A stealthy startup called Armor5 wants to alleviate fears about employees and remote workers bringing their own devices to work.

The Santa Clara, Calif., based Armor5 has a new way for mobile workers to access their company’s applications without sensitive data hitting their handset. The beta version is available for free as of today with a self-service sign up.

Chief executive Suresh Balasubramanian, a former general manager of antipiracy at Adobe, believes that BYOD (employees bringing their own devices to work) is a big problem for IT departments; they have “no choice but to deal with the issue,” he said. But it also raises “significant security, compliance and cost problems.”

You’ve been living under a rock if you’re not concerned about the security risks of BYOD. The topic was the center of discussions at the RSA Security conference, particularly given that the sophistication of attacks on corporate firewalls are increasing.

Balasubramanian told VentureBeat that competitors — including mobile device management and desktop virtualization (VDI) vendors — don’t address IT’s growing needs. MDM software used by an IT department to manage employee’s mobile devices is hard to administer, he explained, and VDI can’t deliver on all app functions.

A lot of companies have attempted to solve this problem by locking down certain apps or enabling IT to access specific parts of a personal device.

But Amor5′s approach is a bit different: The technology connects to a company network via an existing VPN, virtualizes Intranet data and cloud apps, and generates a URL for mobile workers to access content safely from a personal or company-issued device. The entire process takes just a few minutes.

Balasubramanian was brought on as CEO after the company incorporated in 2011. Its founders are former engineers from Microsoft, Adobe, and Motorola.

“CIOs are understandably concerned with data security given the rise of smartphones, tablets, and other mobile devices inside their organizations,” said Fred Wang, the general partner at Trinity Ventures, the firm that led the seed round.  ”Its [Armor5's] singular focus on the intersection of data security and BYOD, and its unique approach to solving the problem, is the reason we are investing.”

The startup has emerged from stealth mode today with $2 million in funding from Trinity Ventures, Citrix, and Nexus Venture Partners. 

Evernote may be grabbing $100M

File that in your Evernote notebooks, with the tag “that’s a lot of cash.” The popular note taking/organization service is apparently raising a new round of $100M at a $1 billion valuation. Meritech Capital partners is said to be leading the round. Evernote has already raised $95.5 million in funding, so this new round would double its total funding.

Get social and chatty with Tango — it just raised $40M

Th video chat app that could rival Apple’s Facetime, Tango, just raised $40 million from Qualcomm Ventures and Access Ventures. The cross-platform app has snatched up 45 million users in the 18 months it’s been available.

Lifecrowd parties with a new $5M investment

Social events startup Lifecrowd has raised $5 million in its first round of funding from Lightbank, Bullpen Capital, Baroda Ventures, and Prism VentureWorks. Lifecrowd lets anyone create a social event, but curates its social calendar so only the best ones show up — no more lame meetups in someone’s parent’s basement.

BranchOut grabs $25M for a better LinkedIn

If you hate LinkedIn but like Facebook, BranchOut has you covered. The service has the same functionality as LinkedIn but operates on Facebook, so you can share business contact information and find jobs. BranchOut raised $25 million from Mayfield Fund, with participation by Accel, Norwest Venture Partners, and Redpoint Ventures.

Robot vacuum producer Neato Robotics gets funding

Neato Robotics has just snagged $12.2 million in fourth-round funding for its robot vacuum cleaner. Vorwerk Ventures and Noventi Ventures led this fourth round, which will be used to grow the company’s business and launch a new vacuum model.

Insieme gets a $100M investment from Cisco

Cisco has invested $100 million in a networking startup called Insieme that was started by three Cisco employees. The company also has the option to pay $750 million more to buy Insieme, should Cisco choose. Insieme tackles issues in software-defined networking (SDN), a somewhat easier and less expensive way to deploy cloud computing systems.

NComputing raises $21.8M for desktop virtualization

Desktop virtualization and thin-client computing firm NComputing has raised $20 million in a new round of funding. QuestMark Partners led the round with existing investors Menlo Ventures, Scale Venture Partners, and Daehong Technew. The company has raised a total of $57.8 million to date.

Greenlight Planet raises funds for solar lights

Greenlight Planet has raised $4 million. The company provides solar lights for rural villages in Africa and India, hoping to replace the kerosene lanterns most off-the-grid villages use. ZA Associates led the round.

Treehouse snags $4.75M to teach you how to code

Codecademy competitor Treehouse has raised $4.75 million for its online coding school. The company offers classes on how to do web design, write JavaScript, and build iOS apps. The Social + Capital Partnership led the round, with Reid Hoffman and David Sze from Greylock Discovery Fund participating.

If you’ve got funding new for us, send it to tips@venturebeat.com

Nivio lets you store up to 10GB of your documents, music, and movies in the cloud for free with nDrive. Your files sync across all of your devices — tablets, desktops, and laptops. And when you make changes to a document, Nivio saves bandwidth by only sending the changes you made, not the entire file.

But file storage isn’t all Nivio has up its sleeves. Its break-out product is nDesktop, the most current version of Windows that lives in the cloud and can be accessed on Macs, PCs, or tablets.

“We are delivering the next generation experience to the customer, so they can access their files and operation system without thinking about where they last worked on a file or worrying about maintenance of their machine,” Nivio chief executive Sachin Duggal told VentureBeat, ”We tell our customers not to worry about their old hardware, we will find the best way to deliver Windows to you.”

Duggal said Nivio has been working on cloud computing technology for the past seven and half years. Its three offerings — nDrive, nDesktop, and nApps — are available in several different packages aimed at students, educators, and small businesses.

The company’s nApps service lets you rent a program for 30 days rather than purchasing a full app or piece of software. The app store already has the full Microsoft Office suite and free apps such as Twitter and Evernote. The company is also in talks with Adobe to offer its products. In keeping with the cloud trend, you can access the app wherever you can access nDesktop. The service is especially helpful for students who may only need a program for one or two projects and can’t afford to buy the software outright.

Nivio is not the groundbreaker in the cloud desktop computing space; Citrix offers desktop virtualization and app downloads, but it focuses on enterprise customers. OnLive Desktop, another cloud desktop computing service, lets you run a pared down version of Windows on the iPad, although it will support more devices soon. Nivio, however, is much more focused on students and small businesses and claims to have put more development into its technology.

Nivio plans to use the substantial investment, led by Videocon and AEC Partners, to grow its product, expand its engineering team, and roll out its services in Europe, the Middle East, India, and Australia.

The company is based in Palo Alto, Calif., and Geneva, Switzerland, with offices in London and Delhi. So far Nivio has more than 120 employees and prior to the current funding, the company raised $9 million from Deutsche Bank and private investors.

[Photo credit for title image of tablet computer (not shown above): Shutterstock]

Redwood, Calif.-based NComputing is on a mission to turn computing upside down by replacing full-blown PCs with lightweight clients that share a single computer. It’s like a return to the old time-sharing of dumb terminals connected to mainframe computers, only different because it makes a lot more economic sense by bringing down the cost of operating a PC.

NComputing’s virtualization software allows several client machines — nothing more than monitors, keyboards and memory hubs — to share the computing power of a single PC. That way, one PC can deliver computing power to 10 or so users for lightweight purposes such as browsing the web or sending email. This set up works well in schools, emerging countries, big task-focused corporations and in retail. Dukker, who will remain co-chairman, helped get the company off the ground the last five years.

NComputing has shipped more than 2.6 million client units to date, and its products have proven to be disruptive. They’re used by more than 20 million daily users. The company’s products have redefined what a PC is.

Dhingra is the former general manager and group vice president of the desktop virtualization business at Citrix. He said in an interview that he will help NComputing grow into the education and enterprise markets.

At Citrix, Dhingra, a 20-year veteran of the tech industry, helped grow the desktop virtualization business to close to $500 million in sales over three years. He said that his goal is to initiate the same leap forward in sales growth at NComputing.

NComputing has done very well grabbing market share in the thin client business, although the exact share depends on how you define thin clients. Other thin clients often have no computing power at the client level and rely entirely on computing power stored in a web-connected data center. NComputing’s designs involve connecting a bunch of mostly dumb-clients to a single smart PC. IDC believes that NComputing is ranked third in thin clients behind Hewlett-Packard and Wyse.

The overall market for desktop virtualization is getting bigger, with Gartner projecting that 15 percent of the business desktop market will be hosted on virtual desktops by 2014. That amounts to a market of 74 million clients in the business market alone.

Virtualization is a threat to the traditional desktop based on the Wintel duopoly of Microsoft and Intel. But by lowering the cost of computers by 50 percent and cutting the power usage dramatically as well, NComputing believes it can make desktop computing available to a much wider audience around the world.

“We believe the traditional PC replacement market is just the tip of the iceberg for virtual desktops, whose market potential is 10-100x larger,” Dhingra said.

In markets such as India, NComputing has run its own virtualization software on its networks of machines. Windows applications could run across those networks, with each user accessing an app on the central computer. But in businesses, NComputing may begin to work more with other vendors such as Citrix, Microsoft, and VMware, which have all created popular virtualization software for companies. NComputing already has strategic partnerships with computer makers such as LG, Fujitsu and Panasonic.

IDC says that NComputing ranks No. 1 in Asia-Pacific and Latin America in the category of enterprise clients and has more than 12 percent of the K-12 education desktop market in the U.S. Customers are in 140 countries and some have ordered more than 150,000 clients.

The next version of the Windows operating system — for both consumers and businesses — might be an operating system that is stored and powered on remote cloud servers and streamed to personal computers, according to leaked information from Microsoft’s architectural summit held in London in April.

Cloud computing allows computers and mobile devices to ship all the resource-intensive data crunching off to beefy remote servers run by companies like Rackspace and Amazon. Tools ranging from facial recognition to collaboration software like Yammer and Huddle are already making strong pushes into the cloud.

Desktop virtualization, which involves storing and running a user’s operating system and programs on more powerful remote servers and streaming the results to a PC, is not a particularly new idea either. It’s a practice that many businesses already employ to allow their employees to access a personalized desktop and access work information from any device. Windows 7 already offers virtualization of a user’s settings and applications. Microsoft also recently brought all of its Office applications into the cloud and offers the programs as part of its Windows Live service.

The next version of Windows would strip the operating system from the actual piece of hardware a user is working on and stream it through the Internet, according to the presentation. But this wouldn’t just be a play from Microsoft in the business space. This would be the first high-profile move into expanding use of cloud technology into the consumer space. The move could finally make buzzwords like “software-as-a-service” and “cloud infrastructure” sexy the same way Apple turned around the mobile phone market — a very explicit goal on Microsoft’s end, according to the slides.

Does this mean the next wave of operating systems will run on subscription fees, like many other cloud services already use? It makes sense until you pull the ethernet cable out of the PC or run into a dead spot in terms of wireless coverage. The operating system is just about the last thing that doesn’t require a computer connected to the internet at this point.

But most tech gurus don’t foresee that being a problem as wireless networks expand and technology marches onward. Tech evangelists ranging from investing titan Marc Andreessen to Google’s Eric Schmidt have repeatedly called to bring everything into the cloud. Schmidt particularly heralded the next rollout of wireless technology, the LTE network, as a significant step toward an always-connected planet.

The tech world is all for finally making the cloud as sexy as Apple’s next gadget. And what a world we live in if Microsoft, traditionally the black sheep of operating systems and web browsers, is the company to finally pull it off.

[Photo: mendhak]

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