing to spread like a rash across the social messaging space - with everyone from Facebook to MessageMe to Path (to name but a few) seeking to surf the sticky craze. Most to eke out a revenue stream, others like Facebook just trying to keep up with the craze. Scringo's platform offers developers a handful of pre-made sticker packs which they can add to their apps as free stickers, or paid packs. The platform also allows them to upload their own sticker designs, so they can customise the content to fit with their specific app. Scringo is a whitelabel offering, focused on giving developers a hand to expand their feature-sets via the likes of a customisable chat UI. Scringo is monetising its own services by taking a cut of any additional revenues it helps developers to generate. So in the case of stickers, it'll get a small cut of any sticker sales. It's the first such monetising feature for Scringo - since its main platform is free. “I see a very bright future for stickers, and for messaging as a whole,” says Scringo co-founder Ran Avrahamy. “And we have several other in-app features to add to every type of app. We have, maybe going into adding small games into apps. We actually started a couple of months ago… we added a quiz into apps - so any type of app could add a quiz into its app for its users, with leaderboards and stuff like that. “We will add more and more of these features in the very near future. We have a very clear future - which is trying to utilise every type of app into a social network. And bring in the users… Every type of app or game has the potential of a social network.” Scringo launched its community and messaging platform back in March, and now has more than 1,000 developers on board. It argues that adding social features enables developers to improve user retention and boost time spent in app. “What we've seen is that utilizing an app's community potential increases its retention by up to 500%,” he tells TechCrunch, adding: “The users are already in the app, with an obvious mutual interest (at least one) - the only thing an app developer should do, is to allow them to communicate.” Scringo customers can be developers of any stripes - although there are certain types of apps that make more sense than others. Apps that are primarily social to start with aren't likely to need Scringo's feature-set, while certain utility apps may struggle to build a sense of community among users, however hard they try (although Avrahamy says Scringo's SDK has even found its way into a calculator app). “Every type of app that doesn't have the initial intent of being a social network [could add social elements via a platform like Scringo]… We see a huge variety of apps using us. From sports to artists, musicians, entertainment apps. Games that people can talk about a certain level in a game, or characters inside a game. We're trying to break the industry into sub-categories that can use us, and basically it's all except social networks and simple utilities,” he adds. Things are certainly afoot in social. A subtle disenfranchisement of the grand old daddies of the category as more and more mobile apps embed their own social features, giving users alternative channels to ping, prod, poke and message each other. Comms are being routed through many different gateways, splintering the pipeline of social chatter into myriad streams. Twitter, for instance, cited the new breed of mobile messaging apps, such as Korea's Kakaotalk, as competitors to its business, in its recent Form S-1 filing ahead of its IPO. It's fair to say that digital comms tools have never been so diverse. And the risk is death by a thousand cuts to any catch-all social networking service. Not immediate death, evidently. And likely not complete service death - Facebook will probably always have a place as a mainstream channel for people to post baby photos to and so on. But little packets of user engagement are inevitably being sucked elsewhere, at a rate that's accelerating as services proliferate and attention fragments across more socialised apps. And of course, the advent and uptake of platforms like Scringo - that make it even easier for developers to ‘socialise' their apps - is only going to accelerate this fragmentation. In terms of competitors, Avrahamy argues that Scringo is “pretty unique” in focusing on messaging and allowing users to communicate with each other within an app - and because of its grander “mission” of helping developers turn any app into an independent social network. And also because Scringo is addressing both the front-end and back-end portions of development. But he does name the likes of Disrupt Alum Layer as a rival platform for enabling in-app messaging, along with companies offering “social SDKs” for game apps, such as Heyzap and PapayaMobile. “What we're bringing is more of a front end, not only the back-end on the stores. So we're bringing you the screens, the GUI, the UI that you can customise,” he adds. “We're doing the back-end and the front-end for you in one piece.” So far, Scringo, which raised a $700,000 seed back in March from Israeli VC Inimiti and “several other angel investors” - and is apparently in the process closing a Series A - is seeing the greatest traction for its platform among developers in the U.S., U.K. and Germany, and in the games app category. It's keen to expand on this. “We're trying to expand both on vertical and on industries. Now we're very into games. We've opened up our platform for Unity, for game developers to operate it on Unity. So we're very strong now in games and trying to also fight other verticals in terms of demography,” says Avrahamy. “There's a million people that are using your app - using your property. And we just want to help developers understand that - let your users talk to each other, let them communicate. You have created that one thing in common for them. You have that common interest. Let them express themselves.”

Runnable Raises $2M Seed Round To Expand Its “YouTube Of Code”

Runnable, a recently launched Palo Alto-based startup that aims to make it easy to discover and reuse code snippets, today announced that it has raised a $2 million seed round led by Sierra Ventures with additional investments from Resolute VC, AngelPad and 500 Startups. Hiten Shah, the founder of KISSmetrics and Isaac Roth, the founder of Makara, also participated in this round. The service, which launched with about 1,000 code snippets for popular programming languages and APIs, plans to use this new influx of cash to onboard the companies that are currently waiting to bring code snippets for their APIs, libraries and SDKs onto the site. Since its launch about four weeks ago, the team told me, it has now gotten requests from over 150 companies that want to add their code to its library. The idea behind the service is to turn it into a “YouTube of code.” Currently, the company argues, developers spend a lot of time searching for code snippets, but there is no single site where they can easily find them. What makes Runnable so cool is that, in addition to finding these code snippets, you can also edit and run them right in the browser. To do this, the team just spins up a virtual machine to run the code in a few seconds and then destroys it when you're done. Right now, Runnable is still monitoring all the code submissions to the site. Over time, the company plans to open its service up to any developer or company. Runnable hopes that, as it becomes more popular, it will become the go-to site for any company or open source project that wants to get coders to use their tools. It bootstrapped this process by adding lots of snippets from PHP, Node.js, Ruby and other popular languages. Now, it will start adding snippets from new projects as it brings on these new partners.

Analytics Startup Mixpanel Expands Into Mobile Surveys

Mobile-focused analytics company Mixpanel is growing its offerings today with the launch of Mixpanel Surveys, a product that allows developers to integrate user surveys into their mobile apps. Currently, co-founder Suhail Doshi said the options “kind of suck” for developers who want to find out more about what their users think. Usually, they end up emailing a giant list of user addresses, an approach that isn't particularly well-targeted and doesn't necessarily result in many responses. With Mixpanel Surveys, the questions can be integrated into the app itself, so users are being surveyed in a context where it's relevant, which should lead to “conversion rates that are much higher,” Doshi said. He gave me a quick demo of the editor, and it took only a few minutes to create a survey that looked like it was a native part of the app. The surveys that Doshi created only had one question per screen, and he said that mobile surveys really shouldn't be longer than a few questions. Nonetheless, Doshi argued that the results can still be quite meaningful, especially when paired with Mixpanel's audience segmentation capabilities. For example, if a developer wanted to know if level 10 of their game was too easy, too difficult, or just right, that's a one-question survey that could be targeted specifically at players who just finished that level. When I asked whether other companies couldn't do the same thing, Doshi replied that the makers of most survey products aren't “mobile first”: The technology that you're asking about, it's not so much that SurveyMonkey couldn't go and build this UI, but I don't think they have the DNA to go and build it. They don't have the design DNA and the mobile DNA. That takes a long time to build. One specific technical challenge that Doshi said Mixpanel has solved is the ability to integrate these surveys “at scale” while minimizing any effect on the performance of the mobile apps in question. He also argued that surveys are a “natural, tangential” area for Mixpanel to move into, and something that many of the company's current customers have already expressed interest in. The existing analytics product helps developers understand how their users behave and how much money they're worth to the business, but with surveys, Mixpanel can also “help companies measure how people think and feel about things.”