Dell has just announced it has agreed to acquire Software-as-a-Service integration company Boomi. Terms of the deal were not disclosed and, as usual, the purchase is subject to customary closing conditions. Dell did not say when it hopes to complete the transaction.

Dell chairman and CEO Michael Dell had yesterday teased the press about an impending acquisition in the cloud computing space (see Reuters).

The comment sparked a guessing game among tech reporters, but it turns out Dell is picking up a rather small company – Boomi had raised only $4 million in venture capital according to CrunchBase – but one that offers a compelling SaaS platform for many a company.

Boomi offers an application integration platform dubbed that aims to reduce cost and complexity out of integrating applications by allowing easy transfer of data between cloud-based and on-premise applications. The company says its solution removes the need for appliances, software or even coding.

Headquartered in Berwyn, Pennsylvania, Boomi says its solutions are used with the world's leading cloud-based apps, including Salesforce CRM, as well as marketing, financial, human resources, content management and service-desk management.

Boomi says it manages “millions of transactions” a month and has completed “tens of thousands of cloud integrations” for “hundreds of customers” globally across a wide spectrum of industries.

The acquisition marks Dell’s third this year – it had earlier bought Ocarina Networks and Exanet.

Google will now pay you to find and report vulnerabilities in its various Web properties. The company made the announcement yesterday, and it applies to sites like google.com, youtube.com, and orkut.com. Should you report a qualifying bug, you can expect to walk away with at least $500.

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As a professional blogger (TM) I find myself dealing with lots of photographs. While the majority of them are press shots of devices, many times we need the odd photograph of a local Best Buy or a hairless mole rat. In very rare cases, the owners of said photos ask us to remove the photos, which we do. Now, however, there’s a better way to tell if a photo is part of a stock photo collection or has been uploaded by a professional photographer and/or costs something to use. It’s called PicScout ImageExchange and, at its heart, basically adds a little icon to photos that belong to others in Internet Explorer and Firefox. Clicking the icon brings up a purchase page and you’re all done, happily motoring through the countryside with your fresh, new image.

The service lets you can buy the photo from the stock agency or the actual photographer and then use the photo in your own projects. The system also includes a service called ImageTracker that allows photographers to tag their photos and then scan the Internet for unauthorized usage.

The website itself is arguably bad simply because it’s quite barren with little real explanation and is thus discouraging to the average photographer on the go. Simply put, the service is essentially a tagging system for photos that does not depend on anything embedded in the photo. You could feasibly Photoshop a photo to within an inch of its life and PicScout would still find it.

Non-intrusive, highly scalable technology identifies unique patterns within an image
PicScout digitally fingerprints your images with proprietary technology and includes them in the ImageIRC
Without dependence on embedded code, correct matching survives many forms or generations of alterations, even matching highly manipulated images to original sources.
PicScout crawls the web and identifies matches, even when images have been cropped, colorized or altered significantly, including watermark removal
PicScout documents each commercial use with a screen capture and full company details and generates regularly scheduled client reports

On the user’s end all you really see is, thanks to PicScout’s plugin, is the little icon. In many cases, that’s all that’s needed to turn a photography thief into a customer.

The service has been around for a few years now but they’ve recently released an API for programmers as well as features to help track your images in the wild. The service can also help content creators track the popularity of their images on the Internet.

While the service has yet to help me in finding a picture of a naked mole rat, its nice to know photographers – and the people who love them – have some recourse when it comes to figuring out whom to pay.

LiveU, which markets solutions for live video transmissions over wireless networks, this morning announced that it has raised $11 million in Series C funding. The round was led by Pitango Venture Capital and joined by existing investors Carmel Ventures and Canaan Partners. LiveU has raised a total of $23 million in venture capital to date.

In its ongoing quest to be more than the “King of SMS,” 4INFO has reached a major milestone.

In a recent Nielsen report for US mobile display advertising, 4INFO tallied more than 63 million uniques for the month of September, or roughly 75% of the market. That put them in second place, ahead of Microsoft’s Extended Ad Network, Quattro, AdMob and Jumptap. Millennial was number one with 72 million uniques.

With a reach of 63 million per month, 4INFO’s mobile display business has now eclipsed the company’s original bread and butter: SMS advertising. Its SMS ad network touches roughly 45 million per month.

Founded in 2005, the mobile advertising company has dominated the SMS ad space, with roughly 3,000 publishers on its msgHaven platform. This publishing platform, which allows clients to manage the content and delivery of their SMS campaign, delivers roughly 400 million text messages per month.

And yet for all the success with SMS, 4INFO’s CEO, Zaw Thet has been trying to reshape the company as a one-stop shop for all of mobile advertising.

Now, no one would call 4INFO the king of mobile just yet, but Thet has made significant strides in 2010, picking up Butter in June (a startup that creates customized mobile solutions), fleshing out AdHaven, its mobile ad management platform, and leveraging its SMS relationships.  Explaining the recent jump in display advertising uniques, Thet says the company has made progress by “moving up the stack from the existing SMS relationships we have with the top publishers and media companies in the US and signing new platform deals.”

This Tuesday, the company is also rolling out a new version of AdHaven, which will provide a more comprehensive suite of mobile advertising tools. Beyond display and SMS ad management, the platform will feature full support for in-app rich media, video and a software development kit.

Business VoIP phone system provider M5 Networks is announcing the acquisition a competitor, Geckotech. The acquisition price is $8 million.

Chicago-based Geckotech provides a Cisco-powered Hosted VoIP platform to businesses. The company’s services include phone service installation and training, system management and free maintenance, system and feature upgrades, and in-house customer support.

M5 Networks also offers VoIP phone systems to companies, including Amnesty International and Etsy. M5 will take over all of Geckotech's staff, customers, and datacenters.

The first time we talked about Leetchi on TechCrunch was back in February - only 3 months after its official launch in November 2009. At the time, the young company created by 27-year-old Céline Lazorthes had just raised funding with Kima Ventures and 360 Capital Partners. Some of France's hottest business angels, like Oleg Tscheltzoff and Xavier Niel, are also investors. And now the company is about to celebrate its first birthday on November 19th with 1.2 million euros in the bank. Along the same lines as YCombinator's WePay, Leetchi's platform facilitates group payments and purchases. And coincidentally, WePay - who raised $7.5 million back in August - is also backed by some rather well-known angel investors, including Max Levchin, Ron Conway and Dave McClure.

It isn’t uncommon for websites to ask users for feedback, but most of the time this involves them responding to sites and services that are already in the wild (see services like GetSatisfaction and UserVoice). What if you could poll users about a new design, before you’d done the legwork required to put together the images, HTML, CSS and underlying code of a new site? Meet Verify, a user feedback platform that’s based on screenshots.

The new service, which was created by Zurb, offers a suite of screenshot-based tests that you can put in front of users to see what they think. There’s the Click Test, which shows users a screenshot and asks them to click the spot that looks most interesting. It takes users all of five seconds to complete this visual survey (you can try a sample Click Test here), but it can result in some invaluable data.

Other tests are similarly straightforward: there’s a Memory Test to see how much users remember after five seconds of looking at your webpage (is your slogan working?), a preference test that lets users pick between two versions of a site, and more — a total of eight test types available now, with more on the way.

Once users have completed these tests, Verify sends the site creators the relevant data, often with heatmaps and other visualizations that demonstrate which designs and features are most effective. For now Verify requires you to bring your own crowd of testers — you can tweet, write Facebook updates, and publish blog posts inviting your users to share their thoughts. In the future the company intends to offer a pool of testers that you’ll be able to tap into.

The service costs $9 a month for access to a basic set of feedback, or for $29 a month you get access to demographic information as well.

Answers Corporation, which owns and operates a community-generated Q&A site at Answers.com, this morning announced that its database of answers now tops 10 million.

In conjuction with the announcement, Answers Corporation is today debuting its first iPhone app, a free fast-paced trivia game dubbed blufr.

The 10 millionth answer registered by the Israeli/US company came in response to the question: “Who was the first Native American to play pro-football?” (direct link).

The company points out that the answer to this question can improve over time as people contribute their knowledge by using the site's "Improve" feature. Questions can also be discussed in Answers.com's community forum and can easily be shared on social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter.

Bob Rosenschein, CEO of Answers.com, also reveals in the press release that its community is now 5.5 million registered members strong.

Logo.com, LLC this morning announced that they have bought the domain name Logo.com for $500,000 through domain marketplace Sedo. The company was – obviously – formed in order to act as the parent corporation of what the site will become, and to facilitate the domain purchase.

The company, which will provide logo design and related services to small businesses, was founded by veteran domain investors and ecommerce developers Adam Strong and Alan Townsend.

Logo.com will provide logo design as well as website design, business card and letterhead design and printing services. The company also plans to introduce other small business services, such as domain registration, Internet marketing consulting and accounting.

The launch of the website is scheduled for Q1 2011.

Strong and Townsend plan on establishing Logo.com as a global brand.

They make a compelling argument for having spent half a million dollars for the domain name, which was first registered back in 1995, based on that strategy:

“The word logo translates the same in English, German, French, Italian, Polish and other languages. Once they visit our site, we'll give these customers the ability to shop in their own language. Because the word logo is relevant in so many countries outside of the U.S., Logo.com gives us the ability to compete on country specific search engines."

Adam Strong is President of Strong Inc., a domain development and brokerage company, and has been involved in the sale of over $10 million in domains through his company DomainDealer.com. He’s also the co-founder of DomainNameNews.com, an online domain industry news publication.

Alan Townsend most recently served as President of Ecommerce at Personal Creations, a retailer of personalized gifts, which was acquired by Provide Commerce in July 2010. Townsend has also developed and managed some of world's leading domain names including Christmas.com, ValentinesDay.com, MothersDay.com, FathersDay.com and many others.

The price tag on the domain name puts the sale in the eleventh spot of top sales for 2010, tied with IPO.com but well behind number one, Slots.com ($5.5 million).

As holiday shopping season ramps up, Amazon is announcing a new way to send a gift card to friends: Facebook. Now, when buying a gift card on Amazon you can connect your Facebook account send the personalized gift card to a Facebook friends (you can also send gift cards via mail, email and print certificates). The card will be posted on the recipient’s Facebook Wall.

Now on the gift card platform, you can choose to log-in to Facebook via Facebook Connect, which will allow Amazon to access your friends’ names and birthdays, and post the gift card to your friend’s Wall on the delivery date (Amazon says that user data and purchase history will remain private).

The sender can choose a gift card design, specify an amount up to $5,000 and provide an optional gift card message. Senders can schedule the gift card to appear on the recipient's Facebook Wall up to a year in advance.

The gift card will be delivered via a post on the friend’s Facebook Wall (only the recipient can see the amount and claim code) And the sender can choose whether everyone can see the gift card message, or only the recipient. That’s actually an important feature because you may not want all of your friend’s Facebook friends to know you gave a friend a gift. As a buyer, I also wish that I could send the recipient a companion email, so that the he or she knows that I are giving them a gift on their Facebook wall.

To encourage shoppers to use the new feature, the first 10,000 customers who give an MP3-themed Amazon.com Gift Card to five different Facebook friends will get a $5 credit good for music downloads at Amazon MP3.

This integration with Facebook isn’t surprising. Amazon is increasingly turning towards to the social network to incorporate users’ social graph into their Amazon.com experience. A few months ago, Amazon rolled out a new social feature that allows users to receive recommendations based on information in your Facebook profile and friends preferences.

Short Version: There will be no pleasing either side of the Apple fanboy divide with this review so I’ll say it up front: If you’re looking for an alternative to a heavier Apple laptop – a MacBook Pro, say, or an Apple Powerbook 170 – and you travel, the MacBook Air is an excellent choice. If you rarely travel and/or are not a Mac fan, you will probably be better served by a cheaper netbook.

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A good chunk of Google TV runs inside a browser. Besides the main menu, everything else like the search, web apps, and a lot more are simply webpages and search queues. This means that you can essentially try out the service — or integrate some of it into your HTPC — right now. This hit me shortly after I posted our full review and I managed to grab the URLs of two of Google TV’s main products: TV Search & Spotlight.

Google TV Search is the platform’s secret sauce and would be crazy useful outside of the product, but alas, those URLs seem to self destruct after a few quick minutes. Still, most people are smarter than I, so I pasted the link below anyway, with the hope someone can deconstruct them and find out something useful. Just don’t bother navigating to it, it won’t show the awesome search tool.

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ATG, provider of eCommerce software and related on-demand commerce optimization applications, this morning announced that it has agreed to be acquired by Oracle for $6 per share in cash, or approximately $1 billion. ATG's eCommerce software platform is complementary to Oracle's CRM, ERP, Retail, and Supply Chain applications, as well as its portfolio of middleware and business intelligence technologies, the company said in a statement.

Lookout, a company that offers security services for a number of smartphones, is launching a premium service today. Lookout's web-based, cloud-connected applications for Android, Windows Mobile and BlackBerry phones helps users from losing their phones and identifies and block threats on a consumer's phone. Users simply download the software to a device, and it will act as a tracking application and a virus protector much like security software downloaded to a computer.

Lookout Premium for Android is essentially a suped up version of the free offering an includes new security and privacy features. With the Privacy Advisor feature, users can scan every app they download and quickly view a comprehensive list of apps that can access their private data, such as identity information, location, and messages. Additionally, consumers can view detailed app reports on the capabilities of these applications on their phone.

The premium plan also includes the ability to remotely wipe and lock a phone in case it is lost or misplaces. You will also be able backup and restore photos and call history, contacts and other data from different phones.

The free apps feature malware, virus and spyware protection, limited data protection and the ability to locate a missing device. Lookout Premium for Android phones is available for $2.99 per month or $29.99 annually, with a free 30-day trial.

In conjunction with the new paid offering, Lookout is also announcing that it has 3 million users (adding one million users only two months) and was recently featured in a Verizon Wireless commercial (see below). As we’ve written in the past, Lookout’s business is flourishing as smartphone adoption continues to rise. Users are becoming more aware of the security risks associated with the increased data and application usage on these devices.

In a recent study, Lookout found that more than 91% of consumers have some level of concern with the privacy of information on their phone, and only 7% of smartphone users feel extremely confident that they understand what private information is being accessed on the phone. Lookout also found that on average, users have 31 apps on their phones that can access their identity information, 19 apps that access their location and five apps that access their SMS and MMS messages.

DocuSign, an e-signature service, is launching a marketplace that will include applications that complement the use of the platform.

DocuSign, which was founded in 2003, allows companies to get legally binding signatures quickly over the internet instead of over the fax or mail. DocuSign certifies digital signatures over the web, acting as a intermediary who holds the documents and verifies the identity of the signature. Currently, DocuSign has 40,000 paying customers, and more than eight million unique users.

The functionality of applications from various partners in the marketplace range from CRM, mobile integration, document storage and real estate. Applications in the DocuSign Marketplace ranked by customer feedback and input. The marketplace includes paid and free applications from Ariba, Box.net, Drawloop Technologies and other technology partners.

Competitors to DocuSign, which has raised $30 million in funding to date, include EchoSign, and VeriSign.

Location-based game SCVNGR is going global, and it’s getting a little help from its friends down in Mountain View. Today, the company is switching to a new, improved database of venues — the businesses, restaurants, bars, and other locations that its users ‘check into’ — and it’s also adding international support. The source of the data? Google, which has given SCVNGR access to the developer preview of its Places API both in the US and abroad.

Now, SCVNGR has technically been available internationally before now because you could download its mobile apps for Android and iPhone. But CEO Seth Priebatsch says that the experience left a lot to be desired, because SCVNGR didn’t have a robust ‘Places’ database (you’d open up the app and usually would have to manually enter the venue yourself, which is a big hurdle). Today’s update fixes that.

Before now, SCVNGR had relied on data from GeoAPI (which was acquired by Twitter last year), but its dataset was US-only, hence the lack of international support. Oh, and it’s no accident that SCVNGR is among the first companies to get access to this places API —the company has a special relationship with Google because it was one the first investments made by Google Ventures.

The San Francisco Giants won the World Series earlier this evening and of course the celebration in San Francisco has at this point devolved into multiple riots, which you can now follow on Twitter through the hashtags #SFRiot and #SFScanner. About a hundred or so people have checked into the (mayorless) riot on Foursquare at the venue “Giants Riot on Polk Street” and assorted others.

Facebook was noticeably absent from the roster of social sites heavily involved in the riots.

According to the Twitter stream, several thousand people have taken over 5th and Mission Street and there are currently multiple bonfires at 3rd and King Street. I’m coming across reports of people throwing beer bottles at police and setting a MUNI bus on fire. There’s been talk of a stabbing at the riots at 4th and King Street, which police apparently have under control.

You can also follow the activity on Ustream (above) and the San Francisco Police scanner, which is just about the scariest thing you’ll ever hear.

One caveat about following the riots on Twitter? You’ll definitely intercept more than your fair share of hashtag surfing.

Thanks: Sacca

In retrospect it was inevitable, people typically upload about 20% more photos on Halloween so of course a service that easily allows you to take photos and share them would explode in usership, much like Instagram did on October 30th. Instagram founder Kevin Systrom tells TechCrunch that this weekend’s Halloween Eve activity more than doubled the iPhone app’s previously quoted traffic, at two photo uploads a second.

Systrom gives three reasons behind Instagram’s record Halloween numbers: “1) We got featured by Apple 2) Halloween is an awesome time to share/take pictures and 3) There’s just the natural growth of this thing that doesn’t seem to be slowing.”

Instagram has been growing at 100k users a week since it launched, and that pace is even faster post Halloween. Dan Frommer speculates that that number might even hit the half million mark at the end of this week. Pretty impressive for an app that’s only four weeks old.

Instagram has caught on because it’s easy to use, posts to multiple social sites like Twitter, Facebook and Flickr, allows users to interact with photos and offers creative license in the choice of “antique” iPhone camera filters. And at no time have I felt its presence in my Twitter feed more than I did over the weekend.

Says Systrom, “Back in college people joked that Facebook took off at Stanford because it launched during our finals week when everyone wanted to procrastinate. Maybe Halloween Week was a great week for us in the same way?”

Yes, yes it was.

Image: Chris Messina

VC funding for cleantech startups tumbled in the third quarter, last week Vestas announced plans to layoff 3,000 employees, and on Wednesday, First Wind shelved IPO plans amid weak demand— the wind energy sector is certainly facing its share of headwinds but there are still signs of life.

On Tuesday, the South Korean government announced that it will invest 9.2 trillion won, or $8.2 billion, through 2019 to build offshore wind farms. According to reports, the goal is to have 500 wind turbines along the country’s west coast in the Yellow Sea with a capacity of 2500 megawatt hours.

The announcement seems to be a scaled down version of the government’s initial plans. In September, the Yonhap news agency said officials from the Ministry of Knowledge Economy were hoping to spend roughly 9 trillion won to install 1,000 wind turbines. As it turns out, the won doesn’t stretch as far in this capital intensive industry.

Although, the South Korean government may be more realistic these days, the country is not shying away from big investments in the larger cleantech space. If anything, South Korea seems to be picking up the pace. Just last month, the government announced a plan to work with the private sector to invest 40 million won in the renewable energy industry by 2015, with the government  contributing 7 million won and the private sector committing 33 million won. According to the Ministry of Knowledge Economy’s figures, South Korea’s clean energy exports are expected to exceed $36 billion by 2015.

Once a year around this time, Brightcove rolls out a bunch of new features to its online video platform and calls it a new release. With Brightcove 5, this year the service is becoming even more Apple-friendly than ever before. Not only is there more HTML5 goodness baked in, but it now supports Apple’s HTTP streaming for video apps and also offers a template for creating video apps on the iPad.

Brightcove started paying closer attention to how videos play on Apple products last year with Brightcove 4, which added support for an iPhone video player. Then as it became clear that Apple would not support Flash players in its mobile devices, Brightcove started transcoding to HTML5 and laying out a roadmap to add support for analytics, advertising, and custom players.

Now, with Brightcove 5 it adding in more HTML5 features. When media sites and other customers create branded video players, they now look the same in Flash and HTML5. And Brightcove’s analytics now keeps track of views in HTML5 players alongside Flash players. It also supports APPle’s new HTTP streaming for videos in iPhone and iPad apps, as well as HTML5 browsers (but only on Apple devices). Finally, it is going to start pushing its iPhone app for video producers and reporters to be able to shoot, edit, and upload video straight from their iPhones to their Brightcove accounts.

In addition to the HTML5 and Apple-specific features, Brightcove is also adding YouTube sync, which lets video producers push their Brightcove videos automatically to their YouTube channel or manage which videos they would like to promote there. Overall, video uploads and processing should also get faster for pro and enterprise accounts with some new file transfer acceleration technology Brightcove is licensing from Aspera.

Rumors of “the death of stealth mode” have been greatly exaggerated. Ever since angel investor Chris Dixon tweeted, “New early-stage start up trend: get big quietly, so you don’t tip off potential competitors” back in March you can’t grab a coffee at The Creamery without hearing a “We’re in stealth mode” come out some neophyte founder’s mouth.

Multiple startups I have contacted for coverage have uttered the dreaded epithet and declined press despite a growing userbase. I’ve spoken to a handful of VCs who hold that it’s getting increasingly difficult to announce funding or undertake any sort of publicity for the nascent companies they’re involved with.

Perhaps the most absurd thing about the state of stealth mode is that many of these under-the-radar companies still manage to be over-hyped (!). In testament to this, the Quora thread “What are the hottest stealth startups in Silicon Valley right now?“ explores the ambiguities of stealth mode and forms a consensus on the most buzzed about stealth companies in Silicon Valley currently.

Some, like 3LM, we’ve tracked down and got the skinny on. And others, like Rockmelt, are still on our radar. (FYI. If you’ve got a Facebook Fan Page, Marc Andreesen as an investor and are working on a new browser, YOU ARE NOT STEALTH.)

We’ve created an expandable PearlTree for those hungry for more information on the secretive startups. But really it’d be great if some of them would just remove the cloak of invisibility or whatever marks the transition to non-stealthy behavior.

Hey guys, I’m really curious about all the cool things you’ve been working on, and I promise we won’t bite (I’m looking a you Path).

Yahoo.com is down again for the second time in as many weeks. Which is news because Yahoo never goes down. Except recently. And they’re probably so busy dealing with that outage that no one noticed that Halloween is over, and so they should probably stop promoting it on Yahoo Shopping.

The Yahoo Shopping slip up is actually more interesting than the outage because it’s not a technology problem, it’s just indifference. They’ll issue some statement around the outage like they did last time, and it’s clearly an engineering issue. But there are people who actually run the Yahoo Shopping site and are responsible for promoting this and that, and nearly 24 hours after the holiday is over they’ve still got it up as their main promotion. Not a good sign.

Will the last person out please turn the lights back on?

Last month we covered a service called Printing Facebook which turned all your Facebook friends’ profile pictures into a giant 20X40 inch “real life Facebook wall” poster. At the time we hoped that Facebook wouldn’t “throw a hissy fit” over artist Benjamin Lotan’s use of its trademark and design aesthetic.

Well it might have not been a hissy fit exactly, but Facebook lawyers did end up approaching Lotan, who has since changed his site’s name to Social Printshop.

Lotan emphasizes the Facebook legal team’s courteousness:

“Despite past reports which have cited Facebook’s bullying tactics, I actually found them to be quite cordial and polite. They even mentioned they were ‘excited about the project’.

Perhaps they learned from the bad press they had gotten out of a few incidents (Placebook for example)?”

Lotan asserts that Facebook gave him enough time to think of and buy a new domain name and helped him formulate a timeline for changing over everything about the Printing Facebook site including its design.

Lotan says that other than the Facebook legal intervention, business has been going well and that he is selling hundreds of posters. To continue with the transition from Printing Facebook to Social Printshop, Lotan today launched his Tumblr poster product and plans are in the works for “Printing” Twitter, Foursquare and Flickr posters as well as other non-poster products related to social sites.

These products include a physical Facebook, which Lotan hopes “will return one’s social graph back into the physical form which Zuckerburg originally chose to name the site after.” Uh, okay.

Social Printshop is currently bootstrapped but Lotan hints that he’s gotten an offer from investors and will be seeking funding soon, as the service has now become more than full time job.

Barnes & Noble’s new Nook Color e-reader, on which our opinions at CrunchGear are divided, represents the first major application of Dictionary.com’s new API tools. They launched them late last month, and I just spoke with Dictionary.com’s President, Shravan Goli, about their approach to modernizing the centuries-old market of providing definitions.

It’s a difficult proposition, and one that is being faced by a number of free or almost-free services out there. People won’t pay to have unfamiliar words defined for them, yet here is Dictionary.com, a thriving business. It’s one of the situations on the new web where monetizing seems to result directly from authority.

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