“We’ve opened authentication and sockets on all your devices,” cofounder Maneesh Arora explains.

What that means, essentially, is that MightyText has trusted, secure connections between all your technology. And that those connections can be used to transfer almost anything.

The company is starting with photos, announcing real-time photo and video syncing between your Android phone and your PC or Mac. I watched Arora take a photo on his smartphone and saw it pop up almost immediately on the MightyText app on his MacBook — a much more immediate experience than what you get with iCloud, which typically takes a few minutes, and sometimes hours, to sync photos via Apple’s Photo Stream.

But photo-syncing is just the beginning.

“Everything on your phone should be everywhere all the time,” Arora says. “No one raves about iCloud, and we feel there’s an opportunity. There will soon be billions of Android devices, and no one’s making it easy.”

It’s good timing, and not just because  iCloud just had an outage yesterday. It’s good timing because, while our phones are the most personal of our devices, they can be islands of content and capability that don’t translate well to your laptop or tablet.

So Arora sees the possibility of leveraging his MightyText platform, which is on pace to route about six billion texts annually, for much, much more.

Essentially, what MightyText has created is the plumbing and wiring for a personal data sharing platform, which can then open up an API for any other apps that want to communicate to the desktop or send data and documents to a user’s other devices.

“That’s in our plans,” Arora says. “We also have some professional features coming soon, such as scheduling texts, managing multiple phones, a B2B play for enterprises, especially as BlackBerry moves out of the enterprise and companies need to manage 50 or 50,000 devices centrally. And we’ve seen that people will pay for storage.”

Building a platform for personal sharing has been part of the plan all along, Arora says, calling MightyText more of a productivity play than a messaging app.

“This is just the beginning,” he told me. “We can do any file type, any media type, install and uninstall apps … “

Currently MightyText works on your tablet or laptop via a web-based interface to its cloud software. However, the company has a native Mac and native Windows client in beta right now — Arora was using it as we video-chatted — and they’ve included native OS-level notifications, so your texting and syncing experience will be as real-time as possible.

Also of note: MightyText is currently building a Gmail plugin that will let you text right from your Gmail account.

“We just want to be a useful product,” Arora says. “We’re trying to find nuggets of value throughout a user’s day.”

It figures. As soon as I learn to love Google Calendar’s appointment slots feature, the company decides it is a “less-popular feature” and discontinues it.

Calendar appointment slots are one of a slew of features that Google is sunsetting today, as part of its “winter cleaning” of less-used or less-than-successful features. Among those features was Punchd, which Google paid $10 million to acquire a little more than a year ago.

Appointment slots was a handy feature that let you set up blocks of time when people could reserve appointments with you — like office hours. It was a little hard to figure out, however, and Google’s user interface didn’t make it any easier to navigate. Plus, it was buried: it always took me five or ten minutes to figure out where to click in order to get to it. So it’s probably no surprise that it’s now gone. (Technically, you can still create appointment slots until Jan. 4, and any slots you’ve created before then will remain open for a year after that.)

Also gone as of Jan. 4: Calendar syncing through Microsoft’s Exchange ActiveSync. “With the recent launch of CardDAV, Google now offers similar access via IMAP, CalDAV and CardDAV, making it possible to build a seamless sync experience using open protocols,” Google wrote on its blog.

Also, it might have added: Screw you, Microsoft.

Google is also ending a few other sync tools: Google Calendar Sync (another ActiveSync-based tool), sync for Symbian S60, and SyncML support.

The company is also discontinuing Punchd, an app that lets you keep your loyalty cards on a smartphone. Google acquired Punchd for a reported $10 million in July, 2011. Punchd will be removed from the Google Play store on June 7, 2013. This leaves Google without a way to help you keep track of how many free lattes you have earned at the local coffee shop, but it might add loyalty card support to Google Wallet in the future.

Evernote and Moleskine go together like fixies and pour-over-coffee. Like PBR and waxed mustaches. Like burritos and skinny jeans.

So I’m guessing that techie hipsters everywhere will get excited about the new Evernote-optimized notebook that Moleskine just announced.

(Also in Evernote news today: The company announced Evernote Business, a version of the note-stashing and -searching tool for small and medium-sized companies.)

A page-capture function in the latest version of Evernote for the iPhone and iPad helps straighten out the photos you snare of each page, correcting for distortions and erasing shadows. Also, you can use stickers to tag each page. Evernote will recognize these stickers and apply corresponding tags to the new note.

It even has cute little pink Skitch arrow stickers.

Moleskine chief executive Arrigo Berni told us about his company’s partnership with Evernote — its first with a software company.

“Nobody wakes up in the morning and says, ‘I’m going to live a digital life,’” Berni said. “Well, maybe a some people. But most people live in both the analog and digital worlds.

“We are bridging paper and digital.”

The integration works partly thanks to the tiny dots that make up the horizontal rules. (A graph-paper version is also available.) The Evernote software recognizes those dots and uses them to correct the page’s alignment in software.

Note that you don’t need these pricey notebooks to do this kind of trick. Inexpensive document-scanning apps for both Android and iOS also do alignment-correction for pages you photograph and even sync with Evernote and other cloud-based storage services. And those apps will work with any rectangular piece of paper, whereas Evernote’s app only does its magic with these special Moleskines.

The stickers, however, are an unusual touch.

The partnership came about, Berni said, partly because people who downloaded Moleskine’s iOS app requested Evernote integration. Also, Index Ventures, which invested in Moleskine in late 2010 and holds 15 percent of the company, suggested a partnership and made introductions to the Evernote executive team.

Moleskine’s Evernote Smart Notebooks will cost $25 for a pocket, 3.5-inch x 5-inch version and $30 for a larger, 5-inch by 8.25-inch version, and should be available starting October 1. Both come with a three-month subscription to Evernote Premium. Moleskine is taking orders on its site now.

Business-focused social network Yammer has acquired document collaboration startup OneDrum, the companies jointly announced today. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Yammer provides companies with their own private social network that employees use to quickly communicate and update their activity throughout the day. (Disclosure: VentureBeat writers use Yammer to communicate on the job.) And while Yammer currently offers some document storage, the OneDrum software will allow businesses to share, sync, and collaborate on Microsoft Office documents in real-time.

“It’s impossible to separate the conversation from the content,” said Yammer CTO Adam Pisoni in an interview with VentureBeat. “But, there is no end-all solution right now where you can create, discover, collaborate, and share content without going between a bunch of different applications.”

Yammer plans to launch a OneDrum document-sync desktop application this summer. The app will have a folder for each Yammer group users create under the broader Yammer account, and will sync documents immediately upon saving. Later on the company plans to add tools that will let people search for anything within the shared documents without having to leave Yammer. It’ll also allow people to view shared documents on multiple platforms, such as the Web, smartphones, and tablets.

But perhaps the biggest addition OneDrum offers is the ability to transform your Microsoft Office docs into a collaboration tool that rivals search giant Google’s Google Docs web app. Users can view changes to a document in a real-time, and much like Google Docs, color-coded cursors identify different users collaborating in the document.

“Most companies use Microsoft Office every day, so adding a social layer through Yammer makes a lot of sense,” Yammer CEO David Sacks told VentureBeat.

U.K.-based OneDrum is the first acquisition for Yammer, which recently closed a $85 million round of funding. OneDrum previously raised a total of $1.62 million in funding. It will bring all 10 employees to Yammer, with CEO Jasper Westaway leading the integration of the two products.

We’ve embedded a demo video from Yammer showing off some of the new integrated social document sharing.

http://vimeo.com/40128698

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Apple has decided to disable the push functionality for all MobileMe and iCloud email accounts connected on any iOS device within the borders of Germany, the company confirmed today.

The reason for the move comes after a German court ruling in early February that determined Apple’s e-mail syncing services violated a Motorola patent. While Apple is appealing the decision, for the time being the push functionally has been disabled for anyone in the country. The patent violation won’t affect syncing for calendar and contacts for German iOS users. The violation also won’t affect push functionality for other e-mail clients like Gmail and Hotmail.

It’s worth noting that iCloud e-mail users will automatically have the push functionality turned off when they enter the country, while MobileMe e-mail accounts will permanently have push cut off until Apple gets this situation straightened out.

It will be interesting to see how this plays out, considering Google’s rhetoric about not using Motorola Mobility’s patents to hinder other companies. Google’s $12.5 billion acquisition of Motorola has been approved by the U.S. and E.U., but the deal has not closed just yet.

Via The Verge