The 1975 movie Monty Python and the Holy Grail has an honored place on my dusty DVD shelf, along with every other Monty Python Movie, Caddie Shack, Fletch and a variety of other movies that shaped my childhood and helped me get through many evenings in high school and college. The best line? “I don’t want to talk to you no more, you empty headed animal food trough wiper. I fart in your general direction. Your mother was a hamster and your father smelt of elderberries.” If you haven’t seen it, shame on you.

It turns out the fart in your general direction line made British censors squeamish, as well as overuse of “shit,” “Jesus Christ,” and at least one reference to oral sex. Thankfully, the good guys won. Via Cyan, Letters of Note and LaughingSquid.

This document sent to potential software partners doesn’t tell much more about the Cisco Cius Tablet than we already know. However, it does show confirmed but limited availability in C4 2010 as well as a sub $1,000 price confirmation. This bit is particularly interesting:

5) Why is Cisco Cius twice the price of an Apple iPad? Why should I purchase Cisco Cius versus just purchasing iPad's instead?
Cisco Cius is not a consumer device so it's not an equivalent comparison. Cisco Cius is the first-of-its- kind mobile collaboration device.

As we said before, the Cius isn’t a consumer device. It will act like a laptop in a board meeting and include a number of Cisco-branded communications systems under an Android wrapper. What is particularly interesting is that this means many Cisco services will be available in Android, a boon to those currently running Cisco installs at their place of work. Full FAQ after the jump:

Thanks, Tipster!

Read more…

Online stationary startup Paperspring is bringing QR codes to event invitations today with the launch of Paperlinks. A "Paperlink" is a customized QR barcode that can be scanned with a smartphone to allow invitees access to everything from photos and videos to registries and detailed event information.

QR Codes, which is short for Quick Response (because they can be read quickly by a mobile phone through its camera), are used to take a piece of information from a transitory media and put it in to your cell phone – this can be links, videos, text, photos and more. Most modern mobile phones can convert the codes and there are applications out there for smartphones that don't support native QR code as well.

Paperlinks QR codes are printed with each order of cards, linking the card recipient to a custom site where they have access to individualized landing pages where visitors can access more information about the event. The codes can be accessed through the Paperlinks iPhone app.

Event planners can create the QR codes while creating an invitation on Paperlinks. Customers then receive their Paperlinks-enabled stationery with a Paperlink QR code printed on the back of each card. Recipients can scan the Paperlink with their smartphone app, sending them directly to an interface within the app, where they can access additional surprise content. Alternatively, recipients without the app can type the website address into their browser and access the same content. Recipients can RSPV to an event from the app or the web.

While QR codes are still a growing feature in terms of adoption, Google and Facebook, and Microsoft seem to be experimenting with the technology so it could be something that becomes more mainstream.

Realtime ad bidding network AppNexus today announced that it raised $50 million in a Series C financing. Investors include Microsoft, Venrock, Kodiak Venture Partners and First Round Capital. The round brings the total capital raised by AppNexus since its founding to $65.5 million. The company first raised an angel round in 2007 from Ron Conway, Marc Andreesen, Ben Horowitz, Khosla Ventures, and First Round Capital.

AppNexus is based in New York City, and was founded by Brian O’Kelley, who was also a co-founder of Right Media. (Yahoo purchased Right Media in 2007 at an $850 million valuation).

AppNexus calls itself a realtime bidding platform for ad networks. It allows 120 ad networks to interface with the big online display advertising exchanges such as Google Ad Exchange (formerly DoubleClick Ad Exchange), Microsoft Media Network, Admeld, OpenX, and AdECN, helping the ad networks bid for display ad spots across the Internet. “We exist to drive demand to the ad exchanges,” says O’Kelley.

More than 4 billion ad impressions are served through AppNexus every day, up from zero two years ago. AppNexus is a software company that builds the interfaces and management tools for the ad networks to interface with the ad exchanges, ultimately allowing advertisers to better optimize for cost-per-clicks, cost-per-impressions, and other metrics.

While he won’t disclose specific details, CEO O’Kelley tells me, “We've gone crazy on the revenue side in the past year.” He’s also been hiring, going from 23 employees at the beginning of the year to about 65 today.

According to August data from The Nielsen Company, Android has passed the iPhone and BlackBerry to become the popular operating system for people who bought a smartphone in the past six months. Over the past six months, 32 percent of new smartphone owners chose an phone with an Android operating system, while 25 percent chose the iPhone OS and 26 percent chose RIM’s Blackberry smartphones.

The data, which covers a period that includes a full-month of iPhone 4 availability, also shows that Blackberry still holds largest share of the smartphone market with 31 percent of the market. Twenty-eight percent of smartphone owners have Apple iPhones, compared to 19 percent who have Android devices.

While consumers may have a peaked interest in Android phone, Apple’s iPhone marketshare remained steady from Nielsen’s June findings. While Apple’s marketshare is still up by a significant amount (ten percentage points) over Android phones, it’s impressive that Android is surpassing the iPhone in terms of new interest and recent adoption.

I’m going to assume you’ve read this story on our sister site CrunchGear today: Revo-Round: Bravely Saving China From the Square-Eye Menace – if you haven’t, make sure you don’t miss it (and everything else on the site).

Here’s the gist: a Chinese company called Revo Round is developing a special computer called Round-Revo that boasts a round screen and keyboard.

Why such an unorthodox shape, you ask?

Well, this is to “preserve the characteristic proud Asian look for future generations to come” and battle the destruction of “the characteristic appearances of one of the oldest civilizations in the world”, of course.

WTF, right?

Well, here’s another shocker: a group of Silicon Valley investors has just pumped €50 million (roughly $69 million) into the venture.

Disclaimer: if this turns out to be an extremely elaborate April Fools joke arriving a bit late (or early), apologies on beforehand.

I’m still trying to wrap my head around this – the subtitle of its Product page reads “THE ROUND-REVO – BECAUSE EVOLUTION CAN BE REVERSIBLE” – but I’m just going to copy-paste this excerpt from the site so you can help me and the rest of the crew here at AOLCrunch figure this one out:

If we let evolution take its course it threatens to destroy the characteristic appearances of one of the oldest civilizations in the world. Recent research at the Medical Faculty of the University of Shanghai shows that the population of the People’s Republic of China will get more Western facial expression within three generations.

That is the conclusion of Professor Zhou Hongan. Measurements done in research at around 150 000 Chinese babies in the last twenty years has shown that the position of the eyes relative to the whole face has changed.

It seems that the Asian glance will disappear as it takes on more and more Western features. Although the changes are minor and hard to detect, the rate of change of the face is to such an extent that an evolutionary development can be identified.

As the reason for the physical change the University of Shanghai notes the frequent use of computer screens. 87.4% of the people in the China has access to a computer while sales of “tangible” newspaper and magazine are painfully stagnant. In the major metropolitan areas in China there is also an exceptionally high percentage of e-zine readers. More and more city dwellers prefer the digital newspaper to the paper version.

With the €50,000,000 investment, the group of investors from Silicon Valley has taken a 25% share in the Chinese company, which plans to introduce the new hardware before year’s end.

According to the Revo Round site, the company was initially founded and privately funded by Professor Zhou Hongan, two computer science students and two ophthalmologists.

A consortium of Chinese investors later took a 15% interest and the group of (unnamed) Silicon Valley investors led by a Dutchman named Roeland Reinders has now purchased a 25% stake for a small fortune.

What a phenomenal story. I can’t wait to read what you think about all this.

Hands across the water everyone! It appears that pulling together a combination of European and U.S. investors is creating some interesting synergies for young startups. UK-startup GroupSpaces, which recently announced new funding, has partnered with WePay, a former ycombinator startup billing itself as the "Paypal for groups". With some deep API integration, GroupSpace users can now sign up to WePay within GroupSpaces and collect money for their groups. This gives groups a U.S. bank account with a debit card, something even PayPal doesn't do. Since its launch in 2007, GroupSpaces has hit 500,000 group memberships and recently secured a $1.3m investment from Index Seed Fund and leading angel investors including Dave McClure, Chris Sacca, Simon Levene, Meagan Marks, Ariel Poler and Quincy Smith of CODE Advisors. Note that it's extremely rare for this many high-profile Silicon Valley angel investors to invest in a U.K. startup, and it appears these U.S. links are paying dividends for GroupSpaces in enabling it to set up deals with U.S. partners like WePay. Let's have more of the same.

SocialShield, a startup that helps parents monitor their kids' online behavior without violating kids' privacy, raised a $10 million series A investment, the company announced today. Venrock and U.S. Venture Partners led the investment, and were joined by angel investors Russell Fradin, Larry Braitman, George Garrick, Craig Sherman and Rick Thompson.

SocialShield gives parents high level visibility into what kids are doing, and who they're interacting with online and via mobile phone. The San Bruno, Calif. company sells its cloud-based, software as a service for $5 to $10 per kid per month.

The company’s founder Arad Rostampour said he came up with the concept for SocialShield in 2009 as more of his friends with kids began worry to about social media:

"Kids, especially 12- to 17-year-olds in the U.S., are sharing an amazing amount of content publicly that they never would have before. They are openly talking about violence and drugs. They'll share details about when they're not home, or when their family is going on a vacation and where. All of that sharing can make them vulnerable to people in their community who may be bullies, and to people who are not direct friends, who might have bad intentions. Our service lets parents know what's going on there, who is contacting their kid, and what data's being shared."

Disclosure: One of SocialShield's largest customers is AOL – which recently acquired TechCrunch. Social Shield's technology is the engine behind AOL's SafeSocial features. Typically, however, the company sells its software as a service direct to families.

A general partner at Venrock, Brian Ascher, believes SocialShield could be the Symantec of social media. "You'd be crazy to put your computer online without antivirus or spyware protection. Parents have come to appreciate they'd be crazy to put their kids on the web, on social media, on Facebook, Twitter, and so on without some form of protection and monitoring or guidance," Ascher said.

The investor also lauded SocialShield's product-centric approach. "The [founders] chose to integrate their product more deeply into the social networks than anything else out there, and get access to the richest data sets…We thought they would deliver a superior experience to both the parents and the kids. It's important that the kids feel good about this product," Ascher said.

SocialShield requires that parents and kids both opt-in to use it. In its current iteration, SocialShield monitors kids' picture sharing, social gaming and other social activity on networks that kids use the most (currently, Facebook, Myspace and Twitter). Rather than giving parents access to kids' accounts or copies of their online communications, Social Shield sends parents alerts when activity indicates potential danger.

If a kid's discussions and status updates use words that indicate substance abuse, bullying, or suicidal thinking a parent will get alerts about this and hopefully counsel their kids, and intervene as necessary. If kids interact with or are contacted by strangers — especially someone who doesn't share any friends in common within their known, online community, or whose name appears on a sex offender registry — parents will get an alert and opportunity to prevent a potential problem.

Rostampour left H-P to start SocialShield with co-founder Noah Kindler in 2009, but neither takes the chief executive title at the company. Rostampour said Social Shield plans to use its new-found capital to hire a CEO, but also to continue researching the needs of parents, online behavior and associated risks for kids, and to evolve the company's algorithms and "alert engine" technology as kids begin to access social networks via mobile web, and to use features like Facebook Places or sites like Foursquare.

Cellfish Media, a major provider of mobile services and marketing solutions, this morning announced that it has acquired mobile app publisher Airborne Mobile.

The newly formed Airborne Studios will combine Cellfish Media’s original-content publishing activities with Airborne Mobile’s distribution of branded mobile content and applications.

According to the press release, the new entity will focus on creating and distributing branded mobile content and applications for high-usage value, including football-league apps, Family Guy, CollegeHumor, Betty Boop and FHM.

Airborne Studios will boast a content catalog of roughly 35,000 pieces of content through 110 licensing partners. Airborne’s mobile applications have been downloaded approximately 4 million times – across 20 distribution outlets including app stores and carrier partners – and the company has seen about 40 million downloads of its graphics, music and games.

Airborne’s former CEO, Garner Bornstein, will move on and henceforth focus on its newest venture, Txt TV, an interactive television network.

Funny sidenote: this is the second time Bornstein has sold Airborne, which he co-founded with Andy Nulman. In June of 2005, 85% of the company was sold to Japanese company Cybird for $90 million, only to be bought back by the two original founders of the company three years later.

Facial recognition technology companies have been in the limelight lately, with Apple buying Polar Rose for a rumored $29 million and rival Face.com raising $4.3 million from Russian search juggernaut Yandex and others.

A lesser-known but equally impressive startup in said field, Viewdle, announces today that it has secured $10 million in Series B funding from a group of noteworthy investors that includes Best Buy, BlackBerry Partners Fund and Qualcomm.

In conjunction with this investment, Best Buy Capital’s Kuk Yi and John Albright from Blackberry Partners Fund will join Viewdle's board. It’s also worth noting that Viewdle's Series A investor, Anthem Venture Partners, also participated in this new funding round.

Perhaps unsurprisingly given the names of the new backers, Viewdle plans to use the additional financing for the launch of new consumer products over the coming months.

Viewdle has developed impressive technology, the result of over fifteen years of research and three years of commercial productization, that is capable of real-time, cross-platform visual analysis at the point of capture.

The startup says its patented facial recognition system automatically identifies faces in videos and photos across mobile phones, computers and in the cloud.

Quick sidenote: I organized my first Plugg conference back in March 2008, and the fledgling company took home the top prize at the startup competition that year (it later went on to win the one at Le Web, too).

Keep a close eye on this one.

The phrase jumping a sinking ship springs to mind, although that's perhaps a little too simple for these muddy waters. But certainly something is up at Nokia as another VP quits, this time Ari Jaaksi, the guy in charge of MeeGo devices, who tells Finland's Talous Sanomat that he resigned last week. This follows the exit of Anssi Vanjoki, Nokia's smartphone champion. Was Jaaksi made to walk the plank or did he go voluntarily, that's a legitimate question in light of the recent change at the very top as new CEO Stephen Elop perhaps begins to assert his authority. We'll probably never know, but it raises a more immediate question: Is Nokia still on track to ship its first MeeGo smartphone powered by the next generation mobile OS being developed in partnership with Intel, which is scheduled for the end of the year.

In one of the most baffling moves I’ve ever seen in CE, a company named Revo-Round is creating a “roundtop” computer with a round screen and keyboard. Why? To “preserve the characteristic proud Asian look for future generations to come!”

Yeah, you read that right. Square screens are causing Asians to lose their Epicanthic folds.

Read more…

Online vacation rental marketplace operator HomeAway this morning announced that it has agreed to acquire Instant Software, makers of vacation rental management software. With the purchase, HomeAway is able to expand its suite of product offerings for professional vacation rental managers.

Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed, but it’s likely material for HomeAway as it will add another 50 employees to its now 710-member team.

Instant Software, founded back in 1994, is said to have about 1,400 property management customers, compared to more than 4,000 that use HomeAway websites for distribution.

Prior to the deal, HomeAway had long partnered with the company to provide electronic distribution and online booking to professional managers using their software through ISILink. HomeAway says it plans to invest further in this capability, making the service accessible to a wider range of property managers on a variety of distribution platforms.

HomeAway has also announced the formation of a new team to oversee development, sales and third-party distribution agreements for property management software. This group, headed by VP and General Manager John Banczak, includes ISI and HomeAway’s two existing property management businesses for the B&B industry, Webervations and RezOvation.

Sources close to the company have told us in the past that it is ramping towards an IPO, likely in 2011. Last year, the company was valued at $1.4 billion after a $250 million round of financing.

Revenue at the time was around $150 million, we heard. Now revenue is more like $200 million/year, with $70 million or so in pure profit.

The Echo Nest, a music intelligence startup, has raised $7 million in funding from Matrix Partners with Commonwealth Capital Ventures also participating in the round. This brings the startup’s total funding to over $9 million.

The Echo Nest's music intelligence platform, which was created by two MIT Media Lab PhD students, intelligently interprets audio signals and can tell when a song belongs to the blues genre rather than a techno genre. And they can detect musical characteristics like tempos, transition types, and harmonies.

The startup’s technology powers music applications for developers in digital music who are looking to understand music content (10 million songs online, 3,000 new songs and 15,000 music reviews added online daily) and deliver knowledge around this music. The company's suite of APIs allow for music discovery, interactive music games, remix apps and analytics-driven music marketing applications.

Echo Nest’s API is used by both Spotify and MOG to intelligently suggest music to users.

Adaptivity, which bills itself as "The IT Blueprint Company" announced today that it has raised a $7.2 million Series A round of financing. The funding round was co-led by Noro-Moseley Partners and Intersouth Partners. Katrin Burt of Intersouth Partners and Mike Elliott of Noro-Moseley will join the company's board of directors. Additionally, George Mackie, a venture partner with Noro-Moseley will join Adaptivity as non-executive chairman working closely with the executive management team.

Open source software company Black Duck Software (which is backed by close to $40 million in funding from Red Hat, Intel Capital and others) has acquired Ohloh, a free public directory of open source software and people. Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.

Ohloh, sold by its previous owner and operator Geeknet (formerly known as SourceForge), will be integrated with Black Ducks’ free code search site Koders.com in an effort to further promote the adoption of open source software around the world.

Ohloh, founded in 2006, is said to be the largest free public directory of open source software, and also hosts a community of software developers and Free and Open Source users. Ohloh's directory contains information aggregated from over 250,000 public code repositories, projects and forums.

Black Duck, which has acquired all assets of the Ohloh property, says it will “maintain and enhance” the Ohloh website, brand, and project information for the Ohloh community. The company expects that enhancements to the site will begin rolling out within a few months, and says it will engage directly with the community to define and implement these enhancements.

Ultimately, the company’s goal is to establish a single premier web destination that developers can turn to as a trusted source of FOSS knowledge.

Visit the FAQ page for more information about the acquisition.

Extra: nifty announcement video:

Acision, a global leader in mobile data services, has secured a big round of funding, to the tune of $100 million. The investment was led by existing shareholders Access Industries (founded by notorious Russian-American businessman Len Blavatnik, one of the wealthiest persons in the world), with funding also provided by co-shareholders International Investment and Underwriting and Atlantic Bridge.

In case you’re not familiar with Acision, it’s a privately held mobile communications network infrastructure company that specializes in mobile messaging and charging systems that enable services such as SMS, MMS, mobile internet browsing, mobile broadband and voicemail.

The company boasts over 1,600 employees around the globe, serves 230 customers (including eight out of the top 10 mobile operators in the world) and claims it delivers close to a trillion SMS messages every year.

Acision says it will use this additional funding to capitalize on the exponential growth in mobile data, spurred by devices like the iPhone, iPad and Android smartphones and other portable devices. The company cites research that predicts a 39-fold increase in global mobile data traffic from 2009 to 2014.

Basil Geoghegan, Acision’s newly hired corporate development officer, told MoneyControl that the bulk of the funds would be used to fund acquisitions, partnerships, and capital expenditure agreements.

Likely, the company will go public at some point in the next few years.

It took a while, but Skype has now released an application for Android smartphones, enabling users to make free calls to other Skype users and send and receive IMs, one-to-one or with a group. The Android app works over WiFi, 3G, EDGE and GPRS, and comes at a cost that’s hard to beat – gratis.

Big caveats: you can only make calls over WiFi in the United States, and the app is not available in the Android Market in China or Japan. Skype teamed up with Verizon last February to introduce Skype Mobile, including for Android phones, exclusively for the US carrier’s customers.

Also worth noting is that there are known issues with Skype Mobile for the Samsung Galaxy S, which the company says are being investigated.

Not much to add to the news, apart from the fact that you’ll need a phone with Android 2.1 or above to be able to download the app, which you can do from Android Market or by visiting Skype.com/m from your phone.

Skype is now available on three of the most popular mobile platforms today: Android, iOS and Symbian.

Of note: Fring yesterday announced an Android version of its FringOut program, enabling users to make calls at $.01 cent/minute over any data connection (WiFi, 3G and 4G).

No matter which service you prefer, it’s been a good week for Android users so far.

On a sidenote: Skype yesterday announced that it has appointed a new CEO, Tony Bates, a senior VP at Cisco – the company filed to go public last August.

ThreatMetrix, a company that provides fraud prevention services on social networks, e-commerce sites and more, has raised $12.1 million in new funding led by Tenaya Capital with U.S. Venture Partners, CM Capital and TVP also participating in the round. This brings ThreatMetrix’s total funding up to over $18 million.

ThreatMetrix’s technologies detect fraud on a number of different types of sites, including those devoted to financial services, social media, online gaming and e-commerce sites. The startup will authorize payments, verify accounts and devices, and recognize whether a user is signing on to a site from a different computer.

Essentially, ThreatMetrix ercognizes returning customers based on anonymous data mined from a visitor's computer and TCP/IP packets, then matches it in real-time against a collection of data previously profiled computers and their transactions.

Over the past year and a half, ThreatMetrix has brought on over 250 customers including Offerpal Media, GoPro, Adknowledge, BillMyParents, BigCrumbs.com, and OnlineLabels.com. The startup plans to use the funding to build out the business internationally; ThreatMetrix says that 25 percent of the company’s revenue comes from offshore business.

If you ask that question on Yahoo Answers, you’ll probably get something about how a husband’s Xbox was once used for Netflix, but now it doesn’t work. If you ask that question on WolframAlpha, you’ll get get some abstract data about money spent on various things each year. If you ask that question on Bing, you’ll get a bunch of old content. Both Ask.com and Google give you the answer if you dig into their links a bit — or if you click on their first links: to Quora.

What happens when you ask Quora that same question?

You get this: “about $600m”

That’s not just some random person citing some old numbers from an old story. That’s directly from Netflix CEO Reed Hastings.

The data point itself is somewhat interesting, but it has been out there before. What’s really interesting is that once again, Quora is proving to be a go-to place to get such information from fairly incredible sources. No one had yet answered the question someone asked about Netflix, so the CEO took it upon himself to answer it. Boom. Next question.

The fact that Quora is able to foster such an environment continues to fascinate me. If that can scale remains to be seen, but real people answering real questions about their companies is very, very useful. And if the platform can prove itself to be a good source of information relayed anonymously — such as here — it could really explode.

I wonder how long until one of the search engines tries to buy these guys? Or rather, I wonder how long until one of the search engines is successful in buying these guys — because I’m sure some have already tried. Again, this Netflix query brought up Quora as the first result in both Google and Ask. Google is all about saving time, so why not just buy Quora and bake this into results?

Of course, whether Quora, which was started by ex-Facebookers, would sell to Google or anyone is another story. But someone is going to offer this company a lot of money. And they’re going to need to.

Update: I decided to put my query on Quora: “Has one of the major search engines already attempted to buy Quora?“

Naturally, Co-founder Adam D’Angelo answered:

No. We’ve been pretty clear with everyone we’ve spoken to externally (including our investors) that our goal is to build Quora into an independent company over the long term and we are not considering acquisitions.

Good for them. Awesome product.

As a complete The Simpsons dork, I’m just going to ignore “journalistic integrity” or whatever for the moment to blabber on for three paragraphs about how cool this is. In making an appearance on a The Simpsons episode last night, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg joined the pantheon of Internet moguls Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, achieving the honorary PhD in nerd pop culture that is awarded with every appearance on Matt Groening’s opus.

Want context? In the “Loan-A-Lisa” episode, Nelson founds a super successful bike shop and decides to drop out of school. Lisa takes him to a TechCrunch Disrupt-like “Entrepreneur Expo” where she attempts to introduce him to rich people that can demonstrate how having an education is crucial to their success.

Except that between Zuckerberg, Bill Gates and Virgin America’s Richard Branson (who all end up in a chicken fight) nary can demonstrate a degree. In fact, the animated Zuckerberg exclaims, “I’ll get the best kind of degree, honorary.”

Even more context here and here.

Enjoy Zuckerberg’s fellow college dropout Steve Jobs’ Simpsons stint below. Highlight, “He’s like a God who knows what we want.”

Comparison shopping site TheFind, which recently passed Yahoo to become the second most popular shopping site behind Google (according to comScore), is pushing its social commerce strategy today with an in-depth Facebook integration.

TheFind’s newest social commerce feature, Shop Like Friends, allows you to sign into the site Facebook Connect and tap into the the tastes and preferences of any of your Facebook Friends, based on the stores and brands they 'like' on the platform. So when you sign on, TheFind requests access to the pages your friends have "liked" on Facebook, then maps the stores and brands it detects to over 40,000 different stores and brands on TheFind.

It might sound a little creepy to source friend product recommendations this way but TheFind thinks this is the future of social commerce. The Like button isn’t new to product search or e-commerce; eBay has high hopes for Facebook’s ability to drive sales.

There are few services I use more on a daily basis than Instapaper. The super-simple bookmarking tool has been my go-to way to come back to articles to read later for a few years now. And with brilliant iPhone and iPad apps, Instapaper has only gotten better with time. So I was happy to hear that developer Marco Arment was stepping down from his role as CTO of Tumblr to focus on the product more. And now he’s wasting little time trying to come up with some ways to make money and extend his creation.

Today, Instapaper rolled out an early beta test of a new Subscriptions service. What is it? It’s a way to pay a subscription fee of $1 a month to the service. Actually, it’s technically $3 for 3 months, because PayPal takes a minimum of $0.30 for each transaction, so Arment needed to make the payment scale make sense financially.

So what do you get for the $1 a month? Right now, not much. Arment is the first to admit that. From the page:

What are the benefits?

Right now? Almost nothing, except knowing that you are supporting the Instapaper service's operation and future feature development.

Subscribers are given the option to hide Instapaper's advertisements. This option appears in Account.

Some future features may be Subscriber-only, but please don't buy a Subscription solely because you expect these exclusive features to be mind-blowing. They might be, depending on how easily your mind is blown, but I'd feel better if you bought the Subscription because you wanted to support Instapaper.

To me, the idea of supporting Instapaper to ensure that it can continue to grow is enough to entice me to pay. For others, perhaps some newer features down the line will. Arment clearly is doing okay from app and ad sales, as he told us last month that the service has actually be profitable every month for the last two years. That’s most than most startups can say, but there’s obviously also a big difference between doing okay and making a solid living.

If there were a few advanced features, I’d gladly pay upwards of $5 a month for Instapaper. One thing I’d love is the ability to make short notations about articles and, of course, search. I have no doubt Arment is thinking about those things, but he also likely wants to maintain the elegant simplicity of Instapaper, and avoid bloat.

Notably, Arment promises that “Almost all of Instapaper's features will continue to be available to non-Subscribers.”

Update: Arment just noted on Twitter: “And search is a great example of a feature that hasn’t been economical to implement, but Subs might make it so in the future.”

Web based physician SaaS purveyor CareCloud announces today a $5 million round of funding coming after a modest $2.3 round in January of this year.

Says CareCloud President and CEO Albert Santalo, "We are delighted with the outpouring of support from our investors. They share our passion and vision to revolutionize the healthcare experience with our digital ecosystem.”

A cloud-based app suite, CareCloud attempts to modernize the process of being a healthcare provider; physicians can use CareCloud’s web-based apps to streamline the managing of their businesses as well as collaborate with other doctors in the CareCloud’s healthcare provider social network.

This most recent round of CareCloud financing is notable because it is entirely from angel investors, with no participation from traditional VCs. Says CareCloud Director of Marketing Mike Cuesta, “A lot of the investors are new, but in terms of the names, we decided not to mention anyone in specific as there really isn’t anyone who is a ‘celebrity angel’, per se.”

According to Santalo, CareCloud plans on using the money to bolster software development and infrastructure to manage the “explosive growth” the service has had since their last series of funding and product launch in March.

Update: An original version of this post mistakenly referred to this as Series B funding, Cuesta clarifies that it is in fact not, “We may very well enter into a true Series A or B in the future where we take an investment from Venture Capitalists where we will offer a stock preference, but that is not the case here.”

It’s been a big couple of months for Facebook — the site launched its Places feature in August, had a major gaming-focused event two weeks ago, and recently revamped its photos feature to allow for high-resolution uploads (which is a big deal). And it’s not done: an invite just landed in our inbox for a special event this Wednesday morning at 10 AM. Facebook isn’t giving any hints as to what this event will cover (sometimes they do — they told us in advance that the last event was focused on gaming). But the fact that they’re trying to get a bunch of reporters down to Palo Alto at 10AM would seem to indicate that this is important (please). Oh, and they’re giving us shuttle service, which probably means they’re inviting a lot of press.

We’re going to try to find out what’s being announced, but here are a few guesses:

• iPad: The lack of an official Facebook iPad app has been glaring since the device launched six months ago, and while some third party apps have stepped up to the plate (and done very well financially), a Facebook app is still nowhere to be seen.
• (More) Places: Facebook Places launched in mid-August, and it’s still missing some key features, particularly on the desktop version of the website. Likewise, we could see a much larger campaign urging local businesses to become active on Facebook Places.
• Credits: Facebook Credits are being used in more games (they frequently came up in the gaming event last month). But what about a broader launch that lets anyone use them?
• The Facebook Bar – Facebook has been working on a Meebo Bar clone for ages now — they even announced it at f8. Where is it?
• The Facebook Phone: They denied it existed. Then they said it sort of does. A full launch is the next logical step, obviously.