Kinvey, the TechStars startup out of Boston that provides a unique backend as a service (BaaS), has closed $5 million in a new Series-A round of financing, led by Avalon Ventures with Atlas Venture following on. Kinvey previously raised a $2 million seed round in August last year.

Kinvey wants to be the company that provides the glue that fits the solutions of old with the service of this new age of IT. To do that, the company is today bringing out of beta a service that does much of the backend work that is often the bane of an organization as it seeks to bridge new and old systems.

I was at first skeptical of a company that calls itself a backend as a service. But I am convinced this makes sense. Why? It’s an automation play. It takes much of the drudgery out of building backend systems. It does this through an API, which can become a latency issue but the service will always be available through Kinvey’s integration with different clous services. Developers use Kinvey's iOS, Android and JavaScript libraries to get access to a RESTful app data store, a CDN-enabled large file store, push notifications, geo-queries with third-party points-of-interest data, mobile analytics, backend versioning, user management, and data-level privacy and security access controls.

Kinvey surfaces this funny issue with enterprise IT. The legacy players have old, client/server environments that uses services oriented architectures, making integration with next generation apps a certain challenge for the developer trying to unlock data behind firewalls and integrating such silo environments such as RedHat JBOSS, SAP Netweaver or an Oracle environment.

The new generation of enterprise service providers use any number of APIS. They are elegant when up and running but the same backend work needs to get done each time a developer integrates a new API. This can be especially complicated for the enterprise that is trying to modernize its infrastructure and trying to make sense of how to fit different loosely coupled environments into systems that me by five, ten or even 15 years old. It can be a monumental task to integrate social, location and push features in such environments. Mobile APIs are often all you get from the likes of Google Places, foursquare or automatic push environments such as Urban Airship. Softwares from infrastructure as a service providers like Amazon Web Services and existing offerings from PaaS providers only provide you with APIs and libraries that let you use their features. If you want a feature they don’t’ provide you with, you have to build it yourself.

All of this can cost them months of work and hundreds of thousands of dollars in costs.

Kinvey has developed a backend environment that glues these different fragmented environments together. It’s a unified process between the client and the cloud with a unified API and software libraries. It also includes a back-end data store for images and videos.

“We are your back end dev team,” said Sravish Sridhar, Kinvey’s CEO and Founder.

This is a major task. It means being everything to everybody. Sridhar said they have spent the last year developing the core data service to move information back and forth between apps and backend systms. It can now handle about 80% of what backend developer might see. They are picking off the remainder one by one.

Kinvey will use a good part of its funding to build a worldwide developer community. They are open-sourcing what they call “service links,” that will connect the bak end environments. The goal is to get developers to build their own and open-sourcing them for others to use.

Tout, the service that lets you post real-time status updates, and another spin-out from SRI, the research institute that birthed Apple’s Siri, is announcing today that it has closed $13.4 million in Series B funding. The investor line-up in this one is interesting, as it includes WWE – yes, that’s “World Wrestling Entertainment!” Others in the round included 819 Capital and individual investors Gordon Crawford, Stan Shuman and Jack Schneider from Allen & Co. The round follows Tout’s $2 million Series A in December 2010, which saw investment from Stanford Research Institute (SRI), Horizons Ventures, and Seavest Ventures.

The company has seen its fair share of high-profile users, including Shaquille O'Neal (who announced his retirement on Tout) and Survivor host Jeff Probst, for example, as well as Ryan Seacrest, Erin Andrews, Dr. Oz, and a number of news stations and major media networks including CBS, National Geographic Channel, CNBC's "Fast Money," C-SPAN, ESPN and even presidential candidate Mitt Romney.

Tout, for those unfamiliar, allows you to post video messages of up to 15 seconds. People who follow you and see the message can then reply with their own 15-second videos. Twitter-for-video and other video messaging startups (e.g. Seesmic, Vlix) haven’t really caught on (unless you count YouTube, and perhaps you should), but Tout believes that its inroads with the celeb/media crowd will be to its advantage. Apparently, WWE agrees.

The company says it now has 23 million users. In March, the company said it had 12 million users visiting its website, so it’s unclear if Tout is counting unique visitors or those with registered accounts here. (We’ll update when we hear back). That’s kind of a big deal – after all, celebs can easily get fans to click through, but how many users then stick around to participate themselves?

But even if they don’t, maybe that’s OK with Tout, it seems. In an earlier interview, CEO Michael Downing told TechCrunch that the company’s vision was not to be “a destination social network,” but wants to enable video messaging for everyone else. The company was then testing an API and teasing “some major partners” in the works. I guess we have some insight into WWE’s interest, then. By the way, if you’re interested in sending your messages to WWE’s “superstars and divas” – and c’mon, you know you are, right? – the company is prompting Tout on its homepage here. Hold my calls.

Amazon has just announced a bit of good news for avid Kindle Fire gamers and developers — the company has been working to revamp the gaming experience on their wallet-conscious tablet and have decided to share the fruits of their labor.

Starting today, developers can use Amazon’s GameCircle APIs to implement a host of new features in their Kindle Fire games. Considering how many other console and mobile gaming platforms already support them, it should come as no surprise that support for achievements is on that list of features. Also on deck is leaderboard functionality, which allows users to see how they stack up to their rivals without having to pop out of the game in question.

So far, it all sounds very Game Center-y (though Amazon could do worse than to take cues from Apple), but GameCircle has one last trick up its sleeve. Perhaps the most immediately impressive feature is GameCircle’s sync functionality, which automatically saves a player’s progress to the cloud. As such, players are able to pick up where they left off even if they’ve had to re-install the game in question or switch devices.

It's an interesting play to see from Amazon, and arguably it's one they need to make. The Seattle-based retail giant is about to face some very stiff competition in the low-cost tablet space thanks to Google's Nexus 7, but Amazon's content and media ecosystem is still perhaps their strongest differentiator. With GameCircle, Amazon is trying to improve a very specific segment of that ecosystem, though it's unclear at this point how many game developers will flock to their APIs.

Of course, it’s very possible that GameCircle’s impact isn’t intended to end with the company’s tablets. Rumors that Amazon is working on a new smartphone are making the rounds with renewed intensity — even the Wall Street Journal got in on the fun recently, claiming that the Amazon phone will sport a four- or five-inch screen. Though details are still sparse at this point, don’t be surprised if whatever Amazon is working on ends up playing nice with GameCircle too.

Fashion — as the saying goes — never goes out of style, and that basic idea is bringing a rush of investment to online startups that want to hook into the colliding worlds of clothing and consumerism with an engaging social twist. One of the latest is Chicisimo – a social media site for fashionistas to post and vote on pictures of their latest looks, and then buy the look for themselves — which today is announcing that it’s picked up a seed round of $800,000 from a list of angel investors including VitaminaK, a backer of another e-commerce upstart, Alice.com.

The news comes as Spain-based Chicisimo exits a long stint in beta mode, which saw the site over the last two years expand to cover seven languages — Italian, German, French, Polish, Portuguese, Spanish and English. Chicisimo currently has 127,000 active users, with the average time spent on the site per user at 11 minutes.

Chicisimo — Spanish for “super chic” — is playing on two ideas that are very trendy at the moment: the surge in consumers looking for visually-driven fashion content online, spearheaded by sites like Pinterest, the Fancy, and Polyvore, but also many smaller players focused specifically on clothes; and the rise of e-commerce sites driven by social recommendations and curation — which at its heart is a big dat/algorithm play. There is some pedigree here, too: Chicisimo’s co-founder, Gabriel Aldamiz-echevarria, had previously been a VP and member of the board at Strands, which develops personalization and recommendation software that powers social sites like these.

In addition to posting pictures of outfits, users can vote for those it likes the most; share the looks they like on sites like Pinterest, and even buy related items. It also lets brands design their own “flower” badges, which get awarded to users who wear those brands the most. In addition to organising looks by users, you can also search by designers, most popular trends and specific articles of clothing (eg “jackets”).

Chicisimo’s tagline is “real fashion on real people,” and the idea is that the content is generated by everyday female users. But like a lot in the fashion industry, that idea on first glance seems like somewhat of an illusion: just about all the women are long and slim, and the pictures don’t exactly look like snapshots. [Update: A Chicisimo spokesperson insists that they are authentically snapped by the users. "They key here is that Chicisimo is a community for fashion bloggers, and they really pay attention to the details of the look and to the quality of the photos. The average user is a high quality fashionista who invests time in getting dressed and buying clothes."]

This is actually one of the unique selling points on the site and points to how Chicisimo may develop its business in the long run. Aldamiz-echevarría, who co-founded Chicisimo with his wife, notes that the “high-caliber community of fashion-forward women” who post “hundreds of artistic photos” daily make this site attractive not only for other fashionistas (including some who are perhaps not as stunning), but for the wider industry, which can use the site’s ranking systems “to see which brands and items their customers are actually wearing (and not just buying).”

There is also the fact that the company is exiting its beta with an already-international footprint. The U.S., it says, is its key market, but it also has a substantial number of posters from Europe who are a “great source of fashion inspiration and diversity,” says a spokesperson.

Chicisimo knows that it’s in a very crowded space, and so it will be using its angel funding to drive more users to its sites in a bid to scale up.

From today it’s also launching a few new features to help further engagement: these include the ability to create sets of clippings around particular trends; and a new recommendation tool, “New Idea to Wear, Each Day.” These will be chosen from those user-generated clipped sets and will focus on a new trend daily.

Hub Ventures, a new San Francisco-based startup accelerator focused on funding entrepreneurs "building a better world” is hosting its demo day today at Hub Bay Area. This year’s portfolio includes seven companies from a variety of sectors, including mobile, agricultural info systems, healthcare, clothing, online giving and personal safety. The startups span geographies (U.S., Kenya, Ghana and Latin America), and include two women-led companies this time around.

As a refresher, the goal for the program is to help fund companies which not only have the potential to succeed as a business, but also demonstrate a scalable social and/or environmental impact.

You can read more about the program and how it works here.

Because it’s important to give a little space to companies which are trying to do something a little more than revolutionize photo-sharing, the full round-up is below.

• DIIME creates medical devices to improve infant and maternal health in low-resource settings of Africa. DIIME has four devices in different stages of development as a result of collaboration with physicians at Komfo Anokye Teaching Hospital in Kumasi, Ghana. Its primary focus is a blood transfusion device that will help save the lives of women suffering from massive internal hemorrhage due to ruptured ectopic pregnancy.
• Acopio offers technology tools and services that help coffee producers collect, manage, and share data along the agricultural value chain. Acopio’s applications, which run on mobile phones or on PCs help farmer-owned businesses efficiently manage key processes even in rural locations without reliable electricity or Internet access. Pilot testing in the most recent coffee harvest in Nicaragua demonstrated the viability of Acopio’s tools and this fall Acopio plans to launch six additional pilots, reaching several thousand farmers.
• Givkwik is a mobile, web and API platform that enables impulse philanthropy. With a more user-friendly experience, a points system, game mechanics and social influences, Givkwik wants to keep the shared emotion in giving electronically by making it easy, fun and social.
• Project Repat upcycles excess textiles into fashionable clothing accessories while creating fair wage employment opportunities in the U.S. On July 4th, Repat is launching a partnership with Threadless to upcycle their excess shirts into bags that will be promoted to Threadless customers. Repat plans to help large brands turn their unsold inventory (which on average is 20% of the products made) into an upcycled product that can be re-introduced to their customers as a co-branded made in the USA product.
• Africa’s Talking is working to reduce information and communication poverty in Africa by providing an API that allows developers to easily connect to mobile phone networks across Africa and deploy basic mobile applications built on SMS, USSD or Voice. With more than 190 mobile phone companies in Africa, spread out over 55 countries and bureaucratic hurdles involved in connecting to mobile phone networks, it’s very difficult for developers to quickly build and scale basic mobile applications across Africa. Africa’s Talking is strategically acquiring mobile connections across Africa and making them available to developers over an API. The company’s vision is to connect more than 700 million basic mobile phone users in Africa to applications and web services that those of us in the internet age take for granted right on their basic mobile phones.
• CheckInOn.Me is a proactive and automated mobile phone-based personal safety system that allows people to maintain their independence while having the security of knowing that someone will be notified if something goes wrong. Users can set the system to check-in on them as often as they want, whenever they want. If there's no response the system notifies the user’s pre-selected contacts, and enables them to coordinate their help efforts.
• RefuelMe, a mobile app and platform by StreetOwl, is based on a rewards system that motivates teens to drive safely. RefuelMe offers teens incentives to drive safely, supported by both parents and branded partners. In addition, the company is building a lead generation channel for insurance companies.

Starbucks is expanding its mobile platform today with two big announcements. The first brings the company’s Android app to Canada and the U.K., and the second involves an update for U.S. users. Starting today, U.S. users of the Starbucks for Android application have access to a number of new features, the most notable being support for PayPal and the introduction of a Starbucks widget for your Android’s homescreen.

In the U.K. and Canada, users will be able to take advantage of the typical app functions, like the store locator, for example, and they’ll also be able to load up their card and check their balance. And, of course, they can use the mobile app at checkout to make payments. The addition of these countries brings Starbucks’ mobile payments to 14,000 store locations worldwide.

With the new international version as well as the U.S. update, users can now PIN-protect their account. They can also pay and reload their Starbucks Card via PayPal, in addition to being able to reload using any major credit card. The app introduces an improved version of My Starbucks Rewards, too, letting you keep an eye on how close you are to your next free drink. And for regular users, there’s a new homescreen widget that lets you watch your balance, keep track of your star count, access the store locator, and conveniently touch to pay.

While mobile app updates or expansions aren’t always big news, Starbucks is an example of a company that has not waited for the confusion around mobile payments to sort itself out, and has gone ahead in delivering a system of its own. The company has an end-to-end solution with mobile apps, barcode scanners, POS integration, and a loyalty program, which it manages in-house. The system works well enough that even though it’s but one company, it’s managing to whet consumers’ appetites for mobile payments in general.

Wix.com, a Flash and HTML5 publishing platform, announced today that users have built over one million sites using their HTML5 tools since March. Wix, which began offering Flash tools in 2008, did not launch its HTML5 builder, which is still in beta, until late March.

Director of Communications Eric Mason tells us that most Wix users only make one website, meaning they have had nearly one million unique users in the past three months. With more than 20 million users overall, Wix allows users with no coding knowledge to build websites from over 170 templates in Java or HTML5.

"What's interesting is that we're putting Flash and HTML5 side by side and allowing users to choose," Mason says. "And many are picking HTML5."

The demand for HTML5 websites continues to grow. In a January survey of technology executives from over 100 Fortune 500 companies, 74% said they were considering HTML5 implementation.

"It's one thing to have big sites developing on HTML," Mason tells us. "It's another to have every day people using it."

Mason tells us that the "lion's share" of the users use only the free components of Wix. He adds that Wix will be releasing a number of product advancements in the next few months.

"No one else is doing a full, launched HTML5 editor like this," Mason says. "This gives us a massive head start and we have an ear to our client base and a great feedback loop. We're learning from what people want and trying to build those capabilities into an infrastructure that will last for people for the next decade."

Fotopedia‘s travel apps have been downloaded over 12 million times since the company’s launch in 2011. Since then, the team has experimented with a number of monetization strategies, including paid apps, sponsorships and – most recently – its own ad platform. Today, the company is launching a partnership with Expedia that will make it easy for Fotopedia users to make travel reservations through the Expedia Hotels iOS app. While Fotopedia won’t comment about whether it is sharing revenue with Expedia, this is such a common model in the travel market that it’s highly unlikely the company didn’t strike a deal with the travel company.

Working with a travel company looks like an obvious choice for Fotopedia (besides the fact that their names are obviously pretty similar). While the company put a strong focus on coffee table book-like experiences in its early days, with apps that often featured thousands of images, it now takes a more magazine-like approach and is launching new but smaller apps at a steady pace.

For the time being, these new Expedia buttons in Fotopedia will only appear in the Fotopedia Paris and Japan apps, though chances are the company will expand this feature to some of its older apps and its upcoming releases as well. Expedia, a Fotopedia spokesperson told us, “is going to evaluate how this partnership performs and then they are free to extend it to all of Fotopedia's upcoming and existing apps.”

In practice, this feature provides a link to the Expedia app when users look at pictures of landmarks. Clicking on the Expedia icon switches the user to the Expedia Hotels app (or opens up the App Store where users can download the app for free).

In the pre-app store days, getting your application or service ‘on-deck’, thereby shipping it pre-installed on millions of handsets, was the holy grail of mobile. These days, the market is little more open, thanks to the likes of the iOS App Store and Google Play, but it still pays to ride the coattails of a handset maker, especially if it ships in volume.

And that certainly looks like the case with music download service 7digital (which is half owned by HMV Group), and its partnership with HTC. Today the company is boasting that its ‘integrated music download application’ will ship on 20 million HTC Android devices in EMEA by the end of 2012. Furthermore, 7digital is the only pre-installed music download store to be shipped with all HTC ICS Sense 4.0 Android devices in the region, including the Hero devices from the One Series.

That appears to be a decent win for 7digital — for now (see below) — particularly when you factor in that it’s far from exclusive — the music service also has a deal with HTC rival Samsung to power its Music Hub app on the Galaxy SIII smartphone and is also planned for pre-install on other devices in the Galaxy family.

7digital also has partnerships with handset makers RIM (remember the PlayBook, anybody? Me neither), Acer, and Toshiba, although their nature varies depending on the devices that 7digital is installed on. In addition, the company has its own stand-alone Android app. However, how many handsets have shipped with 7digital pre-installed in total, the company isn’t saying.

But back to the HTC tie-in. The 7digital application is integrated with the native HTC player, giving users the option to browse, preview and purchase music from 7digital's 19 million-strong catalogue from all 4 major labels and a number of independent aggregators. The app also has support for 7digital’s cloud-based music Locker.

And while we’re on the subject of the cloud: moving forward, it looks very likely that HTC is making a big bet on music streaming over downloads, in the form of the Beats’ acquisition of MOG. Beats Electronics, best known for is hip Dr Dre headphones is partly backed by HTC. That, of course, isn’t such good news for 7digital.

Make hay while the sun shines, as they say.

Kantar Worldpanel ComTech, a market analysis division of WPP, has today published its latest figures on mobile device sales across a number of key markets, and it looks like something of a milestone for Android: this is the first time in ComTech’s recording of sales that Android has accounted for more than half of all smartphone sales in the U.S., the biggest markets in Europe, and Australia.

The sales, recorded over the last 12 weeks that ended June 10, put Android sales in a range going from 49.6 percent of all smartphone sales in Italy to 84.1 percent of all smartphone sales in Spain.

These numbers are a crucial barometer of how well Android devices are selling in the market: Google typically talks activations but not actual sales of handsets. Andy Rubin in June noted that Android device activations are now numbering at over 900,000 per day.

They also underscore the competitive threat the Google represents to all other platform operators at the moment. The newer entrant, Microsoft’s Windows Phone is showing positive signs, in that its percentage of sales is growing in different markets, but it remains in the single digits, and will be hard-pressed to make inroads in the short term with Android device makers continuing to perform so well.

Dominic Sunnebo, consumer insights director at Kantar Worldpanel, puts the popularity of Android down to a crucial factor: a lot of people are migrating from feature phones and Android represents just the right nexus (sorry!) between price and functionality.

Kantar Worldpanel’s research shows that Android devices are particularly successful with people who spend $50 and under for devices (typically sold with subsidies from carriers when you buy the device under contract), in the “vast majority” of countries covered in its research. ”Android handsets currently offer an easier platform to enable these consumers to upgrade, as many first time smartphone consumers state ‘price of handset’ and ‘multimedia capabilities’ as their main reason for choosing an Android device,” he writes in the news release.

But what’s really the killer with Android is that it’s also becoming the migration platform of choice for smartphone owners, too. For example, in the UK, Worldpanel notes that the Samsung Galaxy Ace and Y are popular choices for young people who were previously using — “traditionally loyal” in its words — to RIM’s Blackberry. (Fun fact: the 20 year-old au pair who lives in my house is precisely the young user Worldpanel’s talking about. She’d had a BlackBerry; now she uses a Galaxy Ace.)

But what about the iPhone, you ask? Well, iOS smartphones are still doing fine, and in markets like the U.S. they are actually still gaining at the expense of Android. Google’s OS is still the biggest there, at 50.2 percent, but that’s actually a decline of 6.8 percent compared to the same 12-week period last year. iOS’s share, meanwhile has grown by 8.7 percentage points to 37.4 percent of all sales in the market, fueled partly by wider availability on Sprint’s network. iOS was, in fact, the only platform whose sales grew over the period in the U.S.

Another point worth noting is that Kantar Worldpanel’s figures also provide a rather stark picture of who is on the way down — the counterbalance to who is going up. RIM and Symbian saw declines in sales shares in just about every market listed below: the one exception is Symbian in the U.S., where the share of sales is so small — just 0.5 percent — but at least a rise of 0.3 percentage points compared to the same period a year ago.

AdRoll, one of the leaders in online ad retargeting, has raised a new $15 million round of funding.

Back in February, the company announced that it had quadrupled revenue and become profitable in 2011. AdRoll now says it has more than 5,000 customers and is adding almost 500 new ones every month.

The round was led by Foundation Capital, with participation from previous investors Merus Capital and Accel Partners. (AdRoll raised a $4 million first round way back in 2008.) Foundation’s Charles Moldow is joining the board, and in the funding press release he calls AdRoll “the best-in-breed platform” and says that “nearly every brand selling goods or services online now recognizes retargeting as an essential marketing tool.”

Retargeting means that ads are targeted based a consumer’s past behavior, usually if they visit a website but leave without making a purchase. When I spoke to Vice President of Sales Suresh Khanna earlier this year, he told me that before he left Google and joined AdRoll, he’d had a “knee jerk” reaction to the concept — but he argued that retargeting should be about more than just bombarding someone with kitchen knife ads if they abandon an online shopping cart with knives. Instead, the industry needs to “push beyond that” to take advantage of “all the data you have on all your customers.”

AdRoll says its plans include increasing the reach of its real-time inventory and introducing mobile, video, and social products. It was recently announced as an initial partner on the Facebook Exchange, a real-time bidding system where visitors to outside websites are marked with a cookie and then shown related ads when they come to Facebook. We’re now hearing that AdRoll is putting serious engineering resources into the exchange.

Backupify, the startup providing backup, search and restore solutions for online services like Google Apps, Salesforce, Facebook and Twitter, is announcing today that it’s secured $9 million in Series C funding from existing investors Avalon Ventures, General Catalyst, and Lowercase Capital, as well as from new strategic investor Symantec Corp., a security solution provider.

Backupify CEO Rob May said he couldn’t comment on what the involvement with Symantec means, or discuss how much they went in for on the round, but described the relationship as “new and young,” with more announcements to follow.

Founded in 2008, Backupify got its start as a way to backup online photos at Flickr. But it long ago abandoned its consumer ambitions for the more marketable, and more lucrative, enterprise space. Today, May says the company’s consumer offering serves about 170,000 customers, some of which are paying users, but it’s used more for lead generation purposes. Consumers on the service recommend it to others at their company after a switch to Google Apps, for example.

Today, Backupify has 5,000 paying business customers, with its Google Apps Backup service at the core of its offerings. The company charges by seat, which means that some smaller businesses might only pay $3/month for one seat, while at the upper end, large businesses pay over $5,000/month. Backupify hosts around 350 terabytes of data (compressed) – that’s up from 66 terabytes on January 2011, to give you an idea - and backs up over 2 billion email messages and over 500 million documents. While Google Apps is currently at the center of its lineup, that may change next month when the company launches its Salesforce.com backup service out of beta.

After shifting its focus from the consumer space to the enterprise, Backupify has been able to directly observe the phenomenon known as the “consumerization of I.T.” “We’re seeing larger and larger companies moving to the cloud,” says May. “When we raised our Series B round, we had maybe two customers that were companies that had over 1,000 employees. Now we’ve got thirty or forty customers in that range. And a lot of that is just bigger enterprises adopting Google Apps, adopting cloud applications,” he says.

Those companies still want to backup their data, even if it’s stored online, Mays explains. “If any of these things has a bug, or anybody who’s collaborating has a problem, or tries to be malicious, or an account gets hacked or compromised, how do you get that data back?” says May. “Backup is still a best practice.”

Cambridge-based Backupify first raised $900,000 in February 2010, in a round led by First Round Capital, with General Catalyst, Betaworks, and other angels participating. A $4.5 million A round followed, co-led by Avalon Ventures and General Catalyst. Last year, Backupify closed its B round, led by Avalon Ventures, again with participation from General Catalyst and Lowercase Capital. Although the company doesn’t disclose revenue, May says it’s “decent” and still in the “single digits of millions of dollars.” He says the funding will help the 30-person team at Backupify grow in sales and marketing. The company will hire four or five more sales reps, expand its marketing program to acquire more customers and, more slowly, will expand its engineering staff to increase the products covered. Across the board, the number one request is for Evernote backup, says May, but within the enterprise, it’s Box. No decision has been made on which will be next, but it sounds like there’s more to come.

Tuenti, a Spanish social network with 13 million users that the carrier Telefonica majority-acquired back in 2010 for $99 million, is today kicking off a global launch — the first time it will be available outside of Spain and beyond an invitation-only basis. At the same time, Telefonica is adding in some new features to the free service as it looks to go head-to-head with Facebook and Twitter, particularly in the space of mobile social networking, where Tuenti already counts 6 million users: it’s launching an integrated mobile messaging app as well as beta versions of Tuenti apps for Android and BlackBerry devices, with iOS and Windows Phone apps (latter pictured here) due “in the coming weeks”.

Telefonica’s footprint spans both mobile and fixed operations across Europe and Latin America, covering 25 countries and 309 million users, and the carrier is hoping that this captive audience will be a natural user base for this latest foray into services beyond basic voice and network connectivity. In keeping with that global footprint, Tuenti is launching today in English, Spanish, Portuguese, French, German, Italian, Dutch, Slovak, and Czech. To date, Telefonica notes that Tuenti is the most-trafficked website in Spain, with 6 million monthly mobile users, 40 billion monthly pageviews, and 400 million chat messages sent per day.

Tuenti looks somewhat like a mashed-up, simplified version of Facebook and Twitter in both its mobile and web versions. Like Twitter, which was was originally conceived as a mobile service, Tuenti’s messages are limited to 140 characters. Like Facebook, it’s about uploading status updates and photos — “moments” in Tuenti lingo — that subsequently appear in your contacts’ timelines. Ultimately, its basic concept is “social done simple,” with three basic options: broadcasting messages to everyone, to your close friends, or just directly to single contacts.

The name is a clue to how the service is architected: “Tuenti” is wordplay in two languages. In Spanish, it’s “tu entidad” (your entity, your identity); and in English it’s a pun on the number 20. The idea, the company says, is that in the real world, most people only regularly chat with 20 friends or less, with 90 percent of messages actually only sent to the “same few friends.” In Tuenti, your 20 friends become your default network. "Why call everyone 'friends' when only 20 people are really friends and the rest are just contacts?" asks Zaryn Dentzel, Tuenti's CEO.

That concept of a large book of contacts, but a closer group of friends, is something that also underscores the site’s push on a more private kind of social network. Sign-ups are done using people’s real names, Telefonica says, requiring users to enter a mobile number to verify their accounts. Other features that point to how Telefonica is trying to make people feel more secure on this network are that it sends data via SSL, and it points out that none of the activity on Tuenti is ever indexed in Google.

The messaging option on Tuenti — allowing people to chat in real time — is part of the new set of services coming online today, and is a mark of how Telefonica wants to bridge some of its more legacy features into some of its newer platforms:

"We've integrated a globally competitive messaging service with our core social network, while incorporating a uniquely simple privacy model that makes it easy for users to control what they share", said Dentzel in a statement.

It’s part of a bigger strategy at Telefonica that has seen the creation of a new business unit, Telefonica Digital. This takes the carriers’ multiple, regional digital assets and puts them under one roof in order to better capitalize on its scale, and to better position itself as a player in fast-growing space of digital media, partly to offset declines in more traditional lines of business like voice.

So far, Telefonica’s been making some bold moves: it launched a free voice and messaging app, TU me; it’s integrating its carrier billing services into popular services like Facebook, Google, Microsoft and RIM; and it has been investing millions into hot new startups to make sure it can have a place at their tables, too.

What’s not clear yet is how Tuenti — which, at least at launch, is free to use — will be making money. If it’s advertising that will ultimately butter Tuenti’s bread, then the network’s push on privacy and security may start to encounter a few bumps. (We’re hopefully speaking to Tuenti’s CEO in just a bit, and when we do we will update with his thoughts on the matter.)

MobilyTrip, the mobile app and social network that lets travellers journal their trips, has raised a new round of financing: €300k from a group of angel investors, including Theo Hoffenberg, founder of the language and translation portal Reverso.net. It means that the six-person startup has now raised €500k in total.

The new funds will be used to further develop the product, including adding the option to print a hardbound book at the end of a trip, support for video, and the ability to edit the same journal on multiple devices and by multiple users. The company also wants to expand its partner program that lets travel sites add a user-generated content and social element to their offering.

A bigger marketing push is also planned as MobilyTrip aims to expand its community of 100,000 travellers, in which the majority hail from France, United States and Spain, although the service is said to be growing fast in other mainly European countries, such as Germany and Italy. Furthermore, those users have shared 500,000 'contextualized photos' in more than 90 countries, which plays nicely with the startup's broader mission to build a structured database of geotagged travel experiences that in turn can be used to power its social travel guide.

MobilyTrip's mobile app lets travellers create travel journals on-the-go by recording their itinerary, and documenting the places they visit via photos, location and comments. It runs on iOS and Android, and is also designed to work offline so as to avoid roaming charges when abroad. It does this by letting users synchronize their travel journal with MobilyTrip's website when they do have a mobile Internet connection so that they can share their travel experiences with friends, relatives, or their wider social graph i.e. Facebook and Twitter.

The startup is based in Paris and is founded by Benoît Le Ny, Alexandre Larribeau and Matthieu Godon.

China is currently the largest mobile market in the world, and that is having a knock on effect on mobile investments into startups in the country: I-Media, a mobile ad network that claims to be China’s largest with projected 2012 revenues of RMB 300 million ($47 million), today formally announced that it has picked up a $20 million Series B round of funding led by Kleiner Perkins Caufield Byers with participation from previous investor IDG. To date, it’s raised $30 million.

I-Media’s CEO Shu Yi had actually noted the investment back in April but didn’t provide more details about investors or strategy at the time. Today, I-Media said it will be using the funding to grow its activities in the Chinese market as well as expanding further into other markets in Asia: the focus will be on more products, better ad serving technology and getting a larger base of buyers and sellers for its network, which runs across mobile apps as well as mobile websites. Given how rapidly the Chinese market is growing, and the need to move quickly accordingly, that could also mean I-Media making acquisitions and consolidation of further mobile ad players.

“The mobile ad ecosystem is driven by media and application developers and advertisers,” said Shu in today’s statement announcing the investment. “I-Media will focus on building a more efficient mobile ad ecosystem, and delivering the best ROI for advertisers and highest yield for publishers and developers.”

I-Media posted revenues of RMB 100 million in 2011. Although smartphones are growing rapidly in China, with the country’s shipments now the highest of any other in the world, the majority of revenues in mobile ads for I-Media is actually coming from WAP and feature phones. Some 70 percent of I-Media’s sales come from from WAP, with mobile apps bringing in annual revenues of only RMB 50 million ($7.8 million) at the moment. That portion is poised to grow as I-Media puts a bigger emphasis on iOS and Android, Shu Yi said in May, according to this post from Marbridge Consulting. He also added that I-Media’s profit margin is still pretty low, between 20% and 30%.

I-Media follows in the tradition of many other China-based companies that have stolen a march on much bigger western companies when it comes to gaining market share in the country. Just as Google plays second-fiddle to the likes of Baidu and others in the search market, its mobile ad efforts, which lead in many other markets, lag behind companies like I-Media as well.

But the influence of Western players is still pretty strong: I-Media boasts that it has poached “many senior technology engineers” from Google and Yahoo as it has grown.

I-Media has been around since 2010 and operates three different lines of business: a mobile ad network called “LMMOB,” an enterprise mobile marketing service, “Qi ye bao,” and a self-service ad product, “Bei ke.”

It’s the combination of technology and size that has attracted KPCB. “We are excited about investing in I-Media and helping them to continue to lead and accelerate the mobile advertising industry,” Zhou Wei, a partner at KPCB China, said in a statement. “I-Media has not only demonstrated technology leadership, but also the ability to execute in the market, converting technology leadership to consistently strong results and satisfied customers.”

We have contacted I-Media to get more details about its size, the state of its CPMs and page impressions, and what kind of a valuation the company has following today’s news. Zhang Zhen, a partner at IDG, only notes: “I-Media is worth more following the round, IDG capital will go towards accelerating I-Media ‘s advertising efforts and expansion plans in China and Asia.”

CashStar, a company that makes an online platform for giving digital gift cards, has raised $5 million in new funding.

The new round included Intel Capital and existing investors Passport Ventures, FTV Capital, and CashStar co-founder and current Coupons.com CEO Steven Boal. CashStar says the new money will be put toward building out its platform, which lets businesses provide customers with the ability to buy gift certificates easily via email, on the web, through social networking sites, and on mobile devices.

This is certainly not CashStar’s first brush with big money — its last round of funding this past fall was a $12 million Series C, and this latest infusion of cash brings its total outside investment to more than $26 million.

The company claims it already powers the majority of retailer e-gift programs in the United States, with more than 250 clients including Best Buy, Gap, Staples, Starbucks, The Home Depot and Williams-Sonoma. The average amount gifted through the platform is $50 per transaction, CashStar says.

The growth going forward with the new funding appears to be centered strongly on mobile. David Flanagan, the partner at Intel Capital who led the CashStar investment, said in a statement:

"The momentum CashStar has achieved in the past year alone is indicative of the transformation in how both businesses and consumers are approaching the gifting experience. CashStar's innovations have digitized the act of gifting online and now this trend is increasingly moving mobile, making it a more personal, engaging and rewarding experience."

Of course, CashStar is not alone in the social and mobile gifting space. One of the most notable players to emerge in the past year in this area was Karma, a super slick social mobile gifting app that was quickly acquired by Facebook within hours of its initial public offering. Other startups that continue to stand alone in the space are Wrapp and the currently in “hibernation” Giftly, to name just a couple. With the new cash infusion, CashStar is showing that it’s ready to battle with the competition for market share in the days ahead.

You shouldn’t have to squint at Like and retweet counts to discover the best content your social network has to offer. So with one simple design choice, Google+ for iPad (and Nexus 7 ) has created a better tablet feed reading experience than Facebook or Twitter. As Google announced at I/O, on tablet, Google+ posts with more engagement are shown larger.

The Google+ iPad app launched today feel more like Flipboard, where surging seas of information turn into smooth sailing thanks to visual cues to what’s crucial.  Browsing update after update doesn’t feel monotonous. In fact, it’s quite refreshing and addictive, enough so it might help Google+ finally shake that ghost town label.

Every day we teach our social networks what we care about most, but their’s little response in their design.

On Facebook, popularity is a number of Likes and preferred placement for a post. Our feedback makes the news feed more relevant to read, but not any more dynamic to look at.

On Twitter, popularity is retweet and favorite counts, and how frequently a tweet appears in the stream. Twitter recently acquired content summarizer Summify, and personalized email service RestEngine in order to launch an email digest service showing the most engaging content from those you follow, but beyond the counts every tweet still looks the same.

Without visual differentiation Facebook and Twitter feed reading can quickly become exhausting. That’s becoming a bigger and bigger problem as information overload keeps getting worse.

Google+ for tablet combats this fatigue. At first, trying to read it is a little jarring as all the updates aren’t in a neat little column. However, I’d skim over those neat little columns on other social networks, sometimes missing great photos or enlightening links in my haste.

Google+ makes the best posts stick out so I’m sure not to miss them. It also optimizes the placement of posts so wider or taller posts aren’t squished into squares. While Twitter’s easy-to-scan format is part of the experience, Facebook might consider copying this design for its tablet apps.

On the limited screen size of mobile or the lean-forward experience of the web, standardly arranged feeds make more sense. But on a tablet with a big beautiful retina screen, efficiency doesn’t have to come first. So lean back on the couch, take a deep breath on the train, and give Google+ for iPad or Nexus 7 a whirl. You might be surprised how content comes to life.

Glam Media is announcing a flurry of new features today centering around Ning, the social network building service that it acquired last year. Collectively, they give some sense of what Ning looks like once it has been integrated into Glam’s business and products.

Since Glam is primarily an ads business, perhaps the most important change is the fact that Ning creators can now run Glam ads in their community. Previously, if you had a network on Ning and you wanted advertising, you were mostly on your own. (In fact, Glam CEO Samir Arora says there were already two Ning networks had decided on their own to join Glam’s advertising program.) Now, assuming you fit into one of the company’s ad verticals, you can start monetizing in a more serious way, by running premium advertising from the network.

At the same time, Glam CEO Samir Arora says it’s not just about slapping traditional brand advertising onto Ning properties. He says that on Ning, the ads can be better targeted using social data, and that Glam is also “inventing new ad formats” that are uniquely social — for example, ads could take the form of branded discussions around a topic that’s connected to the advertiser.

Advertisers will be able to take advantage of those formats outside of Ning, through a new product called Glam Social. It’s supposedly “powered by Ning,” but will allow customers to run these types of social campaigns (like the one below) and build their own communities on their own websites, rather than being stuck on a Facebook Page or even a Ning community.

There are some improvements beyond the addition of ads. Glam is also announcing that Ning can optimize communities for the mobile web, whether it’s on a smartphone or a tablet. (Previously, larger Ning communities can hire someone to turn those communities into native apps.) And for the largest customers, Ning is also announcing a new paid product called Ning VIP, which is supposed to provide more scalability, customization, and support, with pricing starting at $1,000 per month.

In addition to the product news, Glam is also revealing that Ning’s communities are seeing more than 50 million unique active users per month, and that more than 2,000 new social networks are created monthly.

Seculert has raised a $5.35 million round of funding today led by Norwest Venture Partners for the Israeli company’s next generation advanced threat detection service.

The company’s software-as-a-service detects back doors in your network, discovering malware attacks that have previously gone undetected.

As much as the cloud is for developing cool apps, it is also a place for botnets. The botnet culture thrives upon our daily immersion into the online world. The botnets are mostly networks of personal computers overtaken by malicious software that is controlled by a master program. The master directs the slaves to act on its behalf, in the industry terminology. People will click on a link in Twitter, on the Web or in email. The malware will then attack and take control.

It could not be a better time to be in this criminal world. There are just too many endpoints out there. By an endpoint I mean that tablet in your purse, the smartphone you look at all day and the laptop back at the house where you do your work.

People work at home. People have lots of devices. And we all spend far more time online. For a lot of us, IT is in some distant place.

That means we need new ways to protect the network. Other new startups like Bromium are cropping up — it sees a future with security built deep into the devices with micro-virtualization capabilities that isolates malware without the user even knowing there was an attack.

Seculert takes a different approach, actually monitoring botnet traffic. It will look for your IP addresses in the botnet itself. If it finds one, it knows you are under attack. If it finds relevant data, it uploads the information to the Seculert Cloud. You are then given access to that information through a secure Web-based dashboard, as well as through email alerts, and RESTful APIs.

For additional advanced persistent threat detection, you can upload your log files, such as Blue Coat, Squid or others, to Seculert Cloud. It will then analyze your logs with Hadoop to identify advanced threats to your organization.

Seculert will use the funding to open an office in the Bay Area and add more people to develop its technology. The company received a seed round in 2010 for an undisclosed amount.

LinkedIn these days may be the social network that is used most by those looking for a new job (and not the place to read tweets), but the company has long wanted to be seen as the place for a whole lot more, and we’re now getting a glimpse of how it plans to put that into action. LinkedIn has been quietly rolling out a new version of its homepage to some of its 160 million+ users — the first major update in years — with a layout that will put a lot more emphasis on building out relationships, make better use of socially curated news content — and, if things go according to plan, should make the site a lot more sticky.

We’ve had three different people contact us about the new-look LinkedIn, and a spokesperson for the company has also confirmed as much:

“We are always looking for ways to make it easier for LinkedIn members to get more value out of our services by creating simpler, more relevant experiences, so we are currently testing a new design for the LinkedIn homepage with a handful of members,” he told TechCrunch.

Judging by the number of tips we’ve already received on the new look (and those that we’ve spotted discussing it online), it could move from test phase to wider rollout in a matter of weeks.

So what’s on the new site? Many of the same elements are there as before, but in more dynamic ways.

The new menu bar, for example, now on a darkened background, has the same tabs as the existing one, but it will now remain at the top of the page as you scroll down and around. That gives users the ability to, say, create a message or check on news from wherever they are on the page.

Similarly, LinkedIn Today still appears close to the top of the page, but now the images in the feed are much bigger. While this isn’t anything like the Facebook Timeline (for starters there are no photos posted on LinkedIn, except for your profile mugshot), you can see the influence of visually-led redesigns like that being used to engage the user more.

Meanwhile, there also seems to be more functionality in the “people who have viewed your profile” area, with conditional “Message/Connect” buttons next to each person, meaning: if someone has viewed your profile and you’re connected to them you can message them, otherwise, you can connect.

The bigger strategic move at LinkedIn has been towards more simplification. It’s something that we’ve seen in the latest version’s of the company’s mobile apps, and it’s what CEO Jeff Weiner has emphasized as a wider goal for the company. And it’s what LinkedIn appears to be going for here, too.

But those aesthetic improvements are almost certainly going to also be followed up with algorithmic changes, where ease of use will be coupled with content that LinkedIn members actually want to use: whether that is a more relevant selection of potential contacts through “people you may know”, a more personalized lists of stories on LinkedIn Today, or easier ways of creating and sharing content with your contacts.

That last point about people using LinkedIn as a place for their own thoughts and information sharing is an important one. Although the development of a new home page with enhanced content features would have started months ago, it’s timely that its emergence happens to come in the wake of Twitter’s semi-divorce from LinkedIn, in which Twitter has limited its API to prevent tweets from automatically posting to LinkedIn’s social network.

Those tweets, we’ve heard, produced a ton of content on LinkedIn, but not necessarily content relevant to the professional network. That says two things: there is a hole to be filled, and an opportunity to fill it in a way that is better than what came before.

One colleague of mine noted to me: “With Twitter being pulled from Linkedin I realize I have more incentive to post status updates [on LinkedIn].” Well, it could be either that or people pulling away from using the site altogether because of the extra time and effort required. All the more reason LinkedIn needs to get a snappy update out the door post-haste.