Digital portfolio company Pathbrite today announced that it has secured a $2.5 million Series A funding round. The round was led by Rethink Education with a strategic investment from U.S. college and career readiness assessment company ACT. These investors join an impressive group of angel investors, including Ben and Jerry’s Ben Cohen, Serious Change’s Joshua Mailman and Zynga co-founder Steve Schoettler. Including this round, Pathbrite has now raised about $4 million. The San Francisco-based company plans to use this additional funding to continue its product development and focus on new user acquisition.

The idea behind Pathbrite is that traditional resumes and portfolios don’t give prospective employers enough information about potential employees, especially now that students create such a wealth of digital artifacts about themselves. With Pathbrite, students can, as the company says, “collect, chronicle and showcase a lifetime of learning and personal achievements, enabling students to differentiate themselves and to stand out from the crowd.”

Credentials 2.0

As the company’s CEO Heather Hiles told me earlier today, the company is currently mostly targeting college students, but it’s also been testing the product with high schools and even some younger kids. There is some evidence, says Hiles, that digital portfolios don’t just increase people’s chances of getting a job, but also improve their critical thinking skills at the same time.

Beyond this, though, Pathbrite’s long-term goal is to see its tools being used across age groups and as a place where life-long learners can aggregate all their achievements and credentials. Indeed, she stressed how she also thinks about the product as something akin to “credentials 2.0″ and as a way to liberate data about learners that is now typically held by colleges (report cards, transcripts, earned credentials etc.). On Pathbrite, these certified official documents can stand side-by-side with other digital artifacts that can give evaluators a more complete picture of a student’s achievements and personality.

A number of college admissions offices will soon use Pathbrite as an alternative to traditional resumes and Pathbrite plans to launch an enterprise product with added security capabilities later this year.

Currently, the service is available for free and as Hiles told me, the company plans to always offer a robust free plan. In addition, the company plans to launch some additional paid features in the future.

This is a guest post Erin Galad is CEO of social media management system tracx. He argues that social media monitoring and measurement is a booming business but merely listening to audiences is one-dimensional and ineffective.

Rather like the little Dutch boy who held his finger in a dike and stayed up all night to prevent the flooding of his country, companies and brands are trying to stem the flow of data that threatens to engulf them.

The ‘Hero of Haarlem’ was an invented character in a broader book called The Silver Skates, but there is nothing fictional about the efforts brands are making to not only control this data, but also how to manage it.
Big data and social media are entwined, but that data will not be brought alive until brands understand what is being said, what the sentiment is, what the response is, who is driving the conversation and what it really means for that company.

It’s all very well to notice and listen to what people are saying, but that gives no depth or perspective to the conversation. Once the context of the conversation is understood then deeper insights will be gained. Merely noting comments is not enough, the conversation has to be understood in its entirety.

Big data is effectively a number of datasets that are sprawling, diverse and unstructured. It is everywhere we go and it’s about individuals talking, expressing opinions, disagreeing, reacting and, in many cases, showing off. It is the very thing that makes us human.

Some would say that this humanity can be managed by automated social responses to conversations on Facebook and Twitter as some brands outsource their social engagement to machines. Such an approach may indeed be viewed with horror but, as the writer of this piece contends, the progression from bank tellers to ATMs, and telephone operator to automated IVR system was relatively seamless.

Some, however, throw themselves into the social media space mistakenly believing that their audiences love their products and confuse themselves when faced with a hostile audience. In this case the erring is completely human, whether the (divine) audience can eventually forgive is something that brands are depending on.
Others use single-dimensional approaches such as keyword search to define their audience engagement when they should be learning about their users’ opinions and intentions. Brands need to understand that it’s not about their social influence, it’s about the social influence of their customers.

Every brand out there wants to mine marketing and business intelligence to use big data capabilities to make truly data-driven decisions. But this isn’t going to be effective when treating brand interactions like human friendship. Brands are secondary to human emotions, but still important.

The problem is that data is not intuitive, it’s not even counter-intuitive, it is anti-intuitive if the incorrect tools are used. As social has accelerated the growth of data, brands seem to believe that we are still in the days of static data storage. But we’re not, we are in a world where data management tools are improving on a daily basis.

Fortunately, big data and unstructured data is gradually becoming a more manageable beast. Its tangibility and measurement are more easily understood because of these tools and brands just need to find the most relevant tool to the data they are creating.

Spectacle-driven events such as football's EURO 2012 and the London Olympics are wonderful opportunities to analyse human behaviour and reactions to stimuli. In a previous age, sponsors of these spectacles merely allowed their brands to be associated with these events, now they are synonymous with data and correct management.

Presidential elections are also events where social media and the accompanying data are change the world. Four years ago the Barack Obama campaign set up its own social network that effectively won them the election because they understood the data the electorate was telling them.

This is a mistake the Republicans are not expected to emulate this time around and this year's election may well be a data battleground that decides how we vote in the future.

For now, however, it's time for brands to act, not just listen. Rather unlike the Hero of Haarlem who plugged the dike, it's time for brands to pull their finger out and really engage their audience, not just stand around passively waiting for a disaster to happen.

It looks like popular walkie-talkie app Voxer is about to get some competition in the mobile voice chat space. A new app called Zello is growing like crazy, too – in fact, it’s growing faster than Voxer internationally (although it’s behind in the U.S.) and it has reached the #8 spot in the free Android social app list. The cross-platform mobile app just reached 1 million uniques per day, is nearing 4 million uniques per month and is adding on 100,000 users daily.

But while Zello shares some similarities with Voxer, it’s not a Voxer clone by any means. Instead of approaching voice chat from the more utilitarian standpoint of a mobile push-to-talk type experience as Voxer does, Zello’s focus is on social, voice-enabled communities. Voice Twitter, if you will. Oh, and it’s doesn’t spam you either, the company says.

Party line reborn for a digital era? Apparently. While some folks use Zello more walkie-talkie style, there are hundreds of thousands of “channels” in the app, which are communities that you can tune into in order to listen or chat about the subject on hand. Today, 300,000 channels have been created, and around 60,000 are active in any one day. Because of its international footprint, many of these are non-English channels. Zello CEO Bill Moore (who you may remember as the founder of TuneIn radio) says that Spanish is the most popular language, and Portuguese is popular as well.

Moore, who joined Zello’s newly relocated Austin-based team in December, knows that while the Voxer comparisons are inevitable, the two companies seem to be moving in very different directions. “Voxer is a communication utility…it’s kind of a Swiss Army knife communication tool,” he says. “That’s a tough space.”

Zello, he says, is more of a social radio or voice Twitter. The channels in Zello are more like public forums, “it’s a very different value proposition than just utility. It’s much more social. It’s somewhat similar to why people listen to radio: you’re bored, you want a friend.”

The interesting thing about Zello is that it emerged from a company called LoudTalks, which used to operate in a space that’s more closely tied to what Voxer is doing now. A TechCrunch 40 participant back in 2007, LoudTalks was focused on building an enterprise push-to-talk experience – and that’s exactly where Voxer is headed now. (Maybe LoudTalks was just too early?) In any event, LoudTalks changed course, and just axed its enterprise features – including the SDK and the two-way radio gateway – which were pulled down from its website this week.

LoudTalks brought on Moore as CEO in December and officially rebranded to Zello in January. The Zello app on iPhone launched in April, joining the Android app, BlackBerry app and PC app already available. So, to be clear, the traction Zello is seeing is cross-platform, not just on iPhone. But given its recent spikes, it’s likely attributable to the iPhone launch.

Not Spammy?

And so far, so good, as they say. Zello’s one-month retention is 20%. “It’s exceptional for a utility,” says Moore, “and not bad for a social app.” It’s also not bad considering that Zello isn’t too spammy about re-engaging users, according to Moore.

“Voxer is pretty invasive…it pulls your address book in,” Moore says frankly. “You could see [Voxer] has a decent team, but I’m assuming that aggressive viral marketing has helped them get to some numbers. And I’m assuming that it’s also responsible for some of the fade, and that it gets worse.” Ouch. Zello, he says, doesn’t save your address book, you can choose to share it with contacts or not, and it doesn’t notify you as new people join the app. (That last one is a personal pet peeve. I. DO. NOT. CARE.)

But the app landscape is super competitive these days; it’s hard to stay on people’s radar, and harder still to stay on their homescreen. Viral marketing may be aggressive, but it can work. And some people really like Voxer. A lot of people, in fact. Including investors. And fortunately, it’s not a zero-sum game here.

Zello has been angel-funded until now, but is raising a VC round of $5 million in the next 60 days. The app is available for download for iPhone, Android, BlackBerry and PC here.

Datasift, the social-data platform which specialises in realtime streams, has done something which is going to make PR people quiver in their boots and journalists sit up and notice. They have turned any changes on Wikipedia into a realtime stream which will be searchable and customisable. The implications are that you’ll be able to changes changes and the people making the changes in a far more user-friendly manner. The stream will be available here on Datasift, but also surfaced at a new site, Wikistats.

Datasift founder and CEO Nick Halstead told me at the Le Web conference in London: “As news breaks on Twitter, it filters through the web to find a home on Wikipedia, for example – 3 minutes after the Microsoft Surface was announced, its Wikipedia page for it was created. With around 12-million edits every day, researchers and corporates now have a simple way to tap into this huge stream of content being created daily to identify trends and updates”

As a licensed Twitter resyndication partner, DataSift already analyses data across the social-web, enabling companies to create filters to “listen” for mentions of brands, breaking news, and public opinion. As a result they worked with Wikipedia to create a realtime stream from which they could pull the millions of changes that happen on the site everyday. The stream can be accessed from here.

At the same time, Wikistats. a new site built specially by Datasift, will provide a real-time insight into the trending articles on Wikipedia in the last 24 hours. Similar to the Tweetmeme site which preceded Datasift and tracks conversations on Twitter, Wikistats surfaces the top articles and content being created on Wikipedia using Natural Language Processing.

To give you an idea of how much that is, Datasift says that each month Wikipedia sees between 11-12 million edits, and each day an average of approximately 7,100 new pages are added. In comparison, Bloomberg publishes approximately 5,000 articles per day, and the New York Times publishes approximately 1,000 per day. That means the combined number of new stories amongst two of the world's largest news organizations would equate to about half of what is added to Wikipedia each month.

Good news for those of you who live outside the U.S. and have been waiting for Amazon to take more of its mobile products outside its home market. Amazon today officially opened its Appstore to international apps — its first move outside the U.S. for  the applications storefront, which launched in the U.S. last year. Developers from the UK, Germany, France, Italy and Spain are now being invited to submit apps to the store, with others coming to the party in the “near future,” according to a statement from the company — although one URL I’ve just tried, www.amazon.co.uk/appstore, still is not working, so still a ways to go before consumers can access the store. The move is another piece in the puzzle that will enable Amazon to begin selling its Kindle Fire tablet in markets outside the U.S.

At the same time, the company made another move to sweeten the deal with developers: it has announced some changes to its distribution terms, giving better control to developers for when their apps can be distributed on the Appstore after submission. It is also from today simplifying the revenue share for apps with a straight 70/30 split for revenues from apps, regardless of whether they are paid apps or free selling content via in-app purchases (paid apps used to have two levels of commission: either 70 percent of the app's sales price or 20 percent of list price, whichever was greater).

Amazon did not provide a specific update on the number of apps in the storefront but noted that Appstore now has “tens of thousands” of apps. The company has more recently been developing a bigger range of options for developers incorporate paid elements into the apps, with in-app purchasing and a try-before-you-buy feature, which Amazon calls Test Drive. Amazon says that since introducing those in-app purchasing into apps earlier this year, some developers have seen their revenues double.

"Some developers have seen revenue double since the launch of In-App Purchasing,” said Jim Adkins, Vice President of the Amazon Appstore, in a statement. “We're excited to open the door to even more opportunity by expanding app sales outside the U.S. We see tremendous potential for current developers in our distribution program to grow with the international expansion. We also encourage new developers to join and participate in the platform's growth."

Developers interested can go to the Amazon Mobile App Distribution Portal to register.

Charging and distribution. The other changes, which apply to all developers on the Appstore (U.S. or otherwise) are aimed at making app purchases a little more simplified, and brings Amazon in line with how Apple and Google charge for apps. In the wake of introducing in-app purchasing in April, Amazon is now letting developers earn 70 percent of the list price on each paid app sale. “This is a change from the prior terms under which developers earned either 70 percent of the app's sales price or 20 percent of list price (whichever was greater),” Amazon writes.

Developers can review the full agreement by visiting the Amazon Mobile App Distribution Portal now.

Branding Brand is an under-the-radar company whose name you might not know offhand, but whose platform powers the mobile commerce in several names you probably do know. Their client list includes brands like American Eagle Outfitters, Ralph Lauren, Sephora, Anthropologie, Dick’s Sporting Goods, GNC, Steve Madden, TigerDirect, West Marine, Timberland and Crate & Barrel, for example.

Given its access to mobile commerce data and customer conversion rates, Branding Brand has the ability to uncover some interesting trends related to social media and mobile commerce. In data tracked from January to May 2012, the company found social media-driven conversions from mobile users are trending downwards, even as social media-driven visits go up. And the impact of social media in general is minimal when it comes to mobile  - as a whole, it was responsible for less than 1% of referrals to brands’ mobile websites.

About the Data

Branding Brand is able to use its analytics system to discover insights related to mobile commerce. Looking at the company’s five biggest clients (you can probably guess the names, but the data is anonymized), Branding Brand CMO Christina Koshzow, tells us that, combined, the clients saw a 31% increase in total mobile visits from January to May. Initially, that sounds like good news. But customers are not buying, it seems.

First, all the usual caveats – e.g., consider the data’s source. In this case, the data was aggregated from 255,363,110 mobile pageviews, 45,871,654 total mobile visits, and $18,641,773 in total mobile revenue from Branding Brand top five clients from January to May of this year. While the five are arguably big name brands, five is still a small group – you can’t call this an industry-wide trend. But Koshzow argues that the five are some of the biggest and most interactive retailers out there, and the sample size is huge (see above).

Also of note, the five clients are seeing declines in social media conversions even while their mobile conversions are up 14% during Jan. through May. For retailers without a mobile site, their social media conversions may even be worse.

That being said, consider this an interesting cross-section of social media data, that, if taken in conjunction with other studies, could produce greater insights.

[Note to RSS readers: most of the data in this article is in chart format, which you'll not be able to see without clicking through. Stupid RSS!]

Social Media Drives Less Than 1% Of Mobile Website Traffic, Facebook Top Referrer

Social media, as a whole, was responsible for less than 1% of the total visits to the retailers’ mobile sites, Branding Brand found, with Facebook providing the majority of the referral traffic.  Facebook sent the clients 95.1% of the social media-driven mobile visits, Pinterest sent 4.88% and Twitter 0.2%.

In fact, despite strong growth in visits from Pinterest, conversion has “dramatically” decreased since January 2012. Pinterest users now convert at .07%, a 73% decline since January.

Twitter, meanwhile, provided virtually no traffic and never resulted in a mobile order.

Pinterest Vs. Facebook

Also, despite all the hoopla surrounding Pinterest, Branding Brand found that Facebook users actually convert and spend more than Pinterest users do.

Why is this happening?, we asked the company. “Increased traffic doesn’t always mean increased conversion, especially if the quality of visitor declines,” explains Branding Brand co-founder and CIO Joey Rahimi, “Many retailers are flooding social media and jumping on the bandwagon, but are they attracting someone who will actually buy?”

“Although these social sites have provided a great way to drive traffic and sales on desktop, they still haven’t cracked the case on mobile. On mobile, they’re providing far less traffic and contribution of sales,” he adds. “We’re still searching for a social solution to help all channels.”

If the above charts speak to truths other retailers are also seeing, it’s clear that mobile changes the game in more ways than one.

Kaazing was founded in 2007 to improve real-time and interactive communications over the web. Its solution to the problem was to back a technology that would enable a “full-duplex pipe” between participants, rather than the legacy infrastructure that required a request and response between two users. It placed its bet on the HTML5 WebSocket protocol, which its founding team also helped design.

Well WebSockets have recently became a standard and as a result is gaining wider browser support. With the market now coming to it, Kaazing has raised a new, $17 million round of financing to attack the nascent opportunity for using WebSocket technology to power the future of real-time communications. Today, the company has 50 employees, but it’s looking to expand that number by another 15-25 employees.

It recently brought Cisco veteran John Donnelly on board to expand its sales and business development channels. Kaazing is also looking to build out its new platform-as-a-service business, as well as to improve real-time communications over mobile networks.

Even with the WebSocket standard just being adopted, Kaazing has built a business out of enabling high-performance web communications for companies from a number of different industry verticals. With the deployment of its WebSocket Gateway, it powers applications for financial services, retail, gaming and entertainment, transportation, and mobile companies. Customers that have already signed up include BSkyB, Cantor Fitzgerald, ITRS, Southwest Airlines, and The Limited.

Previously, Kaazing had raised $5 million in two rounds of funding from TK. It is headquartered in Mountain View, Calif., with additional sales offices in New York City and London.

Waze, the impressively-funded navigation app that offers real-time traffic data collected by its users, isn’t just looking to save you time on your commute. With a new feature launching today, it could also save you money on gas.

Di-Ann Eisnor, Waze’s vice president of platform and partnerships, says this is “the biggest product update since we launched the company.” She says that different groups of Waze’s 19 million users open the app for different reasons (some for navigation, some for the live traffic data), but all of them can save time and money getting gas.

So now, users who are low on gas don’t need to just pull into the first station they pass. Instead, they can bring up a map or list of all the stations along your route and their current prices. The data comes from OPIS, but if you arrive at a station and find that the price has changed, you can improve the data by uploading that information into the app.

To kick off the program, Waze is also offering discounts at participating gas stations, including Kum & Go, Hess, Mid-Atlantic Convenience Stores (BP and Exxon stations) and Vintners Distributers (Shell). Those discounts will show up in the app, and are redeemed using price look-up codes — Eisnor admits that this is pretty old-fashioned, even calling it an “anti-tech solution,” but she says it was the right choice to ensure that the discounts can be redeemed at any station without any additional technology.

The new feature could also help keep Waze relevant in the face of the new turn-by-turn directions app that Apple has announced for iOS 6, by going beyond traffic and directions. (Waze actually appears to be contributing data to Apple’s app.) My interview with Eisnor actually came before Apple’s announcement, but she did tell me that the fuel feature is a way for Waze to test out a more “vertical” approach. iI it’s popular, we can expect to see other updates in this vein.

As the market for smartphones and tablets has exploded, so has the available mobile ad inventory, creating a huge surplus that is hard to manage. But one company's problem is another's opportunity.

Enter: Mobile advertising network Todacell, which claims to solve the problem through its campaign optimization technology that helps marketers reach the right mobile users. It says that traction is up, resulting in a doubling of revenue in the first half of 2012, and that this was the catalyst for a new $2 million "strategic" investment, which the five year-old company is announcing today.

The new funds come from AfterDox (a group of investors from telephony billing solutions provider Amdocs), as well as private investors. Afterdox is also a previous investor and Todacell has now raised $4.35 million to date.

Additionally, Todacell sees a change at the top, appointing a new CEO, Mark Lehmann, who was previously VP Web & Mobile Marketing at Universal Music Group / Island Def Jam. Before joining Universal Music Group, Lehmann served as VP Web Marketing at mobile content provider Flycell.

Previous CEO and founder Moshe Vaknin, who left to do another startup (Youappi), now serves as a board member and strategic advisor for Todacell.

Meanwhile, of interest to European readers, the Israel-founded company now headquartered in the U.S., has opened a Berlin, Germany office, as well as expanding its London office, seeing it increase its headcount two-fold.

Todacell's optimization technology works by taking into account the potential targeting attributes of a campaign, such as publishers, creative, device, location, geo-targeting and demographic, and figures out where the campaign is working best. This could be via clicks, click through rate and/or conversions. It then automatically adjusts the campaign to send more eyeballs towards where the action is at, while past performance is also taken into account so that there's an ability to forecast results to get off to the best start for a campaign.

Todacell's network claims 10,000 publishers and "billions of impressions".

Swype lovers, Nuance has some good news for you. The company just released a major update to the predictive keyboard software, even going as far as calling this update the next generation of Swype. And after looking at the new feature list, that often overused phrase is probably accurate this time.

Chief among Nuance’s tweaks is a new take on the Swype keyboard. It still does the quick swiping input, but users can also now peck at the keys, triggering Nuance’s smart XT9 predictive text. Users can also simply write letters, words or symbols with their finger tips. After a long beta period, Nuance has also included a Dragon button on the Swype keyboard allowing users to simply talk to their phone.

By building in XT9, Swype now features Nuance’s best predictive text software but the alternative keyboard also now sports its own personal dictionary. Swype picks up and learns words pecked out on the keyboard or through voice over time Plus, you can have Swype grabs words from texts, emails, and other user-inputted activities.

Nuance didn’t waste anytime after acquiring Swype late last year. The company quickly added several beta functions including voice input and more languages. This is one of the biggest updates to date for Swype. The company has come a long way from launching on TechCrunch 50′s stage in 2008. Swype built an incredible product and it seems Nuance is committed to the same goal. The version will hit devices through OEM updates or users can download it from beta.swype.com.

App Annie, the app store analytics and market intelligence firm popular among both app publishers and V.C.’s alike, is rolling out a hotly anticipated new feature today: support for Google Play (aka the Android Market). Google Play is now the fourth platform to be supported App Annie’s service, which already tracks iPhone, iPad and Mac applications and app store trends.

As with iOS and Mac, both free and premium product suites will be available for publishers interested in Google Play analytics. And there are a good many who are, given Android’s global distribution.

Today, 50% of the top 20 iOS publishers are App Annie customers, as well as 80% of the top 100. In total, App Annie has more than 100,000 apps and 13,000 publishers using its service, the company says. Many of these publishers are already the makers of cross-platform apps, so they will immediately benefit from the additional insight, if they hadn’t already been invited into the Google Play beta, that is.

The Google Play Suite

The new suite includes the following three products: Analytics for Google Play, Store Stats for Google Play and Intelligence for Google Play. These are very much like the offerings App Annie provides for iOS and Mac platforms now, which allow developers to track downloads, revenues, ranking, reviews, featured placements, and international breakdowns for their own apps as well as offering competitive analysis and Google Play app store trends, rankings, and other breakdowns.

The new Android analytics aren’t just useful because of  the convenience factor of having everything in one dashboard view, they’re also helping developers gain access to international data, which has been a big pain point for the platform (among other things).

As Oliver Lo, VP Marketing for App annie, explains, “if you’re a developer, and you want to get a global view of the rankings for Google Play…if you go to their site, and your computer is in the U.S., you can only see the Google Play U.S. store. That creates a massive barrier for developers to just get hold of international data,” he says. “The technology we’ve built aggregates the rankings from the 35 countries across the Google Play store and puts it all in one place on one site that’s free for anyone to use.”

In the premium tier, developers will also have access to daily email reports that detail their download and revenue statistics, as well as things like where the app has been featured in international app store markets and what its ranking is. In the future, the plan is to increase the granularity of these reports beyond daily, Lo says.

Google Play Stats

To celebrate its Google Play launch, App Annie pulled out some interesting trends related to Google Play and iOS. For example, says CEO Bertrand Schmitt, iOS was responsible for 71% of app developers’ revenue worldwide, while Google Play accounted for just 29%. “It’s a pretty sizable difference between the two,” he says. “And if we look at the growth rate of these two platform over the last four months, we have been growing at 14%…it’s not as if Google is growing faster. So, in the short-term, we don’t see a big change in terms of revenue share,” he concludes.

Schmitt also said that while the U.S. was the top market in terms of downloads for both iOS and Android applications, the #2 and #3 position varied, depending on platform. For iOS, it was China and Japan, but Android was bigger in the U.K. and Germany. “The Chinese market has a lot of older, competitive app stores and Google Play is not readily available by default on Android handsets” says Schmitt, “and we don’t see that changing at all in the short-term.”

As for revenue, Schmitt adds that the U.S., Japan, and the U.K. accounted for 60% of app revenue for each platform (iOS and Google Play). Developers looking to go international should start with those countries first, and ideally the U.K.which is easier because of language. Note that App Annie is looking specifically at Google Play here, not Android as a whole. It’s not counting Amazon Appstore data, for example, although the plan is to launch that later this year, Schmitt says.

The new Google Play Android service is available from here: http://www.appannie.com/androidlaunch.

Cloud storage company Bitcasa today announced that it’s now opening its beta to the public. The service, which says that it will offer its users unlimited cloud storage, is currently available for free, but the company plans to charge $10/month after the beta period. In addition, the company also announced that it has raised a $7 million Series A round led by existing investor Pelion Venture Partners and new investor Horizons Ventures. Andreessen Horowitz, First Round Capital, CrunchFund, and Samsung Ventures also participated in this round. This brings Bitcasa’s total funding to $9 million. The company says it will use these new funds to bring its new storage and data management offerings to market faster and expand its sales and marketing teams.

In total, Bitcasa says, its users have now uploaded more than 1 billion files for a total of 4 petabytes of data to the service. The company launched at TechCrunch Disrupt last September and lets users store, sync and backup a virtually infinite amount of data. The company says that its client-side encryption ensures that your data remains safe. To ensure easy access to your most often used data, Bitcasa caches these files on your local machine. When it launched last year, the company stressed that its advanced de-duplication algorithms and compression techniques are what enables it to offer this unlimited amount of cloud storage. Bitcasa has over 20 patents on this technology.

Just like most of its more “traditional” competitors like Dropbox or Google Drive, the service also puts a strong emphasis on sharing data with friends, family or co-workers, though because of the massive amount of storage it offers, the company also positions itself as a cloud backup service.

Pelion Venture Partners managing director and Bitcasa board member Carl Ledbetter noted in a statement earlier today that he believes “Bitcasa is the first and only service that provides unlimited storage of all of a user’s files in the cloud, making the cloud-based virtual desktop a reality. This is the way we will all connect to our on-line, tablet, mobile, and PC-based environments in the near future, and Bitcasa is the defining step.”

Too Good To Be True?

When it first launched at Disrupt last year, the company’s service was greeted with a healthy dose of skepticism. Unlimited storage, after all, comes pretty close to sounding too good to be true. Now that it is in open beta, the company will have a chance to prove itself to a wider audience.

WPP today has announced a major development in its strategy to have 40 percent of its business coming from digital in the next five years: it is buying AKQA, one of the biggest — and independent — digital agencies around. WPP says that AKQA will continue to operate as an independent agency, and its current chairman will also head up a new investment arm, WPP Ventures, to back more digital marketing startups.

The financial terms of the deal were not disclosed in the release, but the Guardian is reporting that this is actually a majority stake that values the company at £350 million ($550 million). AKQA had assets totaling $282 million as of December 31, 2011, and projects revenues of $282 million for 2012,  some $100 million more than its $189 million in sales in 2011. It employs 1,160 people across offices in San Francisco, New York, Washington DC, London, Paris, Amsterdam, Berlin and Shanghai.

Although WPP itself has been growing its digital business organically — last year it made about a quarter of its revenues from digital, or $4.8 billion out of a total $16 billion in sales — this is a strong step to grow that in a more turbo fashion. It comes on the heels of other investments, including leading a $10 million round of funding for mySupermarket, an online shopping/aggregation services.

AKQA was founded in 2001 and while a number of other agencies have been snapped up, or created within, the big-five ad agencies, the company managed to remain independent, and through that continue to land huge accounts, including Google and Microsoft Xbox among tech brands (one Xbox campaign shown here); and Delta, Diageo, EDF, GAP, Nike, Target, Unilever and Virgin Money, among others.

It’s an innovative agency in that it’s been not only creating campaigns on a creative level, but have been innovating on a technology level in terms of what can be done in marketing and advertising in the digital format. It’s been particularly strong in mobile advertising — one project, with MTV, created a social bridge between the TV channel’s mobile app, the main channel and its website — a first-time example of such an initiative.

As part of AKQA’s intention to remain independent and a standalone brand, the founder and CEO, Ajaz Ahmed, and Chairman Tom Bedecarré wil remain on board. Bedecarré takes on a new additional role as president of WPP Ventures, a new Silicon Valley-based company, “which will explore new digital investment opportunities for WPP as a whole.” More info on that new VC vehicle to come, WPP says.

"We are thrilled to welcome AKQA's unique team of technological innovators and entrepreneurs to WPP. We have admired their creativity and technological skills for a long time along with their outstandingly effective and award-winning work for clients,” says Sir Martin Sorrell, CEO, WPP, in a statement. “We are looking forward to working with Ajaz and Tom to broaden their offer and our own, both geographically and functionally."

For AKQA this represents a new way of injecting capital into the company to devleop its digital initiatives and work even further: "With increased resources and access to new geographies, our partnership with WPP will fuel the next level of energy, excitement and opportunity, delivering innovation and creativity at scale," said Ajaz Ahmed, in a statement.

Raimo van der Klein, founder and CEO of Layar – one of the bigger mobile augmented reality startups – is stepping down and appointing Quintin Schevernels in his place. van der Klein plans to stay on as Creative Director. Schevernels was formerly the COO of VNU Media, a large Dutch publisher. As such the move makes sense since Creator is aimed squarely at print publishers.

The company recently launched both the Layar Creator product that allows publishers to easily add digital content to print pages and Stiktu aimed at consumers. Creator is is to how Layar will monetize itself in the future.

In a blog post van der Klein said:

I will continue as Creative Director, focusing more on our next generation products and new business opportunities. I will further take-up a seat in Layar’s Supervisory Board. With this move I can keep doing the things that I really love, and that is to innovate and shape new markets and products.

Layar says it has had over 20m downloads and has 3 million monthly active users. It’s has raised over $15.6 million in venture funding from investors including Intel Capital, Prime Ventures and Sunstone Capital.

Chad Hurley, the co-founder of YouTube who last year bought Delicious from Yahoo through AVOS, today said that the purchase represents an “interesting experiment” for him and Steve Chen, his partner both at YouTube and the new venture: they want to see if they can use a (still) strong brand as a vehicle for new innovation — beyond the aggregation and bookmarking services that are at the core of what Delicious is known for today.

Speaking earlier at the LeWeb conference in London, where he was on a panel with Kevin Rose of Google Ventures and Niklas Zennstrom from Atomico, Hurley said: ”We are going to restart innovation on the Delicious brand.” So the idea is to use an existing one, rather than “creating a new brand from scratch” to push through new ideas — lots of little ones. “I know how hard it is to build a brand, so this is an interesting experiment.”

He didn’t elaborate on what, exactly, those new services might be, but another project he is working on, Zeen, may point to what he might mean. Zeen, which has yet to go live, will be a way for people to create their own “beautiful magazines,” according to its site — that sounds a little like Yahoo’s Livestand attempt and Flipboard. Hurley notes that his company’s 40 developers are currently spread across three places, China (Beijing), New Zealand and San Mateo.

This does not mean, though, that they are planning to scrap what Delicious is already doing: they have recently launched a Mandarin version of Delicious, for example.

The three entrepreneurs/investors, in a panel moderated by Michael Arrington, also talked about their goals for investing today, and some of the bigger trends they are watching in the tech space:

On the role of international expansion today. Niklas Zennstrom, who founded Skype and sold it, once to eBay and then to Microsoft, said “It’s important to expand internationally and really quickly, because the market for online is global and if you don’t call it fast you will have problems with copycats and other competitors.”

On backing copycats. Zennstrom again: “There is a difference between evolution and copying. Skype didn’t invent internet telephony but we made it a lot easier to use. But we had a lot of companies copying us.”

On transitioning from enterpreneur to investor. Kevin Rose says that he can get the same feeling of “fire” seeing other entrepreneurs pursuing ideas, and he’s had an amazing track record with the companies he’s backed, which include Zynga, Twitter, Foursqure, Chomp and Square — “a hit parade,” in the words of Arrington. “For me personally I’m a little burned out on the entrepreneurial side,” Rose admitted.

The next big thing? Rose: “I think there is a lot of oporutnity with the Apple TV,” and he says that since we know about the dimensions and other specs people can start thinking of solutions now. One area he believes will be a focus is e-commerce. “Look at QVC today, adding a gaming component on the application on the television and the being able to purchase things. “That’s a huge potential company. I don’t want to do it but I would like to invest in it.”

Zennstrom echoed a sentiment that others have also been noting lately, that we are in a quiet period for tech innovation and are more about enriching products today. “Ten years ago we were focused on technology, but now we’re focus on the product. Today people are focused on solving problems, not tech probs but problems around making things easier to use, in areas like healthcare and education, life sciences… those are interesting from the big data point of view.”

Hurley said the next big thing will be products that let people stay engaged but in a passive way: “Today technology asks too much of people,” he said. “I think in the next few years things will become much more passive, whether it’s collecting data for health applications or social networks…to make better sense of what I’m doing, not what my friends are doing.”

Rose also added a continuing focus on mobile to the list: “There is only a handful of apps we use everyday. What will they be in the future?” He notes that there is still space for a daily app replacing cash, for mobile transactions.

Among the must-have apps today, Zennstrom names email, calendar and address book are three. “But those are still things that are lacking innovation.”

[Image: Kmeron, Flickr]

HotelTonight, the last-minute discounted hotels booking app, is bringing its service to the UK, with an initial service in London launching today. In addition, Heather Leisman, most recently of the troubled Jetsetter travel startup, has joined as MD for Europe. The company has also opened its London-based office in the Shoreditch area of East London, widely acknowledged to be home to the largest single cluster of tech companies in the city. Additional cities in the UK and Europe are being planned.

Speaking at Le Web London, CEO Sam Shank told us: “We’re excited to be part of the tech scene in London and we’ll be acting like a local startup in the way we hire and operate.

So far the partners signed up include hotels such as Belgraves , Blakes Hotel, Chancery Court Hotel,The Cadogan and The Langham, among others. The app launches at an auspicious time: just ahead of the London Olympics. All hotels are personally vetted by HotelTonight staff, and given a style category (like Basic, “Hip” or “Luxe”) and illustrated by mobile-optimized hotel photos.

HotelTonight aims itself at business and leisure travellers, but it’s started to break out into a new category they call “spontaneous locals”. That probably means a little less in the US, but in the UK, where vast swathes of the population drink far too much fairly regularly, “spontaneous drunks who can’t or won’t go home” is probably a more accurate description.

TechCrunch readers (or anyone for that matter) will be able to get £15 off their first booking by using the promo code “UK15″. If you invite friends to try out the app they, you’ll get another £15 when that friend makes their first booking.

For those unfamiliar with the business model, it’s so simple you might just do a facepalm. HotelTonight allows hotels to sell unsold rooms literally on the day only. The offers are location-based, at impulse rates, and thus lift revenue per available room without “impacting brand perception” (making them look cheap, in other words).

In fact it’s a little like Path for Hotels – very mobile oriented, great interface – all the stuff you never get from hotel apps.

HotelTonight recently secured a $23 million Series C investment, led by U.S. Venture Partners with continued participation from Accel Partners, Battery Ventures and First Round Capital. It’s raised $35.85 million in funding to date.

HotelTonight launches into a market largely dominated by the long-time LastMinute.com brand which also has a Labs arm pushing apps such as Snaffle. Unfortunately Snaffle has been neglected and only works in one part of London… so it’s not that useful.

Perhaps in its favour is its mobile focus, its rather direct brand name and the fact that North Americans travelling to the UK for the Olympics may well use the app as a means to book their stay.

The startup says its app has been downloaded 2 million times, and covered Canada and the US.

During a LeWeb interview with Path’s Head of Special Projects Shakil Khan, an audience member asked Khan about the state of Path’s relationship with Facebook.

It just so happened that the head of Facebook’s mobile business, Henri Moissinac, was standing behind the questioner in the audience, and host Loic Le Meur took the opportunity to ask Moissinac directly about the relationship between the two social networks.

“There’s a lot of people in Menlo Park [Facebook HQ] who like to use it,” Moissinac replied, “Facebook is trying to copy Path,” he went on, without adding further details about the extent to which the startup was being copied. Okay …

As Facebook has already tried to clone or incorporate features from many existing startups (Facebook Questions, anyone?), this comes as no surprise. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if Facebook hadn’t tried to acquire Path,  if only to rehire former Facebook Platform VP and current Path CEO Dave Morin.

“Facebook is building cities, Path is building the homes.” Khan responded about the Facebook/Path relationship. Those cities are going to need homes, sure — But does Facebook plan on always outsourcing the construction?

“@tknuewer: #Facebook-Designers are trying to copy #Path design says on of the Facebook mobile team at #LeWeb”—
Manuel P. Nappo (@manuelnappo) June 20, 2012

In a move that borrows from the Angry Birds playbook, quite literally, Fight My Monster – the so-called 'Moshi for boys' – has appointed licensing heavy-weights Russell Binder and Dimensional Branding Group to represent the brand globally and, presumably, to begin exploring merchandising options.

Binder's Striker Entertainment actually claims Angry Birds as a client, while DBG works with the likes of Sony, Miniclip and Temple Run — so this appears to be quite an ambitious appointment for the young company and points to the potential of Fight My Monster's brand amongst its much coveted and hard to reach audience of 8-14 year old boys.

Interestingly, Fight My Monster's brand ambitions don't stop there. The San Francisco and London-based startup also recently announced a joint TV production deal with Oscar-nominated BrownBag Films, the animation studio behind the recent 'Doc McStuffins' series for Disney, to work on an undisclosed project.

So what exactly is going on here?

"If you look at where the company is heading, we’re building out a games platform for 8-12 boys which can generate revenue from both virtual and physical lines", says Executive Chairman and Fight My Monster investor Dylan Collins, citing the example of Moshi Monsters and Angry Birds maker Rovio who are each generating $100M+ annually through a combination of online and off-line.

"Obviously, if it was that simple a lot of people would be doing it – success comes down to having the right combination of game, brand, technology and team”, he says. “Kids are much smarter than people give them credit for — they can smell something which isn’t genuine.”

To that end, Fight My Monster, which was founded just 18 months ago by CEO Dominic Williams, thinks it's hit the sweet spot with its target audience of boys and who average 10 and a half years old, and spend around 40 mins per-session playing the online trading card game. In total, the company claims 1.4 million players across the U.K. and North America.

Furthermore, the under-13 segment is "one of the toughest in the world", says Collins, since it is a demographic that is largely absent from social media or email and the "lack of social channels makes marketing extremely challenging".

But it’s a challenge that investors haven’t shied away from, and neither has the competition.

In March this year, Fight My Monster closed a $2.1m round from Greycroft Partners, eVentures and several well-known angel investors including Jarl Mohn (Chairman of Riot Games), Chris Deering (former Playstation Europe), Jeff Lapin (Take Two), Josh Resnick (Playdemic) and Kevin Donahue (YouTube).

Meanwhile, its competitors include the titles Skylanders (Activision), Monkey Quest (Nickelodeon), and "anything on the Nintendo DS platform".

So what's the recipe required to reach this elusive online audience? It appears that there isn’t one.

"Success in this market requires you to forget a lot of what has driven the most recent wave of gaming — it’s quite counter-intuitive", warns Collins.

Counter-intuitive it may be. But merchandise and movies may well be part of the mix.

WorldDesk, a provider of desktop virtualisation software, has integrated with Box to make a version of its WorldDesk for You platform available on the latter's cloud storage and collaboration service. Thus users with Box Business and Enterprise accounts can now access and store their personalised desktop – including files, settings and applications – on Box's service, therefore enabling them to take their desktop with them.

The Northern Irish-founded, now Menlo Park, Calif.-based company announced a similar integration with Box competitor DropBox in February this year.

WorldDesk's proposition is that its desktop virtualization platform frees all aspects of a user’s desktop from the underlying OS and device to enable "unrestricted movement of a user's personal files, profile and apps between devices", making the desktop mobile.

It doesn't exist in a vacuum, however. Other online desktop vendors, like OnLive and CloudOn, offering similar solutions – though, of course, WorldDesk claims that theirs is better (which they would).

Commenting on the new feature, Rao Cherukuri, WorldDesk CEO notes that “Over 120,000 businesses, including 82% of the Fortune 500, use Box to manage critical content in the cloud” and with WorldDesk’s focus on the enterprise, it does seem like quite a good fit.

That said, WorldDesk isn’t disclosing its user numbers – so without being able to quantify exactly what we have here, it’s all just potential for either company.

Banner ads have been around for over a decade, and though they may have been effective back in the mid-’90s, today they just feel like relics. You probably can’t remember the last time you clicked on one. (I know I can’t.) Sure, display advertising is evolving, and marketers still spend billions on display, but as much as we try to spruce them up, they remain one of the weakest forms of digital branding. In the meantime, publishers have become ravenous for better ways to monetize their audience without plastering banners all over their sites.

Founded in 2010, Finnish startup Kiosked is on a mission to help publishers more effectively turn their content into dollars: By converting that content into a storefront. (Or, in their terms, a “kiosk.”) In other words, Kiosked allows advertisers to link their products to relevant images and multimedia within online content so that consumers can buy those items direct. While that may sound gimmicky, there is at least one notable investor that sees potential in the startup’s alternative sales platform.

The startup announced today that Finnish serial entrepreneur and Chairman of Rovio, Kaj Hed, is leading a $5.75 million round of seed funding in Kiosked. This is big validation for the young company, as Hed has not only built and sold international software companies, but he’s also the founder of investment firm Global Inter Partner and majority stakeholder (69.7 percent) in Rovio, which is of course best known as the creator of Angry Birds.

As a result of the investment, Hed will be joining the startup as the chairman of its board of directors, where he will help lead the company through its planned expansion beyond Europe to the U.S., Asia and Africa and the growth of its team from 30 to over 100 over the course of the year.

A group of private investors along with Tekes, the Finnish Funding Agency For Technology and Innovation, also contributed to the startup’s first round of funding. According to Kiosked founder and CEO Lars-Michael Paqvalén, the company has already been finding signs of validation in the market, as it is now connecting with more than 10K brands worldwide, with over 10 million products now being offered for sale through its platform. Its recent partnership with popular Finnish fashion brand, OnePiece, has seen an average of over 9 percent CTRs.

The new Kiosked board chair said that he believes the company is in a position to create a new paradigm in online advertising that could eventually change the way brands connect with their customers. Of course, while the funding helps, there is obviously some trepidation for both publishers and consumers in having advertising linked so closely with editorial content. It’s probably going to be quite some time before the Web completely turns away from those pesky banner ads, but, for publishers, any appealing alternative will do. And in that sense, Kiosked is definitely on the right track.

As to how the startup’s platform works: Kiosked has built a repository of millions of copyright-free images, which can then be tagged with related ads and product information and descriptors. When consumers click, they are given the choice of making online or offline purchases, for example, along with the ability to find the closest brick-and-mortar merchants if an item isn’t available online, save their products in a wish list, or share the product with friends.

If you were to see a picture of your favorite beer on a blog you happen to be perusing, once the startup “Kiosks” the image, you would be able to buy a case of your favorite beer right from the image itself. When a user hovers over a particular image, icons appear to indicate which of the products in the image are available to buy.

Should a reader click through to buy, publishers and content producers will earn sales commissions from those purchases, and thus begin monetizing their content. This is where the startup’s business model comes into play, as it either charges a commission to brands for directing a sale or a fixed fee for when users perform certain actions. How it charges, the CEO says, is based almost purely on performance — which brands love to see. It then shares splits profits with all parties that take part in the sale, whether it be publishers, rights holders or fans.

Though it will take scale for Kiosked to really begin pulling in any significant revenue, the CEO says that in-content marketing represents up to a $132 billion market opportunity, and there’s plenty of room for experimentation when it comes to monetizing online content. For content producers, it’s all about being able to capitalize on the shopping and buying impulses that their content creates. If Kiosked is able to prove out its model and finds appeal among online marketers, you could be looking at the next big Finnish company.

More on Kiosked here.