The quantified self movement’s gaining steam, with companies creating all sorts of gadgets to track our activity levels, sleeping habits and even what’s going on inside our heads. Melon’s an EEG headband that taps into your brain’s inner workings to show you how well you maintain mental focus. We actually saw Melon’s prototype predecessor last year when it was called Axio, and while this new band packs largely the same components, the design’s been refined to a much thinner profile. As before, its got a trio of electrodes for sensing brainwaves, a NeuroSky chip for filtering out extraneous electrical noise and Bluetooth 4.0 for offloading data wirelessly. It sends data to iPhones (Android’s in development) running the Melon app, which translates that info into a focus graph — generally speaking, the higher the neural activity in your pre-frontal cortex, the higher your level of focus. Users then input contextual data tags like time of day, type of activity and the surrounding environmental conditions to allow them to track variables that may affect their focus.
Filed under: Wearables
Source: Kickstarter
Google 
Venture capitalist Jim Breyer is giving up his seat on Facebook’s board in June, which he’s held since April 2005. The split is amicable, and stems from his desire to concentrate on his new board seat with the Harvard University Corporation Board. Breyer joined the Facebook board after his venture firm Accel became one of Facebook’s earliest investors, leading its $ 12.7 million Series A.
We know that eBay has been 
The app stores are overrun, and there’s little way to get noticed until you break into the charts. So Google has just announced a new AdWords unit called “Click-To-Download” mobile ads that lead directly to iTunes and Google Play. With a similar design to Facebook’s app ads, Google is reaching out its hand for a cut of the paid discovery market emerging as every company in the world goes mobile.
BitTorrent, the once-notorious P2P file sharing site that has turned a new leaf as a legit, distributed computing provider, is today launching SoShare, a service to send large files from one computer to another, with the first terabyte of files sent free. Out today in beta for Google Chrome, Firefox and Safari for Mac; and Chrome, Firefox and Internet Explorer for Windows, the service competes with the likes of YouSendIt, as well as DropBox, Box and other cloud-storage and file transfer services. SoShare was previously available in alpha as Share, and it complements Sync, Bitorrent’s cloud-based service that syncs your computer’s files with a cloud storage service, which itself launched in alpha in January. The idea behind SoShare is to target creative professionals – designers, photographers, musicians, and so on – who handle large data files and need to send them to others. That makes sense, since it also targets that community for content for its consumer-facing services. SoShare is built by BitTorrent engineers, on BitTorrent’s P2P framework (not clear whether it uses Amazon’s EC2 and S3 services for caching, as it did in the alpha version), and will sit alongside Sync in Labs, BitTorrent’s “test kitchen,” where it puts work in progress for its community to try out and develop into potentially more commercial products. “For now, we’re going into the public beta without fees,” Catherine Meek, BitTorrent’s director of product strategy, noted in an email exchange. “Leveraging the distributed BitTorrent protocol has helped keep our costs low. We’ll be looking at a few options along the way, but building something that is reliable and adds value to the user is our primary objective.” With a number of companies like YouSendIt and SugarSync, newer players like Mega, and more established startups like Dropbox all already developing names for themselves in the same space as SoShare, it will be worth seeing whether BitTorrent can entice more people to its platform by way of the very large file size threshold — one free terabyte being possibly the largest data allowance yet. BitTorrent is taking the approach of targeting one vertical first. “We saw a gap in the current offerings, a chance to introduce something new,” says Meek. “A key learning from the alpha was that there was a need within the creative community and we had the ability to fix a problem for them.” Meek cites figures from the Americans for the Arts that estimate 3.34
Editor’s note: Dan Portillo joined Greylock as vice president of Talent in 2011. John Schmocker is on the Greylock Partners Talent Team and works closely with portfolio companies to help them build out their core engineering teams.
Editor’s note: Peter Arvai, founder and CEO of 
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As it ramps up to the launch of devices running its next-gen OS in Q1 next year, RIM has announced a new series of BlackBerry developer events focused on its traditional user-base by helping enterprises and other organizations build apps for BlackBerry 10. The Blackberry 10 Jam World Tour will see day-long BB10 events held in 11 cities around the world, kicking off tomorrow in Toronto.
San Francisco-based startup 
Soon, Kodak will cease to be a film company. After spending almost a decade swirling the pot and the 
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