Sept. 9 - 10, 2013 San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Australia is slow, Singapore is fast, and Europe to Oregon is twice as fast as Europe to California.

Increasingly, we rely on “the cloud” to deliver web services. But the cloud is not one amorphous thing, and the cloud is not all equal. As every developer knows, what we generically call the cloud reduces down, ultimately, to physical servers and wires. And even within one company’s cloud — such as Amazon — there are vast differences in speed and optimization from region to region.

What that ultimately means is that developers who don’t pay attention to cloud regions, as server debugging company Takipi discovered, can actually cause their apps to run 10 or even 200 times slower than necessary.

And Amazon doesn’t disclose any of that data.

“We noticed that in many cases there’s 10X (or even more) difference in the performance of services due to AWS/S3 regions and external APIs,” Takipi co-founder Iris Shoor told me via email.

In fact, Amazon’s cloud performance could vary in speed from region to region by as much as 200 times.

For example, upload times vary significantly within each region. Uploading a file in Virginia to Amazon’s U.S. East cloud region, also in Virginia, takes three time longer than uploading a file in Singapore to AWS in Singapore. But it’s moving files between regions to serve differing international clients that will cause the greatest slowdowns: Shifting a file from Amazon’s São Paulo Region in Brazil to its Sydney, Australia region takes 200 times longer than shifting files between geographically close regions like Amazon’s U.S .West (Oregon) and U.S. West (California).

“It seems that the new region — Australia — is by far the slowest,” Shoor says. “Uploading files to Australia can cause 10X latency versus other regions.”

And that makes sense — Australia is an island continent served by a limited number of international connections, and the file has a lot longer to go. But it is something to keep in mind when building global services.

And some of the latency issues aren’t easily explainable due to geographical isolation — they’re more likely side effects of Amazon Web services system design. For example, there’s a big difference between uploading a file from Amazon’s S3 servers in Ireland to the U.S. East Coast and transferring the same file from the same location to the U.S. West Coast. The West Coast, Takipi says, will take twice the time, despite the fact that it’s only 25 percent further.

Even worse, Europe to California takes twice the time of Europe to Oregon:

“It’s possible to make amazing optimizations just by changing the region,” says Shoor. “For example, choosing Oregon over CA for a company that serves the European market will cut the upload time by half.”

One of the main problems when hunting down the cause of slow services, Takipi says, is API latency. And regionality has a huge impact there, even if you’re as geographically optimized as you can possibly be.

For example, Shoor says, even if your app is optimized for Australia and you’re using Amazon cloud services in Australia, Facebook’s API is 11 times slower down under, on average, than it is elsewhere.

To monitor those slowdowns, Takipi is currently building “Project Barkdog,” a service to inform developers of slow APIs globally. Barkdog will likely launch in a couple of weeks, and will inform developers via email or Twitter when APIs that they’re using are slowing down.

“It’s possible to speed up performance significantly,” Shoor says. “Amazon doesn’t share any of this data.”

Image credits: Takipi, Amazon iCloud by John Koetsier, Globe by WoodleyWonderWorks/Flickr

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013 San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

This is a guest post by freelance writer Mark Boyd

Fragmentation between software-as-a-service (SaaS) solutions is beginning to affect the average business that has moved from server-based software to the cloud.

“An API product becomes like a service contract with a supplier,” he said. As was the case with the move to Software-as-a-Service, Medjaoui explains, “businesses don’t need a big investment or to reinvent the coding wheel to start using API products. They can stay focused on their own business proposition. But, of course, they will also become dependent on the API service.”

And for the emerging API market economy to blossom, that’s what investors and startups are counting on.

Mark Boyd is a freelance writer specializing in interactive and connective technologies.

 Top image via Shutterstock

App integration startup Zapier has launched a new API status dashboard, a free tool that can help developers and companies identify downtime for nearly 200 APIs.

The Mountain View, Calif.-based company lets users streamline connections between about 200 different web apps and APIs. It was created in such a way that even non-coders can be build integrations between tools. Zapier recently grabbed a few headlines when it raised $1.2 million in seed funding from Bessemer Venture Partners and Draper Fisher Jurvetson after attracting attention from Y Combinator.

The company was already tracking all of these APIs and says it performs “hundreds of millions of API requests” each month, so it made sense to offer this new solution.

Zapier co-founder and CEO Wade Foster told VentureBeat that this new solution is better than dashboards such as Amazon Web Services, Basecamp, and 37Signals because this gives status information for many services in one place.

“The way you [normally] find out about API downtime is by making a call to the API and realizing it’s busted, but usually people don’t think it’s busted right away,” Foster said via email. “They assume something must be wrong with their code and start investigating.”

Image via Zapier

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

API company 3scale has just announced a new round of funding: $4.2 million from Javelin Venture Partners and Costanoa Venture Capital. 3scale makes products for API management, both from a technical and a business perspective.

With this new cash infusion, the company hopes to scale beyond its current roster of 200 customers and 85,000 end developers, especially when it comes to the growing need for machine-to-machine communication APIs that make embedded devices actually useful.

Current customers include Skype, Wine.com, FlightStats, PagesJaunes.fr (French YellowPages), and Yummly. Competitors include a few better-known names in the industry, such as Apigee, Layer 7, and Mashery.

The latter, of course, has been making headlines for its reported $180 million buyout offer from Intel — a deal that makes 3scale’s long-term survival and competitiveness even more interesting to watch.

3scale was founded in 2007. Its headquarters are located in Sunnyvale, Calif., with offices in Barcelona and London. To date, the startup has taken a mere $800,000 in debt financing. Its founders include AI researchers Dr. Steven Willmott and Dr. Josep M. Pujol.

Image credit: 3scale

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Layer7 is the latest application programming interface (API) startup to find a home inside a corporate IT giant.

CA Technologies confirmed today via a press release that it would be acquiring Layer7. Neither company disclosed the terms of the acquisition.

Layer7, founded in 2003, had raised about $20 million from BDC Venture Capital, GrowthWorks Capital, and Shoreline Venture Management. Its specialty is giving corporations “building blocks” (its words) to expose their internal applications to the world (or to their business partners) via APIs. That simplifies the technical details of integrating the companies’ various applications. In a way, APIs are like the plumbing of the software world, connecting applications to one another so that data can flow between them like water or gas.

Layer7 has hundreds of enterprise customers, and employs about 165 people at its Washington, D.C. headquarters and in Canada, U.K., and Australia.

“This enables us to extend our leading Mobility, Security and DevOps value proposition by liberating developers to securely connect applications to cloud services, expose internal information assets to mobile apps and bridge departments and partners all under a consistent security policy,” a CA spokesperson told VentureBeat via email.

CA, once known as Computer Associates, is a Fortune 500 corporation providing IT management solutions.

The acquisition comes just one week after Intel announced it would be scooping up Mashery, another hot API management company.

Layer7′s VP of client solutions, Matthew McLarty, recently wrote a post for VentureBeat about the lessons that Twitter and Google can teach us about APIs.

Image credit: Eliott Hutchins/Flickr 

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Two months after closing $13.5 million in funding, hitting revenues of $1 million a month, and reaching the 300,000 new users a day plateau, app discovery platform AppGratis has been pulled from the iOS app store by Apple.

“This is going to be an insanely big market,” AppGratis CEO Simon Dawlat told me when we chatted then.

But not for AppGratis, if Apple kills his business.

Update: AppGratis is “welcome to resubmit”

Yesterday Apple pulled AppGratis, which promotes paid apps by offering one for free every day, from the app store. AppGratis has been astoundingly successful, in some cases driving 500,000 install in a single day, and recently, as it has been growing, over a million daily installs.

Apple has not returned repeated calls and emails requesting details, confirmation, or rationale, and AppGratis isn’t talking right now either. TechCrunch speculates that Apple’s new rule around displaying apps other than your own for purchase or promotion might be to blame. That was added in October 2012.

Source: John Koetsier

Not all app discovery engines have been pulled, apparently

(Interestingly enough, user acquisition costs rocketed 30 percent in December.)

Apps, of course, are pulled for all kinds of reasons, such as improper use of APIs, inappropriate content, or simply instability. So there could be some simple explanation here, and all could return to normal quite quickly. If that were the case, however, you’d expect Dawlat to responding immediately on the AppGratis blog, explaining that there is some minor technical issue and that all will soon be well.

Or that Apple would respond with a simple, short explanation of the problem.

So it’s likely there is something deeper here. If it’s about the fact that AppGratis is very successful at promoting downloads, that’s worrisome to both app developers and investors. PocketGamer speculates that AppGratis’ incredibly fast growth caused Apple to pay close attention, and that the company may have used shady methods such as botfarming to grow so quickly.

That’s hard to believe, given that AppGratis has been so successful in driving downloads for others as well, and having had multiple interactions with Dawlat.

The actual wording of the rule that Apple added late last year is: “Apps that display Apps other than your own for purchase or promotion in a manner similar to or confusing with the App Store will be rejected.” If this is the rule that AppGratis fell afoul of, the question is: In what way would users have confused Appgratis with the App Store?

Other app-discovery platforms such as AppHero seem to be still up and running, and a quick search for AppGratis in the app store reveals copycat apps such as Gratis App Hoy still available, as well as other free-app-of-the-day apps such as Free Apps for a Rainy Day and 3 Magic Shots – Paid Apps for Free Daily. AppShopper, however, which was pulled in December 2012, has still not made it back into the App Store, despite promises from the company.

I’m still asking Apple for comment, as well as AppGratis.

As I’m sure both developers and investors will note, StartApp, which provides mobile monetization services for the Android app market that includes a massive amount of app discovery and promotion, and recently hit the 500 million downloads mark, has not been banned by Google.

photo credit: Mike “Dakinewavamon” Kline via photopin cc

Gnip, the company that gives big brands firehose-level access to social APIs, is today offering a new treasure trove of data. Six troves, actually.

The company said it will now be scraping public posts from a few important new sources and using APIs to give enterprise-level clients access to those posts and data. Services to be included are Instagram, Reddit, Bit.ly, Panoramio, Plurk, and Stack Overflow.

The company already serves up similar access for top-shelf online publishing tools like WordPress, Tumblr, and Twitter.

Now, before you go gettin’ creeped out about companies gettin’ all up in your social profiles, Gnip would like to remind you that a) this information is all publicly posted; and b) the brands in question aren’t really into reading up on the details of your personal life. Rather, they’d like to find trends in aggregated data to help them make business decisions.

For example, with Instagram, “Our customers have traditionally been very interested in geotagged social data, and between 15 to 25 percent of Instagram users geotag their photographs,” a Gnip rep wrote today on the company blog.

Here are a handful of other use case scenarios for the curious among you:

* Search for keywords to find brand mentions and current events.
* Access popular posts and conduct tag searches and geosearches.
* Monitor social activity around a given location.
* Track and understand trending content.
* Get warnings of impending PR crises, including service outages or bugs in the system.
* Monitor reputation and comments to get consumer feedback and ensure customers are satisfied.

“Four-and-a-half years ago, the company was founded on the idea that data would be insanely valuable, that people would do amazing shit with it,” said Gnip COO Chris Moody in a recent VentureBeat interview, “and we wanted to fuel all those applications.”

And of course, gaining access to and collecting all this information then turning it over to those who want it most has turned out to be a pretty profitable business.

“We spend all day every day talking to people who are finding goldmines in this data,” said Moody. “They’re so excited and they’re investing so much. Maybe we’re deceiving ourselves, but if that turned out not to be the case, we’d fold up and go home, because we were founded on the idea that data is valuable.”

Image credit: Shutterstock

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

The explosion of public APIs over the past few years has created a new market for companies that can help manage APIs and integration of data and applications. One of the companies leading the charge to make integration seamless is MuleSoft, a startup that has just raised $37 million in its fifth round of funding.

MuleSoft offers an extensive platform for companies who seek to integrate APIs and data from other companies. For example, many business-to-business companies want to integrate Salesforce’s data into their apps because there is a lot of crossover with their customers. MuleSoft has 400 paying customers, including Honeywell, MasterCard, Nestle, Nokia, and Walmart.

“The integration platform is huge, and we’re going after a massive market,” MuleSoft CEO Greg Schott told VentureBeat. “Many legacy vendors don’t move at the speed that you need to today, but we do.”

The new funding will go toward expanding its lineup of products and hiring many more sales and support people to help spread the word on what MuleSoft’s platform can do. Schott said the new cash will also help it acquire smaller companies as it continues to expand.

On top of the funding, it has also launched what it dubs the “Anytime Platform,” a full-service integration service to make it possible to connect any app, data service, or API to another whether it is in the cloud or on-premise.

Many times companies seeking late-stage funding like this aim for IPOs in the near future. MuleSoft is no exception. Schott said the company intends to go public in the “next 12 to 18 months.”

“It makes a lot of sense for us to go public eventually,” Schott said.

The new funding round was led by New Enterprise Associates, with participation by other investors, including Salesforce, Hummer Winblad Venture Partners, Morgenthaler Ventures, Lightspeed Venture Partners, SAP Ventures, and Bay Partners. Including the new round, MuleSoft has raised $81 million to date.

“The success of companies like Salesforce.com and Workday shows the profound economic advantage of the cloud-based approach, but the move to the cloud creates a new set of challenges for enterprises,” Scott Sandell, general partner at NEA, said in a statement. “Companies that are enabling a more seamless transition from on-premise to cloud are among the most exciting investment opportunities right now, and MuleSoft is one of the breakout leaders in this category.”

San Francisco-based MuleSoft was founded in 2006 and has 180 employees. Schott said the company will have “close to 300 employees” by the end of 2013.

Young people holding hands via William Perugini/Shutterstock

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013 San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Cloud communications startup Twilio has partnered with Google to bring voice and messaging abilities to apps being developed with Google App Engine, the companies announced today.

Officially, today’s deal brings Twilio’s API and abilities over to the whole Google Cloud Platform, which encompasses several Google products like App Engine, Cloud Storage, and BigQuery. But testing has only been done to integrate Twilio and App Engine, so that’s the where the real heft of this announcement is.

The integration basically means that Google App Engine developers will be able to easily add in-app dialing, conference calling, group texting, mobile app distribution, two-factor authentication, and more to their apps via the Twilio API platform.

“By using Google Cloud Platform and Twilio, independent developers and enterprises alike can build and scale real world businesses faster than ever,” Twilio CEO Jeff Lawson said in a statement. “The real magic comes from connecting the Twilio API to the App Engine platform to make apps communicate, developers benefit from integrating these two incredibly scalable, robust, and reliable platforms — we can’t wait to see what Google App Engine developers build.”

Today’s deal has similarities to one made last year between Twilio and Microsoft to bring Twilio capabilities to the Azure platform, showing how vital Twilio is to developer communities across many high-profile companies.

San Francisco-based Twilio has raised about $33 million in funding to date from investors including Bessemer Venture Partners, Union Square Ventures, 500 Startups, and SV Angel.

High five in the clouds via Dragon Images/Shutterstock

For PayPal’s grand plan of world payment domination to succeed, it needs developers. And to attract devs, it needs tools that don’t send them running to competitors.

So today, PayPal is launching a new set of developer tools for mobile payments at South by Southwest in Austin, Texas. The company was actually the first financial company to offer APIs back in 2009, but it’s not shying away from the fact that those early tools aren’t exactly modern.

“It was confusing and cumbersome for developers to tie in [to the old APIs],” PayPal chief technology officer James Barrese told VentureBeat. “Our new API is a REST model, so it’s a very simple and intuitive way for an engineer to integrate with us. Over the years, PayPal [has] introduced different APIs to devs; now we have a chance to look and see what they really need.”

Among the new tools is a mobile SDK, which includes the ability to implement Card.io scanning technology into any app. PayPal bought Card.io last year; the technology lets you input credit card information simply by holding the card up to your phone’s camera. Popular apps like Uber and TaskRabbit have already integrated the technology.

The API also includes new JavaScript PayPal buttons, which let devs integrate PayPal into their mobile sites simply by inserting five lines of code.

On the API front, PayPal is adding new APIs built on REST, JSON, and OAuth. That’s good news for developers more familiar with those modern technologies. The company is also launching modernized versions of its most popular APIs, immediate settlement and payment processing, to speed up integration within apps.

The new APIs will also be able to tokenize credit cards, so developers won’t have to worry about the headache of PCI compliance.

“It basically solves a lot of the PCI and credit card industry challenges so we can make sure that customer information is absolutely secure, and it gives us capabilities to be able to reference card information,” Barrese said. “Developers want that — they don’t want to worry about any kind of security or being extra careful on their side [when it comes to credit card info].”

Additionally, PayPal is also relaunching its developer.paypal.com website to serve as a hub for all of its developer tools.

Barrese says PayPal will release more new APIs throughout the year, as it aims to build up its services. PayPal just scored a deal with point-of-sale company NCR to integrate PayPal technology into NCR apps. That’s pretty significant, given that NCR has been around for 128 years and is practically synonymous with point-of-sale technology. PayPal also has 23 retailers using its own in-store checkout technology, and more is sure to follow throughout the year.

Photo: Devindra Hardawar/VentureBeat

“Big data” and analytics startup Sociocast has raised $1 million in new funding, which it will use hire new stuff and to beef up its flagship Prediction API product.

New York-based Sociocast caught our eye last year when it launched new cloud-based software that gives companies “actionable intelligence” related to audience data. But since that time, it’s been hard at work on its products and making them work for all types of data-hungry businesses.

Sociocast CEO Albert Azout told VentureBeat that it is focusing its efforts on its Prediction API, because it has a lot of reach and application. It could help the government analyze data to predict if people are likely to predict crime or help a media provider predict what content will get the most clicks on a page.

The product was originally targeting enterprise companies, but now it’s opened it up to medium and small businesses with a wide range of pricing. The price now starts at $39 per month for small developers and goes up to $749 per month for big data users.

The Prediction API claims to provide “an accuracy rate of four to seven times more precise than existing solutions, seamlessly handles unstructured data, such as URLs and text, and is flexible to handle customer-specific data schema.” It can specifically be broken down for helping do predictions in two categories:

• Entities (number of users, devices, cookies, social media IDs, and so on)
• Clustering (grouping together various entities)

Upon working predictions, that data is then serviced to help make decisions.

“Decision-making is really hard to get right,” Azout said. “We’re making this self-service and way easier to use than anyone else. No one else is doing this.”

The new funding round came from New York’s Raptor Ventures. Raptor partner and former Zynga executive Robert Goldberg will join Sociocast’s board. Azout says he was “excited to have Robert on the board” and that the new funding will act as a bridge until it raises a “much larger round in early Q3.”

Including the new round, Sociocast has raised nearly $6 million. Prior investors include Detroit Venture Partners, Bobby Yazdani, Joe Zawadzki, and Doug Imbruce.

Sociocast was founded in 2010 and has 14 employees, but it plans to hire a few more before the end of March. The company has 25 customers using its Prediction API, including Quicken Loans, StyleCaster, Are You a Human, and Fixone.

Seer working over a crystal ball via Phil McDonald/Shutterstock

The idea of a “plug and play” security tool may seem a bit paradoxical, but one company doesn’t think so. Stormpath, an authentication app that just got $8.2 million in its first round of funding today, wants you to “plug in” its login tool, and let it do all the work as your company’s first line of defense.

The funding was led by New Enterprise Associates and Pelion Venture Partners, with participation from Flybridge Capital Partners.

The company built a product that allows cloud service providers to “offload” the authentication process to StormPath. Authenticating a user is the same as identifying them — giving them a place to login and prove they are who they say they are. This process, however, can be bulky and is one of the most important security measures a company can take today. Stormpath says it can do the job better than cloud service companies can; it uses an application programming interface that developers at cloud service providers can just plug into their existing products.

From there, Stormpath takes care of that company’s authentication, password reset, and account management needs.

Companies like Stormpath may actually make a lot of sense. As a business-owner, you might have the desire to control your company’s security landscape completely on your own. But employing a dedicated company that is putting all of its resources into that one security product might actually make it stronger and more reliable.

Stormpath was founded in 2011 and is based in San Mateo, Calif. Benchmark Capital also previously invested in the company.

Storm path image via Shutterstock

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013 San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

In a partnership that makes so much sense it’s crazy, cloud-focused messaging startups SendGrid and Twilio have teamed up to empower SendGrid enterprise customers with a suite of messaging tools, including transactional emails, SMS, voicemails, and push notifications.

The two companies are already friendly, as I saw first-hand on the “startup bus” that SendGrid and Twilio co-sponsored this past July. Both companies have a passion for developers and robust APIs, as well as providing companies with powerful messaging solutions. Now they are taking their friendship a new level.

Ideally, the new service from SendGrid and Twilio will reduce the cost of building and maintaining a messaging infrastructure for major customers. SendGrid already takes care of transactional and marketing emails that companies need to send out, and it sent out more than 6 billion emails in October. Twilio steps in a provides the back-end solutions for managing texts, voicemails, and other telephony needs.

“We are thrilled to partner with the leading communications API platform provider. Twilio is powering the future of business communications solutions for the enterprise market,” Jim Franklin, CEO of SendGrid, said in a statement. “This multi-messaging platform reinforces our belief in the importance of providing an integrated cloud solution for the enterprise that is cost effective and simple to deploy.”

Boulder, Colo.- and Anaheim, Calif.-based SendGrid has received about $27 million in funding to date. Investors include Bessemer Venture Partners, Foundry Group, Highway 12 Ventures, SoftTechVC, 500 Startups, and Bullet Time Ventures.

San Francisco-based Twilio has raised about $33 million. Its investors include Bessemer Venture Partners, Union Square Ventures, Founders Fund, and 500 Startups.

Photo illustration: Sean Ludwig/VentureBeat

Twitter and the developers who use its platform haven’t been on the best of terms lately.

The company has cracked down on developers who’d made Twitter clients that essentially replicate Twitter’s own features, like posting and reading tweets. It has released a new, more restrictive application programming interface (API). It has given the cold shoulder to LinkedIn and disconnected india app developer IFTTT. It has enforced rules that have left some startups feeling angry, confused, and desperate.

Now it’s trying to soften the blow of its many API changes, with a calendar showing what’s in the Twitter API pipeline.

It’s a useful gesture, because much of the outcry over Twitter’s API and rule enforcement has come from developers who simply weren’t aware of (or didn’t pay attention to) Twitter’s many, repeated signals about what it’s going to do.

Twitter stresses that the calendar is not a replacement for the full firehose of information on @TwitterAPI and the Twitter developers’ blog. You might read the company’s developer rules of the road for good measure too.

Currently, the calendar lists just two upcoming items: Retirement of the @Anywhere API, and, much more significant, the retirement of Twitter API 1.0. Both happen on March 5, 2013.

Mark your calendars.

Mayan calendar photo by NY-P/Shutterstock.

Twitter is an indispensible communications tool. But how do you save all the good stuff?

For example, what if you want to save the URL of a funny video your friend tweeted or something really nice that someone said to you? Twitter has no easy way to save your favorite tweets, and search doesn’t always work.

Twitter chief executive Dick Costolo has said that the company would offer a way for you to download all of your tweets, probably before the end of this year, but he didn’t provide any details.

And in the meantime, geek utility If This, Then That (IFTTT) — which used to be great for saving Twitter posts — has been disconnected from Twitter.

For packrats like myself, this is a drag. I don’t need to save every tweet, but I do like to save certain tweets.

Fortunately, I’ve found some workarounds.

Depending on your archiving needs, the tips below might be just the ticket. I can’t guarantee that Twitter will allow these services to keep running. But for now, here are some ways to save your most important tweets elsewhere.

Got other workarounds? Let us know in the comments!

Pinboard

Remember bookmarking site Delicious? Pinboard is just like Delicious was before Yahoo sold it off to a group of people who seemed to have no idea what Delicious was about. It’s a simple, bare-bones site for saving URLs. Usefully, Pinboard lets you link up to three separate Twitter accounts. You can configure it to import anything you favorite, anything you tweet that includes a URL, or both. Pinboard charges a one-time fee (currently $9.89) to sign up.

Diigo

Diigo is a useful tool for saving URLs and annotating them with notes. It’s got a handy Twitter tool, which saves every tweet you mark as a “favorite” as a bookmark in Diigo. You have to sign up for Diigo, but once you do, you can connect Diigo to Twitter to save your favorites. Diigo is free to try, but it costs $20 per year after that. Its new-user signup page appears to be offline Sunday, but it’s up today..

Evernote

Evernote is a handy multiplatform utility for saving notes and URLs of all kinds. Usefully, it integrates with your Twitter account, though it’s less automated than we’d like. To link Evernote to your Twitter account, first follow Evernote’s @MyEN account on Twitter. You’ll get a direct message from MyEN; after you click on it, you can go into Evernote and link it to Twitter. From then on, add @MyEN to anything you tweet in order to have Evernote archive it, or send a direct message to @MyEN.

LinkedIn

You can no longer link Twitter to IFTTT recipes, but IFTTT still supports LinkedIn, and vice versa. That’s handy, because you can use LinkedIn to update your Twitter profile. This means you can have it both ways: You can save your tweets in the service of your choice and still use IFTTT. Say you want to save all your updates to Evernote. First, add the IFTTT LinkedIn channel to your IFTTT account. Set up the recipe to file your LinkedIn updates to Evernote. Then connect your LinkedIn account to your Twitter account (via LinkedIn settings). Finally, start using LinkedIn to post your status updates instead of Twitter. When you do, your status updates will be saved in Evernote, and simultaneously piped over to Twitter.

Flipboard

Flipboard is a handy tool for reading news culled from various public channels or your social network. Although there might be reasons to worry about Flipboard’s relationship with Twitter, for now it works quite nicely with Twitter. That’s handy, because it’s possible to make your Twitter favorites into a Flipboard section. Once you do, it’s easy to retrieve those favorites for later reading via Flipboard, and from there you can save the linked articles into other apps, like Pocket, Instapaper, or Readability.

Gnip

Gnip is a provider of social media data to enterprise application developers, and it recently released something called Historical PowerTrack for Twitter. This lets you download every tweet ever tweeted since Twitter’s launch in 2006. Are you a packrat and a coder? Then you can probably figure out a way to munge through this dataset to get whatever you want. Pricing is not available, but it’s probably not free.

Packratius

I don’t know how I forgot to include Packratius in the first version of this post, as I’ve used it before, and it’s made for exactly the purpose I describe here. Whenever anything you tweet or retweet includes a URL, Packratius will save it for you in the services of your choice: Delicious, Pinboard, Diigo, Instapaper, Pocket, and more. It can also save URLs in @ replies that people direct to you, as well as your favorite. Packratius is free.

Backupify

Backupify is a service that, well, backs up your cloud-based data, including Twitter as well as Facebook, Gmail, Google Drive, and Flickr. The free version of the service will archive up to three online services for you, once a week. For $5 per month it’ll back up every night. This would be a good way to save absolutely everything from your Twitter account. (Thanks for the tip, Rich!)

Photo credit: redjar via photo pin

 
Update: Nokia has confirmed that it has licensed its location platform for maps and geocoding to Amazon for its maps program.

Amazon has opened a new Maps API so Kindle Fire app developers can ditch Google Maps and instead integrateAmazon’s mapping tech.

“When we announced Kindle Fire HD, we also made the Amazon Maps API available to our developer community,” Amazon wrote in a blog post announcing the Maps API. “The Amazon Maps API makes it easy for you to integrate mapping functionality into apps that run on the all-new Kindle Fire and Kindle Fire HD. These new devices will also support location-based services through the android.location API.”

Amazon’s Maps API provides a migration path for developers using Google Maps for Android. It offers two major features:

• Interactive maps: Developers can embed a “Map View” in an app so users can pan and zoom across the globe. There is also an option for displaying current location, satellite view, and standard view.
• Custom overlays: Display locations of “businesses, landmarks, and other points of interest” with customized markers and pins.

Amazon purchased 3D mapping company UpNext in early July, so it likely is using that tech here.

This move also closely follows Apple’s decision to get rid of Google Maps in iOS 6.

Developers can apply now to get access to the beta release of Amazon’s Maps API.

Maps photo via Fotografiche/Shutterstock

Last week I was reading one of my industry news sources and an article caught my attention. I wanted to let my friends know about the piece so, as usual, I went to tweet about it. And that’s when I noticed this:

There were more people posting the article to LinkedIn than there were people tweeting about it.

And that’s when the sledgehammer hit me. Twitter has a huge new competitor with the potential to swamp them, particularly in one critical area. And, it is all of their own making.

Back in July Twitter announced that it was no longer going to allow users to post tweets automatically to LinkedIn. Twitter gave us the usual gumpf about wanting to “provide the core Twitter user experience through a consistent set of products and tools”. What Twitter really meant to say was, “We don’t want anyone reading tweets where we can’t put ads”.

(At this point I should ‘fess up. I was the developer of Tweetology, a curation tool built on the Twitter API. For two years Tweetology made it easy for brands and publishers to publish only the most relevant and brand-safe tweets. We ran foul of Twitter’s ever-changing rules and we shut down the service. Bitter? Yeah, I guess. Twitter has certainly done its best to screw the developer community. Nevertheless I can’t help myself. I’m the ugly guy dumped by the pretty girl. I still love you Twitter).

Back to the topic du jour…

By denying Linkedin users the ability to post tweets to LinkedIn, Twitter has forced users to make a choice. Do I post to LinkedIn (where I can also check a box to tweet)? Or do I do both? The choice is easy.

The forced change is more fundamental. Your audience on LinkedIn is made up of people you have met in your working life together with other industry people that might catch your post. Your audience on Twitter could be just about anyone and more than likely it is people you have not met.

It is therefore far more valuable for a user to post on LinkedIn as people that have a connection to them are much more likely to read their post.

Twitter also did LinkedIn another huge favor. By denying users the ability to post tweets it cleaned up the LinkedIn news feed. No more voluminous irrelevant tweets, hashtags and @symbols cluttering up LinkedIn news feeds. Feeds are now full of relevant engaging posts because LinkedIn user’s post stuff they think will be relevant to their audience – that is the personal connections they have as a result of belonging to an industry.

LinkedIn is going to overtake Twitter (and very quickly) in terms of importance and volume for users posting industry related news. Twitter may still dominate the ‘what I had for breakfast’, general and social news posts but the audience for industry news will move to LinkedIn. And guess which is more valuable to an advertiser?

On LinkedIn an advertiser can reach an audience who have real and extensive profiles and have like connections in the same industry. And they can even use a standard IAB display unit to get their message across. On Twitter it’s more spray and pray via ad units that do not easily lend themselves to brand messaging.

We will never know whether Twitter realized what they were unleashing by cutting LinkedIn off, or for that matter whether LinkedIn knew what a gift they were being handed.

It’s too late now. Twitter cannot put the genie back in the bottle. LinkedIn is going to steal away the most important segment of users: real identifiable people with loads of other like people connected to them. And advertisers love those people.

Cameron Yuill is a digital media and technology entrepreneur and investor based in Silicon Valley, CA. He is currently Founder & CEO of AdGent Digital, the company behind tablet advertising platform AdTouch and (before it was shut down) the curation system for Twitter, Tweetology.   

Top photo: Nan Palmero/Flickr

Web content analysis startup Diffbot has launched a new beta API called “Page Classifier” that can reveal the page type and language behind any URL, the company announced today.

Diffbot’s first APIs emphasized the scanning, parsing, and extracting of information from web pages. Developers could use these APIs to scan articles or homepages to pull the most meaningful content. Now it will expand its dev cred with Page Classifier, which could have a variety of uses.

The Page Classifier API is already being used by social bookmark app Springpad with the enhancement of links by showing additional content that relates to those links. Page Classifier can be tested out with a Google Chrome extension that analyzes Twitter updates and shows what sort of links are attached to each status, including photos, articles, and products.

“We’re constantly surprised by how developers are using our APIs and how devs might take advantage of the Classifier,” Diffbot CEO Mike Tung told VentureBeat via email. “Internally, we’re already benefiting — our classification of a day in Twitter showed us images are most of what’s being shared, so we’ve prioritized development of our Image API, which will be the next one we release.”

Palo Alto, Calif.-based Diffbot was founded in 2008 and has raised $2 million in seed funding from investors including Brad Garlinghouse, Sky Dayton, Andy Bechtolsheim, Joi Ito, Maynard Webb, and Matrix Partners.

Diffbot has also made an infographic that shows off the data-mining potential of the new API with an analysis of Twitter links. Check it out below.

Homepage photo credit: Eye looking through peephole via Shutterstock

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Contrary to rumors, social media startup Hootsuite is not actively raising another round — but if it were, its price tag would be even higher than reported.

We had a nice chat yesterday with Hootsuite CEO and founder Ryan Holmes. He told us that Hootsuite, which raised $20 million from Omers Ventures in March, was already considering another raise in May.

However, Holmes said, the hunt for cash has cooled off a bit, but the valuation has gone up.

Hootsuite makes a web-based tool that individuals and companies can use to manage updates to social networks, including Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. It competes with Tweetdeck (which got acquired by Twitter), Buddy Media, Wildfyre, and Cotweet (which got acquired by ExactTarget in 2010). Unlike most of its competitors, it uses a “freemium” model: Hootsuite is free for individuals to use, but the company charges monthly fees for companies who want to deploy it to teams of people.

We asked Holmes point-blank if his company was really worth $500 million.

“I’m always talking to VCs, giving them updates,” he told us. “I was looking at doing a raise, and at that point that would have been a fair valuation. … Given some of the comparables in the market, at that point, we would have warranted that kind of valuation.”

(We reached out to a slew of VCs on this point; all declined to comment on Hootsuite’s possible valuation.)

But, Holmes continued, things have changed since then. The startup beat its $10 million revenue forecast for 2011 by a cool million, and it’s also on track to smash 2012 projections by a “significant” margin, said Holmes.

“We’ve been having some really big growth. … I think we’ve moved beyond [the half-billion-dollar valuation]. We’ve created a business with a higher valuation at this point.”

Holmes continued to say that the startup hasn’t been knocking too loudly on the door of Sand Hill Road since this spring. “The company is highly profitable, and it doesn’t really need the money at this point,” he said. “There are a lot of acquisitions happening, a lot of positioning in the market.”

Hootsuite’s investors are not Silicon Valley-based. Besides Omers Ventures, other major investors include Blumberg Capital and Hearst Ventures, the venture capital arm of the Hearst Corporation.

Did the Twitter API change kill the deal?

If “we don’t need no stinkin’ money” and “we’re worth more than that, anyway” sound like sour grapes to you, it did to us at first, too.

One big shake-up in the market is the recent upset over Twitter’s API changes. In fact, given the timing of the funding rumors and Twitter’s most recent “thou shalt not misuse our API” blog post, we wondered if the stern language from Twitter had put investors off on Hootsuite’s funding deal.

After all, Hootsuite’s product depends very heavily on Twitter’s API. And while Hootsuite incorporates Facebook and Google+ features into its product, it is very much a client — precisely the kind of client that Twitter has repeatedly asked third-party developers not to build. Repeatedly. Twitter dev ombudsman-in-chief Ryan Sarver laid down the law in a controversial memo last March, and the company’s intentions were further illuminated in an in-depth VentureBeat interview late last year.

But Holmes told us not to worry ourselves on his account; he and the Hootsuite team remain in close contact with the higher-ups at Twitter, and the API changes didn’t scare off any VCs.

“That fear around Twitter’s API and ecosystem, I absolutely don’t think it has hurt us,” he said. “We have it on very good authority that the product we’re building out is not in conflict with their roadmap.”

That communication is all important in the increasingly uncertain Twitter ecosystem. As repeat entrepreneur Loic Le Meur told me in an interview, “There are two types of Twitter apps: The ones Twitter likes, and the ones that are competitive and don’t have good communication with them.”

Basically, Holmes contends (more or less correctly) that Twitter is looking to take down consumer-facing Twitter clients and other products that strip the tweetstream of money-making promoted profiles, trends, and tweets, which ultimately pay to keep the lights on at Twitter HQ. Hootsuite, like many of the apps on Twitter’s good side, caters mostly to non-consumer users, so it’s not a threat to Twitter.

“Our userbase is small, medium, and enterprise businesses; that’s what we focus on,” said Holmes. “We’ve never focused on being a consumer product; we have a lot more functionality than a consumer needs.”

Late last year, when we asked Twitter’s Sarver for Twitter-based business ideas that were safe bets, he said, “Analytics is a huge sector for us, obviously, finding those insights you can bring to brands using this real-time corpus of data.” He also talked about curation (“finding the key tweets to talk about events that are happening, be that the elections, the Olympics, etc.”) and publishing (“figuring out the right content that will resonate with the audience”). And Hootsuite does focus on those areas, to a great extent.

Still, Hootsuite’s unique freemium model means that it’s still a highly-favored Twitter client among power users, meaning consumers. And there may come a day when Twitter decides to cut off that type of access entirely.

If that ever happened — that is, in a dystopian, nightmarish future wherein Twitter only gave read/write API access to enterprise apps — Hootsuite’s freemium product would have to omit Twitter from its services. If this seems like an unlikely scenario, keep in mind that Twitter restricting API access in the first place once seemed unlikely, too. Since then, API changes have killed off at least a few companies.

“I think it would take away the vibrancy of our product,” Holmes said of an unlikely-but-possible Twitter pull-out. “Twitter and Facebook are the biggest social networks for our users.”

And ultimately, the entrepreneur concluded, “I want to see Twitter’s API do well.”

And Twitter’s API will do well when developers heed the ever-less-subtle warnings from Twitter: Don’t, they repeat, do not make Twitter clients. Don’t take “promoted” content out of the stream. It’s going to be Twitter’s bread and butter within the next couple years, after all.

“It’s important to us that third parties have access to the data,” said Twitter CEO Costolo in a press meeting last fall. “I get a million emails a day about what Twitter could be doing to make more money, but … the advertising business will sustain us. We have no intention to scale the data licensing business. We’re just going to focus on scaling the advertising business.”

And as long as devs stay out of Twitter’s way when it comes to ads, they stand a decent chance of survival.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

API management startup Apigee has raised $20 million in its fifth round of funding to help it expand into new markets, the company announced today.

More than 100 billion API calls per month run through Apigee’s platform. Notable Apigee clients include Walgreens, Netflix, eBay, Pearson, Gilt Groupe, Bechtel, and Getty Images. Just a week ago, the company acquired assets from Wholesale Applications Community (WAC) to help it expand its tech further.

“There will soon be a trillion mobile devices connected to the Internet, and consumers are spending more time on mobile apps than on the Web,” Apigee CEO Chet Kapoor said in a statement. “Every business — from technology startups to brick-and-mortar giants — needs an API to compete in a digital economy that is increasingly dominated by apps as the primary vehicle for communicating, connecting, and e-commerce.”

The new round of funding was led by Focus Ventures, with participation by prior investors Bay Partners, Norwest Venture Partners, SAP Ventures, and Third Point Ventures.

Palo Alto-based Apigee was founded in 2004 and has raised about $72 million total to date.

Public transit data, a key piece of the Google Maps experience, will soon find its way into third-party applications as the map-making experts at Google have just added transit to its Maps API.

Now developers plugging Google’s Maps product into their web and mobile applications can provide their users with public transit routes, color-coded transit layers, and schedules, Google Maps API product manager Thor Mitchell announced during a session at Google I/O Wednesday. Transit routes will include the number of stops, direction of travel, and type of vehicle.

The update further pits Google against Apple on the mapping front, and it provides iOS developers with one very compelling reason to choose Google when picking a maps provider. Earlier this month, Apple announced that it was replacing Google Maps in iOS 6 with its own mapping technology, but its system lacks the transit information that may maps users have come to rely on.

Brian McClendon, vice president of Google Maps and Google Earth, said that more than 800,000 developers work with the Google Maps API.

Also new to the Maps API today, Mitchell revealed, are symbols. These symbols enable developers to add their own markers — in whatever shapes and forms they desire, be it dots, stars, arrowheads, or the like — to maps.

“The goal of the Maps API is about you, your data, your stories,” Mitchell said to the room full of developers.

The updates come as Google Maps, the one-time obvious pick for mapping software, is being forced to cede territory on Apple devices and losing favor with popular app makers as they switch to OpenStreetMaps.

Google Maps covers 75 percent of the world, includes street view imagery spanning 5 million miles, and offers driving directions in 187 countries for a total of 26 million miles of roads. The product’s comprehensiveness, especially when it comes to walking and transit directions, will keep it a long-term leader, Altimeter Group mobile analyst Chris Silva told VentureBeat.

“What Google gives up from not being on Apple devices, it will make up elsewhere,” Silva said.

[ Updated 10:26 PM with a comment from DeMenthon ]

Popular online classifieds service Craigslist has blocked apartment-finding site PadMapper. PadMapper Chief executive Eric DeMenthon said today on the PadMapper blog that all Craiglist-sourced rentals are being deleted from the PadMapper database.

PadMapper is an apartment rental search engine that displays available “pads” on a live Google map background (as shown in the screenshot to the right). The site pulls its listings from sources such as Apartments.com, Rent.com, and, until recently, Craigslist.

But the site has fallen afoul of the Craigslist terms of service, which do not allow “copying, aggregation, display, distribution, performance or derivative use of craigslist or any content posted on craigslist.” Any service that provides access to Craigslist content without permission is prohibited.

As DeMenthon mentions in his blog post, Craigslist allows “mobile apps to display their listings if you buy a license from them, but not websites.”

DeMenthon believes that PadMapper’s use of data was good for users, but he wasn’t able to make that case to Craigslist founder Craig Newmark or CEO Jim Buckmaster. PadMapper received a cease and desist letter from a Craigslist lawyer, and it has been forced to comply.

For DeMenthon, who is the entire team behind PadMapper, this is a tough blow. The reality is that PadMapper is in violation of Craigslist terms of service, so he doesn’t have much recourse. The site is not the first to be shut down by Craigslist lawyers; both the aggregator Craiglook and vertical search engine Oodle are among the sites that have previously incurred their wrath.

There are other sources of apartment listings, and PadMapper will be pursuing those, according to the blog post. DeMenthon invited users of the service to make their feelings known to Craiglist but has asked them to “keep it civil.”

“Perhaps if they see how many people PadMapper has helped, they’ll be willing to consider changing their minds,” DeMenthon writes.

One would hope that as a community-minded site, Craigslist would at least take the time to meet with him and consider the possibility of working out a deal. However, it is of course the company’s prerogative to reject any content-sharing deal, as defined within their terms of service.

VentureBeat has reached out to both Craigslist and PadMapper for comment; we’ll update this post if we receive any news.

[ update ]

The early version of this story said that PadMapper does not appear to make money off the listings. DeMenthon clarified in an email to VentureBeat that the site does make some money “in some limited ways, just not in any way that makes the experience worse.”

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Popular digital magazine app Flipboard is getting some attention from Google in the form of Google+ API support, the company announced today at the Le Web 2012 conference in London.

The support will give Flipboard users access to content streams from the search giant’s social network. The stream will give you access to things like Google+ updates/posts, photos, videos, and other data without having to visit the social network directly. Google+ is hardly the only social network to integrate with the digital magazine — support for Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Instagram, and others is already available. The news of the Google+ stream does comes as a bit of a surprise, though, because Google has its own — albeit less popular — digital magazine app, Google Currents.

We don’t have an exact date for when the new Google+ streaming in Flipboard will go live, nor do we know exactly when Google will begin offering a Google+ API for other developers and programs to start using. However, Google VP of product management, Bradley Horowitz, who spoke about the new Flipboard integration at Le Web, did talk a bit about why we don’t have an API yet. He said Google doesn’t yet have good “noise” filtering controls when it comes to Google+, and the company wants to make sure it has built something that won’t cause developers to go back and rework their own creations to preserve the user experience, according to Robert Scoble.

Via TheNextWeb

Design is determining the winners in everything mobile. The most successful players are focusing on one thing: How to make products, services, and devices as compelling and delightful as possible – visually, and experientially. MobileBeat 2012, July 10-11 in San Francisco , is assembling the most elite minds to debate how UI/UX is transforming every aspect of the mobile economy, and where the opportunities lie. Register here.

The handy devs down at Twitter have just released some case studies into the wild. These eight case studies delve into the best practices of companies and products using the Twitter APIs.

Zappos, Etsy, Pocket Gems, Reuters, ESPN, Esri, Tiny Prints, and Feeding America were highlighted in the case studies. “In the future, we aim to add more examples that show interesting and high impact uses of Twitter’s platform,” writes Twitter platform marketing guy Seth Bindernagel on the company’s developer blog.

The case studies being released today include clever integrations of Twitter buttons, mobile features, curation via Mass Relevance, and more. The studies presented are light on technical details but do give some good general pointers and partnership suggestions.

For example, Reuters used Twitter to turn World Economic Forums attendees in Davos into citizen journalists. The news organization built a “Media Wall that Reuters could use at conferences, political conventions, sporting events, and more,” the Reuters case study reads. “They debuted the wall at Davos, capturing all the photos and videos being tweeted, allowing users to see full resolution versions of the photo or watch videos in-line.”

Feeding America, on the other hand, used some analytics features to more than double its site traffic. “Working with Performics and using BrightEdge technology, Feeding America combined information on Tweet volumes for specific topics with search engine rankings and web analytics data to determine what to tweet about,” reads the organization’s case study. “They then matched that with their most relevant web site content to reference in outbound tweets. By consistently tweeting about trending topics where they already had great content, Feeding America achieved great results.”

Some of the case studies contain links to more data and fuller explanations of best practices, as well. We’re looking forward to seeing more of these soon.

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013 San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Joining this week’s parade of cloud news from Google, Microsoft, and Dropbox, business cloud storage startup Box has revamped its API for developers and signed 15 new partners to its striking OneCloud program, the company announced today.

While Box had no idea Google would be dropping its Drive cloud storage bomb yesterday, talk of the product and how it would disrupt the market has dominated recent tech news. But while Google is playing up its strengths to both consumers and businesses, Box is mostly focused on businesses because it knows that’s where the money is. And frankly, with Google being cozy with so many consumers with Gmail, it’s starting to look like Box could have much more longevity than Dropbox.

As a player for businesses who need cloud storage, Box has done what it can to be available across platforms and made its service available on PCs, Macs, and most smartphones and tablets. Since 2008, developers who wanted to tap the company’s API for applications have used basically the same one. But with today’s news, the company has launched a new API that will make the process of integration more streamlined.

“This update is dedicated to our developer friends, who are extremely important to us,” Box VP of platform Chris Yeh told VentureBeat.

With its API streamlining, Box is introducing a new feature called Instant Mode. This features makes it possible for sites to embed Box features even if a user doesn’t have a Box account. Users simply type in their e-mail address and get access to Box storage. If that user ever signs up on Box with that same e-mail, they then can access files stored on that other site. In a theoretical example, Yeh said LinkedIn could offer a Box-branded storage section where users could store resumes and cover letters, but you don’t have to own a Box account to take advantage of it.

In a related development, Box also announced that it has signed up 15 more partners for its OneCloud program, which helps keep files synchronized even when using third-party smartphone apps. New partners include the very cool CloudOn, Handshake, iAnnotate, and Breezly.

Along with streamlining its API, Box will make is making OneCloud easier to use as well. Yeh said that the company has made it so users will have less clicks to access and upload files to the cloud.

Check out the new partners below:

To celebrate the launch of its new API and OneCloud successes, the Palo Alto, Calif.-based company is hosting a party tonight in New York City. The company wants to put its foot down in NYC and make sure New York businesses know what Box can do for them. To help get the word out about Box and influence the NY tech scene, Box is partnering with General Assembly and TechStars organizations. All of TechStars’ startups will get a free 500GB Box account to work with, and it will provide mentoring for both orgs.

“This is a statement that we want to be here in New York,” Yeh said. “We will be here consistently going forward and building inroads.”

Box now has 10 million users globally and serves more than 120,000 businesses. The company claims 82 percent of the Fortune 500 use its service in some form. The company has raised about $159 million thus far and counts Andreessen Horowitz, Salesforce, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Emergence Capital Partners, New Enterprise Associates, and others as investors.

Check out Box’s new API announcement video below:

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

With all eyes on Instagram’s long-awaited Android app, the hot photo sharing startup today announced a surprising partnership with rival Hipstamatic, opening up photo sharing in Instagram from Hipstamatic’s 4 million users.

“When we launched, it was all about Facebook and Flickr and Twitter, and now we’re seeing a huge shift in our user base toward Instagram,” Hipstamatic cofounder and CEO Lucas Buick told Fast Company in an interview. “We’ve never been a social networking company, but we clearly benefit from social networks. So this will be the first app outside of Instagram that lets you into their network. That’s pretty cool for us.”

Both Instagram (free) and Hipstamatic ($1.99) are iPhone-only and offer photo filters and the easy ability to share your shots — but Hipstamatic also includes other camera tweaks like different lenses and flash options. Hipstamatic has attracted a dedicated community of 4 million users, compared to Instagram’s whopping 27 million users.

The partnership solidifies Instagram’s lead in mobile photo sharing, after seeing explosive growth since it launched two years ago (with only four employees for most of its run). The company is clearly doing something right, if it’s now so big even rivals want in on the action.

As part of the partnership, Hipstamatic users will be presented with the option to share photos to Instagram, along with other social networks. You’ll be able to add a filter and other tweaks as normal from the app, and when it appears on Instagram it’ll show up with a “Taken with Hipstamatic” attribution.

That small bit of text alone could lead to more revenue for Hipstamatic, since users who click on it will be directed to the iTunes Store to purchase the app (it’s not sharing any of the revenue with Instagram). And for Instagram, it means the company gets access to a dedicated community of photo nerds who post 48 million photos a month.

Instagram CEO Kevin Systrom tells Fast Company that users have already been using Hipstamatic to tweak photos before they get uploaded to Instagram, so he just wanted to simplify that process.

“It’s a step in the direction that we’re testing out,” Systrom told Fast Company. “We’ve been very careful about making sure that Instagram photos are about what’s happening right now in your life, and we want to allow for more of those photos to end up on Instagram regardless of where they’re taken.”

I expect Instagram to form similar partnerships with other popular photo apps like Camera+, and I wouldn’t be surprised if it ends up being directly embedded in iOS, similar to how Twitter is now a core part of the platform. With a more inclusive API and an upcoming move to Android, it doesn’t seem like Instagram’s crazy growth will be slowing down anytime soon.

Photo Devindra Hardawar/VentureBeat (using Instagram)

Facebook is now letting users do most of the things they’d do from a status update, like uploading photos or including locations or tagging people, from just about any non-Facebook app.

Starting today, your apps can add location and friends as properties to any update, photo, or link. To accomplish this feat, the social network has rolled out a whole herd of new APIs and documentation. You have your location-setting API, your friend-tagging API, your improved places search API, and your location-reading API.

“It’s going to allows consumers who are using third-party apps to have a richer and deeper experience with third-party apps,” said Gowalla founder and current Facebooker Josh Williams.

“Now, content that’s coming in from an application can have the same sort of feature-richness on a user’s Timeline that something posted natively would have.”

Williams continued that the new APIs will be saving developers a lot of time. “It’s stuff that devs spend a lot of time building out from scratch.”

Also, he noted, some of the functionality announced today is entirely new, stuff that devs couldn’t do with any amount of time or effort. “Previously [at Facebook], there was this idea of checking in,” Williams explained. “There was a traditional checkin product that Facebook built originally, but that was deprecated to allow adding location to any post. That API has never been available before.”

So, instead of just checking into the places they’re at right now, users can put a lot more meaning and nuance into locations — where they’ve been, where they want to go, where life events happened, and more.

“In the context of a Timeline maps view, you can show, for example, the countries you’ve visited in the past,” said Williams. “I’m excited about the things we’ll see on the Timeline map, i think this will open up new channels for creativity.”

Apps can set location for Open Graph actions and objects or with stream publish stories; friends can be tagged with Open Graph actions or with stream publish stories. Place search now includes optional latitude, longitude, and distance parameters and support for finding posts from friends around a place. And location-reading uses the FQL table location_post.

You’ll also get APIs for larger photo display and inline video playback.

“Speaking as a recent third-party developer myself, we were really excited about taking all this content we were creating and seeing it visualized in this consistent, permanent space,” said Williams of developing for Timeline.

“There are all kinds of niches where Facebook is never going to go, but people really want to see that information represented in the kind of holistic journal that Timeline is… it’s beyond the scope of what we are building internally.”

Image courtesy of pressureUA, Shutterstock

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013 San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Enterprise cloud platform provider ServiceMesh has raised $15 million in its first-ever round of funding to help businesses better manage their cloud services, the company announced Wednesday morning.

“Our platform makes it possible for companies to completely govern their cloud ecosystems,” ServiceMesh CEO Eric Pulier told VentureBeat. “We’re going to take this new capital and scale the company globally.”

ServiceMesh’s Agility Platform is subscription-based software that gives companies a set of APIs to improve efficiency and cut costs when it comes to implementing cloud services. The Agility Platform (as seen in the image above) is made up of five distinct products: Planner, Designer, CenterPoint, Manager and Access. The company says it has thus far helped financial, health care and retail customers from the Global 2000 better manage their “mission critical” systems.

The company considers big-name players like BMC, IBM and HP as its competition, but only just. “We welcome companies like IBM and BMC to the space, but they are behind us,” Pulier said.

ServiceMesh has been entirely self-funded up to this point, but it accepted the $15 million round of funding from Ignition Partners because it wants to aggressively grow the company.

Frank Artale, a partner at Ignition will join ServiceMesh’s board of directors. Artale has been guiding investments toward major cloud companies, and just last week Ignition led Cloudera’s new $40 million funding round. Ignition also led AppFog’s $8 million round in August.

“To successfully deploy [cloud] services in the enterprise, organizations must be able to bring their cloud, SaaS, and business services together under a unified SLA [service-level agreement], governance and compliance framework,” Artale said, in a statement. “And because of the do-it-yourself approach that enterprise IT and business users take toward consuming cloud resources, organizations need a transparent mechanism for departmental chargebacks and usage analysis. The ServcieMesh platform is unique in its ability to deliver these capabilities.”

Santa Monica, Calif.-based ServiceMesh was founded in mid-2007 and currently has more than 90 employees — quite a feat for being entirely self-funded.

CloudBeat 2011 takes place Nov 30 – Dec 1 at the Hotel Sofitel in Redwood City, CA. Unlike any other cloud event, we’ll be focusing on 12 case studies where we’ll dissect the most disruptive instances of enterprise adoption of the cloud. Speakers include Aaron Levie, Co-Founder & CEO of Box.net; Amit Singh, VP of Enterprise at Google; Adrian Cockcroft, Director of Cloud Architecture at Netflix; Byron Sebastian, Senior VP of Platforms at Salesforce; Lew Tucker, VP & CTO of Cloud Computing at Cisco, and many more. Join 500 executives for two days packed with actionable lessons and networking opportunities as we define the key processes and architectures that companies must put in place in order to survive and prosper. Register here. Spaces are very limited!

It seems every conference has a hackathon these days, an event in which developers band together at night and to create a new and hopefully useful product by the next day. Twilio’s hackathon requires developers to use Twilio’s application programming interfaces (APIs) and hack together a product for the next generation of Twilio-based companies.

The hackathon lasted from 8pm to 1am — five hours of a lot of beer, pizza and telephony talk. Seven hopefuls will show their products to a panel of judges today including sponsors Salesforce, Dropbox and Appcelerator, as well as three secret Twilio employees. The winners will receive up to $10,000 in prizes such as 11 inch MacBook Air computers and an AR Droid.

The finalists are:

1. PresenTweet: A product that gives you the power to send tweets during a presentation by attaching tweet commands as you move through slides.
2. Yap.io: A conference-focused iPhone app that allows you to submit voice recorded questions to a presenter, who can then play the recording on stage and respond during the event.
3. Sidebox: This app allows service industry employees such as plumbers, to text in a query about a job and receive customer information and outstanding balances.
4. Qwestioned: Adds a voice option to question and answer focused websites.
5. Betwext Talk: An app that allows you to send SMS messages between your browser and a phone.
6. Custard: A platform that allows you to add a customer support call center to any website.
7. SportsSignup.com Roll Call: A coach’s best friend, this app sends notifications to teammates to see who will make it to the game.

The developers will go on stage and pitch their creations at 3pm today. Successful Twilio-based companies will also have an opportunity to be funded by the recently announced Twilio Fund. Dave McClure of 500 Startups and Ron Conway of SV Angel are footing the $250,000 bill to fund a number of these companies over the next year.

[Photo courtesy of Twilio/Flickr]

Developers have been clamoring to get their hands on theAPI since the network’s launch a few months ago.

We asked Google about the letter, but the company declined to talk about a specific timeline. “We definitely plan to involve developers and publishers in the Google+ project, but we don’t have specific details to share just yet,” a Google spokesperson said.

On the assumption the letter is legit, “trusted testers,” which are developers working under the Google Ventures header, will get access to some APIs in the “next few days.” Two to four Google Ventures companies will get access first.

Developers who aren’t in the Google Ventures stratosphere will likely get access in the “next few weeks.” Some reports have said the API is actually months away, but since Google is keeping API developments so close to the chest, it’s hard to know anything for certain at this point.

Here’s the leaked letter Google Ventures sent to its portfolio companies:

Hi -

The Google+ team is going to be starting to roll out some of their APIs to our Trusted Tester program in the next few days (followed by a more general availability in the next few weeks). They’ve agreed to give this early access to a small number (2-4) of our portfolio companies.

If you’re interested, we’d like you to at least be able to commit to building a small “hello world” app quickly (in the next 3-5 days). This stage of the program is more about feedback on docs and code for now, with an intent to have more meaningful interactions with G+ as more APIs roll out.

If you’re interested, please email me back with your company name, contact name, and email address.

Sam