July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Global communications startup Twilio and 500 Startups have partnered to form Twilio Fund Europe 2013, a new microfund dedicated to accelerating Twilio-powered startups on the continent.

Both Twilio and 500 Startups are dedicated to growing and connecting the international startup community. Twilio’s technology simplifies building global communication networks, and 500 Startups nurtures entrepreneurs from around the world. When their powers combine, they will provide financing and mentorship to applicant companies that make “creative use of the Twilio API.”

Twilio provides telephony infrastructure via the cloud. Using the technology, developers can add call, text, and VoIP capabilities to their web and mobile apps. The service is active on six continents (penguins don’t have much need for VoIP) and can power communication in 150 countries. Historically, setting up cross-border communication systems was not something the average startup could do. Twilio’s API helps make telephony services globally accessible.

“At Twilio, we think SMS and voice should work the same way,” said Twilio product manager Patrick Malatack in a statement last year. “There are no geopolitical boundaries for the web, and we want to ensure developers can work with the telecom network like they do other Internet services.”

500 Startups is a global seed fund and accelerator program founded by the colorful Dave McClure. McClure has been an extremely vocal advocate for startups in emerging markets and makes a significant number of investments in companies operating in Asia, Latin America, and Europe.

“I’m being Captain Obvious to say that that there is incredible innovation happening in Europe,” McClure said in a statement. “Entrepreneurs in those countries often have limited access to venture capital. We’re already investing actively all around the world, Europe included. So we’re pumped to be continuing with Twilio Fund Europe.”

Twilio Fund 2013 will provide seed funding as well as free Twilio credits. Applicants must be building or about to launch a service powered by Twilio’s web service APIs, privately held, less than five years old, and have received less than in funding.

The microfund was first formed with 500 Startups back in 2010. Over a dozen startups have received funding to date. The 2012 finalists were announced yesterday –  Babelverse, Call Loop, Healthsouk, Sessions, and Wedgies. The deadline for applying for the 2013 fund is May 1.

Photo credit: C.P.G.Grey/Flickr

Reuters is reporting that Los Alamos discovered and removed at least two switches which were in the process of being installed at the lab.

The fear is that China’s military — which does have notoriously close relationships with the nation’s top companies — has infiltrated the company and potentially put backdoors into communications equipment, which China can then use to spy on the U.S and its top companies.

That exactly what Congress said just a few months ago, releasing a draft report that stated, in part, that Huawei and other Chinese vendors “cannot be trusted to be free of foreign state influence” and that, therefore, U.S. companies should “seek other vendors.” Australia’s government has similar concerns, having banned Huawei products from its new nationwide high-speed Internet network early last year, and as far back as seven years ago, Huawei was blocked from Indian government telecommunications projects.

So what’s a poor Chinese-based multinational to do?

Well, call in the Chinese government, for one. The Chinese government’s commerce ministry struck back at that Congress report, saying it was “suggestive guesswork” and obliquely warning of trade consequences for the “speculative” claims.

Huawei VP of external affairs William Plummer also struck back, telling Reuters that “there has never been a shred of substantive proof that Huawei gear is any less secure than that of our competitors, all of which rely on common global standards, supply chains, coding and manufacturing.”

A little more of that might help — repeated calls to Huawei’s press contacts in North America were not returned in time to add their comments to this story.

Even better, Huawei might consider allowing trusted third parties — or even government inspectors — review their equipment and code in full detail to prove or disprove their innocence once and for all.

The House unanimously passed a Senate resolution calling on the U.S. government to oppose the United Nations’ control of the Internet.

As originally reported by the Hill, the 397-to-0 vote is intended to send a clear signal to the delegates gathering at the UN’s telecommunications conference next week.

The UN will meet in Dubai to update an international telecom treaty; rumors have been flying for weeks that discussions of greater controls of the Internet will be on the agenda.

Any attempts to implement more stringent web regulations will be met with opposition from interest groups in the U.S. California Congresswoman Anna Eshoo, representative for the 14th district, said on the hosue floor that the U.S. will continue to stand by the “open structure, multi-stakehoder approach that has guided the Internet over the last two decades.” Eshoo represents parts of San Mateo and Santa Clara counties — a stretch of Silicon Valley that is home to countless venture capital firms, startups, and tech giants.

Eshoo pointed out that Republicans and Democrats were aligned on this issue:

“I think we are very, very proud that there is not only bipartisan, but bicameral support underlying this revolution, and there is complete support across the Executive Branch of our government. In other words, the United States of America is totally unified.”

The 11-day conference will review the codes that were last reviewed in the Web’s infancy. Technology giants at the Dubai conference — including envoys from Google and Microsoft — fear that a UN oversight on Internet security could be used by nations such as China and Russia to justify rolling black-outs and increased Web monitoring.

Representative Greg Walden (R-Ore.) said on the house floor that Russian President Vladamir Putin has spoken positively about the UN governing the Internet.

Walden said that representatives from the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and Congress will attend the conference in Dubai to “keep an eye” on proceedings.

The question of who should control the Internet — the United States or the United Nations — has been raging for over a decade. In 2005, a global consortium gathered in Tunisia to discuss the digital divide between rich and poor. As Slate Magazine put it, the U.S. may be able to impose sanctions including shutting down websites, but it does not rule the Internet. The California nonprofit ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) has directed traffic on the Web since 1998.

With over half of Internet users in Asia, the debate continues to rage whether a global body like the UN would be better equipped to regulate the web.

Digital World image // Shutterstock

Disclosure: VentureBeat is hosting its holiday party with Orange.

Lookout Mobile received an investment from European-centric Iris Capital and announced today that it will now come preloaded on Android phones sold by French telecommunications carrier Orange.

The amount Iris Capital invested in Lookout was not released, but the venture firm is known to only give our a maximum of $15 million or less in a funding round. This comes out of its larger $300 million fund, which has largely been invested in only European companies except for a recent investment in MoPub, which helps developers make money on Android.

“By partnering with and investing in Lookout, we are ensuring that we will continue to help keep our customers safe in the future and that the Orange & Publicis fund managed by Iris Capital is supporting a company that is positioned to become a global leader in the digital economy,” said Orange Technocentre executive vice president Paul-François Fournier in a statement.

Lookout, of course, is excited about the new partnership with Orange, which will start preloading the security company’s software onto its Android phones starting in 2013. Orange, which is based in France, has a mobile customer base of 169 million people. Lookout’s software will be served to those customers living in France, Slovakia, and Spain.

T-Mobile struck a similar deal with Lookout in October to preload the software onto a number of its Android phones by 2013 as well. T-Mobile calls the program “Automatic App Security,” and it will come preloaded onto the LG Optimus L9 and the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 before rolling out to the majority of T-Mobile’s Android phones.

Many of the security threats that Lookout identifies are found in European countries. The company already has subscribers in 170 different countries, and 30 million users overall, but these types of partnerships help make Lookout a household name. This is similar to how Norton became known as the “antivirus stuff that comes with my computer.”

Lookout has thus far taken on $76.5 million in funding, with its last round for $40 million coming from Andreessen-Horowitz. Other investors include Khosla Ventures, Trilogy Equity Partners, Accel Partners, Index Ventures, Chris Sacca, and more. The company is headquartered in San Francisco, Calif.

Oranges image via Shutterstock

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Update: Sprint confirmed the deal on October 15.

Softbank has purchased 70 percent of telecommunications carrier Sprint, according to CNBC, a deal which may be announced tomorrow. The deal will run Softbank $20 billion.

On Thursday rumors spread around that the two companies were in talks about Softbank buying a majority share in the United States’ third largest telecommunications provider. Sprint later confirmed the talks in a short press release, which stated the company was “engaged in discussions with Softbank regarding a potential substantial investment by Softbank in Sprint.”

The company also explained that “such a transaction could involve a change of control of Sprint.”

According to CNBC, both Sprint and Softbank’s boards are already in agreement. The Japanese company plans to pay $8 billion for shares owned directly by Sprint. Following that transaction, the company will also put out a $12 billion tender offer to shareholders to buy back their stock. CNBC also says Sprint will use some of this money as it attempts to buy out the majority of wireless high speed Internet service provider Clearwire. It lost the majority of Clearwire, a service it uses to power much of its 3G and 4G WiMax networks, in June.

The arrangement is said to be announced Monday after the two companies iron out the details and officially sign papers.

Sprint image via TheDarkThing/Flickr

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

The Chinese Commerce Ministry struck back yesterday after a U.S. report urged domestic companies to sever ties with Chinese telecommunications vendors Huawei and ZTE. The ministry believes the U.S. is being speculative and isn’t basing its claims on solid ground.

The statement comes from state-run Chinese news agency Xinhua, which reported the ministry saying it “strongly opposes” the report and said it was simply “suggestive guesswork.”

“We hope the United States can make concrete efforts to create a just and fair market environment for the two countries’ companies and promote a sound development of bilateral economic and trade ties,” said Chinese Commerce Ministry Shen Danyang, according to Xinhua.

On Monday, the United States Congress Intelligence Committee released a draft report on the trustworthiness of Chinese hardware companies Huawei and ZTE. The report explained that the two telecommunications handset providers “cannot be trusted to be free of foreign state influence.” The government suggested that anyone working with the two companies find new partnerships.

Cisco is said to have quickly taken the advice and ended a seven-year relationship with ZTE yesterday.

Huawei is obviously not happy. According to Reuters, it said, “Baseless suggestions otherwise or purporting that Huawei is somehow uniquely vulnerable to cyber-mischief ignore technical and commercial realities, recklessly threaten American jobs and innovation, do nothing to protect national security, and should be exposed as dangerous political distractions from legitimate public-private initiatives to address what are global and industry-wide cyber-challenges,” he said.

hat tip The Next Web; Huawei image via catorze14/Flickr

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013 San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

The U.S. Congress Intelligence Committee and telecommunications vendor Cisco are agreed on one thing: Chinese networking equipment companies can’t be trusted.

Whether that’s just political posturing and jingoistic protectionism or the plain simple facts of global geopolitics depends a lot on who you believe.

According to Reuters, this morning Cisco killed a seven-year partnership with Chinese networking manufacturer ZTE after investigations reportedly showed that ZTE sold banned technology to Iran. Sending U.S.-developed technology that could allow Iran to monitor and control Internet usage violates U.S. sanctions against that country — and could put Cisco’s U.S. business in jeopardy.

According to Cisco’s financial statements, more than half of its revenue is from North and South America, and most of that will be from the U.S. Cisco had partnered with ZTE, licensing Cisco technology to the up-and-coming company in an attempt to fight larger and more dangerous competitor Huawei in emerging markets.

Coincidentally, perhaps, the U.S. House of Representatives’ Intelligence Committee released a draft report saying, in part, that both Huawei and ZTE “cannot be trusted to be free of foreign state influence,” and therefore, U.S.-based Internet service providers and telecommunications companies should “seek other vendors” for infrastructure projects.

This is not new.

Congress has been concerned about China electronically spying on the U.S. for some time now. The concern is that, since Chinese companies either have close ties to the Chinese government or can be compelled to allow significant amounts of government access to their technology, products used in the sensitive telecom industry could contain backdoors or intentional security holes to facilitate espionage.

Very similar, of course, to what the FBI wants Facebook, Twitter, and Skype to grant it. Or to what the NSA was rumored to have built into various version of Windows.

China has been accused of industrial espionage many times, as well as of spying on activists and political dissidents, and very recently was reported to be attempting to access military systems in the White House itself (not for the first time). So it’s hard for China to wear the white cape here.

But that doesn’t stop the country from trying, and a spokesman for China called upon Congress to “set aside prejudices and respect the facts,” according to Reuters, as well as offering a veiled threat, saying the U.S. should “do more that is beneficial to Sino-American economic and trade ties, rather than the contrary.”

The story won’t end here.

But if it continues in the current path, this war of words threatens to become something more substantial, potentially involving trade sanctions on both sides.

photo credit: ukaszSie via photopin cc

Republicans in the U.S. government are seeking to limit the Federal Communication Commission’s power to oversee mergers in the tech and telecommunications arena.

The Federal Communications Commission Process Reform Act passed in the House of Representatives last night, 274-174, with only 12 Democrats voting in favor of the bill. The legislation seeks to bring more oversight to the big (and rapidly accelerating) business of communications mergers and acquisitions.

Recently, the FCC was involved in the approval of major deals such as Google’s $12.5 billion acquisition of Motorola Mobility — a combination that had many sidelines-bound watchers scratching their heads. Google carefully avoided the appearance of antitrust issues, and the FCC, which was involved primarily because Motorola Mobility owned some licenses under the commission’s jurisdiction, gave the deal the nod.

However, about a year ago, when AT&T announced its intention to acquire T-Mobile for $39 billion, the FCC was the agency that needed to decide whether or not the deal would leave the wireless industry competitive. In the end, when the FCC chair decided the merger would be bad for consumers, and the companies’ application to the FCC was killed off and withdrawn.

And then there was the Comcast-NBC merger, which the FCC approved but with some interesting stipulations about content.

The new proposed legislation does require more transparency from the FCC on merger applications and other activities, but it might impede the FCC’s ability to propose stipulations that promote the public interest — for example, the FCC’s pressuring Comcast for more diversity-friendly programming during the NBC merger.

House Democrats argued that the reform bill would effectively shut down the FCC, and some question whether the bill will pass muster with Senate Democrats. However, Democrats on Capitol Hill are making amendments to the bill as it works its way through the legislative branch.

Where much of technology tries to push new ideas into the hands of consumers, TiKL is putting an old stand-by on smartphones: the walkie-talkie.

“We created TiKL with the vision of redefining the way we communicate,” said co-founder Zafir Ahmed on stage at the Y Combinator Demo Day today.

TiKL (pronounced “tickle”) hopes to be the Nextel of the smartphone generation. The startup explains that e-mail has been overtaken by text messaging as the quicker, easier way to get an answer. In turn, it sees “walkie-talkies” as the speedy replacement for phone calls, when all you need is a quick yes or no answer.

In TiKL’s case, however, you don’t need a carrier for a voice-plan. The “walkie-talkie” communication happens on the data network, and has already gained 22 million users in its first 20 months.

Ahmed explained to VentureBeat that the company accumulated thousands of customers literally overnight. In fact, TiKL saw usage balloon so quickly that people started making copycats. Ahmed said a group of individuals in South Korea took the app and made it available to the Korean public through websites. It quickly gained millions of users in the country, despite TiKL having never introduced it there.

But, Ahmed promised the company had not spent any money on marketing, and that all of its growth has thus far been completely organic.

“We did not put one cent into marketing…not one minute of time,” said Ahmed.

Now that TiKL has traction, the company will start investing on customer acquisition. The goal in coming year for the startup is to increase adoption by 10 percent, rocketing its user base to 220 million.

TiKLis one of 39 companies presenting at Y Combinator’s Demo Day Spring 2012 event. Check out other cool companies making their debut here.

Three security startups caught our eye at the RSA Conference here in San Francisco today. Impermium, Pindrop Security, and MokaFive all showed off their technology as part of the conference’s Innovation Sandbox competition for startups.

10 startups got the chance to strut their wares on stage, solving all sorts of issues from the bring-your-own-device (BYOD) trend to telecommunications. Enterprise application security company Appthority won the competition – the company determines whether an application is safe by teaming up with enterprise Mobility Management and Mobile Device Management solutions such as BoxTone to review and rate each application that enters a company’s app store — but we wanted to shine the spotlight on our three favorites.

Impermium

As Internet users become more and more discerning of which online offers are legit and which are phishing scams, cyber criminals are in need of new avenues to dupe their victims. Focusing on securing social media, Impermium promises to weed out social spam before it affects your business. Impermium’s “Zaru” engine analyzes what’s happening on a business’s website. Social spam can exist in a company’s blog posts, comments, account sign-ups and more. Based on regular user activity, Impermium can detect whether an action is spam-y or legitimate. This can turn up false positives, however, and annoy customers who are actually trying to engage with your company. Impermium says its engine is getting smarter due to its growing “Threat Network,” which provides insight from all different websites on how humans interact on the Internet.

Impermium was founded in 2010 and has received funding from Greylock Partners, Accel Partners, Highland Capital Partners, and The Social+Capital Partnership.

Pindrop Security

Pindrop Security almost seems old school. The company is solving the lesser-known problem of caller-ID spoofing. That is, rigging your caller information to give another’s identity. Caller-ID spoofing is dangerous because sensitive information is often communicated over the phone. For instance, if your bank calls you and a criminal spoofs the call, he or she can then use your information to access accounts or open credit cards. Pindrop protects customers from caller-ID spoofing by reading the call’s audio-fingerprint, or a set of tones that define a caller’s location, phone type, and identity. The company provides a SaaS model as well as an on-premise model that acts on the receiving end of the call and does not tamper with telecommunications infrastructure.

Pindrop is headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia and has received funding from Andreessen-Horowitz and Sigma Partners.

MokaFive

MokaFive wants to help bring Apple to the enterprise. It has created software that lets your company’s IT distribute and control virtual desktops to any employee’s device. MokaFive does this by installing a hypervisor, or a layer of software that allows any computer to run any operating system, onto an employee’s computer. That hypervisor once had to live on the server-side, costing a lot of money implement and maintain. MokaFive attempts to eliminate time and financial cost by keeping the virtual desktops as “golden image” files on MokaFive’s servers. There, MokaFive piles on security features that allow IT to wipe a computer if it is stolen, update desktops, and more. The software takes up five gigabytes on the person’s computer and is otherwise fairly quiet.

MokaFive was founded in 2006 and has received funding from Fuller, Vinod Khosla, Highland Capital, Khosla Ventures, and NGEN.

Image via RSA Conference

Twilio launched “Twilio Client” for mobile today, giving mobile developers an easy way to introduce calling features into their iOS applications.

“There are a bunch of apps [that allow you to make calls] today” said Twilio’s director of product management Thomas Schiavone. “What Twilio is doing is letting people make a call as a feature of the app.”

What Sciavone is suggesting is that it’s so much work to build an app that lets you call out, that it might as well be its own app like Skype or Google Voice. But Twilio wants communications code to be accessible enough for any developer to use.

Twilio Client was originally introduced to Web developers in July. Using this version, a Web developer is able to integrate phone calls into web apps with just three lines of Java script. These phone calls were device agnostic and allowed for calling between browsers, traditional phones, and the mobile web. The iOS version acts very similarly, making it easy for developers to insert the objective-C (iOS) code into their application and let Twilio do the telecommunications heavy lifting.

When a user makes a call from the application, it is sent to Twilio, which deals with the carriers and delivers the call to its destination. It is meant to be incredibly easy, even for companies that don’t have telecommunications-savvy developers, but do want a calling feature.

“The key thing that we’ve seen from our experience in the past few years is once you let people who aren’t communications developers use communications in different ways, you get some really interesting use cases,” said Schiavone.

After its launch, the Web-focused Twilio client became popular with customer service and call center web apps. The iOS version has struck a cord with the same industry, inspiring RingDNA to create a call center application for “remote agents.” That is, the application ran on an iPad and became the person’s virtual desk. He could put on his headset, take calls, and get information all from the mobile device. Schiavone suggests gaming app developers should include it in mobile games to give them a more console-like feel.

Twilio plans to expand the offering to Android later in the year.

VentureBeat is holding its second annual Mobile Summit this April 2-3 in Sausalito, Calif. The invitation-only event will debate the five key business and technology challenges facing the mobile industry today, and participants — 180 mobile executives, investors, and policymakers — will develop concrete, actionable solutions that will shape the future of the mobile industry. You can find out more at our Mobile Summit site.

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013 San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Twilio and Zendesk are the perfect example of how the cloud supports collaboration not just between people, but between companies as well.

The two companies’ technologies fit so well together, you’d think they gave each other friendship bracelets. Twilio is a developer centric company, that focuses on providing application programming interfaces (APIs), allowing developers to more easily integrate telecommunications into their creations. Zendesk is a customer service center, which companies can add as a widget to their websites. It creates tickets for customer queries, and is branded as the company.

What is the natural connection between a customer service center and a telecommunications connector? Creating a call center for customer inquiries, something that both Zendesk and Twilio use for their own operations.

It’s these sort of connections that show how an amorphous cloud allows you to connect and use other businesses’ technology more easily. Twilio and Zendesk aren’t the only ones. Last week, when Tumblr wanted its users to call Congress to resist the SOPA, or Stop Online Piracy Act, it used Twilio deeply. The integration resulted in 87,834 calls to Congress.Intuit also uses Twilio as a security measure for payroll files. When access is requested, Twilio calls the employee with a five digit pin to be inputted before access is granted.

In the future, Twilio and ZenDesk plan on expanding future into the United Kingdom and other European cities. An effort that has shown that even the cloud can’t escape the regulations of the “real world.” Expansion into other countries requires following foreign telecommunication companies’ terms. Indeed, even in the US, Zendesk is regulated by the government. Its newest terms of services requires that you not create a Zendesk that competes with 911.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Twilio announced today 500 Startup‘s Dave McClure (pictured left) and SV Angel‘s Ron Conway (pictured below, right) started a second $250,000 seed fund for startups built on top of Twilio.

“We’re giving access to some of the best angels in Silicon Valley,” Twilio chief executive Jeff Lawson told VentureBeat. “Getting a seed investment from Ron Conway and Dave McClure speaks a lot and gets entrepreneurs up and running.”

Finding funding in Silicon Valley can be difficult given the number of startups on the same search in such a small radius. Twilio wanted to call out the developers who were smart and business savvy enough to run their own companies on top of its platform.

This year’s round will be particularly enticing for startups, because any funding given by McClure will be matched equally by Conway. For example, if McClure invests $50,000, the company will receive a total of $100,000 with Conway’s involvement. The fund caps at $250,000 and will be distributed by the discretion of the investors.

“I think the Twilio platform continues to grow bigger and bigger,” McClure told VentureBeat. “We see [Twilio] being one of the more interesting platforms for developers.”

This is not the first Twilio Fund to be announced. Lawson explained the first fund came about last year when he saw a tweet from McClure saying he had invested in his fourth Twilio-based startup that day. Lawson approached McClure and suggested a dedicated fund. Thus far, the first fund has invested in 10 startups and is continuing the search as six more startups pitch for funding at the Twilio Conference this week.

“We found some great companies the first time around and I’m hoping we find some more,” said McClure.

McClure was inspired by three past Twilio fund investments to start the second fund: employment tool Proven, customer relationship manager Volta, and automated sales caller FastCall411.  McClure was also impressed with GroupMe, which wasn’t in the fund, but was recently purchased by Skype based on the strength of its group messaging capabilities.

McClure explained not all chosen companies will enter his incubator 500 Startups, but he welcomes them.

McClure also readily welcomes Ron Conway to the fund. “I’m really happy to have Ron and SV Angel on board. They’ve also been pretty aggressive and innovative in going after some early stage companies,” he said. “Ron has been around the industry for 15-20 years. I have tremendous respect for him.”

According to Lawson, McClure has led the charge on the past Twilio fund and was very elemental in decision-making.

Both McClure and Conway invested in Twilio, McClure in the company’s 2008 seed round and Conway in 2010.

[Photos courtesy of Joi/Flickr]

The practice of treating all Internet traffic equally—whether it’s text, e-mail, audio, or video—is commonly referred to as net neutrality. This move makes the Netherlands the second country in the world to put net neutrality into law, after Chile.

The concept of net neutrality is contested by ISPs, which want the ability to slow down the traffic of customers using a larger-than-average amount of their bandwidth. Online gamers, illegal downloaders, and those who stream movies and music are likely the biggest winners under the new law.

The law also bans Web advertisers from leaving cookies in a user’s browser without first getting his or her consent. It will have a strong impact on mobile data usage as carriers will no longer be able to charge customers extra to use Skype or other VoIP apps to make phone calls. T-Mobile, which had blocked all VoIP apps, will now have to allow them on its network.

Some net-neutrality-informed rules have been issued in the U.S., but they have not been made into law. In December, the Federal Communications Commission outlined basic rules that banned ISPs from blocking specific kinds of content and websites, but did allow them to throttle web connections if they believed a customer was using too much bandwidth. Wireless companies like Verizon and AT&T, on the other hand, are exempt from these rules.

Would you like to see the U.S. sign an official net neutrality bill into law?