CareZone has been busy discovering a few key markets since launching in February, chief executive Jonathan Schwartz tells me. And the results are good enough to warrant a big round of funding: nearly $13 million from New Enterprise Associates, Catamount Ventures, and Schwartz himself.

Founded as an intranet for people who are taking care of aging parents, children, or anyone else in need of special attention, it has connected with communities around autism, Parkinson’s disease, and other illnesses.

But the service, which includes user profiles, a message board, and features for tracking medicine consumption, is getting used in different ways by each group — that’s resulting in new directions for the product. “Each community we talk to gives us input about what’s unique. Those with Parkinson’s tend to take the same medicine and step up dosage over time. That’ll fold into medication tracking.”

Meanwhile, he says, “The autism community is much more subjective. It’s been vocal about wanting journal entries that can be tagged, to allow caregivers to note diet, behavior changes and other trends in a more subjective way.”

Usage patterns are also changing as the product matures. The average number of Beloveds [those being cared for] climbs over time, he says. “Now that you’re taking care of a child, you might as well use it to take care of dad.” The ratio of caregiver to beloveds starts off close to 1, but then goes up as the caregiver begins using it for more beloveds, or adds others to help them out. The communities themselves are also helping to drive new users, Schwartz adds, like Autism Speaks talking about it on its Facebook page.

So, the new funding. This first venture round is going towards engineer hiring in San Francisco and Seattle, and product and partner development. New features are coming, that include more granular security for managing your parent’s bank accounts/passwords, and Spanish-language translation.

Also as a result of the funding, Schwarts (the former CEO of Sun Microsystems) is bringing on his old CTO, current NEA partner Greg Papadopolous. Catamount, meanwhile, is adding partner James Joaquin, who met Schwartz back when they both worked at Apple. So, an old crew is getting back together to go after a big problem — but something a little closer to home.

The HTC Titan II is a symbol for an excellent partnership. I love HTC hardware and I love Windows Phone. It should be a match made in heaven, but unfortunately it’s not.

John and I sat down in the studio yesterday with the giant 4.7-inch hunk of glass and plastic, and we came away with pretty negative sentiments toward the device.

John thinks it’s too big, which seems to be his usual complaint these days.

My argument is a bit more geeky. To start, the Titan II is made of soft-touch plastic, rather than the aluminum unibody frame we saw on the original Titan. This is actually not that big of a deal. Sure, I’d prefer aluminum, but HTC always finds a way to make sure its hardware feels premium, so that’s no biggie.

What I’m really perturbed by is the way that Windows Phone and HTC came together. First of all, Windows Phone requires its partners to build hardware with a 480×800 resolution. On the 4.3-inch Lumia 900, this is tolerable. On a 4.7-inch display like the Titan II, it’s not.

HTC busted out one of the first-ever double-digit MP phone cameras, at 16-megapixels. This is wonderful, and the camera works just fine, but I never found myself snapping a pic and saying, “Whoa!”. I had expected the doubling of our standard 8-megapixels to be immediately noticeable, but it wasn’t. Images didn’t look any crisper, and while the phone did a tad better in low-light settings, it simply didn’t live up to my expectations.

In short, we both give the Titan II a die.

Look for a full review later this week.

Social enterprise software maker Socialtext is today announcing having received strategic investment from Bedford Funding that will now see the service joining the Peoplefluent family of products. Bedford Funding, for those unaware, is a $1.4 billion tech investment fund and owner of Peoplefluent, the maker of Talent Management software for business customers.

Following the investment, Socialtext will be integrated into Peoplefluent’s own Human Capital Management (HCM) Suite, which focuses on offering tools to help companies recruit better. With the Socialtext integration, employees on the suite will be able to collaborate with each other and their greater enterprise, the company says.

Eugene Lee, Socialtext CEO, will remain CEO of Socialtext but will now report directly to Peoplefluent Chairman and CEO Charles S. Jones.

Founded in 2002, Socialtext was an early player in the social enterprise space, offering a number of products including a Yammer-like microblogging service, blogs, wikis, social profiles and spreadsheets. The company’s software has been offered both as a cloud service as well as an on-site appliance-based solution, and supports integration with traditional systems in the CRM and ERP space. To date, over 6,500 businesses have signed up for Socialtext, including Egon Zehnder, Getty Images, Symantec, Meredith Corporation, NYU Stern, OSIsoft, and Epitaph Records.

Peoplefluent, meanwhile, now supports over 5,100 organizations ranging from SMB shops to global corporations. The company today has 5 million users in 214 countries worldwide.

Since Socialtext is a private company, it chose to not disclose the terms of the deal. The company, however, had previously raised $19.4 million in funding from angels and VCs, including Draper Fisher Jurvetson.

As for why Socialtext is making the shift to join forces with Peoplefluent? The company says it was the right move in terms of being able to further grow the business. And for Peoplefluent, the investment was just a fit, says Mr. Jones. “We are investing in Socialtext to help solidify its leadership position in enterprise social software. Our recent strategies have focused on creating solutions for our customers that enable greater employee engagement and collaboration across the enterprise,” he says.

Both companies say they share a vision for a fully connected internal knowledge sharing network, and Bedford Funding saw this as a strategic investment that will help Peoplefluent fulfill its mobile social collaboration strategy in particular.

Socialtext will continue to operate under its brand name, and existing customers should not be impacted by the deal, the company reports.

Even though we still don’t know when RIM will get around to launching it, CEO Thorsten Heins gave us a few brief glimpses at what BlackBerry 10 would be able to do during his keynote address at the BlackBerry World conference.

But what’s that? You missed the keynote? Well, just for you, here’s the video that Heins played during his time on stage that shows off what the company’s forthcoming mobile operating system could look like when it officially launches later this year.

Now, there’s plenty of time for RIM to change things before the operating system officially debuts on a BlackBerry smartphone, but the teaser video shows off a handsome, simple UI that I hope makes it into the final builds.

How close the video actually comes to accurately depicting the current state of BlackBerry 10 is still up in the air though — the pre-release Dev Alpha device runs on a modified (not to mention stripped down) version of the PlayBook OS, and RIM’s Vivek Bhardwaj wouldn’t show off the newer software build on his own testing device when we visited RIM in Waterloo last week.

We’ve explored some of the features spotted in the video (like the keyboard) in a bit more depth too, so take a peek if you haven’t yet had your fill of BlackBerry 10′s new tricks.

Electronic Freedom Fighters and knee-jerk reactionaries: prepare your big drums because here comes the cause of the week. We learned about Gatekeeper, Apple’s app signing solution that ensures “rogue” apps can’t infect your computer, a few months ago when the company announced the coming of a new OS, Mountain Lion. Developers recently received a note reminding them to begin implementing Gatekeeper features or, well, nothing bad will happen:

There are two ways to think about this. As an IT guy, I see this as a golden ticket to malware-free machines. If my fleet of iMacs or Macbooks is protected – ostensibly – by Gatekeeper, I can rest easy knowing that no unsigned applications can run and ruin my machines. This obviously ignores the fact that there is very little malware for OSX anyway and that it’s trivial, provided you know the password, to bypass Gatekeeper. However, for the vast majority of my users it is a boon.

The “It’s My Machine” crowd will be up in arms because this now suggests there will be a time – maybe soon, maybe not so soon – that Apple will require everything to be signed. Imagine having to jailbreak your laptop and you get what they’re on about. It’s inconvenient, insulting, and patently silly.

Increased control over app installation is an acquired taste. If you weren’t actively using computers in the late 1990s and early aughts, you’d probably never see the horrors that much malware wreaked on Windows machines. The horrors of out-of-control DirectX extensions, nagging adware, and poorly-written spyware essentially forced programmers to ask permission for everything in later versions of Windows and OS X. And that’s fine. I’d rather be able to drop into the Terminal and futz around with my OSes core files while simultaneously being protected from junk apps that may try to steal or break my computer.

Computer users need to pick their battles wisely. It can be argued that Apple’s decision not to allow “homebrew” iOS apps has stifled innovation and you can also argue that the vast majority of iOS users neither care nor are aware of the homebrew scene. Like the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park, homebrew finds a way. If past experience is evidential, the possibility that Apple will be able to totally lock down what you can and can’t install on your Macs is scant at best.

Windows 8 also has controls in place to ostensibly improve the experience. Although they aren’t signing apps – yet – it’s bound to happen.

Gatekeeper, like cod liver oil and Brussels sprouts, may go down rough but, in the end, I think it’s good for us.

Whether you have $10,000 or $10 million dollars, trying to find help to manage your investments can be a minefield.

Mid-level financial advisory firms have come under scrutiny for somewhat shady practices — so even though you can certainly find very good advisers there, it can be a crap shoot. Meanwhile, many of the industry’s top-notch advisers deal only with the accounts of super wealthy people — and even then, it can be difficult to trust that they really know what they’re doing, and have your best interests in mind (as Mark Cuban has written, “If the broker had a clue, he/she wouldn’t be a broker, they would be on a beach somewhere.” Cheeky, but it kind of makes sense.) And each person’s financial situation is unique, so one-size-fits-all advice from books and websites on investing just don’t quite cut it.

Enter SigFig. Launching in public beta mode today, SigFig is a web application that tracks all of your various investments — bank accounts, 401k plans, IRAs, stock holdings, and the like — and gives tailored recommendations about your portfolio’s performance and changes that you could make. The software is really powerful, and the user interface design is super slick.

It’s a very visual product, so SigFig’s co-founders Mike Sha and Parker Conrad came to TechCrunch TV to give a detailed walk-through, which you can watch in full in the video embedded above (you can also click on the images embedded in this post to enlarge them.)

The Run-Down

Here’s how it works: You plug your brokerage accounts into SigFig, by giving it your usernames and passwords, a blind verification process during which SigFig never actually sees your personal sign-in data. SigFig also says it is encrypted by 256-bit SSL security, “the same level banks and brokerages use,” and is verified by three separate independent security firms.

For users, SigFig is completely free. The company makes money by taking a commission on new investments you decide to make through the site’s recommendations, but that’s not on a pay-to-play model. SigFig only surfaces what the best investments are based on their value, and funds can’t pay SigFig to have privileged ranking in recommendations.

Disrupting The Middlemen

In a way, it seems to me that SigFig is doing to the financial planning industry what airline and hotel booking websites such as Orbitz did to the travel planning industry back in the 1990s, and what property search sites such as Zillow and Trulia did to the real estate industry in the 2000s. It’s a space where individual gatekeepers — in this case, financial advisers and brokers — have held the information and power for far too long. The data itself should be free, and now that we have software that can help parse it, it can now go directly to consumers who can make their own decisions.

The thing is, SigFig does not completely want to rid the world of financial advisers. The site will refer you to local financial advisers that it has vetted, and it plans to add more to its network going forward.

In this way, it is more like Trulia and Zillow (which try to work with real estate agents, rather than replace them) than it is like flight and hotel search sites (which were pretty much the death knell of travel agents.) SigFig is a dashboard that lets you personally monitor your portfolio, whether or not you have a financial planner also managing it. It isn’t an either/or solution.

Timing Is Everything

The SigFig product is new, but the company has been around for a while: It’s the same team that made the financial Q&A site and portfolio tracker Wikinvest. The company, based in San Francisco, has raised $8 million in venture capital and has 40 full-time employees.

SigFig’s launch comes at a good time. Right now as tech IPOs abound, there are a good number of data-driven people who are coming into money. They’re no doubt being pitched by financial planners, and if they use them that’s great — but they may also want to use a tool like SigFig to keep a handle on their financial situation themselves.

SigFig provided TechCrunch with a number of invites to its beta mode, so go here if you want to check it out.

EXCLUSIVE-Startup Newvem, which offers a SaaS based service for Amazon/AWS customers that aims to help businesses spend less money and gain more value from Amazon's cloud infrastructure, has raised $4 million in funding from Greylock Partners with participation from Index Ventures and Eric Schmidt's Innovation Endeavors, as well as angel investors, including David Strohm, George Kadifa, and Maurice Werdegar. As part of this financing round, Greylock’s Erez Ofer is joining the Newvem board of directors.

Basically, Newvem’s KnowYourCloud Analytics is a free SaaS solution for Amazon AWS customers, that provides a 360-degree view of AWS cloud usage, revealing issues and anomalies in their cloud, and recommending actionable insights that help solve not just cost efficiency, but security, availability, and utilization issues.

Newvem will analyze and determine whether a user's environment is meeting expectations from a cost, availability and security perspective and detect and notify where it is not up to par. The app is built for Business Managers, IT Managers and Dev Ops to "get to know" their clouds, so they can better see what resources are being used and not used.

Cloud spending can be expensive and Newvem aims to help users pinpoint where to optimize their resource usage and budget consumption. Integrated with AWS, Newvem tracks down-to-the-minute resource usage, learns the behavior of every resource, and identifies service level variations and life-cycle events.

You can see some of the common mistakes that companies make when spending on Amazon Web Services here. These include picking oversized instances, provisioning too many instances, failing to make the right trade-offs when selecting instance types and leaving instances running idle.

In the future, Newvem will continuously and automatically gather numerous streams of cloud operational data, analyze and learn the usage patterns, automatically detecting potential problems, pinpointing anomalies, and identifying trends in cloud deployment. Basically, the startup analyzes all of this data from a multitude of sources and recommends where you can allocate or not allocate resources to optimize spending.

Newvem was founded by Zev Laderman, who has sold two IT companies, including Aduva to Sun Microsystems and Tradeum to VerticalNet; and Ilan Naslavsky; a former Lead Engineer at Sun.

Laderman tells us that since the launch of its free products, 300 customers are using KnowYourCloud Analytics, which is currently in private beta. The new funding will be used to build out the SaaS’ analytics engine to provide additional insights in what provides value for customers.

In the future, Newvem will be expanding to other public cloud services including Rackspace, Microsoft Azure, HP Openstack and others. “The plans are to take current service to to other public services but we still see so much growth in Amazon and are focused on becoming deeper and broader in analyzing AWS data,” Laderman explains. He adds that Newvem also want to tackle hybrid cloud platforms.

There are a number of startups that want to help companies save money on AWS and other cloud services. But Newvem has a compelling take on optimizing cloud spend, considering the data analysis angle. And the company calls their approach “analytics-driven cloud management.”

Get Satisfaction was built around the importance of community to businesses. Now, with the launch of a new product called Get Satisfaction Engage, it wants to make those communities embeddable anywhere.

Basically, Engage is a new architecture for Get Satisfaction widgets, turning them into customizable versions of a company’s Get Satisfaction community. People can browse the new widgets without leaving whatever web page they’re on. That means all the discussion among a company’s customers, users, and fans will become more useful to people who aren’t a part of that community — including in a several contexts outside beyond the customer support arena where Get Satisfaction first made its name.

“You can infuse conversation into all of your web assets,” says CEO Wendy Lea.

Lea walked me through a couple of use cases last week. For one, community can become marketing tool, so that when people visit your website, they can browse through all the discussions about your brand and you products. Or it can become useful in e-commerce — where, at the moment someone is thinking about buying a product, they can actually ask the community any lingering questions, and browse the questions that have been asked and answered already.

The Get Satisfaction team also showed me the new widget creation process. One of the goals, they said, was to make it possible to create the widget without going to your IT department for help. You choose from six different widget templates, select which community components to include, and customize the look to match your company’s branding. You can also hide certain types of content, so that, for example, visitors to your website don’t see complaints. The whole process should only take a few minutes, resulting in a few lines of code that you add to your site.

Engage is part of a larger strategy called Get Satisfaction Anywhere, which aims to bring customer engagement to, yes, anywhere on the Web. One of the next steps, Lea says, is build more integration with CRM products.

Get Satisfaction says there are now more than 4 million people participating in 65,000 communities. For existing customers, Get Satisfaction plans to support the existing widget architecture for another six months while companies migrate to the new system.

Y Combinator alum Crocodoc is debuting a new technology today that aims to bring an enterprise-grade HTML5 document embedding service for Microsoft Office and PDF files to web-based products.

Crocodoc launched in 2010 to kill off Acrobat. The startup’s initial Flash-based technology allowed you to upload a PDF, and receive a version of the same document in your browser, which you could then share with coworkers and annotate with notes, highlighting, text, and a pen tool, with changes that show up to other users in real-time. Last year, Crocodoc launched this technology in HTML5 for mobile embedding.

Today, Crocodoc is debuting a new version of this HTML5 embedding technology specifically designed for the scale and demand of consumer and business web and mobile applications. The startup says that using Crocodoc, documents can be embedded into any web or mobile app using a simple iFrame or JavaScript library (no plugins, downloads, or desktop software required). The technology features fast, crystal-clear rendering, and advanced security, including 256-bit document encryption, on-premise storage options, and multiple deployment options including SaaS and private cloud.

Customers can also customize the appearance and behavior of Crocodoc's viewer and access built-in commenting, highlighting, and drawing tools.

Already, Dropbox, LinkedIn, Yammer, and SAP are using the startup’s document embedding technology. For example, Dropbox uses Crocodoc's HTML5 document viewing solution to allow their users to view documents in their web browsers and mobile devices without having to download large files or use desktop software (you can see an example here). Via LinkedIn’s Recruiter product, Crocodoc enables recruiters to upload candidates' resumes in Word and PDF format without having to download files and open them using desktop software.

Founder Ryan Damico explains that licensing the technology was an afterthought last year, but the company become inundated with requests from companies to use the embedding technology. The startup saw a larger opportunity to go after a licensing model with companies like Dropbox and others.

Crocodoc has raised funding from Y Combinator, SV Angel, Paul Buchheit, Joshua Schachter, Dave McClure, Steve Chen and XG Ventures.

TechCrunch Disrupt is all about shining the spotlight on exciting startups. But starting at this year’s New York show, we’re including hardware startup in the mix. After an initial call over the weekend, spots are filling up quickly, but there is still room for several more.

Hardware Alley will run alongside Start-Up Alley on the last day of Disrupt, May 23rd. We’re looking for promising hardware startups. Got a disruptive Kickstarter project? An innovative take on beer kegs? Perhaps a modern-day ornithopter. Whatever it is, we want to give you a chance to show it off to the best and brightest in the tech world.

Hardware Alley will be up and running on May 23rd. Hardware start-ups will be provided a 24-inch cocktail table, WiFi, power and two passes to the show for that day.

For pricing and more information, contact me at Matt@TechCrunch.com with the email subject of I Want To Be In Hardware Alley. Be sure to include a brief description of your product and link to more information. Act quickly. There are only a limited number of spots.

Parents looking for a curated selection of music and videos that’s a little more kid-friendly than YouTube have another option now, thanks to the launch of Jitterbug.tv. The new iPad app is the first subscription-based music service for kids, and is targeting the 2-7 age range. Included in the app are videos and music from top kids artists like 23 Skidoo, The Jimmies, Laura Veirs, Milkshake Music, The Verve Pipe (yes, they’re a kids’ band now), Recess Monkey, and Gustafar Yellowgold.

I know, I know. If you don’t have kids, you’re like who the heck…wait, Verve Pipe? What? But if you are a parent of a young one, you’ll recognize at least a few of those names. (Sadly).

The app is reminiscent of another one we briefly reviewed, called Happly for iPad. Like Happly, the new Jitterbug app serves up a curated selection of videos, but Happly is focused on more educational fare pulled from YouTube, which it combines with other content, like stories and games. Jitterbug, meanwhile, is all about the music.

It’s also not entirely free. The app itself is free to download and try for 15 days, but continued usage requires a $3.99/month subscription. That payment gives you, well… your kids, access to ad-free music from rock, pop, hip hop, folk and acoustic genres, and the revenue generated through the app is shared with the artists featured on the platform. (In other words, it’s not just a slapped together selection of stuff from YouTube). In addition to videos, audio content is available as well. And both are accessible on the iPad or on the web.

As far as the app itself goes – the experience is OK. Once signed in, videos and music are in separate sections, laid out with easy-to-browse thumbnails, and play controls are simple enough for young users. The biggest complaint, besides the fact that the app lacks a true native feel, is that you can’t register for an account from the app itself – you have to sign up first on the website. No, scratch that – the biggest complaint is the lack of offline streaming. (That may not be a concern if you have a 3G/4G iPad, however).

If you’re wondering why something like Jitterbug makes sense for parents, then you’re either A) not one or B) haven’t stumbled across the YouTube horrors that are Elmo telling baby “f*** you,” holding a knife, exploding, or generally terrorizing kids. Hilarious, sure…until you spend the next few months dealing with your kids’ nightmares. Is your sleep worth $3.99/month? That’s the real question you should ask yourself.

Jitterbug LLC was co-founded in 2008 by Grammy winning music mixer Dan Gellert and Randall Green, previously the CEO of Spanish-language video service Butaca.tv and co-founder of Butaca.tv parent Veranda Entertainment. The company is based in L.A.

Etsy has become the go-to site for people looking for home-made crafts and vintage items from independent artisans — and for artisans wanting to sell them, and it now counts some 39 million monthly unique visitors, 13 million items and 800,000 storefronts within its virtual walls.

Now it looks like Etsy wants to expand into serving a new class of buyers and sellers: the company has bought Trunkt, which specializes in selling artisanal goods wholesale.

The announcement came in a very indirect way: Adam Brown, Etsy’s head of PR, noted it in a comment at the bottom of a post about Etsy on the Pando Daily blog.

He notes that Trunkt is effectively a one-person operation, and that the acquisition is “an investment in a really talented person who has a deep understanding of an area of business that impacts a number of our sellers.” Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

This is not Etsy’s first acquisition but it is one of very few. In 2009, the company bought a digital advertising company Adtuitive, also for an undisclosed sum. To date Etsy has raised some $51.7 million in funding, and most recently reported $62.8 million in sales for the month of March.

No official word yet on how Etsy will be leveraging Trunkt (“we have more details coming up about that soon,” Brown notes), but if you go to Trunkt, you’ll see that Etsy is already using it as a platform for its members who do offer wholesale products to sell them there.

The idea of offering wholesale, which presupposes the idea of mass production, hits a current bone of contention among Etsy sellers. Some of them have been getting increasingly upset over how the site is letting in more “artisanal” creators, who are in reality larger manufacturers rather than independents who make hand-made crafts. As Pando Daily points out, as the site continues to grow, it’s not surprising that the lines between homemade/independent and manufactured/made by machine are getting blurred and possibly harder to police.

So it comes as no surprise that one thing Etsy seems to want to make clear already is that buying Trunkt is not about Etsy selling out or becoming a platform for the kinds of big manufacturers that upset the business model for the independents who have become the lifeblood of Etsy’s existing marketplace.

“If and when we do pursue wholesale tools on Etsy, it will be in service of bringing new channels to existing Etsy sellers to meet their needs, not working with large manufacturers,” Brown says. Indeed, for some long-time Etsy sellers who do have the bandwidth to create items in quantity — even if it’s not Costco or Walmart quantities — the Trunkt move could be a great opening.

While Etsy has yet to comment officially — and we have reached out ourselves now, too, in case this is an elaborate hoax — some Etsy users have picked up on the Pando story and have started their own discussion thread on the Etsy site — with many a colorful response in the growing list of comments.

Update: Etsy’s official response, confirming the move into more wholesale services for its members, and that the Trunkt founder has started at Etsy as of today. Still no details about financial terms of the deal.

“Our acquisition of Trunkt is about exploring how we can better support the thousands of Etsy sellers (and buyers) already doing wholesale business on Etsy — and enabling many more who aspire to it. We’re really excited to start to deliver on a long-time request from our community. Wholesale does not presuppose mass production. Take a look at our Quit Your Day Job series or the sellers currently on the Trunkt platform, and you’ll see it that these are independent, creative artisans. It’s our mission to support those businesses and empower them to change the economy. Trunkt is built off our API and 95% of its sellers are on Etsy already, so it’s a logical fit. Dev Tandon [founder] has a really deep knowledge base and can start to lay out a roadmap for us. We’re really happy that he’s here for his first day at Etsy today, and we’ll be communicating more about it to our sellers soon.”

USB 3.0 is still slowly rolling out but Verbatim has charged forward with a line of flash drives. The new line of Store ‘n’ Go V3 USB 3.0 flash drives utilize the latest USB spec for speedy transfers. Verbatim boasts that they’re twice as fast as USB 2.0 drives. Like other USB 3.0 devices, these models are backwards compatible with USB 2.0 and 1.1 ports although the speeds will be slower. Plus, with the price starting at $19.99 for the 8GB model, they’re relatively affordable as well.

Widespread adoption of USB 3.0 has yet to happen. For the most part USB 2.0 is still very practical offering acceptable file transfer speeds. USB 3.0 is certainly faster, but it only takes USB 2.0 a second to transfer a PDF or Excel spreadsheet.

This line from Verbatim shows that USB 3.0 component prices are finally dropping. It wasn’t that long ago USB 3.0 flash drives cost north of $100. Vebatim’s Store ‘n’ Go line starts out at $19.99.

EcoATM, a company that creates kiosks that automate the buy-back of used mobile phones and other used portable electronics directly from consumers, has raised $17 million in funding from Claremont Creek Ventures, Coinstar, TAO Ventures, PI Holdings, Moore Venture Partners, AKS Capital and Koh Boon Hwee. As you may know, Coinstar operates the change conversion kiosks and owns DVD kiosk service Redbox. The company previously raised $14.4 million from Coinstar, Claremont Creek Ventures, and others

Here’s how ecoATM works. The seller places their phone into the kiosk (the company says it will not damage the phone nor read/copy any personal data from the device). The kiosk then visually identifies the phone as best it can from a database of around 4,000 devices and uses visual recognition technology to determine if the device has been damaged, and also offers up a device-compatible cable connection which allows it to analyze whether or not the device boots.

Based on the type of phone and the shape it's in, ecoATM makes an offer. Users can then cash out (or cancel the transaction and get their phone back at any time), with the option to donate any percentage of the sale to any one of many charities. The kiosk also accepts MP3 players and others gadgets.

Every week, the company picks up the phones sold and sells these to middle market electronics refurbishers, who fix the devices up and resell them or sell the parts to other electronics companies.

Tom Tullie, Chairman and CEO of ecoATM, tells us that currently there are around 50 ecoATM kiosks operating in the U.S., mostly in California, for now. They are located primarily in malls, grocery stores and big-box retailers. And there is one on the Microsoft Corporate Campus, he adds.

In addition, ecoATM announced it has been awarded a Phase II grant for up to $1 million from the National Science Foundation. The NSF received 171 Phase II proposals in July 2011, and ecoATM’s grant was one of only about 60 Phase II Awards NSF granted in fiscal year 2012. And ecoATM won the 2011 Crunchie Award for Best Clean-Tech Startup.

Tullie says the new funding will be used toward mass commercialization and a national roll-out. You can checkout a demo of the kiosk below.

A camera is highly important in any smartphone.

Even since before the iPhone, the ability to snap a picture on your cell phone and essentially leave your camera at home not only changed the digital camera industry for good, but it has changed the way we look at smartphones and ultimately affects our purchasing decisions.

At RIM’s BlackBerry Jam conference this morning, the company hit us with a really interesting take on smartphone camera software. We still know very little about the hardware specs coming out of RIM later this year, but a demo of the BlackBerry camera app shows that the company is thinking about ways to wow current and potential BlackBerry users.

Thorsten Heins, the new RIM CEO, demoed the app showing that all you need to do is take a picture. From there, you actually have the ability to turn back time.

A little analog-style wheel appears on top of the picture, and you can drag a pin along the wheel backwards or forwards to move through a certain amount of time. Even though you have control over when you snap the pic, the app itself is actually capturing extra frames, just in case someone’s eyes are closed or something.

Well done, RIM.

Thanks to our sister site Engadget for the image!

Today is BlackBerry Jam, RIM’s developer conference or WWDC equivalent. It’s RIM’s moment to redefine, rejuvenate, and re-establish itself in the world. Whether or not the company can pull it off, however, is an entirely different matter.

BlackBerry 10, RIM’s brand new platform, has been delayed, run into naming issues, and seen the transfer of power go from the company’s co-founders, Jim Balsillie and Mike Lazaridis, to long-time employee Thorsten Heins. The conference will prove whether or not RIM is now adaptable — something for which the company has been publicly flogged for the past year.

We took a trip up to Waterloo to speak with some of the employees ahead of the event, namely Vivek Bhardwaj, Head of Software Portfolio EMEA for RIM, and as I walked away I felt less sure of who RIM is and what the company is about than I ever have before.

See, one of the first things we heard walking in the door was that RIM has changed with Heins at the top. When I mentioned the past year and described the company as “lacking flexibility,” Victoria Berry, senior manager of PR and social media went ahead and threw out the word “arrogant.”

“Yes,” I said. “Exactly.”

They recalled Thorsten’s first earnings call, during which he admitted he would consider licensing the new BB10 platform and/or selling off the company if the options proved viable. They said partners were optimistic, and that the company was generally undergoing a major change in the way they looked at both themselves and the landscape.

But then we started talking about where RIM is headed.

Bhardwaj admitted that RIM, up until this point, has lacked a clear vision and identity. “We’ve never had a clear vision as to who we are, what we’re for, or the purpose of our strategy,” said Bhardwaj. “The conference is all about setting the stage for that.”

I was pleased at his conviction on behalf of the company, and he hit the nail right on the head. In today’s competitive landscape, the BlackBerry is no longer a hot, new device. It’s a BlackBerry. It’s almost a joke.

But then he went on:

We’ve identified in this world that there is an audience that not only appreciates what we build today but has this desire to really connect to the certain things in their life that they place value on, the things they value in their smartphones, and the things they value on their tablets. We’ve found that it’s different to what an iOS or Android user would put value on.

We’re going to set the stage for how important relationships are to BlackBerry users, as well as how important communities, networking, and messaging are to them. We have this legacy of email and we’ll continue to expand, but we haven’t taken the time to explain to people why messaging is important to our audience.

That sounded diplomatic enough, albeit vague with a touch of Lazaridis-style ego. (Remember this: “We’ve been singled out because we’re so successful around the world. It’s an iconic product. It’s used by business, leaders, celebrities, teenagers. We’ve just been singled out… because of our success.”)

I asked him to continue:

We want to make sure people understand who we are as a company. It’s important to know that BlackBerry isn’t for everyone. I don’t mean that in an egotistical or selfish manner, but there’s an audience that appreciates and desires what we deliver as an experience.

We need to make sure we’re messaging to them first and foremost.

That was the moment he lost me.

See, RBC released a report just yesterday saying that RIM may drop below the 5 percent mark in terms of market share, while Samsung and Apple gobble it up. Of course, this is an issue greater than numbers. Developers are far less likely to put money, time, and energy into a platform that comprises so little of the market, and thus consumers are less likely to buy hardware that stands so far behind its competition in terms of app selection.

Yet, from what Mr. Bhardwaj was telling me, it sounded like RIM is reverting back to its core competency: messaging. It was impossible for me to be sure of that of course — he had been speaking very generally. So I asked for specifics.

I pushed him about what that strategy and vision is really all about, specifically, who exactly the RIM audience is, and why they value BlackBerry messaging in particular?

We’ve done a lot of research on BlackBerry people, and we’ve seen some patterns. The research shows us that these people are hyper-connected, social networking is important to them, organizing their time is a priority, and relationships are really valuable to them. We also see that they want to be able to act and message in the moment, spread things instantly, and share things instantly. It’s very important to these people.

You see now why I’m frustrated by the whole “BlackBerry isn’t for everyone” thing now, right?

Essentially, RIM wants to be the king of messaging again. iMessage does basically the same exact thing as BBM now, but on an iPhone, and there are dozens of SMS-substitute apps (like WhatsApp) on both the App Store and Google Play. Granted, RIM still dominates in terms of secure corporate email and enterprise familiarity/reliability, but that consumer market has wandered elsewhere, searching for a little magic instead of a trackpad.

Messaging isn’t really a focus at all in today’s competitive landscape. Just because people are hyper-connected, socially active online, cognizant of their schedule, and constantly in communication, it doesn’t mean that they’re “BlackBerry people”. Hell, we buy phones to communicate, and text messaging has outweighed voice calls for a while now.

Duh! Messaging (and better yet, seamless quick messaging) is important. But what about everything else?

Well, apparently everything else isn’t really important to “BlackBerry people.”

There’s this market full of people who care first and foremost about messaging and social networking. Yes, apps are important, browsing is important, and games are important, but those aren’t what they value when they first use a smartphone.

They desire living technology — things they connect to and live and breathe by. BlackBerry is something people are always connected to. It’s an extension of their arm. That’s the type of audience we’re going for. What we’re trying to do is take the user interface and the design, and map it to the things they value like conversations and community, while making sure there’s no lag.

I shouldn’t have to say this, but clearly both iOS and Android were built around the idea that apps, browsing and games are highly important. You don’t need me to tell you how those stories have progressed.

“To my point earlier,” Bhardwaj continued, “it’s not for everyone. It’s not meant to be a platform that encompasses the world.”

Part of me, a very small part, understands what RIM is trying to do. They want to reshape the argument to say: maybe an Android or iPhone can do anything and everything, but a BlackBerry does the most important things really really well. He mentioned that RIM will move into the automotive space, leveraging the fact that QNX is baked into 300 million+ cars. “We want to be the platform that connects and simplifies the relationships, services and content, and intelligent things,” he explained.

In fact, he used a somewhat weird example to further describe what he was getting at, which involved the forthcoming, and much talked-about, intelligent fridge. He explained that the BlackBerry owner would walk by the grocery store, and immediately be notified that they’re out of milk. Meanwhile, an iPhone user would be sent directly to iTunes to buy a song about milk, whereas an Android owner would be sent to a Wikipedia page to learn the history of milk.

While Apple wants to sell you content and Google wants your browsing history, BlackBerry simply wants to connect you in a practical way. It sounds glorious, but that’s the vision, not the reality.

The reality is a brand new virtual keyboard, a desire to connect to developers with simplified SDK tools and device seeding programs, and an entirely new operating system (not a refresh — they’re really serious about that).

Yet, RIM isn’t ready to stray from their physical keyboards. Ms. Berry in PR mentioned that “of the 80 million users, I’m not sure how many but it’s a high percentage that say they like the keyboard.”

Oh. OK.

Well, the keyboard is quite nice. It’s intuitive, quick, and takes the soft keyboard to a new level. And the notion that RIM will make life a little easier on developers is a really pleasant thought. I can see it now — devs coding away and porting over Android apps to their brand new PlayBook, handed to them free of charge by a BlackBerry evangelist living out in the field.

But will developers really want to invest time, energy and most importantly, cash into this platform? Will a new keyboard be enough to save RIM?

Hells no.

A magic moment, one that changes the entire ecosystem (much like the iPad, iPod, and iPhone) will save RIM. A moment that takes the company out of the past, and even out of the present, and proves that they are the future. Seamless and easy car integration a la QNX, or something like the fridge example Mr. Bhardwaj offered, would do that. But again, those are just a vision, not the reality.

The reality is that “BlackBerry isn’t for everyone.”

As it stands, most of BlackBerry 10 is still shrouded in mystery. Not even the Dev Alpha devices that will be made available to developers offer a glimpse of RIM’s new software — they’re running a modified version of the PlayBook OS instead.

All that said, RIM hopes to whet our appetites with glimpses at some of the nifty little touches that BlackBerry 10 will sport when it sees a widespread launch later this year. TechCrunch went to Waterloo and met with Vivek Bhardwaj, RIM’s Head of Software Portfolio, who took a few moments to give us one such sneak peek — an early look at BlackBerry 10′s keyboard, still a work in progress.

Fine, it doesn’t sound like the most thrilling way to spent 15 minutes, but let’s not forget that messaging and typing have always been a big part of the BlackBerry DNA and it isn’t exactly the kind of thing the company can afford to screw up.

“We feel that no one does this well,” Bhardwaj said of mobile typing.

Thankfully, the keyboard doesn’t disappoint. On the all-touch Dev Alpha device, the keyboard is large and nicely-spaced, with a small gap in between each row to help minimize errant taps. Even at this stage, everything seemed nice and fluid which is a definite plus when the keyboard leans on a few additional touch gestures to work properly.

Swiping to the left across the keyboard deletes your last input for instance, while swiping up changes to the numeric/symbol keyboard. That same swipe up gesture is used when the keyboard attempts to guess the word you’re typing — according to Bhardwaj, users will be able to send those guessed words flying into their messages by swiping from where the word appears over keys.

Normally, it would take a little time for the keyboard to store and recognize specific words that a person may use often, but Bhardwaj notes that there’s a way to jump-start that process.

“It’ll basically do a scan of all your personal history, your email, your SMS, Facebook, Twitter — basically every conversation you’ve ever typed,” he said. One this process is complete, the device will have a solid starting point for the user’s linguistic quirks, though he didn’t mention if users could opt to skip the scan.

Not all of the changes will be immediately apparent to BlackBerry users — in fact, one such improvement is meant to be all but invisible to people pecking out their day’s messages. Bhardwaj revealed to us that there is in essence a second, invisible keyboard that conforms over time to how a user types.

Let’s be honest: we’ve all been there. I suffer from a condition I like to call “beefy thumb,” which renders a solid chunk of my text messages incomprehensible to all but my close friends thanks to mistyped letters. With that second keyboard in place though, the boundaries of each key will subtly change to ensure that users are actually hitting the keys that they intend to.

It sounds like a minor addition, but the impact could be a big one for users — they won’t care how or why they’re getting better at typing, just that they are. RIM is making it a point to woo go-getters who can’t live without quick and accurate messaging, so the notion of a keyboard customizes itself to each user has the potentially to be a real crowd pleaser. Of course, keyboards alone do not a great platform make — Bhardwaj promised that the keyboard would be one of a few aspects that would get the demo treatment during the BlackBerry World keynote, so stay tuned for more.

RIM has caught plenty of flack these past few months, thanks to (among other things) a multi-day global outage, disappointing PlayBook sales, and a dramatic management shake-up. Beyond all of this, the news that their next-generation BlackBerry 10 operating system wouldn’t see the light of day until the latter parts of 2012 seemed like yet another nail in RIM’s coffin.

But the beleaguered company is trying to move past all of that at BlackBerry World. While we regular folk still have months to wait until the first BB10 products make it to store shelves, RIM has just officially opened up the BlackBerry 10 platform to developers at BlackBerry World, starting with the release of their BB10 beta development toolkits and the BlackBerry 10 Developer Alpha device.

As you may have guessed from the announcement, RIM’s game plan at this point is to give developers as much lead time as possible to develop applications to launch alongside BlackBerry 10, though we’re still no closer to figuring out when that launch will actually take place.

In fact, they’ve already managed to gain the support of some considerable third parties — fitness app developer Endomondo has already committed to the platform, as have the mobile game peddlers at Gameloft. Other partners include Occipital, Poynt, Truphone, and PixelMags, to name just a few. RIM hopes that by locking up some big-name partners, they’ll be able to entice smaller developers to take a chance on their platform as well.

“Anyway you want [to develop], we can support that,” said Adam Nanjee, RIM’s head of Social Media Partnerships. “Typically it’s been ‘Hey, come and join BlackBerry.’ Here we’re saying ‘Hey, you may already have an Android app, but it’s very easy to port to our platform’ and if they’re going for an HTML5 cross-platform strategy, we can support that as well.”

RIM’s app store numbers pale in comparison to larger rivals like Apple and Google, but representatives we spoke to were quick to spin that as a positive. According to developer focus groups the company held, more than a few beleaguered developers claimed that they could actually be found in BlackBerry App World as opposed to be being drowned out by scores of new submissions in competing app stores.

Meanwhile, the move to make the Dev Alpha device available to attendees of RIM’s developer-oriented BlackBerry Jam conference isn’t a surprise, but it’s a clear indicator that RIM is taking the BlackBerry 10 launch environment very seriously. After all, pre-release events for the PlayBook didn’t offer developers that sort of early access, and the company seems determined to learn from their mistakes.

All of the leaked Dev Alpha images that have surfaced over the past few days are indeed legit, and while it isn’t much to look at (imagine a scaled-down version of the PlayBook), that’s all part of RIM’s plan.

The thousands of devices being made available to developers at today’s BlackBerry Jam event are the same as the devices used internally to test code (save for the additional of some BlackBerry branding), and during our time with RIM they repeatedly confirmed that the Dev Alpha devices bear no resemblance to any BlackBerry 10 devices in terms of either hardware or software.

Sadly, this means that we’re still no closer to getting a feel for what BlackBerry 10 will actually look like. It’s a definite bummer, but it was perhaps to be expected — RIM is all about playing the expectations game now, and slapping the BB10 name on a device that essentially only has a web browser and a file system wouldn’t reflect too well on them.

As such, they’re also keeping mum on the thing’s specs — aside from the device itself proclaiming it has 16GB of onboard storage, all representatives would confirm is that it has a 4.2-inch screen running at 1280×768. After playing with one for a few brief moments its status as a developer-only device has been cemented by sheer lack of functionality included, though it did feel rather comfortable in the hand.

RIM CEO Thorsten Heins is in the middle of his BlackBerry World keynote address as you read this, so stay tuned — we’ll keep you posted on anything new or interesting Mr. Heins shares with us.

JP Selects, an online marketplace for selling sustainable and ethical brands has acquired LovingEco, a flash sales site for eco-friendly fashion and natural beauty products. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

LovingEco, which was founded by Justine Lassoff and Melinda Moore, features daily sales on discounted eco-friendly, natural items. Similar to OneKingsLane and Gilt, LovingEco features ‘tastemaker pics,’ where celebrities and environmental experts curate their favorite products from the sales. The site also features a V-Wall for the community to share their donations and eco-friendly content.

And LovingEco takes sales a step further and donates 3 percent of net proceeds from each purchase to a 'tastemaker charity' to help support a social or environmental cause.

LovingEco says that JP Selects' growing distribution channels, will allow the flash sales site’s members to access a much broader range of eco-friendly categories and products, expanding from fashion and beauty to home, pets, health and food.

LovingEco previously raised funding from angel investors including Allen Debevoise; CEO of Machinima; Emily Della Maggiora, VP of comScore Marketing Solutions; Douglas Abel, former VP at Sapient; and Jackie Wilgar, SVP Marketing at Live Nation Entertainment.

Mobile Roadie, which allows anyone to develop and create sleek, rich media iPhone and Android apps, is launching a native iPad app creation platform and self-service mobile website product.

Mobile Roadie offers a self-serve app development platform that integrates with YouTube, Brightcove, Flickr, Twitpic, Ustream, Topspin, Google News, RSS, Twitter, and Facebook. Users can build both iOS and Android apps and the company already has a presence in the UK, France, Spain, Australia, Italy, Germany, Brazil, Turkey and Japan.

Now brands can create native iPad apps and fully customizable mobile websites, in addition to iPhone and Android apps. The iPad app platform included live navigation widgets which turn the main menu into a dynamic feed of streaming content; hi-res graphics layers, parallax scrolling and slideshows; and the ability to sync content with other apps. The iPad app creation platform costs brands $499 per month or $4,999 per year.

The free self-service mobile website product allows any brand or small business to create a mobile-friendly site on any budget. Brands can update content in realtime, create a shortcut icon and more.

The company powers more than 3,000 apps for brands of all sizes, adding more than 1,500 apps in the last nine months. Clients include Madonna, Taylor Swift, Katy Perry, The Dallas Mavericks, The Miami Dolphins, The World Economic Forum, Harvard Law School, and Wynn Las Vegas.