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.

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Box‘s Aaron Levie and GoodData‘s Roman Stanek [above] have already joined forces in making business software sexy. The young CEOs are often lumped into articles about the rise of the “enterprise cool kids.”

So it would seem somewhat inevitable that the chief executives would form a partnership. And today, the companies released a new product dubbed “GoodBox.” Box customers can now visualize relevant data to better understand the effectiveness of their teams.

GoodData claims that it will also be easier for customers to monetize their content. GoodBox can be used by execs to identify behavior common to high-performing individuals, and apply the insights to optimize the whole sales or marketing team.

“Eventually, we expect to be able to provide predictive solutions based on the information GoodBox is gathering for us,” said Damian Fasciani, a technology services manager at REA Group, and one of the first customers of the new product.

Source: Sean Ludwig/VentureBeat

Box CEO Aaron Levie

“It’s a win for Box as their customers will be engaged, and it fits into our vision to organize an enterprise’s data,” said Stanek, GoodData’s CEO.

Stanek told me in a recent interview at the VentureBeat office that the company makes about 50 percent of its revenues through white-labeling its products. Rather than build their own “big data” analytics tools, software as a service vendors like Zendesk can opt to embed GoodData. “This is the new cloud integration model,” he explained.

Indeed, rather than engage in the so-called “cloud wars,” Stanek said his strategy is to forge partnerships with vendors in related categories. ”I am playing nicely with Box and Amazon Web Services,” he said. “This is how you succeed in the new world of enterprise software.”

Cloud storage powerhouse Dropbox will host its first-ever developer conference — dubbed DBX — on July 9 in San Francisco, the company announced today.

Apple, Microsoft, and other big tech companies often use their developer conferences as a place to build enthusiasm and launch new products. It’s unlikely Dropbox’s first conference will have that level of fanfare, but this will at least offers developers who rely on Dropbox the chance to connect and get insight direct from the Dropbox team.

Dropbox says it will use the event to talk to devs about the capabilities of the Dropbox Platform and use it as a connection point for all Dropbox developers. The company also says attendees will become the first to learn about new products that are making their way into the platform.

The event will take place at Fort Mason Center in San Francisco. Developers interested in attending the conference can request an invitation here. You can also get updates from the DBX Twitter account: @dbx2013.

Image via Dropbox

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Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Apple now has more than 300 million people using its iCloud storage and syncing service, Apple CFO Peter Oppenheimer said today on its Q2 2013 earnings call.

During its last quarterly earnings report, Apple announced that it had 250 million iCloud users. So more than 50 million have been added since that time, an increase of 20 percent in just three months.

iCloud is Apple’s cloud service that stores and syncs data like photos, songs, calendars, and email across iPhones, iPads, iPods, and PCs. The service has 27 percent market share among cloud storage services, and more people use it than Dropbox, Amazon Cloud Player, and Google Drive, according to a recent Strategy Analytics report.

While the service is supposed to on 24/7 to seamlessly connect your devices, iCloud suffered an outage this morning and has been hit by several outages in the past few weeks as well.

iCloud image via iCloud.com

Enterprise social networking business Jive Software has launched its spring 2013 update with new features including “rooms” for collaborating on specific projects, and integration with cloud storage service Box.

Jive competes with Microsoft’s Yammer and Salesforce’s Chatter to provide enterprise social networking services to companies. On top of that, smaller player Moxie  just took a shot at Jive and its competitors by offering its enterprise social service for free.

With this fierce competition breathing down its neck, Jive has pressure to add new features. Its spring 2013 update fits the bill and offers two major updates:

• Purposeful Places: Jive offers up “deal rooms” for sales teams to work together on deals and “campaign rooms” for teams working on a structured campaign.
• Structured Outcomes: Jive takes conversations and converts them into trackable actions

Jive product marketing VP Nathan Rawlins told VentureBeat that these features are centered around lessening the amount of email workers need to deal with each day.

“In a big company, you’ve got a really big challenge with keeping track of information,” Rawlins said. “Email is a curse. Our focus is to help people communicate more effectively than they do on email.”

Jive has also announced that its services are now integrated with enterprise cloud storage hotshot Box. So Jive customers will be able to collaborate on Box documents from within Jive, and comments are synced across Jive and Box. Customers will also be able to upload content to Box from Jive and access Box docs from Jive mobile apps on iOS and Android.

The new Purposeful Places also have integration with Box and Salesforce data.

Top photo via Jive

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Forget about the cloud storage wars; competition is fiercer than ever in the cloud collaboration space.

Today, Sunnyvale, Calif.-based Moxie Software announced it is offering Collaboration Spaces, its business-focused social networking software for free. ”General purpose collaboration, what Jive and Yammer do, we now deliver better and for free,” said Moxie Software CEO Tom Kelly (pictured, above) by phone.

With this release, Moxie is taking a clear swipe at the competition. “I can’t imagine why someone would write a cheque to Jive without trying this,” Kelly explained.

Business software has been accused of being poorly-designed, and rich with unused features. So to ensure the collaboration product is “eye candy for the enterprise,” Kelly enlisted the help of storied design firm IDEO. Cloud startups like Box and Evernote have made similar claims that they intend to make user experience design a priority.

Why would the company offer one of its most popular products for free? Kelly believes the  general purpose collaboration space will be commoditized in a few years. To get ahead of the curve, Moxie hopes its free product will attract customers to try its other services.

Moxie is positioning itself as the “customer communication” expert; according to Kelly, it’s the only vendor that can “turn your company into an answer machine.”

Jive Software’s chief communications officer Amanda Pires responded that Jive isn’t threatened. Pires said, “People pay for what they value which is why Jive has more than 800 large enterprise customers across the world and continues to lead the industry.”

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Amazon’s cloud services arm is a giant that towers almost all competitors offering similar services. It looks like that reputation will continue to stick with the announcement that Amazon’s Simple Storage Service (S3) is now storing two trillion objects in the cloud.

S3 is used by many developers and companies for scalable and relatively cheap cloud infrastructure. Last June, Amazon announced that S3 had hit one trillion objects stored. That was a big milestone at the time. And now it has doubled that amount in less than a year.

“I’m pleased to announce that there are now more than 2 trillion (2 x 1012) objects stored in Amazon S3 and that the service is regularly peaking at over 1.1 million requests per second,” Jeff Barr, AWS chief evangelist, wrote in a blog post today. “It took us six years to grow to one trillion stored objects, and less than a year to double that number.”

While Amazon has a big lead in the cloud infrastructure space, it faces a lot of heavy competition, especially from Rackspace, Microsoft, Google, and SoftLayer. This week, Microsoft opened up its Azure infrastructure product in general availability, and it made the commitment to match Amazon’s prices on services such as compute, storage, and bandwidth.

Photo credit: Jeff Attaway/Flickr

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Consumers are hungry for cloud storage and backup services like Dropbox, Google Drive, and Microsoft SkyDrive. But if you’re trying to backup all of your movies and music in the cloud via these services, your bill can be pricey. 200GB of Dropbox storage, for example, runs $20 a month.

Enter Space Monkey, a young startup that wants to put a “mini data center” in your home that costs you $10 a month and gives you a massive 1TB of backup storage.

Salt Lake City-based Space Monkey debuted its product to the world a year ago at the Launch conference, but it has been hard at work getting things ready for today. Co-founders Alen Peacock and Clint Gordon-Carroll (pictured) were previously long-time employees of early cloud storage provider Mozy, so they know a lot about the challenges of maintaining data centers and delivering cloud storage.

“This was born out of seeing inefficiencies at Mozy,” Gordon-Carroll said. “Operating expenses are huge in the data center.”

Gordon-Carroll told me that the cost of maintaining data centers is simply too expensive, with extensive power consumption, cooling, and monitoring all causing headaches for the biggest and smallest companies. So they’ve designed their company to be based on people subscribing monthly or yearly for hardware and service that is more affordable and of a higher capacity than most other cloud services. At one point in a conversation with Gordon-Carroll, he described the service as “anti-cloud.”

Space Monkey’s setup is so different from Dropbox and other traditional cloud storage providers because it uses all the devices in people’s homes to create a powerful backup network rather than using data centers. With enough Space Monkey devices placed around the company, the users’ devices become the data center. The network also allows your files to be accessed from virtually anywhere, including web, Windows, Mac, Linux, iPhone, and Android apps.

The only downside to the product is that because these devices are talking to each other all the time and distributing data between them, users will see some extra bandwidth allocated towards their Space Monkey devices.

The 12-employee company has raised $2.25 million to date from investors including Google Ventures and Polaris Partners. That said, building hardware is an expensive endeavor, one that would require more funding.

Instead of seeking more cash, the Space Monkey team is instead looking to fund the project and building of units via Kickstarter. The campaign starts today and the team has set a goal of raising $100,000 in 30 days. Early-bird backers are able to sign up for a device and one year of service for $99, and anyone who gets in later can get the device and a year of service for $119.

Check out the video below for more about Space Monkey:

Space Monkey photo via Sean Ludwig/VentureBeat

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Cloud storage startup SugarSync has appointed former Intuit VP Mike Grossman to lead the company and help it take on rivals like Dropbox and Google Drive.

Former SugarSync CEO Laura Yecies announced she would resign from her post in late February and help the company’s board of directors find a new CEO.

SugarSync offers cloud storage and applications across the web, iOS, Android, Windows, Mac, and other platforms. Its latest big news was the launch of a drastic redesign of its apps to simplify the experience. Now we will see what Grossman can do with the company.

Before SugarSync, Grossman was the vice president of marketing and business development for Intuit’s financial services division. Prior to that, he was the executive chairman of e-book antipiracy business Attributor, which  Digimarc acquired in December.

Grossman started a few weeks ago, but the company just announced the news today with a low-key customer-facing blog post written by Grossman.

“SugarSync has helped millions of people like you keep their information accessible and in sync,” Grossman writes. “I’m looking forward to leading our team in taking the product and the business to the next level.”

I’ve heard from a source close to the company that SugarSync’s next big release will be a revamped experience for its iOS application. That will help it compete with the many other mobile-focused cloud storage players such as Dropbox and Microsoft SkyDrive, which just updated its iOS app today.

The San Mateo, Calif.-based SugarSync was founded in 2008 and has raised around $60 million in funding from investors including Draper Fisher Jurvetson, ORIX Venture Finance, and Sigma Partners.

SugarSync representative at Outside Lands via Christina Farr/VentureBeat

Our never-ending hunger for data is helping Seagate make lots of money.

The hard drive manufacturer said today that it’s finally shipped its 2 billionth drive. Seagate says it attributes the feat in large part to the tech world’s newfound addiction to data-intensive streaming video services and social networks.

The most telling metric is this one: Seagate says it took it 29 years to ship a billion drives, but it only took it four years to reach its second billion. That makes our hunger for data sound like full-blown gluttony.

Of course, it also doesn’t hurt that Seagate is one half of the hard drive duopoly shared with rival Western Digital, which, like Seagate, has made a habit of scooping up competitors (Seagate bought Lacie last year, for example, and Samsung’s hard drive business in 2011).This has created a largely uncontested space for the two big players, so it’s not the biggest surprise that Seagate’s doing so well.

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Cloud storage startup SugarSync has launched its smart redesign out of beta so all of its customers — and potential new ones — can give it a spin.

As we wrote back in November when the redesign hit beta, the new design simplifies the experience and adds in new features like searching across all devices you have SugarSync installed on and a sharing tab to send files to your contacts more easily. You can download the new apps for Windows, Mac, and other platforms here.

“Our business is growing quickly, and we have many millions of customers,” SugarSync CEO Laura Yecies told VentureBeat in November. “The market has grown more competitive, but the larger players are actually educating people about the cloud. And eventually, many of those people choose SugarSync.”

The only issue I see when it comes to SugarSync’s growth opportunity is that Dropbox, Google Drive, and Microsoft’s SkyDrive (maybe even business-focused Box) have already collected quite a few users. Migration from one cloud storage service to another isn’t smooth, and those companies don’t really want it to be. So no matter how nice SugarSync’s interface is, it will be hard to get folks to switch.

Which means SugarSync’s best chance of success is attracting new users. One big thing it claims that drives new users is offering storage in exchange for getting more users to sign up. Another thing: SugarSync has done a great job with partnerships and counts Samsung, Lenovo, Fujitsu, and SanDisk as partners that offer SugarSync preloaded on some devices. But is that enough to carve out a decent chunk of the market?

San Mateo, Calif.-based SugarSync was founded in 2008 and has raised around $60 million in funding from investors including Draper Fisher Jurvetson, ORIX Venture Finance, and Sigma Partners.

Check out the video and screenshots below for more on how SugarSync 2.0 looks and feels:

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

The cloud storage wars are heating up: Dropbox has released a series of features for its Teams service that should boost its appeal to large corporate customers.

The most important feature is the creation of a new console that managers can use to track which employees are using the Dropbox account, provide and restrict access to files, and monitor which devices they use.

Dropbox has experienced security breaches in the past, so these new features are designed to give administrators peace of mind. If an employee’s phone is stolen, they can block devices and apps to prevent miscreants from stealing information.

Dropbox launched its business-oriented Teams service about a year ago. But the product didn’t contain features to help IT retain control — as CITEWorld’s Matt Rosoff points out, IT admins could add or remove members, but that was about it.

Still, the Teams service is already used by about 2 million business around the world.

Dropbox is king when it comes to consumers: It boasts a customer base of over 100 million people. But competing service Box has been focused on selling its tools to large enterprises and small to medium-sized businesses from day one.

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Looks like connecting the world’s top document software with the cloud is paying off. Microsoft has announced that more than one billion Office documents are now stored in SkyDrive, following the launch of Office 365 Home Premium last week.

SkyDrive is Microsoft’s cloud storage solution for consumers and businesses. To account for the growing reliance people have on the cloud, Microsoft made it so that Office 365 simultaneously saves documents to a local hard drive and SkyDrive to make sure your documents are always backed up. That set up has clearly increased SkyDrive usage, along with the growing number of SkyDrive users using Windows 8, iOS, Android, and Windows Phone apps.

Microsoft Group Program Manager Omar Shahine writes in a blog post today:

Last week Office 365 Home Premium launched and we’ve seen a lot of enthusiasm over the seamless integration of SkyDrive for saving and sharing your docs. Recently we reached a big milestone; our customers are now storing over a billion Office documents on SkyDrive! We’re really excited about the feedback we’ve seen around the new version of Office and the deep integration of SkyDrive. We’re taking it a step further today by announcing a new feature in SkyDrive and the Office Web Apps that allows a more seamless sharing and editing experience for our customers.

The new sharing and editing feature is relatively minor, but we’ll take any feature that makes our lives a little easier. Microsoft has made it so that all recipients you send a SkyDrive “edit link” to will be able to make changes to a document in Office Web Apps without signing into a Microsoft account. Ideally, that makes editing and collaborating on documents using SkyDrive less of a hassle.

Have you tried SkyDrive or are Dropbox and Google Drive more your thing?

Powerpoint image via Microsoft

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

With its set of new features, Dropbox is moving away from file sharing and into the realm of “content.” The goal is to be much more than just a personal storage system.

The cloud storage provider with over 100 million users released new features today at a press event at its San Francisco office. These include quick previews for PDFs and other documents, and more intuitive sharing capabilities for Facebook, Twitter and email. These updates are for the Web-based version of Dropbox, and will be released by the end of the month.

Dropbox is stressing in its messaging that it wants to be associated with “content” rather than files. But as AllThingsD points out, the company still has a long way to go. It’s difficult to scroll through photos that are grouped into albums, and there are no editing capabilities to augment the document preview tool.

Dropbox currently competes with Box, a cloud storage provider that yesterday filed the paperwork for a $150 million Series E round. It also faces off with SkyDrive and iCloud, which is further incentive for the company to add value to its users beyond simple share and sync.

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Despite launching little over a day ago, new cloud storage service Mega has seen 1 million users sign up, according to founder Kim Dotcom, who spoke at a Mega launch event at his home in New Zealand yesterday.

While Dotcom’s claim can’t necessarily be verified, it seems likely that Mega has gained a ton of users since its Saturday launch, especially since Mega is targeting the international community — not just the U.S. and/or Europe.

Mega is the successor to Dotcom’s Megaupload service, which was shut down last year over accusations by the U.S. government that it was facilitating piracy on a massive scale. The new Mega service is essentially a cloud file storage service like Dropbox or Box, but with aspirations to become a fully functional tool for creating, editing, and storing documents, storing a library of contacts, hosting websites, and more. The service also touts a high level of security encryption, which won’t allow Mega to determine what type of files users are uploading — something that the most popular rivals in the cloud storage space can’t say.

The service was understandably slow most of Saturday and Sunday as people were apparently flooding in to check it out. Mega offers 50GB of free storage and three paid tiers.

The launch event is supposedly the last you’ll hear from Dotcom for a while, the founder said.

“After today I’m going to take myself back more, it’s not healthy. I want a good relationship with New Zealanders and I don’t want to be seen as someone who is always in the media,” Dotcom said, according to TheNextWeb. I find that a little hard to believe considering Dotcom’s history of hogging the spotlight. For example, he has previously released a video calling out the U.S. President, amusic video rapping about his plight, a publicized accusation against Vice President Joe Biden, and is even working on both a new book and a Hollywood biopic.

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom’s new service Mega launched to a limited number of people today, revealing pricing tiers and features for the first time.

The Mega service is essentially a cloud storage locker that’s similar to Dropbox, according to TechCrunch. Mega offers 50GB of free storage to users to upload all their media files, documents, and other files. But there’s an indication that Mega will offer more than just the standard file locker storage, with features that include domain, website, and email hosting as well as a database of all your contacts, Google-docs style web apps, and instant messaging.

The only features that are really available at this time, according to TechCrunch’s report, is the file sharing functionality. Of course, most people who try to access the site will be met with a simple “Access Denied” message (including us), so it may be a while before you can actually check it out.

As for pricing, Mega has three premium tiers of service: 500GB of storage/1TB bandwidth for €9.99, 2TB of storage/4TB bandwidth for €19.99, and 4TB of storage/8TB bandwidth for €29.99.

Honestly, it seems like Mega is trying to do too much. The service wants to take on Yammer, Google Docs, Microsoft Office 365, Dropbox, and others. It’s nice that you’ll get the 50GB of storage, but even if all the extra features (web document apps, etc.) are great, are you really going to entrust your data to a guy that made his money from looking the other way when people were committing acts of piracy? Sure, the U.S. and New Zealand governments ignored many privacy laws when going after him, and for that he’ll probably go down in history as someone of importance — meaning Kim Dotcom is sort of like the Larry Flynt of cloud storage.

Still, if you did gain early access to Mega, let us know your thoughts in the comment section below, especially if you liked using it.

Photo via home_of_chaos/Flickr

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Energetic CEO Aaron Levie of Box today revealed that his company is prepping for an initial public offering in 2014.

In an interview with Bloomberg, Levie said a 2013 IPO would be a “long shot,” but he didn’t completely rule it out. The company had previously aimed to IPO in the coming months, and analysts predicted that it would be in a strong position to compete in the public markets.

2012 was a hell of a year for companies that target their products at businesses, rather than consumers. And as we reported, about 80 percent of companies that will IPO next year will be business-to-business (B2B). Likely contenders include SurveyMonkey, which raised $800 million today, Zendesk, and Hubspot.

With software-as-a-service (“SaaS”) vendors Workday and Splunk surging more than 80 percent since 2012 public-market debuts, expectations are high.

The company’s ample shareholders expect to see a return on their investment. Venture capitalists have poured a massive $284 million into Box, which began in 2005 as a college business project. The rapidly growing cloud storage provider competes with larger players like Dropbox and Microsoft.

In recent interviews with VentureBeat, Levie said that the role of the chief information officer is changing, and startups have an opportunity to compete with legacy vendors like Microsoft and Oracle. In recent years, the venture capital community has caught up. “In 2007 when we looked more into the enterprise, even Silicon Valley didn’t think we could win,” he said.

Levie revealed today that his company would be using its ample resources to hire staff and open offices in countries like Germany and Japan. He expects to add about half a dozen executives in senior management roles, including an international chief. According to Bloomberg, it expects to bolster its staff to 1,000 employees in the next year, up from about 670.

The Los Altos-based startup recently celebrated the opening of its London and San Francisco office.

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

YouSendIt, the Campbell, Calif.-based startup that wants to do more than let users send large files, has made its latest strategic acquisition.

The company bought a venture-backed startup called “Found” (the founders are pictured, above) for an undisclosed sum. The technology lets users discover their files, documents, and data across a variety of devices and cloud services.

YouSendIt’s CEO Brad Garlinghouse aims to “go beyond send”, and help users access and manage their data. In an interview, he liberally uses the term “cloud-nogistic” to describe how technology should be able to cater to the full spectrum of providers, whether its Google Drive or Dropbox.

Garlinghouse said the corporate development team was tasked with finding startups to potentially acquire “that were thinking horizontally, not just vertically.” The company bought Found with a combination of cash and stock. They will retain the full team in their San Francisco offices, and will provide resources for the 5-person team to build out the product.

YouSendIt has raised a total of $49 million in venture funding in the previous seven years. According to Garlinghouse, they are experiencing 50 percent growth year over year, and recently exceeded 40 million users. Last year, the company pulled in $57 million in revenue.

Cloud storage titan Dropbox has agreed to acquire photo-focused startup Snapjoy, a move that could help Dropbox own the photo organization and backup space.

Snapjoy, a young company that graduated from the Y Combinator program in summer 2011, offered consumers an online photo library that uploaded your photos and organized them into categories like who, what, when, and where.

The move will likely help Dropbox expand beyond the idea of a photo backup and make it more of a place to organize your memories. The acquisition comes just a week after Dropbox agreed to buy Audiogalaxy, which could help Dropbox users with music backup and streaming from the cloud.

Snapjoy co-founders Michael Dwan and JP Ren wrote in a blog post today:

As a fellow Y Combinator company, we’ve always admired Dropbox and loved their product. From the moment we met the founders, it was clear we shared a common goal. By combining forces with their amazing team, we can leverage the technology and scale of their platform and focus on what matters — delivering an incredible photo experience to over 100 million people.

So what happens next? First and foremost, don’t worry — your photos are safe! Though we won’t be accepting new signups, existing users can continue to use Snapjoy to share and enjoy photos just as you do now. We’ll be in touch with more information over the coming weeks.

The terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Photographer silhouette via Dominic Alves/Flickr

Everpix made waves last year with its promise to store all of your digital photos in the cloud, with no limitations. But the company’s true goal is actually far more intriguing: Everpix is aiming to make you love your digital photos again without having to worry about organizing them.

Today, Everpix is debuting a new Windows application that will let you synchronize your entire photo collection to the company’s servers. Everpix’s website has also been updated to work with iOS and Android browsers. The company already has apps available for iOS and OS X.

“We want to build the future of platforms for photos,” said Everpix co-founder and chief executive Pierre-Olivier Latour in an interview with VentureBeat. “[To accomplish that] you need to build many pieces first … we spent a year-and-a-half under the radar, the last thing we wanted was to grab too many users.”

Now, Latour says, a “solid chunk” of his vision has been executed — and he’s ready to prove it.

“People are missing out the key thing: people’s photo collections are growing very rapidly and they’re getting out of control,” Latour said.

Since cloud storage is extremely cheap these days, the company lets you upload as many photos as you like at their full resolution. Latour boasts that Everpix offers the fastest method for uploading and viewing your photos across multiple devices. Without having to worry about storage, Everpix makes dealing with your photos similar to Gmail — you never have to delete anything again.

Everpix has also developed a patent-pending image analysis technology that can identify objects, scenery, and other details.  That allows Everpix to highlight interesting photos and group together similar shots so you can appreciate them instead of wasting time with organizational details. (Or in my case, just letting your photos pile up without any organizing.)

Photos are always the focus of Everpix’s user interface — unlike Flickr or Google+, where you may get distracted by lots of menus and options. Everpix purposefully made its interface monochrome, to help the photos pop better.

The startup is aiming big, so Latour made sure to avoid offering the service for free from the beginning. You can sign up for Everpix for $5 a month, or for $40 per year. Latour says he’s open to a potential freemium model at some point but notes that that’s a complex detail to figure out. For now, the subscription fee could push away casual users (but then again, those may not be the customers Everpix wants).

It took an overnight uploading session for me to put my 40 gigabyte photo collection on Everpix, but once you get over that initial hump, it constantly keeps track of new photos in your library to upload automatically. Once your photos are processed, you can view them on the Everpix site, or via the company’s mobile apps. The “Moments” section in Everpix gives you a thorough glimpse of your photos based on their date, while the “Highlights” section pulls out the best shots throughout the year. In my testing, both the iPhone and iPad Everpix apps were zippy and rendered photos well.

“It’s a very ambitious project, and it comes with a number of challenges, from financing and technical, to building the apps, designing the user experience, and managing the load,” he said. “They’re interesting challenges because we’re not building an app like Instagram where you would use it every single day; we’re mostly looking at weekly active users.”

Looking forward, Latour says he wants to help people reengage with their photo collections in new and interesting ways. The company is currently testing out an experimental exploration feature on its website, where it will randomly show off a selection of pictures that have something in common.

The San Francisco, Calif.-based company has raised around $1.8 million in funding from Index Ventures, 500 Startups, Kii Capital, and 2020 Ventures.

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Cloud storage startup Bitcasa has released new mobile apps for Android and Windows 8 platforms, with iOS and Mac apps coming in January, the company announced Tuesday morning.

Bitcasa offers a back-up solution that’s a bit different from peers such Dropbox, SugarSync, and Google Drive. Essentially, Bitcasa can back up all of your data and files on Bitcasa’s servers and you can even move things to the cloud that you can delete on your personal hard drive. The service’s interface makes accessing your files as easy as tapping an external hard drive. It costs $10 a month, a pretty reasonable price for what it claims is “infinite storage.”

Bitcasa and its new apps promise the following benefits:

Instant Streaming, Access Anywhere: With Bitcasa, users can play whole music albums, watch videos in various formats, view and share photo albums, and read documents from anywhere. Instant streaming from the Bitcasa Infinite Drive allows users to stream their personal jukebox of music, videos, and photos to mobile and desktop devices without having to sync or store files locally on each of your devices.

Infinite Storage: The Infinite Drive acts as a virtual external drive that expands with the user’s growing storage needs without ever worrying about running out of space again.

Safe Backup: Continuous and automatic backup gives peace of mind. Users can mirror their content from all their computers to Bitcasa, and access it anywhere. All files and backups are protected with client-side encryption, which means that only users can see and access their data. Users can easily retrieve files with time-capsule versioning by date.

Share Content: With one click, users can share any file or folder with their friends and family – Bitcasa or non-Bitcasa users – regardless of file size. For sharing on mobile devices, users can also set up alerts to protect against large downloads that might affect their mobile bandwidth charges.

Get Organized: Bitcasa automatically categorizes users’ data into Music, Photos, Videos, and Documents. Users no longer have to worry about managing and organizing their files — the same way they do not have to worry about storage capacity limits.

Bitcasa CEO Tony Gauda strongly believes in the power of mobile and one of the things he wanted to accomplish was making it easier to tap your files no matter where you are.

“With our mobile app releases, we are now making all of your data easily available from mobile and PC/Mac clients while taking the security of that data very seriously,” Gauda said in a statement. “By announcing our cross-platform support today, we are offering our global users secure access on all computers, mobile devices, or Web browsers by streaming from the cloud while allowing them to keep the data they access more often localized on their hard drive.”

You can download the new apps from Bitcasa’s download page.

Mountain View, Calif.-based Bitcasa launched in Sept. 2011. The company has raised $9 million in funding from Pelion Venture Partners, Horizons Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz, First Round Capital, CrunchFund, and Samsung Ventures.

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Amit Singh, president of enterprise at Google, is ready to fight. Amazon and Google traded blows this week, each lowering their cloud services prices in response to the other.

Amazon, which held its own cloud conference this week, announced on Wednesday that it is lowering its cloud services pricing by 20 percent. This came only two days after Google announced that it lowered its cloud storage pricing by 25 percent. Google responded to Amazon’s price drop by taking an extra 10 percent off today.

Got to love price wars.

“Look, we are happy to compete,” said Singh at the CloudBeat conference in Redwood Shores, Calif. “We believe our storage is actually better. We’re seeing some of the largest Amazon customers actually test and migrate over to our infrastructure because it is unique what we do.”

Singh went on to say that he believes pricing for the public cloud, especially from big companies like Google should continue to go down. When asked whether or not it should be free, Singh said he didn’t know if that would actually happen. He did say, however, that it was possible.

But while Amazon is a big competitor for Google — a competitor getting a lot of attention right now — Microsoft is still in the game. It seems Microsoft might be going off in its own direction, according to Singh, making them less of a concern.

“The legacy is going the other way. You know, Microsoft just increased their prices by 15 percent for no reason. It’s ludicrous. I mean, for what? For the same products and the same users you charge more money?”

For now, Google will continue to build on top of its cloud products, which include Google Docs, Google Apps, Google+ Hangouts, and more. In particular, Google Apps is “going through a big hockey-stick.”

Check out a video of the panel discussion below:

Photo credit: Michael O’Donnell

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

This might come as a surprise, but up until today, the Google Drive mobile apps couldn’t edit spreadsheets.

Thankfully, the latest update to Drive adds the feature, instantly making the app a far more useful productivity tool. With the update, users can tweak fonts, sort data, resize columns, and see changes in real-time — just like with the Drive web app.

In another nifty addition, Drive now allows Android users to create on their homescreens shortcuts to specific Google Drive files. While the idea is cool in theory, Google’s implementation of it is a bit backwards. Rather than create a shortcut from inside the Android app, Drive makes you do it from Android’s “Widgets” panel, which doesn’t make much sense. Either way, the shortcuts work exactly how you’d expect after that.

Google is on a Drive update rampage as of late, having announced yesterday some significant integration between the cloud storage service and Gmail.

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

If you use popular cloud storage and sharing services like Box and Dropbox, you trust your sensitive information to third party data centers.

OwnCloud, the startup that positions itself as the open-source alternative to Box, is the newest contender in the cloud storage wars.

To expand into new verticals and grow its user-base, the Lexington, Mass. based startup pulled in $2.5 million from venture capital firm, General Catalyst. The firm’s Managing Partner Larry Bohn will join the company’s board of directors.

OwnCloud claims to give its 650,000 users a drop dead easy tool and more control over their data. Its server is typically deployed on a company’s servers or trusted service provider’s servers, and integrates well with existing security, storage, monitoring and reporting tools.

Young companies are increasingly positioning themselves this way in the wake of security breaches that may undercut the market leaders in the space. With its hybrid cloud solution, Egnyte is another young cloud storage vendor that emphasizes advanced security and user experience.

The technology works a little differently than the competition — IT users can store information in their cloud of choice. IT gets to decide whether files from services like Amazon, Dropbox or Google are shared with a broad spectrum of users — or accessed by just a small subset. In a recent update to the product, file owners can set expiration dates on shared files and password-protect the URL to a shared link.

The company will use the funds to expand its 70-partner strong channel, aggressively push into the enterprise, and support service providers who implement file sync and share based on OwnCloud.

“There’s no one in this increasingly crowded market that can do the things OwnCloud does — integrate closely with existing IT, innovate at lightning speed and offer choice of storage locations,” said Bohn in a statement. “With those capabilities already in place differentiating it from the competition, we’re confident that OwnCloud will succeed.”

Cloud storage image via Jules 2000 // Shutterstock

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Consumer cloud storage startup SugarSync has redesigned its desktop, web, and mobile apps and pushed them into public beta, moves meant to attract and add more customers to the “millions” already using its service.

SugarSync faces seriously tough competition with Dropbox, Google, and smaller startups like Bitcasa all wanting to help people with their cloud storage needs. Even with this level of competitiveness, SugarSync claims it has had 400 to 600 percent year-over-year growth for the past several years. One of its biggest assets for its word-of-mouth success has been based on giving free storage to users who get their friends and family to sign up. Another is that it comes pre-installed on some Samsung and Lenovo computers.

“Our business is growing quickly and we have many millions of customers,” SugarSync CEO Laura Yecies told VentureBeat. “The market has grown more competitive, but the larger players are actually educating people about the cloud. And eventually, many of those people choose SugarSync.”

Yecies that the new apps for web, desktop, and Android were “very important” and will be a boon to bring more customers into the fold. “We’ve invested a lot in search and dozens of new features,” Yecies said.

All three applications share many of these new and improved features, including:

• Cloud Tab: With this you can see all existing folders you have synced and drag folders on to the app to sync all of its contents.
• Sharing Tab: This tab makes it easy to see what you have shared with other people and what has been shared with you. It also lets you drag a folder or synced file over one of your contacts to share it with that contact.
• Activity Tab: All of your recent SugarSync activity shows up in this tab. Ideally, you can see all files and folders you have updated and shared with others.
• Search: Find files or folders that are synced to SugarSync regardless of which device that data started out on.

The new apps can be downloaded now from SugarSync. Like Google Drive, new SugarSync users get 5GB of storage for free.

San Mateo, Calif.-based SugarSync was founded in 2008 and has raised about $60 million in funding from investors including Draper Fisher Jurvetson, ORIX Venture Finance, Coral Group, Sigma Partners, and Hatteras Venture Partners. The company has 75 employees and counts big names like Samsung, Lenovo, Fujitsu, SanDisk, and others as partners.

Check out the video and screenshots below for more looks on SugarSync’s new apps.

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

With scattered reports of customer defections in the wake of major outages, Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced today that it has expanded to the Asia Pacific region after opening a new data center in Australia.

AWS is a collection of web services that Amazon offers; the most well-known include Amazon EC2 and Amazon S3. It’s the largest cloud computing provider in the world, but it faces heat from Rackspace, Microsoft Azure, and newcomers like Joyent.

For AWS, Australia and New Zealand are ripe for market domination: 10,000 local businesses already use AWS, including the Commonwealth Bank of Australia. No doubt, a local data center should help improve the responsiveness of cloud-based applications and could enable AWS to grow its customer-base.

AWS also revealed that it will be working with a number of partners as it moves into the region, including RightScale, a cloud management technology, and Acquia, which provides hosted Drupal to over 2,000 customers.

“With the capability to achieve single-digit millisecond latency to end-users in Sydney [and] store data locally in Australia. We expect the launch of AWS’s Sydney Region to further increase the amount of Australian and New Zealand customers leveraging AWS,” Andy Jassy, AWS’s senior vice president, said in a statement.

The new Sydney region supports myriad AWS services including Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Amazon Elastic Map Reduce, Amazon SimpleDB and Amazon CloudWatch. Access the full list here. 

At a time when its primary competitors are picking up steam, Amazon is focused on international expansion. Asia Pacific is its ninth region since it launched in 2002; the company already has a strong presence in three regions in the U.S, as well as Tokyo, Sao Paolo and Ireland. Only the Middle East and Africa lack a strong AWS presence.

This summer, high-profile AWS customers were affected by several major blackouts that was caused by a latent bug. Netflix, Foursquare, Reddit and others were down.

Image via Shutterstock

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Google has taken its integrations one step further and made it incredibly easy to share files from Google Drive to its Google+ social network, the company announced in a blog post today.

Google Drive launched in April and has likely taken away at least some business from Dropbox, Box, SugarSync, and other cloud storage players. In June, Google said it would bring Drive to iOS and Chrome OS. And since then, Drive has added more features to make it a more robust offering. Now it’s got deep Google+ integration.

When you’re inside of Drive, all you need to do is click the Google+ icon to share your content to the social network. Or you can simply copy and paste a link from your Drive file into a post on Google+.

Google Program Manager Louis Gray writes:

Google+ is already a great place to share photos, videos, updates, and ideas. Google Drive is your cloud destination for all this content and more. Starting today, you can share content from Drive right here in your stream. I’ve been looking forward to this launch in a big way, and it’s incredible to see it here. Go forth and share.

Photo credit: Google/YouTube

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Michigan-based Yottabyte claims to have a cloud-based operating system to control and manage virtually anything.

The startup is coming out of stealth mode today with a plan to build private, public, and hybrid enterprise cloud storage, creating Google- and Amazon-like clouds that runs on an existing storage area network (SAN). Its OS has been in beta for months.

Yottabyte was founded in 2010. It has raised just under $10 million in private investment and competes with Mountain View, Calif.-based Nimbula.

The product’s concept originated when the founders, Gregory M. Campbell and Paul Hodges, were sitting in a conference room tossing around ideas. “If we could put these together in a suite or a single system, we could actually deliver on the original intent of the cloud,” Campbell, the company’s CTO, explained. “The big, scaled out, successful public cloud companies like Google and Amazon built their infrastructures with inexpensive, no-name equipment and custom software built by gifted teams of Ph.D-level engineers employed to build these complicated, scalable systems.”

Most business can’t afford to employ these full research teams. Yottabyte aims to be a lower-cost software alternative that still runs on commodity hardware. It’s a nice idea, but analysts fear that it may be “overly ambitious.”

Yottabyte does not currently support public clouds such as Google Cloud Storage and Microsoft Windows Azure. It has its own data centers on each coast and a third in Bloomfield, Mich., where the company is based.

Image via Shutterstock

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

In the race against stiff competition from Amazon EC2 and Rackspace, Microsoft announced today that it has acquired cloud-integrated storage device, StorSimple, the complement to its cloud-based infrastructure, Azure.

With today’s acquisition for an undisclosed sum, Microsoft has lifted the veil off its long-term strategy. Instead of luring enterprises away from the competition, it is focusing on an entirely new subset of customers.

The plan is to win over large enterprises that are still using traditional disks before Amazon or Rackspace can get to them.

“Customers faced with explosive growth in data are looking to the cloud to help them store, manage, and archive that data. But, to be effective, cloud storage needs to integrate with IT’s current investments,” said Michael Park, corporate vice president, Server and Tools Division for Microsoft, in a statement.

A technology like StorSimple is attractive to investors and potential acquirers because it connects with multiple cloud services — including ones offered by Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and Rackspace — and an enterprise’s on-premise storage. It is breaking down the barriers that have prevented large enterprises from selecting cloud-based services.

“The StorSimple device sits in between the cloud storage infrastructure and its applications and makes it look like they are talking to a local disk,” explained Mike Volpi, an enterprise-focused investor at Index Ventures who has been an advisor to the company since 2009.

Finally, Microsoft will be able to offer customers all the software components they require, without the involvement of a third-party supplier. For several years, it has been selling StorSimple as a bundle with the Azure product.

“They saw it was working very well and was helping Azure gain market traction,” said Volpi. His firm, Index Ventures, participated in all three of StorSimple’s funding rounds.

As is typically the case with acquisitions of this magnitude, StorSimple will be rebranded as a Microsoft product. The founding team will remain in the Bay Area.

Microsoft officials say that StorSimple will continue to support rival storage partners, whether on-premise or in the cloud (click here to view the list of partners on the company’s website). However, it is not yet clear whether StorSimple’s features will be altered to enhance Azure.

Image via Shutterstock

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Siasto, the tiny startup that competes with Huddle, Podio, Asana, and Microsoft Sharepoint, is making a name for itself as the disruptive newcomer on the scene.

On Siasto, sign up for free, and you can immediately get to work adding tasks, uploading your documents, and inviting your colleagues or friends to join your “team.” An administrator can invite people to work on a project team, or can delete a project altogether.

What’s unique and impossible to ignore about the technology is the tight integration with Google Docs. Users can open and edit a Google Doc from their mobile device or desktop browser within Siasto, meaning they’ll have access to a real-time collaborative text editor. The Google integration is ubiquitous in the design — for instance, your Google + image is auto-uploaded to your profile.

Siasto cofounder, Nic Pantucci

The idea stemmed from the success of Taskforce, the founders’ last product. Taskforce, a Gmail integrated task manager, received thousands of sign-ups and requests for integrations into other popular collaboration software services.

“We didn’t like any of them and so decided to build our own,” said founder Nic Pantucci (pictured left). Co-founder Courtland Allen was one of the first developers to ever build on the Facebook platform.

Unlike its competition, Siasto has already secured valuable partnerships with all the major players: Google Apps, Gmail, Google Drive, GCal, Box, and Dropbox.

In September, the company announced an integration with Box. At the time, Box’s Aaron Levie praised Siasto for its slick user interface and the ability to drill down into a project in a single click.

The San Francisco-based startup with only two employees is certainly punching above its weight. It has brought in several large enterprises as customers, including Thompson Reuters, the British National Health Service (NHS), and Accenture. According to its cofounders, the collaboration space is heating up, and in less than six months, there are thousands of teams already using its software.

Siasto is making a push into the enterprise, but it has not forgotten about its small-business roots. To appeal to students and small businesses, the company has also announced a new “freemium” pricing structure. Up to three people can use the tool for free for 10 projects and get one gigabyte of free storage space. Starting today, Siasto is charging on a per-user basis (rather than a per-project basis), which it views as a fairer option for smaller teams.

The company says its greatest challenge will be to overcome the stiff competition in the space but is convinced that its tool is easier to use than the alternatives. “Many of Siasto’s users were using competitor products previously but switched their allegiances once they started using Siasto,” said Pantucci.

Siasto claims that it is already profitable after launching in April, 2012. The company has raised a small seed round from Y Combinator and a series of angel investors.