A Raleigh, North Carolina-based maker of thermoelectric coolers and generators, Phononic Devices, closed a $10 million series B investment from Venrock and Oak Investment Partners, the companies revealed today.

Often explained as "solid-state heat pumps," thermoelectric technology (a.k.a. thermoelectrics) can capture wasted heat, and convert it into power. They can also displace heat and maintain a cool temperature in everything from laptops to refrigerators and lasers. The technology provides an environmental benefit versus compression-based refrigeration and other power generating technologies, because thermoelectric modules don't use toxic coolants or burn fossil fuels, and generate no noise. They have no moving parts.

Thermoelectric technology has also been around for decades.

President and chief executive officer of Phononic Devices, Anthony Atti, said his company's particular brand of thermoelectrics are distinct from incumbent varieties because:

"[Existing thermoelectric modules] have used bismet telluride and bismet cellanide. Our proprietary materials are from a different class of elements [on the periodic table]. They are abundant domestically, low-cost and can be manufactured and integrated with existing operations across semi-conductor industries. Our thermoelectrics are also much more efficient than others."

Phononic Devices previously attained a $3 million grant from the Advanced Research Projects Agency Energy program (ARPA-E) to improve the efficiency of thermoelectrics in cooling and converting waste heat to power.

According to an ARPA-E press statement on the company:

“In today's energy landscape [Americans] generate most electricity by making heat, whether it’s through burning coal or splitting atoms. That heat makes steam which turns a turbine and makes electricity…Most of the heat is wasted, a staggering 50-60% according to Department of Energy estimates.

Phononic Devices [devices are projected to] dramatically improve thermoelectric efficiency from less than 10 percent today to more than 30 percent, resulting in a dollar-per-watt energy savings of 75 percent for power generation and 60 percent for cooling, respectively.”

Dr. Atti said his startup aims to bring its thermoelectric modules (image, right: they’re about the size of a matchbox) to the market of electronics cooling, first — which encompasses consumer electronics, military equipment, and medical and laser instruments — and to refrigeration for residential use. Longer term, they should be applicable in air conditioners, he said.

A partner and clean tech investor with Venrock in Los Angeles, Matt Trevithick said the company’s highly efficient thermoelectrics — spun out of the University of Oklahoma’s tech transfer program — had disruptive potential, reminiscent of LED lighting:

“Cooling compressors have been refined for a century. They work well enough, despite some known problems, and are cheap enough to be widely deployed. We think Phononic Devices finally has a solid state technology that has the performance metrics necessary to compete directly against compressors.

This is an outlier opportunity. Other technology exists, but does not have the efficiency to compete against vapor compression technology. The story I expect will unfold will be the one that's now unfolding with solid state lighting, which is just now becoming good enough, performance-wise, and is priced appropriately enough to compete against incandescent lights.”

Dr. Atti said his company plans to grow from about ten full-time employees today to about seventy in three or four years. He would not name specific target customers, but said Phononic Devices will use its new-found capital to develop commercial manufacturing capabilities in the U.S. and build its market. The company is pre-revenue.

Corporations that use cooling technology in their high-tech products— like Siemens, GE, LG, Samsung, HP, JDS Uniphase or Honeywell — could all grace Phononics’ list of prospective customers. For a piece of that robust market, the company faces competition from peers in the field of thermoelectrics like Nextreme and MicroPelt, which have focused on harvesting heat in, and powering or cooling wearable, or low power consuming wireless devices.

PCH International isn’t your normal Chinese manufacturing company. They’re located in Shenzhen, a sleepy fishing village in the 1970′s that is now home to 9 million people. It’s an Irish company, headquartered in Cork, Ireland. And to make things even more interesting, it was named after the Pacific Coast Highway (PCH), in California. Founder Liam Casey has been dubbed “Mr. China” – as a Westerner he has a competitive advantage in dealing with U.S. and European brands trying to figure out how to make stuff in China.

The company designs, produces and packages electronics and accessories in partnership with major gadget brands. Revenue has skyrocketed, from next to nothing a few years ago to $400 million last year. And they are extremely profitable, says Casey. If you’re a gadget freak, there’s a good chance something they’ve made is in your pocket or on your desk.

PCH is backed by U.S. venture capitalists. They raised $21 million in 2008 from Lightspeed Venture Partners, Norwest Venture Partners and Focus Ventures.

Now they’ve taken $26 million more from those same investors. And two new investors have joined this round as well – Triangle Peak Partners and Cross Creek Capital.

Why raise more capital when the company is already so profitable? Casey says the Chinese domestic market is growing at a very fast pace, and he needs to expand to meet this new demand. “We’re opening new facilities to serve the Chinese domestic market,” he said with his crazy-unintelligible Cork accent.

Boom! One way or another, word of a March 2nd Apple event trickled out yesterday morning — and sure enough, the invite just hit my inbox.

Apple’s straying from their generally coy approach with this invite. There are no mysterious curtains or cryptic guitars for people to spend hours poring over in Photoshop here — they straight up put a picture of an iPad right on the invite, right behind a big ol’ number “2″.

Read the rest at MobileCrunch >>

Chris O’Shea makes great stuff using a hacked Kinect. This latest experiment is a performance system called Little Magic Stories. It uses a Kinect sensor and a glass screen to create a “Pepper’s Ghost” illusion. Kids can create and animate their own little characters and then interact with them, catching eggs, smacking bugs, and running wild on stage.

Read more…

Exclusive - Grey Area, a small Finnish smartphone games developer, has raised $2.5 million in Series A funding from Index Ventures, London Venture Partners and Initial Capital, TechCrunch has learned.

The startup is behind a mobile alternative reality game called Shadow Cities, which is a pretty fascinating location-based MMORPG that essentially turns the place you live into a full-fledged game scene.

Shadow Cities was initially launched exclusively in the startup’s home country, Finland, in Autumn 2010. Leveraging the iPhone’s locating abilities, the game turns real city streets into a virtual battle zone for players. The goal is to become a local mage and take over streets and neighborhoods by casting spells and undertaking various missions.

And not get hit by a bus while you’re playing, I guess, but let’s not digress.

The game is free to play with additional in-app purchasing possibilities. Here’s the trailer:

The company plans to open an office in the United States soon, and also promises to releases a new, updated version of Shadow Cities in the near future.

I asked co-founder and CEO Ville Vesterinen, also co-founder and editor of the ‘Scandinavian TechCrunch’ ArcticStartup, which countries Grey Area plans to launch in next.

Currently available in Finland only, he says he hopes to make Shadow Cities available in the U.S. in the next couple of months as it would be a good test for the game to run at scale, before debuting in the rest of the world.

We’ll be sure to keep you updated when it formally launches stateside.

Search and online advertising juggernaut Google announced a couple of months ago that it would be providing some $5 million in grants to non-profit organizations devoted to innovating journalism. Around 40% of the total fund was recently allocated to the Knight Foundation in the United States. It appears more than 50% of the fund has just been awarded to the International Press Institute, based in Vienna, which will be used to sponsor the IPI News Innovation Contest.

Remember Archos? With all this talk of Droids v. iStuff, Archos’ stable and handsome PMP/Tablet line has been cast by the wayside, relegated to a distant third place where it commiserates daily with Creative and the Zune. However in many markets Archos is still a leader and now they have the financials to prove it.

According to a recent release, Archos hit 83 million Euro in revenue compared to 59 in 2009. Most of the revenue came from Europe with 116.2% growth and, surprisingly, an over two-fold increase in revenue in America.
Read more…

Do cell phones cause cancer? Some say yes. Some say no. Nobody knows. The frequencies and powers of the radiation used in them haven’t been in use long enough for us to get decent long-terms studies out of them. Sure, the FCC makes sure you’re not frying your cortex with clearly harmful emissions (talk radio doesn’t count), but it could be that after 30 or 40 years, we all get head cancer. Or we all get super powers. It could go either way.

A new study has shown that, at the very least, phones seem to have an effect on the brain. That’s not an insignificant finding.

Read more…

Apple rumors are flying left and right, but the latest might just be the wildest of them all. This rumor states the upcoming MacBook Pro models will feature Intel’s Light Peak high speed data connectivity port under the Apple label as Thunderbolt High Speed I/O. Nevermind that Apple rarely (I can’t name one) debuts an unproven industry technology, this port is said to share a connector with the Mini Displayport. There’s even a photo circulating claiming to be the connector in question, complete with a little lighting bolt next to said port.

The rumor started yesterday with an Intel statement talking about an announcement next Thursday, which happens to be the same day as the rumored Apple event, about “a new technology that is about to appear on the market”. Then a German site, fsklog, posted what’s reportedly a spec sheet for the upcoming 13-inch MacBook Pro. Along with a new dual-core Intel Core i5 CPU with integrated graphics is mention of Thunderbolt. MacRumors then got what seems to be the same exact spec sheet just in English and it also mentions it. It states “Thunderbolt port supports high-speed I/O and Mini DisplayPort devices.”

Read More

College textbook rental startup BookRenter has raised $40 million in funding from Adams Capital Management, Comerica Bank, Focus Ventures, Lighthouse Capital Partners, Norwest Venture Partners, and Storm Ventures. This brings BookRenter’s total funding to $60 million.

Similar to Chegg, Bookrenter wants to be the Netflix of textbook rentals. By renting textbooks, Students are able to save money by loaning textbooks for a fixed duration, usually a semester, and end up spending only the fraction of the cost of outright purchases. The system is simple: a student searches for a book (BookRenter now has 5.5 million titles) on the website using a title or ISBN, and places an order by selecting a rental period and delivery option. The book(s) are delivered complete with return UPS labels for easy shipping. And through BookRenter's RapidReturns service, students can return their rented textbooks at participating college stores, who benefit from increased buyback activity and merchandise transactions.

BookRenter has also made a business of partnering with a number of colleges to set up a virtual rental store on their sites. Partners have access to the same selection of textbooks available on BookRenter's site (which are electronically sourced from the largest textbook suppliers.)

Since last March, Bookrenter is the official book rental platform for 560 college bookstores in the U.S. serving 6 million students, or 31 percent of the college population (and eight of the ten largest independent bookstores). There are between 6,000 and 7,000 college bookstores nationwide.

For BookRenter, these university partnerships have been a wise move. Not only has the company created an automatic platform for the distribution of content to universities, but it saves students money and has also given universities a way to lure students back into book stores. According to NACS' OnCampus Research from January 2011, compared to last year, customers of stores that offer BookRenter rentals are 21% more likely to rent from their college store and 10% more likely to shop at the bookstore for items other than textbooks.

And today, the company is announcing a strategic partnership with The National Association of College Stores (NACS) designed to help college stores become the source of affordable textbooks. NACS, through its subsidiary NACSCORP, will begin offering three new BookRenter services to its 3,100 member stores. These services include RapidReturns, Inventory Purchase and Fulfillment, and Warehousing.

BookRenter’s strategy is paying off in a big way. The company is growing like a weed in terms of both revenue and usage, and is quietly catching up to competitor Chegg. BookRenter’s 2010 revenue is expected to be in the range of $20 to $50 million in 2010. Of course, this is still behind competitor Chegg, which is projected revenues in the range of $130 million in 2010.

But the new funding should help BookRenter add more resources and products in the near future. The company is expected to expand by 600 percent this year alone. The new round of funding will used for product innovation, says CEO Mehdi Maghsoodnia. While he didn’t go into details, in the next 18 months, BookRenter will start executing a new digital strategy, which will be an entirely new way for students to consume content and professors to design courses.

The textbook rental space is no doubt a competitive arena and Chegg is a formidable opponent. Armed with $75 million in new venture funding, the textbook rentals giant is expected to pursue an IPO this year, just hired Netflix’s former COO, and has been making quite a few acquisitions.

That being said, textbook rentals are a huge space and just because BookRenter is the underdog, doesn’t mean it can’t continue to give Chegg a run for its money, and possibly overtake the giant in the next year.

Mobile social network MocoSpace is launching a $1 million HTML5 Mobile Game Developer Fund to accelerate the development of games played on smartphone browsers.

MocoSpace develops a web-based social network that counts over 14 million users and three billion page views per month. While the network, which launched in 2006, was previously only mobile web-based and prided itself on its users mainly being non-techies who don’t own an iPhone, Android or BlackBerry device, the site has evolved into smartphone apps as well. The company just raised funding to expand into mobile social gaming as well, specifically for developing browser-based mobile social games.

MocoSpace’s two in-house social games, Street Wars and Stage Hero, have a combined total of over 700,000 monthly active users, average session times of over 4 minutes and players averaging nearly 2.5 sessions per day. The company is currently working with a number of game studios, and expects to launch its first 3rd party titles this spring.

Interested developers are invited to submit existing games and game proposals and those selected will receive cash and marketing support to develop and promote their titles on the MocoSpace Games Platform.

MocoSpace recently made waves when it announced its “intent” to purchase torubled social network MySpace from News Corp. MocoSpace CEO Jason Siegel said that MySpace would probably sell for between $50 million and $200 million.

Songtrust (founded in October, 2010) and Myspace Music this morning announced a partnership to bring Songtrust's music publishing management services to the social network’s (vast) audience of DIY songwriters and bands.

A division of Downtown Music, Songtrust’s digital rights management solution empowers indie songwriters and artists to manage their music publishing and related rights.

Songtrust thus aims to streamline what has historically been a complicated process of protecting song copyrights, collecting royalties, and maximizing creative licensing opportunities through a single dashboard.

Courtney Holt, President of Myspace Music, a joint-venture with equity stakes from major record labels, said Songtrust provides a much needed music publishing administration solution for the millions of do-it-yourself artists on the network.

Myspace Music says it will promote the Songtrust service to their audience of musicians.

It’s a partnership that makes plenty of sense, and it’s good to see Myspace Music focusing on offering songwriters and artists the tools they need to build a successful career in music, too.

SponsorPay, the European provider of advertisement-based payment systems, has raised further investment. This time the undisclosed funding comes from Nokia Growth Partners, the $350m fund with close ties to Nokia itself. It should comes as no surprise then to learn that SponsorPay intends to use the new capital to support its expansion to mobile devices, tapping the Finnish handset maker's contacts along the way.

Digital sports media company Perform Group has acquired football site Goal.com for an undisclosed sum to stride into the direct-to-consumer market (via PaidContent).

Perform will assume 100% ownership of the popular (and splendidly named) football community site, which logged visits from 19.4 million unique users in January 2011. The site was acquired from a consortium of investors, which includes Bessemer Venture Partners.

Perform says the acquisition will allow the company to rapidly increase both scale and reach in the global digital sports market to more than 95 million users a month. Goal.com boasts over one million followers on Facebook and is available as an application on iPhone, Android and Blackberry.

The media company says it aims to fully integrate Goal.com’s live sports data (GSM), video news (OMNISPORT), video highlights (ePlayer) and live streaming (LIVESPORT.TV) from its catalogue of over 40 different football leagues and competitions.

Perform says it will retain three key members of management. Michael Simpson, one of Goal.com’s original founders, will assume the role of SVP for Product and Content, Jonathan Gamble becomes SVP for Commercial and Sales and Scott Rothrock will continue as CTO of Goal.com. All three members will report to Simon Denyer, joint-CEO of Perform Group.

Since they put it that way specifically, I’m assuming that means Goal.com founder and president Gian Luigi Longinotti-Buitoni, CEO Ron Elwell and CFO Brian Day will not be staying on. I’ve requested confirmation on that.

It seems we only mention Google Calendar here on TechCrunch anymore when things inevitably go wrong – which means we get to cover the cloud-based calendaring service quite often, unfortunately.

We’ve been getting a ton of tips from people whose scheduled meetings and whatnot have apparently all been eaten by Google (as has The Next Web, which covered the issue of wiped out user calendars earlier this morning).

I’m not seeing anything off with my own Google Calendar, but the problem appears widespread, judging by the chatter on Twitter and this support forum entry. No surprise: a calendar happens to be primarily used to remember appointments and events so you don’t have to – having all entries deleted from it seems like a surefire way to freak people out.

Google acknowledges the problems on its apps status dashboard, displaying this message:

We’re experiencing an issue affecting less than 0.125% of the Google Calendar user base. The affected users are able to access Google Calendar, but are seeing error messages and/or other unexpected behavior.

We will provide an update by February 23, 2011 12:52:00 PM UTC+1 detailing when we expect to resolve the problem.

Please note that this resolution time is an estimate and may change.

Affected users may be missing entries in their calendars.

I haven’t been able to find out how many users Google Calendar has, but judging by the noise that less than 0.125% of its user base are making, I’m guessing there’s quite a few of them.

Update: the message now reads ‘less than 0.001%’ of the user base.

Update 2: another update to the status message, which now reads:

Google Calendar service has already been restored for some users, and we expect a resolution for all users in the near future. Please note this time frame is an estimate and may change.

Update 3: the problem should now be fixed (took a while):

The problem with Google Calendar should be resolved. We apologize for the inconvenience and thank you for your patience and continued support. Please rest assured that system reliability is a top priority at Google, and we are making continuous improvements to make our systems better.

Based on the status message and some responses on the support forum thread, it appears this is merely a visualization issue, which would mean Google hasn’t messed up too bad by effectively losing user data. We’ve contacted Google for more information.

I have to admit, though, the idea of having an empty calendar seems strangely utopian to me.

It's amazing, isn't it, the Borders bankruptcy?

Not amazing in a fun way – although the idea of a typically perky Borders employee being handed their pink slip does lend itself to mean-spirited satire: "oh, pink slip, great choice, I've been meaning to read that one myself – did you find everything you need today? Fantastic! Do you have a Borders reward card?"

No, it's amazing in a "woah, how the hell did that happen?" way. It seems like only yesterday that we were cursing Borders for driving local independent bookstores out of business. And yet, this time next month, America's streets will still be littered with thousands of independent bookstores. Borders stores? Not so much.

Explaining the global fall of Borders – their UK arm collapsed last year – isn't quite as simple as blaming Amazon and the rise of ebooks. But it mostly is. The company took a big gamble a decade or so ago in focusing on the notion of bricks-and-mortar book shopping as an "experience". Stores were built with coffee shops and comfy chairs and warm little nooks in which people could hang out all day and read all the book and magazines they wanted. Unfortunately, after finishing their coffee and their free reading time, many of those people subsequently went home and took advantage of Amazon’s significant discounts to actually buy books. Only those few customers who demanded instant gratification needed to actually pay full price in store.

Then, with the arrival of the Kindle, even those impatient shoppers had no need to visit Borders.

So, with Borders gone, Barnes and Noble struggling and independent stores still closing in their dozens, is this the beginning of the end for real world bookstores? Actually, I think probably not. In fact I suspect the death of Borders might actually cause something no-one in the book trade ever thought they'd see: a resurgence in independent book stores.

For a while, Borders – and the bigger (and for now more solvent) Barnes and Noble – represented a kind of mushy middle for bookselling. On one end of the spectrum sits Amazon – colossal of inventory, quick of delivery, soulless of personality. If you know exactly what book you want, Amazon is the place to buy it.

At the other end of the spectrum sit the independents – mom and pop stores and dusty used bookshops, staffed by knowledgeable bookworms eager to recommend something quirky (and possibly second hand) that they themselves have read, and think you might like. Borders plunked itself awkwardly in the middle, trying to out-stock the former (and failing) and to out-personality the latter (and failing). Even if Borders couldn’t replace the independent bookstore experience, the existence of a giant competitor in the their midst certainly hit mom and pop’s bottom line. No-one did well from the fight except for Amazon.

Now, with Borders out of the way, leaving absolutely no major chain book store in some markets (including San Francisco, which had three Borders but no Barnes and Noble), the independents have a real opportunity to push back.

There are, after all, some experiences which Amazon will never be able to replicate: attending book readings by visiting authors, drinking coffee while flipping through magazines, making eye contact with sexy hipsters over the Charles Bukowski shelves… The biggest opportunity for independents to thrive, though, is in the used book market. Used books represent a huge inventory headache for e-tailers but are wonderfully suited to casual in-person browsing, and not just because they smell so freaking good.

By combining a regular flow of quirky new titles, a decent stock of used books, a ton of genuine expertise and enthusiasm, and a drop or two of decent coffee, America’s independent book stores once again have a chance to thrive. And for everything else, Amazon has earned its spoils.

As a lover of books, and of bookstores, I have to say that bright future excites the hell out of me — perhaps enough to stop me mourning the bazillion Borders reward points I’ve racked up over the years and which are no barely worth the plastic they were stored on.

…

A quick tangential update:

In other The Internet vs The Book Industry news, attentive readers might remember a column I wrote last month, bitching about how my forthcoming book still didn't have a US publisher, and proposing ways in which the Internet might disrupt international rights sales. Sadly, my call for an entrepreneur to build an eBay for international rights remains unheeded — however, the column did have one amusing and ironic side effect.

It turns out that Gary Baddeley, President of one of my favourite independent publishing houses – The Disinformation Company in New York – is an avid TechCrunch reader (not least because Disinfo sublets part of their office to TC's NYC bureau). On reading the column Gary took pity on my whining and emailed me to ask for an advance copy of the book. Long story short, thanks to the power of TechCrunch (and, of course, Gary’s exquisite literary taste) The Upgrade finally has a US publisher and will be available in all good American bookstores (except Borders, obviously) early next year. More info on my personal blog.

Because it seems like it’s Apple rumor day I’d thought I’d throw my (very small) hat in the ring. More than a year has passed since Final Cut Pro’s last release and we’ve seen two reported Steve Jobs emails talking up a product that many thought Apple had given up on (“Stay tuned and buckle up.” and “Next release will be awesome.”) but no product itself. This might change soon however, as we’re hearing that the highly anticipated revamped release of Final Cut Pro is imminent.

According our very own people familiar with the matter, a small group of video editors were on the Apple campus recently in order to preview the new version of video editing software, which is in the same space as Avid and Adobe Premier. Apparently Apple is still putting the finishing touches on “the biggest overhaul to Final Cut Pro since the original version was created over 10 years ago” and wanted pro user feedback. Emphasis on “pro.”

One source described the new release as encompassing everything from low level architectural changes to a complete redesign of the user interface. It’s safe to say the newest version will be 64 bit as that’s what users have clamored the most for.

Early reports from people who have demo’d the new Final Cut Pro (FCP 8?) say that the changes are “dramatic and ambitious” and should alleviate concerns that Apple has shifted its video editing focus from the professional to the consumer space, shutting down work on FCP . Apple plans on releasing the new product in Spring 2011 according to our source, in a launch possibly coinciding with the National Association of Broadcasters conference.

Image above: old Final Cut Pro 7/Apple

Bandwidth.com, a supplier of VoIP network services to Skype, Pinger, and others, has acquired Dash Carrier Services, a provider of emergency calling telephony services (i.e. 911 calling). Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed but we are told it is an all-cash deal.

Bandwidth.com provides millions of phone numbers annually and billions of minutes of calls for over 6,000 business customers in the U.S., including Skype, Pinger, Yext, and IfByPhone. For small and medium sized businesses, Bandwidth also provides integrated office phone systems, smartphones, as well as business-grade Internet connectivity. The company’s recently launched Google Voice competitor Phonebooth is a VoIP service for individuals and small businesses that provides users with a free local phone number that can be forwarded to any cell phone and landline. It also offers voicemail transcriptions, and an auto attendant feature that allows users to route callers to different employees.

Dash Carrier Services essentially allows VoIP applications to include emergency services, including 911 calls. Dash also provides 411 services, live nationwide directory listing, and other dialing services. Bandwidth was already using Dash’s emergency calling technology in its own VoIP offerings but will now be able to use the technology more broadly within its products.

Bandwidth believes that eventually the FCC will require that companies like Skype and Pinger offer emergency calling functionality, and Dash will allow the company to integrate this into their wholesale network offerings.

Together, Bandwidth and Dash are forecasted to reach over $100 million in revenues this year and both companies are profitable. Bandwidth, which just struck a deal with Verizon, for lower call connecting fees, has flown under the radar for the past ten years despite its success. And the company is looking to IPO in the next 18 months and will most probably soon announce a fairly big venture financing in the next few weeks (this will be the first large round of funding for the company).

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AppSense, which specializes in what it calls ‘user virtualization’ solutions, has raised $70 million in its very first round of funding. Interestingly, the entire investment comes from one backer, Goldman Sachs, whose managing director Pete Perrone will be joining the company’s board of directors.

AppSense says it will use the funds to “capitalize on its position as a market leader” in what it anticipates will turn out to become a $2 billion market in the next few years.

More information about the investment is available on AppSense’s blog.

User virtualization is a way of managing all user-specific information (think: user-based corporate policy, personalized settings, user rights management and user-introduced applications) independent of the desktop, and applying this information on-demand into any desktop. This essentially enables IT departments to standardize the corporate desktop build, automate desktop delivery and easily and securely migrate users to new desktops.

AppSense has been providing technology solutions to simplify desktop management for over twelve years now.

In 2010, AppSense signed up more than 4,000 enterprise and government customers around the world, including major companies like BT, ESPN, JPMorgan Chase and United Airlines.

Last year, AppSense says it sold some 1.5 million user licenses, comprising a partnership with Fujitsu to provide desktop management solutions to the Department for Work and Pensions for more than 1,000 locations and over 140,000 users in the UK.

The firm says it is profitable and growing, booking a turnover of $47 million in 2010, a 60 percent increase on the previous year.

Charles Sharland, chairman and co-founder of AppSense, and the company’s recently appointed CEO Darron Antill together used to lead Vistorm, which was acquired by EDS back in 2008 and now makes up – essentially – HP’s entire Information Security business.

The iPad 2 nears! An iPad 3 is on the horizon! iPhone 5 is coming! Maybe an iPhone nano! New MacBook Pros! New iMacs! Maybe even an Apple television! Of all the Apple rumors out there right now, there’s a odd lack of talk about something we know is coming — and soon: OS X Lion.

Back in October of last year, Apple gave an official sneak peek of Lion and stated that it would launch in “summer 2011″. The first official day of summer is exactly 4 months away. And yet, Apple has been largely silent about the new OS since that preview four months ago. We now have the Mac App Store which we know will be a key ingredient, and likely points to some other things about the OS as well. But there has been no official update out of Apple about Lion. So where does it stand?

Well, first of all, from what we’re hearing, Apple is now using it internally. That they’re testing it shouldn’t be surprising, but it’s apparently being widely used internally. Recent statistics seem to confirm this. Looking over the TechCrunch logs, it seems that OS X 10.7 (Lion) has been seeing a surge of usage in recent weeks. After peaking in late August/early September, stats fell off a bit. But now they’re soaring again, indicating that full-scale internal testing is underway.

And while we already know some of the new features thanks to Apple’s preview, there are still a few surprises, apparently. One of these is a much-anticipated UI overhaul. But that means that developers are going to need to be ready when it rolls out. And along those lines, we’re hearing that a developer beta should begin soon. There’s no firm timetable for this yet, but again, we’re only 4 months away from the summer.

Apple has also been busy prepping the lastest version of OS X Snow Leopard, 10.6.7. And developers have been receiving builds of it for weeks now. But that development cycle will remain separate from the OS X 10.7 track.

Meanwhile, new MacBook Pro updates are slated for this Thursday, and that may include hardware slightly modified to run the new OS X better. These are likely to be the last hardware updates before OS X Lion hits. Bigger trackpads for better multi-touch support? A dedicated SSD element for the OS? We’ll see.

All we know for sure is that the sleeping Lion is stirring, and about to get a lot louder so it can roar this summer.

In one more step towards the Groupon-ification of everyday life, ShopSavvy, the app that allows you to scan in a barcode, do a product lookup and find comprable deals on products nearby or online is announcing a greater push into geo-location today. ShopSavvy will be partnering up with Groupon and offering its over 10 million users the ability to see relevant local deals in its “Deals” tab.

ShopSavvy boasts almost 50 million product scans a month and its “Deals” function takes into account a shopper’s location, shopping history, and preferences when serving up most offers. The app shares a crowded space, competing with apps like Barcode Reader (really creative guys), Pic2Shop and now Groupon itself. But the land grab for mobile here is in hyper-targeted relevancy of deals and if it can pull that off using data from its bar code scan history it will have a leg up on the competition.

Right now the Groupon function only considers geography, but more specific targeting should be available shortly. "ShopSavvy plans to enhance Groupon's value for our users by sending them only the deals we know they will be interested in, based on their shopping history, location and preferences," co-founder Alexander Muse confirmed.

You can find ShopSavvy on in Android, the iPhone, Nokia and Windows marketplaces.

Companies like Exclusive Resorts and Quintess cater to the wealthy by giving them access to luxury home rentals at relatively reasonable prices. If you’re traveling with a family or multiple couples, it ends up being a lot less expensive than staying at a high end hotel. And it’s definitely a better deal than buying a vacation home, unless you expect big gains in property values.

There’s a big “but” though. Like country clubs, you have to pay a large fee to get in. Hundreds of thousands of dollars to become a member.

Here’s how the Exclusive Resorts/Quintess model works: Pay a few hundred thousand dollars and then you get to rent the homes they own for about $1,000/night. That’s not bad for, say, a $4 million home in Tuscany with five bedrooms. A home like that usually rents for 4x that. The picture above is one of the Exclusive Resorts Tuscany homes.

The companies use those up front membership fees to buy the homes. That means they’re a real estate company, hoping for rising values, as well as a hospitality company. It’s modeled after country clubs, where you pay a big fee to get in and then play golf for free.

The model works. Exclusive Resorts has some 3,500 members and is growing. Quintess has a few hundred members and an almost identical business model.

Members get perks like an on-site concierge, daily housekeeping service and access to chefs and other amenities. And if they ever want to leave, 75% of that initial membership fee is reimbursed.

Sounds perfect? Some people think it is. But when the economy goes south and everyone wants their refundable fee back, the model breaks. Ultimate Escapes went bankrupt last year based on too many people trying to bail out.

Exclusive Resorts and Quintess are still around and financially healthy because they have limits on people leaving. You can get out but only if new people come in. That means the companies are doing well financially, but there are hundreds of people on a wait list to get their membership fees back.

Another problem with these companies is the holiday rush. Everyone wants to be in Tuscany in the Summer, Hawaii over Christmas and a ski resort in the Winter. You have to plan your vacations a year or more in advance to get the best properties at peak times.

Enter Inspirato. They don’t buy their homes, they lease them long term from owners. And they have a variable pricing model that gets rid of the holiday rush.

You pay “just” $9,500 to join plus another $2,500 per year, and you can then rent the homes they offer, which range from around a few hundred dollars a day to a few thousand, depending on the property and time of year.

Think of it as HomeAway without the hassle of guessing which homes are going to be great and which ones are duds. And you get the same perks, like an onsite concierge and daily housekeeping.

Inspirato’s founders include the cofounder and former CEO of Exclusive Resorts, Brad Handler, and his brother Brent Handler.

The company also has an innovative marketing model. If you’re a member and refer a new member you get a $1,000 credit to use towards rentals. And anyone that new member brings in gets you a $1,000 credit, too. It’s like a benign pyramid scheme, and it seems to be working well. Since launching in January, Inspirato says they’ve signed up over 100 new members.

Inspirato raised $5 million in capital in August 2010.

As part of today's roll-out of Gingerbread updates to the Nexus One and Nexus S, Google also took an aggressive jab at Facebook: it has removed the ability of Facebook users to merge their 'Facebook phone directory' with the Contacts application on the Nexus S. In doing so Google has rekindled the battle over contacts that it initiated last November, in which Google has argued that Facebook is locking up user data. But before we get into the implications, it's prudent to explain how things have worked until this point.

Right now when you fire up the Android Facebook application on the Nexus S for the first time, you're given the option to 'Sync friends with Contacts'. Enable the feature, and the next time you open your Android address book you'll see your Facebook contacts — including their phone numbers, assuming they've added them to their Facebook profiles — listed alongside the contacts stored in your Google address book. In short, your Facebook and Google contacts are all seamlessly listed in the same place. It's pretty nice.

But now Google has decided to turn off the feature on the grounds that users can't export any of their Facebook contact data — they can see it in their address book, but the data isn't actually stored as part of the phone's contacts database. Which means that if they ever decide to leave the social network, they'll find that their phone's address book is suddenly missing a bunch of contacts and phone numbers.

So, Google has decided to ‘fix’ the problem by preemptively removing the feature before everyone gets too used to it. Here’s their statement:

“We believe it is very important that users are able to control their data. So in the over-the-air update for Nexus S, we have a small change to how Facebook contacts appear on the device. For Nexus S users who downloaded the Facebook app from Android Market, Facebook contacts will no longer appear to be integrated with the Android Contacts app. Since Facebook contacts cannot be exported from the device, the appearance of integration created a false sense of data portability. Facebook contact data will continue to appear within the Facebook app. Like all developers on Android, Facebook is free to use the Android contacts API to truly integrate contacts on the device, which would allow users to have more control over their data. We are removing the special-case handling of Facebook contacts on Nexus S and future lead devices. We continue to believe that reciprocity (the expectation that if information can be imported into a service it should be able to be exported) is an important step toward creating a world of true data liberation — and encourage other websites and app developers to allow users to export their contacts as well."

You’ll still be able to access this information through the Facebook application, but it will no longer be available in your list of contacts.

Make no mistake: this is a calculated move on Google's part, and one that has as much to do with spurring another wave of press coverage about Facebook's siloing of data than it does with concerns over Android address book confusion. And it’s also sort of strange. Google says that Facebook should use the standard Contacts API like every other developer, but it was Google that enabled this functionality in the first place over a year ago, when the Nexus One shipped. Obviously there has been a lot of heated back-and-forth between the two companies since then, and Google may be concerned that users will increasingly start to use Facebook to house contact information and phone numbers when the integration is so seamless.

The reality is that while this will frustrate some Neuxs S users, most Android owners won't care. The Nexus S only came out in December and caters primarily to early adopters, but the vast majority of Android users are on other devices that won’t see the change. In fact, Google isn't even making this change on the Nexus One, explaining that because the Nexus One came with Facebook pre-installed, users expect this syncing feature as part of the out-of-box experience. But the Nexus S didn't come with Facebook pre-installed, so it's fair game. From a Google spokesperson:

“There will be no change in the way Facebook contacts appear on the Nexus One. Since the Facebook app was preloaded on Nexus One, it created an expectation for users of how the device would function. “

Even if Facebook doesn’t wind up changing its application (and I wouldn’t bet on it), the move makes one thing clear: Google isn’t done with this fight. Don’t be surprised if it takes the opportunity to point out Facebook’s lack of contact export at every opportunity, in the hopes that the general public eventually starts to pay attention.

Update: One thing to note is that Google says this applies to the “Nexus S and future lead devices” — in other words, whatever ‘official’ Android devices it will be releasing down the line. If any of those future releases do catch on with the mass market as opposed to the early adopter crowd, then the removal of this feature could actually impact a lot of people.

Nexus One owners, the surprisingly long wait is (almost) over: today Google has begun pushing out the latest version of Android, codenamed Gingerbread, to Nexus One devices. The rollout will likely take a few days, but you should be expecting an Over The Air update very soon.

And there’s more good news: Nexus S owners are getting an OTA update as well, which includes fixes for some annoying bugs (including a random reboot issue) and additional support for Near Field Communication. The update for Nexus S owners also includes a big change to the way Facebook syncing works (in short, it doesn’t) — see this post for more on this aggressive move by Google.

The improvements to NFC for the Nexus S are especially interesting because they give a taste of Google’s future plans for the technology. The new functionality is best demonstrated by additions to the Tags application, which ships on the Nexus S.

Until now Tags has allowed users to tap their phone on NFC tags at various venues to read information off of them (unfortunately these aren’t very commonplace yet — I have yet to actually use the feature in a real-world situation). But this update also adds write support — you can now create your own tag on the phone, and specify what information you want to share, be it your contact information, a link to a website, or a snippet of text. Then, when someone else with an NFC-equipped device taps your phone with theirs, they’ll be able to immediately receive this information (much in the same way you would using Bump). And, if you happen to own any of those NFC stickers that Google likes to show off, you can use the phone to write data to those, too.

At this point the feature is going to be more of a novelty than anything, but it’s likely that the next iPhone will support NFC, and it won’t be long before we start using it for payments and third-party applications take advantage of it, too.

No, the FTC hasn’t taken on Apple over its controversial 30% fee for subscription-based apps on the App Store. But, according to Cecilia Kang at the Washington Post, it is investigating whether the feature makes it too easy for children to purchase digital goods without realizing they’re spending real money (and without their parents’ permission).

According to the report, Representative Ed Markey (D, Mass.) sent a letter to the FTC earlier this month about the issue, after reading a previous article in the Washington Post describing the trend. FTC Chairman Jon Leibowitz responded that they would be looking into the matter:

“We fully share your concern that consumers, particularly children, are unlikely to understand the ramifications of these types of purchases,” Leibowitz wrote. “Let me assure you we will look closely at the current industry practice with respect to the marketing and delivery of these types of applications.”

The issue stems in part from the fact that Apple only asks for your password once every 15 minutes when you’re purchasing items using in-app purchases. Which means if you buy a game, then hand the phone to a child to play with it, they could wind up racking up the charges. Apple is rumored to be considering shortening this window.

The original Washington Post  article also discusses purchases made by children who have guessed their parents’ password — which doesn’t seem like something Apple can really protect against.