As we heard over the past few months, PayPal is ramping up its payments options for large and small merchants. The payments giant debuted an in-store payments platform for large retailers; PayPal Here, a card swiper that attaches to a mobile phone for small businesses; and hinted at a brand new PayPal wallet. Today, PayPal is rebranding its services for small businesses as PayPal Payments, which suite of business products with three tiers of capabilities to give US small businesses multiple payment options that work for them.

Peter Karpas, North American Vice President of Customer Engagement at PayPal, tell us that this is next evolution of PayPal’s payments product for small businesses. “As the lines between online, offline and mobile are blurring, we are doing a comprehensive revamp of our products, allowing small businesses to get paid however they do business.”

Previously, PayPal’s suite of product for small business were named “website payments,” and offered standard, pro and nonprofit plans but focused on web payments. Now, PayPal is moving beyond this by offering offline, mobile, and other payments options bundled with web payments. The company has dropped the word "website" from its US product names to represent the company’s move away from the online payments platform to a multi-platform, multi-channel offering.

PayPal says every tier offers an integrated suite of products that makes it easy to take payments from mobile devices and in-person, as well as online. Each tier includes the ability to implement online payments via PayPal, in-person, offline payments via PayPal Here, mobile payments via PayPal’s checkout services for the web and apps, as well as invoicing. The suite also includes a debit card, which gives merchants access to cash in their PayPal account, with 1% cash back when they sign for purchases.

There are four tiers, including standard, pro, advanced and nonprofit plans, based on features available. Nonprofits have a discounted per transaction rate (2.2 percent vs 2.9 percent for all other plans). All the rates include online payments support, PayPal Here, the ability to accept checks, global payments, telephone support and more.

Advanced holds a $5 monthly fee, and Pro has a $30 monthly fee. The standard rate does not include the ability to have payments completed without customers leaving the website. The Pro rate gives merchants the ability to accept credit cards via the phone, fax and mail. And Pro users can design their own checkout pages.

For PayPal, this is a move towards exposing small businesses, especially those who mainly use its web products, to some of the other payments platforms the company has been launching, including mobile checkout and PayPal Here.

Canonical, the corporate sponsor of the Ubuntu Linux distribution, has been doing a lot of interesting development work across a number of different computing segments: their on-going work with the Unity interface for Ubuntu, Ubuntu TV, Ubuntu for Android, and a whole lot more. Ubuntu, according to Canonical, is the world’s most popular OS for public, private, and hybrid clouds. Not content with being a tenant, Canonical is pushing to make Ubuntu the number one OS for running clouds, too. Similarly uncontent with existing descriptors like Platform-as-a-Service (Paas) and Infrastructure-as-a-Service (Iaas), Canonical is announcing their own Metal-as-a-Service (MaaS).

When I first heard the term “Metal as a Service”, I admit that I immediately envisioned Ubuntu’s Jono Bacon distributing heavy metal free software songs. MaaS is, in fact, a new server orchestration solution cooked up by Canonical.

The basic idea is that hardware is increasingly a commodity that you buy for what it offers, not what it is. In a cloud environment, you don’t really care too much about the technical details of your CPUs, or bus speeds, or memory channels. You want computational power, and storage, and networking. According to Canonical, MaaS is a way to abstract all the details of the physical computers into what you really care about.

According to Matt Ravell, Canonical’s MaaS Product Manager, MaaS represents a layer underneath Infrastructure-as-a-Service. The idea is that you use MaaS to orchestrate your hardware, and then you use Juju to orchestrate your applications and workloads. Conceivably, you can use MaaS + Juju to deploy something like OpenStack or Cloud Foundry much faster than if you were manually deploying those instances.

MaaS is available with the beta release of Ubuntu 12.04 LTS. I asked Ravell, and Dave Walker, Canonical’s Cloud Engineering Manager, how mature MaaS was, since it was going into a long-term release of Ubuntu. Both men quickly assured me it was LTS-qualified, even if it doesn’t currently have all the features they’d like it to have. Walker told me that Canonical has been thinking about the problems of provisioning and orchestration since at least 2008, and have made a number of tepid attempts to solve them; but those attempts “didn’t tell a strong enough story” and “felt kind of klunky.”

The long-term roadmap for MaaS includes a number of interesting features, like ensuring that the BIOS or RAID controller firmware is patched to your standard, integration with existing authentication and authorization services, performing burn-in tests on newly deployed hardware, and more. Right now, MaaS looks best suited for greenfield cloud deployments.

Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth blogged about MaaS today. He paints a very interesting picture. To me, though, MaaS feels like a solution looking for a problem. There are many provisioning solutions in the open source community (to say nothing of the proprietary world!), and many talented and clever people are working to address provisioning –physical and otherwise — in a variety of ways. MaaS sounds, to me, like Canonical is suffering from not invented here syndrome. Ravell told me that MaaS is using aspects of cobbler, for example, but insists that MaaS is something brand new.

My gut reaction is that if Canonical feels that deploying OpenStack or similar solutions is currently too complicated, they’d do everyone a favor by working to directly improve those processes, rather than develop yet another abstraction layer to script the installation of complicated workloads. I understand Shuttleworth’s desire to make physical nodes easily managed, but in my experience that only benefits specific data center designs. Existing enterprises already have physical server provisioning and management solutions, and MaaS will likely face an uphill battle with those shops.

As skeptical as I am about MaaS, I am glad to see the bright folks at Canonical thinking beyond the “cloud” fixation that seems to dominate today. Time will tell whether MaaS gains the traction necessary to succeed.

photo credit: Metal Only by _gee_

After weeks of speculation and rumors, Google has officially pulled back the curtain on what they have come to call Project Glass — a pair of augmented reality glasses that seek to provide users real-time information right in front of their eyes.

Alright, so perhaps calling glasses is a bit of a stretch. When the New York Times’s Nick Bilton broke the story back in February, the glasses were said to bear a striking resemblance to a pair of Oakley Thumps, but the demo images on Project Glass’s Google+ page (one of which can be seen above) don’t look a thing like them. Rather, they appear to be constructed of a solid metal band that runs across the brow line, with a small heads-up display mounted on the right side.

It’s much more stylish than the original reports made it out to be, but really — who cares about that right now? A brief demo video (below) highlights some of the functionality that the Project Glass specs aspire to provide: the protagonist of the video goes about his daily life aided by the glasses, which displays a circle-based UI that provides real time information like and weather and transit when needed. Further applications include the ability to send messages using your voice, instructing the glasses to take a picture, and displaying the location of nearby friends.

I’d caution users to take the images and video with a grain of salt for now though, not because I don’t think Google will eventually make good on them, but because they represent just one direction that the project could go in.

Developing…

Aviary, the company that makes it easy for mobile developers to integrate image editing into their apps, is debuting a huge partnership today. The New York-based startup will be powering photo editing for Flickr’s 75 million users.

Picnik was the default photo editor for Flickr for some time now, even after Google bought the startup. But Google decided to shut down Picnik, and and editor will be removed from Flickr as of April 19, 2012.

For years, Aviary has been offering one of the more advanced suite of web-based, yet easy to use image editing apps. Last year, the startup shifted toward distributing a developer-facing mobile SDK, which allows third-party developers to quickly integrate photo editing, filters, virtual stickers, and other related features into their applications.

Now within Flickr, you’ll see a new Aviary-powered photo editor in your Actions menu on the site. The feature will be rolled out to users over the next few weeks. As Flickr writes it its announcement of the news, tens of thousands of members edit their photos on Flickr each day, and the most important features user wanted in a web-based editing tool was speed and simplicity.

Flickr says it has worked with Aviary to deliver a fast editing experience. Basically, one your photo loads, it will be ready to be edited. And similar to Aviary’s UI, the Flickr editor is extremely simple. User will be able to add filters, stickers, text, and save it back to their photo streams.

Here’s how it works. One ce you’ve uploaded a photo, you click on the Actions tab, then select Edit. Aviary’s editor will pop up, giving you access to fourteen simple tools, including brightness, orientation, filters, cropping and more. Once you choose the edit to the photo, you click Apply and you are done.

And since Aviary’s photo editor is built using HTML5, the Flickr editor is available on mobile and iPad apps as well.

“We built Aviary’s web editor with Flickr users in mind. All editing happens directly on Flickr itself using HTML5, allowing for quick load times, fast photo processing and a great overall user experience. You can’t ask for a better community than Flickr to help give you feedback in crafting the perfect photo- editing experience,” said Aviary’s CEO Avi Muchnick.

Considering the size and scale of Flickr, this is a huge win for Aviary. The startup also has its own loyal userbase, and currently has 3.5 million users that have edited over 40 million photos over
the past 30 days. Existing partners include Box, Constant Contact, MailChimp, Ning, Imgur, PicCollage, FriendCaster, PicPlz, and others. And the company’s SDK is growing 50% a month (measured based on how many users are accessing the editor and editing images).

Maria Seidman helps organize a monthly womens’ networking event for her business school alums in New York City but was frustrated with some of the options for creating a dedicated mobile app for an event. So she decided to create a DIY mobile app creation platform herself. Today, her brainchild, Yapp is launching as an online service where a consumer — even if they lack any technical or design skills — can create a beautiful mobile app in minutes.

As Seidman explains to me, she believes that one day everyone will be able to create a mobile app but doesn’t believe that one platform can create apps for everyone and that consumers, developers and even companies need different options for various skill sets. She’s targeting the consumer audience with Yapp, which wants to make it as simple to create an app as it is to create an online invitation.

Users simply go to Yapp’s homepage and can start creating an iOS app or an HTML5 mobile site in minutes. You can choose from a collection of themes for events, including weddings, book clubs, parties, fundraisers and more. Once the app is created, you can invite guests or attendees via email t0 view the app via Yapp’s native iOS app (called Yappbox) or via the mobile web.

Once the invitee downloads the Yappbox app, they can enter an event ID to get the designated application for the event. The app itself is fairly simple in functionality, and includes a home page, schedule, a news feed and a gallery of photos. Users can also sync their Facebook account. Organizers can also create push notifications to invitees for event news.

The startup has raised an undisclosed amount of seed funding from Kleiner Perkins, North Bridge Venture Partners, Cue Ball and other individual investors.

In the landgrab among reading apps that aggregate content to make it more accessible on tablets and smartphones, one of the early movers, Pulse, is today announcing a deal with magazine publisher Bonnier that will give its offering a significant boost.

Bonnier is adding 20 titles from its special-interest magazine portfolio to the Pulse reading stream, including titles like Field and Stream, Parenting, Saveur, Scuba Diving, Skiing and Sound + Vision. Pulse, which already had some 300 content partners on its platform, says the Bonnier deal is its biggest yet.

The news comes weeks after rival platform Flipboard expanded in another sense, adding several features to make its newsreading app more Chinese-friendly.

The deal between Pulse and Bonnier comes out of an existing, successful relationship between the two around a single hit: back in July 2011 Pulse and Bonnier signed a deal to include one of Bonnier’s biggest titles, Popular Science, in its stream.

Within six months, Pulse says subscriptions for Popular Science went through the roof, from 60,000 to more than three million as of January 2012. The two aren’t giving out more current numbers but say that “millions” of stories from the magazine have been read to date, and it is one of the most popular magazines on Pulse at the moment.

Whether the more niche titles featured in this latest deal will prove to have as much of a bang for Bonnier’s buck remains to be seen. To date, Pulse has signed on more than 300 partners to its platform, with the content ranging from general interest news providers like the BBC and Businessweek to more specific subjects, such as golf (and, naturally, the best in tech news from TechCrunch).

Scale may not be the priority now, but it will be longer term for the business. Akshay Kothari, the founder and CEO of Pulse, once told me that the company does have plans to monetize content on the app — you can imagine in-stream, preroll and post-roll advertising that is targeted to a users’ reading preferences — but that this will come only when usage grows more. The same goes here: “Bonnier and Pulse do plan to monetize this once we build a significant audience,” he said.

What’s notable about Bonnier’s Pulse push is that its giving users another way of accessing that magazine content on smartphones, a platform that the publisher does not seem to have emphasized as much in its app strategy.

At the moment, Bonnier lists 28 iPhone apps compared to 66 for the iPad. Readers who want articles and no bells and whistles can also bypass the fact that the apps for titles like Popular Science are free to download but cost money to read, whereas the Pulse version of the magazine is, for now, free.

Kothari says that this deal is not exclusive to Pulse, although it is the first time it has moved to make so many of its titles available on a news app. But it wouldn’t be a surprise if the content found its way to Flipboard and other aggregators soon, too.

On a wider scale, this is not the first move we’ve seen from Bonnier to extend its digital footprint: the publisher earlier in the year signed a deal with AOL (TechCrunch’s owner) to share content and ad sales across Bonnier’s Parenting.com sites and properties within AOL that touch the same subject: those include Huffington Post Parents, the AOL Family channel and AOL.com itself.

The full list of Bonnier titles in Pulse now:

Real estate search company Trulia is adding to its mobile lineup today with the launch of Trulia Rentals for iPhone. The app joins its Android rentals-only counterpart, which launched back in September. Like the former, the new iPhone app will also offer a dedicated view of nearby rentals, including property details, photos, as well as other neighborhood rental info, including where restaurants, schools and other points of interest are located.

In addition, the app will offer new property listings sent out via push notifications, the ability to save search, and a feature that connects you with a broker or landlord right from within the app.

The now profitable Trulia says it’s seeing the rentals market really pick up as of late. This seems to coincide with a housing trend in tech hotspots like San Francisco, in which entrepreneurs are simultaneously being encouraged not to buy a home, and yet, also can’t seem to find one. For those looking to rent, the idea is that you’ll need to be first, and fast, grabbing a place before others know about it.

That’s where a few of the new app’s features can help. The push notifications offer immediate alerts about new rentals in the area, while color-coded listings are organized by time-on-market, allowing you to spot the newest (less than 24 hours old, indicated by green), as well as those that have been viewed (grey) and those older than 24 hours (in black). Yes, 24 hours is old.

You can also configure your search using your own personal criteria so that the notifications you receive are relevant to you, then jump into the app to beat everyone else to the property. Searches can be filtered by monthly rent amount, property type, number of beds and baths, and square footage.

The Trulia rentals joins the company’s other mobile offerings, including its apps for iPhone, iPad, Android (mobile and tablet) and mobile web. The new rentals app is available for download here.

Daily fantasy sports operator FanDuel isn’t subject to online betting laws in the US thanks to daily fantasy sports games being exempt under the carve out in the 2006 Unlawful Internet Gaming Enforcement Act. That means it’s virtually a license to print money in the US. However, FanDuel is 100% legal as it is classified as a game of skill not of chance.

FanDuel says its revenues hit 4x in the past 6 months with the company giving out over $10m in fantasy payouts in 2011 and it plans to pay out up to $4m per month for the baseball season.

Off the back of that success today the site has raised another $1.3m round of funding from existing investors, including Pentech and Piton Capital taking its total raised to date to $7m.

Paul Martino, an early investor in Zynga and Tribe, joins the FanDuel board as an Angel investor in this round. Martino is co-founder of Bullpen Capital and is known as a long-time investor in games startups, founding Tribe in 2003 with Mark Pincus, and investing in PayNearMe and TubeMogul.

Based in New York and Scotland (yes, really) FanDuel focuses solely on US sports, and since 2009 has offered a different take on the traditional fantasy sports game model.

Instead of games lasting the whole season, players play and win in as little as a day – think of it as "one-night stand" fantasy sports. In traditional fantasy sports leagues, league winners are only declared after the entire season ends and players often drop out as the season progresses. In FanDuel the leagues last one day (or the weekend in the case of football) and prizes are paid out immediately by the site as soon as games finish.

Let the proliferation of vertically-themed startup accelerators continue! Today, a new accelerator focusing on the enterprise sector is launching in Washington D.C. Called “Acceleprise,” the program’s goal is to invest in 60 enterprise software companies over the next three years. Participating startups should be trying to solve problems facing large organizations, whether the Fortune 5000, large nonprofits, or government.

Acceleprise’s founders include Sean Glass (Higher One, EmployInsight), Collin Gutman (EmployInsight, formerly of NEA), and Allen Gannett (formerly CEO of Splash Networks).

“It started off with me thinking about how I wanted to do my personal angel investing,” says Glass of Acceleprise’s founding. After looking at his portfolio, the companies that had done the best – the ones he was the able to most help as they were getting going in the early stages – were enterprise-focused.

As with most incubators, participating startups in Acceleprise will receive shared office space, discounted and free software (some through Microsoft BizSpark), mentorship, and a small amount of seed funding ($30,000). But Acceleprise will offer some other advantages, too.

For starters, it’s located in D.C.

“D.C. as a physical location has a lot of resources that are useful to early stage enterprise companies,” says Glass. “Almost every industry has an industry association and it tends to be headquartered in D.C…if you’re an early stage company and you want to quickly get exposure to potential customers to learn about the marketplace, that’s a really good setup.”

Acceleprise will help facilitate those introductions, he says.

In addition, D.C. is home to the federal government, the largest enterprise software buyer in the world. And then, within a couple of hours drive or train commute, you have the East Coast corridor down to Atlanta and up to New York, where you’ll find the highest concentration of of really large company headquarters in the U.S., Glass says.

Another advantage for Acceleprise are the mentors, a large network that includes Scott Case, CEO of Startup America, Vijay Ravindran, the Chief Digital Officer of The Washington Post Company and Jonathan Bulkeley, former CEO of BarnesandNoble.com, to name a few.

Startups will also have access to “customer panels,” which will consist of large enterprises that have agreed to take sales meetings with each portfolio company. Panel participants, so far, include The Washington Post Company, Microsoft, and a few others than can’t be publicized yet. The goal is to have ten companies by launch day.

“We’re solving one of the major issues when you’re starting out in enterprise tech,” explains Gannett of the panels,”how do you access enterprise? How do you get those introductions? How do you get these first customers?”

“When you come to the accelerator, you’re not just coming for the capital, or the mentors, or the collaboration, or the community,” he says,  ”there’s actually going to be customers that are waiting to meet with you.”

So if enterprise tech companies show so much promise for big returns, why hasn’t there been an enterprise-focused accelerator until now (that is, one that’s run outside of large companies)?

There’s not one easy to single-out reason, it appears.

“Enterprise tech entrepreneurs don’t want to be part of a GE internal accelerator,” says Gannett, “so why isn’t there a 500 Startups for enterprise technology? And it’s especially weird because the majority of software IPOs are enterprise software…there’s this huge pent-up demand.”

He notes that a lot of the regional efforts are focused on what’s in the news. “Consumer web is sexy, everyone wants to talk about it. Everyone wants to build the next Facebook.”

Adds Gutman, “it’s also about patient capital. A lot of the people who are doing accelerators are doing it because they’re seeing the technology that can produce a $100 billion company like Facebook, and they can take off in six months. Whereas with enterprise software, it takes a few years to build the business,” he says. ”It’s less sexy, less quick to explode.”

“A lot of investing in consumer web is the idea that somewhere in your portfolio is a lottery ticket, and when you do have the lottery ticket, you produce phenomenal returns,” Glass explains. “Part of it is that we’re all individuals in addition to being entrepreneurs and investors, there’s a natural inclination in wanting to see your company featured on CNN or the front page…if you’re solving a problem for a Fortune 5000 CIO, there’s a much more limited audience for hearing that story.”

Another part of it is the amount of money it took in the past to get enterprise companies off the ground. The cost of building a consumer technology company came down three or four years ago, but the cost to build an enterprise-class technology company has only started to come down in the past year or two, Glass explains.

“You can now do cloud development in a secure way, with sufficient uptime that can be enterprise class and meet enterprise requirements.” Before you needed a $1-3 million seed round, then a $5-15 million Series A, he says. “I think the economics are changing – we can do it now, I don’t think we could have done it a couple of years ago.”

The program is four months and the first class starts July 15th. Applications are being accepted now.

The Nokia Lumia 900 is set to be the question mark of the week. The embargo lifted last night, so everyone and their brother is posting a review, proudly giving yeas and nays on the first hard-core Nokia/Microsoft mobile offering.

But what do John and I think?

Well, the answer is two-fold, but the big guy and I always find common ground somewhere. With the Lumia 900, it’s Windows Phone itself. We both agree that the operating system is solid, clean, and engaging. The phone, however, could be a bigger step up from the Lumia 800 as far as John’s concerned. He’s also like, “Big Phones? So Over.”

But contrary to my employer’s opinion, I think the Lumia 900 stands a good chance of snatching up some market share for Windows Phone and for Nokia. The specs aren’t quite on par with some of the big guns out there, but the hardware feels premium even at a $100 price point, and you can’t help but reach out and pick up a Windows Phone.

Those live tiles are tempting.

Note: I mentioned a 4.5-inch display on the Lumia, when it’s actually a 4.3-inch display. My apologies.

I sold mortgages over the phone in a previous life. That involved calling over 100 people a day using an archaic but functional web-based phone system. That system cost the company a fortune to implement and required a dedicated support staff. PhoneDeck does most of it for free. And it works directly with Android and S40 phones. This is disruption defined.

Mike Butcher broke the news about PhoneDeck’s recent launch yesterday. The startup, which made the rounds to several start-up events last year, allows anyone to link their phone to their service for analytics and remote control. PhoneDeck lets users send and receive text messages and phone calls right from their website. If your phone rings, a popup appears on your computer with the option to answer the call or send it to voice mail. The mobile app also syncs your contacts and usage to the web interface, making all sorts of information available on the web.

It works well, too. There’s a bit of lag when the phone rings until the pop-up appears. That needs to be resolved. But for the most part, and for the right person, this could be a very powerful free tool.

Small businesses often spend good money on similar phone services. It allows marketers and salespeople to quickly and efficiently place a lot of phone calls. Trust me, when you have to call more than a few people, it’s a lot easier to don a headset and click a button on a computer screen than using just a mobile phone.

PhoneDeck seems to have all the right additional functions, too. Missed calls can easily be responded to with a text message. Each number stored in the system, either through a contact or one-off call, shows detailed statistics including the geolocation, calls missed, initiated, and received. This might not be important to the average Joe, as Devin told me, “I feel like this is a solution to a problem that doesn’t really exist”, but small businesses or even a single user can easily and quickly incorporate PhoneDeck into their workflow for increased productivity and insights.

There is a bit of blind trust involved with PhoneDeck. You’re entrusting this start-up with a good deal of your data including contacts and detailed phone usages. As some users point out in the comments of Butcher’s posts, this system could be perfect for snooping spouses or divorce attorneys. In fact, it only takes about three minutes to install the Android app and upload all the data to the web interface. The data stays online, although the phone no longer actively syncs once the app is deleted from the phone. Scary.

Still, privacy issues aside, PhoneDeck could be the free answer to many people’s expensive problems. Even casual users like myself can benefit from the online phone interface. I’m often sitting in front of my computer and have no idea if missed a call or text message (no one calls or texts me though) since my phone is lost somewhere within my house. It makes the most sense in a business where time is money and improved efficiency can make a big difference.

Good news, Godfather fans — Google has just recently announced on their official YouTube blog that they've inked a licensing deal with Viacom-owned Paramount to bring some 500 new titles to YouTube and the Google Play store over the coming weeks.

Google first started toying with the notion of movie rentals via YouTube in early 2010, and their rental catalog has since swelled to nearly 9,000 titles. Bringing movie rentals to the Android ecosystem took a little bit more time, with the feature launching in the Android Market in May 2011. With Paramount now in tow, Google has licensing agreements with five of the six major motion picture studios, with Fox being the only big player still sitting on the sidelines.

While welcome, the news comes as a bit of surprise for a few reasons. Paramount, for example, isn’t exactly a stranger to the digital distribution game — they officially pulled back the curtains on ParamountMovies.com earlier this year, which allows users to rent or purchase a number of films from their catalog.

More notable though is the contentious history between the search giant and Viacom, Paramount's parent company. Viacom, in case you had forgotten, filed suit against Google nearly five years ago over claims of copyright infringement because users were uploading their content without permission. The case was eventually dismissed in 2010, but that wasn’t good enough for Viacom — they sought to revive the suit just last year, with one of their lawyers mentioning that the initial decision would “lead to the vast exploitation of material on the Internet.”

Windows Phone 7 is an excellent new mobile operating system — there’s no doubt about that. But every rose has its thorn, and on Windows Phone it’s a lack of apps. Luckily, the Marketplace seems to be growing at a rapid pace, today topping 80,000 apps.

The platform has been slowly but steadily picking up steam, topping 50,000 apps in December, 60,000 in January, and 70,000 in March. All About Windows Phone claims that the Marketplace is growing at a rate of 340 published apps per day.

It’s only fair to note that the total number of published items (which would be that 80,000 figure) isn’t the same as the number of total apps available to users. This is because Microsoft removes some of the applications or the developer withdraws them, or simply because not all apps function across every market.

The U.S., for example, only has access to about 69,123.

Still, it would seem that the Windows Phone Marketplace is growing at a steady pace, which is good news for anyone considering the Lumia 900, set to go on sale this weekend.

Yahoo has made its massive round of layoffs official. The company just released a statement saying that 2,000 jobs have been cut, or 14 percent of it total workforce (which was previously around 14,000). We’ve pasted the release below.

"Today's actions are an important next step toward a bold, new Yahoo! – smaller, nimbler, more profitable and better equipped to innovate as fast as our customers and our industry require. We are intensifying our efforts on our core businesses and redeploying resources to our most urgent priorities. Our goal is to get back to our core purpose – putting our users and advertisers first – and we are moving aggressively to achieve that goal," said Yahoo’s CEO Scott Thompson. "Unfortunately, reaching that goal requires the tough decision to eliminate positions. We deeply value our people and all they've contributed to Yahoo!."

Yahoo says that it will save $375 million upon completion of the layoffs. The company currently expects $125 to $145 million in a pretax cash charge relating to employee severance packages.

As AllThingsD’s Kara Swisher reported yesterday, the layoffs will extend throughout the entire company, but the product division is expected to be hit the hardest. Yahoo will also announce a new reorganization of the company in the near future. And this may not be the end of the road for Yahoo in terms of layoffs. Swisher says that as Yahoo consolidates its businesses and strategy, more employees could be let go.

This is one of the largest round of layoffs for Yahoo in recent years. In December 2010, Yahoo cut 4% of its global workforce, which amounted to 560 employees.

Best of luck to those Yahoo employees affected by today’s news.

Yahoo! today confirmed that it is taking important next steps to reshape the company for the future.

"Today's actions are an important next step toward a bold, new Yahoo! – smaller, nimbler, more profitable and better equipped to innovate as fast as our customers and our industry require. We are intensifying our efforts on our core businesses and redeploying resources to our most urgent priorities. Our goal is to get back to our core purpose – putting our users and advertisers first – and we are moving aggressively to achieve that goal," said Scott Thompson, CEO of Yahoo!. "Unfortunately, reaching that goal requires the tough decision to eliminate positions. We deeply value our people and all they've contributed to Yahoo!."

Yahoo! has a solid foundation – nearly 700 million users and thousands of advertisers that engage with Yahoo! properties regularly and trust the company with their data and their business. Through its restructuring efforts, Yahoo! intends to grow by responding more quickly to customer needs and competing more effectively in areas where it can win. Yahoo! has identified key parts of the business – a select group of core businesses, the platforms that support those core businesses, and the data that drives deep personalization for users and ROI for advertisers – where the company will intensify efforts and redeploy resources globally, all focused on increasing shareholder value. With a clear focus on profitability and growth, the company will be disciplined in its investments and radically simplify how it builds, launches and maintains many of its properties and products.

Today, the company will begin the process of informing employees about these changes. As part of that effort, approximately 2,000 people will be notified of job elimination or phased transition.

Yahoo! expects to realize approximately $375 million of annualized savings upon completion of all employee transitions. The company currently expects to recognize the majority of an estimated $125 to $145 million pretax cash charge relating to employee severance in its second quarter financial results. The company may incur additional charges in connection with this action. More information will be provided about Yahoo!'s future direction in conjunction with the release of its first quarter financial results on April 17, 2012.

More than a half-dozen mobile ad companies are getting behind a working group called ODIN to find a new way of tracking and identifying iOS users that still respects their privacy. This is happening because Apple is pressuring developers to stop using an older method called UDIDs (or unique device ID numbers) faster than previously thought amid criticism that it compromises privacy.

Velti, Jumptap, RadiumOne, Mdotm, StrikeAd, Smaato, Adfonic and SAY Media are hoping that by collaborating, they can influence the new standard that the rest of the mobile advertising industry will adopt.

“We need to get everybody on the same page so that we have a uniform solution that ends up working for everyone,” said Krishna Subramanian, who is Velti’s chief marketing officer.

The old way, the UDID, was a unique identifier specific to every single iPhone, iPad and iPod. But critics have said that UDIDs are sensitive because they can’t be cleared or erased.

So the industry is scrambling to converge on a decent alternative right now. I surveyed a bunch of alternatives last week and covered their weaknesses and strengths.

If the mobile advertising industry and developers don’t find an alternative soon, it could become much harder to run targeted advertising campaigns and revenues could decline for many app makers.

ODIN says that about 60 percent of mobile ad revenue comes from this type of performance-based advertising. If you factor in cost-per-install or cost-per-action campaigns, which are based on when a consumer downloads an app or takes an action in an app, ODIN says that the app ecosystem could miss out on about $2.6 to $3 million dollars per day in ad revenue.

ODIN has proposed one alternative right now, but that could change if Apple doesn’t like it. Right now, ODIN derives an ID from a phone’s MAC address (or media access control address). It’s the address that’s used to connect to Wi-fi networks.

ODIN hashes or assigns a secure key to the number so that privacy is maintained. “It is 'computationally impossible' for the original ODIN to be traced back to the hashed ODIN, meaning it cannot be reversed to connect targeting or installation information to a particular user,” the group said in a statement.

The issue though is that many other developers don’t think that Apple will tolerate use of MAC addresses as an ID for much longer. Jim Payne, who is the chief executive of Mopub, told us last week that: "The MAC Address is terrible. Your phone is constantly broadcasting your MAC Address to find Wi-fi networks. It's literally being broadcast while you walk around. So it's got all the same problems at UDID, plus this other huge problem."

But because ODIN doesn’t use the raw MAC address as the identifier, maybe Apple will be OK with it.

“From our standpoint, we felt that this would be the most accurate for a given time period,” Subramanian said.

As you may well know, we’re having a series of three mini-meetups in DC, Norfolk, and Richmond next week. You’ve probably already RSVPed, but I’d like to spend Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday mornings visiting some cool companies in the area. I think I’m already full in Norfolk – someone is dragging us around – but DC and Richmond are wide open.

If you have a cool office, a cool product, or a hardware start-up, we want to hear from you. Are you building an iPhone app or a robot? Let’s talk. Are you building a B2B marketing platform for the Albanian oil industry? Maybe bring your pitch deck to the meet-up. Our time will be short in these cities and I’d like to shoot some cool video so ideally the more visual the better. We’ll have plenty of time to talk at the event that night.

So if you have something for us to see, email us at john@techcrunch.com with the subject “COOL STUFF [city of your choice]” and we’ll try to schedule some meetings. Sound good? Good.

To recap:

Monday, April 9 – DC – RFD – 810 7th St NW – 6pm-10pm (??) – Our first event will be at RFD in NW. These guys have a huge selection of beers on tap and, if we play our cards right, we’ll have a few hours of open bar. If you haven’t RSVPed hop over to Plancast or email me at john@techcrunch.com with the subject “RSVP DC.” Try to include a rough headcount.

Our first sponsors are HomeSnap by Sawbuck, Canvas.co and Create Digital. We’ve just added Applied Predictive Technologies and WeddingWire.

Tuesday, April 10 – Norfolk – We Are Titans Offices – 259 Granby St 3rd Floor – 6pm-10pm – We will begin the night at the We Are The Titans offices, kindly provided by a team of titans who work there, and the perhaps we can move to another location later. Please RSVP hereor email me at john@techcrunch.com with the subject “RSVP NORFOLK.” Try to include a rough headcount. We are also looking for sponsors, so please let me know in a separate, non RSVP email if you’re interested.

Here’s a little bit about our first Norfolk sponsor:

Wednesday, April 11 – Richmond – SnagAJob HQ – 6pm-10pm – 4851 Lake Brook Dr – Finally, we’ll meet in Glen Allen, outside of Richmond, for our final meet-up. Thanks to SnagAJob for donating a space with a bar and some booze. We’re still looking for Richmond sponsors as well, so please email me directly. RSVP hereor email me at john@techcrunch.com with the subject “RSVP RICHMOND.” Try to include a rough headcount.

Here’s a bit about our first Richmond sponsor:

Mogreet, a Los Angeles-based mobile video marketing startup, is today announcing that it has raised $4.1 million in strategic capital. The round was led by Black Diamond Ventures, with participation from existing investors, including DFJ Frontier, Ascend Ventures, Bryant Park Ventures, and Draper Associates. The new infusion of capital brings the startup’s total funding to $14.1 million.

Along with expanding its international presence, Mogreet will be using the funding to support its recently launched product, moShare. Launched in 2006, Mogreet has built a distribution platform for mobile messaging, which specializes in the delivery of rich media, specifically video and MMS, to mobile devices. The startup works with both Fortune 500 companies and SMBs in over 170 countries to help them better engage their audiences. Mogreet currently accounts for over 70 percent of MMS messages sent by marketers in the U.S.

The team said that both SMBs and corporations alike are increasing their mobile marketing budgets to meet the growing demand for MMS capabilities from both marketers and consumers. As a result, the company saw 1,000 percent growth in mobile video distribution last year, as companies and consumers move to evolve their mobile communications from SMS to MMS.

Mogreet is leveraging the growing demand for rich mobile messaging and its domestic share of the MMS market to expand upon the recently launched moShare, which offers a quick way to share videos, photos, songs, articles, and other content to mobile phones. The mobile sharing service, which is built on top of the company’s MMS platform, enables publishers, app developers, bloggers, and advertisers to share their content to any mobile device, regardless of carrier or device type.

Publishers can simply add Mogreet’s share button to their website or blog to share directly to readers’ devices, along with taking advantage of analytics and reporting capabilities to get a better sense of how their content is being shared. The startup believes that, while Facebook and Twitter give consumers and advertisers quick, easy ways to send messages to larger groups of people, publishers prefer one-on-one, more conversational communication with their users. With 95 percent open-rates on those personal messages, Mogreet thinks they can persuade brands to make the switch.

For More on Mogreet, check them out at home here.

With how much TechCrunch and other tech publications cover incubators and accelerators in Silicon Valley and in the U.S., it’s refreshing to occasionally get a glimpse of what’s happening outside North America, especially those places where startup incubation and entrepreneurial activity is on the rise. One such example is a relatively new startup accelerator and seed fund called SeedStartup, which makes its home in Dubai, UAE. SeedStartup focuses on digital media startups, selecting 5 to 10 companies to participate in its 3-month program. Those selected receive $20K to $25K in exchange for 10 percent equity, access to a global list of mentors, as well as networking, and introductions to investors.

While SeedStartup accepts applications from businesses all over the world, it tends to home in on companies that hail from MENA (Middle East, North Africa), and requires its chosen founders to live in Dubai for the duration of the program. The Next Web did a round-up on the accelerator’s first batch of three companies, which you can check out here. SeedStartup’s next program will begin on June 14th, with the application deadline being May 3rd. Since launching, the accelerator has become part of TechStars’ Global Accelerator Network.

SeedStartup was founded by Rony El Nashar (who is also a managing partner), a United States-educated entrepreneur and investor who founded startups in the U.S. before moving back to the UAE to help grow the local entrepreneurial ecosystem, working with a local seed fund before starting his own accelerator.

Rony is dedicated to finding and cultivating tech talent in the Middle East, which he says has seen an explosion of entrepreneurial enthusiasm over the last year. This was also recently evidenced by TC’s own Mike Butcher traveling to Beirut at the end of March for the ArabNet Digital Summit in Beirut, Lebanon. Mike said that ArabNet has become the largest digital event in the region, and this year expanded to 5 days, a startup competition, workshops, included 1,500 delegates — and even a hackathon.

As the Web and web-based business spreads across MENA, Rony has been looking to find ways to fund Middle Eastern entrepreneurs, who still today, in spite of events like ArabNet, have limited seed investment resources for startups. While SeedStartup was designed to begin to address the lack of funding and mentoring, the process starts with education. Especially education from the brightest minds and leaders in the tech sphere — as they are the people that can help get would-be founders excited about taking the entrepreneurial leap of faith.

To aid in that endeavor, Rony recently launched a side project called Cofounder TV, which is meant to be an educational resource for international entrepreneurs — specifically in the form of video. Yes, the site is essentially a curated library of some of the Web’s best entrepreneurial content, designed to enable users to learn from founders, investors, and thought leaders.

“The goal is to educate and inspire,” Rony tells us.

The site is organized into categories, on a variety of different subjects, and offers quick search of its database. It’s like an entrepreneurial YouTube for MENA, or Khan Academy for startups. Obviously, there are quite a few other alternatives, other sites that seek to offer entrepreneurs educational opportunities via video, like BizMixx, or there’s Grovo’s Expert Series, Now I Know, and the awesome Mixergy — to name a few.

But, as to Co-founder TV, Rony tells us that the website has been received very well by publications from Latin America to China, with Asia constituting over 32 percent of the site’s traffic. Cofounder TV is by no means the only video-based entrepreneurial vehicle on the Web, but it’s great to see a connection between the interest in the video resource and the rise of the UAE and MENA as an increasingly sophisticated entrepreneurial hub.

For more, check out SeedStartup here and Cofounder TV here.

SugarCRM, a provider of commercial open source CRM software, has completed a $33 million equity and debt financing round. We’re told around $14 million of the round was equity financing. The investment round was led by New Enterprise Associates and includes participation from new investors Silicon Valley Bank and Gold Hill Capital as well as the company’s current investors Draper Fisher Jurvetson and Walden International. To date, SugarCRM has raised over $60 million in equity funding.

While Salesforce tends to grab the most attention as the cloud-based CRM company, SugarCRM has quietly built a loyal, and growing userbase around its customer relationship management platform for sales teams. SugarCRM applications have been downloaded more than ten million times and currently serve over 1 million users from over 6,000 companies in 192 countries.

SugarCRM, which has been cash flow positive since Q4 2010, saw sales grow 67 percent in 2010, and added more than 2,700 companies to its user base. Coca-Cola, Chevrolet, and Avis are all customers.

Larry Augustin, CEO of SugarCRM, tells us in an interview that his company is solely focused on giving customers a CRM that is intuitive “and enables them to work the way they want to work.” He adds that SugarCRM isn’t just available to be run in the cloud, but can also be available on-premise or in a virtual, private cloud. It’s this flexibility in delivery models that helps set SugarCRM apart as well.

"NEA supports SugarCRM's vision to drive increased CRM adoption by offering affordable and easy to use CRM solutions to its customers," said NEA partner Brooke Seawell, who is joining the company’s board. "We believe SugarCRM is uniquely positioned to serve the market and continue to generate impressive results."

Although SugarCRM has a worthy competitor in Salesforce, Augustin says the company “wins its fair share of the customer CRM deals.” Augustin also said the company didn’t necessarily need to raise new funds, but did so to have some extra cash in the bank for strategic opportunities, potential expansion and for acquisitions.

You may not be familiar with Wikia, but the collaborative media company has been quietly growing into a giant, recently passing IGN, for example, as the largest network of gaming sites on the planet. Led by both its gaming and entertainment verticals, Wikia’s content-driven social network is home to one of the largest and most active communities on the Web. For those unfamiliar, building on the popularity of its non-profit predecessor (Wikipedia), the site allows anyone (even you) to create new communities around any subject they’re passionate about — or participate in one of its 200,000 existing communities — for free.

Wikia now boasts 20 million pages of user generated content, all of which are viewed by 50 million-plus global visitors each month. So, really, if you’ve come across any wiki outside the confines of Wikipedia — be it an article, a video, a review, or a demo — it’s likely that sucker was created by a Wikia user. The open, collaborative nature of Wikia’s content production, minus the hierarchy of a traditional media platform, has proven surprisingly successful in and of itself. Thanks to a simple ad-supported rev model, Wikia CEO Craig Palmer says that the company has managed to remain “profitable for years.”

However, as publishing models change, Wikia is looking to more strategically marry the world of professional content creation with the open, free-for-all of UGC, without fundamentally changing or restricting the formula that got it here. As its communities have been largely disaggregated and separate from one another, Wikia is today officially unveiling its biggest redesign in years, which aims to collect its communities under one, sleek-looking roof while improving both engagement and discovery for a more mainstream audience (i.e. new users).

To do so, the company has launched new category “hub pages” that will curate the site’s content into entertainment, gaming, and lifestyle verticals, which makes it significantly easier for users to interact with pages according to preference and to discover new, previously obscured Wikia content. It’s also a move aimed at more effectively piquing the interest of advertisers, which will be able to expand their footprint beyond individual articles to category verticals and the front page — both of which, as the site’s new entry points, will likely be seeing increased, and more targeted traffic. After all, Wikia is a for-profit enterprise, and advertisers keep the wheels spinning.

All in all, the site’s new look is far more professional in the way it’s visually representing its UGC, giving its portals an editorial, magazine-like interface — a change that may seem drastic to core users, but will be far more familiar in terms of navigation and browsing for first-timers.

The content Wikia will be surfacing on its front page and in each hub will continue to be fueled by the community, through promoted submissions and by way of popularity as measured by the amount of traffic. On top of that, probably the coolest feature of the redesign would be its new remix function, which allows users to shuffle top content with the click of a button, introducing new wikis to browse, etc. (not unlike Wikipedia’s “random page” option).

The new home and hub pages now display current wiki stats, not only making it easier to find out how many people are visiting per month, or the number of edits made on a given day, but to discover trending content, including top picks, popular videos, etc.

Without a doubt, Wikia’s new design has created a much softer landing for new visitors, and it will be up to the hardcore users to determine whether or not their voices still jibe under the new paradigm. The Wikia CEO tells us that he thinks that the site’s new verticals and filtering, in fact, offer a more effective way to make individual voices heard. And that’s really what has made Wikia great, as diving into the depths of communities and individual pages makes one feel as if they’re visiting a meeting of fellow gamers in their basement.

Palmer believes that Wikia’s current trajectory places it in a comparable position to early YouTube. That is to say, the site has a presence, but it really hasn’t established itself as a brand, nor has it created that bullhorn mechanism on behalf of its community. Wikia is sitting on this pandemonium of unique voices, and the CEO thinks it has become imperative to showcase and share the work of those active, and loyal community members. In the long run, Wikia is looking to find ways to bring these users increased exposure, and a more meaningful voice.

In the same way bloggers and YouTube’s videographers have turned passions into careers, Palmer said that the company is set on finding the most effective way to do that for its users. If that means taking a cue from YouTube and creating channels, or offering some sort of hybrid profile, Wikia will likely consider it. But, in the meantime, an aggregated, hub-centered redesign is a good start.

Certainly, the other side of creating a more refined editorial ecosystem is intended to strengthen the site’s appeal to brands and advertisers. With its redesign in place, Wikia will look to expand these relationships, bringing in pre-release content from movie or game studios, for example, to build early, organic excitement for a new title, or increase its reach post-release.

In sum, it provides a telling snapshot of Wikia’s evolution, and it will be interesting to see how the company walks the line between niche and mainstream, and professional content and good, old-fashioned UGC.

For more, check out the new Wikia at home here.