Mystery funding of the day? That’d be YesGraph, a stealthy startup in the recruiting space founded by Ivan Kirigin, a former product manager at Facebook and Dropbox.

Kirigin today secured $1.2 million of a $1.8 million round, according to a Form D. A total of seven angel investors participated in the funding.

“The financing has enabled us to build a good product and hire talent — there is a lot that is hard about this space,” said Kirigin on a phone call.

Ivan Kirigin

Kirigin would not say much about the product at this stage. But he did reveal that YesGraph is building tools for tech companies to improve the hiring experience — and not just the “output.” To that end, Kirigin just released a survey, an attempt to find patterns in how startups make their first hires.

“Companies have a hard time hiring good people — we are trying to help them,” he added.

Serial entrepreneur Kirigin is also the founder of a micro-payments service called Tipjoy, which both Facebook and Twitter considered acquiring, TechCrunch reported. After negotiations fell through with Facebook, the company made Kirigin an offer, and he joined in 2009 to work on a virtual currency product. He would later join Dropbox, where he claims on his LinkedIn page to have helped drive growth 12X over 2 years.

Investors in Kirigin’s previous company Tipjoy include Chris Sacca and Y Combinator founder Paul Graham.

Top image via Shutterstock

Before you can play in the cloud, you must first break the cloud — or at least build up a solid infrastructure to utilize it.

That’s the specialty of Happy Cloud, a cloud-gaming firm that today announced the closure of a $4.25 million funding round. Avalon Ventures led the latest investment along with Jesselson Capital and Shaman Ventures. Happy Cloud’s funding total is now at $7 million.

The company also introduced Tamir Buchler, an e-commerce veteran, as its new chief executive officer.

“Happy Cloud adds unparalleled value to the gaming ecosystem by eliminating barriers to entry and giving users what they want,” Buchler noted. “By offering free on-demand access to the best high-end games, we can bring new gamers on board, increase conversions and keep gamers engaged. Happy Cloud is a scalable solution that can effect change in the same way iTunes and Netflix have transformed media consumption by offering seamless, instant access.”

Happy Cloud provides server-based distribution to PC, console, and Android game publishers. It will use this latest infusion of cash to expand its games-on-demand service.

“We are excited to have Tamir Buchler on board,” said Michael Jesselson of Jesselson Capital. “He has strong leadership skills and has a proven track record of driving revenue growth for consumer-facing platforms.”

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Elastic cloud infrastructure startup Cloudscaling has raised $10 million in its second round of funding so it can keep growing at a quick clip and innovating its cloud technology.

San Francisco-based Cloudscaling was founded in 2006 and claims to be “the leader in elastic cloud infrastructure.” Its core product is the Open Cloud System, an OpenStack-powered cloud infrastructure application that can give companies the same benefits of cloud infrastructure providers like Amazon Web Services and Rackspace. But unlike those companies, Cloudscaling’s solution is deployable in a client’s data center under an IT team’s control. It can also run its solution on Amazon and Google’s public clouds if a customer wants to do so.

In April, Cloudscaling announced version 2.5 of Open Cloud System. Some of its newest customer wins include LivingSocial, EVault, Ubisoft, and DataFort.

The new funding was provided by prior investor Trinity Ventures and new investors Juniper Networks and Seagate. Previously, Cloudscaling raised $4 million back in Sept. 2011.

“This financing round caps a tremendous year of momentum for the company,” Cloudscaling CEO Michael Grant said in a statement. “That momentum affirms the voice of the market, clearly stating that customers want more than OpenStack. They want an on-premise, OpenStack-based private or public cloud turnkey system solution that delivers architectural and behavioral fidelity with major public clouds like Amazon Web Services. Our Open Cloud System product delivers on that need to enable hybrid cloud application deployments that span private and public cloud services.”

Clouds photo via Alejandro Erickson/Flickr

“We offer unified photo storage across all your devices, for free, at 1,024-pixel quality,” founder Steve Cosman told me a few weeks ago in Toronto. “Or you can pay $5/month for unlimited resolution.”

Tomorrow MyShoeBox is launching version two of its photo backup and sharing service, with a new iPad app, updated mobile apps, and a new shared galleries feature that you use to build grouped sets of photos with people you went on vacation with or family members who shared an event such as a wedding.

The freemium model has helped the company get a quick start.

Source: MyShoeBox

Search and self-quantification

After exiting from Toronto accelerator Extreme Startups in the fall, the service saw 13.4 million photos uploaded in November, its first month. And, Cosman says, MyShoeBox users upload far more photos than Facebook or Flickr users — 3,200 each, compared to Facebook’s 220 and Flickr’s 320.

But the value proposition is much more than photo backup.

Instead, MyShoeBox is a way to enjoy all of your photos, all of the time, on any device you have. Frankly, for most people, their photos are strewn around their main computer (photos from their actual, official, camera), their phone (snapshots from their built-in camera), and their social networks (uploaded from wherever you happened to be at the time). There’s no unified view, no way to see — and search — all your photos at once.

Using MyShoeBox for the first time syncs your photos up to the cloud-based service automatically, in the background, and installing the services’ mobile apps on your Android or iOS-based phone will do the same.

That’s helpful, because we often want to see more of our photos on our mobile devices.

“Our new iPad app is an incredible way of browsing your entire photo collection,” Cosman says. “And it’s one of the only ways you can get your full photo collection on your iPad … most people don’t have enough space.”

What most interested me when I chatted to Cosman is MyShoeBox’ solution to a problem that I think I share with many other digital photographers: enjoying your own work and finding photos. A former program manager for Microsoft’s augmented reality team for Windows Phone, Cosman has placed special emphasis on automated sorting, tagging, and exploring features.

“So many people that have given up the concept of a photo collection,” he says. “Faces, places, and things are important ways to automatically categorize photos. And they keep getting smarter every day.”

So MyShoeBox highlights places you’ve been, photos you took last year at this time, events, cameras you used, and more, creating what the company calls “an interactive infographic” of your life. That includes personal quantification data like the top times you take photos, and your most photographed neighborhoods.

And if you want to search your photo collection, MyShoeBox has just rewritten its search features to be much faster and more powerful as its power users often have more than 15,000 photos each.

“iOS, Android, Windows, Mac … it works pretty much anywhere,” Cosman says. “And once together, it’s automatically organized.”

MyShoeBox is based in Toronto, Canada, and is currently raising a financing round. Its new iPad, iPhone, and Android apps will be live in Google Play and the app store tomorrow.

Image credits: MyShoeBox

With the debut of the new Xbox One gaming system, we could focus on many things: hardware, flashy games, and entertainment options. But one aspect really gets me fired up: Developers should now be able to use Microsoft Azure’s cloud computing platform to make games more powerful than ever.

Wired reports that the game developers and studios can tap Azure for all kinds of things. Microsoft isn’t going to force developers to use the cloud platform, but it will certainly push them to do so.

The Xbox One will not have to be always connected to the Internet to play games, but it does generally require an online connection. And if developers do decide to tap Azure’s cloud computing platform to boost a game’s power, a web connection will be necessary to play that game.

Why Azure?

Microsoft has been building Azure’s cloud computing capabilities for a long while. Azure has been mostly known as a platform-as-a-service that (primarily .NET) developers use to make the process of app development easier.

Microsoft opened up Azure for pure cloud infrastructure use in June. It now competes with top dogs like Amazon Web Services, Rackspace, and Google Compute Engine.

Steven Martin, the general manager of Azure’s operations team, told us this past October that Azure users are consuming more compute capacity than the entire world used in 1998. As of December, Azure’s cloud storage holds more than 4 trillion objects. It also handles an average of 270,000 requests processed per second, with a peak of 880,000 requests per second.

Azure applications in gaming

Now, let’s see what you could do with all that power.

The first and most obvious application of Azure on Xbox One is making Xbox Live more powerful and useful. All your downloaded games and achievements would be synced and available wherever you are. You would also have dedicated servers for every multiplayer game you participate in. Multiplayer matches would be able to host up to 128 gamers in a single session.

Xbox Live currently runs on 15,000 servers, but it will soon move to a stunning 300,000 servers later this year for the Xbox One launch. That’s a lot of power dedicated to making Xbox Live better.

Second (and this is a bit more crazy), developers can offload computational tasks to the cloud instead of relying on physical hardware to do the heavy lifting. Necessary game computations for physics, rendering, and the like could be immensely enhanced with a connection to powerful virtual servers in the cloud.

“It’s not like on day one, everyone will have figured out how to take advantage of that power,” Microsoft interactive entertainment CMO Marc Whitten told Wired. “It’s just one of those stakes we’re placing.”

Screenshot via Microsoft

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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Communication is one of the biggest challenges facing health care today. Doctors cannot use e-mail, social media networks, or SMS texting to discuss patients because it violates privacy regulations, and electronic medical record (EMRs) systems are generally incompatible with each other, which makes the secure exchange of information even more difficult.

At VentureBeat’s HealthBeat today, Verizon managing principal of connected health care solutions Nancy Green explained how Verizon can benefit the health care community.

“When you think of Verizon, you think of our wireless network. But we have a $6 billion health care practice and a chief medical officer ,” Green said onstage. “We are moving and enabling the business of health care so others can innovate. We have experts on compliance and security, and startups can use the size and scope and scale of Verizon to make a difference.”

Security and authentication are major concerns when it comes to medical communication. Green said that 27 countries, the White House, and the U.S. nuclear launch codes are secured by Verizon. The company knows how to do security and authenticate people, and it is applying this expertise to the health care. Verizon has credentialed every clinician and physician in the United States and provide a secure channel for transmitting data, such a prescriptions. An example is Verizon’s work with Surescripts to support electronic prescriptions and set up digital signage on devices. From their iPads and  iPhones, doctors can sign in using a passcode, authenticate their identity, write, confirm, and accept prescriptions, and digitally sign documents. Verizon’s “exchange layer” moves the information securely from network to network (doctor to pharmacy) so doctors don’t have to visit a terminal or use pen and paper.

Verizon’s dual persona technology is also particularly useful in the medical field. Doctors often use their personal mobile devices for work and Green said that it is a struggle to securely manage patient data on phones and keep it separate from personal information. Through an exclusive partnership with VMware, Verizon has a solution that can lock down the enterprise/clinical side of phones.

To quote Voltaire (or Uncle Ben from Spider-Man), with great power comes great responsibility. Verizon has a network of 115 million people and a huge telecommunications infrastructure, and Green said the company is committed to supporting entrepreneurs and ideas that use this power for good. So is competitor AT&T, which also has health care solutions. Both companies see opportunities in an industry that makes up 17 percent of the GDP and relies heavily on mobile and telecommunication technology. These opportunities also extend beyond mobile health technology. In March, Verizon announced its new cloud service for health data exchange and a partnership with HealthSpot to power tele-medicine kiosks in the field.

Photo Credit: Michael O’Donnell/VentureBeat

This sponsored post is produced by Matt Quinn, CTO of TIBCO.

We’re well beyond any question about whether cloud computing is the future. Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) paved the way for the idea that organizations can operate some of their most important systems in an on-premise or off-premise cloud. Small, medium and even large businesses accept that cloud computing delivers flexibility, cost and scalability that business has never had before. Companies are gravitating to cloud because it brings very short time to value and doesn’t impact the current business model. Lower cost and less risk are very attractive propositions.

How big is this move? Forrester estimates that the average company has 9.3 different SaaS applications in use. Consulting firm Cap Gemini reports that 78% of new applications are deployed into the cloud. And that’s just the applications that are being tracked. In reality, workers today are practicing BYOS (Bring Your Own Service) as they experiment with SaaS in broad ways that IT and even business managers may not know about.

Cloud has its challenges

As cloud computing continues to mature and its use expands, it hasn’t been without challenges. The single most significant limitation has been the increasing pain of a lack of integration between cloud applications and the rest of the business. This is a pain that becomes more acute as the cloud-to-cloud and cloud-to-on-premise system invariably becomes more complex. On top of the integration challenge, the mechanics of cloud expose organizations to increased risk of data integrity, process latency and security. Oftentimes, SaaS applications are being marketed to the business, which likely looks at risk in a different way than IT or compliance. This is a challenge itself as the organization faces risks that aren’t understood or moratoriums on SaaS use that aren’t followed.

A way to solve this problem is to stay within a single SaaS vendor “stack,” but that leaves an organization beholden to a single vendor – a risky position. But there’s a reality of the still-maturing cloud: SaaS applications are typically limited in capability, a necessary evil of the SaaS paradigm that creates economies of scale for users by requiring customers to use highly standardized interfaces and functionality. To build out the same level of capability that’s commonplace in the on-premise world, organizations need to blend custom functionality within their own walls with multiple, disparate cloud applications and storage options. The reality of Cloud is that nearly all enterprises will need to operate a hybrid model for years to come.

TIBCO Cloud Bus

With these challenges in mind, TIBCO today released TIBCO Cloud Bus. This is an entirely new integration-platform-as-a-service (iPaaS) that uses ready-made templates and connectors to integrate cloud-to-cloud and cloud-to-on-premise systems and applications, and includes integration with social networks. In keeping with the nature of the cloud, TIBCO Cloud Bus is a subscription service and pay-as-you-go without a large upfront investment or infrastructure.

The immediate benefit of this iPaaS platform comes from being able to rapidly connect SaaS applications without having to program, by using the latest graphical tools in a business-friendly user interface. Considering how critical time-to-value has become, this kind of ease of use is essential. Let’s face it, what matters enormously today may not be necessary tomorrow and likewise, business needs to constantly innovate through technology that changes, it seems, daily.

Sponsored posts are content that has been produced by a company, which is either paying for the post or has a business relationship with VentureBeat, and they’re always clearly marked. The content of news stories produced by our editorial team is never influenced by advertisers or sponsors in any way. For more information, contact sales@venturebeat.com.

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Leading corporate performance management (CPM) company Adaptive Planning has raised a massive $45 million in its fourth and final round of funding with a goal to further dominate the CPM space, the business said Tuesday.

Adaptive Planning offers a suite of budgeting, planning, forecasting, and data discovery software in the cloud. Its software works for small businesses all the way up to large enterprises, which now represent 25 percent of its business. The company had 1,500 customers at the end of 2012 and it estimates it will have 2,000 customers at the end of this year. Big name customers come from all kinds of industries including Box, Coca-Cola, Johnson & Johnson, Jive Software, NBC News, Nissan, Red Hat, Toyota, and Zipcar.

“We address all of the CPM market — and it’s a huge market,” Adaptive Planning CEO John Herr told VentureBeat. “Most of our new customers move to us from Excel. We help customers upgrade from ‘Excel hell’ to Adaptive.”

Adaptive Planning competes with solutions from Oracle, IBM, and SAP, but its software-as-a-service has made it a leader in its space. And now the company will have more cash to hire more employees, further refine its software, and create more partnerships with resellers.

That last point is particularly important for the company, as it already has a strong reseller network of more than 400 “channel partners.” These partners help sell the product to more businesses and give it better access to international customers. One such partner is NetSuite, which offers Adaptive-based Financial Planning service that is integrated with NetSuite’s software.

The huge new funding round was led by new investor Bessemer Venture Partners (BVP), with participation by existing investors ONSET Ventures, Norwest Venture Partners, RBC Venture Partners, Cardinal Venture Capital, and Monitor Ventures. BVP partner Byron Deeter will join the company’s board.

“The business is on fire and this investment is a strong endorsement of what we’re about,” Herr said. “Many BVP companies are also customers of Adaptive.”

Including the new round, Adaptive Planning has raised about $100 million to date, including a $22 million round a little over a year ago.

Herr said this will be the last round of venture capital funds raised for the company and that it will explore the option of going public “in the next couple years.” He also indicated other “exit opportunities” were on the table. “We’re open to all positive outcomes,” Herr said.

Mountain View, Calif.-based Adaptive Planning was founded in 2003 and has 200 employees. Herr said the company aims to double its number of employees in the next 12 to 18 months.

Businessman with tablet via ollyy/Shutterstock

Apparently no one, not even those who are building complex web applications. And new startup Orchestrate.io just took a massive $3 million seed round to prove it. Orchestrate takes the queries that developers would typically write in order to build an application, such as geolocation, time-series, social graph, full-text search, and more, and unifies everything a developer would need in a single API.

In other words, all the time and resources that would typically go towards designing your data solution can now be redirected to building your application, as Orchestrate outsources the need for you to own and manage your own databases.

“Complex apps require highly optimized queries, so much so that major companies such as Facebook and Google wrote custom big data databases like BigTable to manage them,” founder and CEO Antony Falco told me yesterday. “Typically you would devote 20-25 percent of your resources to data management, so there’s lots of savings. But when creating new apps, you can also reduce the time barrier to building services, getting multiple weeks of savings.”

Antony Falco, CEO and founder

One of those savings: Often companies have had to run or access multiple databases to enable their applications. All of them have to be monitored and maintained, scaled as your app grows, and distributed geographically and across multiple service providers to ensure high availability and low latency.

With Orchestrate, that’s all built in, Falco told me, including geographical distribution. Simply use the Orchestrate API to insert, read, and update data, and pay no attention to whatever is happening behind the curtain.

Falco used to be a VP at Akamai, the content delivery network, so he knows a few things about scalability and access. And talking about scalability, Orchestrate is looking to fill a pretty big niche.

“Database and operating system licensing, servers, storage, power, labor, outsourcing, and professional services represents a market that exceeds $100B annually,” Falco said in a statement. “We believe our service will save our customers significant time and money, allowing them to instead focus on what matters most — the end-user.  With Orchestrate.io, our customers can build better apps, faster.”

The $3 million is for getting Orchestrate’s existing solution into production and hiring more engineers.

It’s a largish seed round — you typically see $750,000, $500,000, or less for seed rounds, but Falco, who acknowledged that it had some aspects of an A round, says that it will help the company expand further. And, for a company with global aspirations, some expensive requirements are just table stakes.

“With $3 million we will be globally distributed,” he says.

Falco is a serial entrepreneur, also founding Basho Technologies, maker of open-source distributed database Riak. Orchestrate was founded just three months ago, in March 2013, and is based in Portland, Oregon.

The investment was led by True Ventures with Frontline Ventures and Resonant Venture Partners joining in.

photo credit: adesigna via photopin cc

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SAN FRANCISCO, Calif. — Cloud companies like Box and Salesforce have a new sector in mind: health care.

It’s still not clear whether the industry is ready for them.

“Anyone who has to write a check knows the value of cloud computing,” said Joshua Newman, an M.D., who is also the director of product and health strategy at Salesforce, a pioneering cloud technology company and the leader in defining the marketing term “software as a service.” Newman spoke this afternoon on a panel at HealthBeat, VentureBeat’s health-focused technology conference.

Newman said a big part of his job is to communicate the value of the cloud to health providers, and to assuage fears about breaches of sensitive patient data.

In the past, patient records were stored on film, tape and paper charts. As data gets digitized, everyone in the field has grappled with how to keep it secure, including hospitals, physician practice groups, software and hardware companies, consulting firms and affiliated health care organizations.

The federal government recently released statistics that 21 million people had their sensitive health records hacked. This is just the cases that were reported — the actual number is thought to be far higher.

As a result, security challenges have overpowered the benefits of the cloud. Cost-savings and easier software upgrades pale in comparison to leaked health care records. As a result, health providers are treading very carefully.

Newman is convinced that we’ll see increased adoption of services like Salesforce in the coming years. “There are a lot of great examples of how it’s working, and you can see how quickly it’s grown,” he said. “There are emerging standards in health care,” David Chao, a product manager at MuleSoft, said in agreement.

At HealthBeat, we also heard from Box CEO Aaron Levie how the company intends to be an “underlying layer for how content gets stored and shared” for physicians. Recently, Box received HIPAA compliance certification, meaning the product is now considered safe enough to hold on to data about your health — and safe enough for health care developers who use it.

Box and Salesforce are both appealing to progressive CIOs at hospitals and other health providers. But Newman believes it really needs to start small. “Let’s get the ball rolling with small apps,” he said. The hope is that CIOs will then realize the value in these tools.

“Getting into the cloud is not an all-or-nothing game,” said Newman. When it comes to healthcare, he stressed that we can take “baby steps.”

Photo credit: Michael O’Donnell/VentureBeat

David Yakimischak (who goes by “Yak”) opened a fireside chat at Healthbeat today by holding up a CD from radiology center that he has to physically deliver to his doctor. As the general manager of E-Prescribing at Surescripts, a leading health information network, Yak is an expert on using the cloud to exchange health information. He said that despite advancements in the transmission of health records and clinical information, data like X-rays MRIs, and lab results are primarily moved around offline.

“Over half of prescriptions in the country now flow electronically,” he said. “500,000 doctors actively use Surescripts every month, 60,000 pharmacies are connected, and we work with 450 EMRs. We successfully achieved critical mass because the players in the ecosystem got together and created this company. E-prescribing is deeply embedded into every prescribing application as a neutral common network that plugs into existing workflows. That’s what we have to do with labs and radiology.”

E-Prescribing digitized the exchange of prescriptions which makes life easier for doctors, pharmacies, and patients. Physicians can quickly access their patients’ benefit and medication history, send presciptions to pharmacies online, and all of that information is kept within one secure network. Yak said that labs and images are currently moved in a point-to-point manner. To do for radiology and lab results what Surescripts did for prescription requires a strong network on both sides.

“We are where we are because people are trying to multiply both sides of the network, we need a single national plan or model that brings governance, a business model, and public and private institutions together to capture the market,” he said. “This is not a technology problem, this is a system problem.”

Surescripts has that system, and the network, experience, and technology to migrate imaging and labs to the cloud. Yak said the company signed a deal with Merge Healthcare in November to tackle this very problem. Surescripts has “laid the rails” to 500,000 physicians and Merge will push its imaging results across its network.

For the cloud-based transmission of imaging and labs to succeed, it needs to provide a more cost-effective and efficient alternative to the existing model. Yak and John Cooper, a partner at Archepoint Ventures who moderated the discussion, agreed that the real opportunity here exists in the sharing of meta-data. Doctors usually don’t need super high-resolution images to make diagnoses and prescriptions, but they do need contextual information about the patient.

“You have to build some value around this data,” Yak said. It’s not just a transaction or a message switch, there is an ecosystem play here. Consumers, and doctors probably won’t pay, but providers and labs would if the efficiency and accuracy is heightened and pays off.”

As with most services in health IT, the bottom line is increased efficiency at a decreased cost. In today’s day and age, driving across town with an envelope or CD-Rom with medical results is unnecessary and seems a little absurd, but no company has been able to create a superior, compelling alternative. Is Surescripts that company?

“We may be,” Yak said.

Photo credit: Michael O’Donnell

According to a test by Ars Technica, Microsoft is intercepting, decrypting, and reading at least some Skype messages — to the point where URLs embedded in Skype chat are being visited by machines at IP addresses belonging to Microsoft … most likely a bot, but potentially a human being.

“And this can only happen,” Ars’ security expert Dan Goodin writes, “If Microsoft can convert the messages into human-readable form at will.”

Skype currently uses 256-bit AES encryption to secure communications between users, which is considered very secure. Secure, perhaps, but not necessarily private. When Ars sent messages via Skype containing four web links created specifically for this experiment, two of them were accessed by a Microsoft-controlled machine.

Skype’s privacy policy openly states that Skype may check instant messages and SMS texts for spam, fraud, or phishing attempts, and, in some cases, have a human being check them. Ergo, we can decrypt our own encryptions and can know what you say and know what you send.

Skype may use automated scanning within Instant Messages and SMS to (a) identify suspected spam and/or (b) identify URLs that have been previously flagged as spam, fraud, or phishing links. In limited instances, Skype may capture and manually review instant messages or SMS in connection with Spam prevention efforts. Skype may, in its sole discretion, block or prevent delivery of suspected Spam, and remove suspicious links from messages.

That’s not good if you have an expectation of and desire for privacy. And now that it’s obvious that Microsoft itself can read your private messages, the question is, who else has that ability?

Almost a year ago, the FBI requested private backdoor access into multiple communication and social networks, including Facebook, Twitter, and, yes, Skype. Wiretaps are increasingly useless, the FBI realized, and modern communications were defeating the bureau’s attempts at surveillance. Whether the requested access was ever granted is unclear, but Microsoft has a patent on ways to make it happen.

And Skype’s terms of use also say the company can route your communications to law enforcement agencies:

Skype may disclose personal information to respond to legal requirements, exercise our legal rights or defend against legal claims, to protect Skype’s interests, fight against fraud and to enforce our policies or to protect anyone’s rights, property, or safety.

However, if you want more security — and privacy — on Skype, you can have it. You simply have to pre-encrpt any messages (as a Polish professor discovered) and then decrypt them on the receiving end.

I won’t do that, and most Skype users won’t do that, probably because we’re not discussing matters of national security or engaging in nefarious behavior. But it’s disappointing, if only the cold slap of reality in a dangerous and violent world, that private isn’t really private any more.

And it would be nice to know the exact limits of Skype privacy and security.

I have talked to a Microsoft representative about this story and am awaiting a statement or comment from the company.

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

He calls upon entrepreneurs to work hard, innovate, be bold, and take risks. He is fascinated at the prospect of education meeting neuroscience. He thinks you can train your brain to learn more things. He’s an avid reader; he starts more books than he finishes. And, he managed to get a good 3G connection while on a Safari in the jungles of South Africa, this spring.

A man of varied interests, he’s worked and lived many many technologies over the years.

Meet Satya Nadella, president of Microsoft’s server and tools division, a division that builds and runs the company’s computing platforms, developer tools, and cloud services. Nadella leads a team of over 10,000 employees, and his group alone makes $19 billion in annual revenue – which is more than the combined revenues of Facebook, Yahoo, LinkedIn, Zynga, Netflix, and a few others in the Valley.

While you’ll think $19 billion in revenues is huge, Nadella is often found telling his folks, “We’re only doing 19 billion of 2.2 trillion dollars of IT.”

Technology trends have significantly changed from when Nadella joined Microsoft over 20 years ago. He remembers it was all about business process automation and communication driving productivity in the previous generation.

But he says the key trends emerging now are software defined data centers, application platforms, storage, and big data. Ten years down the line, he envisions the most innovative work happening around the conversion of data into meaningful insights and actions.

At Microsoft, he believes in continuously re-inventing, and in the nexus of concept, capability and culture. He mentions how Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer always stress on doing what is relevant.

We caught up with Nadella at TiEcon 2013 to talk strategy, cloud, and more. Here are some excerpts from the interview:

VentureBeat: What are the key initiatives that your division is working on?

Satya Nadella: One of the divisions I run is the infrastructure side of Microsoft, and whenever you run infrastructure the best way to stay grounded is to look at the applications that are being built for the next generation. In our case, historically what has shaped what our division does is our own applications — for example, Exchange, Lync, or SharePoint. Now, in this next era, things like Xbox Live, Bing, Office 365 are defining what we’re doing in infrastructure.

So there are four specific things that we’re working on: One is the modern data center because now you’re managing compute, storage, and network as a unit at data center and multi data center scale. People refer to it as a software driven data center, and to us that’s a key part. Next layer is the data… we need to have a very first class data platform. Then above that, you have to have a very modern application platform for building mobile, social, and data driven applications. Lastly, we want to make all these applications available on any device while giving IT the ability to secure the access and the data. These four things are what we call the “Cloud OS.”

VentureBeat: How do you think cloud is changing the buying decisions of corporate customers?

Nadella: There’s a significant change in the following sense: Cloud makes production of backend computing much more friction free because if you want to spin up a server, you can spin up a server as a developer very easily because of the elastic nature of some of these public clouds. Some of the friction that existed to get going in order to be able to have access has changed. Also, applications built in the cloud for the business decision maker… SaaS applications like Azure and Office 365 are so much easier. In fact, there are a number of customers that are using Office 365 who never bought a server from Microsoft. So this is the first time they are able to take Exchange capabilities because they never installed an Exchange Server, but Exchange as a service makes it that much more palatable for them.

So that transformation that business decision makers and developers are able to rely on applications as infrastructure is a fundamental change. I still believe IT has a significant role because we go from provisioning infrastructure to governing infrastructure, so it’s still very relevant because you can’t have every department, every developer inside a company storing the data in the cloud. You need to have visibility into it, you need to be able to have some amount of compliance controls in it. IT needs to play that role while at the same time end users, business decision makers, and developers have uncontrolled access.

VentureBeat: Talking of “cloud” in Microsoft’s context, how’s the adoption of Windows Azure been? Can you share some numbers and statistics around it?

Nadella: The way I would sort of characterize it is that the Microsoft Cloud is made up of both Office 365 and Windows Azure. First of all, Office 365 relies on Windows Azure for lots of extensibility and core infrastructure.

If you’re an enterprise customer, you’re really choosing a vendor; you’re not choosing a product because some of the most critical data and business processes are inside this cloud. Office 365 is on a billion dollar run rate. Recently, Telephonica, our big customer, moved over to Office 365, which is significant.

With Azure also is has been significant.  Azure AD, which is the directory, has got 2.5 million entities. That means anyone who is a subscriber to Office 365 would also be a tenant in Azure AD. That means any entrepreneur can do a single sign on with those 2.5 million businesses.

We’ve had significant momentum in the last six months – storage and compute capacity has doubled, we’re adding 1,000 customers a day, Windows Azure in its own right has built a lot of momentum, and it’s both compounding at a pretty fast rate.

VentureBeat: How does it compare to Amazon Web Services?

Nadella: I think Amazon has done a good job. Amazon does a lot of business on Windows as well. The key thing for us — where some of our natural strengths are — is this combination of server to Azure and Office 365 to Azure, both of which are pretty unique to us.

If you look at Amazon or Google, the two other providers in the cloud, we have a very unique way to tell a customer that it is not just about building an application in the Azure platform but [also] having a way to take it out or to extend it.

I don’t think distributed computing will somehow get locked up in one data center or even 100 data centers in one company. It is going to remain distributed because of the diversity of needs. SLAs, the laws of physics, and the regulatory environment will demand that applications and infrastructure be spread out more efficiently.

So this hybrid cloud, I would say, is one very unique value proposition, and that matters a lot to enterprise customers. If you’re an Office 365 customer and you’re doing SharePoint and you want to extend SharePoint, that nexus with what we have is again unique; you’re an Xbox game developer and Azure is a unique way to extend. So a bunch of things that we’re doing are different.

VentureBeat: How is mobile and BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) influencing the server business?

Nadella: In a pretty fundamental way. If we look at what used to happen in the enterprise, it used to be that the PC and server [were in the same domain on-site] at the company and that ensured real security and real identity. Now, once you start saying that your data and your applications are accessible on personal devices, then you have to really create that security and compliance.

So, between what we’re doing with Systems Center and Windows NT and Azure AD is consumerization of IT infrastructure. In an enterprise, an IT professional can ensure that they can allow [employees] untethered access to their applications and data on any device at the same policy control because you really don’t want to stop employees from bringing their own devices. While you let employees do that, you still want information assurance because you can’t have the employee walk away with some of the secure data. That ability is now possible with all the work we’ve done in Azure AD.

VentureBeat: What is Microsoft’s future roadmap? And, how do you see your division playing out in the bigger picture?

Nadella: We broadly as a company are moving from a software company to a devices and services company, and that’s really the transformation, both in terms of technology and delivery – as well as business model. What I do, what our division does is very central to this. We’re providing all of the infrastructure for all of the services that are enabled across both the consumer and the enterprise space in the company.

Photo Credit: Microsoft News Center

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.

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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Big Data and Predictive/Real-time Analytics startups: Are you looking to jumpstart development & accelerate market traction? Sign up for the SAP Startup Focus program to receive technology, support, resources and community to help you develop new applications on SAP HANA, a cutting edge database platform. Get started here, and enter promo code “VB2013″ on the form.

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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.