As Facebook pushes ever closer to one billion users, one of the biggest issues it has faced has been backlash from consumers around the areas of privacy and security. Today, the social network is taking two steps in an effort to improve its image around that area, and potentially positioning itself as a software reseller in the process.

It is partnering with Microsoft, McAfee, TrendMicro, Sophos, and Norton/Symantec to enhance its own URL blacklisting system; and it is launching a new service, the Antivirus Marketplace, with these five companies, to offer a selection of antivirus software to protect users even further. That software will be free of charge for the first six months of use.

“We believe that arming our users with anti-virus software will help empower them to stay safe no matter where they are on the web,” the company said in a blog post announcing the news. The AV Marketplace will also be available as a link within the Facebook Security section of the site.

From today, Facebook users will have the option of downloading full versions of antivirus software from these five companies, under free six month trials. After that, users will have to buy the software, an example of Facebook facilitating the sale of computer software to its users.

Meanwhile, Facebook says that its URL blacklist system — the one where a site may end up when a user reports it as “abusive or spammy” — already scans trillions of clicks per day. Now that system will be augmented by blacklist databases from these five companies.

Today’s news is another move in Facebook’s evolution to improve the experience that people have through the social network, and is part of a continuing trend for Facebook to turn to third-parties to do this: that not only lets Facebook choose best-of-breed applications, but also allows for some of the brand credibility from those third parties to rub off on it.

Among past deals, Facebook partnered with Websense in October 2011 to develop a system that checked a link when a user clicked on it to determine whether or not it's safe. If it's not, a message is displayed warning the user that the link is potentially harmful and suggests you return to the previous page.

Facebook also says that the five companies will be contributing blog posts to its Security Blog — information about keeping their data safe and other relevant news about the world of social media security.

Social video browsing app ShowYou has often been referred to as something like a “Flipboard for video content,” but now, that comparison may no longer be as apt. The company today is bringing its signature video grids, which contain all the videos you’ve liked or shared, to a notable new platform: the web. No longer confined to mobile phones and tablets, ShowYou isn’t just an “app” like Flipboard anymore, it’s a service.

Alongside ShowYou’s arrival on the web, the startup has also beefed up its search engine using social signal data to return more accurate and timely results.

ShowYou, in case you aren’t a user, is one of the many new services competing in the social video space. It aggregates the videos your friends are sharing on social networks like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Vimeo, while also offering up other channels featuring popular videos and those from specific publishers or individuals.

Today, the company is tracking over 1 billion pieces of what it calls “social signal data” (e.g. tweets and posts from friends) for nearly 40 million videos. While for iPhone and iPad users, the service has been a fun way to browse, collect and share video content with friends, that content, until now, has remained somewhat trapped in the application. Friends using Android or those without smartphones, couldn’t find and follow your video collections. Now they can.

With the web grids, ShowYou is expanding on the latest version of the iPad app introduced in February, which created “profile grids” for each user to aggregate all of their activity, including both likes and shares of videos on ShowYou and on third-party social services.

These grids have now been ported to HTML5, allowing them to work across any number of devices, including mobile, tablet and PC. However, the website at www.showyou.com isn’t being opened up for everyone –  it’s invite-only to start. Current ShowYou users will be able to invite friends via Facebook or email. Then, using a following model similar to Twitter, ShowYou users can find and follow others in the new web version, or set their profiles to private if they don’t want the videos they share showing up online.

According to founder Mark Hall, the decision to expand to the web is an effort to help grow the service even larger. Already one of the top apps operating in the space, with average sessions clocking in around 30-40 minutes among active users, Hall says the company is focused on driving “durable, organic growth” for the service. ”The launch of Showyou on the web today is the first step we’re taking to accelerate growth,” he says.

“We want to allow all of the people who have our app now to connect with their friends. And not all of them have an iPad or iPhone,” Hall explains. “The web provides a way for people who have the app (and an iPhone or iPad) to connect with their friends and share videos with [their friends] who may not have the app,” he says.  In addition, by building an HTML5 version of the service, ShowYou is now poised to expand to other mobile and tablet platforms, he adds.

Also new today is a improved search engine feature, which goes live across iPhone, iPad and web. The company says results will be more relevant, accurate and timely than it was previously.

The updated version of the ShowYou site and new features are launching this morning, at 9 AM PT.

Automattic, the software company best known for running the for-profit fork of the WordPress blog publishing system, is perhaps the best proof out there that blogging can be a real business.

The company, which was founded in 2005 by 28-year-old WordPress creator Matt Mullenweg, disclosed some big numbers in an interview published today by AllThingsD’s Liz Gannes. Automattic is profitable and on track to make $45 million in revenue this year. WordPress — both through its open source software and the WordPress.com platform — now powers 70 million sites (Disclosure: TechCrunch is one of them, by the way.)

That represents serious growth, even from a near-term perspective. Some 16 months ago in December 2010, Mullenweg told our own Alexia Tsotsis that Automattic’s revenue was around $10 million. At that time, WordPress was powering 30 million publishers.

It makes sense then that Automattic has hired its first full-time finance executive to concentrate on those numbers. Stuart West, who was previously chief financial officer at educational software company Kno, has joined Automattic as CFO. The company has also brought on Paul Sieminski to serve as its first general legal counsel (or, as Mullenweg has characterized the role in his own blog post announcing the executive appointments, “Consigliere/Automattlock.”) Meanwhile, Mullenweg still serves as the company’s president, and the CEO role has been occupied by Toni Schneider since 2006.

Wiggio, an online collaboration service designed for students, has been flying under the radar since raising $2.1 million in funding back in spring of 2010. The company has been slowly and steadily growing its user base, and now reaches over 2,000 universities and 120,000 students groups around the world, as well as several national organizations. Today, the company is also announcing a major milestone: it just hit 1 million users.

In conjunction with this growth news, the platform, which currently offers web conferencing, file sharing, chat, document creation, and more, is now also adding video messaging to its available services. A premium version of Wiggio’s service is entering pilot testing, too.

Founder and CEO Dana Lampert describes Wiggio as the “anti-SharePoint,” explaining that the service has been designed to be dead simple. “If there’s any kind of learning curve involved in getting on a product, it’s going to fail,” he says. “What happens is, if there’s ten people working on a product and eight get it, but two don’t get it, it doesn’t work,” he explains.

And how dead simple is it? Well, for starters, he tests it on 4th graders. Yes, that’s right, Wiggio’s focus group is a bunch of Boston area elementary school students. If they can figure out a new feature, then it’s ready to go. If they get confused, then Wiggio makes adjustments until it’s even easier to use.

Today, the collaboration platform offers the kind of services that companies like Box, WebEx, Yammer, Google Docs and Basecamp now provide, but all under one roof.

There’s also a heavy focus on mobile, says Lampert, which is why the company has designed the product to include several mobile-friendly features like support for SMS and email. For example, one of the service’s more popular features, a listserv tool, is text-messaging enabled, allowing students to receive every post as an SMS text. In addition, the native iPhone application is now being used by 45,000 Wiggio users, and the Android version will arrive in just a few months.

The platform mainly addresses two types of users: the more academic-focused groups like those formed for class projects, study groups, labs, etc. and the student organizations, like sports teams, clubs, and fraternities or sororities. Each student is typically in around three groups, Lampert tells us, as they’re first invited in to join one group, then ending up joining a couple of others once involved. Engagement is also decent, with average session times at 14 minutes and users returning three times per week to contribute content.

As noted above, Wiggio has 2,000 schools now using the software, 600 of which are showing “significant usage,” says Lampert. Not all of Wiggio’s usage is in schools, however, but schools form the majority (80%) of the user base. The company is now seeing some high schools come online, too. Currently, a few notable customers include Harvard University Extension, Habitat for Humanity, Science Olympiad, University of Memphis, and the U.S. Tennis Association.

Recently, the company began piloting its first paid offering, a premium version that allows customers to customize Wiggio with their own branding, while also offering backend analytics surrounding usage. For now, pricing is being handled on a case-by-case basis, but the eventual plan is to charge somewhere around $5-$10 per seat/per year for this version.

Also new is a video blasting feature powered by Tokbox, which allows users to send out video messages to groups which others can respond to by voice, audio or text.

Future plans under consideration (based on user feedback) involve deeper integrations with learning management systems like Blackboard and Moodle, support for single sign-on, and the ability for schools to self-host their own installations.

Wiggio, now a team of eight, is also actively hiring developers, especially in mobile. The plan is to roll out a native iPad app after the Android one goes live. Wiggio is also in need of mobile optimization to make the site work in mobile browsers – parts of the service uses Flash, and the goal is to shift to HTML5 to be more mobile-friendly.

The startup was founded in 2008, after being born out of Cornell University class project. In May 2010, the company raised $2.1 million in Series A financing, led by New Atlantic Ventures, bringing total funding to $2.55 million.

The Sphero is a clever little gadget. It’s instantly addictive made possible by an incredibly intuitive control scheme. In short the little robotic ball is controlled by simply drawing on the connected smartphone’s screen. Users generally get the hang of it within seconds. Obama did. “…Excuse me, give me some space to drive my ball,” the POTUS said.

Yesterday, prior to an event at Boulder’s Coors Event Center, President Obama was greeting the gathered crowd when he ran into Boulder-based Orbotix. After a quick demonstration, Obama took the controls and had a bit of fun with the Orbotix’s Sphero before getting back to his presidential duties. As with most people who play with the Sphero, he seemed mighty impressed and found the whole concept “terrific.”

The Sphero is a $129 robotic ball that’s controlled by a smartphone or tablet. The company developed a large offering of games and apps around the device, making it a truly multifunction gadget rather than just an expensive cat toy. As shown in the video above with President Obama, it’s a whole lot of fun. Spike TV said it best, though, “It’s a new type of gaming system.”

Gary Flake is a cool guy. He’s the CEO and founder of Clipboard, a web clipping service that lets you grab pieces of the Internet and save them in your own curated catalog of web-flavored goodies.

It’s quite intuitive, and as Robin Wauters said at launch time, it’s highly addictive.

The first thing I had to ask Flake was centered around privacy. It’s a growing issue in the industry, and Clipboard in particular likely has access to troves of valuable data with regards to the way we use the Internet. Flake said that as it stands now, there are no intentions to use that data for revenue, or even to take it out of the private realm.

At that point, I couldn’t help but ask about the obvious: Pinterest. See, Clipboard doesn’t necessarily compete directly with Pinterest — the services are fundamentally different in that Pinterest is aspirational images and Clipboard is saved web clippings (utility-based). Even so, a Clipboard redesign in February was strikingly similar to the Pinterest layout.

Flake assured me that his redesign was imagined well before Pinterest hit the scene, and that he really doesn’t see Pinterest as competition at all. As I said before, the services are fundamentally different.

Another interesting tidbit discovered in our chat had to do with Clipboard’s highly impressive list of investors. Of the 14 or so investors, Flake only knew two or three of them around the time of investment. When all is said and done, it came down to the idea. Flake said that it’s such a simple idea, that when you see the product for the first time it really resonates with the users who have this particular need.

And who doesn’t? Everyone sees something on the Internet, whether it be an article, a coupon code, a picture, or an entire website, that they simply have to tuck away to check on later. Clipboard solves that problem, so it’s no wonder that the company is pulling in cash from names like Andreessen Horowitz, Index Ventures, CrunchFund, DFJ, SV Angel / Ron Conway, Betaworks, First Round Capital, CODE Advisors, Founder's Co-Op, Acequia Capital, Vast Ventures, Ted Meisel (former CEO of Overture and now at Elevation Partners), Blake Krikorian (former CEO of Sling and now an Amazon board member), and Vivi Nevo.

It wasn’t that long ago that I complained about cloud fragmentation issues. There were some interesting observations in the comments on that post. Now word comes that the Linux Foundation is hosting CloudOpen, a “new conference to advance openness in the cloud.”

Most of the major players are already committed to participating at CloudOpen: Canonical, Citrix, Dell, Eucalyptus, HP, IBM, Intel, OpenStack, Red Hat and SUSE. From the press release: “Designed for software developers and IT managers responsible for deploying and developing cloud solutions, CloudOpen will feature technical content that includes … big data strategies and open cloud platforms and tools. This conference will also cover open source best practices and how they relate to topics such as company data and APIs.”

This is what the Linux Foundation does best: provide a vendor-neutral common ground for collaboration on advancing the state of the art in Linux and open source technologies. “This conference is built on one belief: open works,” said Amanda McPherson, vice president of marketing and developer services at The Linux Foundation. “We know this from experience and know that the cloud demands it in order to be successful for the long term.”

My first question upon hearing about CloudOpen was: what took you guys so long? “We are getting to the point now that real decisions are being made by customers and vendors,” McPherson told me. “We feel now is the best time for us to provide this neutral forum and also advance the conversation.” She told me that the Linux Foundation evaluates three questions when they see an opportunity to serve the Linux community:

1. Is it being done by someone else?
2. Are we uniquely suited to provide the service?
3. Do we have the resources or can we easily obtain the resources to support it?

The press release seems to focus on companies and projects offering Infrastructure-as-a-Service (Iaas) solutions, so I was curious if the Platform-as-a-Service (Paas) crowd was invited to the discussion. “Both are absolutely invited. We expect vendors representing both offerings to participate,” McPherson confirmed. She went further to say that CloudOpen wasn’t exclusive to Linux Foundation members, but that “it’s definitely open to others and we expect many non members to be involved.”

CloudOpen is taking place August 29-31, concurrently with LinuxCon North America in lovely San Diego, Calif. The early bird price to register for CloudOpen is $400, and gives you full access to all of the LinuxCon North America event, as well. Compared to other Linux and open source conferences, that’s a very reasonable price.

I expect to cover LinuxCon North America, and I’m really looking forward to the CloudOpen conversations.

It seems the Samsung Galaxy Note really is headed to T-Mobile. A pic showing a T-Mobile-branded Note was just posted on TmoNews somewhat confirm a report from earlier this week. The phone here had the standard assortment of T-Mobile apps including T-Mobile Name ID, T-Mobile Mall, T-Mobile TV and My T-Mobile. This thing is for real.

T-Mobile has been hurting for a killer device for sometime. The Galaxy Note could help the carrier regain a bit of its swagger even though it will likely carry the same $299 price as the AT&T version. Of course there still isn’t a projected release date but it’s probably right around the corner.

The Note has been a bit a surprising success for Samsung. The company sold three million of the massive phones during its first three months on the market. Even though it’s a massive the device, for better or worse the Galaxy Note is something different from the rest of the nearly identical Android handsets.

YC-backed new car-buying service CarWoo is partnering up with car comparison site FindTheBest, which operates something like a Kayak.com for hundreds of products and services from smartphones to snow blowers. The partnership means FindTheBest’s Car Comparison tool will now point users over to CarWoo’s service when shoppers are ready to look for a local dealer.

For those unfamiliar with CarWoo, the company operates in the same space as TrueCar, allowing car buyers to specify the make, model, style and color of the car they’re interested in, then receive offers from nearby dealers. Shoppers can also negotiate with those dealers anonymously via phone, email or from the site itself as a part of the service being offered.

Explains CarWoo CEO Tommy McClung, part of his company’s strategy has been to provide online publishers a better car buying experience for their users, and the new FindTheBest partnership is one example of that.

“Today if you head to most automotive websites… pick one, you’ll find forms asking you to fill in your contact information to receive a ‘free price quote’ from a dealer. A consumer thinks they are going to get real quotes form dealers, instead their personal contact information is sold into an ecosystem worth billions of dollars and the consumer is inundated with spam, automated emails from dealers (without price quotes), unwanted phone calls and even spam from affiliated industries (insurance, finance, etc.),” McClung says. “This is the industry we are disrupting.”

He adds that FindTheBest could have partnered with any automotive lead buyers, like Autobytel, Dealix, or AutoUSA, and then easily have made quick bucks by selling shoppers’ information. But the site chose CarWoo instead, because the alternative would have led to a bad experience for their users.

Kleiner Perkins-backed FindTheBest was founded in 2009 by DoubleClick founder and CEO Kevin O'Connor and CeBotics CEO Scott Leonard. Today, its engine allows for comparisons across over 800 different categories. The company is now seeing 7.5 million visits per month, and is still growing.

The CarWoo integration is live on the FindTheBest car comparison site here - just look for the big blue buttons reading “FindTheBest Dealer.”

On the heels of acquiring sales data analytics company Varicent last week, Big Blue is making another buy in the data space today— Vivisimo. Financial terms were not disclosed.

Vivisimo, which has raised $6 million in funding, launched as a spin-off from Carnegie Mellon and applies clustering technology to enterprise search. Vivisimo provides enterprises with search software that helps organizations access and analyze big data across the enterprise. Vivisimo products are available for standalone search applications or as OEM versions embedded within partner applications and solutions. The software automates the discovery of data and helps employees navigate it with a single view across the enterprise.

Big Blue says the combination of IBM’s big data analytics capabilities with Vivisimo software will help “further IBM’s efforts to automate the flow of data into business analytics applications, helping clients better understand consumer behavior, manage customer churn and network performance, detect fraud in real-time, and perform data-intensive marketing campaigns.”

IBM says it will incorporate Vivisimo’s technology into its big data platform.”The winners in the era of big data will be those who unlock their information assets to drive innovation, make real-time decisions, and gain actionable insights to be more competitive,” explains Arvind Krishna, general manager, Information Management, IBM Software Group.

Vivisimo has more than 140 customers in industries such as government, life sciences, manufacturing, electronics, consumer goods and financial services. Clients include Airbus, U.S. Air Force, Social Security Administration, Defense Intelligence Agency, U.S. Navy, Procter & Gamble, Bupa, and LexisNexis among others.

IBM, whose big data platform is based on open source Apache Hadoop, says it is expanding its big data platform to run on other distributions of Hadoop, beginning with Cloudera. Cloudera Hadoop clients can now use IBM’s big data platform to perform analytics and build software applications.

It’s no secret that IBM is bullish on big data and analytics. As The New York Times recently reported, IBM has spent $14 billion purchasing analytics companies as part of its Big Data initiative. And considering the company’s acquisitive nature and deep pockets, we can expect more purchase in the big data arena in the near future.

PayNearMe, an alternative payments product that provides a compelling way for the ‘unbanked’ to use cash payments for online goods, is debuting its first mobile integration today. As you may know, the term “unbanked” refers to consumers who don't have traditional bank accounts or cannot qualify for credit cards. PayNearMe allows people who don’t have or don’t want to use credit or debit cards to purchase products, pay for bills and more with cash at thousands of 7-Eleven stores in the continental U.S.

Here’s how PayNearMe works. With participating partners, e-commerce or merchant sites, consumers can use the PayNearMe option to pay for purchases or debts owed. You simply place your order with PayNearMe and print out the given receipt. You then take that receipt into a 7-Eleven and they scan it and you pay in cash. Once you pay, your order with the retailer or merchant will be fulfilled.

With the new mobile integration, users can choose to pay with their mobile phones instead of printing out a physical receipt. When paying with PayNearMe, users can now click to use their mobile phone. They will receive a link via text or email with a barcode. When this code is scanned at a 7-Eleven store upon payment, the cashier will authorize the transaction and the payment will be completed. No paper receipts necessary.

Already, Greyhound and Progreso Financiero have been using the mobile payments system and have seen increased traction in the PayNearMe product.

As PayNearMe’s CEO Danny Shader explains to me, as more and more consumers are using smartphones, it makes sense to integrate the payments platform onto mobile platforms. And he points to reports that prepaid smartphones are a fast-growing market commonly used by cash consumers and the unbanked.

It makes sense for PayNearMe, which is now growing by 30 percent each month, to start getting into mobile payments. Printed receipts seem to be in the past, and as more and more consumers (including the ‘unbanked’) look to mobile phones as a wallet, PayNearMe could become a more seamless way to pay for goods, bills, and other services.

Once upon a time Michael Arrington broke the news that Facebook was developing its own phone. That was in 2010. However in a followup interview with TechCrunch, Mark Zuckerberg killed the notion, saying they’re pursuing a horizontal strategy that will put a social layer on top of existing platforms. “We're not trying to compete with Apple or the Droid or any other hardware manufacturer for that matter,” he said.

But now, two years later, that strategy may have changed.

A new report hit today stating that Facebook and HTC are co-developing a customized Android smartphone. This phone, said to be developed exclusively for Facebook, would integrate all of the social network’s functions into the mobile platform. Per unnamed industry sources, the device would launch at the earliest in the third quarter of 2012.

Since Arrington’s first post on the device, such a phone has yet to hit the market even though Facebook has worked closely with HTC and INQ on phones with deep Facebook integration. But those were underpowered Android phones with Facebook buttons and not devices Facebook would want to champion. Then, late last year, a new report rekindled the Facebook Phone fire.

The mobile landscape has changed drastically since Zuckerberg shot down our initial report. Smartphones are now outselling feature phones in key markets. Android is the dominant mobile platform and the cost of quality hardware has dropped. Plus, and perhaps the most importantly, the Amazon Kindle Fire has shown that you do not need Google services to be a success.

Today’s report seems to suggest that the so-called Facebook Phone would use a completely customized Android OS. There’s a real possibility that HTC and Facebook will opt for a complete reskinning of the OS, thus forgoing Google services such as Google Play, Gmail, and Google Maps. That might be a deal breaker for some potential buyers, but the Facebook brand is arguably as strong as Google’s. A proper Facebook Phone can standalone.

HTC’s latest handsets show that the manufacturer has upped its game. The hardware is spectacular and HTC’s Sense 4.0 Android overlay is equally as impressive. HTC has the goods to build an industry-leading handset. If this phone really exists, it’s set to be something special.

The latest report states that this phone will not come out prior to the third quarter. Even that target might be optimistic. Given this rumor’s track record, it’s probably best not to delay a phone purchase to hold out for this device.

Cloud storage platform Box has been aggressively targeting and engaging developers in building out an ecosystem around the company’s collaboration and file storage platform. Last fall, Box launched a platform for developers building off of the Box platform, called the Box Innovation Network (/bin). And earlier this year, we learned about Box OneCloud, a mobile cloud and API for the enterprise that allows businesses to access, edit, and share content from their mobile devices. Today, Box is debuting a new, more powerful API for its platform, and is announcing new partnerships with New York City startup incubators General Assembly and TechStars.

Box’s offering for the enterprise has evolved from a simple file storage platform to a collaborative application where businesses can actually communicate about document updates, sync files remotely, and even add features from Salesforce, Google Apps, NetSuite, Yammer and others. The company says 80 percent of the Fortune 500 are using Box; and now has over 10 million users with more than 200 million files accessed via Box each month.

The newest version of Box’s API give developers more granular view of how their application is being used on Box, as well as stronger connections to collaborator discussions. Additionally, Box has reduced the amount of documentation for developers to review when building integrations with the platform. The API is fully RESTful, and the company says it leverages common naming standards and output formats.

The API also includes a new feature called Instant Mode, which makes it easy for developers to connect their applications to Box’s content and collaboration services. Basically, Instant Mode removes the user sign-up process for third party applications connected to Box. And Box has added the its mobile API, OneCloud, to its App Framework. The framework provides developers with new documentation and user interface guidelines to simplify the application development process.

In addition to the 30-plus developers who launched apps on OneCloud in March, another 15 have integrated with the mobile platform, says Box, including CloudOn, Producteev and others.

In an effort to connect to newly formed startups in the enterprise works, Box is partnering with both General Assembly and TechStars in New York City. Box and General Assembly will co-develop an education initiative to foster the creation of successful enterprise software companies. With TechStars Box will dedicate resources to mentoring TechStars startups focused on enterprise software and sponsor the group's HackStars program, which hires experienced developers and designers to work with the TechStars portfolio companies.

In other news, Box’s Aaron Levie was quick to respond yesterday to Google’s launch of its own file sharing and storage platform, Google Drive, explaining that Box offers a more full-fledged collaboration platform for businesses.

As Box looks to grow into a enterprise giant, part of this will involve creating a definitive ecosystem around its platform. Partnerships with startup incubators and new enhancements to APIs are some of the steps the company has to take to create a Facebook-like developer ecosystem within the enterprise.

The day after another monster set of earnings from Apple, the company is continuing the momentum. Today, Apple has announced the dates for its next Worldwide Developers Conference: June 11-15, held in its now-traditional venue, the Moscone West in San Francisco.

Expect the usual wave of speculation leading up to June, especially since Apple is already preparing us for news at the event: "We have a great WWDC planned this year and can't wait to share the latest news about iOS and OS X Mountain Lion with developers," Philip Schiller, Apple's senior vice president of Worldwide Marketing said in a statement.

Given that Apple has become such a juggernaut in the mobile and consumer electronics industries, even those who are not working on its platforms need to pay attention to what the company is doing and saying.

Those with Apple developer IDs can register for tickets here. They are selling for $1,599 each, and are limited to one per person, and five per organization.

But go quick — these events sell out fast, with the last one reaching capacity less than 10 hours after tickets went on sale.

Full release below.

Apple Worldwide Developers Conference to Kick Off June 11 at Moscone West in San Francisco

CUPERTINO, California—April 25, 2012—Apple today announced that it will hold its annual Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) June 11 through June 15 at San Francisco's Moscone West. At this year's five-day conference, developers will learn about the future of iOS and OS X, allowing them to build incredible new apps. WWDC will also feature more than 100 technical sessions presented by Apple engineers as well as the popular Apple Design Awards, a showcase of the most outstanding apps from the past year.

"We have a great WWDC planned this year and can't wait to share the latest news about iOS and OS X Mountain Lion with developers," said Philip Schiller, Apple's senior vice president of Worldwide Marketing. "The iOS platform has created an entirely new industry with fantastic opportunities for developers across the country and around the world."

Developers will be able to explore the latest innovations, features and capabilities of iOS and OS X Mountain Lion and learn how to greatly enhance the functionality, performance, quality and design of their apps. Developers can even bring their code to the labs and work with Apple engineers, applying development techniques and best-practices to enhance their apps.

Activities at Apple's WWDC 2012 include:

• more than 100 technical sessions presented by Apple engineers on a wide range of technology-specific topics for developing, deploying and integrating the latest iOS and OS X technologies;
• 100 hands-on labs staffed by more than 1,000 Apple engineers providing developers with code-level assistance, insight into optimal development techniques and guidance on how they can make the most of iOS and OS X technologies in their apps;
• the opportunity to connect with thousands of fellow iOS and OS X developers from around the world—last year more than 60 countries were represented;
• engaging and inspirational lunchtime sessions with leading minds and influencers from the worlds of technology, science and entertainment; and
• Apple Design Awards which recognise iPhone, iPad and Mac apps that demonstrate technical excellence, innovation and outstanding design.

Please go to the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference 2012 website (developer.apple.com/wwdc) to purchase tickets, as well as for updates and more information.

Developers who are unable to attend this year's conference can access and watch all technical sessions from the Apple Developer website (developer.apple.com/videos) as soon as they are posted for free.

Apple designs Macs, the best personal computers in the world, along with OS X, iLife, iWork and professional software. Apple leads the digital music revolution with its iPods and iTunes online store. Apple has reinvented the mobile phone with its revolutionary iPhone and App Store, and is defining the future of mobile media and computing devices with iPad.

This post is written by our regular contributor Natasha Starkell, the CEO of GoalEurope, the outsourcing advisory firm and a publication about outsourcing, innovation and startups in Central and Eastern Europe. Twitter @NatashaStarkell. Gplus.to/natashastarkell.

Jelastic, a U.S./Ukrainian/Russian provider of a cloud-based deployment platform for Java apps, has closed a $2 million Series A funding round from Russia and CIS-focused Almaz Capital Partners and Foresight Ventures, a global fund with a bias towards Russia and the US.

Jelastic, which competes with Heroku and Google App Engine, offers developers of Java applications a hosted platform based around standard software stacks, which it says helps avoid lock-ins and code changes. The company launched its public beta in October 2011, and since then has picked up over 15,000 unique users.

The product is available in the US through Servint, in Europe through dogado / HostEurope and Rusonyx in Russia.

Jelastic’s basic idea is to take a different approach to the hosting and deploying of Java apps: Normally, in order to host an application, one goes to, for example, Amazon Web Services, but configuring virtual machines manually takes time. This means developers have to install and maintain an operating system and application servers, instead of spending time on improving the core product.

According to Jelastic COO Dmitry Sotnikov and its Chief Evangelist Judah Jones, what developers want to do is create an app, publish it, quickly iterate over the application to improve it based on customer feedback and make a lot of money. This means spending time on admin tasks every time the application needs to be changed, or when different servers were required to serve the demand. Before Jelastic, in most cases server administration and scaling had to be done manually.

With Google App Engine or Heroku, one gets locked in, says Sotnikov, because the application code has to be written so that it works with one or the other. The only way out is to rewrite the application for another platform. For example, Google App Engine has its own custom app servers, and using them means reducing application compatibility. If the application developer is located outside of the US, using either service means hosting in the US, which leads to roadblocks such as compliance with the US Patriot Act. (See further comparison of Jelastic with Heroku on the Jelastic blog here, and with Google App Engine here.)

Amazon offers basic configuration automation capabilities via AWS Elastic Beanstalk, but according to the recent statement by its CTO Werner Vogels at Cloud Expo Europe, Amazon does not plan to create a major PaaS product, but rather to concentrate on providing the hosting infrastructure instead.

Jelastic may be offered by any hosting provider as a hosted service to avoid lock-ins to a particular supplier. One can choose standard software stacks and an autoscale option, and the Jelastic platform does it all automatically, without pushing developers into any particular way of doing things. The company supports all the main software stacks and different databases. As for time savings, according to the new investor, the co-founder and the managing partner of Almaz Capital Alexander Galitsky, Jelastic cuts deployment time from hours to minutes.

Another platform-as-a-service in application deployment is Open Source Cloud Foundry from VMWare, which is offered for a number of programming languages including applications written on Spring Java. Cloud Foundry is not available commercially yet.

According to Foresight Ventures general partner Andrey Kazakov, the PaaS market is expected to be worth $9.8 billion over the next five years.

Jelastic’s co-founders Ruslan Synytskyy, Constantin Alexandrov and Alexey Skutin created their business out of necessity: the three had been working together remotely on a different project, but what they found was that an ever-increasing amount of their time was spent on hosting tasks. Google App Engine put restrictions on the tools they could use, and even on the code itself. So the team pivoted into the direction of developing tools for application deployment.

In 2010, Runa Capital, the global venture fund with origins in Russia, invested $500,000 into the company. Interestingly, it was in the office of Runa Capital that the founders of Jelastic first met in person.

Runa’s founding partner, Serguei Beloussov, is also a founder of Parallels, one of the leading global virtualization technology companies, and an advisor to Jelastic. The fund helped the team understand the hosting market, and define its distribution channels.

Google is the undisputed search giant at the moment, with some 92 percent of all searches passing through its engines worldwide at the moment. But when it comes to what browsers seem to be driving the most search queries, Google’s platforms, surprisingly, are not in the lead.

According to research out today from the ad network Chitika, when analyzing web browsing traffic, Apple’s iOS mobile platform drives the highest proportion of search queries: 54 percent of all iOS web traffic is devoted to search, the company says. Its Macintosh OS is the second-most search-friendly: some 48 percent of all web traffic on Macs is in the form of search queries. Both are well above the average percentage of search queries across all major platforms, which stands at 36 percent, says Chitika.

And although you would have thought that Google would have optimized Android to be as search-focused as possible, it only places third on the list, with 43 percent of all web traffic on the Android platform dedicated to search queries.

Similarly, Microsoft, which has been trying hard to get its Bing searches to break through the Google stronghold, is actually only seeing 32 percent of web traffic on its platform dedicated to searches.

Linux sees the smallest number of searches of all at 14 percent. And while Chitika doesn’t answer why Google and Microsoft’s platforms are not seeing as many search queries as Apple’s, it does have a possible explanation for why Linux rates the lowest: “Linux devices tend to be used for operational and development purposes.” I guess developers don’t need to search as much as average consumers.

This theory might explain the lower numbers on Windows, too: Microsoft’s OS has huge traction among enterprises and they may be using their browsers less for searching and more for applications than other platforms.

And extrapolating this even further, this could also explain why Apple is doing so well: although Apple is making some headway into the consumer market, it’s first and foremost popular with consumers, who in Chitika’s view seem to drive more search queries than those using browsers for professional purposes.

Chitika’s numbers are not only an insight into how certain platforms do (or don’t) drive search queries, but the data has a direct relevance to how marketers manage online campaigns, and specifically which platforms they may focus more of their efforts.

But as with all data from ad networks you should take the results with a good-sized grain of salt — a Google AdSense analysis, for example, may well throw out a very different picture of online activity.

Chitika, which says that it analyses hundreds of millions of ad impressions on its network to mine this data, also provides some figures on how local search — for local services or news, for example — is faring as a percentage of all searches. Here, too, Apple’s mobile iOS scored the highest, with 36 percent of all searches on the platform dedicated to local results. It ties with Linux, also at 36 percent, with Android at 28 percent.

Unsurprisingly, the platforms more likely to be tied to physical locations, Macintosh and Windows, see a lower proportion of their searches focused on local results, at 23 percent and 19 percent respectively.

[Image Kara Allyson, Flickr]

Cloud storage and backup service Symform has raised $11 million led by WestRiver Capital, with participation from existing investors OVP and Longworth Capital.

The Symform Cloud Storage Network provides businesses with unlimited offsite cloud storage and backup services. Symform says its global network encrypts, shreds, and geo-distributes data, providing a more secure and and higher-performing cloud data storage and backup service. In fact, Symform is a global peer-to-peer network for data storage, where users contribute excess local storage to the network in exchange for free or flat-fee cloud storage.

Basically, members contribute unused server space equal to the amount they consume in the storage cloud. Symform handles the day-to-day management of network security and administration of the storage cloud.

Symform has active users in 138 countries, up from 46 at the end of 2011. In the first quarter of 2012, the company grew customer accounts by more than 100% quarter-over-quarter, while the number of devices and data files stored on the Symform network jumped by more than 50 percent during the same period.

So I am sitting here staring at this New York Times article and it is titled “Apple Chief's Offhand Comment Spawns Internet Quip,” which is probably one of the most ridiculous news headlines I’ve ever seen, bar this. The word “Quip” here is probably the issue, because who says that? Really who says that?

Also, I wish we too had covered Shaw’s Windows 8 tweet because that is hilarious. I’m pretty sure MG would have made a masterpiece of it.

must be a typo. it’s not a toaster/fridge. It’s a toaster/oven. Those seem pretty popular. Just saying. #win8 #toasterovenFTW—
Frank X. Shaw (@fxshaw) April 24, 2012

You may know TED, not as the guy from marketing, but as the nonprofit organization devoted to “Ideas Worth Spreading” — or as the set of global conferences, Talks, and videos that touch on the many heady, relevant issues surrounding Technology, Entertainment, and Design. As an increasingly powerful medium through which the world’s experts share their hard-won knowledge, TED is also an educator. In March, the organization launched the first phase of its “TED-Ed” initiative, in practice a series of a dozen short animated YouTube videos “created for high school students and lifelong learners,” in the big picture an invitation to teachers to collaborate with TED to create more effective video lessons that can be used in classrooms.

Tonight, TED is announcing the second phase of its education initiative — a website that lives on TED.com, which is designed to enable teachers to create unique lesson plans around its video content. As TED’s curator Chris Anderson wrote in March, the platform is not meant to build an exhaustive online university, with entire curricula on video. Khan Academy and others are already well down that path. Instead, TED-Ed aims to harness the talent of the best teachers around the globe by giving them tools that spark and facilitate learning.

Since launch, TED-Ed’s YouTube channel and its corresponding call to educators and animators to submit lesson ideas and animations has attracted 2.4 million views, 42K subscribers, and 3K comments, and more importantly, the interest of both educators and brands. The new TED-Ed site was built thanks to a $1.25 million commitment from Kohl’s Department Stores(!), and optimizes TED content for use in classrooms, boardrooms, and educational settings.

The new site, which launches in beta, will initially only contain a few dozen videos, as it’s really intended for illustrative purposes, says TED-Ed “Catalyst” Logan Smalley. Since each video on the site is mapped via tagging to subjects taught in schools and is accompanied by materials that assist teachers and students understand the video lesson, this is more about what teachers can do with those lessons.

Those supplementary materials include multiple-choice and open-answer questions, and links to relevant web resources on the video’s topic. But Smalley says that the real draw is that the site allows teachers to flip the content — meaning that they can edit or add to those materials as they see fit. Doing so automatically renders a new, private web page, which the teacher can then distribute and use to track students’ progress on the assignment.

TED’s new website also lets educators create lessons from scratch using any TED-Ed video that allows third-party embedding (most of them) and distribute them to a wider audience, with the best of those new videos being featured on TED-Ed. The goal of this is to make “flip teaching” — in which teachers assign homework on video, something that’s difficult for most teachers to do — much easier.

As the site is still in beta, TED will continue to add new features and content in the coming months (the site currently has about 65 videos), and expects to launch the site in full in time for the start of the school year in September.

In regards to the goal of TED-Ed’s new site, Smalley described it like this:

The goal of TED-Ed is for each great lesson to reach and motivate as many learners as possible. The new TED-Ed website goes a step further, allowing any teacher to tailor video content, create unique lesson plans, and monitor students' progress. By putting this new technology to use, we hope to maximize time in class and give teachers an exciting tool for customizing – and encouraging – learning.

For more, check out TED-Ed’s new site here, or find TED at home here.

Right now there’s a cutthroat battle between social marketing platforms to represent the world’s biggest brands. In hopes of seducing dollars from offline and clients from competitors, social marketing platform FanBridge has just hired away Buddy Media’s GM of lifestyle brands David Dowd. Previously the head of branded content biz dev for Google, his experience courting fashion, retail, luxury and other companies there and at Buddy Media will give him the edge as FanBridge’s new VP of brands.

Selling big brands on the future is tough. There’s plenty of social skeptics still clinging to TV. Many companies aren’t shifting their whole marketing budgets to digital, but that’s the direction the money is flowing. Be it Buddy Media, FanBridge, or their many competitors, those who can lock down trend-setting clients and get positioned for the coming wave will surf their way to multi-million dollar contracts.

For background, FanBridge powers digital brand promotion with custom landing pages, branded apps for social network Pages, and an email marketing platform. Dowd will be managing the latter, FanBridge’s Social Digest, which lets web celebs and brands automatically send an email of their top content like photos and videos to their email list each week. Dowd is tasked with getting more brands using the product, and paying for ad space on the digests sent by other clients that reach 8 million people.

“Branded entertainment is a massive, $51 billion market” says Dowd. He’s not the only one who sees it, judging by the massive rounds social marketing platforms have been raising. Buddy Media raised a $54 million Series B, Vitrue took a $17 million Series C, Wildfire snagged a $10 million Series B, and thisMoment pulled in a $7.3 million Series A. In comparison, the $2 million FanBridge raised a year ago seems small, but it was already cash-flow positive at the time. All these companies are constantly vying to sign “The World’s Top 10/100/1000 Brands”, so expect more poaching of people like Dowd that come packing direct relationships with sought-after clients.