Last year, Hulu brought in $420 million in revenues, with was 60 percent above the year before. The news, however, was seen as a miss because Hulu earlier in the year suggested that it would make $500 million.

Today at the D: Dive Into Media conference, CEO Jason Kilar defended his record, revealing that “our board plan was $408 million.” So Hulu came in above the internal goal it had set for its board.

So why the discrepancy? “Earlier in the year we were pacing higher than that,” says Kilar. Then in the third quarter the ad market softened and the “pacing changed.” But he insists that there was a rebound in the fourth quarter and so far in 2012.

Nevertheless, Hulu’s subscription business, Hulu Plus, “is our fastest growing business,” says Kilar. He ended last year with 1.5 million subscribers and expects subscription revenue to become the majority of revenues this year. Those subscription dollars “allows us to pay the content business more than anyone else,” he says.

We measure every last click when it comes to the Web, but there remains a gulf between online and the real world. Yet the online world increasingly drives behavior offline, especially when it comes to purchasing habits. How many times have you researched something online or on your mobile phone before buying it? Yet when you go to a store to buy it, everything you did online might as well disappear as far as the merchant is concerned.

It doesn’t have to be that way. The last mile in local commerce is really only the last few inches between the credit card in your outstretched hand and the card swipe at the register. That terminal is the gateway to the payment network, which today isn’t really connected to the Internet for most practical purposes. The payment networks is archaic and operates based on its own closed standards. But what if it was as easy to connect to the payment network as it is to develop an application on the Web?

That is the question a group of former Netscape engineers and executives are trying to answer with a new startup called CardSpring launching in private beta today. Cardspring is creating an application platform that will allow Web and mobile developers to write applications for credit cards and other types of payments. Cardspring attaches itself to the payment network in a secure fashion on one side, and on the other it presents itself as a platform for developers to create payment apps via Web-standard APIs. It is a bridge between the two networks.

These applications could include things like electronic coupons, loyalty cards, virtual currencies, or yet-to-be-imagined commerce apps. For example, you could get a $10 off coupon online, enter your credit card number, and then when you go to a store and pay with that card, the payment network would recognize the card and give you the $10 credit. Or you could swipe your card and it could email you the receipt. Or it could check in for you. Swiping the card would trigger an application. What you see is a piece of plastic. What the network sees is an application.

If this sounds a little bit like what Groupon, LivingSocial, Foursquare, Square or Google are trying to do, it is because they’ve all been trying to crack this nut in different ways. They all want to close the redemption loop between digital offers and in-store payments. “Groupon threaded the needle with coupons,” says CEO Eckart Walther, but in his eyes daily deals are no more than a “wonderful one-off solution—We are literally inside the payment network.”

Walther once ran Netscape’s platform group. He later went to TellMe Networks, Yahoo search, LiveOps, and ended up as an EIR at Accel. The company’s CTO is Jeff Winner, who was the head crypto guy at Netscape. He is helped come up with SSL (the standard security layer in the browser), among other things. Cardspring already raised $10 million from Accel and Greylock in a Series A (Andrew Braccia from Accel and James Slavet from Greylock are the partners on the deal). Other investors include SV Angel (which is a big believer in the Online2Offline trend), Morado Ventures, Felicis Ventures, and Maynard Webb’s investment vehicle, WIN.

Groupon isn’t the only attempt at a one-off solution. Foursquare links its merchant specials to American Express card purchases, but not every card. Google Wallet is trying to put payment apps into your phone.  It’s too fragmented. “Every day, a mini-platform is trying to launch.” he says. Instead, CardSpring is attacking the problem just like you’d expect a bunch of Netscape engineers would: at the network level. “What if we could bring the browser platform to the payment network?’ asks Walther.

Try to wrap your brain around that for a second. Your plastic credit card can trigger different applications—coupons, loyalty rewards, reminders, check-ins, you name it. All of it is secure and based on permissions you allowed each application to have (in return for some benefit). “One of the Internet’s fundamental challenges is its inability to effectively capture the economic value it creates for business in the physical world,” notes Braccia. “CardSpring’s platform enables offline stores to easily measure the impact of the web on their business.”

There is a huge need for this type of payments platform. Groupon could use it to finally track redemptions of its coupons without having to ship iPads with special software to bars and restaurants. Foursquare could tie it into its specials and actually capture the purchase data and then show that to merchants in their dashboards. So could LivingSocial.

And that’s just for starters. Imagine cost-per-action ads where the action is an in-store purchase. The possibilities are endless. Not only that, but any website or mobile app that takes credit card information will now have the opportunity to append data to those purchases, and to read and write data to the payment network. It is not just about moving money, but moving payment-related data. In the end, the data may turn out to be more valuable.

The difficult part will be to convince consumers to hand over their credit card numbers in order for these applications to work. To the extent that the initial websites and apps already hold consumers’ credit card information, like Groupon or LivingSocial do, that shouldn’t be an issue. But when unknown sites or businesses start asking for that information, it might not be as forthcoming.

Still, there is a lot of low-hanging fruit here and Cardspring brings a clever approach to a difficult problem. It is not asking much of consumers or merchants. They do not need any new technology or fancy NFC-powered phones or terminals. All they need is their credit card. The network will do the rest.

 

Note from the editor: This is a guest post from Steve Case, the co-founder of AOL (which owns TechCrunch) and founder of Revolution. Case is the chairman of the Startup America Partnership and sits on the White House Jobs Council.

In recent weeks, Americans from all walks of life came together to stop SOPA from advancing through Congress, demonstrating the power of the Internet to rally people around an important cause. In the weeks ahead, we have reason to rally again. This time, the goal is not stopping something bad, but starting something good. Specifically, ensuring that America builds on its legacy of innovation, and remains the world’s most entrepreneurial nation.

Earlier today, President Obama unveiled his Startup America legislative agenda and called on Congress to pass it quickly, so he can sign it promptly. It's a very positive first step.

Let’s capitalize on this moment, and call on our elected representatives to quickly pass this legislative agenda that helps entrepreneurs start and scale the companies that can change the world while creating jobs, jumpstarting our economy, and increasing our competitiveness globally.

Here’s why you should join me – now – in rallying behind the President's proposed Startup America legislation:

Young high-growth companies have created 40 million American jobs in the past three decades thirty years – and accounted for all of the net new jobs produced during that period.

America’s entrepreneurial economy has been the envy of the world for decades. But other nations now recognize that entrepreneurship has been America’s secret sauce, and they are now racing to replicate it. Just as we’re seeing the globalization of manufacturing, we’re also now seeing the globalization of entrepreneurship.

Meanwhile, outside of some sectors (like social media) and some regions (like Silicon Valley), America’s entrepreneurial economy is sputtering. Indeed, start-ups are down 23% since 2007.

The rest of the world is accelerating, while America is slowing. But we still have time to act.

Enter the President's Startup America legislative agenda. The proposed legislation, released this morning by the White House, builds on the great work that Republicans and Democrats in the Senate and the House have initiated in recent months.

Here's a short primer on some of the measures included in the President's Startup America legislative agenda:

Crowdfunding – The legislative package will allow entrepreneurs to leverage online platforms to raise small amounts of capital from a large number of people. The benefits of creating an efficient and transparent marketplace to raise capital have been established by successful platforms such as Kickstarter and IndieGoGo, and this new legislation will extend the reach of these platforms to help fund entrepreneurial companies.

IPO on ramp – Well-intentioned regulations to protect investors have contributed to a decline in IPOs. The cost and complexity of initial public offerings has resulted in fewer companies going public, and more companies being sold. Public offerings of less than $50 million were 80% of IPOs in the 1990s, but only 20% in the 2000s. Sadly, IPOs typically lead to accelerated job growth – 90% of job creation typically occurs after a company goes public – while acquisitions often lead to job-deceleration. The President is embracing the recommendations of the IPO Task Force and his Jobs Council by calling for a smart, phase-in for emerging growth companies, so that they can adjust to the most costly and complex requirements of going public.

Winning the global battle for talent – America is great at attracting talented immigrants to its universities, but then forces most to leave and return to their countries – taking their educations with them, and all too often creating companies in other countries that end up competing with ours. This is a critical issue that will require more attention, but the Startup America legislative package takes a positive first step by allowing more highly-skilled immigrants to stay, build companies in the U.S., and create American jobs.

Investment incentives – The proposed legislation provides a capital gains tax cut when an investment is kept in a business for at least five years, incentivizing investors to put their cash behind entrepreneurs who are focused on building lasting companies. In addition, the package adds investment incentives by raising the limit for "mini-offerings" from $5 million to $50 million and increasing the Small Business Investment Company program by $1 billion.

Incentives to Encourage Growth and Reinvestment – The Startup America legislative agenda would make permanent certain tax cuts for small businesses, so that once a new firm gets up and running, it has more capital available to re-invest in growing the company. The package also includes a 10% income tax credit for new small business hires, a doubling of the tax deduction for startup expenses, and an extension of the 100 percent depreciation for property through this year.

I was honored to chair the high growth enterprises subcommittee of the President's Council on Jobs & Competitiveness. (Other members included John Doerr of KPCB and Sheryl Sandberg of Facebook.) We met with the President in October and presented a series of recommendations on steps both the private and public sector should take to improve the environment for entrepreneurs.

Since then, nearly a dozen bills have been introduced in Congress. The AGREE Act was introduced by Senators Rubio (R-FL) and Coons (D-DE) and the Startup Act was introduced by Senators Warner (D-VA) and Moran (R-KS). Now, the President has stepped forward with his own proposal, the Startup America legislative agenda.

I'm encouraged to see our nation's leaders focus their attention on entrepreneurship – and issue legislative proposals that will help us innovate, grow our economy, create jobs, and strengthen our competitiveness.

This is a moment. While the partisan bickering in Washington is intense, and will heat up further as we head towards the November election, we can – and must – rally the entrepreneurial community to support pro-entrepreneurship legislation.

It might seem as though Washington isn't listening, but the successful effort to stop SOPA in its track proved that we can have an impact. That was about stopping misguided legislation. This is about promoting a positive Startup Agenda that moves us in the right direction. Is it a perfect package for entrepreneurs? No, but there is no such thing as perfect legislation – and we can't let the perfect be the enemy of the good.

So join the cause and tweet your support with the #StartupAmerica hashtag. Now is the time to rally together and pass a Startup America legislative agenda!

Electric car drivers deserve to see their positive impact on the environment and their wallets, but the official mobile apps for the Nissan LEAF and Chevy Bolt only display remaining battery. GreenCharge is a new iOS app released today that displays your car’s remaining charge, but also its current range, the local energy price, a log of its usage, and your cost and carbon reduction versus driving a gasoline vehicle. Finally, an app that shows how you’re saving both kinds of green.

The app was developed by Xatori Inc, creators of PlugShare, the largest electric vehicle charging network in the United States. It’s the second product from the Palo Alto-based company, fueled by $400,000 in seed funding and three full-time employees. CEO Forrest North engineered for Tesla and was the CEO of electric vehicle component company Mission Motors. CTO Armen Petrosian developed anodes for Amprius and was on the Stanford Solar Car Team.

Just like the official LEAF and Volt apps, the $9.99 GreenCharge wirelessly connects to your car via cell signals know as telematics. Once authorized, GreenCharge continuously records your EV’s usage creating a logbook of your total, peak, and average energy expenditure. GreenCharge ties this to local energy costs, providing the most accurate way to determine the cost of driving a electric car.

The app also gives you plenty to feel good about. You’ll see your monetary savings and the pounds of carbon offset by not driving a gas guzzler. You can put some friendly pressure on others to consider electric vehicles by sharing how much money you saved to Facebook, Twitter, or email. An Android version is on the way.

A vague sense of helping the environment isn’t enough. EV sales won’t surge until their financial benefits become common knowledge.  By educating drivers and their social networks, GreenCharge could get the mainstream to plug in.

Artspace, an e-commerce startup that helps connect contemporary artists and galleries with potential customers, has raised a $2.5 million Series A funding round with participation from Felicis Ventures, Accelerator Ventures, Blue Equity LLC, and Metamorphic Ventures.

The round also includes a wide range of accomplished entrepreneurs. The full roster: Michael Yavonditte (Hashable, Quigo), David Rosenblatt (1stdibs.com, Doubleclick), Dave Morgan (Simulmedia), Seth Goldstein (turntable.fm), Thomas Stemberg (Founder/former CEO of Staples); Rob Selati (Madison Dearborn Capital Partners); Todd Simon (CEO of Omaha Steaks) and Peter Ricketts (former COO of Ameritrade). The company previously raised a $1.2 million seed round last spring.

Artspace is setting out to make contemporary art accessible to those of us who aren’t necessarily deeply immersed in the art world already — and to help connect artists and galleries with potential buyers. The site also allows art fairs to create a virtual representation of their fair, which helps expand the number of potential buyers beyond those who can attend an event in-person.

The company says it plans to use the money to expand its team, boost marketing, and to continue to build out its product. Alongside the funding news, the company is also announcing that Andrew Goldstein, who was previously executive editor of ArtINFO, will now lead the site’s editorial teams, who will be writing educational content and tracking art-related news.

Cofounded by Catherine Levene (formerly COO of DailyCandy) and Christopher Vroom (founder of Artadia), Artspace is one of several NYC-based companies looking to help bring the art world to the web. Other startups in this space include Art.sy (a service, currently in private beta, that looks to be a sort of Pandora for fine art) and Artsicle (which lets customers rent art for $25 a month). There are also sites like 20×200 that sell curated art prints, and Etsy, which has been connecting artists with shoppers directly for years.

Asked about how the site differs from Art.sy, which has also generated plenty of buzz, Levene says that Artspace is focused on ecommerce — everything on the site is available for purchase and can be bought directly through the site. In contrast, pieces on Art.sy are not always for sale, and you can’t actually purchase pieces directly through the site (you need to get in touch with Art.sy to coordinate the transaction).

The site itself looks great, and there are options available for most pricepoints (the homepage currently includes pieces running from $100 to $6500).

News of HTC’s forthcoming Ice Cream Sandwich-powered Ville has been making the rounds since last November, but now with Mobile World Congress less than a month away, we’re finally getting our first real look at it.

HTC-Hub has managed to get their hands on a pretty extensive hands-on video, and it looks like the Ville is shaping up to a pretty impressive mid-range device.

The video tour confirms most of the specs that BGR leaked last year, from the 1.5 GHz dual-core processor to the 4.3-inch qHD display. A (possibly backlight-illuminated) 8-megapixel camera sits high on the device’s back, while a VGA front-facing camera rounds out the package up front.

The Ville looks mighty slim in the video — the rumor mill pegs it as being under 8mm thick, which could put it in competition with devices like the Droid RAZR for being the world’s thinnest smartphone. Interestingly, the Ville still leans on three discrete hardware buttons rather than placing them directly on the screen a la the Galaxy Nexus.

In light of some recent handset releases, the Ville’s spec sheet doesn’t seem quite as impressive as it once did. Still, it’s got at least two things going for it — some frankly impressive industrial design and HTC’s Sense 4.0 overlay.

I’ve never been a huge fan of manufacturer-specific Android tweaks, but if Sense 4.0 is as fleshed-out as a recent report from PocketNow makes it out to be, I may soon be singing a different tune. Though the Ville seems to have its share of snazzy animations, the promise of deep Dropbox integration and the thoughtful inclusion of a guest mode may be the real crowd-pleasers once the Ville (and its big brother the Edge) start trickling out of Taiwan.

Offers are a booming form of advertising in which consumers are presented with offers to try or buy products. It is particularly popular in social games where players receive virtual currency in return for looking at the offers. One of the leaders in this form of ecommerce advertising is TrialPay, which just raised $40 million from Greylock Partners, Visa, T. Rowe Price, DAG Ventures, DFJ Growth and QuestMark Partners.

The series C round brings TrialPay’s total funding to $56 million.

Visa’s involvement in the round is significant in that it’s other major venture investment is in Square. As alternative forms of payment appear and gain traction, Visa wants to keep tabs on them.

TrialPay’s offers reach 70 million active users a month around the world, and the amount of transactions flowing through its platform increased sevenfold last year (although the company does not say from what base). It is one of the partners that powers offers for Facebook Credits.

Last week, we heard from Evelyn Rusli at the New York Times that Andreessen Horowitz was in the process of raising $1.5 billion for the venture firm. Today, partner Ben Horowitz has confirmed that the fund has closed, bringing Andreessen Horowitz’s total funding under management to $2.7 billion.

The firm says that the $1.5 billion was raised for its Fund III. "a16z's Fund III is all about extending our capabilities to more disruptors and pioneers," said Horowitz in a release. "We're remaking the modern venture capital firm, and entrepreneurs are responding to our unique approach."

One of the differentiators Horowitz and Andreessen made with their fund is that the firm’s network be made available firm wide, Horowitz explains in his blog post. This has helped create a vast network for portfolio companies, he says.

Horowitz reveals that in 2011, the firm hosted over 600 portfolio presentations to corporate customers and partners at their office in Menlo Park. These presentations resulted in more than 3,000 introductions between portfolio companies and prospective Fortune 500/Global 2000 senior executives.

The firm has relationships with over 4,000 engineers, designers and product managers, has made more than 1,300 introductions to portfolio companies, resulting in 130 hires within the portfolio. And Andreessen Horowitz has added over 550 executives to its network in 2011 and made more than 300 executive introductions to portfolio companies.

"Software is the catalyst that will remake entire industries during the next decade. We are single-mindedly focused on partnering with the best innovators pursuing the biggest markets," co-founder Marc Andreessen explained in the release announcing the new fund. This is the third fund for the firm.

In October, Michael Arrington reported that AH was raising a $900 million new fund, and AllThingsD revealed in December 2011 that the firm was raising as much as $1.5 billion for the fund. As stated in a filing from last year, the new $1.5 billion fund will provide Andreessen Horowitz with the flexibility to invest anything "from $10,000 to $100 million" in fledgling startups and growth companies. Founded in 2009, the firm currently has six general partners including Jeff Jordan, Peter Levine, John O'Farrell, Scott Weiss, plus Horowitz and Marc Andreessen.

Andreessen Horowitz’s investments include Zynga, Foursquare, Airbnb, Kno, Groupon, Airtime, Box.net, Pinterest, Asana, Lytro, BOKU, and Jawbone.

Accelerators, Accelerator, Accelerators! There’s a rash of them appearing everywhere, and the latest is the Rockstart Accelerator, a new startup program aimed at Europe's most promising startups that want to hit a global scale (but then don’t they all?). However, this one has some credible partners in the shape of Google, Microsoft BizSpark, Mozilla WebFWD and StartupHouse in San Francisco.

Oscar Kneppers, founder of Rockstart says the program is for startups from the whole of Europe. Based in Amsterdam, it’s looking for 10 teams of founders and will subject them to 99 mentors for 100 days, and combine that with an additional three-month summer program that culminates with a 25-day Silicon Valley road trip. That last point is probably not a bad idea, for obvious reasons, though Seedcamp has done this for the last few years.

After recently announcing the milestone of 3 million active users, geo-coupon system a Shopkick is revealing that its mobile app helped drive more than $110 million in-store revenue for partner retailers and brands in 2011 in its first full year operating the app.

Shopkick, which is backed by Kleiner Perkins, Greylock, SV Angel and others, provides an in-store, location-based mobile shopping platform, Instead of checking in, as you would with a geo app like Foursquare, Shopkick automatically recognizes when someone with the free Android or iPhone app on their phone walks into a store. Once a Shopkick Signal is detected, the app delivers reward points called "kicks" to the user for walking into a retail store, trying on clothes, scanning a barcode and other actions.

Kickbucks can then be redeemed across all partner stores for gift card rewards or for Facebook Credits. User can also receive special discounts on specific products at partners stores like Macy's, Best Buy or Target. National retail partners in the loyalty program include Target, Best Buy, Macy's, Crate & Barrel, Old Navy, American Eagle, Sports Authority, Toys R Us, Simon Malls and others, and 40 brands (P&G, Unilever, Kraft, Colgate, Clorox, Disney, HP, Intel).

To date, Shopkick has seen 1 billion in-app deals and offers viewed, and as of December, saw 5 million walk-ins to partner stores, doubling in four months. The app has seen 10 million product scans, up from 7 million in August 2011 and 3 million in February 2011.

So how does Shopkick measure the revenue contributed to retailers and brands. Founder Cyriac Roeding tells us” Conversion rates of walk-ins to sales can be measured directly by counting specific shopkick offers in the basket at retailers, by rewards for purchases through POS integrations, and conversion rates of product scans to product sales can be measured through in-app questionnaires and POS integrations.

In 2011, Shopkick built these measurement approaches together with its retail and brand partners, to make it a more trackable and performance-based marketing platform in the physical retail world. Shopkick’s technology is clearly helping physical retailers drive traffic and conversions in the store, which has been a challenge of late.

Alice.com, the retail platform for household goods, has raised $3.6 million in funding from an undisclosed group of Spanish investors. This current round brings the total funding amount raised by Alice.com to $18.2 million.

Launched in June, Alice.com’s retail platform allows consumer packaged goods manufacturers, like Procter & Gamble, to sell directly to consumers instead of going through retail channels like Target or Wal-Mart.

On the consumer side, Alice.com lets users create a profile of their household (i.e. how many adults, kids, babies) and then the site will keep track of items and reminds users with emails when they are running low and need to reorder. Each shipment is bundled together in a single 'Alice' box, delivered directly to the consumer's door, with no shipping costs.

The e-commerce marketplace is now home to more than 600 manufacturers and thousands of household brands – from large household names, to smaller niche brands. In the past year, Alice says it has seen a 200% increase in the number of direct-to-consumer online storefronts the platform powers for CPG brands. These brands include Kellogg’s, Slim-Fast, BIC, Seventh Generation, 3M, Ecover and Solo Cup.

Last year, the company announced a merger with spanish company Koto.com to expand the marketplace to an international European audience. Alice launched in Spain last year, and plans to debut similar sites in Germany, France, Italy and the United Kingdom in 2012 and 2013.

Alice says it will use this latest round of funding to enhance its consumer offerings through site advancements and new features.

Toronto-based deal provider Dealfind is expanding into luxury goods with the launch of a new service called Dream Deals. Starting now, in addition to Dealfind’s everyday and weekly deals, customers will also get “surprise” Dream Deals, which involve deeply discounted retail goods.

As a test, the first Dream Deal actually rolled out last Tuesday without warning, offering customers an authentic Louis Vuitton “Speedy” handbag for $80.00, shipping and taxes included. The six bags sold out in nine minutes. Curious customers wanted to know what was going on, prompting Dealfind Co-founder Gary Lipovestsy to head into the comments section for the deal to explain that, yes, the bag was real, and that this was start of new service called Dream Deals.

These Dream Deals will appear on the site randomly at various times throughout the week, offering products that will be 80%-95% off regular retail prices. The deals will involve consumer electronics items, accessories, clothing and other popular retail goods. Like any flash sales site, Dream Deals’ quantities will be limited and deals will sell out quickly.

For this reason, Dealfind customers who only follow the site via daily emails won’t be likely to get in on the action. The only way to track the surprise deals is via social media – including the Dealfind Twitter accounts and Facebook fan page. (Or you could get lucky and spot the deal as you’re browsing the website.)

Dealfind is now operating in 71 U.S. and Canadian markets, and has sold more than 1.8 million vouchers since 2010 for a savings of over $430 million. The company has been busily rolling out new features in recent weeks, including instant deals (“Everyday Deals“) and mobile apps, both of which arrived in December.

In May 2011, Dealfind was ranked  as the third largest deal provider in North America by North American Daily Deal Media, which tracks data from over 500 deal websites.

Like how there are all sorts of companies offering tools to let you build your own web site today, a new wave of them is doing the same thing for mobile apps. Appafolio stands out among the various options because it lets you create a polished native presentation for iOS without having to do any coding.

Instead, you either download the Appafolio app (here) or use its web site to select the text, icon and images you’d like to feature. The interface reminds me of setting up a Powerpoint presentation (in a good way), in that you can create pages within your app for specific types of media that you want to showcase, including slideshows and videos.

Once you’ve created the product, you can direct anyone to view it who has the Appafolio app installed by sending them a shortlink or a pass phrase. The download-and-pass-phrase process creates some friction — or at least it seemed that way to me when I tested it. But, using the Appafolio native app as a portal for presentations also means that the slideshows and videos can be cached and played later even if the user is offline. If you’re an artist trying to show off your latest painting, Appafolio will let veiwers pinch and zoom to see your work close up.

The overall goal, cofounder Brent Brookler tells me, is to cover the main use cases for creative professionals and small businesses — people who need a quick presentation or brochure to show off what they do, that they can easily share in a way that looks great on a mobile device.

The company behind the app, called Treemo Labs, has the right experience for what it’s trying to do, having spent the last several years making professional mobile apps for a variety of television shows, musicians and news organizations, including 60 Minutes, 48 Hours, Big Brother,  CBS News, CNET, Nirvana Nevermind (a video app), Rick Steves, Survivor, and Smiley Central.

Appafolio currently provides a range of options for customizing the interface, including page templates, sample logos, coloring alterations, and other visual tweaks — and everything is free. Brookler says the plan is to introduce additional, premium features in the future. You can take a tour for more details here.

 

IBM just announced the purchase of WorkLight, an Israeli startup that provides a mobile app development and infrastructure software. IBM says the acquisition will help expand the enterprise mobile capabilities it offers to clients. Financial terms were not disclosed but we’ve heard that the acquisition price is around $70 million, according to Israeli publication Calcalist.

WorkLight, which has raised $18 million in funding, allows organizations develop and deliver HTML5, hybrid and native applications with, and deliver these applications with mobile middleware, security features and integrated data management and analytics. Worklight dramatically reduces time to market, cost and complexity while enabling better customer and employee user experiences across more devices.

Worklight’s customers range in terms of sector and include companies in financial services, retail and healthcare. For example, a bank can create a single application that offers features to enable its customers to securely connect to their account, pay bills and manage their investments, regardless of the device they are using.

IBM says that Worklight will become an “important piece of IBM’s mobility strategy,” offering clients a development platform that helps speed the delivery of existing and new mobile applications to multiple devices and ensures secure connections between smartphone and tablet applications with enterprise IT systems.

IBM’s goal is to provide an end-to-end solution that allows enterprises to build and connect mobile apps, manage security on these apps and devices, provide analytics for mobile data, and more. In addition to Worklight, IBM today is also unveiling IBM Endpoint Manager for Mobile Devices, a new software system that will enable corporate users to manage and secure their mobile devices these applications are running on.

The acquisition of Worklight is expected to close in the first quarter of 2012. Worklight will sit within IBM’s Software Group.

Location Labs’ Safely, which provides mobile services that help parents ensure the personal security kids’ mobile phones, is revealing that its Safely Family Locator has enabled more than one billion family safety location checks since inception. These "locates" have been initiated by Family Locator subscribers across millions of child phones on carriers such as T-Mobile, Sprint, and AT&T.

Location Labs is also debuting Family Check-In, the newest offering in the Safely suite of digital parenting tools. While the locate service simply locates a child, the Family Check-In expands lets kids show parents that they arrived at the library or a friend's house with a location-verified map.

The service is first launching in partnership with T-Mobile, under the name "FamilyWhere Check In" and is available as a free download in the Android Market.

Location Labs also offers DriveSmart Plus, which uses the phone's GPS to determine when a subscriber is likely in a car and then disables the ability to read or send text messaging while driving and transfers all calls to voicemail or hands free Bluetooth.

Mobile app marketing company Fiksu just released new data revealing the impact the holiday season had on iOS app downloads and user acquisition costs. According to the company’s App Store Competitive Index, a measurement of the average aggregate download volume of the top 200 free U.S. applications, December saw 6.04 million daily app downloads. That’s a nearly 7% increase from November’s 5.65 million, and a clear indication of how many folks were unwrapping new smartphones during the holiday season.

That last half of December was the most competitive for mobile marketers, says Fiksu, with the traffic and dollars spent in the final week up 100% over prior weeks. “December is a strategically critical month for app discovery," said Micah Adler, Fiksu's CEO. "What we witnessed during the month was a 'land rush' in which advertisers earnestly spent marketing dollars in order to achieve ranking before the traditional App Store freeze which then would generate substantial organic downloads through increased visibility."

The App Store “freeze” being referred to is the time period when Apple itself goes on holiday, shutting down the queue for new app submissions and updates. For advertisers, it’s critical to get the apps in the best position possible before the freeze occurs, so as to improve discoverability during the December rush. Notes Fiksu, on Christmas Day alone, there were over 6.8 million new iPhone and Android devices activated.

The company also measures the cost to acquire loyal (that is, returning) users for mobile applications. In December, this index hit a record high: $1.81 per user, up 26.5% from November’s $1.43. The increase was due to brands participating in bidding wars, in their attempts lock in top ratings before the freeze.

Data for the Fiksu Indexes was sourced from more than 11 billion mobile app actions, including things like app launches, registrations and in-app purchases, as well as from the more than 200 million downloads recorded by apps marketed via the Fiksu for Mobile Apps user acquisition platform.

Sumo Logic, a startup focused on enterprise log management and analytics, has raised $15 million in Series B funding round led by Sutter Hill Ventures, with participation from previous investors Greylock Partners and angel investor Shlomo Kramer. The new funding brings the startup's total venture capital backing to $20.5 million.

Today, Sumo Logic emerged from stealth to unveil its log management and analytics platform, aiming to help companies to uncover operational and security insights buried in enterprise log files. The startup was founded by ArcSight veterans Christian Beedgen and Kumar Saurabh in 2009, to provide a cloud based system for managing the massive amounts of enterprise log data.

similar to other cloud based data management offerings, Sumo Logic wants to eliminate the need for expensive on premise-based log management applications. Using algorithms, the service provides enterprises with operational and security insights from their log data in real time, at a massive scale. We’re told the service can analyze petabytes of log-data a day.

Sumo Logic's architecture features an elastic petabyte scale platform that collects, manages and analyzes enterprise log data, reducing millions of log lines into valuable operational insights in real time. The cloud-based service is powered by Sumo Logic's Elastic Log Processing, which is a scalable architecture that enables log analytics at a large scale; and LogReduce, which are a set of adaptive algorithms that reduce millions of logs into a small number of patterns.

The platform also features real-time interactive forensics and push analytics to provide proactive detection and notification of trends, changes and anomalies in data. Sumo Logic’s service also mines global trends and anomalies across customer organizations.

As Beedgen explains, there is a major opportunity behind providing a cloud-based alternative to log management because enterprises have real problems managing and analyzing log and machine data. He says existing products can suck in data but have poor analytics and data analyzation with too many false positives.

Sumo Logic has an innovative approach, he says, because it provides a scalable elastic architecture, applied machine learning for IT intelligence, and the horsepower to process massive amounts of IT data.

The new funding will be used towards expanding engineering and marketing. Sumo Logic faces competition from Splunk, which just filed for an IPO.

Way back in 2009 there was no large event dedicated to technology startups in the UK. TechCrunch, under Mike Arrington, was busy trying to get its TechCrunch50/Disrupt programme going in the US, and outside of local meetups, the TC event juggernaut still had yet to arrive in Europe. My friend and colleague Robin Wauters was doing Plugg in Brussels, but there wasn’t a startup event in London. So I launched a personal project, an event I called GeeknRolla, the name for which I literally dreamt up in a London pub. Despite those amateurish beginnings, about 400 people turned up that year, and I ran it again for the next couple of years as a fun side project. But times move on and after running it single-handedly for three years in a row, I’m going to bring the GeeknRolla “mojo” to a new event (while we wait for the TC event machine to spin up in Europe, and more on that later so stay tuned).

Thus, GeeknRolla and the Dublin Web Summit, are merging to create the London Web Summit. It’ll be on March 19th in The Brewery Venue, in London’s “Tech City” area.

Two weeks ago, we covered a fast-growing security startup called AlienVault, which had just stolen seven senior HP security executives. At the time, Barmak Meftah, who left HP Fortify to become president and chief executive at AlienVault told us that the allure was the startup’s technology, which he said is “one of the more widely-deployed Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) on the market.”

With the number of cyber attacks and high profile hacks that took place over the last year, both government organizations and corporations are making security a priority and realizing that it’s an issue that needs to be addressed from the top down, and SIEM, he said, is one of the fastest growing segments within the security market.

The startup and its flagship product, OSSIM, an open source SIEM solution, are focused on providing unified management of critical security systems and processes across the network, like vulnerability scanning, etc., and have attracted customers like the Telefonica, Metro Madrid and the European Aeronautic Defense and Space Company.

On top of its raid of HP Fortify and HP enterprise security execs, AlienVault is today announcing that it has closed an $8 million series B financing round, led by Trident Capital. Existing investors, Adara Venture Partners and Neotec both contributed to the round, bringing the startup’s total funding to over $12 million.

As part of the series B round, Trident managing director J. Alberto Yepez and Trident principal Michael Biggee will be joining the startup’s board of directors. The team said that it will be using its new infusion of capital to expand its sales and marketing initiatives and expand research and development to meet the growing demand for unified security management.

Trident Capital has funded a number of successful cyber security companies, including Sygate, which was acquired by Symantec, Tablus, acquired by EMC, Thor Technologies, which was acquired by Oracle, and Tricipher, acquired by VMWare.

The Trident team helped recruit AlienVault’s new HP executive team, and is clearly banking on the fact that this new capital can help AlienVault position itself as a player in the global market, where cost-effective, unified management approaches to security are in demand. According to global investment banking and asset management firm William Blair & Co., the SIEM market is growing at 21.9 percent CAGR and is on track to surpass $2.3 Billion by 2014.

For more, check out AlienVault at home here.

NEC did it again: about 11 months after unveiling the world’s slimmest smartphone at that time, the company is ready to release another super-thin Android phone with a set of impressive specs (via Japan’s biggest mobile carrier NTT Docomo). Dubbed MEDIAS ES N-05D [JP], the handset will hit Japanese stores in February or March this year.

NEC rolled out quite a few Medias-branded Android phones in recent months, but this model is just 6.7mm thin and has the best specs.

Here are the main features:

• Android 2.3.6
• waterproof body
• 4.3-inch LCD with 720×1280 resolution
• 8.1MP CMOS camera with NEC’s Exmor R for mobile engine
• dual-core MSM8260 CPU (1.5GHz)
• 1GB RAM
• 4GB internal memory
• Bluetooth 4.0
• Wi-Fi
• NFC e-wallet function
• infrared connection
• digital TV tuner
• microSD card slot, microUSB slot
• 1400mAh battery
• connectivity to Casio’s G-SHOCK GB-6900 watch
• size: 130×67×6.7mm, weight: 110g

The MEDIAS ES N-05D might reach markets outside Japan at some point in the future, but there is no official word from NEC yet.

Via IT Media [JP]