HealthTap has raised $11.5 million in a first round of funding to expand its expert online physician community, which answers questions that patients pose online or via smartphones.

The backers include Google chairman Eric Schmidt’s Innovation Endeavors fund and Mohr Davidow Ventures, while Mayfield Fund led the round.

Palo Alto, Calif.-based HealthTap’s interactive health network started just two months ago and it already has more than 6,000 doctors and 500 healthcare institutions. Patients ask questions and physicians answer them. That by itself is pretty mundane. But HealthTap motivates the doctors to stay engaged because it rewards them with a better reputation and peer recognition.

Ron Gutman, chief executive of HealthTap, said in an interview that the idea for company came about because searching for authoritative health information on the internet is a frustrating experience since users don’t trust the answers they find. Doctors can be much better at answering direct questions, but they are notoriously busy and technology-phobic.

“The goal is to transform healthcare in this country,” Gutman said. “People who use the internet for health information find it useless because they don’t trust it. There are 1.2 billion health searches every month, but the real trusted information comes from doctors.”

HealthTap “gamifies” the process of answering questions, giving the physicians reputation points for their answers. On top of that, physicians can simply tap a button on a mobile phone if they agree with an answer that another doctor gave. Doctors who earn a lot of “agree” buttons can grow their standing among peers.

In the network, anyone can ask health questions online or on a mobile app. They can get answers from U.S. doctors across 100 specialties for free.

HealthTap will use the money to accelerate growth, recruit talent, and engage more physicians and patients in its online HealthTap community.

Tim Chang, managing director at Mayfield, said in an interview that Gutman has a track record of working for seven years in the field, dating back to work he did at Stanford University. Chang said that no other service has gotten doctors so engaged in answering questions and the reason is the “gamification of health.” The physicians stay engaged because they enjoy giving answers, getting rewards, and getting peer recognition. And the network taps mobile apps, which make it easy to respond.

“The ‘aha’ that caused me to invest is not just Ron’s vision for health 2.0 and gamification,” Chang said. “It was also that he was able to get doctors to care in a way that no other startup has been able to.”

In the past, drug companies often tried to bribe doctors with money. But HealthTap also taps into the same kinds of motivations that keep people playing games. The apps feed the doctors’ pride, altruism, and vanity.

“We call this the virtualization of healthcare,” Gutman said. “Instead of using strangers to do crowdsourcing, we call this ‘trust sourcing.’”

Gutman said that all physicians undergo background checks to participate on HealthTap, verifying their medical licenses and good standing in terms of lawsuits or complaints. Approved doctors get a free “virtual practice” from which they can lead an online health conversation. They can also make connections to get new patients for in-person care.

HealthTap was founded in 2010. It launched its beta apps a few months ago with expert discussions focused on pregnant mothers and pediatricians. Then it expanded to 100 different specialties where patients can ask questions 24 hours a day, seven days a week. The information is free.

HealthTap has 12 employees. The competition is doctors and hospitals who work in traditional ways. Participants include the big providers such as Cleveland Clinic and The Mount Sinai Hospital, as well as small practices across the nation like Women’s Care of Beverly Hills Medical Group, to individual physician offices such as the one run by Robert Kwok in Saratoga, Calif.

Filed under: games, mobile, VentureBeat

Enflick, the Canadian creator of popular apps like TextNow and PingChat, is taking a big step forward today with the launch of Touch, a new mobile messaging platform to help you keep in touch with your closest friends and family.

Yes, that sounds a bit similar to Path, the year-old mobile social network that recently received a major update. But Touch, available for iOS, Android, and BlackBerry, is more focused on real-time chat rather than posting updates. It’s about active communication with your close friends.

And Touch has one other major advantage over its better-funded competitor: a massive pre-existing user base. The company says it has 21.5 million worldwide users on PingChat and TextNow, and Touch will roll out as an update for 13 million existing PingChat users.

Enflick co-founder and CEO Derek Ting tells us that Touch will completely replace the existing PingChat network — which makes sense, since Touch is an evolved form of that app. Like PingChat, you can have quick text conversations with your friends and share photos, but Touch will also let you easily keep track of all of your friends’ updates in typical social network fashion.

The Touch app looks attractive (though perhaps a bit too similar to Path), and it lets you easily move friends in and out of conversations to make group chats easier. Like all mobile messaging apps, it lets you know if your messages have been delivered and read, as well as when your friends are typing.

Still, Enflick has a long road ahead, as there are plenty of other messaging solutions on the market. And when it comes to keeping in touch with close friends, many are already praising Path’s slick new interface and life-tracking features.

Based in Waterloo, Ontario, Enflick recently raised $1 million in seed funding from Freestyle Capital, the Menlo Ventures Talent fund, and both Justin Bieber and Lady Gaga’s managers (not surprising, given the massive teen demographic for free texting services).

Filed under: mobile, VentureBeat

Much to the dismay of pretty much everyone on the web, a federal judge decided yesterday to allow luxury brand Chanel to seize and shutter 228 web domains that it argued offered counterfeit versions of its products.

The decision, and the process by which it was made, are ridiculous. A judge based in Nevada issued a death sentence for these sites without so much as a hearing. And none of these sites was given a chance to make its case before the sentence was carried out.

In an even more troubling move, the judge has ordered Google to remove these sites from its index. Search is the gateway to the Internet – the modern day access to information. The government telling a search engine which sites it may include in its index sounds like censorship to most people.

But a bad decision based on a bad process doesn’t mean that there’s not a real underlying problem here. Anytime a user can go to a search engine, search for a Chanel product and end up getting a knock-off instead, that’s a problem. And not just an annoyance. It’s a full-fledged security problem.

Clever search engine optimization professionals are experts at positioning sites of dubious quality on the first page of results on a search engine. There is no branding that allows sites of high quality to distinguish themselves at a casual glance from those of content farms, spammers or knock-off sites. Indeed, it’s the opposite. These sites are specifically designed to look legitimate. So consumers can be completely unaware they’re not on a company’s official site.

Ignoring First Amendment issues for a moment, having a federal judge curating a multibillion-page search index is a little like putting a finger in the hole of the dam without realizing there are 100 more holes draining the same lake. The web did not become a littered cesspool overnight, and it won’t be cleansed in one day by one judge issuing one arbitrary ruling.

A number of technology companies are already at work on tools and services that could solve this problem. My own company, Blekko, for example, uses human experts to curate the web and tell us which sites are shady. Our curators cull the results across hundreds of vertical topics and surface the results they think offer the best information.

Then, of course, there’s Facebook, which is itself a form of curation and one of the reasons many people think the social network will be such a huge threat in search. Facebook users don’t “like” sites that are spam, so user curation has the potential to create an incredibly high-quality index.

And now Microsoft’s Bing admits it is using its own editors to curate results. The search company has said its editors eliminated many holiday shopping and information sites because content on the sites is too thin. Google this year issued another update to its algorithm in an effort to improve its machine’s ability to recognize and kill spam.

Another approach to the problem is the new peer-to-peer search model developed by YaCy. The peer-to-peer network approach is interesting as it uses your browser history — a form of curation — as its index. Only sites that users have actually visited are returned in search results.

And there’s Quora, which skips the middleman search engine altogether and asks users directly for answers to specific questions. No doubt, human-supplied answers are going to trump algorithm-served answers every time.

It’s time to face the facts: The Web is more and more the Wild West every day. Search spam is now one of the fastest growing inroads for malicious attacks. It’s time to start thinking about how to improve security in search. If we need spam filters to protect us from malicious email attacks, then we also need something to protect us from getting ripped off by phony web sites or having our computers trashed because we click on a malicious link in search results.

Rich Skrenta is cofounder and CEO of search engine startup Blekko. A serial entrepreneur, Skrenta previously cofounded news site Topix and NewHoo, a crowdsourced web directory acquired by Netscape in 1998.

Filed under: VentureBeat

A fun new iPad game is pushing the limits of psychology and gameplay. Gua-Le-Ni, Or: The Horrendous Parade is a beautiful series of memory puzzles that are supposed to give you the jitters.

The object of the game is to match disjointed paper drawings of animals with cubes that have different sections of animals’ bodies on each side, all while the drawn critter marches across the screen. For example, the drawing might have the the head of a tiger, the body of a wartho and the tail of a lobster. You manipulate the cubes below the drawing by pinching and turning them to find the corresponding animal bit.

The $4.99 Horrendous Parade draws upon the PhD work of Italian game designer Stefano Gualeni, for whom the game is named. It was developed by game studio Double Jungle at the Academy for Digital Entertainment at NHTV Breda University of Applied Science, where Gualeni is conducting his thesis research.

While creating the game, developers hooked tester players up to monitors that tracked their heart rate and blood flow, and monitored their facial contractions with cameras. This was done in order to better understand player responses, and to build a game that would stimulate them on as many levels as possible.

Rather than being invasive, the team thinks they’re pushing the boundaries of gameplay for the iPad. “Most design is based on this type of feedback loop, [Horrendous Parade] is just more defined,” Gualeni told VentureBeat. The result, the designers hope, is a game that creates the maximum thrill and engagement, by intentionally striking a nerve.

“I think it’s no better or no worse than traditional design philosophy in terms of ethics,” Gualeni said, and his sentiments were elaborated in a press release:

By observing the way stress and anxiety changed in our test subjects together with the changes in the game while designing and tuning it, we were capable — we believe —  [of having] a better, more thorough and more objective insight [into] what it is like to play our game than would ever be possible to achieve with traditional quality assurance procedures. This experimental way to approach game design was never even attempted in the casual sector of the industry, we are very proud of this pioneering effort too.

Gualeni also said that the developers for console games such as Left 4 Dead and NBA 2K11 rely upon observing the same types of bodily reaction to create the maximum response and enjoyment in players. Gualeni also cited products like Gmail that carefully track user metrics as a way to constantly improve design and user experience.

“Gmail is one of the most used services in the world, and they heavily rely on user metrics to refine the product,” said Gualeni. “What we do is push it to a more objective and embodied version. Personally I see it as a useful tool. I wouldn’t be surprised if more people start to use it.”

My first impression was that if the intent of the game is to provoke anxiety, it may work too well.

The interface of the game is supposed to evoke images of a leather-bound field journal from an old library. The book is filled with gorgeous illustrations, and flipping the page grants access to the next set of challenges. But as the only mode of controlling the game, the touch controls felt sticky and slow, and it was hard not to get frustrated.

I was flummoxed by the game mechanics at first, too. It took while to get a handle on the pinch and twist gesture that is familiar to any iOS user. After a block was placed, it was easy to accidentally dislodge it. As I went along I quickly realized that part of the trick to doing well is to remember which parts of each animal were on each colored cube, such as the humps of the camel or the snout of a salmon

“We only give the player two basic mechanics,” Gualeni said. “There are three hidden, unexplained mechanics.” Rather than spell it out for users at every turn, Gualeni said the game is meant to be an experiment in exploratory game play. “Most casual games treat the users as minors,” said Gualeni. ”I hope someone will discover all the secrets and play the game in advanced mode,” said Gualeni, insinuating that game itself is full of secrets.

The initial level of difficulty was higher than expected, and an “ease-in” period would have been nice. Because some of the mechanics were unfamiliar, I thought about bailing before I mastered the techniques.

Even though the game took some getting used to before becoming fun, once I was up to speed, it was definitely worth the investment of time and energy.

It’s still too early to know whether the team behind the Horrendous Parade has a hit on its hands, but the developers have pushed the boundaries of science and game play in a beautiful and highly engaging iPad app that’s unafraid to be misunderstood.  And just like a clomping, camel-headed rabbit-tailed beast with the body of salmon, it may not be love at first site, but you have to respect it.

Filed under: games, VentureBeat

Editor’s note: Serial entrepreneur Steve Blank is the author of Four Steps to the Epiphany. This story originally appeared on his blog.

Venture capitalists who are serious about turning their firms into more than one-fund wonders may want to have their associates actually start and run a company for a year.

Running a company is distinctly different from simply having operating experience, such as working in business development, sales or marketing. None of that can compare with being the CEO of a startup facing challenges such as a rapidly diminishing bank account, your best engineer quitting, working until 10pm and rushing to the airport and catching a redeye for a “Hail Mary” close of a customer, with your board demanding you do it faster.

Today, you can start a web, mobile or cloud startup for $500,000 and have money left over. Every potential early-stage venture capitalist should take a year and do it before he or she makes partner. Here’s why.

Why have a startup

Venture capital as a profession is less than half a century old. Over time, venture firms realized that the partners in the firms needed a variety of skills:

 

People skills (ability to recognize patterns of success in individuals and teams)
People skills
People skills
Market/technology acuity (patterns of success, domain expertise)
Rolodex/deal flow (deal sourcing/ability to make connections for the portfolio)
Board skills (Startup coaching, mentoring, strategy, operational/growth)
Fund raising skills

Some of these skills are learned in school (finance), some are innate aptitudes (people skills), some are learned pattern recognition skills (shadowing experienced partners, hard won success and failures of their own), and some are learned by having operating experience. But none of them are substitutes for having started and run a company.

How to become a VC
Early-stage Venture Capital firms grow their partnerships in different ways, some hire the following people:

 

Partners from other firms
Associates and put them on a long career path
Venture/operating partners to get them into new industries
An executive who had startup “operating experience”
Rarely a startup founder/CEO

In surveying my VC friends, I was surprised about their strong and diverse opinions. The feedback varied:

“.. because culture is such an important part of who we are, we will probably never hire a partner from another firm. The idea of bolting on someone from another firm is somewhat antithetical to who we are. We think that our venture partner role is the most likely path to general partner.”

..we have a partner-track associates program.  We want to find someone who has a lot of consumer internet product experience as either product manager, founder, VP Product, etc. with 3-7 years of experience.”

“…we do not even try to train new partners. We bring people into our firm who have learned how to be VCs at the partner level somewhere else and have demonstrated their talent in boardrooms alongside of us. We completely and totally punt on the idea of “training a VC.”  It’s an ugly and painful process and I don’t want to be part of it.”

“…if they don’t have operating experience  the odds of them knowing what they’re talking about in a board meeting for the first five years is low..”

Carrying the cat by the tail
When I finally became a CEO, it was after I had spent my career working my way up the ladder in marketing in startups. I did every low-level job there was, at times sleeping under my desk (engineering was doing the same.) By the time I was running a company, having some junior employee tell me why they couldn’t do something because of “how hard it was” didn’t get much sympathy from me. I knew how hard it was because I had done it myself. Startups are hard.

What running a company would do is give early-stage VCs a benchmark for reality, something most newly-minted partners sorely lack. They would learn how a founding CEO turns their money into a company which becomes a learning, execution and delivery engine. They would learn that a CEO does it through the people — the day-to-day of who is going to do what, how you hold people accountable, how teams communicate and more importantly, who you hire, how you motivate and get people to accomplish the seemingly impossible. Further, they’d experience first hand how, in a startup, the devil is in the details of execution and deliverables.

My hypotheses is simple:  What most VCs lack is not brains or rolodex or people skills, but hands-on experience as a startup CEO — knowing what it’s like trying to make a payroll while finding sufficient customers while you’re building the product.  Sure, a year as a CEO won’t make them an expert, but it will change them quicker than 10 years in the boardroom.

Does it matter?
There’s a school of thought that says the skill set of a great early-stage VC (awesome people skills, curiosity, likable) versus the attributes of a great entrepreneur (pattern recognition, tenacity) may not have much overlap. Early stage investing is not a spreadheet, quantitative driven exercise, nor is it about technology — it is a deal business and people drive the deals. And while having experience as a startup CEO may make you a better board member, it may not substantively contribute to your career as an early stage investor, which depends on many more important skills.

Steel in their eyes
Ten years ago starting a company required millions of dollars and first customer ship took years. Now it’s possible to build a company, ship product and get tens of thousands of customers in a year with less than $500K. For venture firms who want to groom and grow associates or operating execs into partners (rather than hiring proven partners), here are my suggestions:

 

Have them start as an analyst (search for deal flow and people, due diligence).
Then take a year as a product manager in a startup in the firm’s portfolio.
Then come back as an associate for a year – shadowing board and partner meetings.
Then take a year and $250-500K to start and run a mobile, web or cloud company. See what it’s really like on the other side of that boardroom table.
Then return as a partner.

This process will create a new generation of venture capital partners, ones who have been battle tested in the trenches of a startup, hardened by hiring and firing, tempered by making a payroll and losing orders, and will never forget it’s all about the people.

These VCs would return to their firms with steel in their eyes. They’d be relentless about accountability from board meeting to board meeting with laser like focus on the one or two issues that matter. They would understand the CEO-VC-board dynamic in a way that few who hadn’t lived it could. They’d be ruthless in their choice of people and teams, looking for those few who have natural curiosity, a passion to win and who won’t take no for answer.

[Folder image via Shutterstock]

 

Filed under: Entrepreneur Corner, VentureBeat

No one embodies the classic, sniff-it-out serial entrepreneur more than Mike Cassidy, who has now built and sold four companies (Stylus Innovation, Direct Hit, Xfire and Ruba), some of them with very impressive exits.

Last week, Cassidy traveled to Turkey for a start-up event, and he talked about how he does it. Below right is one of the slides he showed to the audience of about 200 entrepreneurs and investors. It documents the milestones he hit while building DirectHit, which he sold 500 days after he started it, for $532 million to AskJeeves.

MIke Cassidy's slide on Direct Hit milestones, on way to $500M exit
I’ve been soaking up the lore of Silicon Valley for the past ten years, but something about Cassidy’s talk still grabbed me: With infectious energy, Cassidy takes the classic tenets of entrepreneurship and douses steroids on them. For the uninitiated, Cassidy’s recommendations look a tad perverse, but the results, like former SF Giants’ Barry Bonds’ home-runs, are effective.  To be sure, Cassidy’s is not the recipe used by folks like Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Larry Ellison and Bill Gates, who think especially long-term while building their companies. It’s the recipe for the extremely quick exit. It’s the second of two dominant strands in company-building.

So let’s turn to Cassidy’s philosophies, which he encouraged the Turkish audience — largely a group of early entrepreneurs — to try to emulate if they want to succeed.
.

Raise funds in a single day: Most outrageously, for the inexperienced Turkish audience, Cassidy said it is important to try to raise funds in a single day. He wasn’t joking. To create a sense of urgency, you should ask the investors you’re talking with to make sure they have all the decision-makers in their fund present during your pitch. You round up all meetings with investors in a single day (Cassidy calls this “sychronized timing”) and give them a deadline by 5pm to give you a termsheet. He backed up his point, and he does with his other points, with examples from the companies he’s launched. He’s gotten a termsheet on the same day he presented to VCs in seven of the eight times he’s raised a round.

Idea in two weeks: Entrepreneurs should limit themselves to two weeks to formulate their business idea, he said. Anything longer, and the entrepreneurs risk talking themsleves out of it. Better to launch quick, and to iterate, than take too long perfecting something that will bomb later because it hasn’t been tested.

Team in two weeks: Entrepreneurs should take only two weeks to put their core team together, another provocative prescription, considering it can take some entrepreneurs months to make core hires. Cassidy wasn’t apologetic. The excitement and urgency you create by offering someone a job on the same day that you meet them, and forcing them to give you an answer by 9am the following day, leads to significant momentum for the company, he said. And if they don’t work out? Well, you can fire them just as quickly. Cassidy talked about some of his tricks: He invites candidates over to dinner at his home — the same night as the interview — with himself and his wife. And once the candidate has accepted, Cassidy makes sure they get all the HR paperwork and agreed-to task-list signed before they even start. That way, they hit the ground running. This contributes to warp speed.

3.5 months to launch: Once you’ve settled on your idea, it shouldn’t take any longer than 3.5 months to launch your product. By launching your product, and iterating on a quick schedule of every couple weeks, you’re more likely to surge ahead of slower competitors and bigger companies.

Deal with hard deadlines. On deal-making, Cassidy’s recipe for success is to drive partners to decisions by pointing a virtual gun at their head. Either they sign a deal by a hard deadline, or he walks. This also helps drive things quickly. A deal’s chances of closing declines by 10 percent every day it doesn’t close, according to Cassidy’s rule of thumb. So he may be bluffing a partner when he provides a deadline, but it’s worth the risk, he says. If a partner is unwilling to sign a deal by an appointed deadline, the chances of it closing are declining anyway. And it’s good if you can use these deals to drive funding decisions too. Cassidy’s second company, Direct Hit, once found a way to accelerate a search results by rendering a URL 50 milliseconds faster than competing search enginse. By convincing a major search engine to sign an binding agreement to use the technology — before the deal was full approved by lawyers — Cassidy was able to present  the agreement to investors. This convinced the investors that Direct Hit was worth investing in, and at a higher valuation.

Raise smaller rounds. Cassidy recommends raising smaller amounts of VC funding, because they can propel you quickly to the next step in your business, with minimal dilution. You can raise money later at higher multiples. The results speak for themselves: He sold Stylus Innovation for $13 million after he and his founders put a total of $1,500 into the company to start with — a near 10,000 times return, he notes. With Direct Hit, he took about $1.3M in funding in his first round, and produced $532M the eventual exit in a year and a half to AskJeeves. With Xfire, he raised $1M, and sold it to MTV/Viacom for $110 within two years. With Ruba, he raised a first round, and Google bought the company within two years after he launched it, but he isn’t saying for how much.

To be sure, his Turkish audience was left scratching their heads.

Cassidy’s slide presentation below.

(See my related story about the emergence of Turkey as an e-commerce hotbed.)

Filed under: Entrepreneur Corner, VentureBeat

Much of what happens at a startup happens out of sight of journalists and their readers.

It’s not the stuff of compelling reading, either. Running a business involves a vast amount of logistical work, stuff that has to be learned step by step if you don’t already know how to do it.

You don’t find this out in business school. The only way to learn it is by doing it. That’s why, if you’ve got a killer business idea, you should go out and do it.

You don’t find this out by being a journalist, either. Back in the dot-com era, another writer and I got together, decided we had a pretty good grasp on this digital publishing thing, and started a company.

We probably did have a good idea. Our plan was to write and syndicate how-to content like tips and tricks, starting with tech products and then expanding into other categories. We figured we’d sell advertising, and syndicate our content to sites that needed to make themselves stickier, like e-commerce sites. A better-funded competitor, eHow, went on to dominate the how-to category before getting acquired. It’s still around. Meanwhile, syndication turned out to be a decent model for making money from content. We were just 10 years too early.

At least, that’s what I like to tell people. In reality, we had a great idea but no clue how to execute it. Despite great advice from more experienced business people and investors, we were good at the writing and editing business but not so hot at the generating-revenue and organizing-a-team business.

Things you wouldn’t ordinarily think twice about, like incorporating and taking care of our (nearly nonexistent) finances took up a huge amount of time, as we realized that we were out of our depth. We then spent too long talking with lawyers and accountants who cost way too much. Eventually, we realized we didn’t really need such heavy-duty firepower helping us, but by then we had spent thousands on them.

We were convinced we needed to raise a lot of money, and quickly, so we could “get big fast” and then figure out our revenue model. In reality, that was exactly backwards: For our kind of business, we should have stayed small, kept the company simple, built a product that we understood and could sell, and then grown the business once we had some idea what we were doing.

Eventually, we ran into one too many roadblocks (including the dot-com bust) and wound the company down. We didn’t make ourselves or our investors rich, but we did return more than half of what they’d invested to them — which is more than you can say about Pets.com or Boo.com.

But here’s the thing: I think our experience is typical of many, many startups. Unless you’ve been through a startup at its earliest stages before, you have no idea what kinds of unexpected, and possibly stupid, things you’re going to have to deal with. Do you need desks? How is your team going to communicate: on ICQ, AIM, Yammer or something else? Should you incorporate or form some kind of simpler partnership? What happens when a customer asks for an invoice? How do you handle it when one of the cofounders refuses to bathe and smells terrible? (Just to be clear, that last example comes from Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs, not from my experience.)

One of the advantages that entrepreneurs have today is that, thanks to cloud technologies like Amazon EC2 and S3, it’s easier than ever to build a prototype, get a website up and running, and start testing your business with real customers.

It’s also easier, thanks to the examples of companies like Craigslist and 37signals, to ignore the received wisdom about “getting big fast” and raising venture capital. If you haven’t read Rework, the 2010 book by the founders of 37signals, check it out — it’s an excellent book with lots of practical advice for people in regular jobs as well as startups.

But one thing remains the same: Starting a company is a risk. Doing that when you’ve got kids, a mortgage or other obligations is a lot more challenging than it is when you’re in college, or just out of school.

In my case, the entrepreneurial thing to do would have been to learn from my failures and jump straight into another startup. Silicon Valley is full of repeat failures, and one of the strengths of the area is that failing in business is not stigmatized, as long as you learn from your experience. With kids on the way, I didn’t have enough flexibility, so I went back to the lucrative, stable world of journalism. (Ha!)

So if you’ve got an idea for a company — or want to work at a startup, like our new columnist Julia Plevin — do it before you’ve incurred a lot of other responsibilities.

“You can’t build a world-changing company in between classes or while servicing six figures of debt,” the president of the Thiel Foundation said this week, when announcing the foundation’s plan to give $100,000 “un-scholarships” to 20 people under 20 years of age. The scholarships are meant to help students with good ideas so they can drop out of college and work on their business.

I think that’s a great idea — and the Thiel Foundation is right. Whether you can get an un-scholarship or not: Do it now.

Image credit: Robert S. Donovan/Flickr

Related articles

Dylan’s Desk: How stressful product launches make stressful products (venturebeat.com)
Startup and the City: Lessons from landing my first startup job (venturebeat.com)
Peter Thiel will give you $100K not to go to college, opens 2012 Thiel Fellowship class (venturebeat.com)
The lean startup: How to stay lean when your company takes off (venturebeat.com)

Filed under: Entrepreneur Corner, VentureBeat

Cloud computing has fundamentally altered the economics of software.

Thanks to the cloud, it is much, much cheaper for users who only need a browser to tap into the world’s largest data centers. It is cheaper for developers to write code and deploy it on virtual servers that are rented by the minute. And it is fundamentally cheaper for entrepreneurs to build and launch new services, to support business users and to scale rapidly.

Traditional SaaS companies have ridden the wave of lower costs, taking significant share from traditional software companies, but their single biggest cost continues to be sales and marketing. Innovative cloud service providers are figuring out how to take this advantage further, using lower costs to generate millions of users by giving away their service for free.

This approach is common in consumer world because advertising revenue can support the operating costs, but increasingly, business application companies are utilizing this approach by relying on a small percentage of users who pay for premium features or heavy usage.

In just over two weeks at Cloudbeat 2011, some of the leading business freemium thinkers and entrepreneurs will come together for a panel (Wednesday, November 30 at 1:30pm) to discuss how they were able to build fast growing, capital-efficient market leaders that are disrupting established competitors and making real money by giving away their crown jewels. Expect an interesting and in-depth discussion about how a business freemium company works, and how it is effecting the software landscape. Our panelists will include:

Ivan Koon is CEO of YouSendIt. A proven and passionate business executive with over 20 years of experience, Ivan has built YouSendIt into the Web’s largest business content collaboration solution. Under his leadership, YouSendIt has aggressively expanded its B2B collaboration platform and increased its registered user base from zero to over 23 million around the world.

David Sacks is Founder & CEO of the enterprise social network Yammer. He has been involved in the internet space for ten years as an entrepreneur, executive and investor. Prior to founding Yammer, David was PayPal’s Chief Operating Officer and product leader, taking the company from startup to IPO and eventual sale to eBay for $1.5 billion.

Jason Lemkin is Founder and CEO of EchoSign, acquired by Adobe. His operational experience spans the business development, sales, legal, human resource, and finance fields, and he is an acknowledged expert in the field of electronic signatures and electronic contracting.

Freemium in the business world is here to stay, and I am excited to talk with some of the pioneers of who can share their experiences and insights. Join us!

Brian Jacobs is a General Partner and Founder of Emergence Capital. He has over 20 years of venture capital experience, a deep national network and an understanding of how technology startups grow into market leaders.

CloudBeat 2011 takes place Nov 30 – Dec 1 at the Hotel Sofitel in Redwood City, CA. Unlike any other cloud events, we’ll be focusing on 12 case studies where we’ll dissect the most disruptive instances of enterprise adoption of the cloud. Speakers include: Aaron Levie, Co-Founder & CEO of Box.net; Amit Singh VP of Enterprise at Google; Adrian Cockcroft, Director of Cloud Architecture at Netflix; Byron Sebastian, Senior VP of Platforms at Salesforce; Lew Tucker, VP & CTO of Cloud Computing at Cisco, and many more. Join 500 executives for two days packed with actionable lessons and networking opportunities as we define the key processes and architectures that companies must put in place in order to survive and prosper. Register here. Spaces are limited!

Filed under: cloud, VentureBeat

Clingle is a new location-based social network that wants to enhance conversations as you check in to places throughout the day.

The service, which officially launched across the U.S. yesterday with a new iPhone app, allows people to leave multimedia messages (text, video or audio) for a specific user or group of users when they check in to a certain location. Those messages can grow into full-length conversations. Users can also leave messages for others to discover, regardless of their location — sort of like Foursquare’s Tips feature.

But unlike Foursquare, Clingle isn’t focused on a public stream of activity. Instead, its more like Google+’s Huddle feature. Clingle co-founder Puneet Mehta told VentureBeat that the service is best compared with the experience of text messaging that’s been enhanced with GPS and the ability to send video and audio messages.

Mehta said Clingle has plans to partner with retail and restaurant chains to allow users to purchase items for friends so that those items are waiting for the friend when they check in at the location. And rather than dealing with point-of-sale integration with thousands of merchants, he said a solution can be as simple as providing a proof of receipt. For instance, if I wanted to buy a cup of coffee for a friend who will be at the cafe down the street hours from now (when I’m not around), I could take a picture of my receipt and send it to him. My friend would show the picture to the merchant to receive the pre-purchased cup.

Clingle’s revenue model is based on commission fees and advertising from its merchant partners. However, the company’s main focus for the time being is providing a good experience for its users, Mehta said.

While the service does have potential, it’s going to have plenty of competition from both Twitter and Foursquare, which are adding new features that give its users a more well-rounded experience.

Clingle was developed by MyCityWay, a New York-based startup co-founded by Mehta, Archana Patchirajan and Sonpreet Bhatia. Founded in 2009, MyCityWay has received $6 million total funding to date from BMW iVentures, FirstMark Capital, EDC and IA Ventures.

Filed under: mobile, social, VentureBeat

Is there a business in making mobile to-do lists more collaborative and less headache-inducing? Startup Any.do formally launches Thursday with a free Android application proffering shareable, voice-operated to-do lists, and $1 million in seed funding to find out.

The startup, founded in 2010, first released a simple to-do list application for Android called Taskos to test the mobile task management waters and determine what mobile users wanted in a lightweight to-do list app.

Taskos became an accidental hit and attracted 1.3 million users, who now create hundreds of thousands of tasks each day. The startup claims that it’s the most popular app of its kind on Android — and that’s what got investors salivating.

“We have a killer team … we’re tackling a huge market … and we came with proof,” Any.do CEO Omer Perchik told VentureBeat. “The combination of the three got us [the] funding.”

Any.do managed to get Eric Schmidt’s Innovation Endeavors, Genesis Partners, Blumberg Capital, Joe Lonsdale at Palantir and Aydin Senkut at Felicis Ventures to participate in its first round of funding.

Now, Any.do for Android, a free mobile app hitting the Android Market Thursday, will be the company’s key product moving forward. It comes with three particularly drool-worthy features — shareable tasks, contextual autocomplete and a simple but elegant interface — that set it apart from similarly-purposed applications, including Apple’s new Reminders application for iOS 5.

You can also interface with Any.do using your voice, drag-and-drop tasks, sync with a Google account and choose themes to personalize the experience.

A similar application for iPhone is said to be several months away from release.

“We invested in Any.do because of the strong team and their vision to take the productivity space beyond the task list,” Dror Berman, managing partner of Innovation Endeavors, said of the firm’s interest in the to-do list app maker. “Any.do’s core technology understands people’s intent, and leverages the mobile phone to not just make a list, but to actually get things done — anytime, anywhere.”

How Any.do will profit with its nifty little application is anyone’s guess. Perchik says the startup has a few business tricks up its sleeve, but he isn’t ready to reveal those plans just yet.

As for Taskos, the startup will eventually let users port over their tasks and lists to Any.do, but its ultimate fate remains uncertain.

Ten-person Any.do is based in Israel and has an office in Palo Alto.

Filed under: mobile, social, VentureBeat

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“Forget being in love with the open web and all that touchy-feely stuff.”

Jay Sullivan is Mozilla’s vice president of products, and for a spokesperson of one of the open web’s dearest darlings, he’s on a tear.

“If you want to have a variety of mobile apps, it gets expensive… that’s a lot of apps to build,” he told VentureBeat in a recent interview.

Sullivan is making a strong case against building native apps and for the mobile web as the new platform to (literally) end all platforms.

Now, a number of developments make his words especially timely. Yahoo has just announced Yahoo Cocktails, a set of tools for developers to use that make web apps look and behave more like native apps. Mozilla is working on tools to help developers sell web-based apps to mobile device users, enabling them to make profits just as developers in the iTunes App Store or Android Market can now do.

Even Adobe is scrapping Flash for mobile phones and pinning its hopes on HTML 5 for the mobile web. “HTML5 is now universally supported on major mobile devices, in some cases exclusively,” wrote Danny Winokur, Adobe VP and General Manager of Interactive Development.

“This makes HTML5 the best solution for creating and deploying content in the browser across mobile platforms.”

It looks like mobile apps may be headed the same direction as multimedia CD-ROMs did a decade ago. Sadly for mobile apps, they don’t even have a useful second life as drink coasters.

But parties on the other side of the fence say it’s too soon to play Taps for apps. App advocates say mobile web enthusiasts are indulging in pipe dreams while the rest of the world is still working on proprietary technology stacks that do, now, what HTML5 has so far failed to deliver. Even if they admit that building for the mobile web will eventually be cheaper, faster and easier, it’s at least few years away from reality.

In the Mozilla Foundation’s new offices overlooking the San Francisco Bay Bridge, Sullivan — an unapologetic HTML5 advocate — sits in a conference room and rapidly deconstructs the assumption that to get your software onto a mobile phone you have to build a native application.

But he doesn’t resort to the familiar (and tired) ideologies about freedom from corporate technological tyranny that figure large in Mozilla’s current ad campaign. Rather, he gets downright practical.

First, he explains the obvious: Each mobile ecosystem has its own technology stack, its own operating system and programming language. That means developing apps requires a different skill set and a separate development process for each ecosystem.

At the end of the day, building a mobile web app instead of two or three or four native apps just makes more economic sense. “HTML5 is less expensive,” he says. “There’s always some stuff around the edges that won’t work perfectly, but compared to writing in seven different languages, it works.”

For developers, it’s technologically more manageable to build one mobile web app than a half-dozen or even just two native apps. And given the state of mobile web standards, we’re quickly approaching a point where end users can’t tell the difference between the two. All that’s really left is a business model for mobile web apps, Sullivan contends.

“When the web offers a more easy to access business ecosystem to developers, it will become more attractive.”

A better package

In conversations with organizations like Mozilla and Yahoo, in talks with mobile developers — basically, anyone who doesn’t have an explicit interest in promoting a single mobile operating system like Android or iOS — one trend is becoming quite apparent:

The app as you know it is dying.

It’s like the CD, an expensive package for digital information, a package that is increasingly becoming unnecessary and obsolete.

And just as with the CD, all we’re waiting for is a better delivery method to come along and kill it off.

The challenges to that shift are partly technical and partly cultural. Mobile web apps first must meet consumer demands for high quality and performance. And as previously noted, developers need to be able to market mobile web apps.

Yahoo is one company working on the first challenge. Bruno Fernandez-Ruiz is Yahoo’s platform vice president, and he is working on what he calls “a bunch of tricks to make web applications feel native.”

“We don’t want to emulate native, it has its own paradigm. What we want to do is create a new class of experiences. Something that’s the same across phones, TVs, tablets — the web is a paradigm that is cross-platform.”

But however much Mozilla or Yahoo might want to see the mobile web overtake native apps as a paradigm for ideological reasons, those who have to approach the problem practically in the here-and-now still have to deal with native issues and stacks.

“I absolutely believe that the mobile web is going to continue to grow rapidly,” says Jeff Haynie, who co-founded Appcelerator, a company specializing in getting web developers up and running on mobile OS platforms.

But, Haynie says, it’s too soon to discount the opportunity afforded by apps.

“That’s a huge opportunity for developers worldwide,” he continues, talking about mobile web apps. “But those compelling native experiences across lots of devices are where opportunity is going to be in the near-term. Consumers have come to expect a very high bar from experience, like the Flipboards and Instagrams that you just can’t acheive now with a web app.”

Referring to Mozilla et al., Haynie says, “These companies have many, many web developers — their foundation is the web. That’s what they’re yearning for, how to leverage that. That’s the promise of the web…

“The real question is, how do you let web developers build applications that span the native experience and the web?”

Web advocates, not surprisingly, have answers: New technologies and new marketplaces for making  money from web apps.

New technology for the new mobile web: JavaScript and Node

JavaScript and Node.js are two key technologies that will make the transition from native apps to web apps possible.

“JavaScript is LISP in disguise. It’s as powerful as any functional programming language can be,” says Yahoo’s Fernandez-Ruiz.

And with JavaScript-based Node.js in the equation, he says, “It’s hard to tell if this will be the next Ruby on Rails, but this could be.” (Ruby on Rails is a platform for developing web applications that has become wildly popular in the past few years, thanks to the speed with which developers can create sites and apps using it.)

JavaScript and Node are core components of Yahoo’s Cocktails, a new suite of tools to help developers make their mobile web apps look and feel indistinguishable from high-quality native apps. Fernandez-Ruiz says that in early previews, responses from mobile developers have been positive and enthusiastic; everyone wants to get their hands on it.

Getting content to run consistently across all mobile and device platforms is a daunting task, and to date, many companies are trying to tackle it by translating code from one OS’s language to another, e.g. Objective C for iPhone development to Java for Android development.

But the code that comes out on the other side of such translations is too often spaghetti, and trying to solve the compatibility problem programmatically isn’t a long-term option.

Instead, said Fernandez-Ruiz, “We decided to solve the problems of the next three years rather than the problems of today.”

Ideally, Yahoo wants to eliminate the multi-language scenarios that introduce complications for developers. That’s the goal of Cocktails. One Cocktail product, called Mojito, uses JavaScript and Node to run a single codebase both on client and server side.

“We’re not making any difference between the front end and the back end,” says Fernandez-Ruiz. “For us, it’s the exact same code.”

Manhattan, another Cocktail, is a Node.js hosted environment for Mojito. Apps can be wrapped in a native shell and shipped to the iTunes App Store or the Android Market or simply run in a browser, and Manhattan helps to speed up the user experience access across high- and low-speed networks and to run apps on platforms that don’t have full HTML5/CSS3 support.

While Node has been shown to have insane performance benefits, Fernandez-Ruiz says, “We’re not using it for event-driven, low-latency reasons, although those are there. We’re using it because it runs JavaScript on the server side.”

JavaScript is evolving, he says. “The next generation of JavaScript will make the it a compelling, high-performance programming language for the web. This is a new class of web apps that are cross-environment, continuous, fluid experiences.”

And for the end user, Fernandez-Ruiz says that jumping from one interface on a TV to another interface for the same service on a tablet or smartphone or PC is disturbing. “But with HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript, you can have apps that look and feel the same.”

This is something we saw in action when we reviewed LinkedIn’s latest suite of mobile apps, which are Node-powered and web-heavy. Even the native apps for iOS and Android relied heavily on the mobile web for a lot of pages and features, and the mobile web version of the app looks and functions exactly the same as the native versions.

For Yahoo’s purposes, Fernandez-Ruiz continues, “Node.js is part of the puzzle, to execute code on the server side. But the premise is the same: It’s not native; it’s the web.”

Yahoo will also be introducing other Cocktails, including Windjammer and Screwdriver, in the near future.

But Haynie says the web-app-in-a-native-wrapper model should be regarded with some caution.

“That kind of hybrid application — we’re seeing almost no one using that rig[…]

This post is sponsored by Geo-Loco.

With the success of smartphones, cloud-based platforms like SimpleGeo, and “contextual” data from sources like GeoIQ and Factual, location-aware mobile devices and solutions have reached a tipping point. Consumers are accepting and using the technology, and location intelligence is bringing the benefits of “hyper-local” to media and advertising through apps like Foursquare’s just announced Radar.

Executives from Google, Starbucks, Facebook and Foursquare will join investors and entrepreneurs to address these topics in a highly interactive setting.

VentureBeat readers can register here with discount code vb25 to receive a 25% discount.

Conference topics include:

- The Future(s) of Location Based Services
- The Brands are Coming, the Brands are Coming!
- Tap, Tap: Is the NFC Tipping Point Finally Here?
- The Future of Geo-Loco Investment
- Daily Deals Suck! Why and What to Do about It
- The Future of Mobile-Loco Commerce
- The Great Indoors: the Future of Indoor LBS & LBA
- API overload: Making $$$$ and Sense with Data
- Context, and Infrastructure

By fostering discussion, interaction and exchange among startups, businesses, and investors, GeoLoco offers a unique forum to explore, learn about and capitalize on important new developments and opportunities in geo- and location-based services.

[Source: Dr. Phil Hendrix, director immr and GigaOm Pro analyst]

Filed under: mobile, VentureBeat

Stealth startup Nextdoor believes it has cracked the social/local code, and is today launching a digital platform  that brings together  your real-world neighbors.

Nextdoor is creating the “neighborhood graph” by combining the best of  Web 2.0 sites like  Yelp and Facebook, with the features of early Web tools such as Craigslist and Yahoo! Groups to reconnect neighborhoods and re-establish a sense of community, on and offline.

Nextdoor has the look and feel of Facebook, with an activity feed, and tabbed navigation, where you’re able to look for a babysitter, and check out recommendations left by your neighbors. Anyone who has used the Internet during the last decade will feel right at home.

Nextdoor has gone to great lengths to create an experience that is authentic, and where trust and identity are the operative words, says co-founder and chief executive officer Nirav Tolia.

There are four mechanisms for verifying your address, all of which inject significant friction into the sign-up process, he says. You can request postcards with a unique code; your home phone number attached to your home address can be called with a code; you can can enter your credit card for verification; or you can be invited by a verified neighbor.

“The amount of friction is directly correlated to the value you derive from being in an environment is where everyone is verified,” says Tolia.

Of course there’s a business model somewhere in all of this. It could be merchant services, it could be deals, or something else. Though he wouldn’t specify, he said there are lots of potential opportunities around connecting businesses with customers who live and shop in the area, once they’ve nailed the product, and have grown the user base. ”As we’ve done with everything else, we’ll follow what the users ask for,” says Tolia.

It cost the company $60,000 to buy the domain name, said Tolia, but he thinks it’s definitely worth it. He pointed out that all the most powerful tech companies have two “o’s” in the name. Facebook, Yahoo! Google, — even Microsoft. “And now Nextdoor,” says Tolia.

Nextdoor is backed by Benchmark Capital and Shasta Ventures.

Filed under: social, VentureBeat

I’ve been a corporate lawyer for more than 17 years, and there are certain fundamental legal mistakes that I’ve seen startups repeatedly make (many of which surface when investors are conducting their due-diligence investigation).

Accordingly, I thought it would be helpful to provide a simple checklist for startups that includes links to indepth posts for a more detailed discussion.

Startup checklist:
1. Form a corporation, not an LLC (see post here) or a partnership (see post here).

2. Incorporate in Delaware and qualify the company to do business in the state in which its principal office is located (see #2 here).

3. Set-up vesting schedules for the founders (see post here) and file 83(b) elections with the IRS (see #3 here).

4. Button-down IP ownership and assignment issues (see post here).

5. Split the equity based on prior contributions and expectations going forward, not necessarily equally (see post here).

6. If you hire any employees, make sure you don’t misclassify them as an independent contractor or fail to pay them at least the minimum wage (see post here).

7. Only raise funds from “accredited investors” (see post here) and don’t pay anyone a commission for raising funds for you unless they are a registered broker-dealer (see post here).

8. Put proper privacy policies in place and make sure you adhere to them (see post here).

9. Don’t issue stock options unless a proper option plan is in place and a valuation has been done in compliance with Section 409A of the Internal Revenue Code (see post here).

10. Regarding lawyers, don’t give them equity (see post here); don’t use your investors’ lawyers (see post here); and there are ways of cutting legal fees in half (see post here).

None of this is rocket science.  But as the late, great super-lawyer and VC Craig Johnson wrote in the book, The Silicon Valley Edge: A Habitat for Innovation and Entrepreneurship, “Starting companies is a lot like launching rockets: if you’re a tenth of a degree off at launch, you may be a thousand miles off downrange.”

Scott Edward Walker is the founder and CEO of Walker Corporate Law Group, PLLC, a law firm specializing in the representation of entrepreneurs.

[Image via Yes Man/Shutterstock]

Filed under: Entrepreneur Corner, VentureBeat

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Today’s biggest trends — the mobile web, social media, gamification, real-time — are changing the landscape for business. Consumers are connecting with one another, and in the process they’re becoming increasingly empowered and influential.

How these connected consumers discover, share, and communicate is different than the way they used to. This change requires businesses to rethink their approach. Organizations need to examine the impact of technology on consumer behavior and understand how connected consumers make decisions and influence the decisions of their peers.

The End of Business as Usual makes the case that the need for business transformation is bigger than social media and more important than just connecting or communicating with customers in social networks.

In this excerpt from the book, I discuss how social networks are the platform through which people connect to one another.

Social networks as your personal operating system
The medium is no longer just the message. Now, the medium is the platform and people now represent both the medium and the message. Their digital relationships define the nature of information discovery and its course through the social graph.

For example, Facebook started out as a social network, but it is growing into a personal operating system of sorts, where friends and experiences are interconnected, and apps and brand pages connect people through interests. Every month, the Facebook population invests over 700 billion minutes interacting with their social graphs and creating and sharing content and experiences. Facebook is a hub for people and information.

The acts of sharing and consuming content in social media represent the social dealings between people and set the stage for interaction and education, but it is a platform for development and a solid foundation for social architecture.

People on Facebook install 20 million applications every day in the popular network.
250 million people engage with Facebook on external websites every month.
More than 2.5 million websites have integrated with Facebook, including 80 of comScore’s U.S. top 100 websites and over half of comScore’s global top 100 websites.

Indeed, according to comScore, Facebook traffic soared by 55.2 percent, hitting 151.1 million in October 2010, up from 97.4 million visitors at the same time last year. It’s also important to note that Facebook was home to 300 million active denizens in 2010 and it now has a population of more than 800 million.

50 percent of active users log on to Facebook in any given day.
The average user has 130 friends.

Facebook is becoming an epicenter for all online activity. It’s where individuals pool all that they are and all that interests them into an organized, presentable, and searchable framework. We can learn a lot about someone based on what they share as well as what they don’t share.

Aside from our favorite bands, movies, TV shows, and destinations, we reveal more than we realize. Democracy UK, a UK-focused political campaigning initiative run by Facebook, released some very telling facts and figures in its snapshot report of Facebook in 2010. Let’s take a look at relationships in one year:

 43,869,800 changed their status to single.
 3,025,791 changed their status to “It’s complicated.”
 28,460,516 changed their status to in a relationship.
 5,974,574 changed their status to engaged.
 36,774,801 changed their status to married.

We now know that more than 700 billion minutes are clocked every month on Facebook. But, what does 20 minutes look like? In the same report by Democracy UK, we are able to look at the events that unfold every 20 minutes.

Every 20 minutes, more than one million links are shared.
1.3 million photos are tagged.
1.5 million invites are sent.
1.6 million Wall posts are published.
1.9 million status updates are published.
2 million friend requests are accepted.
2.7 million photos are uploaded, making Facebook the largest photo network online.
10.2 million comments are shared.
4.6 million messages are sent.

The extent of interaction that takes place in 20 minutes reveals a glimpse of the sheer size of Facebook. On a monthly basis, this translates to:

The average user creates 90 pieces of content each month.
More than 30 billion pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photo albums, and so on) are shared each month.

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Filed under: VentureBeat

After revolutionizing the digital music business, smartphones and tablets, former Apple CEO Steve Jobs was planning to take on an unlikely project: textbooks.

Jobs apparently wanted to hire textbook writers to create interactive digital versions of their books for the iPad, the New York Times is reporting based on information from the upcoming Steve Jobs biography by Walter Isaacson.

The Times was one of many news organizations that got its hands on the biography last night, which goes on sale Monday, Oct. 24. The book sheds light on several stories about Jobs, like the fact that he refused potentially life-saving cancer treatment early on.

Jobs held meetings with publishers about working together with Apple on the new digital textbooks. He proposed the idea of giving away the books for free on the iPad, which would have allowed publishers to get around state certifications for textbooks. (Not being too familiar with the textbook business myself, I’m not sure what the advantage would be for publishers.)

Jobs believed that states would be facing a weak economy over the next decade, and that Apple could offer them a way to save money by circumventing the certification process.

Apple would have had plenty of company from others companies looking to revolutionize the textbook industry, including Kno, which launched an iPad app for textbooks earlier this year after dropping plans for its own tablet. There’s also digital textbook creator Inkling, which aims to create interactive tablet textbooks with social features.

Photo by Matt Yohe

Filed under: media, mobile, VentureBeat

Good news for the hordes of students hopelessly addicted to Facebook and Farmville.

Grockit, a company that applies social networking and gaming mechanics to studying, just closed another $7 million round of financing to fuel its international growth.

The startup lets students work on sample test problems together and rewards them with points and badges to boost motivation. It’s been on a bit of tear recently. After launching in 2008, as a social-study platform for the test-prep market, it expanded into the k-12 market over the last two years. Since the beginning of September, it’s been integrated with Facebook’s Open Graph API to give students access from within Facebook. It’s also introduced a one-for-one program called “Grockit for Good” that matches each account purchased with one year of free access for under-served students, added a VP of engineering, and teamed up with the Gates Foundation and the Kauffman Foundation to launch the Startup Weekend EDU series.

Grockit has seen a lot of adoption in India — the team tells us 25% of students in India who took the GMAT used Grockit to study — and it plans to use a good portion of the new funds to fuel growth in new markets. It will also continue to develop social and gaming mechanics to fuel user engagement.

The round was led by existing backer Atlas Ventures but included two new heavy-hitters in the education-technology world: NewSchools Venture Fund and Michael Moe from GSV Capital. Benchmark Capital and Integral Capital also participated.

One potential challenge for the company is creating enough high-quality content to achieve the same educational rigor as traditional study programs. Grockit seems to be expanding into virtually every k-12 subject and will increasingly do battle with big text-book publishers and test-prep companies slowly getting into the digital game, not to mention other edtech startups like Knewton. Grockit licenses much of its content from other publishers, but also allows its partners to author original content. Eventually, founder Farb Nivi tells us, partners will be able to attach Creative Commons licenses to their original content. That paired with some smart distributed editing (see Grockit’s guest post on Mechanical Turk for how they manage low-level copy-editing) could facilitate a growing base of quality questions to rival competitors.

The company has raised a total of $24.7 million in angel and VC investment. Its early angel investors included Mark Pincus, CEO of Zynga and Reid Hoffman.

Filed under: deals, VentureBeat

Digital notebook service Springpad has doubled its total registered users in the last six months to 2 million, the company tells VentureBeat.

Springpad’s mobile apps let you save information about movies, wine, books, check-ins, recipes and more that you come across during the day. It then organizes that data within smart notebooks and arranges it into useful packages. For example, if I’m looking for movies in the area, I can pull up a list of the most popular movies among my friends. That movie page will have a map of theaters in the area, movie times, etc. It’s a pretty useful tool for keeping track of things and discovering your next few steps throughout the day.

Apparently, I’m not the only one who thinks so. Springpad’s user base has saved over 27 million things using the service, according to the company.

“People’s habits are shifting from sharing their activities with one large network to smaller subsets of friends, like Facebook’s smart friend lists and Google’s Circles,” said Springpad CEO Jeff Janer in an interview. “What Springpad does is take the data from what you and your friends share and turn it into something much more useful.”

Right now, the company makes its money through affiliate partnerships from new business it directs to various products and services. Its mobile apps send users alerts for relevant news, price drops, product availability, coupons and other retail offers, which help facilitate that part of the business. Eventually, Springpad plans to open up relevant advertising into its smart notebooks while continuing to keep the service free for consumers.

Founded in 2008, the Boston-based company has $5 million total funding to date. Springpad faces competition from services like Evernote.

Filed under: media, mobile, social, VentureBeat

De Beers Group, the world’s largest diamond company has set up investment offices in Silicon Valley to find and fund startups that use synthetic diamonds in their business.

The investment group, Element Six Ventures Group, has already funded a number of startups that use synthetic diamonds in the semiconductor industry and other manufacturing processes. Its new office will be in a Santa Clara, Calif. location that will also house an Element Six production site.

Synthetic diamonds have been in production for some time, but diamond experts have been able to tell them apart from geologic diamonds, where pure carbon crystallizes into the hardest known material under extreme heat and pressure. De Beers Group has a vested interest in being able to both mine diamonds in the real world and create them in the labs. Synthetic diamonds have found a number of uses in manufacturing.

“Synthetic diamonds’ extreme properties enhance performance in new technology applications to levels not otherwise possible,” said Susie Wheeler, managing director of Element Six Ventures Group. “Locating the Ventures’ office in Silicon Valley allows us to connect with new partners who, like us, want to develop these emerging technology investments.”

Element Six Ventures has been actively investing since 2006; it is a part of Element Six, the synthetic diamond group within De Beers Group. It specializes in seed to late-stage tech ventures that use synthetic diamonds and other “supermaterials” with commercial potential. The company has invested in seven companies within the cleantech, semiconductor and electronics sectors.

Portfolio companies include: California-based Group4 Labs, which develops gallium nitride-on-diamond semiconductor wafers for communications; Massachusetts-based EOI, which harnesses synthetic diamond-enabled electrodes to generate ozone for chemical-free sterilization and sanitization of water; and United Kingdom-based Diamond Detectors, which makes synthetic diamond radiation detectors that are used high-energy research at CERN (European Organisation for Nuclear Research).

Filed under: VentureBeat

Silicon Valley isn’t a place with a long memory. There are plenty of people who migrate here in search of wealth, without knowing much about its history. To them, only the newest technology is important, not the stuff of the past. They race ahead from one bubble to the next, oblivious to the fact that there are such things as boom-and-bust cycles.

But the death of Steve Jobs is a reminder that history matters. We haven’t had to deal with the loss of many of the valley’s iconic leaders because they are still living. Jobs’ passing shows us that the leaders won’t be around forever. We can’t take them for granted, nor can we forget the valley’s own leadership in the world’s technology industry. Leaders matter. They can make or break a company, a region, or a country.

This occasion makes it a good time to reflect on and learn our history, because we’ll need it to figure out where to go. Jobs was the guide to the future of better products and experiences. He was able to imagine a better experience, while most of us can’t do that until we see it working in front of our own eyes. He was a seer, much like Intel’s Bob Noyce, the co-founder of Intel, and David Packard, co-founder of Hewlett-Packard.

Jobs himself felt the tug of history. He apologized to Packard and Noyce for failing when he was fired from Apple after founding the company. He later said that failure was one of the best things that ever happened to him because it led to his eventual renewal. In his 2005 commencement speech at Stanford University, Jobs credited history and an ability to “connect the dots” in order to create something new.

“Again, you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards,” Jobs said. “So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.”

I am reminded of how hard it is for places like the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif., to collect artifacts of computer history. That is because most reasonable people threw out aging computers and other obsolete gear. Only the pack rats kept things like the first hard disk drive or the first floppy disk.

“It’s one of the top four or five most important inventions in the world, like the printing press and the wheel and the cotton gin,” said Len Shustek, chairman of the museum’s board and one of the people who pushed for the museum 15 years ago, in a talk earlier this year. “It’s happened in such a compressed time. We are living in a time when we are going through a transition from having no computers anywhere to computers in everything we touch.”

He added, “We are here with Michelangelo as he paints the Sistine Chapel and we have to record how that happened.”

Jobs had a very documented life compared to most people, but we still don’t know enough about him. He was a giant in so many ways, but we didn’t know how important he was to Silicon Valley and the world until after he was gone. We are probably very lucky that Jobs agreed to do 50 interviews with author Walter Isaacson for an upcoming biography on the life of Jobs. Jobs himself was a student of history. As noted in the New York Times, Jobs admired the business giants, but was particularly enamored with the relatively obscure Edwin Land, the inventor of instant photography at Polaroid. While we will learn a lot from the biography about Jobs, there was so much more to him that we all want to know.

The loss of Jobs is a lot like the loss of other towering figures like Noyce and Packard. Jobs’ contributions spanned the beginning of personal computers, music players, smartphones and tablets. My guess is that part of Jobs’ brilliance in his later years came from the fact that he had first-hand knowledge of the early years. He had seen the same movie play out so many times before. Now, nobody holds the mantle of the master of the tech universe.

Without someone like Jobs, there’s a real danger that Silicon Valley may lose its edge. If Apple has no seer anymore, it could fall victim to a thousand different competitors. Foreign giants such as Samsung or big Chinese electronics giants would love to steal a march on Silicon Valley. Since there are so many unproven CEOs running many of the great Silicon Valley companies now, the valley is actually in a vulnerable state.

We have many questions about where to go to find the next big thing. The answers will come easier to those who know their Silicon Valley history. Startup CEOs would do well to visit places like the Computer History Museum, which is preserving old pieces of the computer industry’s history before they are tossed out with the trash.

If there is a silver lining to Jobs’ too-early passing, it is to remind us to think about who built Silicon Valley, what inspired them, where they are now and how we should redouble the investment in innovation and creative thinking in order to ensure a brighter future.

Filed under: VentureBeat

Technical founders have already become prerequisites in the world of tech startups. Now get ready for the designer founder. The combination of this new duo is going to change the world of tech forever.

To quote Daniel Pink in his book A Whole New Mind,

The last few decades have belonged to a certain kind of person with a certain kind of mind—computer programmers who could crank code, lawyers who could craft contracts, MBAs who could crunch numbers. But the keys to the kingdom are changing hands. The future belongs to a very different kind of person with a very different kind of mind—creators and empathizers, pattern recognizers, and meaning makers. These people—artists, inventors, designers, storytellers, caregivers, consolers, big picture thinkers—will now reap society’s richest rewards and share its greatest joys.

Although we agree with Daniel Pink’s quote and premise, we are by no means diminishing the role of the technical founder. We’re huge advocates of engineers/hackers (aka technical founders) and believe their “in-house” talents are crucial in this new tech renaissance. Our position here is to highlight the importance and opportunity of the emerging technical and design founder duo. We strongly believe that both are equally important!

High-concept, high-touch mentalities in tech startups are a winning proposition. When founders seek out talent these days, most of them (at least in our experience) are looking for designers as much as for engineers. This is mainly because, more often than not, it is the technical founders who are starting companies, and they realize that creating an exceptional user experience is a competitive advantage. Adding “Design Founders” to the mix is a potential “black swan:” hard to predict, highly improbable, and will change the world— potentially redefining the high tech landscape.

There is, however, a shortage of good startup designers, at least when it comes to people who have both interaction and product design experience and skill sets. Designers today are being asked to do more than simply build visuals and hand them off to engineers. They are evolving into experts in user research (customer development), information architecture (IA), interaction design (IxD), visual design, and storytelling (copy writing and messaging). They also possess back-end skills and have a thorough understanding of the technology stack that the product is being built on. Just as importantly, they get the big picture and realize that user experiences are built around business models as well, including marketing, distribution, customer support, sales, business development and operations.

Bringing user-centered design to the agile process is producing a new generation of startups. Design is no longer considered tactical; instead, it is recognized as a strategic component of the startup process by the tech mainstream. While it’s really always been strategic, it’s only recently that the perception has caught up with the reality (consider Apple, IDEO, Target, Design Within Reach & Coca Cola). This new breed is whole-minded, leveraging the right brain to create experiences and the left to analyze the experiential data in order to iterate and improve.

This breed of founder is focused on weaving their new sensibilities into the strategic fabric of the startup, forging the path to the customer through user metrics, customer metrics, product flows, and conversion funnels. Last, but not least, they are sociable. They seek to understand user behavior and empathize with users, rather than constantly defending their creative output.

Design founders are creating an “unfair advantage” by opening up new markets and reconfiguring existing ones. The new world of design is displacing incumbents all over the IT landscape.

User experience-driven innovation will most likely bring large-scale change (and financial success) to the evolving startup landscape. With lower startup costs and a vastly expanded global market for online and mobile services (almost 2B people on the Web and billions using smart phones) combined with cheaper online distribution, building better user experiences will become the way of the future.

Bottom line: As we move out of the age of information and into the conceptual age, we are faced with the demand to create product experiences that are no less than exceptional.

Venture51 is high-centered on design/user experience-driven startups. Part of our core strategy is to align with the best design founders globally and expose their expertise to this unique opportunity in the high-tech startup ecosystem. It’s not a matter of if or even when these changes will take off; it’s here now, and for the foreseeable future we are betting big on this design-driven thesis. This new frontier creates a competitive edge we like to refer to as the Unfair Design Advantage.

Filed under: VentureBeat

Open-source software provider Red Hat is planning to acquire online storage vendor Gluster Inc. for $136 million, the company announced Tuesday.

Red Hat said it’s purchasing the privately owned Gluster to boost its cloud computing offerings — specifically, Red Hat wants to offer data storage for email and social media information to its enterprise customers.

Red Hat plans on incorporating Gluster’s products into its existing product line, which the company will eventually offer to clients through a subscription payment model, according to Red Hat.

Founded in 2005, Sunnyvale, California-based Gluster previously obtained a $8.5 million second round of funding from Index Ventures and Nexus Venture Partners. Gluster has a list of high-profile customers, including Deutsche Bank, Samsung, Autodesk and Barnes & Noble.

The acquisition deal should close later this month, according to Red Hat.

Filed under: cloud, deals, VentureBeat

Adapteva has designed a chip with 64 computing brains for smartphones, tablets and super computers. The chip design company calls the new Epiphany IV microprocessor the “most energy efficient microprocessor” in the world.

The Lexington, Mass.-based company announced that its fourth-generation Epiphany chip will have 64 cores on a single chip. The chip can execute 70 gigaflops of computing performance while consuming a single watt of power. That’s actually a lot of power for a smartphone, but the performance can be dialed down to handle tasks more efficiently. The chip could be used in a wide range of mobile-focused markets, including running applications for machine vision, radar, speech recognition, software defined radio, security and medical diagnostics.

Adapteva was founded in 2008 and it has managed to design four chips with a tiny team of just five employees, said Andreas Olofsson, chief executive of Adapteva, in an interview. That is unheard of chip circles, where it often takes hundreds of people to complete the design of a full-fledged chip.

But Adapteva is focused on designing a chip that others can license and then take to market. Olofsson is also a veteran chip designer. He was previously part of a 100-person team at Analog Devices, but he broke off to do Adapteva. He designed the first prototype chip himself and brought on more people to do follow-ups. The company’s third chip was completed in May and it is the first commercial device.

Olofsson said that Adapteva got the power of its chip much lower by tossing a lot of things out. The chip won’t run a full operating system such as Linux; rather, it functions as a companion chip, or co-processor, sitting alongside an Intel or ARM-based microprocessor. Olofsson said the chip didn’t need a memory management unit because it wasn’t running the full Linux OS. And the chip didn’t need a large cache to run big applications either.

“We just kept throwing more features out, and with every feature we threw out, we saved more power,” Olofsson said. “At the end of the day, we have a lot of energy efficiency.”

Olofsson said the company was able to get by with a small team because it reused a lot of its design components across the chip. The chip operates at up to 800 megahertz and is built with a 28-nanometer manufacturing process.

Nathan Brookwood, a chip analyst at market analysis firm Insight64, said that he was impressed that Adapteva could design a chip so small, given the performance. He said there is nothing wrong with the companion chip approach, considering that graphics chips often have to be paired with microprocessors in personal computers. Brookwood said there are some gaps in the available information as to whether the companion approach will succeed. As for the supercomputing side, Brookwood said the approach looked promising.

Olofsson said the processor shows how it will be easy to beat the 2018 goal of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, which wants to hit 50 gigaflops per watt. The company says it can do server-level computing on mobile devices.

The previous-generation Epiphany III chip was able to match the performance of some of Intel’s Xeon processors while consuming less than 2 watts of peak power. The Epiphany IV chip will be able to outdo those benchmarks by four times using the same amount of power. Chip samples will be ready in the first quarter in 2012.

The venture was self-funded at first and then Olofsson raised $1.5 million from Bittware, a digital signal processing board maker that also became a customer. Bittware makes boards for military applications. Olofsson said the company is looking to raise more money. Rivals include Intel and Tilera.

Filed under: mobile, VentureBeat

Instead of just drooling over gorgeous iPad magazines, you can now create your own.

Adobe today announced Adobe Digital Publishing Suite, Single Edition, which will grant tablet publishing capabilities to just about anyone for $395 per magazine app.

The software is aimed at freelancers, small businesses, and others who want to get their work on tablets easily. Single Edition relies on existing Adobe software: You need InDesign CS5.5 to create page layouts and Folio Producer to add sexy interactive elements, like 360 rotation, panoramas, and other media.

Once you have a completed publication, you need to purchase Single Edition at Adobe.com to publish the app to the iTunes App Store. True to its name, you’ll need to purchase a new Single Edition for every app you want to publish.

Adobe says that Single Edition will soon be available, and you’ll be able to publish iPad tablet apps by the end of the year. The company is working on support for Android tablets and the BlackBerry PlayBook (seriously) for 2012. For those who need to create multiple tablet apps, Adobe also announced the pro version of its Digital Publishing Suite, which will cost $495 a month.

Filed under: media, mobile, VentureBeat

Nimbula, a company ties together public and private cloud resources in a way that companies can manage them easily, this week released the latest version of its software.

Nimbula calls itself a cloud operating system — because it helps its corporate customers manage their various cloud assets — private, public, and hybrid — from one place, with a single login. It’s new product is called the Nimbula Director 1.5.

Chief executive Chris Pinkham stopped by VentureBeat‘s office recently for an interview (see video above).

He said there’s been a lot of talk about the “hybrid cloud,” but it’s been just that. Until now, no one has really been able to do it well. While gaming company Zynga was a front-runner, and built a hybrid cloud internally — because of the huge cloud computing needs of its popular social games, Nimbula is one of the first to offer it to third parties, he said.

EMC, VMware and Citrix all offer products that require customers to rely system administrators to manage large installations, he said. But Nimbula removes that middleman, Pinkham explained, and allows companies to manage both public and private cloud computing and storage assets more simply (self-serve), and to scale them as needed. If customers want to keep existing infrastructure products, they can build upon that, say by adding public cloud infrastructure.

Competitors include Openstack and Eucalyptus.

This “infrastructure as a service” market is a $4 billion market, Pinkham said, citing Gartner research.

The company received $21 million in venture capital from Sequoia and Accel Partners last year.

We’ll be exploring the most disruptive cloud trends at our inaugural CloudBeat event on Nov 30-Dec 1 at the Sofitel Hotel in Redwood Shores. We’ll be unveiling some of the most revolutionary cases of cloud adoption by the enterprise. It’s invite only. To apply to come, click on this link.

Filed under: cloud, dev, VentureBeat

There’s certainly no shortage of successful young entrepreneurs in business today. We hear daily of fast growing startups from New York City to Silicon Valley, headed by CEOs such as Mark Zuckerberg, Andrew Mason and Tim O’Shaughnessy. These creative minds have demonstrated the power of youthful tenacity and innovation, combined with a sharp eye for business.

Yet, in 2010, entrepreneurs aged 35 to 54 were responsible for over 50 percent of total new entrepreneurship activity in the U.S, according to the Kauffman Index of Entrepreneurial Activity. Individuals aged 55 to 64 also made their mark, representing 22.9 percent of new entrepreneurs in 2010, compared to 14.5 percent in 1996.

With their irreplaceable advantage of experience, perhaps those who are older and wiser have learned a few valuable lessons during the course of their careers. Having started my first venture at the age of 28, followed by two others in the last 20 years, my experience has taught me the following crucial lessons:

Follow-through is essential
Nearly 1,000 startups raised $7.5 billion from venture capitalists in the second quarter of 2011, up 19 percent from the first quarter this year and 61 percent from the same period in 2009, according to the National Venture Capital Association.  But the success rate of first-time ventures is only 20.9%, according to research published by the Journal of Financial Economics in 2010. Knowing what it takes to turn a vision into a successful business reality is crucial, and often times, is acquired through experience.  Prove your ability to execute in both the short and long term, conduct comprehensive market-research and don’t give up when economic outlook appears grim.

Build an enthusiastic and passionate team
Experience teaches you the importance of building the right team and inspiring that team to never give up.  Often times, ventures are formed with a top-heavy team of executives overly skilled and inappropriately scaled to the size of a business.  When times get tough, instead of having the hunger to stick with it, many will jump ship.  Build and inspire a core team that fiercely believes in your vision and has the commitment to persevere through market crises and the ups and downs of a startup.

Balance is critical
New ventures often follow an extremely lean operating model – too lean in fact. To a certain extent, you need to pay for play to capture greater market share. Raise sufficient capital and allocate the appropriate resources to expand your business. Seek to achieve the right balance; don’t be afraid to adjust your business plan depending on market conditions.

It pays to think like an investor
Venture capitalists alone evaluate hundreds of presentations a year. While you undoubtedly need a brilliant idea that addresses a market need to spark interest, investors also gauge their faith in the executive team.  Experience helps you to build relationships with your target investor group, and identify the right type of capital to raise for your venture. This does not happen overnight, but over time, strong relationships help you expand your resources and understand how to raise capital and who to raise capital from.

Listen and learn
Listening is a virtue for a reason. Entrepreneurs often focus on communicating, convincing and selling. But investors can be more than financial-backers; they can also act as advisors who speak from their personal experience, failures and successes. Find mentors and industry leaders who can walk with you through your entrepreneurial journey.

In 2010, 565,000 new businesses were started per month by new and repeat entrepreneurs, according to the Kauffman Foundation. In this time of economic uncertainty, the need for innovative ideas and new business ventures is greater than ever.  Entrepreneurs are a vital part of the economy, so hold fast to your vision, be flexible, and persevere through failure and fluctuating market conditions. It will pay off in the end.

Brin McCagg is the co-Founder, President and COO of OneWire. He has more than 20 years of entrepreneurial executive management experience.

[Image via Yuri Arcurs/Shutterstock]

Filed under: Entrepreneur Corner, VentureBeat

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The first time I met Box.net chief executive Aaron Levie, he showed me a magic trick with a deck of cards.

A year later, the 26-year-old was standing on stage (in his typical electric orange sneakers) in front of 350 customers and press at his company’s first annual conference, BoxWorks, held yesterday in San Francisco. He had just turned down a buyout offer worth more than $500 million. That evening, Box.net hosted a party where the entertainment was one of his favorite bands from middle school, Third Eye Blind.

Levie has come a long way since middle school. In fact, he and his company have emerged as iconic figures for the new wave of enterprise technology.

Like Steve Jobs, Marc Benioff and Mark Zuckerberg, Levie is part inspirational leader and part visionary. More to the point, Box.net is part of a new wave of startups that are bringing new ways of thinking into the enterprise, borrowing from Apple’s consumer playbook. For instance: make something simple, easy to use and insanely useful, something that you would have never realized you needed, but can’t live without today. It’s a totally different way of working than most enterprise technology companies.

“In the last 10 years, it feels like something fundamental is changing, consumer computing is leading the industry,” Andreessen Horowitz co-founder Marc Andreessen told VentureBeat. (Andreessen Horowitz is one of Box.net’s investors.) “Consumers get the hottest mobile devices years ahead in advance before adoption in the enterprise.”

Box.net was started in 2005 in a garage by a bunch of University of Southern California students. It has since gone on to capture the attention of investors and massive companies. The enterprise-focused cloud storage provider went from five-figure revenues in its first year to millions by the time it closed its first round of funding from Draper Fisher Jurvetson in 2006 and more than $10 million by its fourth round in February, 2011, Meritech Capital managing director George Bischof said.

Today, the company has more than 7 million users and 77 percent of the largest companies in the world on the Fortune 500 list have deployed its service in some form. Box.net just closed an extension to its most recent funding round worth $50 million that includes its existing investors — including Draper Fisher Jurveston, Andreessen Horowitz and Meritech Capital, all Facebook investors — and also a new investment from Salesforce.com. In total, the company has raised more than $130 million in funding.

“We were kind of kicking ourselves for not getting in earlier, but they were below our revenue threshold,” Bischof told VentureBeat. “We met a year before, and we saw it had the potential to be one of those mega-spaces that affects everyone.”

And half of the $130 million is still in the bank, Draper Fisher Jurveston partner Josh Stein told VentureBeat. The most recent round is an extension to its fourth round of funding, which had already brought in $48 million. Box.net is gearing that funding toward infrastructure costs and opening a third data center to run alongside its existing two centers to manage the load from its new customers.

Now, using all those new enterprise applications is basically a prerequisite for an investment by Andreessen Horowitz, Andreessen said. Every company funded by Andreessen Horowitz in the past year has used Box.net to some extent, along with a mishmash of the other enterprise 2.0 applications like Google Docs and Workday, he said. Most of the time they are either free to try out — in the case of freemium apps like Yammer and Box.net — or are dirt cheap.

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Filed under: cloud, VentureBeat

SweetLabs has raised $13 million in funding to bring the one-click app experience to the desktop computer.

The San Diego, Calif. company makes an app platform called Pokki, which lets developers create and distribute rich connected desktop apps using standard web languages such as HTML5. e also runs the Open Candy ad network, which offers recommendations to users when they are downloading and installing apps. Open Candy has powered more than 400 million desktop app installs since the product launched in 2008.

SweetLabs launched Pokki for beta testing in June. The idea is to create an easy-to-use app platform that is similar to the app experience users enjoy on smartphones and tablets. The company will use the money to expand that platform. SweetLabs will also expand its Ope nCandy ad network.

Intel Capital led the round. The investment fits with Intel’s strategic goals, since SweetLabs aims to reinvigorate the PC for the age of apps. Existing investors Google Ventures and Bessemer Venture Partners also participated. Darrius Thompson, chief executive, said that the PC is the largest platform for applications, but it is the most underserved when it comes to apps.

Filed under: deals, VentureBeat

Achievers has raised $24.5 million for its business of motivating employees by inspiring them with rewards and social network.

That seems like something every company should do. But Achievers gives them a helping hand, and the company has grown 105 percent in monthly revenue over the last 12 months.

The company has programs such as social recognition, which allows employees to share their work accomplishments on Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook. Employees can forward their recognitions via email and can accumulate points that they can cash in for real-world rewards such as TVs or vacations. Achievers’ clients include Marriott, Microsoft and 3M.

Sequoia Capital led the funding, which was the company’s third institional round. Other investors included JLA Ventures, GrandBanks Capital, and the Ontario Venture Capital Fund (managed by NorthLeaf Capital). Total funding to date is $38 million.

Achievers has 150 employees and recently moved its headquarters from Toronto to San Francisco, where it hopes to hire 40 more people.

Alfred Lin, a partner at Sequoia, said employee rewards and recognition is a $48 billion industry that is fragmented and largely handled manually. Achievers, on the other hand, has turned the process into a software-as-a-service. Achievers is available in multiple languages with round-the-clock support. It targets firms with 500 employees and up.

Achievers was founded as I Love Rewards in 2002. Rivals include internal recognition programs as well as Globoforce and Rypple. Founder and chief executive Razor Suleman has been starting businesses since he was 15 years old.

Filed under: enterprise, games, VentureBeat

Wikets, a soon-to-be-released iPhone application that recommends places and products to friends, announced a $1.5 million seed round from Andreessen-Horowitz and Battery Ventures today. But will yet another recommendations product survive when reviews and opinions already litter the Internet?

I imagine these recommendation apps to be like little bodies treading water in the Internet ocean. Apps like Where exist in rafts, websites such as Yelp are the ships that float on their own, and companies that provide exit strategies or funding are the lifeboats searching the scene for people to pick up.

Not every treading body drowns. Wickets is hoping a classic approach to recommendations will help it edge out competitors, openly acknowledging that the space is crowded.

“We are doing it the old fashioned way. Our goal was to come up with a way users can put their best recommendations at their friends’ fingertips,” said Wickets chief executive and co-founder Andy Park in an interview with VentureBeat.

Wickets works by allowing you to follow other Wikets members and see their recommendations in a stream. Recommendations are made by searching a particular place or company, finding the product and adding your two cents right on its page. You can save recommendations in wishlists and define a wishlist by topic. Commenting is also enabled on the various reviews.

Based on how many people “re-recommend” what you’ve already recommended or add your review to their wishlist, you get points, which can result in gift cards. The company is not releasing the names of all of its retail partners, but does say the first gift cards awarded could be from Amazon, iTunes or other large scale retailers.

Park says that the app solves two problems: having to find a product and send an email or text regarding the product, as well as time spent waiting for a recommendation when requested from friends. The app solves these issues by attaching a review directly to the product or place page and, in theory, your friends’ recommendations will already be available on the app, so you won’t have to query the person directly.

This requires that people actually use the app, however. The app can’t reach its full functionality until a majority of your own friends are using it. So how will Wikets get people to use the app? The company believes Facebook and Twitter connect, a prompt to find friends, and a natural desire to meet people will bring in the required amount of users.

By “natural desire to meet people,” Park means that because you can see friends-of-friends’ reviews, you will want to get to know those people as well. For example, if you’re with someone who mentions a restaurant your friend reviewed, you can offer to invite that friend along since you know they like the place. It’s a little intangible, however, and hard to measure if downloads will directly correlate to people meeting each other.

User acquisition is a big problem for app companies today, which have turned to gamification, or a rewards system such as Wiket’s as a way to lure people. A number of crowdsourced products such as CrowdTwist, BunchBall and Needle are all doing this. But as any gamer knows, getting rewarded is great, but its entertainment value will die if the means by which you get rewarded is boring.

Parks did, however, say that he is saving specific strategies for the app’s launch.

The growth of a company like this is very much up in the air, especially as funding becomes less and less of an indicator that a company is worthwhile.

Matt McCall of Chicago venture firm New World Ventures told VentureBeat, “There are just way too many companies getting funded.”

For now, however, Wikets has been pulled out of the ocean to develop its app with capital from investors Battery Ventures and Andreessen-Horowitz. It is using the funding to launch the application, which went into full development after the company closed on the round in May.

Prior to the round, Park knew Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz when his former company BladeLogic was a competitor of their Opsware, both optimization focused data centers. BladeLogic went public in 2007 and was sold to BMC Software in 2008. The teams grew mutual respect over the years and are collaborating this time around.

Wikets plans to launch the iPhone app in October, as well as announce its strategy and partners further. For now, the seed round will keep the project afloat.

[Photo courtesy of Andrew Doran/Shutterstock]

Filed under: deals, mobile, VentureBeat

Online doctor appointment startup ZocDoc on Thursday announced that is has raised an additional $25 million in third-round funding from Wall Street titan Goldman Sachs.

ZocDoc is shaking up the businesses of scheduling doctor appointments, as well as making doctors more accountable by having patients publicly rate them. The company makes its money by charging doctors $250 a month to list their practice. It lets patients find a doctor easily, set up appointments and rate their experience. Well-rated doctors then attract more patients and attention from ZocDoc’s more than 700,000 monthly users.

The $25 million from Goldman adds to DST Global’s $50 million investment from early August to create a monster $75 million third round. The company said the most recent funding will help “speed its expansion into additional regions.”

ZocDoc’s service is now available in 11 metropolitan areas in the U.S., with six of those areas launched in 2011. The service is live in Atlanta, Baltimore, Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Houston, Los Angeles, New York, Philadelphia, Phoenix, San Francisco and Washington D.C.

Before the third round of funding, ZocDoc had raised around $19 million, with investments coming from the likes of Khosla Ventures and Founders Fund. All together, the hot startup has attracted about $95 million in funding.

Have you used ZocDoc to book an appointment or rate your doctor?

Filed under: deals, VentureBeat

DataStax, which sells products built on top of the open source “NoSQL” data store Apache Cassandra, just announced a $11 million investment from Crosslink Capital and Lightspeed Venture Partners.The company also announced a new enterprise product which will be available in Q4, 2011.

NoSQL databases such as MongoDB, CouchDB and Cassandra have a number of advantages over traditional relational databases of the type proved by Oracle and Microsoft. Instead of rigid schemas, NoSQL databases have flexible ones which can be updated easily, data access is faster and they often scale better to store very large amounts of data.

Cassandra, which is used by web giants like FaceBook and Twitter, uses a peer-to-peer architecture which has no single point of failure. It’s designed specifically for high-availability applications which cannot afford to lose data even if an entire data centre went down. You wouldn’t be happy if Facebook lost your account data or Twitter your follower list, now would you?

Cassandra can also store different types of data at the same time: structured (similar to that stored in a relational database), semi-structured (data in a format like an XML documents which contains tags or other markers to separate semantic elements) and unstructured data. Cloud or on-site servers can be used to host Cassandra.

DataStax’s CEO Bill Bosworth sees the traditional relational database vendors like Oracle and Microsoft as the main competition. It’s still a big shift, in terms of mindset as much as anything else, for a company to move from a relational database to a NoSQL database. “We want to make it easy and efficient for people to adopt this new technology.” said Bosworth. “It’s a philosophical shift that you have to make but once you make it, you start to see solutions in entirely different ways.”

I asked him about what pushes companies to make that leap.”The top reason would be scale.” said Bosworth. “The second reason would be data type.’I have semistructured and unstructured data I want to work with as well’. The third reason would be change. ‘I want that flexible schema.’” If the existing database uses lots of procedural logic, however, migration will be more complex.

There’s also the cost factor. Bosworth gave the example of a customer called Constant Contact which had been considering using a relational database for a new project and estimated that it would take 9 months and cost $2.5 million. With Cassandra, they were able to get up and running in 3 months at a cost of $250,000. DataStax currently has around 100 customers.

DataStax also announced that it will release a new enterprise product in Q4, 2011 which will include the existing OpsCentre web-based monitoring product and Hadoop and MapReduce (distributed computation of large data sets stored across a cluster) functionality on top of Cassandra. DataStax will charge a per node subscription fee for the product. The new funding will mainly go towards the development of that product and expanding sales efforts.

DataStax was founded in 2010, has 30 employees, is based in the Bay area and received $3 million in from Lightspeed Venture Partners prior to the current round.

Filed under: deals, dev, VentureBeat

Just ahead of the launch of Facebook’s much anticipated music service, Internet radio service Pandora has unveiled a slick new HTML5 website and removed the cap on how much music free users can stream each month.

“In late 2010 we started with a clean sheet of paper, challenging ourselves to create a new Internet radio experience that was fast, social and easy while still being familiar to the tens of millions of people that listen to Pandora each month,” Pandora CTO Tom Conrad wrote in a blog post. “The result is ‘New Pandora’.”

Streaming music services have been making quite a few headlines as of late with the hyped U.S. launch of Spotify, the aforementioned Facebook service and MOG and Rdio offering free versions of their services. With such a crowded field, Pandora has decided to reinvent its site and the way users experience music in hopes of keeping people coming back.

The new HTML5 version of Pandora looks much cleaner and more modern than its old implementation. Look at the above photo and you can see the easy-to-access play controls on top and colorful high-res album art in the center. One click on the left-hand column changes your artist, song or genre-created radio station. Another helpful feature shows lyrics below the song information.

There are also new social features included in the redesign that help with music discovery. You now have enhanced profiles and access to a music feed that lets you see what your friends and like-minded members are listening to. Stations will also now have their own URLs, which make them easier to share on social networks.

Along with the redesign, Pandora has thankfully removed the 40-hour streaming cap that used to plague all non-paid users. Still, to get the most out of the service, users have to pay for a premium Pandora One account. A premium account costs $36 a year, removes advertising and lets users listen to higher-quality audio.

What do you think of the new Pandora layout and site changes?

Filed under: media, social, VentureBeat

ClrTouch, a Brooklyn-based startup with a love for touchscreen interfaces, makes it dead simple to create a webpage for tablets right on the iPad.

There are plenty of companies, like OnSwipe, focused on making it easy to create tablet sites, but ClrTouch appears to be the first to let you do so right on an actual tablet.

“Our product is made to evolve the web from a click- to a touch-based environment with consumer as our focus,” founder and CEO Mark Spates told VentureBeat. “We are not just making blogging easier or [prettier] on tablets but addressing a real shift that will occur in human computer interaction over the next 10-20 years.”

Using ClrTouch is simple: You log onto the website from your iPad, enter a page title, choose feeds that you’d like to feature on your tablet, pick a layout, and hit publish. The service will help to promote the page to others, and you can also explore new content through its “Discovery Dashboard.”

Think of it like a Tumblr for tablet web pages. The company plans to build a network around the pages users create, which should make it easy for anyone to find interesting tablet sites.

ClrTouch currently has three employees and was founded in 2010. It has also recently been accepted to the startup accelerator DreamIt Ventures’ Fall 2011 Philadelphia class.

ClrTouch is one of 80 companies chosen by VentureBeat to launch at the DEMO Fall 2011 event taking place this week in Silicon Valley. After our selection, the companies pay a fee to present. Our coverage of them remains objective.

Filed under: mobile, social, VentureBeat

Social networks, search engines and online resources have all created new challenges for business-to-business marketers. Prospects do more research on their own, and it’s not always easy to know how to reach them.

So how do you adapt to the changing landscape, in order to engage and nurture potential customers more effectively?

Here are five areas that B2B marketers should be paying careful attention to and selecting their marketing automation tools accordingly.

Data Collection
Listening, absorbing and acting on information about contacts rather than shouting generic marketing messages is key to nurturing leads in an age in which inboxes are overflowing and time is short.

For marketers, this means using marketing technology tools to help build a robust database based on prospect preferences and behaviors that can be used to send automated, triggered messages. A few hot areas:

Web tracking: While not new, Web tracking has grown more sophisticated, enabling marketers to tie anonymous behaviors to specific contacts and thus send more relevant automated messages, as well as monitoring a more expansive range of behaviors, such as blog comments, Foursquare check-ins, white paper downloads, Twitter follows, etc.
Progressive profiling: Instead of trying to collect 12 data points about a prospect up front and risking form abandonment, progressive forms allow marketers to set up an automated process in which they ask buyers for a few key data points at first and then gradually increase their knowledge as the relationship grows.
Social: Offering website visitors the option of signing in with their social network credentials, adding a lead generation form on a company Facebook page and inserting share call-to-actions in event reminder emails and white paper .pdf files are just a few ways marketers can build their database and increase their message reach.

Lead Management
Marketing automation enables you to add a layer of sophistication to your lead-management process that will increase efficiency, tighten up any remaining leaks in the funnel, and improve alignment between marketing and sales.

New technology enables you to create more comprehensive lead-scoring systems than ever, allowing you to rank the qualification of prospects according to their buyer interest and increase the number of quality leads sent to sales.

And tighter integration between marketing automation platforms and CRM systems means you can easily alert sales when leads perform certain meaningful actions, as well as giving sales full visibility into marketing’s activities—and vice versa—when you turn a lead over to them.

Cross-Channel Campaign Management
Today’s buyers want to be communicated with as individuals, so marketers are faced with the challenge of incorporating various decision points into their campaigns in ways that build deeper relationships and drive conversions. The best marketing automation platforms make this process easier by providing visual campaign tools that enable marketers to create programs with multiple messaging tracks and touch points and automatically route each contact down a specific track based on his or her interactions with the company.

Whether it’s a nurture email, event invite or an alert to your call center to contact a lead in your system, the possibilities for engaging prospects are endless.

Social Marketing
Many prospects are now coming to companies via search and social, so marketers need to make sure their content creates a consistent conversation path during the relationship. In addition to the tactics mentioned above, B2B marketers should focus on making their content shareworthy and shareable, delivering educational content that addresses key pain points and including social icons that make it easy to share with the click of a mouse.

Marketers should also plan their automated nurture campaigns around the idea of facilitating a social dialogue, encouraging sharing in multiple emails and enabling conversations around their content. In today’s marketplace, integrating social media into a multichannel marketing strategy is becoming an increasingly essential element of nurturing leads and driving conversions.

Tracking and Reporting
There’s a lot of pressure on marketers today to demonstrate their value and impact on the bottom line. By employing marketing automation technology and strategy that captures all aspects of their campaigns and offers a clear view into the results of their marketing efforts—from lead acquisition to account close and beyond—marketers will be well-positioned to accurately showcase how they’re capturing prospects’ attention throughout the whole lead-management process.

To gain a complete picture of their marketing efforts, marketers should run reports that look at both first touches and influence. The former will tell you where new leads are coming from and where you should keep spending your money, while the latter will provide insights into what actually convinced someone to buy.

When tracking where leads came from (“first touch”), put an automated system in place that separates the source from the offer, so that no matter how prospects interact with your content and what path they take from seeing your ad to signing a contract, you’ll be able to keep tabs and better determine where to focus future resources.

As the director of product strategy at Silverpop, Bryan Brown is responsible for defining the broad strategic vision of the company’s family of products and helping marketers grow revenue.

Image: Nikoniano / Shutterstock.com

Filed under: VentureBeat

Internet search startup Diffbot launched its API today for visually scanning, parsing and extracting information from web pages. Diffbot detects what type of layout a page has, then searches it for common visual cues to monitor when any content changes on a page, or to extract specific information for developers to use.

The Palo Alto-based company was founded in 2008 by two former Stanford students, CEO Mike Tung and CTO Leith Abdulla, with seed funding from Stanford incubator StartX. Tung originally created Diffbot to monitor the websites for his various Stanford classes and tip him off to any new announcements, posted lectures or assignments via text message.

According to Diffbot’s creators, all web pages fall into one of 30 different page-type categories. By pegging what category a page falls in to, it can extrapolate the various types of information on that page. For example, front pages of news sites typically have the same elements: headlines, images, tags, advertisements and article summaries.

“Diffbot understands visually what all of these different elements of the page are and can be used by developers to connect that content to direct action,” Tung told VentureBeat.

Currently Diffbot has hundreds of developers using the beta API, and some intriguing products have already been created using the tools. AOL’s free Editions iPad magazine app uses Diffbot to analyze the front pages of news sites and pull out important new or breaking information. Hacker News Radio tapped Diffbot to pull content from hacker news sites and turn them into spoken reports. The city of São Paulo in Brazil uses Diffbot to track changes on the local government website and turns them into an automated Twitter feed.

Diffbot’s Follow API creates an RSS-style feed of fresh content. The On-Demand API currently looks at just two major page types, Frontpage and Article, but Diffbot plans on releasing more in the future, and that’s when things could get interesting.

“Once we have released the API for all 30 page types, we hope to enable a new type of mobile application — one where the user can take actions directly on web data, instead of reading a bunch of blue links,” said Tung to VentureBeat. “Something like SIRI, but for the entire web, and not just a set of handpicked APIs.”

Filed under: mobile, VentureBeat

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He has $1 million in the bank, a promising new company and a rolodex that makes Silicon Valley swoon.

“Hang on, I’ve got to take this,” says 19 year-old Cory Levy. “Hi, mom.”

I’m interviewing Levy in our office when he takes the call. As I wait, I cannot shake his eerie resemblance to Mark Zuckerberg. It’s not just his curly hair, the hoodie, the strangely similar necks and chins. It’s the fact that this teenager is wicked smart with serious ambition. He wants to change the world.

“Worried parents,” he sighs as he hangs up the phone. “They live in Houston. They always like to know where I am and what I am doing.”

What he’s doing is remarkable for someone his age. He is co-founding a startup called One, which has created a mobile app that notifies you when people around you share your interests. You create a profile, and when someone with similar interests is right next to you, you get a notification. Levy and his co-founder, 28 year old Michael Callahan, have the ambitious goal of making missed connections history.

“How do we meet the important people in our lives?” asks Levy. “It’s all about situations. I like tennis, and met my best friend because he was carrying a racket. We started talking because of that racket. What if he hadn’t been carrying it that day? We want to prevent people from walking past each other and missing a chance to know each other.”

The app makes its initial debut at the end of this month at UC Berkeley, when students get back to school. He’s timed the launch carefully, so it will be available after the noise of signing up for classes and extracurricular activities has quieted.

“You need a large number of users in a small geographic area, so we’re focusing on college campuses,” explains Levy. “We’re going from campus to campus. We are emulating what Facebook did. Why did Color launch to everyone? Why are all of these companies trying to build a network by launching publicly? Exclusivity is key.”

Color is a good analogy. Like One, the startup is focused on making connections between people based on physical proximity. The fuse was lit when Color raised $41 million earlier this year. The result was more of a fizzle than a ka-boom. Early reviews indicated users weren’t as excited as a $41 million company should make them. It still hasn’t taken off. One will also face competition from apps like WhosHere and Skout.

After Berkeley, One will launch at University of Texas and University of Illinois. One tracked invite requests on its site to see which schools got picked.

The company raised $1 million from SV Angel, True Ventures, Charles River Ventures, General Catalyst, Square COO Keith Rabois, wine guru and marketing consultant Gary Vaynerchuk, serial entrepreneur Naval Ravikant, and Harrison Metal founder Michael Dearing.

Dearing doesn’t talk to the press very often. A current Stanford professor and former senior vice president at eBay, Dearing has quietly backed innovative and successful start-ups. His greatest hits include AdMob (Google acquired for $750 million), Xoopit (Yahoo bought for $20 million), Mixer Labs (Twitter acquired) along with other startups like Widgetbox, CafePress, Polyvore and BloomSpot. You’ll be hard-pressed to find him talk publically about himself or these companies.

In this case, he was happy to talk.

“Three people in the same week told me to meet him,” says Dearing with a chuckle, recalling how he met Levy. “He’s got charisma and the courage to use it. He reaches out to people and is self confident in the best way. He finds interesting people and interesting things to talk about. He can connect with people and that deep desire is reflected in his product.”

I ask if he can find something negative to say about Levy.

“He’s the real thing,” says Dearing. This validation from Dearing is one of the best you can get in Silicon Valley. “You can’t do what he’s done at his age without intense focus and discipline. The reason you haven’t been able to find red flags is he hasn’t had much time to accumulate them.”

Levy spent one year at University of Illinois studying computer science, where the university had recruited him for his entrepreneur talents, he says, “just like an athlete.” But what he was really studying was how to sell himself and his ideas. He did an independent study with Paul Magelli, the senior director of the Academy for Entrepreneurial Leadership at U of I. Magelli is also scholar in residence at Kauffman Foundation, advising on entrepreneurship initiatives.

“Cory is ‘the’ mythical example we use in class, except he’s for real,” says Magelli, as he puts down his Chicago-style hot dog to do an interview. He’s just landed in Chicago, and called as soon as this interview was requested. “I’ve been teaching for 57 years and you wonder when in your career you’ll get a Cory. He makes you rethink the proposition as to whether entrepreneurs are born or made. He’s so young. How did he absorb it in 19 years? He’s an enigma.”

Levy says he’s taking a break from school to work on One. He’s not sure how long that break will last.

Next Page:
One Headquarters: Remove your shoes and mind the rabbit
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Filed under: Company launch, VentureBeat

The Internet is about to hit its fourth major shift in server architecture.

The early days were powered by simple Perl applications. As the dotcom hit, Java application servers running on highend UNIX machines powered the majority of the web and created a multibillion dollar per year industry. In the 2000s, scripting languages such as PHP and Ruby running on cloud based Linux infrastructure have spawned massive growth at companies like Rackspace and Amazon with its Amazon Web Services service. Each of these shifts in server architecture brought greater efficiencies and the ability to more cheaply deliver more sophisticated Internet services. We are now on the verge of hitting another inflection point with JavaScript running on the server.

JavaScript came onto the scene in 1995 as the browser language in Netscape’s Navigator browser and was primarily used to implement simple user interface elements such as menus. With the wave of Web 2.0 companies building out JavaScript libraries such as jQuery and various HTML5 extensions of late, JavaScript is becoming increasingly sophisticated and capable of delivering highly interactive web and mobile-optimized sites comparable to Flash sites. As websites become more and more interactive, an increasing amount of business logic and data processing is starting to happen in the browser with JavaScript rather than on the server.

The growing up of JavaScript is leading to a collision of sorts between the client and the server. Why use one scripting language on the client, and then a different scripting language on the server? PHP and Ruby programmers are constantly dynamically building DOMs, the document object model for a browser page that JavaScript innately understands. Programmers also have to transform data in and out of JSON (the JavaScript Object Notation) so that it can be understood by browsers. All of this work translating between languages causes errors and bugs, and forces unnecessary communication between front-end and back-end developers. Each language has it stakeholders claiming better frameworks and whathaveyou, but at some point the pain of translation outweighs these benefits. Especially when you consider that JavaScript programmers are widely available, and Ruby programmers are virtually impossible to find.

Imagine if you were building a house and the architects spoke only Japanese and the builders spoke only French. There is a lot of time and energy spent handling communication and fixing miscommunication between the two parties. The same problems happen when you use two different languages to build a web application.

Even worse, when code is written, programmers have to decide whether it is going to run on the browser or on the server. Things as simple as validating a phone number need to be decided before a programmer can start, and be assigned to either the front-end JavaScript programmers or the back-end PHP, Java or Ruby programmers. Once the code is written, if for whatever reason it needs to be moved from client to server or vice versa, it needs to be rewritten from scratch.

The fissure between client and server is even starting to hit large corporate websites that have barely budged toward scripting languages from Java. When you go to your bank’s website or favorite e-commerce website, chances are that it looks and works very much like it did 10 years ago. This is because most corporations perform all of the processing of a website on their servers. When you click on something on a webpage, it goes to the server, which creates a whole new webpage and sends it to your browser. While this is not the most efficient way to serve a website, it is definitely the most efficient way to create a website inside a corporation, since the programmers do not have to learn all the intricacies of the various browsers and can simply program in Java, the favored language for corporate websites.

The sudden preponderance of mobile and tablet devices has created a sudden rupture in the way that corporations serve their websites. It is very slow and cumbersome to completely refresh a web page every time a user does something on a phone with its relatively slow web browser and connection. Now corporate web applications need to be upgraded to HTML5 and be able to update themselves dynamically, just like the modern web applications offered by Google and all of the Web 2.0 startups.

There have been various attempts to productize JavaScript on the server over the years. Netscape acquired LiveWire’s JavaScript server and shipped it in 1996 but then quickly replaced it with the Java and C++ based Kiva Application Server in 1998. Aptana attempted to provide hosted JavaScript servers and ended up selling its development tools to Appcelerator.

Over the past couple of years, a new breed of JavaScript servers have taken hold and are starting to get significant traction. An open source JavaScript server called node.js is becoming increasingly popular especially for communication servers and getting a lot of geek and startup love. Last year, Sequoia invested in Sencha, a company focused on JavaScript client libraries that has also done work on node.js.

It all makes sense when you think about it. It took many years for scripting languages to be considered serious web languages and for significant client logic to be implemented on the browser. But now this is the normal way to create an Internet application. Why code in two different scripting languages, one on the client and one on the server? It’s time for one language to rule them all.

Peter Yared is the VP/GM of Social at Webtrends. He has founded four e-commerce and marketing infrastructure companies that were acquired by Sun, VMware, TigerLogic and Webtrends. You can follow him at @peteryared.

Filed under: VentureBeat

You’re about to witness a sharp increase in the number of advertisements and marketing campaigns that use live, interactive broadcast platforms.

For example, look no further than the hidden webcams Honest Tea pointed at bottles of tea it left out in the open in various cities, a marketing stunt disguised as test of citizens’ honesty.

Once reserved for “live from the red carpet!” entertainment events like the Oscars and sporting events like the Tour de France, suddenly live streaming is becoming popular with events not shown on television — partly because of the high cost-per-thousand (CPM) ad rates and high levels of interactivity it can command.

“Advertising is now our primary growth opportunity,” said Ustream founder and CEO John Ham. We spoke with him at the live streaming company’s hip HQ in San Francisco’s SOMA district. “Live content has always had some of the highest levels of engagement in traditional media like television. Some of the highest CPM is during the Super Bowl, American Idol and other live TV events. The reason for that level of engagement is simultaneous reach.”

Honest Tea is wrapping up a live social experiment today with unmanned pop-up tea stores in major U.S. cities. The campaign demonstrates how streaming video can play an important role in modern marketing campaigns.

Honest Tea placed bottles in prominent locations, unattended, and let passers-by purchase them on the honor system. The San Francisco location, near the historic Ferry Building, is pictured to the right. Each bottle cost one dollar, and it was up to each individual to decide if they would pay for their drinks. Honest Tea used hidden cameras and Ustream’s live interactive broadcast platform to see how honest folks were.

The campaign found Chicago was the most honest city, with 99 percent of visiters to the pop up paying for their tea. New York came in last with 86 percent paying. San Francisco was 8th with 93 percent.

Even if your city wasn’t competing, you could still be polled online. 99 percent of online users polled said they would pay for a bottle. (Sure, that’s easy to say when a cold bottle of tea isn’t staring you in the face.)

“The digital component really brought the brand to many many more consumers,” said Honest Tea VP of marketing Peter Kaye, in an interview with VentureBeat. “We want more people to ‘like’ us and follow us on Facebook. The live streaming certainly helped. We will have doubled our number of ‘likes’ to over 60,000 in one day.”

The campaign was effective, and cute, but it was the live streaming that got our attention. Perhaps many unknowing participants didn’t see the the hidden cameras, such as the the one aimed at the San Francisco pop up, pictured to the left. Signs explaining the legal rights to live broadcast and record the event were posted everywhere, but the ice-cold bottles of tea were what passers-by noticed.

Ham points out that Honest Tea’s goal was to reach a specific audience, and that audience happens to match Ustream’s: Young, tech-savvy professionals who use social media to share their favorite products with friends and family.

Friends and family were the reasons Ham and Ustream co-founder Brad Hunstable started the company. The two met at West Point and were sent to warafter 9/11. During military deployment the they found the options to communicate with their families and friends were limited.

“When all you have is five or 10 minutes to communicate, you start prioritizing,” says Ham. “You make tradeoffs between loved ones. It hit us: Why can’t we connect with more than one person in a meaningful way? We bet other people would use it. This is a one to many business model. We got out of the army, moved to Silicon Valley and started this company.”

They launched Ustream in March 2007 and today have 150 employees with offices in Los Angeles, Tokyo, and Budapest. The company has raised $87.8 million in investment capital from SoftBank Group, DCM, Western Technology Investors, Band of Angels Fund, and Infinity Venture Partners.

Ham says one of the keys to their current success is that they are integrated into Facebook, Twitter, Ning, AIM and other social networks.

“We allow the brands and the agencies to syndicate directely into their social media,” he says. “Live video and interactivity give customers a new aspect to an existing or new campaign. In the Honest Tea campaign, you get to see people walking by and the choices they are making. It adds an element of credibility and transparency for the company.”

There’s also the ability to partake in the campaign before it starts, during and after. Social media allows potential customers to have a conversation about the campaign from start to finish. There’s no down time. The live element can certainly be a risk, but Honest Tea’s VP of marketing has nothing to complain about today.

“We did this last year in eight cities,” says Kaye, who is busy churning out follow-up footage and highlights from the campaign. “From what I saw today, this was a big step forward. It is real time, and a good way to showcase what we have going on. It is very worthwhile and a very good investment.”

Will Honest Tea live stream again?

“Whether it’s Ustream or another real time video provider, I think definatly,” Kaye says.

Ustream competitors include Livestream.com, Justin.tv and Stickam.com. They are all pretty busy these days. Perhaps we are entering the golden age of live streaming.

Filed under: media, VentureBeat

Crittercism, a platform that allows developers to track support issues in their mobile apps, announced today at VentureBeat’s MobileBeat 2011 conference that it is launching to the public with funding from Google Ventures, Kleiner Perkins, and others.

Crittercism’s technology is easily integrated into any mobile app and connects to a cloud-based service for monitoring apps. The company has focused on iOS for some time, and today it also announced that its SDK will also be available for Android apps.

During beta testing, Crittercism saw over 700 developers implement its technology, and it has been installed over 1 million times since it launched on iOS in January, CEO Andrew Levy told VentureBeat in a chat last week.

“Mobile app users had no recourse when an app crashed or misbehaved and were left with no other option than to leave a bad review in the App Store,” Levy said in a press release. “Crittercism gives a voice to an app’s user, keeps them engaged, and provides tools for a developer to diagnose, fix, and communicate the issue back to its users.”

The company is an alum of startup incubator AngelPad, just like task manager startup Astrid, which also announced funding from Google Ventures today. Crittercism says the funding helped it to make the transition to Android.

The company has also received funding from Opus Capital, Shasta Ventures, AOL Ventures, and early Facebook engineer Lucas Nealson.

Filed under: deals, mobile, VentureBeat

I’m convinced I have a strategy that allows me to get a meeting with any person I want, no matter how famous, rich, busy, or difficult they are to reach. Why? Because I’ve tried it, and my success rate so far is 100%. It just doesn’t fail.

When I was interviewing founders for my book, Startups Open Sourced, I had a few names on there that I just shouldn’t have been able to get access to. It’s one thing to reach out to my immediate network and get meetings, but there were people who I didn’t have any connections in common with and it was a crapshoot at best to think I could get them to respond to one of my e-mails, let alone agree to give me one to two hours of their time for an in-depth interview.

I only discovered the hack as I wrote the book though. It came from an unsuspecting place. I asked every founder I interviewed what their best non-technical hack was, and one answer I received was particularly interesting. Evan Reas, the cofounder of LikeALittle.com, had some interesting answers to my other interview questions, like how he took $10,000 from his parents at the age of 16, lost $8,000 of it in two weeks, and made more than $200,000 with the remaining $2,000 by constructing stock market algorithms.

That’s only one of a few very interesting things I discovered about LikeALittle. But the one thing that stood out during that interview for me is Evan’s answer to my question: “Tell me about the time you most successfully hacked some non-computer system to your advantage.” His answer will undoubtedly leave a lot of people shaking their heads, thinking “well, that’s just desperate—and annoying! Whoever tries that would be an idiot.” That’s how some people respond to the “hustler” type of advice I give to students, such as how to Infiltrate Any Startup (which recently worked incredibly well when Loren Burton tried it and got the Airbnb CEO to contact him within hours of posting the site—he says the blog post gave him a great boost in the right direction to apply for a job at Airbnb).

Here’s the answer I got from Evan:

I’m very confident that I can get access to anybody in the world and get in front of him or her. So one guy, specifically, that is now an investor in our company—an advisor and investor—I sent him 12 emails. Every single month I would send him an email and give an update and say, “Hey, here is what we’re doing, here is what is going on, we’d love to hear your thoughts, whenever. You’re just an awesome guy so we want to get in front of you.”

I think I did this for six or seven months, then after that I was like, “Okay, I’m going to send you an email every single day for the next month and if you don’t respond, fine, but I’m going to keep sending them to you until you respond. If you tell me to stop, I’ll stop, but I think you’d be really helpful, here’s why.” So every single day at the same time I would send him an email that said, “Here is what’s going on, let’s chat, talk to you tomorrow.”

I think it was after six or seven of those emails he finally said, “Okay, let’s go grab coffee.” So we grabbed coffee; he was an awesome guy. I told him he was awesome and it turned out that he would be an advisor and an investor in the company as well as an awesome mentor. So I think it’s all about perseverance, persistence, being able to keep pushing and getting things done.

That might not sound like much, but let me summarize the points in cased you missed any of that: You’re talking to someone important who isn’t responding to e-mails. This demonstrates interest on your part, but at this point you have three choices: you can either keep doing what doesn’t work and expect things to change, you can give up and quit, or you can try something else. This is the time to escalate.

3 important rules to follow
Here are the a few simple yet important rules to follow when you’re using this strategy.

Rule one: Find a schedule and stick to it. Tell the person you’re going to send them an e-mail every day for the next 30 days, or whatever time period you’d be happy with knowing you tried your hardest if you do decide to quit and give up. Then add a reminder to your phone because you’re already busy; probably just as busy as the person you’re trying to reach. If you’ve got an iPhone, this means just pulling up your calendar, setting an event for 9 PM every night—or whenever you know you’re most likely to be at a computer—setting it to repeat daily, and then acting on it consistently. Don’t plan on missing any of these. If you know you’re going to be away for a period of time, don’t commit to this plan.

Rule two: Be respectful. Tell them if they ask you to stop, then you will—and stop if they ask you to, don’t keep asking. There’s always a fine line between persistence and desperation, and you don’t want to cross over into desperation. This requires some personal judgment skills, and you can apply this to a lot of other situations that require some degree of persistence, so always check yourself and ask “am I acting desperately, or am I acting persistently?” I’m not sure there’s a rule to know when you’re one or the other; I listen to my gut feeling first, and then I reason with myself.

Rule three: Make the reasons for meeting good. Don’t just come up with lame excuses for why someone should meet with you. Put some thought into it, and actually sell the person on how they’d benefit from meeting you. What do they get out of it? Evan had been talking to—or “at”—this investor for 6 or 7 months. Here’s what probably happened: this investor read the e-mails, and there was probably no clear call to action other than “hey want to meet up sometime?” There was probably no sense of urgency. While the updates may have been somewhat interesting, the investor probably thought “ok, well I’ve got 500 other e-mails in my inbox, I should probably get to work on those. This was a good read, maybe I’ll follow up some day.” Then they hit the “archive” button and forgot it was ever sent. They might have seen some other messages and had the same reaction.

Busy people and investors all have one thing in common: they all have inboxes full of e-mail, and it’s in their DNA to churn through that stuff quickly. They don’t want their inbox to stay full; they want to handle things quickly. So now your proposition is offering an opportunity cost: either you can allow my 30 e-mails over the course of a month to reach your queue and take up a portion of your time which consists of me trying to sell you, or we can get right to the point and talk and skip over all these e-mails. In some sense, the busy person already feels a sense of accomplishment because by answering to one of your e-mails, they know they’ve staved off 25 just like it. Use that to your advantage.

Busy people protect their inbox mail count, and they might go out of their way to prevent unnecessary clutter—though anyone could reasonably argue there’s a “spam button” for a reason, but I think it’s more painful for someone to click that rather than just agree to take a meeting. Most people started out as nothing, just like the people trying to reach them, and to click that “spam” button would be rejecting a core part of the Entrepreneurs Oath (the unofficial equivalent of the doctor’s Hippocratic Oath): “I will remember that I and my company remain a member of society, with special obligations to all my fellow human beings, those sound of mind and body and well as rich and poor.”

Investors want to help entrepreneurs out and make them succeed; that’s a fundamental trait that exists in the good ones. When you try this tactic, you’re sort of saying to them, “If I had one chance to exercise my Entrepreneurs Oath rights, it would be now. That’s how serious I am about doing this meeting.”

Tip: Follow up on other mediums if possible. If you’re on Twitter, it might be saying something like “hey, I’ve got reason #2 coming tomorrow, I know you’re super excited about that. Wait for it!” (I tried this with Dennis Crowley) If they have a fan page, you might go on there and tell the fans what you’re trying to do, and to vote up your comment if they support it (I tried this with Husky Starcraft). However, don’t expect this tactic to work if you’re only using Twitter. People already get tweets, and they have no real obligation to read them. There’s very little sense of urgency there, so try to invest most of your time finding out the correct e-mail address.

So now that you’ve got the base rules, go for it. Be sure you have the right contact information. You can’t always get e-mail addresses, so try to find someone on Twitter and send them messages once per day. Here are some of the people I’ve landed meetings with by using this tactic:

Dennis Crowley, Cofounder/CEO of foursquare, for a 1 hour interview
Brian Chesky, Cofounder/CEO of Airbnb, for a 2 hour interview
Mike Lamond (Husky Starcraft), a major e-sports commentator on YouTube with 500K subscribers, for a 1 hour interview

Short follow-up e-mails seem to work best. Get to the point; ask what you’re trying to ask after you’ve got their attention. If they don’t immediately respond, see if there’s something wrong with your own e-mail. In the case with Mike, I suggested a time the following week, and after receiving no response for a day, I realized he probably wanted to do it sooner. I e-mailed back again and said “how about tomorrow or the day after” and we had it scheduled.

The end result of all these interviews is that the founders thought it was a positive experience. Nobody has complained that it was annoying or distasteful. In fact, the results turned out great for everyone—Mike publicly said the interview was fun, I asked interesting questions, and the community loved it. They saw that I was bei[…]

Typesafe, a maker of software development tools for the Scala programming language, has raised $3 million in a first round of funding.

The Cambridge, Mass.-based company is also introducing today its open source Typesafe Stack, which integrates the most recent releases of the Scala programming language, Akka middleware and development tools. That makes it easier to develop software with Scala, which takes advantage of multicore hardware and cloud computing. Scala is used by some of the world’s highest-trafficked web properties such as Foursquare, Twitter and LinkedIn.

Multicore processors and cloud computing offer a lot of benefits for speeding up performance and allowing lots of users to use software at the same time. But it requires programming tricks to take advantage of them. That’s where the open-source Scala comes in. Scala is the foundation for building apps that are used by millions upon millions of users.

Greylock, the investment firm whose roster includes LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman, made the investment. Cambridge, Mas.-based Typesafe makes money via commercial support and maintenance options through a subscription service. Martin Odersky, chief executive of Typesafe, created the Scala (which stands for scalable language) programming language in 2001 at the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne and launched it seven years ago. It runs on top of the Java Virtual Machine and is interoperable with Java.

“The previous generation application architecture came from sequential computing and it is running out of steam,” said Odersky. “With Typesafe, we’re introducing a modern software architecture that is designed for parallel and distributed computing, bringing huge advantages in scalability and reliability.”

Greylock partner Bill Kaiser, who made his bet on open source as an early investor in Red Hat, said that computing is entering the era of “big cores,” meaning lots of cores, or computing brains, on a single chip. And there are lots of chips inside servers, which are the computing machines inside data centers that keep huge internet web sites running. Kaiser said Scala is the only proven alternative that can handle the challenges of multicore and cloud computing. Typesafe, Kaiser says, can take Scala to the mainstream and thereby help protect the billions of dollars that corporations have invested in java.

Chris Conrad, engineering manager at LinkedIn, says Scala is a powerful programming tool that offers scalability and efficiency. He is glad to see the creators of Scala launch Typesafe so that they can invest in the next generation of the programming language.

Alex Payne, former platform lead at Twitter and chief technology officer of online banking firm BankSimple, said that Scala played a critical role in improving the scalability and reliability of Twitter’s backend services (which have had to handle huge computing loads as more and more users sign up for the service).

The company named Java creator James Gosling and Java concurrency expert Doug Lea to its board of advisors. Willy Zwaenepoel, a parallel computing expert, has also joined the advisory board. Odersky co-founded Typesafe this year with Jonas Bonér, creator of Akka. The company has 12 employees.

Tags: cloud computing, Open source, Scala

Companies: Typesafe

People: Alex Payne, Doug Lea, James Gosling, Jonas Boner, Martin Odersky, Reid Hoffman, Willy Zwaenepoel

(Editor’s note: Ari Jacoby is CEO and co-founder of Solve Media. He submitted this story to VentureBeat.)

Go to any news source these days and you will certainly see stories about the looming technology bubble.  Are we approaching a bubble? Are we in one? And more importantly, how do we prevent it from being like the dot-com bust in the late ’90s?

For entrepreneurs looking to outlive the hype of a commoditized market, technology or offering, there are three key areas to focus on:

Innovation – Is your company legitimately improving on a current solution? Expanding an established market? Or is your company simply copying the hottest industry trend? As you’re creating and refining your business strategy, it’s important to ask yourself these questions to ensure that you are actually bringing innovation to market. The companies that survive long-term always create new categories.

Take Amazon.com, for example. Numerous vertical e-commerce sites emerged during the dot-com bubble – many of which did not survive. While it launched as an online bookseller, Amazon rapidly expanded beyond that single niche. Amazon wasn’t interested in limiting itself to one narrow vertical and saw opportunity to innovate by offering a long-tail, almost limitless, supply of products.  They’ve since revolutionized shipping, warehousing and web services.  Many competitors folded – and today Amazon battles against Wal-Mart – not Borders.

Can companies that aren’t actively trying to forge and market new categories survive in the shadow of competitors that are? Certainly. But, when the bubble pops, those companies will likely hang on for survival while the true innovators are well positioned for growth, success and longevity.

Solve real problems – There are always companies that struggle to explain the need for their product or service. While it might make perfect sense to the company’s founders and backers, if you are not offering a concrete solution to a real problem that is being faced by companies and consumers – you won’t last. It’s a hard truth.

Think simple – Too many companies hype the complexity of their solution as a way of masking its ineffectiveness. Most products that offer a solution to a real problem derive that solution from simplicity.

It is easy for pundits to look at current valuations of tech companies and write another piece opining about a new digital bubble. It is tougher to be intellectually honest and examine the underlying reasons why one company failed and another succeeded.

Entrepreneurial optimism bias is dangerous and unforgiving, so here’s an easy litmus test: Would your customers truly miss your offering if it ceased to exist tomorrow?

If the answer is “no,” you’re simply building a commodity and contributing to the inevitability of the next bubble.

Tags: tech bubble

Social enterprise network startup Magnet Systems announced today that it has pulled in $12.6 million in a first round of institutional funding. The round was led by well-know tech venture capital outfit Andreessen Horowitz.

The company said it will use the money to “fight for the best people possible” to help it develop a platform for creating business applications with attributes like those of social networks like Facebook.

Palo Alto, Calf.-based Magnet was founded by Alfred Chuang in 2008 and currently has 17 employees. The company said it aims to make the public cloud less of a conundrum for companies worried about the security of how their information is stored.

Chuang, a former Sun Microsystems engineer who was also the CEO and “A” in former software startup BEA Systems before it was snapped up by Oracle in 2008 for $8.5 billion, says Magnet’s key technology is a platform dubbed the Workplace Interaction Network (WIN).

WIN is designed to help companies become social from the start, by automatically linking up existing social networking connections their employees have within the company, as well as with their customers, clients and partners.

Chuang wrote in a blog post that the social aspect of enterprise is a key factor that can no longer be ignored by managers or large corporations:

“Now … about enterprise social computing … it’s almost impossible to believe, but after hundreds of millions of people worldwide have embraced social applications in nearly every aspect of their personal lives, businesses are still resisting social applications.  In fact, many enterprises have not made any significant investment in social applications despite obvious use cases for customer service, HR, marketing, product development, recruiting, sales, training and much more.

While the power of social networking to facilitate information sharing, knowledge transfer, team building and wealth creation is on display all around us, there has been almost no innovation in enterprise social computing.  This defies all logic and common sense when we see the tremendous success of consumer platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Yelp and YouTube.

Whether companies like it or not, their people are working and communicating through blogs, online communities, personal relationships, pictures, referrals, videos, websites and countless other vehicles.  Unfortunately, traditional enterprise applications aren’t designed to capture, organize and prioritize the knowledge and connections that reside in these unstructured assets.”

As such, Magnet has been operating “Sales WIN,” which Chuang has called Magnet’s attempt to “educate ourselves and learn stuff fast…to make our platform do what it does quicker,” in beta since October and has several unnamed customers, he told the Wall Street Journal today. Chuang added that he is still “figuring out” how to charge customers, because “operating in the cloud changes how software is capitalized and how revenue is recognized.”

WIN , which has yet to debut,  will eventually be rolled out in configuration that costs businesses a yet-to-be-determined amount but will be free to developers, with sections of it available as open source code.

For their part, Andreessen Horowitz said it was delighted to be involved, with founder Ben Horowitz blogging:

“The transition from today’s Web back-end architectures to tomorrow’s cloud computing will result in profound benefits. Over time, every existing application will be rewritten to take advantage of the cloud and these benefits. In addition, an incredible new class of never-before-possible applications will be developed.”

Warburg Pincus Managing Director Bill Janeway is also putting more money into this Series A round, as is Chuang himself.

Companies: Andreessen Horowitz, Facebook, magnet systems, Twitter, Warburg Pincus, Yelp

People: alfred chuang, Ben Horowitz, bill janeway

Many venture capitalists like to say they invest in people, not ideas. That seems particularly true in the case of Milk, Kevin Rose’s new mobile development firm, which just raised $1.5 million in angel funding.

Rose, of course, is famous for founding social news aggregator Digg, but he resigned earlier this year, after the company launched a controversial redesign and seemed to stagnate. He reemerged in April with Milk, which he said consists of a small team that will experiment with different app ideas, hopefully launching four-to-six ambitious apps in a year.

The funding was first reported in TechCrunch and confirmed on the San Francisco company’s Twitter account. Investors include Digg backers Mike Maples, Jr. (of Floodgate) and David Sze (of Greylock Partners), as well as Ron Conway, Dave Morin, Philip Rosedale, Ev Williams, Joshua Schachter, Ashton Kutcher, Philip Kaplan, Chris Sacca, Gary Vaynerchuk, Tony Hsieh, TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington, and others. (Yes, it’s a crazy list.)

The “development lab” model seems to be a nice career path for entrepreneurs who have launched one or two successful companies and now want to create cool new products without the headache of running a mature company. AdMob Omar Hamoui recently announced his own project, Churn Labs, which has backing from Sequoia Capital.

Tags: mobile apps, mobile development

Companies: Milk

People: Kevin Rose

Pixable, a New York City startup offering a new way to explore your friends’ photos, just announced that it has raised $3.6 million in a second round of funding.

The company has released several apps, but its focus seems to be on Photofeed, an app that launched earlier this year (Pixable launched the iPad version at the DEMO conference). Photofeed is supposed to help users explore photos that their friends have already posted on Facebook, using Pixable’s “WonderRank” technology to prioritize images that would be most personally interesting based on factors like Facebook Likes and what kind of photos users have liked in the past.

Pixable says Photofeed has now sorted 10 billion photos for its 500,000 users. It has plans to expand beyond the Web and iPad to iPhone and Android devices, and to add video browsing too.

The new round was led by Menlo Ventures with participation from Highland Capital. Pixable previously raised $2.5 million from Highland.

Tags: photo sharing, Photofeed

Companies: Highland Capital, Menlo Ventures, Pixable

Editor’s note: This discussion about the superphone app platform 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 discussion about HTML5 versus native, we’ll have top executives around the table, including Facebook, Google, Verizon, Sencha, AT&T and more.

With Android and other devices eroding the once monolithic iOS mobile app market, many developers face the costly prospect of developing for multiple mobile platforms. This, in turn, has led to a resurgence of the web vs. native debate that VentureBeat editor-in-chief Matt Marshall clearly outlined in a post several days ago.

The debate is personal for me, since I created the open source mobile web application development framework SproutCore while on the MobileMe team at Apple, a framework that lets you build mobile web apps that have many of the benefits and none of the problems of platform-specific apps.

So I’m here today to say that the debate is over: The web will win, but it won’t be the web of 2005. The iPhone and other mobile devices have forever changed the way users perceive software. iPhone apps have a user interface you can touch. They use hardware acceleration. They work offline.

Traditional web apps do none of this – which is why you see so many developers gravitating towards native technologies today despite the fact that mobile web browsers are also some of the most powerful the world has ever seen.

The problem isn’t the browser; it’s the apps. Most web apps in existence today were designed for a PC era. They were built for a world of mice, high speed internet, and legacy web browsers (like IE6). Mobile devices are just the opposite; touch-based with powerful web browsers, but often used on slow and unreliable 3G.

This change in context is dramatic. Some things that were fast now seem slow. Other things that were impossible are now easy. Even newer web apps, built using techniques that were cutting edge three years ago today, feel old and obsolete when compared to what today’s technology makes possible.

We need to build a new web experience that embraces all the benefits of native without trying to copy it: touch and gesture-driven interface, lightning fast speed, integration with next-generation web browsers. And we need to improve upon the native experience and build in functionality that makes true multi-device deployment possible: persistent data store, automatic data synchronization across platforms, easy deployment to multiple devices, built-in discoverability and the ability to work off-line.

Today’s mobile app developers are faced with two bad choices: 1) They can either build native apps, which are increasingly expensive and hard to manage due to the proliferation of mobile platforms in the market. 2) They can use today’s web development approaches, which basically force them to try to mimic the native experience in a way that doesn’t deliver a positive consumer experience.

But, as I’ve said, there’s also SproutCore, the first web application development framework available today that lets you build web apps that deliver the user experience typically associated with native apps. At my new company – Strobe Inc. – we have a team of developers with a long history of building easy-to-use web platforms, like Ruby on Rails, who are now actively enhancing SproutCore to make it easier to use, more powerful, and available on more platforms.

We have a long way to go until the web sees its final victory. The next few years will be a wild ride for developers and users alike. SproutCore is a solid start on this vision and the best way available today to place your bet on the web to win.

Charles Jolley is a co-founder and CEO of Strobe, a software and cloud services company focused on the mobile web. He is also the creator of the SproutCore open source framework. Before founding Strobe, Charles was responsible for MobileMe application development at Apple.

Tags: mobile web, native apps, SproutCore

People: Charles Jolley

Startup incubator AngelPad presented its Winter 2011 class of companies to investors and the media today in its AngelPad Demo Day. Thirteen companies total, ranging from cloud computing startups to car insurance search engines, presented.

The most recent class was chosen from a pool of around 800 applicants. The last batch, AngelPad’s first class, was selected from the extended network of AngelPad’s founders.

Here’s a list of the companies that presented:

Astrid is a mobile to-do list and reminder application for phones running Google’s mobile operating system, Android. Users can rank the importance of each task, and the application automatically prioritizes them. The application has been downloaded 1.7 million times and has picked up 20,000 five-star ratings on the Android Marketplace.

Shopobot is an online site that tracks how prices of certain products change and alerts users when the price falls beneath a certain level. The site focuses on big-ticket items that consumers usually consider before making a purchase. Shopobot searches social networks for experts in the area a consumer is shopping in, picking up recommendations from friends rather than unknown experts. Its founders come from Microsoft and online retail site Amazon.com.

Hopscotch is a mobile app that uses QR codes — two-dimensional bar-codes that anyone can scan with a phone — and links to more related media. Hopscotch users can, for example, scan a QR code on a concert advertisement poster and find out which friends are going and listen to music videos. Businesses like Live Nation, which runs concerts, can attach QR codes to their ads and pick up information about the smartphone users who scan the codes.

Cloudbot is a neutral mobile application that grabs information from multiple cloud-based services like Dropbox, Facebook, Google Contacts and Salesforce. Users type in some keywords like “eat with” and a name and the application calls that information from linked cloud services and social networks. The application can also use location-based services like Foursquare. There are 24 apps connected to Cloudbot right now and 40,000 “nouns” — basically words that correspond to parts of cloud services like Dropbox files or tweets.

Kismet is a mobile dating application that uses real identities, photos and locations to match potential couples. The site focuses on using photos more than large amounts of text such as other dating sites like OKCupid. The app is built on Facebook Connect to validate an identity, but users can remain anonymous through the application until they are ready to reveal their identities. It uses Foursquare and other location-based services to keep track of a user’s activity.

Splash is a single line of code that adds a tab to mobile games that checks which friends are playing that same game. Mobile app users can also share achievements and ask for help within each game within that same tab. The application also gives information about Splash users back to developers that add the application to their mobile games. Michael Powers, a founder of Splash, was the first employee at Slide.

Crittercism is a library in mobile applications that detects errors and lets users submit a crash report for an application directly to developers. The application gives developers a more-detailed dashboard about which errors are most prevalent. The application also lets developers communicate directly with app users. There are 25 applications live in the app store with Crittercism, and the company is testing the application with a number of top-10 applications.

Stickery creates mobile educational games for children. The application combines a number of games with educational concepts and submits feedback to parents. The application became the top education app on the App Store after launching earlier this month.

LocBox is an iPad application that customers check into with a name and e-mail as soon as they enter a store. Customers that check in get a “deal” similar to those Groupon and Foursquare users typically get. Store owners are then able to acquire data about potential customers. LocBox is then able to push out additional deals through Facebook and other social networks to bring those same customers back again.

CompanyLine is an enterprise-style social network that lets employees communicate amongst themselves. Whenever they publish a status update, the application picks up on key words that launch external applications like WebEx or download files from a Dropbox account.

Feedgen is a simple web-based application that prioritizes marketing leads in an e-mail-like interface. Any lead that is missing any information automatically tries to grab missing information from other social networking sites. The more leads and activity a Feedgen user participates in, the smarter the application gets about prioritizing certain leads over others.

Coverhound is a web-based application that has consumers put in a little bit of simple information like name and email address. The application then uses third-party applications to gather a lot of information about the consumer’s credit history and income. Coverhound then ships that information off to insurance companies and pulls in insurance rate quotes.

Secondleap personalizes the process of changing careers. The site asks a few questions to determine whether the new career is a good fit for that individual. The application then recommends schools and gives examples of ways to finance the path to a new career. The recommendations are proximity-based and are organized by how expensive they are.

Tags: Demo Day, startups

Companies: AngelPad, Astrid, Cloudbot, CompanyLine, Coverhound, Crittercism, Feedgen, Hopscotch, Kismet, LocBox, Secondleap, Shopobot, Splash, Stickery