Makes some sense, no?

So the ratings site checked all the credits on the all-time top 500 movies. And then checked where those actors, directors, and producers went to school to learn their trade.

The result?

A ranked list of the top 25 film schools in the world — or, at least, the English-speaking world:

1. New York University (208 credits)
2. University of Southern California (186 credits)
3. University of California – Los Angeles (165 credits)
4. Yale University (110 credits)
5. Julliard School (106 credits)
6. Columbia University (100 credits)
7. Harvard University (90 credits)
8. Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (86 credits)
9. Fiorello H. Laguardia High School of Music & Art (64 credits)
10. American Academy of Dramatic Arts (51 credits)
11. London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art (51 credits)
12. Stanford University (50 credits)
13. HB Studio (49 credits)
14. Northwestern University (47 credits)
15. The Actors Studio (44 credits)
16. Brown University (43 credits)
17. University of Texas – Austin (40 credits)
18. Central School of Speech and Drama (39 credits)
19. Cornell University (39 credits)
20. Guildhall School of Music and Drama (38 credits)
21. University of California – Berkeley (38 credits)
22. California Institute of the Arts (38 credits)
23. University of Michigan (37 credits)
24. Beverly Hills High School (36 credits)
25. Boston University (35 credits)

Using publicly available data on movie quality was critical, according to Ranker data scientist Ravi Iyer. Ranker used data from Freebase, DBPedia, IMDB, and its own rankings in order to arrive at a list of quality movies from which the source data was gathered.

Otherwise, of course, movie-mill film companies that produce reams of B-quality films would skew the rankings.

When the company mashed the data, it turns out that even though USC produced the most film credits by graduates overall, NYU produces more credits on the top 500 movies. Interestingly, some high schools made the list, such as New York’s Fiorello H. Laguardia High School, at number nine, and L.A.’s Beverly Hills High School, at number 24.

It’s perhaps not exactly big data, with 500 movies and perhaps 100-250 contributors to each, but it is a big data approach to solving a problem.

photo credit: silkolive via photopin cc

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Raindance Technologies has closed a $20 million fifth round of funding with strategic investment from Myriad Genetics, the biotech company at the center of this month’s debate about we should be able to patent human genes.

Myriad’s involvement in the landmark federal case has not put a road block in its expansion plans. The company has signed a multiyear commercial agreement with Lexington, Mass.-based Raindance. The terms of the investment dictate that Raindance will provide technology to improve Myriad’s hereditary cancer test and speed up its process for large-volume genetic testing.

Raindance’s best-known genetics research product, dubbed “Thunderstorm,” helps its customers target 20,000 regions of the genome using any of the commercially available gene-sequencing technologies.

In recent years, the cost of sequencing the human genome has fallen, reaching a low of $1,000 in 2012 due to a microchip and machines designed by genomics company Life Technologies Corp. Raindance is one of the companies that seeks to capitalize on these developments, and it’s providing research tools for the growing crop of genetics labs.

“Imagine all diagnostics some day being reduced to a simple blood test,” said CEO Roopam Banerjee, who believes Raindance products are a “step in that direction.” The company’s overarching mission is to develop more reliable methods for researchers and physicians to detect disease and predisposition risk.

In a phone interview, Banerjee said he took on additional funding as the company is at an “inflection point.” He explained, ”We – along with our customers — have generated some compelling data to track complex human disease noninvasively.”

Raindance claims its customers will process 50,000 samples in 2013 and 100,000 samples in 2014 alone. According to Banerjee, the company doubled its sales in the previous year and anticipates explosive growth in the wake of the funding.

Existing investors Mohr Davidow Ventures, Quaker BioVentures, Alloy Ventures, Acadia Woods, and Sectoral Asset Management also participated in the funding round.

Top image via Raindance 

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Social networks offer unparalleled insights into how humans interact with each other. But sometimes that insight’s not so thrilling.

This is the case with the latest analysis from answer engine Wolfram Alpha, which examined the usage habits its Facebook Personal Analytics users and found that…well, we’re all pretty boring.

Here’s a summary of some of the more notable findings, some of which are depressingly stereotypical, according to Wolfram Alpha designer Stephen Wolfram.

The median number of Facebook friends is 342, a number that varies based on how old you are: Teenagers tend to have more friends than adults do.

When you’re younger, most of your friends are your own age, but the range of ages broadens as you get older.

Teenage boys tend to have more friends than teenage girls, but that difference disappears as they get older.

The older you get, the more likely you are to be married; women get married earlier than men; and, by 30, about 70 percent of people are married. (“It’s as if all those humans, with all the complexities of their lives, still behave in aggregate a bit like molecules—with certain “reaction rates” to enter into relationships, marry, etc,” Wolfram says.)

As people get older, they talk less about things like video games and more about politics, weather, health, and money. Men love to talk about sports and technology, while women tend to talk about pets, family, relationships, and their personal moods.

What’s worth keeping in mind here is this data is limited to the small number of Facebook users who let Wolfram Alpha use it — so just imagine what Facebook itself is able to deduce about the people who use the social network.

Similar to the data that OkCupid periodically releases about how people use the service, all of these findings also confirm that our social networks know more about us than we do ourselves.

“But what to me is remarkable is how we can see everything laid out in such quantitative detail in the pictures above — kind of a signature of people’s thinking as they go through life,” Stephen Wolfram writes.

When we consider the word “search,” most of us will conjure up a mental image of a Google search box.

But Google isn’t the be-all and end-all for search. The newly launched startup SRCH2 doesn’t focus on standard web search, a space inhabited by Google and Bing. It’s offering a new take on “enterprise search.”

“We are trying to make enterprise search more Google-like,” said SRCH2 CEO Dev Bhatia [right] in a phone interview. “And make Google search available across all handsets and devices,” he explained.

Enterprise search specifically refers to the practice of making information, available from within multiple corporate data sources, searchable to an audience. Consider the typical search bar on Home Depot’s or Macy’s websites.

A group of ex-Googlers founded SRCH2. They have raised seed funding from a roster of high-profile investors, including Data Collective Zachary Bogue and Matt Ocko, Redpoint’s Brad Jones, Horizen Ventures, and TenOneTen Ventures, a new Southern California venture firm created by Gil Elbaz and David Waxman, the founders of Applied Semantics.

The problem is that enterprise search results are not nearly as relevant or instantaneous as a Google web search. This is particularly true when you’re performing a search on a mobile device. The problem has perpetuated, says Bhatia, because most search technology is an extension of Apache Lucene, an open-source project that was not developed to meet the needs of today’s consumers.

Bhatia considers search companies ElasticSearch and LucidWorks as the primary competition. But he clarifies that these search products are built on top of Lucene. SRCH2 is developed from the ground up.

Also potentially challenging for the startup’s growth is that some companies will task their developers to build an in-house solution for search. Bhatia said this is labor intensive, time-consuming, and in most cases “30 times slower” than SRCH2.

Customers can pay for an annual license (usually in the five-figure range) or a hosted platform model, which is how SRCH2 plans to make money. Bhatia said the technology is currently used by a handful of large beta testers — primarily in the e-commerce space — but the company can’t disclose them yet.

Top image via SRCH2

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It’s no secret that a cadre of data analysts helped President Barack Obama secure a second term: While on campaign trail, the campaign rigorously assessed and measure the electorate with a batter of new tracking tools.

Political candidates are harnessing this proliferation of data in new ways. But how can you use this information to hold politicians more accountable?

A startup called ElectNext has developed a database that can determine where politicians really stand on the issues. It gleans its information from organizations like The Sunlight Foundation, GovTrack, and Follow the Money, and it also works with open data-friendly cities like Philadelphia.

And the company just closed a $1.3 million funding round so it can bring its data to where it’s needed most: the media.

“If ElectNext can be the vehicle that helps us deliver open data to the public, that’s a perfect partnership,” said Sunlight Labs director Tom Lee, the data arm of the Sunlight Foundation.

When ElectNext launched at the DEMO conference in October, it was focused on consumers. In the run-up to the presidential election, the survey would help you decide who to vote for.

“‘Big data’ is the biggest trend in politics today. Yet all the benefit of that big data is going to industry, not individuals. We’re here to change that,” Dannenbaum said at DEMO.

The mission struck a nerve with the audience. Andreessen Horowitz partner Frank Chen wrapped up the reviews by calling ElectNext the most compelling presentation of the day.

Since then, the Philadelphia and New York-based company has been building technology that can better integrate with its set of media partners.

So if you’re on a political news site and come across an issue, a person or a political event, click on an ElectNext embedded profile. Each profile will contain relevant biographical, campaign finance and legislative information. ElectNext is currently working with The PBS NewsHour, Hearst, the Washington Post, and the Philadelphia Inquirer, among others.

The new focus on the media will lead to new revenue opportunities. Dannenbaum told me she envisions a subscription service for politicians and political groups who want to monitor their earned media across ElectNext’s publishing partners.

The seed round was led by Brooklyn Bridge Ventures along with Liberty City Ventures, Digital News Ventures, Gabriel Investments, The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, Comcast Ventures and Investor’s Circle.

Top image via DEMO Conference // Stephen Brashear 

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Imagine using data to pinpoint the most high-performing employees and keep them satisfied?

A startup called Evolv is building technology to make that possible, and it has raised $15 million in a fourth funding round led by Vantage Point Capital.

“We prevent the wrong person ending up in the wrong job,” said Max Simkoff, the company’s founder and CEO, in an interview.

Evolv’s team of data scientists have developed software they claim can increase workforce tenure by an average of 15 percent and workforce performance by 5 percent. The product compiles data from disparate sources and makes recommendations.

“It’s hard to understand why it’s radically predictive, but it’s radically predictive,” said Jim Meyerle, Evolv’s cofounder.

More specifically, the in-house data science team will extract information like termination history and performance data, then combine it with relevant econometrics, like gas prices and nationwide unemployment rates. To bolster the data sets, Evolv pushes out surveys to its customers’ employees about social media usage, work history, and other core traits and competencies.

Evolv showcases how “big data can be leveraged to improve stagnant business processes,” said Bill Harding, Managing Director, VantagePoint Capital Partners, and a newly-appointed member of the company’s board of directors.

Since forming in 2007, the company has scored some high-profle contracts with household-name customers, such as Xerox, that pay a six figure sum for an annual subscription.

Evolv’s San Francisco-based team will use the cash at its disposal to build out its sales and marketing team, and expand internationally. Previoius investors, GGV, Khosla and Lightspeed Ventures, also participated in this latest funding round.

In November, we reported on Evolv’s partnership with The Wharton School of business. The effort was not just about helping Fortune 500 companies recruit talent and boost productivity — there are tools like SAP’s SuccessFactors and Oracle-owned Taleo for that. Instead, the partners were looking to better understand (and potentially combat) high attrition rates in US workplaces.

Top image via Shutterstock

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In the past few weeks we’ve been under a data deluge. There have been data-fueled debates over the performance of Tesla cars and who will win the Oscars. Esteemed journalists have pointed out what “data can’t do.”

This drives home a point: Data is a hugely important theme making its influence felt all around us, regardless of whether or not it’s overhyped.

It is also clear that while we still haven’t perfected how to use data to “change everything” for the better, we’ll work toward that. We are merely in the Pleistocene era of data, much as we’re in the very early stages of our overall technological development. Who doesn’t anticipate our future holds vast improvements in wireless communication, transportation and personal computing technologies?

John De Goes makes really solid arguments about changing our perspective on the “big data” industry and meme. I think we should view data as being a part of most everything. After all, we don’t think of “technology” as a discrete concept. There are few facets of contemporary life that are not driven, augmented or produced by technology.

Making the most of the data you know

Data itself is not the be-all and end-all (as David Brooks has said). There are so many x-factors in our world that data cannot account for right now: ideas like context, and variables such as human whim and emotion.

Interestingly, the human factor also makes data work for us. We are quite adept at making the best of what’s available to us in a specific time or era. Think of earlier milestones in human advancement, the furthest extent these developments were taken to and the maximum benefit or consequence achieved. The atom bomb was developed and it helped end a war (we can save the political and moral discussion for another day). Computers were invented and moved from room-sized to pocket-sized. Think about how many facets of our lives have been impacted by these developments.

In this and every era, we will make the most of the data we have. It won’t fix everything, but there’s little it won’t impact. As technology advances, so too will the pervasiveness of data in everything, everywhere.

What’s obvious right now is that data has entered mainstream life, and just look at a few reasons why everyone needs to care:

Data is driving business decision-making

The much-discussed Netflix show House of Cards was essentially a product of data. The show and its unique distribution model have been bandied about as heralding a new type of entertainment production. Netflix’s entire business — not just this program — is built on and focused around data insights and usage. It looks like our entertainment future will likely be very data-driven.

But forget the Kevin Spacey character’s thirst for power, and think of a more “romantic” human desire: the search for love or partnership. Online dating companies say that a growing percentage of us are meeting a future spouse digitally. This means a lot of data is shaping a lot of human interaction, and possibly altering the make up of future society.

As Matt Asay has said, “According to IDC, Big Data is set to explode to $23.8 billion in 2016, fueled by our need to be more data-driven in everything from how we do business to how we eat.”

Data makes you buy

As digital ad spending outstrips print and is poised to be the big dog in marketing, data grows right along with it. Down the road, nearly all forms of marketing will be digitized in some way — addressable and targetable. This will create an even deeper trough of data for marketers, brands, agencies and media companies to mine for insights.

Those who prevail will be able to sift through the biggest pile of sand and extract the gold nuggets. We’re seeing more marketers rely on technological solutions that help them take control of the vast trove of data available. This is critical because it allows marketers to focus on the creativity and strategy of marketing, while technology companies provide them with the tools and information that enable them to do so.

Jonathan Gardner is director of communications at Turn, the cloud marketing platform. He has spent his career as an innovator at the nexus of media and technology, having worked in communications and as a journalist.

Photo: Leonardo Rizzi via photopin

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“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

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Firebase‘s cofounder James Tamplin wants to make the process of developing an app “10 times easier,” so he built a product that will do the hard work for you.

Launching to the public today, Tamplin’s Firebase provides a backend for developers so they won’t need to scale up hardware or servers from a provider like Amazon Web Services or Rackspace. Anyone with a basic understanding of HTML or Javascript can build an app, and Firebase will “do the rest,” said Tamplin (left), who is an alumni of elite tech accelerator program, Y Combinator.

Tamplin claims that Firebase is a step ahead of Heroku and is the first of its kind to offer a real-time solution. It’s ideal for companies who don’t have access to technical talent. Firebase can sync data in milliseconds, so you can build apps in a matter of minutes, not weeks.

Firebase came to my attention through Data Collective‘s Zachary Bogue, who said that it has been quietly building buzz and making the rounds with developers. One of Firebase’s most recent hires to the seven-person team “wrote the WebRTC spec,” according to Tamplin. (WebRTC is a project that was open sourced by Google).

In addition, hundreds of startups in the social networking and gaming space have signed on to the beta. Customers include Codecademy, Klout, and Atlassian Software.

Firebase will make its money by charging developers $4 a gigabyte for storage, and $2 for bandwidth. According to Tamplin, developers will pay for the service as the alternative is to build a real-time distributed system in Java, Node, or another language.

“The end goal of the product is to help developers build amazing experiences they wouldn’t have otherwise be able to build — and even bring novices that just started programming into the fold,” said Tamplin.

The San Francisco-based startup has already raised $1.4 million in seed funding from Bogue, Greylock Partners, New Enterprise Associates, and Flybridge, among others.

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This company officially emerged out of stealth mode, is within days of shipping its first batch of devices, and announced $6 million in its first round of funding. Connected Data manufactures the Transporter, a piece of hardware that is “online, but off-cloud” for privately sharing, accessing, and protecting files.

The investment was led by a diiptych of gates- Floodgate and Northgate Capital, who are paving the way for Connected Data to distribute their product nationwide.

The Transporter’s $100,000 Kickstarter campaign launched in December and successfully brought in $260,000 from 1,055 backers. Since then, Connected Data signed a deal with a large technology distributor and partnered with national retailers to bring the Transporter to market.

Using the Transporter, people can communicate and shares files with computers and other Transporters from anywhere in the world. It enables communication and global access, while also ensuring security. Traditional hardware storage is not connected to the internet which makes it challenging to share and sync data, while cloud options can be expensive and unreliable for people with large storage needs. The Transporter bridges the gap between the two.

Connected Data was founded in 2011 by “storage professionals” who were frustrated by the available options. Now, there are three versions of the Transporter available. A $199 device with no storage built in, a $299 device with 1 TB, and a $399 with 2 TB of storage.

The team is based in Santa Clara, Calif. Read the company’s blog post. 

Russian search engine Yandex shut down its social search app Wonder today. Why? Because Facebook’s data is worth that much.

Facebook’s data is a rich pool of information that, when used appropriately, could create some really interesting products outside advertising. Yandex showed us that when it launched Wonder last week. But Facebook doesn’t allow anyone to use its data to “replicate” its own features or provide obvious ways to share back to the social network, so Wonder is being taken off the table.

“Wonder’s functioning, in its current state, as well as the quality of user experience it provides, largely depends on the access to Facebook’s Graph API,” a Yandex spokesperson told VentureBeat in an email. “Since this access was revoked, we decided to put our application on hold for the time being.”

Yandex launched Wonder last week, calling it an experimental product. The app used voice-to-text software from Nuance to allow anyone to ask natural language questions out loud and receive answers on their phone. Answers were based on data from Facebook, Foursquare, Instagram, and Twitter, but the app only served questions related to places, news, and music at its launch. In order to protect itself from Facebook, the company explained that it does not consider itself a search engine and thus it is not in violation of Facebook’s platform policies. Facebook didn’t agree.

After cutting off data access for Wonder, a social search app from Russian search engine Yandex, Facebook explained today that if you’re building an app that “replicates” its “core functionality,” its data stream is not for the taking.

“For … apps that are using Facebook to either replicate our functionality or bootstrap their growth in a way that creates little value for people on Facebook, such as not providing users an easy way to share back to Facebook, we’ve had policies against this that we are further clarifying today,” wrote Justin Osofsky, Facebook’s director of platform partnerships and operations, in a blog post.

Osofsky explained that Facebook wants to provide resources to any developer who wants to build an app for the social network. He added that Facebook wants to make an environment in which it is easy for developers to create social experiences that are equally as easily shared across the network.

A Yandex spokesperson told VentureBeat via email last night, “We are in touch with Facebook to figure out on reasons and ways to solve the problem. As of now, any new Wonder user who is trying to sign up with their Facebook’s account in Wonder gets the notification by Facebook ‘An error occurred. Please try again later.’ Users who has already been signed up can still ask questions, but the Facebook data will not be updated. Instagram, Foursquare and Twitter data are being updated normally.”

Wonder, which took Facebook’s data and used it in search results evidently didn’t fit the bill. The company tried to head off Facebook by pointing out Facebook’s policy to not provide data to search engines. It then explained that Wonder is not a search engine but a personal assistant.

Facebook also recently shut down data access to voice mail app Voxer, which let you find your friends through Facebook, but it didn’t provide obvious ways to share back to the social network.

The company’s new Platform Policy section 1.10 now reads:

“Reciprocity and Replicating core functionality: (a) Reciprocity: Facebook Platform enables developers to build personalized, social experiences via the Graph API and related APIs. If you use any Facebook APIs to build personalized or social experiences, you must also enable people to easily share their experiences back with people on Facebook. (b) Replicating core functionality: You may not use Facebook Platform to promote, or to export user data to, a product or service that replicates a core Facebook product or service without our permission.”

Mark Zuckerberg image via Meghan Kelly/VentureBeat

Facebook is giving no data love to Yandex, a Russian search engine that launched a social search iOS app today called Wonder. While Wonder lets you ask natural-language queries in a method similar to Facebook’s own Graph Search, the company said the app is not, in fact, a search engine but rather a personal assistant.

The app launched this morning, and according to TechCrunch, it only lasted three hours before Facebook pulled access to its data. The app lets you search across Instagram, Foursquare, Twitter, and earlier in the day, Facebook. You can ask questions like “What are sushi places my friends like?” and it will provide you with a list of restaurants approved by your buddies. The company warned that it was purely experimental and that you’d only be able to ask it questions about places, music, and news at this point.

But Facebook recently released it own search called Graph Search, which does exactly this, only it pulls exclusively from Facebook’s data.

Thinking it could head-off Facebook’s data withholding, the company released a statement saying that it did not consider itself a search engine or directory, therefore it was not in violation of Facebook’s platform policy. Facebook will not let anyone index its data for a directory or search engine without its permission first.

As TechCrunch notes, this decision to block data from Yandex’s Wonder app doesn’t seem to affect the broader Yandex search engine.

You can still use Wonder as per usual. You just may not be able to access as much data as you once could. The two companies are reportedly in conversations about the data.

We have reached out to both Yandex and Facebook and will update upon hearing back.

Hose kink image via Shutterstock

Won a place at a four-year college? The odds are against you that you’ll graduate in less than six years — if you complete your program at all. There are an estimated 37 million people in America that have some college experience, but no degree.

If there is a technology solution to this problem, Canadian startup Desire2Learn, wants to be the first to market. With its third acquisition, the well-funded ed-tech company is exploring how predictive analytics can reduce the time it takes for students to graduate college.

Jeff McDowell led the acquisition of “Netflix effect” software Degree Compass

Today, the company has bought the much-hyped “Netflix effect” software for an undisclosed sum. The product is called “Degree Compass,” and it is the brainchild of Tristan Denley and a team of developers at Austin Peay State University, who received a $1 million grant from the Gates Foundation.

It works by helping its users select courses based on their academic interests, and the success rates of students with a similar set of competencies. Inspired by sites with recommendations engines like Netflix and Pandora, the algorithm combs through hundreds of thousands of previous students’ grades and transcripts to make its highly personalized suggestions.

Degree Compass pulls its data from the student information system (SIS), so it can be installed in any university, regardless of whether its a customer of D2L’s learning management system.

According to Jeff McDowell, D2L’s business development and marketing lead, this buy-up will create social value and generate revenue for the already profitable company. “The next evolution in this space [ed-tech] is the analytical layer with all the data that is generated about students and schools,” he said by phone.

McDowell said he was recently approached by Denley to discuss ways to commercialize the software (see below), which was already being used by colleges across Tennessee. This morphed into a conversation about a potential acquisition, with Degree Compass’ developers and data scientists joining the D2L team.

Students get course recommendations in the form of star ratings.

D2L has been building its own analytics toolset for teachers and administrators since it launched in 2009, and saw an opportunity to reach students. The company’s software-as-a-service tools are used by 700 K-12 and higher-ed institutions throughout North America.

Degree Compass is likely to be folded into D2L’s existing set of products in the long-term. “I suspect it could happen,” said McDowell, who added that Denley is under contract to provide ongoing “innovation and evangelism” and help the company connect with college students.

“The ROI on this is huge,” he continued. “If the product is able to save two students from dropping out of college, the tool has paid for itself.” McDowell would not reveal pricing information at this time.

In September 2012, we reported that Desire2Learn had received the largest infusion of investment capital in Canadian startup history. The Waterloo, Ontario-based company pulled in $80 million from New Enterprise Associates (NEA) and OMERS Ventures, the venture arm of one of Canada’s largest pension fund managers.

Top image via Lasse Kristensen // Shutterstock 

Radius has raised $12.4 million to measure these ripples and turn them into actionable sales insights.

Radius crawls the Internet for information about small businesses. The engine collects data in real time from over 22 million businesses and indexes it into a goldmine for sales teams. The information is highly searchable and, when combined with lead generation tools and CRM integrations, makes it much easier for companies to identify potential customers and partners.

The brain behind the company is Darian Shirazi, Facebook’s first intern, who forsook college to pursue life as an entrepreneur. Forbes recently named Shirazi one of its 30 Under 30 tech pioneers. Shirazi swung by the VentureBeat offices to chat about his startup, the funding, and the future of small businesses in America.

“There are big challenges today for business trying to sell to or work with small businesses because there is no good deep information about small mom and pop businesses,” he said. “We are trying to add as much data as we possibly can from all over the web to track the small business economy, which represents 70% of the American economy and is responsible for eight times as many jobs.”

Amassing data of this kind is difficult — many of these companies have a weak (or no) online presence, and their churn rate is extremely high. Shirazi said that 10% of small businesses either move, die, or come into being every month, making it a monumental task to keep up with the rapidly changing index. Furthermore, Radius faces challenges like variations in labels (such as “and” vs. “&”) and distinguishing between multiple stores with the same name. Shirazi and his team, however, are passionate and up for the task.

“My family has started businesses for hundreds of years,” he said. “I care about the small-business economy and I care about data. There isn’t really a way to do this halfway. We have spent the past three years working on this database. This funding will help us build a sales team for ourselves, add engineers, add new data sources, and build up a data science team to build the best data product out there for small businesses.”

Using Radius, sales and marketing teams targeting small businesses can apply specific filters like ratings, increasing/decreasing traffic, minority-owned etc., to pull up lists of businesses that fit their criteria. Based on the results, they can build informed and actionable lead lists. Target customers include daily deals and e-commerce sites, business insurance agencies, web hosting companies, and payment platforms.

The financial sector represents a major market for Radius’ technology, which is why American Express significantly contributed to this round. While Shirazi did not comment on whether this was a strategic partnership, he did say there was “alignment” and “overlap” between his product and American Express’ goals.

Radius’ data is valuable for a huge range of applications. As small business owners become more tech-savvy, this is just the first toe dip into the pool.

Existing investor Blue Run Ventures also participated, after throwing in for Radius’ first $6 million round along with Comcast. Radius is based in San Francisco and has 20 employees.

This is a guest post by journalist Andy Meek

President Obama’s former campaign’s director of digital analytics, Amelia Showalter, is now a kind of political sabermetrician-for-hire.

Showalter has launched her own consultancy in Washington D.C. that will employ a lot of the same “Moneyball” tactics which drove the Obama campaign, including the rigorous testing of data and assumptions in order to drive decision-making.

Amelia Showalter, one of Obama’s top backroom numbers-crunchers

“The culture of testing we had in the campaign was really incredible,” Showalter said by phone. “My team’s purview was to help all the other teams within digital to test and improve their outreach. And we tested everything — email, ads, you name it — and measured everything from changing formats to subject lines.”

With Obama’s campaign manager hiring an analytics department five times as large as that of the 2008 operation, there has been a shift in attitudes in the nation’s capital. According to Showalter, political data nerds who encountered “plenty of resistance over the years,” are seeing no shortage of job offers. “Curiosity has replaced skepticism,” she said.

“Part of the reason I feel confident starting my own shop is that data and testing are gaining mainstream familiarity and acclaim after the 2012 election,” she continued.

Showalter’s not the only Obama tech vet to make moves in the months after the election.

Ashley Arenson, who had been director of integration and innovation for the campaign, is the new general manager at SoHo Tech Labs, Lerer Ventures’ in-house incubator.

For Obama’s former analytics team, it’s not about imitating what the Obama campaign did right.

The campaign was basically testing everything, every day. Some days, for example, you might get an email from the campaign with the subject line “hey” — an intimate greeting that encouraged a certain amount of people to open the missive who might not have otherwise if it had included a more run-of-the-mill subject line.

Other emails to supporters might include a large photo of the president for some recipients, while other recipients of that same message might see a more closely-cropped photo — or, heck, a different photo altogether. And that’s just email, not to mention the campaign’s other social media and digital efforts.

Showalter will help organizations develop an interest in running tests and use data to drive their decision-making, so they can develop their own set of best practices.

For now, Showalter expects her new venture to focus on working with campaigns, advocacy organizations and to stay generally rooted in the political sphere. The consulting services she’ll provide include strategic advice on how organizations can design and run experiments, help with test plan implementation, assess online fundraising plans, and analyze relevant data.

Her data analysis can include experimental results, an organization’s archival data, polling data and electoral results, voter files and demographic data.

Data helped to drive engagement and more successful outcomes for the Obama campaign, whether through a pop in volunteerism or an influx of dollars. It’s up to Showalter and Obama’s former campaign staffers to determine what comes next.

Andy Meek is a journalist in Memphis who frequently contributes to outlets including Fast Company, Forbes, Politico, and several tech blogs.

spirit of america / Shutterstock.com

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But Ayasdi, a startup that closed $10 million in venture funding today, doesn’t just talk the talk. Stanford researchers have been baking the complex algorithms behind Ayasdi (its quirky name means “to seek,” in Cherokee) for over a decade, with the goal of unlocking the hidden value in human genetic data.

In 2008, the founders, Gurjeet Singh, Dr. Gunnar Carlsson, and Harlan Sexton, decided to commercialize the technology. With the government stepping up its funding for science, they were able to pull in $3.5 million in grants from DARPA, the department of defense agency responsible for building new technology for the military, and the National Science Foundation. The result? A synthesis of machine learning technology and topological data analysis (TDA) that has impressed a score of Silicon Valley investors. Rather than typing in search-style queries, the tools allow for automated discovery of information.

As Dr. Carlsson explained in an interview, “The idea is to answer questions that you didn’t know to ask.”

Ayasdi CEO, Gurjeet Singh.

This year, the 30-person team of engineers will expand its marketing and sales efforts with funding from Khosla Ventures, Floodgate, Data Collective’s Matt Ocko, serial entrepreneur, Steve Blank, and more. Storied investor Vinod Khosla, who rocked the medical world with the statement that 80 percent of doctors would be replaced by machines, said Ayasdi’s “machine powered intelligence” has the potential to unearth “previously unattainable insights that will help solve some of our most pressing global, social, and economic issues.”

Eric Schadt, Director of the Institute for Genomics and Multiscale Biology, has a team of researchers using the technology to identify the genetic predispositions of many diseases, including cancer, which they hope will help them “glean new insights that will lead to breakthrough drug therapies.”

Related: In the burgeoning field of genomics, entrepreneurs aim to deliver more personalized treatments for life-threatening diseases.

Ayasdi is working with the nation’s top hospitals and medical researchers to uncover more targeted treatments for disease. Singh, the company’s CEO, told me that hospitals and big pharmas are routinely pulling data from public sources — medical researchers are required to publish their data  – and combine it with private data to yield new insights.

A data visualization depicting 14 variants of breast cancer

The data isn’t anything new — it’s the technology that has evolved. “We have automated the discovery of knowledge from data,” said Singh in a phone interview. “We were able to discover a new type of breast cancer without asking questions.”

Singh was referring to a recent breakthrough where Ayasdi mapped 14 variants of breast cancer. Using data collected during a 15 year period, and studied by thousands of scientists, the algorithms discovered a sub-group of patients that have a higher chance of survival based on their genetic profile. If a patient falls into this sub-group, it is unlikely that they will require chemotherapy.

Ocko witnessed this medical breakthrough first-hand in the minutes before he opened his check book. “The massive deficit that corporations and governments face as the amount of data gets exponentially larger is not more intelligence, it’s insights and intuition,” he explained by phone. The data-focused investor said the company’s ability to provide human analysts with “intuition from vast amounts of data in very short periods of time” is virtually unprecedented.

In another recent partnership, with Mount Sinai Medical Center, Ayasdi was used to point to targeted treatment options for E. coli sufferers. E. coli affects more than 265,000 people in the U.S. every year, and millions around the world. It is known in the medical community for developing resistance to many drugs, and doctors are never 100 percent sure if a treatment will work or not. Mount Sinai is using Ayasdi to analyze the entire E. coli genome sequence, which includes more than 1 million DNA variants. This will further our understanding of why some types of E. coli develop resistance to antibiotics and how we can combat the spread of the bacteria.

Singh, a former researcher at Stanford, told me that the company has secured 20 customers in the oil and gas, government, pharmaceutical, and healthcare sectors. Big name customers include Merck, the Food and Drug Administration, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

HealthCatalyst is the latest health technology startup to benefit from the Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare.

The startup, once known as Healthcare Quality Catalyst, provides health care data warehousing for 81 hospitals and health systems, serving 20 million patients. The company claims to be the only data warehouse that is specifically built for the healthcare industry.

This makes it ideally positioned to take advantage of Obamacare, which mandates that health providers and hospitals shift to to electronic records.

“Almost every hospital and hospital system will need a data warehouse to organize, visualize and utilize its data to address the $750 billion of waste in the U.S. healthcare system,” said Norwest Venture Partners’ Pramod Haque in a statement. He said that Health Catalyst can meet this need and boasts a “pipeline of health systems that are demanding the company’s solutions.” Its current customers include Stanford Hospital and Clinics and Texas Children’s Hospital.

The Salt Lake City-based company raised a mammoth $33 million in funding from a roster of venture capital firms. The second round was led by Norwest Venture Partners, with participation from existing investors Sequoia Capital and Sorenson Capital. Haque will join the board of directors, and Frank Bullock, Sorenson Capital’s managing director, will assume a role as a board adviser.

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Today, data analytics company Chartbeat released the latest creation from its company-wide hackathons: the Percent of the Internet tool. The tool shows you how many people, according to Chartbeat’s data, are using a certain browser or computer type at that moment.

It built the page in two hours and shows how many people at a given time are using Google’s Chrome browser, FireFox, Internet Explorer, Safari, and it also looks at whether people are using a Mac, PC, or Linux device. It is based on an application programming interface Chartbeat created by pulling all of its client data and making the client anonymous.

“We’ve already received some awesome feedback, so we may decide to expand on it and spend more than two hours on it in the future,” said Chartbeat brand manager Lauryn Bennett in an e-mail to VentureBeat.

When you click on a the browser icon, a new page will open with the percentage of “active browser sessions” using that browser (see the image to the right). The same goes for types of computers. At the time of writing this post, over 5 million people, 22 percent of Chartbeat’s customers, are using Firefox.

Chartbeat holds week-long hack events for its employees every six weeks. It’s kind of like Google 20 percent rule, where 20 percent of the employee’s time is spent on building personal projects. During this past hack week, three of Chartbeat’s employees — Daniel McGrath, Tom Germeau, and Tadas Vilkeliskis — put together the Percent of the Internet page. They used JavaScript and HTML 5 to build it.

“There are loads of estimates on browser usage that so many companies put out there, but we know it’s constantly changing, so we wanted a real-time data point on what the breakdown is,” said Bennett. “Internally, it’s helpful for us to keep an eye on … how we build our products, and since we work with so many sites, we thought it would be a great (really just a quick, fun) real-time breakdown for the Internet at large.”

Disclosure: VentureBeat uses Chartbeat’s products.

Wonder what your first tweet was? Now, you can finally find out.

Twitter announced this morning it is finally making historical data available to end users.

Previously, this kind of information had only been accessible to data-wranglers who paid big bucks to companies like Gnip. In fact, Gnip’s historical Twitter search just launched in September 2012 — a feature it was only able to introduce due to a close, longstanding partnership with Twitter.

Now that the same ability (for our own tweets, at least) is available to us common folk, we can now download all our Twitter updates, including retweets, starting with our very first message on the service. Once you’ve downloaded the archive, you can browse through your tweets chronologically by month; you can also choose to search for specific keywords, hashtags, or usernames. And yes, you can still retweet and favorite your old gems just as you’d be able to with more recent content.

To get your archive, go to Twitter and click on your settings. Scroll to the bottom, where you’ll see an option to request your Twitter archive. Check that little box, and Twitter will email you with more details on how to get your data and when it will be ready for download. Then sit back, twiddle your thumbs, and wait for a potentially cringe-worthy stroll down memory lane.

Apparently, meetings and PowerPoint slides kill more productivity than an alcoholic lunch. And, more than 50 percent of business data is locked away in inaccessible or unfriendly formats, resisting executives’ efforts to review, learn, and react to the most important information in their companies.

Roambi produces apps that free data from spreadsheets and databases and bring it alive in magazine-style graphical layouts, with charts and interactive graphics. More than 100,000 businesses and executives use its products, and the company surveyed those users to learn what works and what doesn’t in business and data.

Roambi’s iPhone app

There’s a great deal of anxiety about data  in the business world, the survey found.

For instance, 21 percent of those executives said that they could only review and derive value from 10-15 percent of their business data. Another 29.6 percent said they could see and act on between 25 and 50 percent of their business data. For 10 percent, key business data was simply inaccessible.

To deal with the problem, over two thirds of businesses said that business intelligence services were critically important investments in 2013, followed closely by mobile hardware and security.

Of course, good data — and good data tools — are one key to improving productivity. But the survey also asked about other productivity issues.

The top-rated productivity devices were laptops, with 40 percent of executives agreeing, followed by iPads at 30 percent and iPhones at 26.5 percent. Desktop PCs were rated only fourth, followed closely by coffee — and having a meeting canceled unexpectedly.

(And I thought I was the only one who was happy when that happened.)

On the time-wasters and productivity-killers side, however, meetings are unsurprisingly first, followed by PowerPoint presentations. And, perhaps astonishingly, office watercooler chats, Facebook and Twitter browsing, and multi-tasking were all rated more harmful than having an alcoholic drink over a business lunch.

Roambi says that 20 percent of the Fortune 50 companies use its tools for data visualization.

photo credit: || UggBoy♥UggGirl || PHOTO || WORLD || TRAVEL || via photopin cc

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July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

A new study by the Interactive Advertising Bureau says that most of our mobile video watching actually isn’t very mobile at all.

Sixty-three percent of video-watching on mobile phones, the study said, happens right at home, sweet home. And 36 percent that is right in the front of another, bigger screen: a home theater system, laptop, or a tablet. In other words, the researchers say, mobile video isn’t a way to kill minutes wasted in lineups or something to do when there are no other entertainment options, and this has implications for what kinds of video content brands and entertainment companies should focus on creating.

“We need to see mobile as a primary screen for on-demand consumption, not as an afterthought,” digital agency 360i’s president David Levin said in a statement.

The IAB did not speculate on why supposedly “mobile” video is mostly consumed at home, but this makes a lot of sense. Not only is your phone the most personal device — the go-to device wherever you are — but video consumes a lot of bandwidth. Data costs money when on cellular networks, and it’s typically much slower than on your own home Wi-Fi.

What do we watch? Almost exclusively entertainment content, strongly trending to music videos. There’s a reason Gangnam Style is the most-watched video in history.

• Music videos (45 percent)
• Movie trailers (42 percent)
• Tutorials/How-To’s (41 percent)
• Funny short video clips (37 percent)

What we share with others, though, is a little different: Funny clips and music videos are the most likely to be shared; tutorials and movie trailers are not nearly as viral.

Of course, the Interactive Advertising Board is interested in the use of mobile video for marketing purposes. How do people feel about mobile video ads?

• 53 percent said they’re OK with mobile video advertising
• 48 percent said video ads should relate to the video content they’re watching
• 44 percent remember seeing video ads (10-15 second spots are the most memorable)

The small but intensive study — just 200 participants — lasted for two weeks.

photo credit: mark sebastian via photopin cc

The much-hyped data analytics startup ClearStory Data has pulled in $9 million in funding from Kleiner Perkins, Andreessen Horowitz, and Google Ventures.

It’s still in its early days, but ClearStory is positioning itself as the next evolution of the typical analytics-heavy dashboard, which provides only a “rearview mirror” look into your data.

The problem is that valuable data lives in separate silos and often requires engineers to bring it together. ClearStory is developing the tools to pull in relevant data from Google, Twitter, Facebook and other sites and present it in a visually compelling way.

Silicon Valley-based ClearStory is one of a dozen technology startups that would support data services teams employed by large corporations — or replace data scientists altogether.

It’s certainly a crowded space, but it doesn’t hurt that founder and CEO Sharmila Shahani-Mulligan (pictured, left) has been an investor and advisor to Bay Area startups for years. She has a knack for joining startups that are ripe for acquisition. Prior to founding ClearStory, she worked at Kiva Software (acquired by Netscape for $180 million), Aster Systems (acquired by Teradata for $263 million), and Opsware (acquired by HP for $1.6 billion).

ClearStory is still being baked by the company’s 20-person team and will not be generally available until 2013. However, it says what makes ClearStory stand out is its capability to pull data from disparate sources. “Not all data is born and lives inside your company,” Shahani-Mulligan says on the ClearStory blog.

Shahani-Mulligan says that simply retrieving a sliver of data from a single database or website can be a “chore.” ClearStory wants to provide an alternative to the legacy data visualization products on the market, including QlikView and Tableau, which the company blog describes as “cumbersome” and unequipped to handle unstructured data (texts, email, and so on).

Clear Story’s clear focus is its user experience and design. According to GigaOm’s Derrick Harris, who had a sneak peek of the demo,  it’s similar in feel to Platfora’s Hadoop-based software  – “pretty visualizations and lots of dragging, dropping and collaboration.”

[Top image credit:  Bruce Rolff/Shutterstock]

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If you’re only protecting your enterprise’s perimeter, you’re not doing enough. Cloud encryption company CipherCloud, which just announced a $30 million first round of funding from Andreessen-Horowitz today, knows that it’s the data inside that cyber-criminals really want.

The best way to protect the cloud is still very much up in the air. Protecting the perimeter, or only accounting for the point of entry into your system, doesn’t help you when the bad guys get in anyway and start messing with your data. Just putting up firewalls doesn’t seem to work anymore. Now we’re sending our data out of the locked-up gates into the cloud, so CipherCloud encrypts that data before it ever reaches your cloud applications.

The data is encrypted in such a way that your cloud applications can still make use of the data, but in theory, it’s much safer since you hold the keys that decrypt it. You can also change the level of encryption you have based on your company’s needs. It works on applications such as Salesforce, Microsoft Office 365, Amazon Web Services, Google apps, and more.

It also uses tokens to protect the data in instances where encryption isn’t an excepted form of security. Some industries have different regulations on security measures, and CipherCloud caters to a range from banking institutions to healthcare. The tokens allow businesses to store their data on premises and then send a token — which is a form of the data, but not the exact file you want to protect — out to the cloud application.

CipherCloud faces competition from Vaultive and other such companies. Vaultive, which specializes in Microsoft Office 365 and Microsoft Exchange 2010, also encrypts an enterprise’s data before it reaches the cloud. It received $10 million from New Science Ventures, Harmony Partners, and .406 Ventures in February.

This is the first round of funding for CipherCloud, which was founded in 2010. It has 40 enterprise clients, and within that, 1.2 million users.

Cloud diagram via CipherCloud

Meeker is delivering her report to a group of Students at Stanford University, and Kleiner Perkins is live-tweeting the presentation on Twitter at @kpcb.

This is an update to a report Meeker delivered in May 2012, and it’s got a ton of new information.

We’re still digesting the slides, but the slide above (#24 in Meeker’s deck) is a real standout. Echoing a similar graph of computer system sales from Horace Dediu at Asymco, it shows the dramatic shift away from Windows-powered Intel machines (Wintel) in the past few years. Apple drove a wedge into the Wintel monopoly, but it’s Google’s Android OS that’s really eating Microsoft’s lunch. Since Q4 2010, combined shipments of tablets and smartphones have exceeded the number of PCs shipped, Meeker reports, and that trend shows no sign of reversing.

Other tidbits:

• Meeker’s data show 2.4 billion Internet users worldwide, a number that’s still growing eight percent yearly.
• There are 1.1 billion smartphone subscribers worldwide — but that’s still just 17 percent of the global cellphone market.
• 29 percent of adults in the U.S. now own either a tablet or an e-reader.
• Mobile devices now account for 13 percent of worldwide Internet traffic, up from 4 percent in 2010.
• Mobile app and advertising revenue has grown at an annual rate of 129 percent since 2008, and now tops $19 billion.
• Mobile traffic app Waze has been adding users faster than all GPS makers combined have sold personal navigation units, and it’s been that way since the beginning of 2012.

Meeker’s presentation goes on to spell out how these device and connectivity trends are leading to the complete re-imagination of everything from encyclopedias to money itself. It’s a great presentation — you should definitely read it.

See the full slide deck below.

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Telecommunications giant Ericson has released a massive report on the state of the mobile world. And clearly, unless you live in the almost-fully-penetrated European and North American markets, everything is up and to the right.

China, the rest of Asia, and Africa together accounted for 75 percent of new mobile subscriptions in the third quarter of 2012, with 38 million in China, 31 million in the rest of Asia, and 25 million in Africa. That contrasts rather sharply with only one million new subscriptions in western Europe and two million in North America.

With 6.4 billion global cellular subscriptions and a world population just shy of seven billion, it would seem that almost everyone has a mobile phone or other mobile device connected to the internet. However, Ericsson, says, those 6.4 billion subscriptions are spread over only 4.3 billion people, meaning that many people have more than one plan … for example, a phone and a tablet, both with a cellular connection.

Which leads to a penetration percentage of well over 100 percent in some areas:

Source: Ericsson

Mobile subscriptions penetration globally

40 percent of all phones sold in the third quarter, Ericsson says, were smartphones, but only 15 percent of the global installed base of phones is smartphones … so there is still a long runway for growth. In fact Ericsson is predicting smartphone subscriptions alone will reach 3.3 billion in 2018.

Source: Ericsson

Global total traffic in mobile networks. Yellow is voice; red is data

Global data traffic is skyrocketing as well — doubling between Q3 2011 and Q3 2012 — while voice traffic is only growing slowly. From perhaps 10 petabytes of monthly mobile data traffic in the first part of 2007, the world’s use of mobile data has exploded to about 900 petabytes, per month, today.

In the same period, voice traffic has only grown from perhaps 80 petabytes to about 190.

By 2018, Ericsson expects mobile traffic to grow 14 times to over 13,000 petabytes of global monthly data, as mobile PCs will gobble up over 10 GB each per month, and smartphones about 2 GB.

Speeds will increase to handle that influx of data traffic, rising to a current global median of 1.3 megabits/second as LTE networks continue to roll out. LTE can already offer download speeds in the 100 Mbps range, on supported devices, and an more-advanced version known as LTE-Advanced will offer peak

data speeds higher than 1 gigabit/second. Only about 100 LTE networks are currently in operation, covering 455 million people. By 2017, Ericsson expects LTE to be available to about half the world’s population.

Interestingly, Ericsson measured the network impact of free versus paid apps as part of the study. Free apps, which are generally, ad-supported, use much more data than premium apps — connecting with the network 30 times more frequently and use over 100 times more data … presumably for ad downloads.

Tethering is also a massive data consumer, especially iPhone and Android users who use data services on their smartphones to get network access on their laptops and tablets. Users who tether use 20 times as much data as non-tethering mobile subscribers.

The full report is available at Ericsson’s website.

Image credits: Ericsson

The day before Thanksgiving, Prior Knowledge was gobbled up (gobble gobble) by Salesforce.

Prior Knowledge is the company behind Veritable, a predictive database that provides insight into the process of building applications. Referred to as “infer-structure,” the API examines the underlying infrastructure of an application to find causal relationships. It then tells developers what they might be missing. Using this system, developers without deep knowledge of statistics or analytics can make data-driven predictions.

Since the product entered public beta in July and made it to the finals at TechCrunch Disrupt, there has been a lot of excitement surrounding the technology and its MIT PhD holding founders.  Salesforce has been on an aggressive buying spree this year of mobile, social and cloud startups, and while P(k) does not fit into any of those categories, it could help Salesforce take on enterprise behemoth Oracle. Now, Salesforce has an “oracle” of its own, a database that can predict the future.

With this acquisition, Prior Knowledge will shut down the Veritable API and service on December 5. The details of the purchase have not been disclosed. Read the company’s blog post.  

Sourcebits

Sourcebits is offering a 50-50 Partner Program where participating status can pay half price for its services. Sourcebits builds custom mobile, cloud, and web applications, with a focus on “design-led engineering.” The platform significantly cuts down on the time and resources a business must expend to roll out an app. Any friends and family or angel-funded startup can join today and pay just 50% of the cost for the total design and development of their project, as well as receive guidance and support. To learn more, click here. 

CrashPlan

CrashPlan is offering its “Biggest Sale Ever” on one-year plans. CrashPlan is a data storage company that provides hardware and cloud backup solutions for personal use, small businesses, and enterprises with cross-platform needs. Clients include Google, Netflix, Groupon, LinkedIn, Cisco, Pandora. Starting at 6:00 am CST this morning, CrashPlan is free. Every two hours thereafter, the price will increase until Monday November 26 at 2:00 CST, when the purchase is discounted by 42% where it will remain until the sale ends at 11:59 pm CST that night. To learn more, click here.

Appsumo

Appsumo is running a marathon of its “all-time best 12 products.” Appsumo seeks out the “greatest, geekiest products for entrepreneurs” and features them on the site. It is basically a Groupon for software, packing software subscriptions and giving a group discount for a short time. Beginning at midnight CST, a selection of deals will be available for two hours each:

• 12 AM – 2 AM: Piktochart — Easy infographics – $49
• 2 AM – 4 AM: CanvasPop — Amazing wall art – $25
• 4 AM – 6 AM: Email Templates — Get your inbox on – $25
• 6 AM – 8 AM: Copywriting Checklist — Writing 101 – $5
• 8 AM – 10 AM: HitTail — SEO simplified – $49
• 10 AM – 12 PM: SideProject Book — For the freelancers – $5
• 12 PM – 2 PM: Backblaze — Backup everything – $25
• 2 PM – 4 PM: Treehouse — Learn programming – $99
• 4 PM – 6 PM: AppSumo Hiring Secrets — Hire away – $25
• 6 PM – 8 PM: Prey — Never lose your laptop- $39
• 8 PM – 10 PM: Sumo Business Blueprint — Start a business – $39
• 10 PM – 12 AM: Double Your Freelancing Rate — Cha-ching strategies – $10

Entrepreneurs are advised to time their shopping and pigging out accordingly. To learn more, click here. 

Udemy

It is said that the greatest gift is the gift of education, and online education portal Udemy has dozens of discounts for people looking to improve their knowledge of programming and expand their skill base. Aspiring developers, designs, and entrepreneurs can find special Black Friday offers on Ruby on Rails, Python, and HTML5 (among others), as well as on marketing and sales, data analytics and business strategy. These courses are even available as gifts. To learn more, click here.   

Adobe

Adobe is offering multiple Black Friday deals on its software from November 22 through November 28, with savings as large of 40%. Commercial customers can save 40% on the full version of Elements family products, 20% of Photoshop Lightroom 4, and 15% of Acrobat XI Pro or Standard. To learn more, click here. 

TurnKey Internet

Hosting is an important part of the holiday season, whether it be of the Thanksgiving dinner, Christmas soiree, or web variety. TurnKey Internet is offering an “Early Bird Exclusive” on its IT and Cloud-Hosting services for enterprise. Businesses can receive up to 75% off on dedicated servers, virtual private servers, cloud servers, SEO hosting, reseller hosting, or web hosting. Just like deluxe waffle makers, the offers are pony good while supply lasts and the sales end on midnight of November 26th. To learn more, click here.

DesignModo

Designers and web developers, rejoice! If Victoria’s Secret buy-one-get-one free bras and free tote bags aren’t your thing, do not despair. There is still Black Friday fun left for you. Design and development blog DesignModo is putting on a week-long sale, featuring 6 products to make websites as beautiful as possible. Techies can get up to 75% off on the personal or developer licensed version of The Bricks, Impressionist UI, Pandora UI, Futurico UI, Dark Amber UI, or Magnoia Graphics. To learn more, click here.

If you know of other tech companies running special Black Friday deals, contact Rebecca@venturebeat.com.

While NASA is busy extending the Internet to outer space by increasing fault-tolerance and caching for packets traveling long distances over long periods of time, Chinese scientists are helping invent something that could make communication between Mars and Earth even more reliable. Or help create the next generation of quantum computers.

I’m talking about data teleportation. Data has been teleported before — as far as 89 miles —  but never between two large, physically visible objects.

So the scientists at Hefei National Laboratory for Physical Sciences in Anhui, China entangled photonic quantum bits in a quantum memory node, sent one of the entangled particles  to another quantum memory node via an optical cable, made changes to the spinwave state of the nearby photon, and observed the same changes happening in the remote photo.

If you understand this, you’re a genius. Stop reading immediately and create a Star Trek-style matter teleporter, charge the world royalties, and retire as the richest human in the history of the world.

The stupid translation — meaning one I can understand — is that some super-smart geeks mysteriously connected two tiny particles so that they want to be twins but cruelly separated them. They then made changes to Mike (the nearest one) and observed equivalent changes automatically happening in Ike (the farthest one).

What’s this good for?

The upshot is that scientists can read data that has been received without, apparently, having been sent. Without, that is, having been sent by any physical means that we currently understand: no radio waves, no light messages, no audible communication, and yes, no smoke signals.

Which means that if the distance over which this occurs can be increased, and if you can reliably transport half of your entangled quantum bits and bites to Mars, Jupiter, or Alpha Centauri … you’ve got an awesome interplanetary Internet that’s reliable even if there’s a solar flare filling local space with charged particles and drowning out radio waves. Or, you’ve got the makings of a quantum computer that can have parts in Washington, Beijing, and Valles Marineris, the Martian Grand Canyon.

Unfortunately, however, you do not get instantaneous transmission. You still have to wait the 15 or so minutes it takes for light to travel between Earth and Mars, depending on where the two planets are lining up.

Because sadly, although teleportation is cool and spooky and amazingly high-tech and doesn’t travel by light, it does obey Einstein’s laws of physics and will not move faster than light.

Seems odd, doesn’t it, that such a crazy metaphysical technology feels bound by that cosmic speed limit?

photo credit: - Dave Morrow - via photopin cc; hat tip: ExtremeTech

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“Government surveillance is on the rise,” Google said after it released its sixth transparency report today. The company releases the bi-annual reports in order to keep governments accountable as Internet companies receive more and more requests to hand over or remove data.

Today’s report represents the first half of 2012, beginning in January and ending in June. Google’s first transparency report in 2009 revealed that governments around the world made 12,539 requests for specific users’ data. That number has steadily increased, and today Google announced it received the most requests for user data it has ever seen: 20,938 requests on 34,614 different user accounts.

On top of that, Google says requests to take down data also spiked. Governments made 1,791 requests to remove 17,475 piece of data.

“The information we disclose is only an isolated sliver showing how governments interact with the Internet, since for the most part we don’t know what requests are made of other technology or telecommunications companies,” said Senior Policy Analyst Dorothy Chou in a blog post. “Our hope is that over time, more data will bolster public debate about how we can best keep the Internet free and open.”

The company doesn’t let the governments sit in anonymity, however. It provides a list of the countries that submit requests and provides a snapshot of the kinds of data that government tries to take down. You can see these on its annotations page. For example, Google detailed that it received removal requests from 10 new countries, including Saudi Arabia, Hungary, Slovakia, and Azerbaijan.

It also doesn’t comply with all of the requests. In the U.S., Google was asked to remove seven YouTube videos “for criticizing local and state government agencies, law enforcement, or public officials.” Google did not take down any of those videos.

Keyhole image via Shutterstock