July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

FindTheCompany launched out of beta today to give you the lowdown on businesses.

The business-research site provides information on more than 30 million U.S. companies. Consumers, business owners, investors, analysts, sales people, and others can use the engine to learn more about a company before doing businesses with them or refine searches with filters for location, industry, employee count, annual sales, and so forth.

The engine aggregates information from various sources. Financials for public companies come from Xignite, information on government contracts from the U.S. government, and business histories and product and service listings from sister site FindTheBest. All this data is collected into profiles and then turned into visualizations based on the data so consumers are looking at more than just spreadsheets of statistics.

“We’re putting the power of knowledge in the hands of consumers and small businesses — people who normally don’t have easy access to all the incredible information that’s available on U.S. companies,” said FindTheBest founder and chief executive officer Kevin O’Connor in an email. “Now it’s simple to make informed decisions about companies, products, and services based on the facts.”

O’Connor said that people now expect better, more tailored search portals for finding the information they need. He founded FindTheBest.com in 2009 after growing tired of all the sites that claim to tell you what was best — whether it were colleges, credit cards, or insurance — when often they were getting paid to promote certain products and services. FindTheBest is meant to provide an objective comparison tool for consumers, and FindTheCompany is the next extension of that idea.

Competitors include Manta, MerchantCircle, Yellow Pages, and YellowBot. To a lesser extent, the company also competes with social-networking sites like Yelp, LinkedIn, and Facebook Pages and paid providers like LexisNexis, Factiva, and Bloomberg. O’Connor said FindTheCompany has better data and a platform and is free while still providing the same caliber of information as paid providers. The site currently monetizes through display advertising and affiliate revenue and will soon release a sponsorship product.

Before founding FindTheBest, O’Connor founded DoubleClick, which sold to Google for $3.1 billion and was an initial investor in ISS, which sold to IBM for $1.4 billion.

FindTheBest raised $11 million in March from Keliner Perkins Caufield & Byers and New World Ventures, bringing its total capital raised to $17 million. It is based in Santa Barbara, California and has 90 employees.

Photo Credit: Shutterstock

Offering a “big data” solution is apparently irresistible to every company on the planet. Megacorporation General Electric has just announced a new big-data and analytics platform it calls “Predictivity” so it too can join the number-crunching party.

Unlike many other big-data solutions, GE’s new Hadoop-based software is targeted at the “industrial Internet.” Companies in industries like aviation, health care, energy, transportation, and manufacturing all can benefit from real-time insight and analytics, and GE thinks it is the right company to deliver that since it already has such deep ties with those industries.

GE’s vice president of the Global Software Center, Bill Ruh (pictured above), called the new offerings a major step toward “a new era of computing.”

“GE’s industrial-strength platform is the first viable step to not only the next era of industrial productivity but the next era of computing,” Ruh said in a statement. “The ability to bring machines to life with powerful software and sensors is a big advancement — but it is only in the ability to quickly analyze, understand, and put machine-based data to work in real time that points us to a society that benefits from the promise of big data.”

To add to the announcement, GE also firmed up partnerships with Pivotal, Amazon, and Accenture that will help them fulfill some of the promise of this software.

The EMC-backed Pivotal partnership might be the biggest of the three. Pivotal is the recent high-profile spin-off of EMC and VMware that got $105 million in funding from GE in late April. The two companies are intertwining in a meaningful way, and so they will work together on these big data solutions. Specifically, Pivotal will use its Cloud Foundry platform and Hadoop-based tech to support GE.

“Pivotal and GE share a vision for a common platform that is cloud-agnostic and based on modern scale-out technologies — and does it all at speeds faster than what was previously possible,” Pivotal chief executive officer Paul Maritz said in a statement.

Amazon Web Services and Accenture will give GE additional support. Amazon will be the first cloud provider on which GE will deploy its “industrial Internet platform.” Accenture and GE say they will jointly develop new tech and analytics apps that leverage big data.

Screenshot via Sean Ludwig/VentureBeat

Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, AOL, Verizon, and Apple might breathe a little easier today. Their denials of working with the NSA’s PRISM program to turn over huge quantities of customer data over to the secretive U.S. intelligence agency just got a little bit more credible today thanks to testimony from NSA Director General Keith Alexander.

“The U.S. government does not unilaterally obtain information from the servers of U.S. companies,” Alexander said. “Rather, the U.S. companies are compelled to provide these records by U.S. law using methods that are in strict compliance with that law.”

Unfortunately, Alexander also referred to the companies as “our industry partners.”

Alexander testified before the House Standing Committee on Intelligence today, saying that it was a “privilege and honor” to serve the United States as director of the NSA, also that data accessed by PRISM and other NSA surveillance programs has spared the U.S. from over 50 terrorist attacks since 9/11.

Facebook, Google, Apple, Microsoft, and other companies have denied allowing the U.S. government full access to their customer data. But their denials have strange similarities and significant gaps, and initial whistle-blower Edward Snowden has stuck to his guns, saying that their responses were misleading.

Alexander’s words are, frankly, in tune with the companies’ denials.

Based on his testimony alone, obtaining information from Facebook servers, for instance, could happen as long as it was not “unilateral.” That seems to be written by the same speechwriter who crafted the companies’ denials, which all said that any governmental access is not “direct.”

In addition, Alexander said that “virtually all countries” have laws that sanction them to get data from communications providers and companies and that therefore the U.S. is not alone in this regard. And, that this data is critical to keeping America safe.

“The U.S. operates its program with careful oversight by the courts, Congress, and the administration,” Alexander said. “In the 12 years since 9/11, we have lived in relative security as a nation as a direct result of the Intelligence communities’ quiet efforts to connect the dots.”

That’s a contention that organizations like StopWatching.Us, which includes the EFF, Reddit, the Mozilla Foundation, and the American Library Association might find difficult to believe.

“The revelations about the National Security Agency’s surveillance apparatus, if true, represent a stunning abuse of our basic rights,” the organization’s said recently in an open letter. “We demand the U.S. Congress reveal the full extent of the NSA’s spying programs.”

Officials such as Alexander and Robert Litt, who leads the Office for the Director of National Intelligence, repeatedly stated that all data access had “multilayered levels of oversight” and that the NSA’s programs were limited, focused, and disciplined. But all the denials appear to be couched in language that allows for a significant amount of interpretation.

Image credits: John Koetsier, Steampunk eyes by Daniel Proulx/Flickr

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Searching for a good read can be a difficult amidst the millions of books and infinite diversity of tastes and opinions. Parakweet has raised $2 million to not only make this quest easier but also more individualized.

Parakweet’s core product Bookvibe combines natural language processing and social-media analytics to find the books that are right for you. The technology identifies discussions about books and movies — along with associated behaviors and sentiment — from hundreds of social media conversations and recommends books accordingly.

“People generate vast amounts of social media text every day, and social networks are a huge influencer in the way that consumers discover products and [make] purchase decisions,” said founder Ramesh Haridas in a Q&A. “By helping computers understand what we say to one another, we believe there’s great value that we can bring to people by surfacing what is most important and relevant.”

The system taps into hundreds of millions of organic updates on Twitter, Facebook, and more and identifies certain behaviors like “intent to read,” “read,” and “recommend.” It factors in users’ personal interests, their online behavior, and the interests and affinities of people in their social graph to make recommendations that are more targeted than those Amazon promotes or word of mouth.

Haridas said Bookvibe is just one of the possible applications of the platform, and books are just “the tip of the iceberg.” This is Haridas’ third startup. He has founded and sold two companies and is an active angel investor. Parakweet was founded in 2010. This funding came from angel investors Scott Banister, Alan Braverman, David Jeske, Takashi Kobayashi, Mark Kasiraja, Tom Isaac, Vikas Taneja, Michael Young, and others.

In March 2013, Amazon announced that it was acquiring Goodreads, a popular social-reading service. The site had over 16 million members, and Amazon wanted to scoop up its technology, which improves the process of discovering and discussing books to ultimately drive sales. Other competitors include Shelfari, Riffle, and social-media analytics companies Radian6 and Crimson Hexagon. Haridas said Bookvibe is distinguished by its focus on specific vertical markets to maximize precision and actionability.

It has six employees and is based in San Francisco.

“These programs have protected our country and allies … over 50 times since 9/11,” Alexander said while promising to provide full details of those 50 occasions to congressional overseers tomorrow. “These programs have been approved by the administration, Congress, and the courts.”

FBI deputy director Sean Joyce provided limited details of four of those attacks publicly, including an attempt to bomb the New York Stock Exchange, an attack to detonate backpack bombs in the NY subway system, and a plot by an American to bomb a Danish newspaper that published cartoons with the prophet Mohammed.

Source: John Koetsier

FBI deputy director Sean Joyce

In his testimony, Alexander made three key points:

1. The NSA’s programs are critical to the intelligence community’s ability to protect our nation.
2. The programs are limited, focused, and subject to rigorous oversight.
3. The discplined operation of these programs protect the civil liberties of our nation.

Committee chairman Mike Rogers (R-Mich.) opened the session with a long official thank-you to Alexander, calling him and his subordinates in the NSA hardworking patriots who are burning the midnight oil to keep us safe while also facing a “laundry list of alleged misdeeds” that were all wrong.

“Thank you for working to protect America,” Rogers said. “You’re doing a very difficult job — thank you on behalf of America.”

Then Rogers turned both barrels on the media, saying that it was frustrating to sit on the Intelligence Committee in the possession of knowledge about what is actually happening and yet see falsehoods in the media.

“The public trusts us,” Rogers said optimistically. “But that trust starts to wane when faced with half-truths and full-out lies.”

The accused companies have denied complicity in PRISM and other NSA programs, saying that they do not provide the NSA with “direct access” to their servers. Alexander also said later that the NSA does not have “unilateral” access to these companies’ servers. But organizations such as StopWatching.us, the EFF, and more, have their doubts. And, all the allegations have foreign countries alarmed as well, with officials from the European Union asking their American counterparts what PRISM is, how it works, and whether it spies on their nationals.

Rogers as well as Rep. Dutch Ruppersberger (D-Md.) also turned their attention to suddenly famous whistle-blower Edward Snowden, saying that Snowden put our allies and our country in danger and that he “gave the enemy our playbook.”

Mike Rogers (R-MI)

“It is at times like these when our enemies within become almost as damaging as our enemies outside,” Rogers said while appealing to Snowden and others in the intelligence community to not “make it easier for the bad guys overseas.”

Ruppersberger said that PRISM and other programs like it were critical to the security of the United States, saying that ”good intelligence is the best weapon against terrorism.” He publicly wondered how a “29-year-old systems administrator” was able to access “such sensitive information” and called on Alexander to “seal this crack in the system.”

Image credits: John Koetsier

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

The health care industry is sick, but increasing numbers of startups are applying their tricks and treatments to nurse it back to heath.

Health startup Medivo has raised $15 million to expand its health monitoring platform that connects doctors, consumers, and clinical labs. The company’s vision is to save and improve lives through faster and easier access to quality health care.

Its applications are designed to improve the level of understanding and communication between patients and providers. Patients get free, secure access to symptom-tracking tools and lab results along with simple explanations of those results. The system also helps patients understand connections between symptoms and factors like diet and medication and automatically reports that information back to the doctor.

Medivo organizes a patients’ lab results for providers so they can identify who needs office visits and prioritizes visits by who needs care the most. The condition management services analyzes patient data to see who needs what lab tests and which patients require urgent follow-up care.

The platform includes modules for physicians and patients with diabetes, dyslipidemia, hepatitis C, gout, low testosterone, irritable bowel disease, hereditary angioedema, and chronic myelogenous leukemia. This financing will support expanding the network of labs and modules to include obesity, rheumatoid arthritis, hepatitis B, HIV, colon cancer, breast cancer, prostate cancer, myelofibrosis, multiple myeloma, growth hormone deficiency, osteoporosis, hypothyroidism, and multiple sclerosis.

The team has extensive experience in using technology to improve patent care and clinical outcomes. CEO and cofounder Sundeep Bhan was the founder Medsite, a online portal for continuing medical education that was acquired by WebMD in 2006. Cofounder Dr. Destry Sulkes worked as an executive in health care IT for over 15 years. He saw the potential in using  data analysis to bridge gaps between patients and their providers, and he’s led medial education programs helping doctors in this area. Cofounder Jason Bhan is a practicing family physician who previously founded Ozmosis, a physician’s network and resource for medical knowledge.

The three came together to form Medivo in 2010. In the past year, the startup has significantly expanded its reach and increased its professional network. It closed a $7 million Series A round in 2011. Merck Global Health Innovation Fund led this $15 million second round, with participation from existing investors Safeguard Scientifics and MentorTech Ventures.

It’s a good year to be a health startup. Digital health incubator Rock Health recently released data that forecasts a record year for digital health deals. Remote patient monitoring, personalized health, and cloud-based electronic health records technologies are all attracting attention from strategic and VC investors. In the first quarter of 2013, some big deals went down. HealthCatalyst raised $41 million from Kaiser Permanente Ventures, Norwest Venture Partners, and Merck Global Helath Innovation invested $20 million in mobile health company PatientSafe Solutions.

Medivo is based in New York.

Image credit: Shutterstock

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

I’m sure you’re happy to know that deep neural networks perform significantly better than shallow networks. But you might be thrilled to learn that Microsoft has doubled the speed at which it can translate what you say into text … while also improving accuracy.

What do the deep neural networks (DNNs) have to do with it?

Microsoft says that DNNs, which function more like a human brain than a traditional computer, can detect tiny variations in speech that stay the same even when your voice changes. In other words, even when you speak faster or yell, or when you’re winded from running up the stairs, those variations remain stable. Even better, they remain stable from individual to individual as long as you’re speaking the same language.

The result is that a message that takes 1.06 seconds to render into text with Microsoft’s old technology now takes .53 seconds. That may not seem like much, but in the video below it feels almost instantaneous. To skip the theory and see the goods, fast-forward to the 1:08 mark:

The best part is that the error rate is now down as well — from 16 percent to 13.5 percent — and that the technology is resistant to background noise interference. All of which — as we use more and more voice-recognition technology to control our mobile devices, our gaming systems, and to dictate our texts and messages — is a great help.

The update is currently rolling out to Microsoft data centers in the U.S.

Image credit: Microsoft

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013 San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

“Life is awful; it just sucks,” CloudFlare chief executive officer Matthew Prince jokes.

His company is now processing 150 billion page views every month. Every minute, it generates 30 gigabytes of server log files — records of pages and images that have been sent to web-surfers around the globe. Last year, CloudFlare had more traffic than Amazon, Wikipedia, Twitter, Instagram, and Apple combined. Now it provides sites to more global surfers than the king of online engagement itself, Facebook: 1.5 billion every month.

“We keep growing, despite our best efforts,” Prince told me last week.

CloudFlare is a content-delivery network among many other things. Add your site to its cloud with a few lines of code, and it’ll be served out by thousands of machines prepositioned all over the globe — faster and more reliably than you can yourself and (for most sites) for free. Want better performance, more analytics, guarantees, and a “2,500 percent service level” agreement? That you’ll pay for.

Source: LinkedIn

Matthew Prince, CEO of CloudFlare

What the company is focusing on now, Prince told me, is building its own equipment direct from Quanta. In other words, like Facebook and Google, it’s no longer buying from an original equipment manufacturer like Dell or HP but designing its own servers straight from the original assembler in Asia to cut about a third of the cost, Prince says. And importantly, it’s partnering with up to 1,000 global Internet service providers to put those servers right in their data centers — as close as possible to clicking data consumers.

“It’s like a giant game of Risk,” Prince says as he talks about trying to put servers in Turkey, which is hard, and settling for Bulgaria, which is the gateway to the country. “Increasingly, ISPs are inviting us to take our servers and install them in their data centers. There’s a Chilean ISP that we sent a gigabit of data to every second of every day that is just begging us for servers.”

The key when you’re a gigantic global mover of data is to preposition the data as close as possible to where it’s needed and then replicate it and cache it locally. That not only saves on bandwidth transfer costs but also speeds up access for users. Right now, CloudFlare is in only 23 ISPs. By the end of the year, Prince plans to ramp that to 50 of the world’s largest and then to 1,000 by the end of 2014.

If he accomplishes that goal, he’ll have joined a very, very exclusive group of companies.

“Only 2 companies in history that have pulled that trick: Akamai and Google,” Prince said. “We’re joining that club.”

One country that’s particularly annoying is Australia. While Asian Internet traffic is expensive, Prince said — on the order of five times the cost of U.S. and Western Europe traffic — Australian bits cost five times more to move, making the Aussie Internet 25 times more expensive than that of the U.S. Prince blames the Aussie’s former national telephone company, Telstra, for being noncompetitive.

The other key when your bandwidth requirements are massive and doubling roughly every four months is peering.

“As you get larger, you can start peering traffic off your network,” Prince says. “ISPs are asking us to send traffic across private peering exchanges, and as we move closer to the ISPs, that’s easier.”

Peering allows other companies to use your infrastructure to transfer their data for free while they allow you to use theirs for the same price. Interestingly, when it comes to transferring traffic over other companies’ pipes, the U.S. is one of the most difficult countries in the world.

I asked Prince when he sees the company’s massive growth leveling off.

“You’d think with the law of large numbers it would slow down,” he said. “But it doubled in the last two and a half months recently … which is way scary … and it’s only accelerating.

Image credit: Viewminder/Flickr

Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, head of the National Security Agency (NSA) Keith Alexander, and other senior officials scheduled a briefing on Thursday afternoon to inform senators on classified programs that secretly track and collect data on Americans’ telephone calls and Internet activity.

Only 47 of 100 senators showed up.

News about PRISM broke a week ago, sending shock waves through the government, American population, and the world. It turns out that the FBI and NSA have been secretly mining user data from thousands of telecommunications and Internet companies since 2007. While this program challenges the very core of our democracy, a majority of the Senate did not feel the need to linger at the office past 2:30 p.m. on a Thursday to learn more.

The Senate held its last vote of the week a little after noon on Thursday, and “many lawmakers were eager to take advantage of the short day and head back to their home states for Father’s Day weekend,” according to congressional newspaper The Hill.

Why protect your constituents’ privacy when you could be barbecuing?

The Hill reported that this exodus “exasperated” Dianne Feinstein, who chairs the Senate Intelligence Committee.

“It’s hard to get this story out. Even now, we have this big briefing — we’ve got Alexander, we’ve got the FBI, we’ve got the Justice Department, we have the [Foreign Intelligence Surveillance] Court there, we have Clapper there — and people are leaving,” she said.

The White House has responded to criticism of PRISM by claiming that it is necessary to protect the U.S. population from terrorism. A study conducted by the Washington Post and the Pew Research Center found that 56 percent of Americans find the NSA’s secret tracking of our phone calls “acceptable,” and 62 percent think it is more important for the government to investigate threats even if it intrudes on privacy. So maybe the senators aren’t indifferent. Maybe they don’t value a three-and-a-half day weekend more than the Constitution but rather understand that their constituents are OK with secret intelligence programs remaining secret.

I certainly would have appreciated being privy to that briefing and knowing that my elected representative cared enough about my rights to attend. However, who attended and who didn’t has not been disclosed. Lucky for the Senators, they still have privacy. Unless they use the Internet, that is.

Oh well, our Constitutionally protected freedoms are going down the toilet. Enjoy your Father’s Day, everyone.

Photo Credit: Wikimedia commons

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

PRISM not only challenges our trust in the U.S. government but also our trust in the companies that are secretly supplying the government with our data.

In the wake of revelations about PRISM , Google and Facebook are locked in a pissing match over which company is the “more transparent.”

News came out that Facebook was engaged in discussions with the U.S. Department of Justice and the FBI to gain permission to release information about the number of data requests it receives. Yesterday Facebook’s general counsel Ted Ullyot announced that the request was granted, and the company can now include all U.S. national-security related requests, such as Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) and national security letters, in transparency reports.

Facebook revealed that in the second half of 2012, it received between 9,000 and 10,000 user-data requests from any and all entities in the U.S. government, which represents a “tiny fraction of 1 percent” of its 1.1 billion monthly active users worldwide. Microsoft followed suit and said that “we are still not permitted to confirm whether we have received any FISA orders,” but it did say that it received between 6,000 and 7,000 criminal and national security warrants, subpoenas, and orders affecting between 31,000 and 32,000 consumer accounts.”

This seemed like a step forward until Google responded that these measures aren’t enough. The company said it is important to differentiate between different types of government requests. Subpoenas and search warrants are not the same as FISA requests, and lumping all types of data requests together is a “step back” for users.

Google is basically saying that Facebook and Microsoft aren’t going far enough, and last night Twitter’s legal director Ben Lee tweeted in agreement. This isn’t the first time Google has made a push for greater transparency than its fellow tech titans. Google filed a petition in March 2013, resisting a national security letter (NSL) from the FBI that demanded that it offer up private information about its users. According to a report in Bloomberg, Google has been the only major communications company to fight back against NSLs. Challenges are rare: Of the 300,000 government-issued NSLs since 2000, only a handful of companies have resisted. The petition was denied, but Google should still get some credit for effort.

The PRISM drama continues to snowball. First it was the government tracking Verizon calls. Then it was the FBI and NSA secretly mining data from nine major tech companies. At the time, Google, Microsoft, Facebook and the others responded to these reports with denials. They claimed that they do not give the government direct access to servers, that they had never heard of PRISM, and that they want more information about it as well. However, the language is a bit ambiguous there, and often orders for data come with gag orders so the companies are legally prohibited from acknowledging awareness.

Then, when we thought it couldn’t get any worse, Bloomberg issued a report that said thousands (thousands!) of technology, finance, and manufacturing firms are working with the NSA, CIA, FBI, and branches of the U.S. military.

Who knows what, who did what, what is true, and what isn’t are all up in the air, and every day a new wrinkle comes to light or unfolds. Regardless of who is “more transparent,” the intent of these companies to keep users and the American public informed of how our data is being used is a commendable one. Let’s hope it is in the name of democracy and not just for PR.

Photo Credit: Divine Harvester/Flickr

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

President Obama is trying to get off the tech community’s shit list.

The President issued a memorandum today to expand the availability of spectrum and bolster America’s leadership in wireless innovation. He mandated that federal agencies free up a significant portion of wireless spectrum so that it can be used by individuals and businesses, and he also announced that the government will invest $100 million in research and development of spectrum-sharing technology.

The initiatives are in an effort to fuel American innovation and maintain the country’s position as a “global leader in wireless broadband technologies.”

“These new initiatives are the latest in a series of actions the administration has taken over the past four years to ensure American businesses and workers have the infrastructure they need to compete in the 21st-century economy,” said a fact sheet the administration issued this morning. 

The President issued a memorandum in 2010 called “Unleashing the Wireless Broadband Revolution,” which required that 500 MHz of spectrum be made available for commercial use within the next 10 years. However, the percentage of American homes reached by high-speed broadband networks has more than quadrupled since 2009 and is now at 80 percent. Use of mobile devices has exploded in the past few years, putting greater strains on available spectrum and making the need to increase access more urgent.

The military, government agencies, and law enforcement currently use a significant portion of available spectrum (which is a finite resource) for national security and public safety. In July 2012, the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology presented a report that said “it is imperative we make enough wireless spectrum available to meet the needs of rapidly expanding and innovative sector of the economy.” Increased access will not only spur domestic economic growth but also help keep the U.S. on top of the technological hierarchy.

President Obama has been a vocal advocate for technical innovation and emphasized over and over the important role that entrepreneurship plays in driving the U.S. economy. Last week, he announced an ambitious plan to get 99 percent of American students connected to lightning-fast Internet within five years. He said that American schools, where only 20 percent of students have access to high-speed Wi-Fi, are falling behind nations like South Korea, where 100 percent of students are wired. Furthermore, the President has made a major push for STEM (science, technology, engineering, math) education. American students’ test scores in this areas lag far behind those of other countries, and there are far more open STEM jobs than qualified people to fill them.

The spectrum initiative is part of the overall mission to grow the U.S. economy through technology. The announcement comes a week after news broke about the FBI and NSA’s top secret data-mining project, PRISM. The snowball of privacy invasion keeps on growing, and today Bloomberg came out with a report that found that thousands of technology, finance, and manufacturing firms are sharing customer data with the government.

The government may be spying on your Internet activity, but it also wants you to have better access to that Internet.

While the expansion of access to spectrum and the improvement of Internet in schools are crucial steps toward supporting technical innovation and the economy, so is establishing an environment where businesses, entrepreneurs, and individuals are not indiscriminately being spied on.

Photo Credit: White House/Flickr

According to a new report by Bloomberg, these thousands of companies are granting sensitive data on equipment, specifications, zero-day bugs, and yes, private customer information to U.S. national security agencies and are in return receiving benefits like early access to classified information.

Those companies reportedly include Microsoft, Intel, McAfee, AT&T, Verizon, Level 3 Communications, and more.

China has to be viewing these reports with a mixture of glee, anger, and frustration.

It was not too long ago that the U.S. accused China of attempting to infiltrate government and corporate networks by placing backdoors into communications equipment: network switches built by Chinese manufacturer Huawei. Congress said that Huawei and ZTE switches can’t be trusted, Los Alamos National Laboratory ripped out two Huawei switches, and Australia banned Huawei from a lucrative government bid.

There have long been rumors of a Windows backdoor allowing government agents access to computers running Windows, which Microsoft has always denied. But those backdoors might not even be necessary if companies like Microsoft and McAfee provide government agencies early access to zero-day exploits that allow official hackers to infiltrate other nations’ computer systems … and American ones.

It’s become increasingly clear that we need more Edward Snowdens  – and much more oversight over what our three-letter agencies are doing supposedly on our behalf.

And it’s becoming increasingly clear that the U.S. calling out China for hacking overseas is the pot calling the kettle black. Or the dirty cop calling the thief a criminal.

Wouldn’t it be ironic if the largest shadowy international hacking organization is probably right here at home.

Photo credit: jef safi \ ‘Parker Mojo Flying via photopin cc

Over the past week, Twitter quietly, even secretly opened up its analytics dashboard for all users. But you’ll never find it on your own. And sadly, at the moment, it’s almost completely useless, which is precisely why Twitter didn’t announce it for the whole world.

First, here’s how to get your very own official super-duper Twitter engagement stats:

1. Click on your Settings menu on Twitter.com (the gear icon at top right)
2. Find “Twitter Ads” and click on it
   (If you don’t see it, just follow this link: ads.twitter.com. Twitter appears to be closing off access due to a great deal of demand — more on that later.)
3. Click on the Analytics menu at the top of the page and then select Timeline Activity
4. Voila — your own custom Twitter engagement stats

Source: http://www.christopherspenn.com/2013/06/official-twitter-analytics-most-hidden-ever/

What your Twitter stats might look like …

Unfortunately, there is some bad news. And the bad news is why you really shouldn’t even bother right now.

Although Twitter has by and large outgrown its early “fail whale” days of Twitter service interruptions, it does not have infinite capacity. And reporting tweet, favorite, retweet, click, mention, follow, and unfollow data for hundreds of thousands — if not hundreds of millions — of users is extremely computationally intense.

So your stats are almost certainly wrong, incomplete at best, and misleading at worst. Mine were, showing fewer mentions, follows, and retweets than Twitter’s own mobile app. And while I was browsing the stats, refreshing to try to get more up-to-date data, the Timeline Activity menu item (see No. 3 above) disappeared, leaving only Followers.

And that said, there was “not enough data to display analytics at this time” although I have around 8,000 followers:

Source: John Koetsier

8,000 followers but no data to display …

In other words, Twitter’s managing the load and reducing server strain. If you’re interested in your Twitter stats — and who wouldn’t be — I suggest you try back again later.

If we can’t get our Twitter analytics now, part of me wishes that Twitter would at least have given us a fail whale to look at.

Photo credit: joelaz via photopin cc

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

“Big data” company GoodData has raised $22 million from Latin America’s largest enterprise software company.

TOTVS Ventures is the investment arm of TOTVS S.A., which provides enterprise resource planning (ERP), business analytics, customer relationship management (CRM), human capital management, and collaboration software across multiple sectors. Its venture arm began making investments in January, looking for companies where there are “potential synergies.”

GoodData is one of Silicon Valleys “enterprise cool kids.” It is a business-intelligence service provider, meaning businesses use its cloud-based technology to make data-driven decisions. The platform includes operational dashboards, metrics and performance reports, data storage, analytics, and collaboration tools. Founder Roman Stanek said GoodData stands out from the crowd because it emphasizes heavily on user experience to make the tick technical elements of big data comprehensible to people outside of IT.

With this agreement, TOTVS will have exclusive access to GoodData’s platform in Latin America.

Big data is trendy right now, and the market is competitive, but GoodData stands out for its growth and traction. It recently boasted that its first-quarter revenues in 2013 were three times bigger than the same period a year before, and it works with 20,000 customers.

GoodData has focused its operations on the U.S., and this partnership will bring its services to the emerging Latin American market. This fourth round of funding brings GoodData’s total capital raised to $75.5 million. Previous investors Andreessen Horowitz, Generaly Catalyst Partners, Next World Capital, and Tenaya Capital also participated in this round.

GoodData was founded in 2007 and is based in San Francisco.

Photo Credit: Jesse the Traveler/Flickr

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

There wasn’t a huge number of deals today, but the ones that there were, were big.

FireHost gets $12 million

FireHost, a cloud-hosting company, announced a $12 million series D funding round led by investment partner The Stephens Group. FireHost has customers in 30 countries around the globe, including Whole Foods, Kaiser Permanente, and Casio.

“FireHost has had tremendous traction in extending the cloud into the most secure and mission-critical applications, and this investment will enable them to extend their reach in cloud and security innovation. Enterprises can no longer reactively address gaps in security,” Aaron Clark, the vice president at The Stephens Group, said in a statement. “The company has strong and proven leadership, has a defensible advantage in the market, continues to push innovation and product development, and is driven to succeed.”

FireHost is using the cash to expand its enterprise market presence, develop new solutions, and add new security, compliance, performance, and managed services. This increases its total amount raised to $34 million.

Idomoo snaps up $9 million

Idomoo, which provides a platform for the creation of inexpensive personalized videos, closed a $9 million round of equity funding led by New York-based Marker LLC.

The company built what it calls a Personalized Video as a Service (PVaaS) platform that helps companies general “massive numbers” of personalized videos for individual customers. So far, it has served tens of millions of videos in 16 languages, each automatically generated for an individual person, the company says.

Idomoo is headquartered in Hod Hasharon, Israel, and will use the new investment to expand its operations in North America, South America, and Europe.

Datamnr raises $30 million for Twitter hotspots

Dataminr has closed $30 million for its real-time analytics service, which helps enterprise clients keep tabs on the pulse of their industry.

The company takes social media data and analyzes it for “hotspots of activity.” The system then creates a customized signal stream of market-relevant information, noteworthy events, and emerging trends that clients can refer to while making decisions.

The company has raised $46.5 million to date and is based in New York.

Photo credit: ViaMoi via photopin cc

At least according to one cybersecurity expert.

James Foster, the founder and CEO of Riskive, a cybersecurity company that works with large companies and, yes, (alert, alert) government agencies, says PRISM is impossible. In fact, Foster claims, it would require an annual budget of at least $4.56 trillion dollars:

“The National Security Agency is not spying on our U.S. citizens — and the thought is not only illegal — it’s ludicrous. A simple mathematical analysis proves this point. If we can assume that one person has the capacity to fully scour 100 people’s communication a day, a feat in and of itself, to read all of someone’s email, text messages, phone calls, and overall interaction then the NSA would have to have over three million employees and would have an annual budget that would be 20 percent greater than the entire U.S. Federal budget. The bigger threat is from rogue individuals who waste millions of U.S. taxpayer dollars by revealing insights into government programs intended to protect our citizens.

We are in the midst of an era where national security is paramount and the balance between security and privacy will continue to be tested. Complete transparency is an oxymoron in a post 9/11 world.”

Journalists get a lot of pitches. I guess the law of averages says some of them have to be stupid. This one landed in my inbox about 45 minutes ago.

Foster has never heard of “big data,” apparently. He isn’t aware of technologies like cluster analysis, machine learning, predictive modeling, sentiment analysis, or association rule learning that drive automated analysis of massive datasets. He doesn’t know that three-letter-organizations like the CIA, NSA, and FBI have been asking Silicon Valley data scientists for help by appealing to their patriotism. And he is not aware that individual humans will never see most of the 97 billion data points that the NSA has admitted snooping on.

Either that, or perhaps he thought that a quote like this would help defuse the scandal.

I suppose the possibilities here include that various men in black are mobilizing security experts to cast aspersions on the press reports about PRISM. Another might be that a security company that wants to do business with secretive government agencies wants to be seen visibly supporting their interests in public.

But you’d think he might have used a little intelligence in crafting the message.

Photo credit: striatic via photopin cc

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Student success depends on more than just the student. Silverback Learning has raised $2.5 million for its educational-tech platform that rallies the community to help students reach their full potential.

Silverback’s flagship product is called Mileposts. It brings together students, parents, teachers, and administrators to improve communication and collaboration between them. If a student is struggling, the platform serves to “construct a team of action” to support that student as well as look for opportunities for improvement. Research shows that this “360 degree approach” — where everyone involved in a student’s education is highly engaged– is an important part of success.

Silverback not only encourages communication but also collects specific data to better track performance. It features a Key Performance Indicator (KPI) dashboard that allows teachers, administrators, and parents to see how individual students are doing and compare students, classes, or groups to overall school and district performance. Teachers can access information about their students in advance and identify “at-risk” students who may need intervention or an alternative education plan.

The system organizes all student progress in one place and analyzes that data to identify trends. The goal is to create greater levels of transparency into the state of each student, classroom, school, and district that will ultimately lead to data-driven improvement efforts.

This approach first came about when chief executive officer Dr. Jim Lewis served as the superintendent of the Blaine County School District in Idaho. He wanted to bring more accountability into the educational system and initiated a project in country schools that later became Mileposts. The project yielded positive results and was implemented into more schools. It is now used in 30 percent of the school districts in Idaho and in districts across 13 U.S. states.

Angel investors made up this round and will support continued expansion of the product as well as product development and strategic partnerships. Silverback is based in Boise, Idaho.

Photo Credit: Trustypics/Flickr

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Dataminr wants to break news faster than the speed of light. Or at least faster than news outlets.

Dataminr has closed $30 million for its real-time analytics service that helps enterprise clients keep tabs on the pulse of their industry.

The company takes social media data and analyzes it for “hotspots of activity.” The system then creates a customized signal stream of market-relevant information, noteworthy events, and emerging trends that clients can refer to while making decisions.

Dataminr has a strategic partnership with Twitter that includes real-time access to the Twitter Firehose. The company claims that its software can detect and send alerts in advance of mainstream news. It notifies clients of actionable opportunities when they first emerge.

Two recent examples of these alerts include confirming the AP Twitter hack was a hack four minutes before it was reported and alerting its clients of the Baltimore train derailment 16 minutes ahead of mainstream news.

Its primary clientele are financial organizations, where even a short headstart can give them an edge. It also works with government customers. This funding will help Dataminr enter new verticals. Venrock and Institutional Venture Partners led this round with participation from existing investors GSV Capital Corp, Deep Fork Capital, and Wharton Equity Partners.

Dataminr was founded in 2009 by a trio of former Yale University classmates who brought together their experience with social media analytics, big data, and finance. The current team is made up of data scientists, PhDs, and engineers. It also includes people with professional experience at financial institutions like Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, and Merrill Lunch as well as the U.S. Department of Defense and Department of State.

The company has raised $46.5 million to date. Dataminr is based in New York.

Photo Credit: U.S Army/Flickr

While official reaction to the PRISM Internet surveillance scandal in the U.S. has been muted at best, the European Union is up in arms over the NSA’s access to data from Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, Google, and other companies. Now, the EU’s justice commissioner, Viviane Reding, has written a letter to the US attorney general asking some very pointed questions about PRISM and other U.S. civilian spying programs.

After all, if the NSA were — shockingly — telling the truth that its surveillance is mostly targeted at foreign nationals, European citizens are right in the crosshairs. And Europe has some of the strongest data protection laws in the world.

Reding’s questions to the attorney general, as quoted by the BBC, include:

• Are they (PRISM and any other surveillance programs) only aimed at gathering the data of US citizens and residents, or are they also — or even primarily — targeting non-US nationals, including EU citizens?
• Is the data collection limited to specific and individual cases and, if so, what criteria is applied?
• How regularly is the data of individuals collected or processed in bulk?
• What is the scope of Prism and other such programmes? Is it limited to national security and foreign intelligence, and if so how are such terms defined?
• How might companies in the US and EU challenge the efforts to access and analyse the data?
• What ways might EU citizens find out if they have been affected? How is this different to the situation for US citizens and residents?
• How might EU citizens and companies challenge any effort to access and process their personal data? How does this compare to the rights offered to US citizens and residents?

Those questions have answers that Europeans won’t like.

Based on what we know of PRISM so far, non-U.S. nationals are indeed targeted, along with U.S. citizens. The data collection doesn’t appear to be very limited; rather, it looks rather broad. The scope of PRISM is massive. Companies are not able to challenge the law, or even discuss it publicly, although Google has challenged it, apparently. And private individuals have no hope of knowing whether they’ve been sucked up in the dragnet, and also no hope of challenging any collection of their private data.

How do you like them apples, Ms. Reding?

Probably not very much. And the EU justice commissioner will no doubt be asking these and other uncomfortable questions of U.S. attorney general Eric Holden in person on Friday, when they meet at a previously-scheduled event.

Any answers she gets — and any pressure Europe can bring to bear on PRISM and other spying programs — could help U.S. citizens challenge the NSA’s efforts to surveil Americans, as well as Europeans. Eighty-five organizations, including the Electronic Frontier Foundation, are already gathering to fight PRISM, while the only substantive response from the U.S. government has been a possible criminal investigation into the leaks.

Which is one reason I’m hoping the Pardon Edward Snowden petition at WhiteHouse.gov gets 100,000 signatures. At least that will force some kind of response.

And, as Jill Killock, the executive director of the Open Rights Group, recently said:

“European governments respect the rights of U.S. citizens. Why shouldn’t [the U.S.] do the same?”

Image credit: EU

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013 San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Tibco today acquired Streambase to augment its analytics offering and appeal to the largest financial firms on Wall Street.

Neither company disclosed the final sum. But Tibco released the news on its website today, and it says the acquisition will bring streaming capabilities to its event-processing portfolio.

Palo Alto Calif.-based Tibco is a midsize enterprise company that competes with giants like IBM and Oracle. It has been around since the late ’90s, and it provides infrastructure software that its clients can use in the cloud or on site.

Tibco’s software helps data flow between and within companies in fractions of a second. Customers include e-commerce companies that want to sell products based on real-time customer behavior or broker the processing of high-frequency trades.

Tibco targeted Streambase for its data analytics technology, which is used for algorithmic trading, and it’s a known brand in the capital markets. Tibco is also popular with Wall Street firms, a highly lucrative source of business.

“This combination extends our event-processing abilities and provides a terrific opportunity to address a growing number of use cases for data in motion – in financial services and beyond,” said Tibco chief technology officer Matt Quinn in a statement.

VentureBeat’s Matt Marshall reported in March that Tibco claims to be the fastest growing enterprise software company — despite sales missteps with its larger accounts. Tibco CEO Vivek Ranadive [above] says Tibco has grown 20 percent each year for the past decade.

This spring, Tibco acquired a French location analytics company Maporama, which it will roll into its Spotfire offering. Spotfire, along with Tibco’s messaging product, Tibbr, and some other cloud products, is growing rapidly.

In five years, half of Tibco’s revenue will come from products “I don’t have right now,” Ranadive told VentureBeat.

Today, it announced a new Q&A service where patients can anonymously post health questions and get answers from people with comparable medical histories. According to founder Johnson Chen, this type of information is otherwise unavailable.

“Healthcare big data holds the answers to many questions, but individuals and patients do not have the means to use it,” he said in an email. “eHealthMe removes these barriers so ordinary people can get health information that is personalized to their needs and allows them to securely connect with people of the same age and gender who are taking the same medication.”

While other medical sites like WebMD, HealthTap, Quora, and Ask.com have information and health forums, eHealthMe uses data to connect people who have similar backgrounds to make the exchanges more relevant and personal. The system automatically forwards questions to people who match to the questioner and only invited people can answer questions. Chen said hundreds of questions and answers were posted during early testing of his feature.

Earlier this year, eHealthMe released a new subscription-based drug monitoring service for patients who suffer from chronic conditions and taking multiple medications. New users enter their age, gender, drug regimen, and existing conditions. eHealthMe’s database contains information about 16,000 conditions 45,000 drugs, vitamins, and supplements and over 40 million drug outcomes. The engine analyzes all that information and sends out notifications on serious drug reactions.

Chen said that 133 million Americans live with a chronic condition and  this service provides them with unprecedented awareness of potential complications. The site also has a drug comparison engine that lets users compare common side effects for similar drugs, drawing distinctions between short and long-term effects and including studies on overall effectiveness, effectiveness by condition, and alternative drugs. Each search produces an original study using continuously updated data.

One of the company’s goals is to protect against drugs like Vioxx, an arthritis medication that was linked to thousands of deaths and pulled from the market in 2004 despite being an FDA approved drug. eHealthMe uses available data to study treatments on a large scale and make this information available to individuals.

Chen founded eHealthMe in 2008 after working as a senior healthcare consultant at Deloitte. He initially set out to make it easy for ordinary people to study large amounts of FDA data. Since then eHealthMe has worked with the Mayo Clinic, Northwestern University, IBM, Yahoo!, and the London Health Science Center. Its original studies have been referenced in medical publications including the Mayo Clinic Proceedings, European Association of Neurooncology, and the Annals of Pharmacotherapy.

The company is self-funded and based in Mountain View, California.

Photo Credit: Shutterstock

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

A brand-new organization composed almost at light speed to oppose the broad surveillance activities of the NSA’s PRISM program is calling on Congress to stop spying on Americans and reveal the full truth.

“The revelations about the National Security Agency’s surveillance apparatus, if true, represent a stunning abuse of our basic rights,” the organization’s open letter reads. “We demand the U.S. Congress reveal the full extent of the NSA’s spying programs.”

PRISM, of course, is the NSA’s big data surveillance program that snags data from massive U.S. Internet and communications companies such as Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube, and Apple. Apple and other companies accused of participation have denied the allegations – as has the NSA, previously – but those denials seem oddly similar and carefully constructed to truthfully tell a lie.

The 85 participating organizations include well-known companies and organizations such as Reddit, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Internet Archive, the Mozilla foundation, the World Wide Web Foundation, and the American Library Association. Concerned citizens who have added their names to the letter so far include author Cory Doctorow and Reddit founder Alexis Ohanian.

The signatories believe that PRISM is unconstitutional and therefore illegal, and have set up a website at StopWatching.us to collect more signatures and coalesce support for a political challenge to PRISM.

“This type of blanket data collection by the government strikes at bedrock American values of freedom and privacy,” the organization’s open letter reads. “This dragnet surveillance violates the First and Fourth Amendments of the U.S. Constitution, which protect citizens’ right to speak and associate anonymously and guard against unreasonable searches and seizures that protect their right to privacy.”

As part of the effort, Mozilla will be setting up Firefox to link directly to the StopWatching.us website from the browser’s start page.

“That means that every time users open a Firefox browser window, they’ll see a message regarding the campaign,” Sina Khanifar, who led the effort to push through cell phone unlocking legislation, told me via email. “They’ve been instrumental in pulling this together, and I’m personally very excited about having millions of eyeballs directed at this message.”

StopWatching.us wants Congress to repeal Section 215 of the Patriot Act, which provides some cloak of legality to the surveillance program, reform the FISA Act, which allows mass surveillance, and amend the state secrets privilege, which prevents the government from being held accountable.

In addition, StopWatching.us is calling on Congress to fully investigate and report on PRISM, and to hold accountable public officials found to be responsible.

“Unwarranted government surveillance is an intrusion on basic human rights that threatens the very foundations of a democratic society,” Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the Internet, recently said.”

StopWatching.us will be holding a call today to discuss the new initiative, recent revelations, and a coordinated response.

The organizations that have currently signed the petition include:

• Access
• American Library Association
• Calyx Institute
• Center for Democracy and Technology
• Center for Media Justice
• Centro de Cultura Luiz Freire
• Competitive Enterprise Institute
• Consumer Watchdog
• Defending Dissent
• Detroit Digital Justice Coalition
• Electronic Frontier Foundation
• Entertainment Consumers Association (ECA)
• Fight for the Future
• Free Press
• Freedom of the Press Foundation
• Freedom Works
• Greenpeace USA
• Guardian Project
• Internet Archive
• Learning About Multimedia Project
• Liberty Coalition
• LibrarianShipwreck
• Main Street Project
• Media Alliance
• Media Mobilizing Project
• Mozilla
• National Coalition Against Censorship
• Open Technology Institute at New America Foundation
• Participatory Politics Foundation
• PolitiHacks
• Praxis Project
• Privacy and Access Council of Canada
• Privacy Camp
• Progressive Change Campaign Committee
• Public Knowledge
• R Street Institute
• RevolutionTruth
• Rocky Mountain Civil Liberties Association
• RootsAction.org
• World Wide Web Foundation

photo credit: laverrue via photopin cc

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Lawyers deal with a lot of paperwork, but the industry has been slow to adopt technology that can help them manage the data flow. Legal tech startup Modus just announced it has raised $10 million in funding to continue expansion of its successful eDiscovery service.

Lawyers are “getting crushed” by massive (and ballooning) amounts of data volumes. It takes time, effort, and resources to find relevant materials, and those costs add up fast. Modus has built enterprise-grade technology that processes and hosts hundreds of terabytes of data from large corporations and law firms. Modus works with legal professionals on a fixed-fee basis to help them discover the information they need.

“Disovery” is a legal term for the pre-trial phase of litigation where plaintiffs and defendants exchange information and evidence. This can include admissions, depositions, documents, and answers to questioning. For big cases, this requires providing massive amounts of data, as well as lengthy depositions.

The digital era has changed the way information is collected and shared. Ninety percent of the world’s data has been created in the past two years, and with it, advancements in the technology to deal with it. Modus brings these advancements to bear for lawsuits. Clients consult with Modus for strategic and project advice to predict and control costs, access one system for review (rather than transferring data between systems), collecting and processing electronic files, and reporting.

Founder and CEO Abtin Buergari previously worked as a legal assistant at a Washington DC law firm and served as a liaison with the eDiscovery department. He saw major problems in the way eDiscovery worked– the firm and vendors still racked up huge bills — and built Modus to be a more transparent, efficient, client-focused model through a fixed-fee business model.

Harbert Management Corporation and Azalea Capital led this round, with participation from Buergari. Modus is based in Washington DC. It was founded in 2008.

Photo Credit: Shutterstock

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Yet another big data-meets-marketing startup has hauled in a hefty round of funding.

BrightEdge has raised $42.8 million in its fourth round of funding. The company provides an enterprise grade SEO platform that applies big data analytics to marketing efforts.

Founder and CEO Jim Yu said in an interview with VentureBeat that the S3 platform does three core things. It visualizes collected data in customizable dashboards with drag and drop charts. The engine indexes information from websites, search engines, mobile devices, and social media and “glues” it back together for an overall view of relevant activity.

It then generates recommendations in a to-do list of actions that marketers can take to drive impact. Third, BrightEdge has also built a strategy engine that looks at how competitors are performing in different segments and create a “market map.” Using predictive analytics, businesses can build forecasts to help understand and prioritize what drives the most impact.

“We now live in a world where brands are becoming publishers and consumers are influencers and content is getting created, shared, and accessed at a massive scale.” Yu said. “This is one of the biggest changes that has happened in modern business and marketing is the first place where you will see that impact. Marketers have to think more like scientists than artist and we believe there is a massive chance there.”

Yu founded BrightEdge six years ago as a marketing platform to help companies measure the value of their content across multiple digital channels. 90 percent of the world’s data has been created in the last two years alone, and BrightEdge got an early start on making this data accessible to people who can use it to impact their business.

Now BrightEdge works with over 6000 brands and 600 direct clients, including 30 percent of the Fortune 100. Clients include Microsoft, 3M, Nike, Marriott, and Performics. Yu said the technology serves 9 of the top 10 largest hotel groups, 7 of the top 10 online retailers, and 7 of the top 10 technology companies. Yu said this is because the platform drives “transformative results” in traffic and revenue.

The company is growing fast and this funding will go towards scaling and expanding the business, with a focus on international markets. It will also fuel product innovation. Insight Venture Partners led this round, with participation from existing investors Intel Capital, Battery Ventures, Altos Ventures and Illuminate Ventures.

BrightEdge said it is taking on a $12 billion market. Using big data to make intelligent business decisions is ubiquitous now as companies of all sizes realize the benefits of funneling their time, money, and resources into areas where it can drive returns on investment (ROI). Last week Brand Networks closed $68 million for its enterprise software for social media marketing and Marketo, which makes marketing automation software solutions, went public in March 2013 after raising a total of $108 million. Eloqua and HubSpot are other big time competitors.

BrightEdge is based in San Mateo, California. It has raised $61.9 million to date.

Walmart, the world’s largest retailer, announced today that it would be acquiring Inkiru, a small startup that uses data analysis to improve e-commerce.

Inkiru, currently based in Palo Alto, Calif., will join @WalmartLabs, a technology group within the company’s e-commerce division. “ The similarities between Inkiru and @WalmartLabs are uncanny, with both having an innovative spirit and the ability to leverage big data to improve the customer experience,” someone at @WalmartLabs posted on that company’s blog today.

Inkiru’s “predictive intelligence platform” applies data analysis to a variety of e-commerce needs, including fraud reduction, customer segmentation and targeting, just-in-time recommendations to entice customers to buy more stuff, and more. It incorporates machine learning technologies to automatically improve its algorithms, and can integrate with a variety of external and internal data sources. We’re guessing (in the absence of a clear statement from Walmart) that this will eventually disappear as a product, while Walmart will absorb the technology for its own needs.

“Walmart’s data scientists will now be able to work with big data directly and create impact faster than ever before,” Walmart’s blogger wrote.

In other words, this sounds like a fairly straightforward “manquisition,” the latest in a long series of such acquisitions aimed at incorporating talent and technological capital into the retailer. (OneOps and TastyLabs joined Walmart in mid-May.) Inkiru’s Vijay Raghavendra, Jaya Kokhatkar, Yitao Yao, and founder Alok Bhanot will be joining the @WalmartLabs team in various roles.

The companies did not disclose how much Walmart paid for its acquisition, and we don’t know how much Inkiru has raised to date, or from whom.

Top photo: Attention Inkiru founders. Please pick up your checks at the Walmart Financial Services counter. Photo credit: Ron Dauphin/Flickr

The Washington Post and Pew Research Center conducted a random poll over the weekend of 1,004 Americans, asking their opinion on the government’s use of secret court orders to track telephone calls of millions of Americans in an effort to investigate terrorism.

Sixty-two percent of respondents said that it is more important for the government to investigate threats, even if it intrudes on privacy, while 34 percent said the government should not intrude even if it limits its investigation. Forty-five percent said that the U.S. government should be able to monitor everyones email and other online activities if it might prevent future terrorist attacks.

The Guardian reported on June 5 2013 that the NSA issued Verizon a secret court order to hand over call data of Verizon customers. The order is un-targeted which means that the NSA can snoop on calls without suspecting anyone of wrongdoing.

This was just the tip of the iceberg.

News broke the next day that the U.S. government is conducting a top secret data mining program called PRISM where the FBI and NSA gather informations from the servers of nine major tech companies– Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube, and Apple– which are all denying awareness. The Wall Street Journal reported that Sprint and AT&T are also involved in similar surveillance program.

The White House responded to criticism of its Verizon program saying it is necessary to protect the U.S. population from terrorism:

“Information of the sort described in the Guardian article has been a critical tool in protecting the nation from terrorist threats to the United States, as it allows counterterrorism personnel to discover whether known or suspected terrorists have been in contact with other persons who may be engaged in terrorist activities, particularly people located inside the United States.”

 A good portion of the American population seems to agree.

The discovery of PRISM has elicited strong reactions from people on all sides. While some are expressing outrage on the violations of freedoms, others have said they are not at all surprised, and many are OK with it because they believe it ensures a greater degree of safety from national security threats.

The Patriot Act greatly expanded the FBI and NSA’s abilities to track the activities of American citizens but even the author of the Patriot Act said that the government is going too far. The ease with which the government can cast a massive dragnet and allegedly monitor suspected sources is chilling

“In digital era, privacy must be a priority. Is it just me, or is secret blanket surveillance obscenely outrageous?” Al Gore said in a tweet.

This is a massive crisis with constitutional implications on privacy, security, and freedom from surveillance. The balance between personal privacy and the government’s ability to conduct terrorist investigations has been a controversial topic since 9/11. In 2006 when news broke about the NSA’s monitoring of telephone and e-mail communications without court approval, the Post said there was a closer divide on the practice– 51 percent to 47 percent. Furthermore, Democrats are now 12 percentage points more likely to support the government’s monitoring of all e-mails and other online activity if officials say that it might help prevent terrorists attacks, as compared to a 2002 Pew poll.

Is the American population really this comfortable giving up our Constitutionally-granted freedoms? This is one of the few times where I hope the data isn’t accurate.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Spinnakr released its product today that works as a “Big Data for Dummies.” The company also announced raising a seed round from Andreessen Horowitz, 500 Startups, Point Nine Capital, Sandhill Angels, a cofounder of comScore, and other angels.

Spinnakr’s platform seeks to make data analytics so simple, accessible, and comprehensible that anyone can do it. The technology serves as an “analytics and optimization consultant” that can sense important opportunities and give insight as to how to respond.

“Spinnakr’s insights driven analytics eliminates the need for digital strategists or expensive consultants to interpret web analytics data and make sites changes based on that data,” said founder Michael Mayernick in an email “Previously this process could cost tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars and take months. We found it intolerable that the value of big data is still locked away.”

The system collects visitor data and runs it through real-time analytics engines to detect trends and then prioritizes the information and notifies the business owner/marketing person of the most important ones. Startups, small business owners, bloggers etc…using the system receive a news feed of whats going on in words, rather than charts and graphs. It could read “you have a traffic spike from Facebook” or “you have a new search term driving traffic.” Once the discovery is displayed, Spinnakr will present a targeted, specific recommendation on how to act on that data. For example, if there is an influx of job seekers to your site, the engine suggest that you redirect them to a careers page to learn more about job opportunities.

Mayernick said that many clients don’t want to interpret data on their own and prefer to be told what to do. Spinnakr still does advanced, real-time analysis like competitors Chartbeat, Google Analytics, or Optimizely, but presents it a more clear-cut, idiot-proof way.

Mayernick and cofounder Adam Bonnifield previously worked on digital strategy for a political campaign. They built online targeting systems for politics, working with congressional, senatorial, and gubernatorial campaigns, and said their technology helped set fundraising records in 2006 and 2008. While data scientists and experienced strategists were able to extract value from data, this was still a challenge for regular people. The two wanted to open up the benefits of data to all.

Analytics are becoming an increasingly important (and necessary) element of any business that operates online. To remain competitive, companies of all sizes need to be aware of what drives or hurts their traffic and engagement, and react accordingly. Those that can’t afford or understand analytics products like Chartbeat, Google Analytics, or Optimizely can use Spinnakr. The demand is clearly there — Spinnakr has more than 5,000 business on its waiting list and said it already optimizes 10 million page views each month for active SMB, e-commerce, and emerging enterprise customers. It also said that users frequently see over 100% conversion lift on messaging, compared to the 10 to 30 percent of traditional web optimization methods like A/B testing.

Spinnakr works out of AOL’s First Floor Labs in Palo Alto and Washington DC. It was founded in 2011 and has six employees.

The WhiteHouse.gov online petition site, which the Obama administration set up to hear the will of the people, is being put to good use, as one U.S. citizen has set up a petition for the pardoning of Edward Snowden. Snowden is the geek hero who started the series of leaks that exposed the NSA’s PRISM surveillance program that tracks huge amounts of data via public companies such as Google, Facebook, Apple, Yahoo, and more.

The petition is a big deal, because any petition that reaches 100,000 requires a White House response. And conspicuously absent in the national and international debate over PRISM, citizen surveillance, and privacy has been any full and comprehensive reaction from President Obama and the current administration.

Of course, the rub is that Snowden has not yet been charged with a crime.

Technically, therefore, he does not need a pardon. Realistically, however, Snowden needs some kind of official act of benevolence to allow him to return to the United States from Hong Kong, where he is hiding in a hotel, concerned about legal extradition or illegal “rendition” by the original men in black. Reportedly there is already a criminal investigation underway into the leaks.

The petition reads:

Edward Snowden is a national hero and should be immediately issued a full, free, and absolute pardon for any crimes he has committed or may have committed related to blowing the whistle on secret NSA surveillance programs.

In President Obama’s only comments on the matter, he focused almost entirely on the Verizon phone-tracking issue, and the fact that the NSA was not listening to the contents of calls, but only the metadata: who, when, where, and length. On the Internet surveillance portions of PRISM, Obama said this, which doesn’t appear to be either fully accurate or fully comprehensive, given what we’ve learned over the past week:

Now, with respect to the Internet and emails, this does not apply to U.S. citizens, and it does not apply to people living in the United States.

Currently the petition, which was started by a ‘P.M.’ in Rochester, NY, has just 10,943 signatures. Issues listed include Civil Rights and Liberties, Government Reform, and Human Rights.

It needs 89,057 more signatures to push it to the 100,000 level.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Tech companies like Facebook, Apple, and Google are not the only ones helping U.S. intelligence agencies track citizens.

For years, data scientists have been brought in to brief with the National Security Agency.

The NSA has a massive team of analysts and a huge wiretapping program called PRISM, but it is eager to take advantage of the newest “big data” and machine learning technologies, so it can more easily make sense of millions of phone calls, emails, and text messages.

The goal is to track suspicious activity and create a complex “alerts system” for acts of terrorism, said Sean Gourley, a data scientist and founder of Silicon Valley-based Quid, which provides big-data analysis services, mostly for government customers.

Some of the most innovative technology designed to cope with massive data streams has come out of Silicon Valley. For this reason, the CIA’s venture arm, In-Q-Tel, has an office on the Palo Alto’s famous Sand Hill Road. It makes strategic investments in “big data” startups, like Recorded Future, whose products may come in useful for various government agencies.

“The NSA is naturally interested in data mining; I know of data scientists in Silicon Valley who have helped them,” said Mike Driscoll, chief executive of Silicon Valley-based big data startup Metamarkets.

“They appeal to our sense of patriotism,” said Driscoll.

Driscoll was not surprised by today’s news exposing the government’s PRISM program, which caused a furor among civil liberties activists and the media. He referred to the Echelon Project, the NSA’s clandestine data mining project and spy program that we’ve known about for years, as a precedent.

To recap: The Washington Post reported today that tech companies are participating in a top secret data mining program for the FBI and NSA, dubbed PRISM. Since the news broke, the companies named in the report have almost universally issued statements to the press that they do not provide direct access to their servers.

However, the government is a third party. Facebook’s terms of service, for instance, state that it can share your information with third parties. The assumption most Facebook users make is that the wording refers to marketers or advertisers, not the government.

“We don’t mind little bits of manipulation, but we do mind if it’s on this scale,” said Gourley.

According to Gourley, who regularly works with federal agencies, the NSA is most interested in real-time systems for data analysis. It’s not just what you say — but who you know. In other words, you’ll be flagged if you’ve communicated with a person of interest, or if you share a suspicious tweet.

“The NSA is essentially looking for a needle in a massive, massive haystack,” he said.

Given that technology exists for sophisticated analysis of social networks, “you could be on the list by association,” he warns.

In case you haven’t either, the NSA and FBI allegedly collect, aggregate, and analyze audio, video, photographs, e-mail, documents, and connection logs for people using Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube, and Apple as part of a surveillance program named PRISM as well as metadata like device and location information via a sister service, BLARNEY.

At least, according to a Washington Post story. But Apple denies that it is part of the program.

In a statement, the company said:

“We do not provide any government agency with direct access to our servers and any government agency requesting customer data must get a court order.”

That’s good news for consumers, and good news for Apple customers. But there could be a caveat to that denial.

As Jolie O’Dell discovered when talking to Google representatives about PRISM, it’s possible that there is a gag order from the U.S government that prevents Google — or any other company — from talking about certain information … like the existence of a secret digital backdoor or the fact that anyone is aware of or participating in such a program.

As VentureBeat learns more, we’ll update this story.