The web wasn’t built for the complex web apps we’re using today — Instart Logic hopes to fix that.

The Mountain View-based company is emerging from stealth today with a cloud-based solution to make mobile web apps perform lightning fast. Instart Logic also announced that it has raised $17 million in a second round of funding led by Andreeseen Horowitz and Greylock Partners.

Specifically, the company aims to fix slowdown problems that arise from increasingly complicated mobile web apps and a non-stop flood of mobile device traffic. The hope, naturally, is that faster web apps will lead to people actually using them more.

For the most part, web apps today just aren’t as fast as native apps built specifically for mobile platforms. But while fast, native apps are costly to produce and difficult to update — so publishers turn to the HTML5-based web apps to support multiple mobile platforms with a single app.

Instart Logic held a beta program last year, and it boasts that several of that program’s participants — which includes a Fortune 500 company — are subscribing to its service for “mission critical” apps.

The company raised $9 million last year, bringing its total funding to $26 million. Other investors include Sutter Hill Ventures and Tenaya Capital.

Cheetah photo via Shutterstock

While many companies fear hactivist entities like Anonymous, some, like Whitehat Security, can actually thank them for creating a big need for security technology services. Whitehat, which claims to be the first software-as-a-service option for application security, raised $31 million fourth round of funding today.

“Back in 2011, starting with the Sony breach, organizations like Anonymous and Lulzsec began kind of a systematic campaign. That really raised awareness in the industry,” said chief executive Stephanie Fohn (pictured above) in an interview with VentureBeat. “That is very important to us. We are growing very quickly.”

The funding was led by JMI Equity, with participation from existing investor IGC (Investor Capital Group).

Whitehat Security was focused on protecting web applications first, and now mobile applications. Web applications can be popular points of entry for a cyber criminal. This is because many big enterprises, and even small to medium-sized businesses, have online presences that can span for thousands of web pages. Some of those pages eventually go un-monitored or get forgotten, so the source code can become weak and go without updates for long periods of time.

“Organizations today are saying, ‘Hey, I just can’t rely on focusing my resources on my most valued sites, I have to look across all 1,000 sites that I own,’” said Fohn.

The company’s product, Sentinel Services, monitors your web applications and source code continuously to spot vulnerabilities and tell you where they are.

After hacker groups Anonymous and Lulzsec started what the security industry called a “hack a day” in 2011, the demand for Whitehat’s products spiked, as did its need for capital. So, the company went out in search of funding and brought $31 million back, compared to an $8 million round in 2011, a $7 million round in 2008, and a previous total of $6.2 million made up of two different rounds.

Whitehat Security plans to use latest funding to expand internationally, hire on the sales side, and build out more support for its mobile application monitoring products.

Whitehat Security was founded in 2001 and is headquartered in Santa Clara, Calif. with offices in the U.K. and Singapore. Today’s funding brings the company’s total to $53 million, from Horizon Ventures, Altos Ventures, Garage Technology Ventures, Startup Capital Ventures, JMI Equity, Investor Growth Capital, and a number of angels.

Stephanie Fohn image via Whitehat Security

Streaming music startup Spotify will begin rolling out a beta of its first web-based app today to a small number of users, according to a report from The Verge.

Spotify has offered a desktop-based app for streaming music since the beginning of its company, and it has collected more than 4 million paying customers since that time. Those Windows and Mac apps, along with mobile apps for iOS, Android, Kindle Fire, and BlackBerry, show a long-standing dedication to native development. The desktop app also enables great Spotify apps that create exciting new experiences.

The new web app reportedly looks a lot like the desktop apps, with search, radio, playlists, and a “What’s New” section all available. Almost certainly, the web app will provide some free usage as long as you listen to audio ads and see banner ads. The web app will roll out to all users over the next several months.

Offering a web app will encourage more usage of the service. No matter what computer you want to use, you’ll be able to start streaming music without downloading an app. This is a similar strategy to what Pandora, Rdio, and other online music services have embraced.

Spotify told The Next Web that the web app beta is being “testing with a small number of users” and that the company will “have more detail on the web player next year.”

Today’s news comes on the heels of a report that Spotify has raised a new $100 million funding round based on a $3 billion valuation. Along with lead investor Goldman Sachs, the company is rumored to be receiving investments from Coca-Cola and Fidelity. Prior to this new cash, the company had raised about $188 million in funding.

Photo via The Verge

It seems like birds don’t fly the nest at Twitter, they just keep making the nest bigger. The social network acquired Cabana today hoping the team will serve its third party developers.

Cabana provides tools for mobile and web app developers and plants to shut down its “standalone mobile app development environment” on December 1. The team will then join Twitter’s platform division.

Before being bought by Twitter, Cabana took funding from well-known names in the Valley, including SV Angel, First Round Capital, Kevin Rose, Shervin Pishevar, and number of others.

The Cabana team explained in a blog post that its new purpose will be to provide Twitter’s third party developers with tools to “create new experiences on Twitter and empower the larger Twitter ecosystem.” Twitter has recently been in hot water with its developers since it released a new application programming interface.

The API put a kink in Twitter’s data hose, meaning developers are no longer able to access data streams that they used to. It’s detrimental to developers because many of them already built company, relying on that data. Starting last month, developers have six months to move their applications to the new API, which could mean a lot of reworking, reprogramming. It’s a dangerous game to play, however, when your entire business relies on another company’s API, which could be shut off in a snap.

Twitter is by no means completely cutting off the access, however, and it seems the company is trying to come up with new avenues for its developers, starting with this acquisition.

Cabana image via Shutterstock

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July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

So you want a mobile app, but you don’t know a lick of code. iBuildApp‘s online app creator makes it easy to create a wide variety of mobile apps for the code clueless, and today the company is also launching a marketplace for plugins on its platform.

“Just image for a second that you can build powerful mobile applications within just three minutes, without knowing the code, and it’s free for you,” said chief operating officer Artem Gassan at the DEMO Conference in Santa Clara, Calif.

Using iBuildApp’s web client, you can create native smartphone and tablet apps for iOS and Android, as well as HTML5-based mobile web apps. All you need to do is choose an app design, plug in elements like an RSS feed, social media feed, or photo album, and then upload your content. The company will also host your apps, and makes it easy for you to send updates as well.

“The platform as a service market has had a lot of adoption lately because it has this trend of building things faster, easier,” said Ross Fubini, partner at Kapor Capital at the DEMO Conference, “The question is, how good are the apps?”

iBuildApp’s solution isn’t exactly meant for huge companies or complex services — especially since your iOS apps aren’t available on Apple’s App Store. But for individuals and small businesses who want to connect with their clientele on mobile, it could be a good solution.

“Currently, if you are business owner or even an enterprise, you have to face a long way to develop app using internal Android and iPhone, [use] HTML5 developers, or have to hire an external dev agency,” said iBuildApp’s CEO Rafael Soultanov in an email to VentureBeat. “We can really speed up the process of developing and testing apps even for enterprises that have long [six month to 10] month research and development process.”

Soultanov says that the company has recently rebuilt its plugin architecture, allowing developers to create their own useful extensions for other iBuildApp customers to use. The company is today opening up a marketplace for the extensions, which will allow developers to make a few bucks from their creations and will also give another way to speed up their app development.

The company competes with the likes of PhoneGap and AppCelerator’s Titanium platform.

You can make apps for free on iBuildApp’s platform, if you don’t mind the company’s brand and ads within your app. Custom apps with only your branding start at $9.99 a month/$99 a year, which includes up to 200 downloads. At the high end, you can spend $79 a month/$799 a year for unlimited app downloads and added support.

The company claims that more than 11,000 apps have been downloaded from its platform by more than 180,000 app builders since its launch in 2010. Overall, iBuildApp’s platform has led to over 230,000 apps being built, and more than 60,000 of those were published.

Based in Foster City, Calif., iBuildApp has raised $375,000 in seed funding and is seeking a $3 million round now.

iBuildapp is one of 75 companies and 6 student “alpha” startups chosen by VentureBeat to launch at the DEMOFall 2012 event taking place this week in Silicon Valley. After we make our selections, the chosen companies pay a fee to present. Our coverage of them remains objective.

Photo via Shutterstock

Shortly after getting its Android app kicked out of the Google Play store, Grooveshark is rolling out the full version of its HTML5 web app today.

For those not familiar with it, Grooveshark is a streaming music service that relies on its users to upload songs to the cloud. People can then share or add those songs to genre-specific channels, much in the same way you can with YouTube videos. The service is unlike popular rivals such as Pandora and Spotify because it doesn’t have expensive licensing deals allowing it to play copyrighted music. And because of this, Grooveshark has run into legal battles with major music publishers that claim the startup is either infringing on copyrights or owes them royalty payments.

Many speculate that Grooveshark’s legal woes are what caused its mobile apps to be banished by mobile app stores. Not only has Apple banned Grooveshark’s iOS app, but Google has kicked it out of its Google Play store (formerly called the Android Market) on two separate occasions — with the most recent happening last week. Google claimed that Grooveshark’s app violated policy but remained vague on exactly how.

The move has pushed the startup to focus on its HTML5-based web app, which it says retains all the functionality of its iOS and Android versions. Grooveshark first released a beta version of the HTML5 app back in January, and it seems that not a lot has changed since then.

Having played with the full web app across multiple platforms, I experienced minimal complications when using Safari on both the iPhone and iPad. My sole Android device, a Nexus 7, didn’t fare as well. At first songs didn’t catch in the playlist and required refreshing the page to fix. Once music did begin playing, I didn’t have any problems, and the overall experience was on par with other music services.

Its software helps uncover problems and gather insights from web apps that run on multiple servers. With the service, you can find out how long it takes your web app to do certain tasks or if its encountering problems on a specific browser. The company counts Github as a customer.

“When you’re dealing with massive applications, people often don’t really understand what’s going on in them,” said Aman Gupta, a GitHub engineer in a statement. “With Tracelytics, I immediately found issues that our other APM (application performance management) software had failed to identify.”

Tracelytics’ services start at $95 per month and go up to $495 for premium service. The company’s competitors include NewRelic, which charges $149 monthly for its pro services.

This first round of funding will be used to open a new office in Boston, Mass. and to hire more engineers. Bain Capital led the round, with participation from Google Ventures, Battery Ventures, and Flybridge Capital Partners, which led Tracelytics’ seed funding.

Tracelytics is based in Providence, Rhode Island. The company was founded in 2010 and has grown to eight employees.

Grooveshark has been in legal hot water with the major music labels because it doesn’t have broad licensing agreements to play the majority of its music, unlike Spotify, MOG, Rdio and Rhapsody. Much like YouTube, Grooveshark depends on users to legally upload music that can be enjoyed by the community. If a user uploads a file that he or she doesn’t own and it gets a DMCA complaint, Grooveshark takes the file down.

The company has been in enough trouble that Apple and Google banned the service’s native music apps from their respective app stores, but with the launch of an HTML5 app it can now work around it. The new HTML5 app is accessible through mobile browsers and it works for the iPhone, iPad, Android 2.3 or later devices, the BlackBerry PlayBook and the HP TouchPad. At present, you must go to the URL http://html5.grooveshark.com and not just http://grooveshark.com from the browser, in order for it to work.

Overall, the app is super simple in design, but it is functional. As you can see in an iPhone snapshot to the left, the app has three tabs — Search, Stations and Popular. The Search tab lets you look for artists, songs and albums. When you find a song you want to hear from your searches, tap the song and it will begin playing and show up in a black bar at the bottom of the screen.

The Stations tab shows all kinds of pre-made radio stations, such as 80s, 90s Alt Rock, Ambient, Indie and R&B. And the Popular tab shows several of the most-listened to songs playing on Grooveshark. We’d definitely like to see more additions, such as artwork on songs that are playing and social recommendations, but this is still beta so we expect more in the future.

Have you checked out Grooveshark’s HTML5 app? What do you think?

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Multi-platform note-taking startup Evernote has now reached more than 20 million users, CEO Phil Libin said at the LeWeb conference this morning in Paris.

Evernote made our list of “10 disruptive cloud companies we’re excited about” because the company has taken to solving the simple problem of effective note-taking in an innovative, cloud-based fashion. Just yesterday, the company launched two free iPhone apps, “Food” and “Hello,” which help you better keep track of meals and people.

Back in June, Evernote reached 10 million registered users, with more than 400,000 of those paying $5 a month for a premium plan that enables larger uploads and better collaborative tools. It’s unclear how many of the current 20 million users are paying, but Libin did say that about 27% of users who continue to use the service for 40 months pay for it.

Libin, as first noted by SiliconFilter, also said Evernote now has nearly 9,000 third-party apps using its API.

Mountain View-based Evernote has raised $95.5 million in total funding to date, with a massive $50 million round in July led by Sequoia Capital with participation from Morgenthaler Ventures. Evernote became a profitable company 6 months ago, but due to recent hiring and expansion the company is now back in the red. Libin expects the company to go back to black soon.

Speaking at the Develop Liverpool conference, Kinlan’s plans could pave the way for cloud-based gaming and open video chat services to make an appearance on the browser, which is currently supported by over 200 million users worldwide. As the popularity of  HTML5 web apps and the Google Chrome Web Store continues to grow, the shift towards a web-based console experience seems completely natural.

Alongside the gamepad, webcam and microphone support will also undergo the plug-and-play treatment, allowing users to connect instantly. It has been rumoured that this will be used to progress the use of Augmented Reality, the use of computer graphics on top of live imagery, which is already being used across a variety of advertisements and gaming platforms.

Google will also look to exploit the abilities of WebRTC, an open-source real-time communications application. This will grant users with the ability to communicate without the need for plug-ins.

With Google Chrome updates appearing every six weeks, there’s plenty for web developers to get excited about at the moment. Will Google launch a HTML5 gaming console? Will it wait for others to take advantage of the structure it’s slowly unravelling to the public? Either way, Google Chrome’s stock continues to rise.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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Take QuickBooks for example: Millions of business people use it, but what percent really love it?

On the BestVendor beta site, we ask people to share three favorite “work apps” they recommend, along with other products they use. Nearly 3,000 startup and small business professionals have signed up so far.

Using their data, we compared applications based on how much they are recommended versus how much they are used overall. We only included products that were used at least 20 times.

The results reveal a ranking of “belovedness” — a NetPromoter-like score for work apps. While our results are early and we’re just getting started, here’s a list of the top 25 at this point. If you haven’t already done so, be sure to check out these rising stars of the work world.

Jeff Giesea is the founder of BestVendor.

[Laptop image via Shutterstock]

Quixey aims to do something new: It lets users search for mobile, desktop and web apps based on what the app does. The company calls this “functional search,” and Quixey says it differs from typical mobile app store search, which is based on keywords found in titles and descriptions.

Instead of relying solely on what app developers say about their own products, Quixey incorporates data from review sites, blogs and social networks to determine what an app does. Using this fuller set of information on app functions and features, Quixey is able to show users an ostensibly more accurate and complete list of apps.

“Apps make people’s lives better… Quixey is working with companies throughout the world to ensure that their users can finally access what technology has to offer,” said Tomer Kagan, Quixey co-founder and CEO in a release today.

Right now, the app search works for platforms such as Android, iOS, Mac and Windows. Quixey also covers apps, plugins and extensions for browsers such as Chrome and Firefox, apps for Facebook, general web apps and more.

The new funding will help get Quixey’s services onto more devices by allowing for more and better partnerships with manufacturers, carrier networks, app stores such as the iTunes App Store and Android Market and other organizations that control what functions appear on smartphones and other devices. Quixey hopes to power app search for these entities, and it currently also lets individuals run queries on its website.

The $3.8 million is Quixey’s first institutional round. The investment was led by U.S. Venture Partners and WI Harper Group with participation from Webb Investment Network and Innovation Endeavors.

Image courtesy of Flickr, liewcf.

Cloud PHP platform provider AppFog on Thursday announced it has raised $8 million to expand its offerings to PHP app developers and hire more staff to bolster what the platform can do.

“We’re going to use this funding to take the template we offer developers to another level and offer the framework to those that use Java, Node, Ruby, and others,” AppFog CEO Lucas Carlson told VentureBeat.

The company previously raised $1.8 million. The $8 million in new funding is being led by Ignition Partners. Frank Artale, managing director at Ignition, said the platform-as-a-service (PaaS) sector is a strong area to bet on for the near future.

“The PaaS market is incredibly exciting right now, and while there are a number of new entrants, I was attracted to AppFog for its strong technical and leadership track record,” said Artale, in a statement. “Their commitment and leadership in open source provides them with a position to help drive a movement that will significantly benefit enterprise IT.”

AppFog has eight employees now, but Carlson said it will try to double that size as soon as possible. He also said being based in Portland actually gives the company an advantage over San Francisco when it comes to hiring talented developers.

“Portland has a really large open-source community,” Carlson said. “There are a lot of exciting things happening here.”

AppFog currently hosts about 10,000 web applications on its platform, including offerings from eWEEK Labs, Picdish, ShareFuze, VenPop, and FedUpWithLunch. And with a cool $8 million in pocket, it could grow that number quickly.

Photo via Mike Behnken

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Many hoped that Apple’s iCloud web apps would offer a fully functional version of iWork, but it doesn’t seem likely for the service’s initial launch, according to a demo video recorded by a iOS developer today.

True to its description, the iCloud.com storage service will store documents created on Apple’s iWork office application suite. However, it doesn’t allow its users to edit documents directly from the iCloud web apps.

Currently, the iCloud site acts as a web portal for all iWork documents created on an iOS device. You can begin a document on a mobile device and eventually transfer it to a desktop computer to view, edit and finish. (And vice versa)

You can convert files to a variety of different formats when downloading them on another computer, which is actually pretty helpful for managing documents on the go. The video also shows off iCloud’s quick response time between viewing document alterations in the cloud.

I’ve used the iWork apps in the past, and for the most part I’ve been very pleased with usability. But Google Docs is still a far easier solution for document collaboration and Microsoft’s Office 365 suite is not far behind. But until Apple offers a fully functional web app, I doubt the iCloud storage will get much attention by the majority of people.

Via 9 to 5 Mac

Check out the iCloud.com Beta demo video by NatesTechUpdate.

The new service, Intuit Anywhere, lets developers connect their apps to Intuit’s Partner Platform, giving them the ability to integrate with QuickBooks data and let customers sign on using their Intuit ID. That’s similar to the way you can sign on to websites using Facebook Connect or a Twitter ID, except in this case you’ll be using an Intuit login and giving the web apps access to your QuickBooks data on Intuit’s servers.

The service is aimed at helping turn QuickBooks into a platform and an app store, an approach that has generated huge returns for Apple, Facebook, Twitter, Salesforce.com and others. Intuit also said it would make certified apps available on its Intuit App Center, a collection of Web apps that work with QuickBooks. Intuit said that 1 million users have registered for its App Center.

With just 4 million customers, QuickBooks doesn’t have anything like the gravitational pull of an Apple or a Facebook. But those customers — small businesses that use QuickBooks to run their core operations — are a prime target for developers.

“The ease of building and marketing apps using Intuit Anywhere means we’re going to see more developers integrating with QuickBooks,” said Paul Jackson, president and founder of MethodCRM.com, in Intuit’s press release.

Companies using Intuit Anywhere include Bill.com, Concur, eBay, FreshBooks, Mavenlink and MethodCRM.com, according to Intuit.

Intuit Anywhere is in beta now and will be released in the fall.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Editor’s note: This discussion about enterprise mobility is one of the five themes we will be focusing on at the VentureBeat Mobile Summit, on April 25-26. We’ve carefully invited the top executives in mobile to discuss the biggest challenges of the day, which, if solved, can lead to much faster growth in the industry. And at our enterprise session, we’ll have top executives around the table from a number of companies, including Verizon, AT&T, Cisco, Salesforce, Box.net, and more. (If you think you should be part of the discussion, you can apply for a ticket.)

Don’t expect to find the core applications that run the pistons of a business as native apps in Apple’s App Store. With a few exceptions, the future is touch-enabled web applications that will bring a more complete version of a vendor’s feature set to any tablet.

I’ll say it more explicitly:  Native apps are for phones, gadgets and games.  Touch-enabled web apps are for tablets and broad business applications.

The iPhone’s size has almost necessitated an alternative user experience for business apps, but the iPad’s screen real estate does not suffer that limitation.

The iPad has been in the market for over one year.  Conspicuously absent from Smartsheet’s Top iPad Apps for Business lists — produced over the last 8 months by 10 industry watchers — are any cross-business operating apps tackling customer relationship management (CRM), accounting, project management and the like.

Smart software companies are building tablet access into their core products by touch-enabling their existing web applications.  For some vendors with form-based solutions, the effort may be fairly simple, for others with rich desktop-class UIs, it is more complex.

Some serious business apps have native tablet versions, but they are either narrow business functions or small carve-outs of their overall solution. Here are some examples:

Some examples of companies with broader business operations applications that are benefiting from the touch-enabled web app approach are:

The key reasons to go native on the iPhone / iPad have been:  performance, access to device features (geo-location, camera, etc….), offline support, and most importantly, an entry in the App Store Directory (this will be the only remaining benefit to building native business apps in 12- 18 months).

But the following dynamics in the tablet ecosystem are predicting the demise of that native apps advantage:

Competition Among Tablets Will Dramatically Improve Performance
Intense competition in the tablet market will drive hardware, browser and connectivity performance closer and closer to parity with PCs.  Note the step up in hardware power from the iPad to the recently released Motorola Xoom and iPad 2.  Vendors do not build native apps for PCs and Laptops any more, and the reasons for that will be just as valid for tablets.

HTML5 Will Erase Native App’s Device Advantage
HTML5 will give browser apps powers that until recently have only been accessible by native apps such as instant on, access to camera, location, and off-line.  And, unless it’s a game, most apps require connectivity to be useful anyway.  (Here’s a good write-up on this, and here’s another VentureBeat piece on HTML5 versus native.)

Web Apps Will Outpace and Outreach the Natives (adding features vs platforms)
As more tablets come to market on more operating systems, ISVs will become weighted down building redundant apps for each OS.  This will inherently come at the expense of adding more features to a single web app.  Inherent in any application development toolkit are its limitations, and Apple’s is no different.  Richer experiences are possible with today’s browser development tools.

Businesses Will Favor App Stores that Include “Bookmark a Link” Apps
Apple forbids “pointers” or “very thin wrappers” to touch-enabled web business apps.  This benefits Apple, but not business users.  There are a host of good business apps that work on the iPad browser, but they’re not present in the App Store.  This is slowing the growth of the iPad as a business tool.  The marketplace that lists compatible business apps will have a broad audience – one that expects them.

The debate will continue on both the mobile and tablet fronts and it depends on a multitude of factors, but ultimately businesses will choose which approach delivers a more compelling user experience for their specific application.  ZDNet reports on three of the key business scenarios prevalent with the iPad, which includes 1) sales people out in the field, 2) executives on an overnight trip, and 3) warehouse managers, retail floor staff, medical staff, and anybody else that needs real access to apps while on their feet.

A tablet untethers the user categories above from a desk if it can handle typically more comprehensive operational business applications that can cover a diversity of business needs. For example,  this video shows the owner of a 109-year-old lumber operation bringing automation to the mill floor via the iPad.

For this company and the millions just like it, the need for rich tablet-ready business apps is real, but native apps aren’t there yet. Thankfully, there is an app for that. But you’ll have to look beyond the App Store.

Brent Frei is the founder of Smartsheet, an online project management and collaboration tool. He submitted this story to VentureBeat as part of a series leading up to our Mobile Summit later this month.

Zurb, interaction design and strategy firm that specializes in online and mobile applications, has gone back to the drawing board for its Web-design collaboration tool Notable. By stripping away unnecessary features, lowering its pricing, and removing storage and user limits, the company is aiming to shine a new light on Notable.

Zurb marketing head Dmitry Dragilev admits that Notable’s previous iteration “got a bit clunky and unfocused” in a blog post today. So the company took to redesigning and refocusing the app to avoid feature creep — the point in which adding new features only makes your program more complicated and slow. It’s a lesson that many developers should take note of: it’s never too late to put a stop to feature creep and start from scratch.

The new Notable still serves the same function as the older version. It’s a Web-based app that allows multiple users to collaborate on web-page design, either via screenshots of sites or pictures of wire-frame design concepts. Collaborators can take notes directly on the designs, or add comments.

Here’s how the new Notable works: Paid plans start at only $19 a month, which gives you the ability to work on an unlimited amount of posts, share them with anybody, and add an unlimited amount of team members to a project. You can also export annotated posts as PDFs to share with clients. The $49 Plus plan adds more customization options, while the $99 Premium plan offers a wealth of organizational features for hardcore designers.

To give you a taste of what Notable has to offer, the company also offers free accounts that let you work on up to 10 pages with an unlimited amount of team members.

Zurb has also made it easier to capture web pages to collaborate on with capture plugins for every major browser, apps for the iPhone and iPad, and desktop screen capturing tools for Windows and Mac OS X. Sharing posts with others outside of your organization has also gotten easier: every Notable post has a private URL that can be shared with anyone, and they will also be able to add comments and notes without logging into the site.

Competitors include design collaboration tools like ConceptShare, but Notable differs from most other options by allowing for unlimited projects, storage and users.

Campbell, Calif.,-based Zurb has been in the design consulting business for more than 12 years. It presented its Verify app at DEMO Spring 2010.

Games and other apps built specifically for Apples iOS devices or Android devices have to be rebuilt in order to work on other platforms, so HTML5′s portability makes it appealing to developers and game publishers alike. The move mirrors Disney’s larger corporate strategy as well, in which it seeks to distribute its content across as many platforms as possible.

Rocket Pack, based in Helsinki, Finland, will become a subsidiary of The Walt Disney Company in the Disney Interactive Media Group. According to Fast Company, the price of the acquisition was between $10 million and $20 million.

The one-year-old startup just released the first HTML5 game based on its Rocket game engine for developers. The game, called Warimals, is about the everlasting battle between cats and dogs.

Rocket Pack promises its engine will be able to handle many kinds of social multiplayer features, including virtual currency to buy virtual goods. The engine works with Apple iOS devices, Android, and most major browsers on a PC or Mac.

Here’s a sample of Rocket Pack’s work:

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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Mobile apps are a hot topic at the moment, but ApSynth believes there’s still plenty of opportunity available in Web apps meant for desktop Web browsers.

Today, the company is launching a Web-app editor that lets anyone create their own apps, and it also offers multiple ways for users to distribute and monetize their apps. Users can submit their apps to the ApSynth Marketplace to make money from their creation, or they can just offer up the apps for free. The apps can be embedded on websites, social networks and even be used as standalone desktop applications.

Founders Guillaume Gruet and Jeff Gruet created the company as a response to the popularity of mobile and social media apps. They wanted to create an easy way for users to bring apps to the wider web, instead of being stuck in closed mobile or social media environments. The former Gruet worked in sales for a software publisher and marketing for Vivendi Universal, while the latter came from Airbus as an IT project manager.

ApSynth faces steep from the likes of Conduit, a company that has found great success with its massive web app platform, and Heroku. There’s definitely room for competition in the web app arena though, and by focusing on easy app development, ApSynth may be able to carve out a place for itself.

The Paris, France-based company was founded in 2008 and is self-funded to the tune of 100,000 euros.

IBM researchers said the recent growth of cloud computing and remote desktop access will likely become a sore point for security issues, as hackers cracking into a master rig that controls several virtual desktops could theoretically access all of those desktops.

Web apps had the largest number of security vulnerabilities, growing by 55 percent year-over-year. The report indicated that incidents of malicious code hidden in JavaScript, a common interactive scripting language, and other Web app code rose by 52 percent compared to the same period a year earlier.

Exploits of documents in Adobe’s PDF format rose 37 percent. Most of that increase can be attributed to the use of PDF exploits earlier this year to expand the Zeus and Pushdo botnets, organized networks of infected computers manipulated remotely by hacker gangs.

Phishing activity, which involves tricking users into putting information like bank account logins into a website masquerading as a bank or email service, fell 82 percent from the same period a year earlier. Browser makers have taken measures to discourage phishing attempts by warning users. About half of all phishing attacks in 2010 were coordinated against financial websites, such as those of banks.

More than half of the security vulnerabilities listed in IBM’s X-force report were not patched by suppliers or vendors by the end of the first half of 2010, when the reporting period ended.

[Photo: Clip Works]

A Motorola official confirmed to TechCrunch that Motorola acquired the web-app developer to “help facilitate the continued expansion of Motorola’s application ecosystem.” The deal was reportedly worth $20 million.

280 North developed the Objective-J and Cappuccino app development platforms, designed for those with more limited and focused programming experience. The platforms were showed off in the company’s 280 Slides app.

These app development tools could be another way for Motorola to differentiate its devices from other Android phones. Device makers are already trying to do this by developing their own “flavors” of the basic Android operating system, including Motorola’s own MotoBlur.

Those major handset manufacturers are founding members of the Open Handset Alliance, which was created to help promote an open set of tools available to all developers in the form of the Android operating system.

The deal was closed earlier in the summer, according to the Motorola official cited by TechCrunch and Barron. 280 North had initially raised $250,000 in a 2008 Angel investment fundraising round, giving a pretty sizable exit for its current investors if the TechCrunch number is accurate.

I’ve reached out to both Motorola and 280 North for confirmation and details, and I’ll update if I hear back.