A full 7.5 million years later, it arrives at the answer: 42.

Google appears to be referencing that bit of geek cult humor in a new device, the H2G2-42, that it is currently submitting to the FCC for regulatory testing. H2G2 is a Wikipedia-ish guide to “life, the universe, and everything” inspired by Adams’ books.

There’s little data available about the device, but Google does say it is a “media player,” and a “fixed base station” with 802.11b/g/n Wi-Fi, which would make it almost certainly a replacement for Google’s failed Nexus Q. The Q was Google’s ”first social streaming media player” that met with almost universally negative reviews, underwhelmed users, and is no longer for sale.

Source: FCC

Google device H2G2-42 is in FCC testing

One change that seems likely: It appears that the H2G2-42 will allow users to plug in external monitors via provided USB ports:

Source: FCC

Google’s H2G2-42 may be connectable to external monitors

As The Verge notes, Google’s new streaming music app broke compatibility with the Nexus Q. The Google Play Music All Access product is impressive, enabling personalized “radio stations” and inexpensive streaming music. Google calls it “radio without rules,” and it seems reasonable that Google would want a shiny new device to go with this major new music push.

Photos are not yet available and more details will have to wait until 45 days after certification. And it’s unlikely that a music streaming device will be the ultimate answer to the ultimate question.

But meanwhile, enjoy:

Image credits: Google, FCC

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

More than 20 million students currently use Google Apps, and another 10 million are soon to join, thanks to a deal with Malaysia.

As students and schools are increasingly storing more of their data and documents in clouds of Google’s servers, Backupify recently announced that it has tripled its education user base, with more than 40,000 new education users since January of this year. Schools are using the cloud-based backup service to ensure critical data is archived and safe, even if it would be accidentally deleted or lost on Google’s servers.

Education is a notoriously slow adopter of technology, but Google Apps is growing quickly, if not virally, doubling over the last two years. And the current 20 million users include seven million inside the U.S. alone — led by Oregon that adopted Google Apps in all K-12 classrooms in 2010.

And sometimes, they’re using Backupify because they have to:

“Millions of students and educators around the world are currently using Google Apps to enhance collaborative learning,”  Backupify CEO Rob May said in a statement. “The education sector is ahead of other industries in this regard, but faces unique compliance requirements for data privacy and retention that demand an effective backup strategy.”

To celebrate the recent growth of Google Apps for Education — and their own growth — Backupify put this infographic together:

Image credit: John Koetsier/Venturebeat

That means that yes, at some point you’ll be able to run your little WordPress-powered blog on the biggest server farms on the planet. But it also means that major companies will be able to use Google’s famously reliable services to run their enterprise-scale “big data,” backend, and, yes, consumer web projects, all in the PHP language that that is increasingly penetrating corporations.

I talked to one of the three founding fathers of PHP and current Zend CEO, Andi Gutmans, about the implications for PHP.

It’s a busy time for the Gutmans, the open-source programming language, and Zend, the company Gutmans formed to offer commercial support and tools for PHP. Engine Yard just recently added PHP to their Platform-as-a-Service as well. And Zend is expanding quickly in the enterprise as it has recently released integrated development tools for cloud-enabled mobile applications.

But Gutmans, though busy, is thoroughly upbeat.

And for good reason: The biggest web company on the planet just added support for the most widely used programming language on the planet. And in that support is a massive implied compliment to PHP — the first non-Google programming language to be supported by Google App Engine — and a potentially major boost to Zend’s business.

VentureBeat: Did Google talk to you before adding PHP to Google App Engine?

Source: John Koetsier

Andi Gutmans at ZendCon 2012.

Andi Gutmans: I don’t know how to answer that. I was aware that they were going to make that announcement … I’ve worked with the product manager on the project before.

VentureBeat: Google didn’t formally brief you?

Gutmans: Let’s put it this way: It’s not a surprise that a platform-as-a-service (PaaS) player that’s serious about gaining market share added PHP support. Google App Engine was almost a science project for the first few years, only supporting languages that Google used internally.

But in the past few months, there’s been a real attitude from Google that we’re going to go and compete with Amazon and with Microsoft, and we’re going to do it all fronts. They’ve become very aggressive on differentiating on performance and billing.

VentureBeat: What does this announcement say about PHP?

Gutmans: We have internal jokes about PHP’s web penetration and have used the stat that PHP runs 39 percent of the web because it was the only number we could get from Netcraft.

But I love Google’s stat, that 75 percent of the web runs PHP. No one knows the web better than Google.

If they’re trying to gain market share and gain it quickly, there’s no other language to do it with. And this is the first non-Google language they’re supporting.

VentureBeat: How’s that feel? And how are your customers reacting?

Gutmans: I’m definitely excited about it.

When any player does something like this — especially Google — it’s a huge validation. We got emails from some of our largest customers, saying this is great … it gives our enterprise customers a higher sense of confidence. And that stat that 75 percent of the web runs PHP is great for Zend – anything that is good for PHP, by proxy is good for Zend.

In addition, they said that PHP was their top-requested feature, which means the developer community was very supportive of us.

VentureBeat: Will you offer Google App Engine Support within Zend Studio, so developers can publish to Google right from within their Zend development environment?

Gutmans: We don’t know yet … it’s early and we’re exploring what kind of relationship we can have with Google.

We do support Google Compute Engine — that’s a full integration and some of the larger companies who run PHP already use it — but Google App Engine is just launched, it’s still in experimentation mode.

VentureBeat: What took Google so long to add PHP support?

Gutmans: I can’t speak for Google, but my assumption is that I felt that Google App Engine in the first few years was something they knew they wanted to do really well but … they kinda went down the simple easy route.

But we’ve seen a significant acceleration in the past 12 months. This will be a $20 billion market by 2016, and they moved from testing the waters to being very very aggressive right now.

We recently surveyed 5,000 PHP developers, asking them where in the cloud do you think you’ll deploy. Fifty-one percent said Amazon Web Services, but Google was 21 percent … and we just support Compute Engine right now.

It wasn’t even on the list last year, so that’s a big jump.

VentureBeat: What does this mean for the little guy building in PHP or hosting a WordPress blog?

Gutmans: I think it gives another option for the guys who do the small stuff, who are using shared hosting for $20/month.

What’s really great for the small developer is that it’s a nice value proposition — you can start at a lower cost. And, it’s a modern platform versus shared hosting, which is quite constrained.”

VentureBeat: So what does this mean for PHP overall?

 Gutmans: The number of requests that Google got from developers was very very significant. It exemplifies what we’ve been talking about … that PHP is very broadly adopted, but also by enterprise.

And that is driven by web, mobile, and cloud, which is where PHP’s sweet spot is. We’re seeing a strong tailwind behind us.

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Google tricked out its entire I/O conference with hundreds of sensors this week. Today, we got a glimpse at some of the data and the work that went into making it happen.

Michael Manoochehri, with Google’s cloud engineering group, explained the project from Google’s perspective: It’s a big experiment designed to help Google figure out how to use its many cloud tools to collect, organize, and analyze large quantities of sensor-driven data.

To pull off the project, Google needed some hardware-hacking experts. So it called on Kipp Bradford, a professor of engineering design and entrepreneurship at Brown University; and Alasdair Allan, a hardware hacker with Babilim Light Industries in the U.K.

The pair designed a sensor module based on the Arduino Leonardo R3 chip, a popular microprocessor that many DIY hobbyists use. Each module, or “mote,” carries a mix of temperature, humidity, noise, and other sensors. Some have air quality monitors that measure the amount of particulates (dust) and volatile gases (from cleaning fluids or alcoholic drinks). Some are connected to floor mats that record footsteps.

The devices send their data via a Zigbee-based mesh network back to Google Data Store, a NoSQL database running on Google’s App Engine. BigQuery, a tool for doing analysis on large datasets that is based on Google’s own internal data analysis tool, “Dremel,” allows the team to perform rapid queries on the enormous dataset (see sidebar for some of the project’s metrics). The team even used the Google Maps API to display data from each sensor on a map of the conference center.

Tableau Software, which held an IPO this week and whose stock is already up 60 percent in its first day of trading, provided real-time visualizations of the data. That’s a Tableau-generated chart at the top.

Bradford and Allan are editors at Make magazine and have done similar work with O’Reilly’s Data Sensing Lab, albeit on a smaller scale. (O’Reilly is the publisher of Make and the organizer of the Maker Faire, coming up this weekend in San Mateo, Calif.) For O’Reilly’s Strata conferences, the Data Sensing Lab build networks of about 50 such devices.

Also helping Bradford and Allan were Julie Steele, a project manager for O’Reilly, and Harry Johnson, a Stanford engineering student who laid out the project’s first circuit board and acted as the project’s “sanity check,” Bradford said.

“When the first prototype came back and it worked, I breathed a huge sigh of relief,” Bradford told me.

Once the team had built several working prototypes and ironed out the kinks, Bradford send the circuit board design to Sunstone, a company in Oregon, which produced hundreds of custom circuit boards. He then arranged to have the boards and various components sent to VR Industries, a company in Rhode Island, which assembled all 525 devices. The per-unit cost was about $120, though that’s with volume discounts figured in (it would cost you more than that to build one or two of these things).

After that, the team spent a nearly-sleepless week configuring and setting up all the devices.

“We basically spent the last week locked in a room at Google Boston doing integration and testing,” Allan said.

For Google, it was a chance to get its hands dirty with real-world data.

“We wanted to understand how this kind of use case could work with the Google Cloud platform,” Manoochehri said.

Did they learn anything about the conference? So far, the takeaways seem pretty obvious. For instance, in the steps-per-minute graph above, there’s a big spike of activity as people lined up to enter the Google I/O keynote on the first day. Then activity settles down as they all sit to watch the presentation. There’s a flurry of activity as people attend the first evening’s party, and the noise level spikes during Billy Idol’s concert. Air quality tends to go down when people are milling about, as they raise dust, and it gradually improves after they go away. Also, a cleaning crew comes through the Moscone Center at 4 a.m. every morning.

The company is making all the hardware, code, and data from the project available freely to the public. The goal is to make it easy for others to use the same kinds of technologies in their own data-gathering projects.

There are already lots of sensors out there. From wristband health and fitness sensors to smart thermostats like Nest to automobile sensors, we are increasingly surrounded by connected sensors. These devices are already collecting a lot of data, and soon will be collecting orders of magnitude more, Manoochehri said.

“This is a really big deal,” Manoochehri said. “So we need to understand this use case, and test that our platform is good for this use case.

“People collect all this data, and they go, ‘Oh my god, what do I do?’”

This project provides an answer to that question — provided you’re willing to use Google’s many cloud services.

Also, if you are looking for the best place to take a nap, check the graph below, which shows Manoohchehri’s “serenity metric,” showing a combination of low average audio noise and low noise variance. Conference rooms in the far corners of the building are your best bet. The least serene location? Apart from Google’s radio-controlled blimps (which carried sensors over the crowd), the second floor escalator was the least serene location.

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Data visualization company Tableau Software has raised the price range of its initial public offering to $31 per share.

In a media release, Seattle-based Tableau announced that it has raised $254 million by offering 8.2 million shares at $31, above the revised range of $28 to $30. The shares are expected to begin trading on the New York Stock Exchange on May 17 under the symbol DATA.

The company originally filed for its IPO in early April. Back in November, we picked it as one of 10 startups leading the way in ‘big data.’

“Our mission is to help people see and understand data,” Tableau’s prospectus says. The company offers products to help technical and nontechnical users create interactive charts and simulations based on raw data. Tableau offers a variety of public, corporate and premium products, and caters to a range of customers.

Source: Tableau

Tableau CEO Christian Chabot

Tableau’s is the latest in a series of high-performing enterprise IPOs, including Workday, Splunk, and Palo Alto Networks, making 2013 the year for business software.

“Data visualization applications like Tableau are ushering in a post-spreadsheet era, threatening to kill Excel as the killer app for desktop analytics,” said data scientist Mike Driscoll, who is also the CEO of Metamarkets.

Still, Tableau faces strong competition from giants like IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, and SAP as well as startups like Tibco Spotfire. And maybe even Google.

“Our mission, to help people everywhere see and understand data, isn’t all that different from Google’s,” Christian Chabot, the company’s cofounder and chief executive, said in a recent interview with VentureBeat.

Goldman, Sachs & Co. and Morgan Stanley are acting as lead joint book-running managers for the offering.

The business software behemoth is more than doubling its commitment to the SAP HANA Real Time Fund, going from $155 million to $405 million, to support innovation surrounding real-time applications and big data.

The SAP HANA fund launched in 2012 and primarily makes investments in early stage venture capital funds and startups building off SAP’s technology. HANA, which stands for High-Performance Analytic Appliance, is SAP’s next generation in-memory database. It can store up to 500 terabytes of data and execute at high speeds.

Big data technology is hot right now as large corporations and enterprises look for better ways to store, process, and analyze their data. SAP’s head of database and technology product marketing Amit Sinha told VentureBeat in an interview last year that “innovation in data management has stagnated” and there is a $2 trillion market opportunity for HANA and related database management technologies. HANA is SAP’s answer to the big data trend.

In an effort to stimulate innovation, SAP began the SAP Startup Focus program which is like an accelerator program for enterprise and IT companies that are working on predictive analytics products. Innovation can be tough in large companies and initiatives like Startup Focus and the Real Time Fund are intended to keep SAP ahead of the curve, or at least keeping pace with it. The company has actively been acquiring startups to this end as well.

The increased size of the fund is a reflection of the strong interest of entrepreneurs and VCs in participating in the SAP ecosystem. Elizabeth “Beezer” Clarkson, COO and Managing Director at SAP Ventures, said it is also indicative of a changing venture capital landscape.

“We believe we have a new model for corporate venture the start-up ecosystem is embracing,” she said. “The additional funding allows us to broaden the scope of what the SAP HANA Fund invests in to include all SAP platform technologies, for example, cloud, mobile or analytic technologies as well as HANA.  We will also be able to extend our investment horizon for the SAP HANA Real Time Fund from 3-5 years to 7-10 years. Further, we will hire a business development staff and develop programs and partnership opportunities with the SAP ecosystem that deliver additional business value, like helping companies to grow internationally and exchange insights with industry experts.”

So far the fund has made investments in three startups — Gild, a recruiting solution that helps organizations find developers skilled in big data, FeedZai, a Portuguese startup that provided real-time fraud detection and prevention, and a third unnamed Israeli company. SAP HANA RTF (enough abbreviations for you?) has also committed funds to ten early stage venture capital funds including SV Angel, August Capital, and Data Collective in the Bay Area, and Point Nine and Magma in Berlin and Tel Aviv, respectively.

The fund is managed by SAP Ventures, which also manages a $353 million direct growth fund that invests in growth-stage IT companies. Over the past 15 years, SAP Ventures has invested in more than one hundred companies round the world including LinkedIn, Box, Violin Memory, and Lithium.

Photo Credit: SAP’s president Sanjay Poonen on stage at CloudBeat/Michael O’Connell

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MicroVentures has a powerful pitch for startups: We’ll help you raise money.

The Austin-based company helps accredited investors pool their cash together (usually somewhere between $1,000 and $30,000 per person) to fund early-stage startups like Ribbon and Medigram. For investors, it’s the opportunity to fork over as little as $1,000 but still get in early alongside more seasoned angel investors.

MicroVentures has reached $16 million in investments today and claims to have surpassed any other equity-based crowdfunding platform. The company issued a press release announcing the news stating that its success is evidence of “significant demand” from smaller investors in this asset class.

The release reads like a strong nudge to the Securities and Exchange Commission, which is taking its sweet time to finalize rules on the provision of the Jumpstart Our Business Startups Act, known as the JOBS Act.

“As we patiently wait for the SEC to enact rules around the JOBS Act…,” CEO Tim Sullivan begins his statement to the press (pictured above, left, with cofounder Bill Clark).

For over a year, we’ve been hearing from founders of crowdfunding platforms how the rules will change sometime in 2013. At this point, entrepreneurs (and Republicans) are only cautiously optimistic that the SEC will come to a decision this year — the deadlines have passed since the JOBS Act came into effect one year ago. A new October 31 deadline was recently proposed by the House.

As IndieGoGo founder Danae Ringelmann democratically put it in a recent article, the SEC is taking “longer to introduce the Act than expected;” still, she says she’s glad they are “taking the process so seriously.”

It’s a tricky process for the SEC — the regulatory body will need to weigh up the interests of investors, entrepreneurs, and crowdfunding execs from platforms like MicroVentures, AngelList, and FundersClub.

“We will continue working hard amid a busy rulemaking agenda to get these crowdfunding rules done as soon as possible, with an emphasis on getting them right,” John Nester, an SEC spokesman, said last month in a statement to Politico.

For now, Sullivan hopes entrepreneurs will continue to open up their rounds to small dollar investors rather than relying on seasoned Sand Hill Road investors. “We may find that the crowd does an even better job at picking winners,” he said.

“Enterprises’ need for public cloud is much different than startups,” Newvem CEO Zev Laderman told me yesterday. “Azure is exactly the perfect extension of the data center.”

Newvem is well-known for its Amazon Web Services offerings, offering startups optimization services, security checking, and overall cloud management — including the first-ever iPhone app for managing your cloud services. Now, Laderman said, the company is returning to its roots in enterprise with a similar offering for Azure. It’s the fruit of an 8-month effort, and it’s a signal that Microsoft’s cloud offerings are hitting a needed an lucrative market niche in a way that Amazon is not.

“Azure is a billion-dollar business,” Laderman says. “Azure is Microsoft’s best-kept secret in the enterprise.”

Newvem’s new offerings on Azure include visualization of your cloud costs, inventory, and usage trends, methods to create dynamic views of your cloud usage and align them to business objectives for very granular optimization recommendations, and pattern-recognizing tools that identify and highlight consumption patterns, such as regular peaks, bursts, and trends.

Private beta participant Linkury agrees, saying that Newvem for Azure gave the company “visibility into specific Windows Azure inventory that we use,” and that “it’s a great time-saver and has helped us to better plan and forecast our usage.”

Source: Newvem

Your cloud dashboard.

The lure of Azure, according to Newvem, is that Microsoft is already huge in the enterprise, and corporations can seamlessly move workloads between owned servers and cloud servers as required. So a company that begins a speculative new project can start serving its computing needs on Azure and then, once workloads stabilize, move the workload into the corporate data center.

That helps enterprises be as nimble and quick to market as startups, since projects can begin immediately without the need for purchase, installation, and configuration of owned hardware and software solutions. But it also enables enterprises to manage costs effectively. If the project isn’t successful, there’s no unused hardware left lying around. If it is, and if via Newvem’s optimization offerings IT management determines that costs could be lower in the data center, projects can easily be moved back inside the four walls.

To Laderman, that’s a key differentiator between Amazon and Azure.

“That’s important for Microsoft,” he says. “They win both ways, because they’re both in the cloud and in the enterprise.”

Source: Newvem

Your cloud utlization heatmap.

Microsoft is very “partner-centric” and has been a key supporter during the 8-month project, Laderman says, especially Bill Hilf, Microsoft’s general manager for Azure.

Microsoft is supporting Newvem in its enterprise marketing channels, will put Newvem’s solution in the Azure store, and will help Newvem go to market via joint sales efforts … all indicators of Microsoft’s commitment to deploying its cloud solutions in the enterprise, and partnering with companies who have complementary services.

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

While Google added the option to send money through Gmail yesterday, the search giant clearly wasn’t finished with announcements. It has also debuted new “quick action” buttons in Gmail that you can use to RSVP to events, see flight info, and more — all without leaving the inbox.

Quick actions will appear next to certain kinds of messages in your inbox, and you don’t even have to open the email to provide a response. If someone sends you a calendar invite, a button will show up on top of the email line that lets you RSVP or decline the invitation. Another example: You can rate a restaurant you went to last night straight from an email notice sent to you.

One of the most exciting potential quick actions is checking into a flight from the inbox. Google hasn’t committed to check-ins exactly, but it says that you’ll be able to see flight info more easily in Gmail, including whether your flight is on time and when your connection is. (See an example of flight info and a potential check-in below.)

These quick actions will roll out over the next few weeks to all Gmail users. Developers that are interested in adding Gmail quick action functionality can check out the Gmail developers website dedicated to schemas.

Image via Google

“SimulTV puts the social in TV – literally – by merging the second screen with the first,” the company says.

The second screen is the biggest phenomena in traditional media, supposedly. Forrester says that 85 percent of tablet owners in the U.S. check social media while watching TV. It’s such a big phenomenon that TV Guide rolled out an app to see what’s playing, watch whatever’s on, and also tweet, post, and blog about it. And that Apple is rumored to be releasing a mini-TV tablet to enable an iOS-style second-screen experience.

Of course, when I go to watch TV, I go to chill, or to immerse myself in a story … not to tweet about it or share. But I am, admittedly, not 20 anymore.

For those who want to stay socially connected while watching the big game or the last episode of can’t-miss-TV, SimulTV’s solution is to combine both screens, right on the web. So your football game, Twitter conversations, Facebook messages, online search, and text and voice chat with others on SimulTV who are watching the same thing as you.

“If you’re using two screens, you have to take your eyes off the football game or reality show you’re watching and go to your second screen when you want to complain about a penalty or celebrate with your friends when your favorite contestant wins the game,” Steve Turner, founder and president of SimulTV, said in a statement. “That means you are either watching or interacting, but not doing both.”

There’s something to what he’s saying.

I tried the service myself, and besides the fact that it’s Flash-based — at least the code that asks for control of your microphone and webcam in order to participate in on-site chat — and fairly processor-intensive, it seems useful and a better solution than a standard two-device second-screen setup.

Currently, there are only a few channels, but by this summer, SimulTV promises to have more than 100 channels, including ”top channels” from Latin America, China, Japan and Europe, plus 5,000 video-on-demand titles. The service is HD-quality, with picture-in-picture for the truly ADHD social TV aficionados, and according to the company, takes only half the bandwidth of typically required.

Most importantly, however, SimulTV is a service that — depending on the channels the company actually brings on this summer — allows you to cut the cord and simply use your computer or tablet to watch TV.

The service will be free initially, and eventually will cost between $5 and $20.

Image credit: John Koetsier

Vend’s technology integrates with existing systems like printers, cash drawers, and barcode scanners. It collects data and stores it in the cloud, and it’s accessible on Macs, PCs, and iPads. Business can manage their inventory, monitor and track sales, and look at real-time reporting.

Traditional POS systems are not connected to the Internet, difficult to manage, and expensive. A host of startups have cropped up over the past few years building on developments in mobile technology, cloud computing, and the growth of digital payments to give the POS industry an overhaul.

The most well-known of these startups is Square which pioneered a small piece of hardware known as a dongle that is plugged into an iPhone or iPad to accept credit cards payments. The dongle is accompanied by a suite of software called Square Register that includes checkout customization features, management tools, and data analytics. PayPal and a host of clones such as iZettle and Payleven have similar solutions.

Vend is like Square (or PayPal or iZettle or Payleven) without the dongle.

Vend’s funding news comes on the heels of announcements by Square and PayPal yesterday that could sound the death knell for cash registers. PayPal announced that it would offer free credit, debit, check, and PayPal processing to U.S. businesses that adopt its PayPal Here solution, and Square released a new piece of hardware called the Square Stand that provides a more “elegant” alternative to the cash register.

However, businesses that already have POS hardware may not want to throw them out and start fresh, which is why Vend’s solution is appealing. Vend launched in 2010 and now powers payments in 6,500 stores in 100 countries. Customers include businesses in fashion, sports, tourism, food and drink, and healthy and beauty who pay a monthly subscription fee for the software.

Vend is based in Auckland, New Zealand. Half of the funds came from new investors in New Zealand and Australia, including the Milford Active Growth Fund, and entrepreneurs Craig Winkler, Paul Bassett, and Matt Rockman. Existing Berlin-based investor Point Nine Capital also contributed. This brings Vend’s total capital raised to just under $10 million.

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Google cloud infrastructure service Compute Engine is now open to all developers who want to use it, the search giant announced today.

Compute Engine was first announced about a year ago and aims to compete with Amazon Web Services, Rackspace, Microsoft Azure, Joyent, and other infrastructure-as-a-service providers. Back in April, Google opened up Compute Engine to many more developers and lowered prices by 4 percent.

On top of opening it up for all potential users, Compute Engine has also been updated with the following new features:

• Subhour billing charges for instances in one-minute increments with a 10-minute minimum, so you don’t pay for compute minutes that you don’t use.

• Shared-core instances provide smaller instance shapes for low-intensity workloads.

• Advanced Routing features help you create gateways and VPN servers and enable you to build applications that span your local network and Google’s cloud.

• Large persistent disks support up to 10TBs per volume, which translates to 10 times the industry standard

More Google cloud updates

App Engine, Google’s platform-as-a-service for developers, has also been updated with PHP runtime. PHP is one of the most popular web programming languages, so it’s great to include that in App Engine for all the PHP developers out there.

Google also used today to announce a new product called Google Cloud Datastore. It is a standalone NoSQL-based service for storing non-relational data. Google says the app includes automatic scalability, high availability, ACID transactions, SQL-like queries, indexes and more.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

We knew Google would unveil new updates on Google Maps today at I/O, but we didn’t expect it to be this substantial. Google claims it has completely rebuilt Maps with a new interface, search abilities, and faster performance.

You can request access to a preview of the new Google Maps here.

One big key to the revamp is that Google Maps is based on vector imagery and delivered via WebGL. This means maps will download and show up more quickly. The app will also be smarter about adding street names and labels in real time.

As for new features, the revamped Maps will include the following:

Every click brings up a new customized map: Maps will now highlight only the roads and landmarks that matter to you.

Search results labeled on the map: Info cards pop up on places in the map to provide better info like business hours, ratings, and reviews.

3D photographic imagery for some locations: Google showed off St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome as an example, and it also included user-uploaded photos in the mix so you can get a feel for what the inside of the building looks like.

Earth view: You’ll be able to see the Earth from all the way out in space. Cloud cover is a real-time representation of what’s actually in the sky. Pretty cool.

Google also has updated its mobile apps for iOS and Android with new features including Google Offers and Zagat reviews that pop up in the map. You’ll also get traffic alerts that include live accidents that have just happened and it can reroute destinations automatically.

Google said it will finally release Google Maps for iPad “this summer.”

Just ahead of Google I/O, “magic” movie editing application Magisto has announced it is one of the first apps to launch on Google Chrome’s packaged app platform, which is full of software that act more like native apps than web apps.

Magisto offers automated video editing. You just upload clips and photos and pick a song, and Magisto intelligently mashes it together into one seamless video. Previously, it offered this experience on iPhone and Android. Now it adds this Chrome app. The application has some offline capabilities, including processing large videos regardless if you’re offline or online.

Notably, Magisto is only one of a handful of apps on Google’s Chrome Packaged App Platform at launch. The Chrome app is now available on the Chrome Developer Channel, which is version 28 of the browser. Magisto will make the native Chrome app available generally outside of the Developer Channel “later in the year.”

“We think that Google has offered a clever solution in packaged apps in that they offer a hybrid of traditional web apps and desktop software,” Magisto CEO Oren Boiman told VentureBeat via email. “The Magisto Chrome packaged app is a cross-platform product that is one-click to install, like a Chrome web app, yet is 10 times faster than the regular Magisto web app.”

Additionally, Magisto also announced that it has added Google+ Sign-In to make it easier for people to register and use Magisto. It also will make it possible for those users to download Magisto on their Android devices with a single click.

New York City- and Tel Aviv-based Magisto received $5.5 million in second-round funding in Sept. 2011 following an undisclosed first round. Hong Kong investor Li Ka-shing’s Horizon Ventures led the second round, with participation from prior investor Magma Venture Partners. Magisto has received more than eight million downloads on Android and iOS to date.

Photo via Magisto

Kabbage announced today that it will provide loans to both online and offline businesses, and will reject or approve a claim in minutes.

The Atlanta Georgia-based company’s bread and butter is to provide cash advances to sellers on online marketplaces like Amazon and Etsy. It is one of a handful of startups in the “alternative finance” space that offers an alternative to the traditional bank loan.

Today, the company is expanding its scope to brick and mortar stores. The expansion was precipitated by an integration with Quickbooks, Intuit’s small business accounting software that is used by millions of small businesses.

The company claims to be the first to leverage Quickbooks data to determine whether to give out a loan.

Kabbage has experienced rapid growth since it launched two years ago. It recently closed a credit facility of $75 million, and projected that it would fund 100,000 businesses by the end of the year.

Kabbage makes its money by charging fees to merchants for the working capital. Fees depend on how long the online merchant keeps the cash, and the customer’s repayment risk. Rates range from two percent to seven percent of the original advance amount.

Chief executive Marc Gorlin said that he’s received a ton of requests for Kabbage to serve offline businesses — “that day has arrived,” he said. “Today’s expansion dramatically accelerates Kabbage’s vision of democratizing access to capital for all small businesses. ”

Cloud startup SugarSync just closed an additional $3 million in funding, according to an SEC filing. 

A spokesperson for the company just confirmed the debt raise and said it would be used to bolster the product development team. The funding was brought in through an existing investor  – likely Draper Fisher Jurvetson’s Andreas Stavropoulous, whose name appears on the Form D.

The company has not raised funding since February 2012, when it pulled in $15 million to grow and define itself in the crowded cloud storage market.

“This small cash infusion was from existing investors who were simply supporting our focus to continue to improve the user experience,” said the company’s CEO Mike Grossman in an email. ”We’re very disciplined related to what we’re delivering and who we are targeting,” he added.

San Mateo, Calif.-based SugarSync helps individuals and small businesses manage and back up files across multiple platforms, including PCs, Macs, and iOS, Android, and BlackBerry devices. Unlike its primary competitor Dropbox, SugarSync has grown organically through word of mouth.

The company would not confirm whether it will use the additional resources for an acquisition, but it’s certainly a possibility. Another competitive Box has made a few small strategic acquisitions of late — most recently, Crocodoc.

Why do students cheat — and how are they getting away with it?

One unintended use for massive open online courses, dubbed “MOOCs,” is to help professors better understand the mechanics of cheating in online learning.

Bernard Bull, an assistant vice president for academics at Concordia University Wisconsin, will ask his class to cheat for the purposes of anthropological research. Students will then be asked to disclose exactly how they cheated.

The assignment is a unit in a new class, “Understanding Cheating in Online Courses,” which is offered through the Canvas MOOC platform run by Instructure, a course-management company.

This research will come in particularly handy for educators and online course providers like Instructure and Coursera. With a handful of Coursera courses recently approved for credit, the fear is that students will simply perform a Google search if they’re stumped. As the New York Times reports, the solution may be a new technology for remote proctoring, where online test takers are tracked via their keystrokes.

In the meantime, Bull hopes to dig into the psychology behind cheating and to take steps to prevent it. He embarked on a study a few years ago and found that half of all cheaters never get caught, prompting further investigation. According to Instructure, he held off on publishing this research until he could get a better handle on what motivates people to cheat.

One interesting example is a girl who claims a former boyfriend sabotaged her online test by logging in under her user name. But it was a lie — she made up the whole story in order to get a second chance at a test. Bull’s class will explore the reasons that this girl felt compelled to cheat, and whether the current education system can be adapted to prevent such behavior.

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

In a move to get more people to try its sleek email app Outlook.com, Microsoft has smartly added Google to its list of chat services, joining Facebook and Skype chat.

Microsoft recently announced that Outlook.com now has more than 400 million active accounts following the migration of all Hotmail users over to Outlook.com. The rebranding and redesign that occurred from Hotmail to Outlook.com was necessary because Hotmail had struggled to find new users after Gmail started gobbling them up. Those moves clearly paid off.

Now, to bring even people over to Outlook.com, Microsoft is adding Google Talk functionality.

“As a part of making Outlook.com personal, we believe people choose to use many different services and our role is to help them connect to the people who matter most, wherever they are,” Douglas Pearce, the group program manager for connected services, wrote in a blog post today.

To add Google contacts, open up the Messaging pane in Outlook.com and there will be a dialog prompt to “Add people to chat with Google contacts.” Once you have access, you’re all set. If you ever want to change the connection settings, you can do so at you Live profile page.

Users of Microsoft cloud storage service SkyDrive will also get the benefit of Google chat. This could especially come in handy if you want to work on a document and chat with colleagues at the same time.

“If you’re working together on a document with a Google friend, you can be chatting with them at the same time without leaving SkyDrive,” Pearce wrote. “You can even share a link to the document and edit it together in real time.”

Google functionality in Outlook.com and SkyDrive chat will roll out to all users during the next few days. Take a look at chat in SkyDrive below.

Photos via Microsoft

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Hot database-as-a-service startup Cloudant has raised $12 million in its second round of funding, the company announced today.

Boston-based Cloudant was initially founded in Cambridge, Mas. in 2008 by three MIT physicists. The team struggled to move around multi-petabyte data sets and analyze those data sets wherever they went. So they ended up creating what would become Cloudant.

Cloudant offers a highly scalable database-as-a-service that makes it possible to store, access, and analyze your operational data in the cloud. In the layers of the cloud, Cloudant becomes a “data layer” that can be run on top of most infrastructure-as-a-service providers, including Amazon Web Services, Rackspace, SoftLayer, Microsoft Azure, and Joyent.

Cloudant CEO Derek Schoettle told VentureBeat that this “agnostic” approach to infrastructure deployment separates it from its biggest competitor — Amazon database services. “We believe in not having vendor lock in,” Schoettle said.

Cloudant has attracted some big-name customers with its approach, including Samsung, Microsoft, Adobe, Nokia, Salesforce, Expedia, Zynga, and Flurry.

The new funding was led by Devonshire Investors, Rackspace Hosting, and Toba Capital, with participation by current investors Avalon Ventures, In-Q-Tel, and Samsung Venture Investment Corporation. Including the new round, Cloudant has raised $16 million to date.

“One of the reasons we let Rackspace invest is because of their committment to customer service,” Schoettle said. “We also believe in that.”

In addition to funding, the company has opened up a new office in San Francisco, which joins the Boston HQ and offices in Seattle, the U.K., and South Korea. In the next 90 days, Schoettle said the company will open another office in Hong Kong.

Money in the clouds via Andy Dean Photography/Shutterstock

This is a guest post by Yoav Dembak, CEO and co-founder of Colabo, a self-service marketing analytics tool.

Google Alerts has long had the reputation of being a simple, user-friendly email alert service for news stories and general web mentions, extracted from a customized search query. As one of Google’s oldest tools, the product has been held to a high standard of reliability and accuracy.

Recently, Google has taken the turn for the worst, killing off Google Reader, a valuable RSS tool for a variety of users. Many fear that, given Google Alerts’ recent issues, it will soon be added to the quickly growing list of “Google Graveyarders.”

For professional users who are looking to keep track of a product or competitor, Google Alerts’ service has never been ideal. Too often, alerts are missing important data or not being sent in real time. The results are dry in their presentation, making it hard to see across multiple sources. Lastly, the complex syntax and Boolean operators can be challenging for users, leaving them with unwanted results or missing relevant information.

With Google Alerts’ recent performance issues, the door is open for a new hot market. Many companies have taken advantage of the problems and have created solutions to improve where Google went wrong. Ranging from entry- to enterprise-level tools, there are now solutions for any professional to receive the most reliable results in real time. Here are seven options for various needs and budgets:

Entry level replacements

These tools replicate Google Alerts’ interface and functionality but also include a few more social sources, such as Twitter and Tumblr.

1. For similar interface and functionality — Talkwalker advertises itself as “the best free and easy alternative to Google Alerts.” If you like the functionality of the Google Alerts search query, this is the product for you. Receive alerts in real time from the web via email or in an RSS feed reader.

2. For simple social monitoring — Social Mention is a free and reputable product in the social search engine arena, tracking alerts across the web and social media channels. Additionally, Social Mention provides sentiment analysis on social media mentions and hashtag tracking as part of its service.

Mid-level replacements

These tools offer a configuration of data sources, such as proprietary sources, specific media outlets, and Google Analytics. In addition, they have a better UI, analytics, and custom reports suited for the professional user.

1. Social and traditional media monitoring — Mention is a high-end version of Google Alerts with the addition of select social sources. Mention offers a free version with limited capabilities and an unlimited version starting at $19.99 a month and provides real-time alerts via email and push notifications to your cellular device. Alerts are flagged by importance of mentions according to the latest source interactions by influence and authority.

2. Tracking TV and media campaign alerts — Trendrr lets you harness the power of social media to see how a TV ad or a show is received by the audience. The service starts at $499 a month.

3. Customizing sources and adding proprietary sources — My own company, Colabo provides unlimited data sources and self-service analytics. Additionally, you can add searches from internal databases, such as your CRM or paid services like Hoovers. And you can add notifications for key terms and receive them in real time. Colabo starts at $90 a month with a limited free trial.

High-end replacements

These tools usually offer their own proprietary news sources per industry and often can be combined with a service offering that filters the news for you.

1. Proprietary news source per industry with a financial focus — Bloomberg’s recently launched platform, Bloomberg Professional, provides a different scope of information. Starting in the thousand-dollar range, financial professionals are able to receive alerts from any device in real-time that include news and analytics.

2. PR management — Meltwater News is a full solution aimed at PR and marketing professionals for both inbound and outbound coverage. The product covers news features, online media monitoring, and delivers breaking news about your brand from more than 190,000 news publications, including some social sources like Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and blogs in the form of daily alerts. A subscription starts around $6,000 a year.

Yoav Dembak is the CEO and co-founder of Colabo, a self-service marketing analytics tool. Prior to Colabo, Yoav was an executive at VMware in charge of Product Marketing for the data center management product suite. Yoav was the CEO of B-hive and before that he held various marketing and sales roles at Breach Security, Gilian Technologies, and Gilat Satellite Networks.

Alert icon via Pavel Ignatov/Shutterstock

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Apple has built a massive and fast-growing $16 billion annual revenue stream in digital content alone, Apple analyst Horace Dediu says.

The company announced that quarterly iTunes revenues topped $4 billion — including $2.4 billion in content alone — in its latest earnings report. Based on historical numbers alone, that’s a $16 billion annual run rate, thanks to Apple’s 500 million iTunes users. But since it also has grown at a fairly steady 29 percent per quarter for the past six years, it’s also an underestimate of the annual value of the iTunes ecosystem.

And it gets better as users have more Apple devices.

“Apple users spend about $1/day for each Apple device in use,” Dediu says.

Source: Horace Dediu

iTunes digital media revenue by product segment.

All of which means that Apple is still king of the mobile ecosystem, at least as far as monetization is concerned. Users have currently downloaded 49.9 billion apps, and Apple is currently running a contest which will see the downloader of the 50th billion app win $10,000 in iTunes cash. While Google Play is growing faster than Apple’s app store, Apple still leads in downloads, and it holds a 2.6-times revenue advantage.

It’s also an interesting metric for Amazon to evaluate itself by.

Amazon sells Kindle devices at or near cost in part because it hopes to make extra revenue on digital content — perhaps $3 per user per month – via its own app store and its digital media offerings, such as TV shows and movies. Its newly launched virtual currency Amazon Coins should help with that mission, and with 11 million to 12.5 million Kindles sold through Christmas 2012, and perhaps 15 million sold to date, that would translate into just over half a billion dollars in revenue.

And at Apple-like numbers of $40/user/year, it would be $600 million dollars.

All of which could help explain why Amazon is hitting digital media hard and buying technology to make all of its Kindles full-color, with responsive screens.

And why Apple, Amazon, and Google are increasingly hard-core competitors in their three-way battle to own your devices … and your wallet.

Image credit: 401(K) 2013/Flickr

CEO Noah Pepper announced the acquisition this afternoon on the Lucky Sort’s website. The company has been building a visualization and data navigation engine called TopicWatch, which can discover real-time patterns in streams of data, and took in $500,000 in seed funding from Neu Venture Capital in early 2012.

The startup had operated in stealth mode, but it caught the attention of investors and the press when it raised seed funds from a roster of “big data” experts, including chaos theory physicist Dr. Norman Packard.

Pretty clearly, there’s a strong Twitter tie-in, as Twitter is nothing more than a live stream of data, continuously updated by millions of people. Where Twitter will use the technology was not fully disclosed, but Pepper did offer a hint.

Several of us will be moving to San Francisco to join Twitter’s revenue engineering department, so if you’re in the neighborhood and want to talk about text mining or data visualization, give us a shout.

Twitter has been beefing up its ad tools in the past few months, releasing new functionality for keyword targeting, self-service tools for interest, platform, fan, and gender targeting, and more. And as it ramps up for a possible IPO this year, it needs to give advertisers even better tools for placing, targeting, and evaluating their Twitter ad spend. It’s likely that Lucky Sort technologies will be helpful for that purpose.

In any case, the existing Lucky Sort toolset will be shut down, Pepper stated:

We’ll be helping current customers transition off our system in the coming months such that we can focus fully on our future at Twitter.

Twitter has been acquiring small companies at a fairly rapid pace lately, having just acquired big data startup Ubalo. And in 2012, Twitter was the fourth-most acquisitive company, buying a total of 10 startups and ranking just behind Facebook, Google, and Groupon.

Here is Lucky Sort’s full announcement:

Lucky Sort acquired by Twitter!

Two years ago I started Lucky Sort with several friends. Our goal was to make huge document sets easier to analyze, summarize and visualize by building elegant and user friendly tools for text analysis.

Today I’m very excited to announce that our journey has entered a new phase: Lucky Sort has been acquired by Twitter!

Several of us will be moving to San Francisco to join Twitter’s revenue engineering department, so if you’re in the neighborhood and want to talk about text mining or data visualization give us a shout.

We’ll be helping current customers transition off our system in the coming months such that we can focus fully on our future at Twitter.

In building Lucky Sort we had an enormous amount of support from friends, employees, advisors and investors. It has been uplifting to have so many people help us and it highlighted just how much business is a social endeavour.

Best,

Noah Pepper
Chief Executive Officer
Lucky Sort

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Google has modified its cloud storage allocation for regular users of its services so they now share 15GB of free storage across Gmail, Drive, and Google+ Photos.

“With this new combined storage space, you won’t have to worry about how much you’re storing and where,” Clay Bavor, the product management director for Google Apps, wrote in a blog post. “For example, maybe you’re a heavy Gmail user but light on photos, or perhaps you were bumping up against your Drive storage limit but were only using 2GB in Gmail. Now it doesn’t matter, because you can use your storage the way you want.”

Google’s goal with the reallocation seems to be to simplify the purchase of cloud storage and make it more clear how much free storage you have. So if you were planning to buy more space for Gmail or more space for your Drive account, you’ll do that all in one place. Google will also update its Google Drive storage page to help people better understand how their storage is allocated.

On top of making unified storage available to consumers that use Gmail, Drive, and Google+, unified storage will come to Google Apps users as well. Google Apps users will end up with 30GB of unified storage that’s shared between Drive and Gmail.

The changes to Google’s cloud storage will roll out to all users “over the next couple of weeks.”

Photo via Google

‘Big data’ startup LucidWorks has raised $10 million to help enterprise companies “turn multistructured data into business gold.”

LucidWorks product suite contains two development platforms that enable organizations to search, discover, and analyze their data. LucidWorks Search is built on top of Apache Lucene/Solr open-source search project and seeks to simplify and improve the process of building embedded search applications. The other product, LucidWorks Big Data, then helps businesses make sense of the data.

The company employes one-fourth of those who originally committed to the Apache Lucene/Solr project. It started as Lucid Imagination in 2008 to provide support, training, and consulting services for open-source search technologies Lucene and Solr. However, it saw greater opportunities to make open-source search more accessible and “unlock data’s ability to power competitive advantage” and set down to build LucidWorks Search and Big Data, which released in 2011 and 2012, respectively.  AT&T, Nike, Sears, Ford, Verizon, The Guardian, Elsevier, The Motley Fool, Cisco, Macy’s, Netflix and Zappos are customers. 

LucidWorks claims to be the largest supporter of open-source search in the industry. Organizations are struggling to draw business insights from mountains of unstructured (texts, emails, and so on) and structured data and a crop of well-funded big data startups are trying to provide the simplest way to crawl through petabytes of information, store a massive volume of data, and extract the most relevant information. Endeca, Autonomy, ElasticSearch and recently launched SRCH2 are other players in the space.

According to a form filed with the SEC, existing investors Shasta Ventures, Granite Ventures, and Walden International contributed to this third round of funding. It brings LucidWorks’ total capital raised to $26 million. LucidWorks is based in Redwood City and has not yet responded to request for comment.

And like in all big rushes, the companies providing the picks and shovels can make a killing.

Lately, a number of enterprising startups that sell big data analysis tools to large companies are seeing explosive revenue growth — the latest sign the big data gold rush is fully on.

One of them is Datameer, a Silicon Valley (San Mateo, Calif.) company that offers a tool to help other companies analyze and visualize their big data quickly and easily — by providing it in a spreadsheet-like user interface that most employees can understand.

Datameer has tripled revenues over the past 12 months and looks on track to hit a $10 million run rate by early Q3, according to back-of-the-envelope math. Datameer CEO Stefan Groschupf says the company will reach 100 enterprise contracts by that time, and the average contract is $100,000 in value. The company offers annual software subscriptions, including an enterprise version can cost $100,000 or more, depending on data throughput.

Groschupf says many of his customers like to keep the details of their contracts confidential. But if you check Datameer’s web site and other announcements, you’ll see it serves companies like Sears and Visa, as well as emerging companies like hot gaming firms Kabam and Kixeye. Datameer says it also has four of the five largest global banks as paying customers as well as three of the four largest credit card companies and the U.S. government, though Groschupf is mum on specifics, citing confidentiality agreements.

Datameer’s traction comes as news emerges about other big data companies with similar growth. GoodData, a San Francisco company that provides business intelligence from data, said it too has tripled revenues over the past year. GoodData has been around since 2007. Datameer was founded in 2009. The coinciding explosion of growth this year suggests we’re seeing the “hockey stick” growth part of the big data cycle.

Datameer has raised $17.8 million from firms like Kleiner Perkins and Redpoint, but it may raise an expansion round to ensure it can grab more market share even as other competitors pile in. It can reach profitability based on the money it has already raised, said Groschupf.

Datameer’s value comes in offering an easy-to-use application layer on top of Hadoop, the popular open source software framework that allows companies to store and organize data on the fly. While companies can try to hire hard-to-find and expensive Hadoop experts to analyze the data themselves, Datameer’s app layer dumbs things down. Just about any manager in any unit can integrate, analyze, and visualize any data for their own needs. Does an HR manager want to track the performance of sales executives in new ways? Well, they can query that.

The advantage of the Hadoop-spreadsheet approach is that it allows companies to interact directly with new or existing data sources, without actually changing the underlying data. And it lets them run new types of queries on-the-fly. This contrasts to the cumbersome technology that has dominated until now, where data queries are constrained by slow and expensive data manipulation process: Generally, ETL (extract transform load) technology is used to feed data into enterprise warehouses for subsequent manipulation by business intelligence apps. This process can take up to 18 months to set up, and requires preconceived data modeling. In other words, if your intended queries aren’t thought up beforehand, you’re out of luck. No peering into your data with new sorts of queries.

Datameer’s CEO Stefan Groschupf recently shared evidence of his company’s traction during a panel discussion I moderated at Interop Tuesday (see a good summary here).

Here are five interesting ways Datameer, or services like it, are creating value:

Making money

Datameer helped a large anti-virus software company double the conversion rate of some of its marketing campaigns, netting it more than an additional $20 million in revenue within six months. Before using Datameer, the company had sunk more than $1 million into advertising campaigns that weren’t converting very well: It had used Google ads and tried to market through weblogs, its download logs, and sales accounts. Datameer helped it optimize across all of these areas, with no additional investment in infrastructure or advertising outlays. Similarly, Datameer is helping fast-growing gaming companies like Kabam and Kixeye respond more dynamically to data collected by their users, giving them a leg up on more mature companies like Zynga, which isn’t using Hadoop and is reliant on the more traditional, less flexible ETL/warehouse technology. By encouraging Kabam and Kixeye game developers to write to log files that can be instantly analyzed, Datameer can run 1,000 reports a day on them, checking to see say, what color — red or blue — is best used on game buttons for enticing gamers to click. Similarly, hundreds of other variables can be tracked on the fly, about how gamers are clicking, buying virtual goods, and then leaving.

Identify fraud

Datameer worked with a credit card company to help it save billions by identifying fraud before it happened. Groschupf wouldn’t identify his customer. However, the WSJ recently reported how Visa has used big data to save “billions” by identifying fraud that could have cost it $2 billion; it mentions Visa is using Hadoop but didn’t mention the app running on top of it. The technology allows credit card companies to view data at the individual merchant terminal level and across hundreds of attributes from average authorization volumes to the frequency of purchases that turn out to be fraudulent.

Prediction

Datameer helped an unnamed “hardware company” analyze server usage among its customers to predict when those customers will need a new server. Instead of waiting for the customer to realize servers are at full capacity, Datameer’s data knows capacity will be hit in, say, two weeks, and ships a new server to the customer before they realize they need it. That has helped the hardware company improve sales by more than $100 million “over a few years,” according to Groschupf. Datameer can perform a range of other needs for customers based on trends. One example is price optimization. While online retailer Amazon is using price optimization techniques to update prices up to 12 times a day, traditional retailers have typically optimized pricing once every 12 weeks. Datameer recently helped Sears shorten that time to three days.

Matching people

Datameer’s principal competition is not other providers, says Groschupf, but when companies decide to do the job themselves. Relationship site eHarmony, for example, was an early adopter of Hadoop, and claims this has helped eHarmony allow 550,000 U.S. marriages to happen. eHarmony matches people by running Hadoop every night on the questionnaires filled out by its customer base.

Another big step for the big data industry occurred late last year, when Datameer announced an OEM deal with online human resource software vendor Workday to embed the Datameer analytics platform as part of their big data analytics application for customers. “This marks one of the first deals to integrate Hadoop analytics into the enterprise packaged application ecosystem,” said Tony Baer, an analyst at research firm Ovum at the time. The firm called it a “key milestone in the process for big data securing mainstream enterprise acceptance.”

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Earlier this week Adobe announced it was abandoning traditional boxed product in favor of Creative Cloud, Creative Suite’s digital and subscription-based equivalent. Although Adobe maintains that many customers have already made the transition to Creative Cloud and have no intention of looking back, the comments on the coverage across the web have been notably negative on the move.

VentureBeat sat down with Adobe Software Marketing Executive Scott Morris at the Adobe MAX conference in Los Angeles to discuss the reaction to the controversial announcement.

VentureBeat: In all of your time with Adobe, has there ever been a more divisive announcement than the one made this week about moving to the cloud?

Scott Morris: I don’t think I’ve ever had a time in my career, at Adobe or Macromedia or any other company I was at, where we’ve been going through as massive a change as what we’re going through at Adobe right now. The introduction of Creative Cloud last year was huge for Adobe, but even then, even though we had two very discrete and different offerings, both new and both available at the same time with the introduction of CS6 and Creative Cloud, it took a while for customers to really understand what Creative Cloud was about. We’ve done that now, but this is definitely a huge transitional moment for Adobe.

From a controversy perspective, we know that a lot of customers are ready for Creative Cloud, because they’ve moved there in really big numbers already. But we definitely know that not everyone is ready. It was 10 years ago, in 2003, that Adobe introduced the idea of Creative Suite. There were some similar reactions at the time, where a lot of customers were upset or frustrated or angry and didn’t understand what Adobe was doing. They thought this was just Adobe’s way to get more money out of them and things like that.

Then, what they saw over time was that the value they were actually getting from the Suite was high. They were spending less than if they were buying multiple individual products. The value we could give them by integrating the tools really tightly, where work flows between the apps, was significant. Now fast-forward to 2013, when pretty much everyone is on Creative Suite, or now Creative Cloud. We’re going through something like that. We’re going through a change that is at least as significant and probably more so, because we’re also pretty dramatically changing the whole model.

VentureBeat: Not only on VentureBeat, but also on TechCrunch and pretty much every site that I checked, for the announcement of Creative Cloud, there were hundreds and hundreds of comments of people complaining, with maybe literally one or two people who stuck their neck out to defend it. Did you feel the reaction to the Creative Cloud thing kind of overshadowed all of the features that were announced for CC? How does Adobe plan to work around that?

Morris: Yeah, that’s a great question. You’re the first person to ask me that, and also, since we’re doing this a [couple days in], you’ve had a chance to see those comments and that reaction, so you have kind of a unique perspective. We expected there to be some of the community reaction that you’re seeing. We’re introducing a huge change for our customers. There are a lot of them who are already on board. They’ve already moved to Creative Cloud. There’s a bunch more who we know are excited.

What I also saw was, there were very specific examples of people who’ve been complaining about the Creative Cloud model – customers of ours on very public forums, like on Creative COW. If you actually look at those, some of those same customers are saying, “All right. I like what I saw with CC so much, even though I’m hesitant about this, I just signed up.” We have a specific example of that with this one guy who was really, really upset on Creative COW the last couple of months, and then just yesterday, one of my colleagues showed me his tweet. He’s like, “I gave in. I signed up. I love what the CC apps have in them.” So I think there definitely was some of that negative community reaction from people just not being ready for this big of a change.

I don’t think it overshadowed all the goodness that we released. I’m sure, to a certain extent, it did. I’m sure there are customers who right now are so focused on the change that they’re not taking a good hard look at what the actual offering is. But that will come over time. It’s going to be part of people’s process for figuring out what they want to do moving forward. Some of them will just sit on CS6 for a while, some of them will move immediately to the cloud, and some of them are going to wait and see what happens and then take a deeper look. We hope that then they’re going to move, because we think it’s a pretty great release. But everyone has to be on their own path.

VentureBeat: Did Adobe look at something like Steam or any similar digital distribution service to reference what works and what doesn’t for Creative Cloud?

Morris: We’ve definitely looked at all the different models and the different examples of what other companies have done, peer companies. We looked a lot harder at what Autodesk does and what Microsoft has done and what some of our competitors or peer companies in the creative space have done. We also have a lot of people who have joined Adobe in the last two years who came from some of those companies and worked on those businesses, companies that transitioned from a traditional shrink-wrapped software business to a services-based business.

We brought that knowledge in-house to help us with the transition and we examined what other folks had done. What we’re doing is unique. I think even if you look at Microsoft, they offer their subscription offerings, but they also offer their perpetual… The subscription offering actually hasn’t been as successful. We decided that splitting ourselves like that actually didn’t make sense for us. Evaluating companies that had to do that, that had to manage the traditional shrink-wrapped software and the new model of services… That’s really tough to do. It was tough for us to do in the last year. That’s why we said that we’re just going to focus on one thing.

VentureBeat: I come from the games industry, where every year, especially at E3 — which is kind of like the Adobe Max for the entire games industry — a lot of CEOs and suits and businessmen get up and tell you what you’re supposed to be excited about for the holiday season and the coming fiscal year. It’s always extremely forced and usually extremely awkward as a quick search on YouTube can attest to.

Yet when I watched the keynote and the Sneaks from MAX, everyone from Adobe was very genuine and really enthusiastic about what they were talking about. Not only are these the people who make it and make decisions around it, but they’re also people that use it, which is not always true of other companies and industries. So with that said, when the entire company make such a dramatic shift in one direction, who is involved in that decision?

Morris: The business decision, in terms of the path that we chose forward, is made at a pretty senior level, but with input from people all throughout the company. But actually, having that change be socialized throughout the whole company and getting the whole company on board is a huge effort. Everyone takes part in that. So in terms of the decision, do you mean how we get the whole company aligned like that?

VentureBeat: Correct. Was there alignment, or was there just kind of like a memo handed down? “Hey, guys, by the way…”

Morris: [laughs] No, it actually didn’t work that way at all. We were very deliberate in terms of getting feedback from employees, from customers, from partners all over the last year and a half. Even before we launched Creative Cloud, we announced that it was coming. At Max, actually, a year and a half ago. So it’s been 18 months that we’ve been talking about Creative Cloud. We spent a lot of time getting feedback. We didn’t know, back then, that we were going to choose one path 18 months later and basically stop any further development on Creative Suite to only focus on Creative Cloud. It caught us by surprise in terms of… We knew Creative Cloud would be successful, but it was even more successful than we thought it would be.

And so you really see that, as an employee, without someone telling me what we’re going to be doing… For me, one of the reasons why it’s been so exciting working at Adobe is because customers who are moving to Creative Cloud really, really love it. They’re very vocal about how much they love it. So while this whole change is difficult for some, when you look at the enthusiasm that the people who have moved to it have… Just look at what they’re putting on social media, like ratings and reviews on our site, or things like Yelp reviews. We don’t control what people post. They can give us one star or five stars. Creative Cloud has a higher star rating than Photoshop, which is unheard of. Just by a little bit, but that’s unheard of. And you read what customers are saying about it.

I think that as a company, it’s been so thrilling over the last year to see that happen and have customers just love Adobe again. When the decision went down throughout the organization that we were only going to focus on this, I don’t think it surprised a lot of people. I think it was easy for the company to get on board, because it feels like a different place even internally now than it was a year and a half ago. It really does.

VentureBeat: Everyone from starving students all the way up to Disney animators use Adobe’s products. Recently, in the past year or so, crowdfunding has surged in popularity, especially on Kickstarter. You see a lot of creative projects popping up, whether it’s an indie film or a game or even an artbook or whatever. Because Adobe’s products do play such a large part in the projects that are being made through crowdfunding, do you have any initiatives that might be of interest to creative teams with really small budgets, such as a sponsorship program for particularly creative indies? For example, Epic Games will still license the Unreal Engine to smaller dev teams who can’t pay for the fees up front. The backend arrangement changes, but they don’t want to exclude anyone from being able to use their product.

Morris: You know, we actually don’t, because that’s a really interesting idea, especially with things like Kickstarter. In fact, someone who is a big influencer for Adobe in the video space just had a Kickstarter project funded on Sunday. He was telling me about it, and it really made me think. I have other friends who’ve put creative-related projects there. They wanted to get a documentary film made and stuff like that. I think that’s something interesting that Adobe probably should look at doing. We do have a program, a community involvement program, where we actually give free software, and in some cases funding, to community organizations or people who are doing really interesting projects, non-profit things. But we don’t really have anything formal beyond that. We don’t. That’s actually a really interesting idea.

We asked startups throughout the health care industry to apply and stipulated that founders must only have raised a seed or series A round of funding. In each category, our expert judges selected five finalists who will pitch their products and services live in front of more than 400 health care executives, leaders, IT decision makers, venture capitalists, and press.

The judges include representatives from Norwest Venture Partners, Morgenthaler Ventures, Venrock, Qualcomm Life, Burill & Company, AARP, and one patient advocate. During the competition, they will look for digital health and health IT startups that are developing innovative solutions that serve the smart hospital, patient, and provider and has early signs of industry traction and user engagement.

The finalists have the opportunity to win editorial coverage in VentureBeat, four hours of partner meetings and mentorship from Morgenthaler Ventures, a $250,000 convertible bridge loan from Venrock Quarry (only in the seed category), and more. Read the full list of prizes here. 

It wasn’t easy to narrow down our finalists, so we included an honorary mention for promising startups that just missed the cut.

Here are the finalists for HealthBeat 2013 Grand Rounds Innovation Showdown.

Seed Stage

Smart Patients is an online community where cancer patients and caregivers learn from each other about treatments, the latest science, and how it all fits into the context of their experience. A built-in clinical trial search engine helps patients find relevant trials and discuss them with the community.

Clinicast builds risk scores, cost scores, and workflow tools that identify high risk patients, match patients to appropriate interventions, and streamline workflow. By mining actionable insights from health data, CliniCast enables providers to optimize outcomes and minimize unnecessary costs.

ReferralMD is an enterprise business relationship management health care service that helps primary care and specialist providers bridge the communication gap by providing real-time status updates, business intelligence, and performance measurement for referrals, insurance authorizations, and progress updates. ReferralMD complements all electronic medical record software.

Liviam is a personal sharing site that give you a simple way to bring together your team of supporters when you need them most. Anyone who has ever been hospitalized knows, care for a sick or injured loved one, coordinating family members seeing the new baby, or asking for help from friends during a tough time knows that it can be really hard to find the right way to say, “I need you.” Your friends and family want to help, Liviam makes it easy.

mHealth Technologies makes any compiled application (.ipa, .exe, .apk, etc.) on any platform HIPAA compliant with proximity-based security. The patented three-part solution consists of the Token, an application or container, and a dashboard. MHT embedded security enables any application to defend itself or self-destruct without a network connection, making breach impossible.

Honorable Mentions: 

Socialblood is a social network that connects blood donors and recipients of the same blood type through Facebook. They are on a mission to connect the entire Facebook population of over a billion users to their blood types. So when in need users could help each other and potentially save lives.

Jumpercut engages patients through personalized video. It’s increasingly difficult to reach patients in a busy media environment. By using JumperCut to engage patients with instantly personalized videos based on their immediate needs, you’re reinforcing the personal nature of your relationship with them, increasing their loyalty, and driving them towards positive action.

Series A+

Procured Health helps hospitals tackle their fastest growing cost item, medical products, with a web-based device analysis platform and an evaluation workflow solution. Procured also proactively highlights savings opportunities based on purchasing tendencies and market insights. In the face of multiple revenue pressures, hospitals can take control of their input costs with Procured.

Empower Interactive brings scale to behavioral health by transforming evidence-based psychotherapy into interactive e-learning programs, teaching structured coping techniques in a cost-effective, highly accessible way. The underlying platform is structured to ensure that end users will benefit from data-driven, proven methods that help them improve their psychological well-being.

Beyond Lucid is an award-winning company that makes software to connect Fire, EMS, and Industrial Emergency Response Teams in the field with the care facilities they serve. BLT’s MEDIVIEW platform incorporates industry-leading, mission-critical features to make emergency response safer, more efficient, and cost-effective, with zero integration engineering required.

Ringadoc simplifies communication between doctors and patients. Ringadoc empowers doctors, giving them the capability to triage patients, centralize communications, and manage their after-hours calls on any device. Based in San Francisco, Ringadoc is backed by top Silicon Valley investors, including FF Angel.

Better Doctor helps people find the doctor that’s right for them. Each year over 70 million Americans struggle to find the right doctor. BetterDoctor seeks to solve this by offering web and mobile apps that make doctor discovery simple and transparent. Since the launch in October, BetterDoctor’s health marketplace has helped a million patients find the right doctor

Honorable mentions:

Tiatros Inc. is a cloud computing company that dramatically improves coordination across the healthcare sector to make clinical services, telemedicine services, and clinical research more efficient. Pioneered in alliance with experts across the University of California Health System, the Tiatros solution is a private, secure mobile solution that connects healthcare providers to each other, to their patients, and to family members and other caretakers using social-network styled tools and interfaces that are already familiar to 1.5 billion people.

Zeel is a revolutionary way to book same-day, in-home massages with the best licensed massage therapists in New York City.

Check out the full HealthBeat 2013 program here, which is packed with over 70 industry leading speakers and two days of high-level chats, breakout sessions, and networking initiatives. And make sure to register today. There are only a few seats remaining!

Thanks to the following industry leaders for supporting HealthBeat 2013: AARP and ArchPoint Partners as Silver Sponsors and Allayo, athenahealth, California Healthcare Foundation, Morgenthaler Ventures, Norwest Venture Partners, Practice Fusion, Venrock, and Voalte as Event Sponsors.

Top image via Shutterstock

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Cameron Peron is VP Marketing at Newvem, a cloud operations optimization service.

Amazon has launched a series of local Amazon Web Services summits across in key cities across the world. Capitalizing on the re:Invent conference in November of last year, the AWS summits are a great forum for local AWS users to learn about featured AWS services and meet partners exhibiting at the event itself.

The AWS Summit in San Francisco a number of days ago lived up to this expectation. Here are 5 insights from Amazon senior VP of web services Andy Jassy’s keynote, and the exhibition itself.

It’s all about the enterprise

Adoption of the public cloud by the enterprise was a key message through the introductory keynote.  In sharp contrast to the keynotes delivered in re:Invent in November, Andy Jassy emphasized the public cloud as part of an enterprise’s IT and cloud strategy as opposed to a complete alternative to on-premise and virtual private cloud.

Andy highlighted use cases of AWS services that the enterprise can use to both move workloads to the AWS cloud as well cooperate between on-premise and AWS environments.

Security = priority #1

Jassy stated that AWS is committed to providing a secure public cloud, highlighting the addition of advanced security controls, certifications and accreditations.

No doubt this was a direct message to enterprise level CIOs that are considering moving small variable workloads to the public cloud, but need to deal with security and compliance risks that run deep into their respective organizations.

Redshift, redshift, redshift

The keynote contained many use cases and examples of using AWS RedShift, a data warehousing and data analysis solution.

Based on an hourly pricing model, RedShift enables AWS customers to analyze large volumes of data with their existing business intelligence tools.  The RedShift use case was a common theme throughout Andy Jassy’s address, use cases delivered throughout the keynote, and breakout sessions. RedShift follows in the footsteps of enriched AWS services such as OpsWorks and Trusted Advisor.

Cost is still the driver for onboarding new business

Throughout the keynote Jassy championed many organic AWS services, as well as solutions provided through the AWS Partnership Network that enable companies to scale once on the AWS cloud.  Despite this, low cost is still king.

Just as Werner Vogel discussed cost savings in the beginning of the New York City keynote, Jassy emphasized that AWS lowered prices 31 times in the absence of competitive pressure to do so.  In line with the success of the Amazon.com model, Jassy implied that that AWS will continue to reduce prices.

Jassy also offered examples of customers reducing costs by using solutions beyond EC2, highlighting that Foursquare reduced their analytical cost by 50 percent with AWS.

Launch of the AWS Certification Program

Jassy also shared the launch of an AWS program that certifies solutions architects, SysOps Admin, and developers.

To qualify, applicants must complete an exam that covers both proficiency in AWS as well as general IT knowledge and experience.  The program should complement and reward AWS users who have championed both onboarding and scaling AWS within their organizations by mandating and regulating their skill sets throughout the career.

In other words DevOps and other AWS users can add AWS certification alongside experience and proficiency in code, such as Ruby and Python.

Cameron Peron is VP Marketing at Newvem, a cloud operations optimization service designed for cloud users. Offering a business view into a company’s public cloud operations, Newvem actively tracks cloud health in order to help reveal and solve cloud irregularities related to cost, security, utilization and availability.  Follow Cameron at @cameronperon

Ubalo announced the acquisition on its website, saying that the company was founded to focus on making large-scale computing easier and that after fruitful collaborations with Twitter’s infrastructure team, the two agreed to come together.

The startup was working on simple ways of scaling code beyond single machines. Using the Ubalo infrastructure, developers could write code for multiple machines with no additional overhead, using the same tools, languages, and libraries that they would ordinarily use for single-computers applications. Case studies that the team published include reducing image processing tasks from eight hours to five minutes using 100 processor cores on Amazon S3 and using Ubalo to generate 8GBs of data by drawing one billion samples from a set of data and computing sample averages, all in just .7 seconds.

Ubalo achieved this by creating modular “pods” that run calculations in replicatable environs you set up once and can run anywhere as well as APIs and messaging protocols to keep all the calculations in sync, and data management techniques to access, manage, and store gigabyte-sized data files.

The startup’s name, Ubalo, means “counting,” according to the site, and it had just four employees including the founders.

Here’s the team’s announcement:

We’ve got some exciting news: The Ubalo team is joining Twitter. In early 2011, we started Ubalo to make large-scale computing easier and more accessible to a technical audience, and we’ve had a great time working with our partners and customers on a number of interesting products. When we met the infrastructure folks at Twitter, we realized that it’s a company with brilliant people, strong momentum, exciting challenges and a promising future. We quickly became enthusiastic about the possibility of collaborating with them and the impact we could have there.

A few days ago, Twitter agreed to acquire our technology and we agreed to join their staff. We look forward to working with Twitter in the years to come.

Thanks for your support and interest in Ubalo!

— Jacob Mattingley (@jem_nz) and Ian Downes (@ndwns), May 9, 2013

It seems to be more than simply an acqui-hire, as Jacob Mattingly, whose Twitter account says “I like making complex things simpler,” tweeted that his startup’s intellectual property was acquired. Cofounder Ian Downes apparently just started using Twitter today and has only one tweet — a retweet of Twitter Engineering’s tweet — to his credit.

Twitter, of course, can always use top-notch expertise on its infrastructure teams. The company’s days of fail-whale adventures seem to be in the past, but with a continuously growing network of users and new services like Twitter #Music, among others, there’s a strong need for ongoing talent acquisition.

Ubalo was based in Palo Alto, Calif., and was funded by Harrison Metal.