YouTube today launched a new feature that allows its users to easily blur the faces of everybody in a video with just one click. This, says YouTube policy associate Amanda Conway in a blog post today, can have a number of uses. It can, for example, help users ensure they can share a video of activists during a protest without putting them at risk for later repercussions. As YouTube becomes an increasingly important part of how news spreads, having the ability to ensure the safety of those captured on these videos becomes imperative. At the same time, of course, this new feature can also help users share video of their children without broadcasting their faces to the world. This new visual anonymity, says Conway, will allow “people to share personal footage more widely and to speak out when they otherwise may not.”

Google freely acknowledges that this new tool, which can be found in YouTube’s Video Enhancements tool, doesn’t always work perfectly. “This is emerging technology, which means it sometimes has difficulty detecting faces depending on the angle, lighting, obstructions and video quality,” says Conway. Some faces, for example, may not be blurred in some frames. In these cases, YouTube recommends that users keep their videos private. The tool probably uses the same algorithms that Google’s StreetView does, by the way, but we’ve asked Google for clarification.

Currently, it seems, this new tool only allows users to blur all faces in a video. You can’t just selectively blur some faces but leave others untouched. Still, this will likely become a very useful feature for those who want to share video without putting those filmed at risk.

Want more proof that the private, mobile social networking space is exploding? Today, there comes yet another entrant into the game: an iOS and web application called Sidebark, which targets families and friends interested in sharing photos and videos privately via mobile.

Because there are so many of these apps, with Path perhaps being the one to beat in this space, each has to offer some differentiating factor in order to stand out. In Sidebark’s case, that feature is an automated email analysis tool that smartly builds sharing lists for you.

Sidebark’s user interface is pretty much par for the course, in terms of how media-sharing apps go – there’s a camera button, the ability to import from your camera roll, a profile page, an activity feed, and even photos filters.

But before you get started with all this, the app walks you through an email analyzer that scans your Gmail, Google Apps, Yahoo mail, or AOL mail, and then determines which groups you might like to share photos with. The experience is reminiscent of Katango, the app that automatically grouped Facebook friends for private sharing before it got snapped up by Google. The difference is that Sidebark analyzes your email connections, not your social networks.

In theory, it’s a handy feature since a large majority of private phot0-sharing, believe it or not, still occurs via email. Sidebark’s co-founder David Cho, a Harvard Business School grad (and dad) who left his comfortable job at Bain & Company to build the app with longtime PayPal engineer and manager Nick Stanev, tells me that only 50 billion of the 350 billion photos taken in 2011 were actually shared. “The ~50B is from cobbling together a bunch of data sources,” he explains, “but the biggest numbers come directly from Facebook (~40B photos shared) and Google+ (~3.5B shared).  Once you start adding up the rest of the services (Flickr, Instagram, etc.) you pretty quickly start to converge on 50 billion,” he explains.

Cho says the number one reason why these photos have been shared is privacy. “There’s a ton of activity and energy right now around private video and photo-sharing, and there’s a reason for that – we think it’s a big opportunity,” he says. There is an advantage to using groups, instead of Path’s small, but still singular group. You can share the appropriate pictures and video with the appropriate people – the whole family, school buddies, parents and grandparents, your girlfriends or bros, etc.

In addition to its focus on the privacy angle, Sidebark also aims to differentiate itself simply by supporting (and not favoring) photos and video, unlike how Instagram focused on photos and recently acquired Socialcam went for video. “There’s all chatter around what’s going to be the Instagram of video,” Cho says. “It seems like a false dichotomy to say there needs to be an Instagram for videos. Why can’t they both just be in one app?”

While the app is simple and easy to use (Android users are directly to a mobile-friendly webpage so they can use it, too), I did encounter some issues. The app crashed on me once, it lacks the ability to authenticate via Facebook or Twitter, it requires an email confirmation to activate (which seems decidedly old school), and the list-making feature is a non-starter if you use your email account for both work and personal emails, as many do. It seems the algorithm there should be smarter – not looking for just frequently emailed contacts or those from the same domain, but also those with whom you’ve shared photo attachments with on a regular basis.

But the biggest problem is that the photos, once shared, can’t be saved to the Camera Roll. Now this could be positioned as an advantage if you were looking for a way to share sexting pics, I suppose, but given that Cho says Sidebark is targeting families, it’s just a miss. The very first thing grandma wants to know is if she can have a copy of the photo to use as her iPhone’s wallpaper. Oops. The founders say they may add this feature in a future update, though, along with that new “print to Walgreens” function.

Sidebark is a free download on iTunes here.

When it comes to predicting how companies or stocks will perform, we all have our own methods of fundamental analysis (I personally prefer voodoo). But, generally speaking, for the everyday investor, it can be tough to pick out the key metrics and stats buried in the ocean of unreliable financial data that permeates the Web. While there are a bevy of free engines for realtime company info, like Yahoo Finance, many lack detail and fail to offer the advanced tools we need to filter the noise and build comprehensive, long-term projections.

Founded in 2009, YCharts set out to offer a legitimate alternative to the Yahoo Finances of the world by becoming a full-service resource for detailed and reliable financial information. The startup wants to turn everyday investors into savvy stock analyst by digging into long-tail data from a variety of sources to get a glimpse into the outlook of your portfolio companies and actually understand the companies you buy and invest in.

And because a picture is worth a thousand static rows, columns and ratios, YCharts (as its name would imply) has focused on charts — rather, on becoming the mother lode of chartable financial data.

The startup offers graphs and plots on umpteen different categories, starting with those common to technical analysis, like 200-day moving average and price/volume metrics — and going from there. So, YCharts users can poke through price charts, focus on individual metrics or combine a variety of data points in millions of different permutations.

And that’s where it aims to differentiate: Breadth and flexibility. By allowing you to compare dividend yields, total returns, and 100 other metrics that let you weigh your holdings against others, YCharts gives you a chance to better understand the value of your investments in the long-run.

It’s for this reason that, since raising $3.5 million from the 30-year-old financial data giant Morningstar last November, the startup has been on the up and up. YCharts founder and CEO Shawn Carpenter tells us that the company is now seeing 500K visitors per month and has expanded its data coverage to over 500K data series, which includes over 100 metrics on 5K equities, commodities, forex and interest rates. On top of that, users can now combine over 40K economic indicators with the rest of its equity data.

500K visitors per month may not seem like a lot compared to the Instagrams and Facebooks, but considering that there are a number of free, easily searchable resources for financial data, growing from 30K to 500K in less than 18 months is a good sign. After all, YCharts relies on offering enough of a taste of its free tools and reams of data to get you hooked before leveraging its business model, in which users that want more advanced analytics pay $40/month to access 30 years worth of metrics and ratios and a bunch of advanced calculations.

On top of its free and Pro offerings, YCharts also offers third-party sites, journalists and bloggers the opportunity to create their own charts with its so-called Chart Creator.

Chart Creator, which has recently been updated, is a great tool for startups, media and the like, looking to quickly graph out individual metrics or combinations thereof. The feature now supports all 5K of YChart’s stocks with 100 metrics each, 2.5K ETFs and 40K economic indicators, all of which can be combined in any permutation — in addition to being able to add up to six metrics from 500K options, titles, notes and recession dates. (Here’s a techie example.)

This is awesome because, historically, this type of data and charting functionality has really only been available to professional analysts and economists. The YCharts CEO believes this is the reason that the tool has begun to see increasing adoption among editorial teams and contributors and is currently being used by Motley Fool, SeekingAlpha, TheStreet.com, Business Insider, Forbes, Morningstar, Zacks, StockTwits, LA Times and The Chicago Tribune — to name a few.

The tool is spreading rapidly and is currently used by the editorial team/contributors at Motley Fool, SeekingAlpha, TheStreet.com, BusinessInsider, Forbes, Morningstar, Zacks, StockTwits, Gigaom, AllThingsD, LA Times, Chicago Tribune and a ton of others.

Thus, in addition to the 500K visitors on YCharts.com, Carpenter said that the startup is generating millions of impressions via its partner sites and is working towards the goal of facilitating the “visualization of the financial conversation” everywhere. As part of this, the team plans to launch a higher-end version of its Chart Creator later this year.

But what would the service be without giving investors the opportunity to communicate with other like-minded armchair analysts? YCharts subscribers can turn their data points into sharable plots that can be sent via Twitter or StockTwits, tweeting messages that cut straight to the chase, offering abbreviated URL links to charts and tables.

The YCharts team has clearly put a good deal of thought into how to better communicate the crazy amount of complicated, disorderly, and often unreliable financial information. It’s well on the way to offering a viable alternative to Yahoo Finance and a more affordable option compared to the Bloombergs, even though it has nowhere near the same traffic and user base. So, in the end, if YCharts yearns for that big audience, it may work better as part of a larger entity or portal. But, in the meantime, Carpenter says that the team will continue to focus on adding value to its exhaustive financial data, while keeping things clean and relevant.

For more, find YCharts at home here.

Anyone want an iPhone 5 case? A bunch of manufacturers are currently taking orders and shipping nearly every style from cheap silicon sleeves to hard shell Hello Kitty cases. All of them feature a design taller than that of the iPhone 4S and most of them make room for a smaller dock connector.

As the next iPhone approaches, Apple will start handing out specs to trusted accessory makers. That could have already happened. After all, this move is a standard operating procedure to ensure the phone launches with strong accessory support. But these cases are now available for purchase as long as buyers are willing to order them in bulk.

Alibaba currently lists several dozen cases listed as for the iPhone 5. As a b2b connecting platform, Alibaba serves as a marketplace for bulk items sold from a direct supplier. Want a thousand 15.5 gallon beer kegs? Click here. How about a cheap Android tablet? Or even a fleet of racing ATVs? Alibaba is where the brands and retailers go shopping and they can start stocking up on iPhone 5 cases now.

Leaked cases have long plagued Apple launches. They prematurely revealed the iPhone 4′s new design and the iPad 2′s larger speaker. Leaked cases revealed the iPod touch and nano were getting a camera.

The iPhone 5, or whatever it will be called, is rumored to launch this fall as early as September. And with cases already available, it will likely launch sooner versus later.

Ticketmaster could get away with high service fees because it’s one of the few ticketing options for huge venues, but not anymore. Ticketfly can now power sales for any reserved seating venue, not just general admission shows, with today’s relaunch of its ticketing platform. Considering 70% of advanced event ticket sales in North America are for reserved seats, this triples Ticketfly’s addressable market.

Along with the freedom to ditch Ticketmaster, Ticketfly’s social tools for efficiently marketing tickets on Facebook and Twitter are now available to concert halls, arenas, and sports stadiums that are too big for GA free-for-alls. And this could all mean lower ticket service fees for you.

Ticketfly considers itself a software company first — and a high-performing and fast-growing one at that. The 500 venues it powers saw a 17% increase in their tickets sold last year compared to the industry average of 3% growth. It doubled its client base in 2011 and is up another 65% so far in 2012 with only around 100 employees.

The Ticketfly software-as-a-service lets venues quickly map out a visual model of their general admission or reserved seat floor plans.  Venue managers can set different prices and whether fans can pick their seats or only buy the “best available, and instantly put their show up for sale on stable platform that won’t crash when hundreds of thousands of people rush to purchase Radiohead, Lady Gaga, or Rolling Stones tickets.

Rather than having to rebuild their seat map for each show, venues can reuse templates. Ticketfly clients can also edit prices and add seats on the fly (har har). For comparison, Ticketfly’s co-founder and CEO Andrew Dreskin says his competitor Ticketmaster’s platform takes days to create an event, and venues have to start from scratch to change prices and seating options. I’m awaiting a response from Ticketmaster on that claim, though Dreskin should have good insight considering he sold his last company Ticketweb to Ticketmaster a few years ago.

Reserved venues that partner with Ticketfly and pay it a fee per ticket will also get access to its social marketing tools. These let venues automatically create Facebook events for their shows, schedule tweets to promote them, and quickly generate email marketing blasts.

The Facebook integration includes deep hooks into Facebook’s Open Graph so a user can automatically RSVP to the Facebook event, publish to the Ticker and Timeline that they’re attending, or Like artists on the bill. Ticketfly clients also get analytics about which channels are driving sales so they can spend their marketing dollars in the right place.

Ticketfly still has a lot of work to do. It can’t handle season ticket sales, ticket subscriptions, or donations which it will need to serve performing arts and sports events. It also lacks Ticketmaster’s  awesome concert recommendations based on your Spotify and other music streaming listening habits. And it doesn’t yet allow buyers to see where their friends are sitting so they can buy seats next to them, which you can do on Ticketmaster. Expect that in an upcoming Ticketfly product update, though.

It’s going to be an uphill battle to displace the domineering Live Nation / Ticketmaster. Most huge venues have signed three year contracts with Ticketmaster, so Ticketfly will only get a shot to steal 1/3 of them away each year. But if it can focus on efficiency, affordable rates, and powerful marketing tools that let venues sell more tickets at lower prices, event promoters will hopefully pass the savings on to their customers. It might even force its Ticketmaster to lower its fees to compete.

So if you don’t feel gouged the next time you buy a concert ticket, you can thank technology!

You may remember StartApp from their September 2011 launch, or perhaps from the $4 million the company raised in March. But today, 10 months after the initial launch, StartApp is back with the news that its search monetization software has been downloaded more than 150 million times on Android.

The company has said that around 4,000 live apps in the Google Play store are using its platform, with approximately 1.25 million daily SDK installs.

If you’re not already familiar with it, StartApp is basically a platform that lets developers bundle in a search portal with their app, meaning the user not only installs the Herp Derp app but they install a little search icon controlled by StartApp. Developers then receive a cut of the revenue generated by the search, though the user has every right to delete the icon immediately.

That said, 150 million downloads as opposed to 450 million downloads in December is a huge spike in growth. Developers using StartApp receive an upfront payment for their free apps, where they'll receive $10-$50 per 1,000 downloads, depending on location. Alternately, they can choose to share the revenue generated by the search option on an ongoing basis.

Some developers have said that they have generated 10 times more revenue than they were before implementing StartApp, so clearly StartApp’s partners are happy campers. I’d be more interested, however, to see how users feel about that curious little search icon that appears after downloading an app. Sure, the developer is required to mention the search icon bundle, but I’ve blown through permissions and informative pop-ups plenty of times. And I’m sure I’m not the only one.

The spam attack and related possible address leak over at Dropbox may be even more serious than we originally thought. According to a message posted by the company over on its forums, they’ve now brought in “an outside team of experts” to assist Dropbox’s own security team in the investigation.

As of now, Dropbox says it hasn’t had any reports of unauthorized activity on user accounts, and it has taken a number of precautionary steps to deal with the issue, but declined to go into further details.

In case you missed it, yesterday we reported that some Dropbox users began to see their accounts targeted by spammers. What was troublesome was the fact that many of these users claimed they were being attacked despite having set up unique and private email addresses that were only being used with Dropbox. If that’s true, it means there’s the potential that the spam attack is related to an address book leak, which could be the result of a hack. Many of the reports came from Dropbox’s international users, specifically those from Germany, the U.K. and the Netherlands. Today, there are now six pages of complaints on the forum site about the spam.

While initially, it was possible that the users were the victims of random spambots being able to “guess” their emails, a malware infestation on their PC that stole their credentials, or even a compromised third-party application, those scenarios now seem far less likely given Dropbox’s admission that it has brought in hired help.

While the spam largely contained messages related to European casino scams, and doesn’t seem to have any other impact beyond annoyance at this point for the affected users, its mere existence is now seemingly pointed to a more definite possibility that Dropbox was actually hacked.

According to Dropbox engineer Joe Gross, the outage Dropbox experienced yesterday was “ incidental and not caused by any external factor or third party.”

If it weren’t for its acquisition of TapEngage, Dropbox would be having a very bad week, it seems.

Note: We’ve reached out to Dropbox for additional details, but it’s not likely that they’ll comment on this beyond what they’ve chosen to publicly share at this point. If they do, however, we’ll update this post.

AT&T unveiled its new Mobile Share plans earlier this morning, and at first blush it seemed awfully familiar. Under those new plans, users pay a set monthly access fee for unlimited talk, messaging, and a specified lump of data, with different classes of devices adding to the total monthly cost.

It's nearly identical to how Verizon's Share Everything plans work, but that's not exactly new for the two carriers — they've been jumping on and implementing each other's ideas for years now. That said, there are still some notable differences between how AT&T and Verizon have approached the shared data situation.

The biggest of those differences? Unlike Verizon, AT&T’s Mobile Share plans supplement their current offerings instead of replacing them, so new customers don’t need to run with a shared data plan if they don’t want to.

There’s more, of course. AT&T's tiers top out at 20GB for instance, which seems a bit unnecessary for anyone buy business customers; Verizon has instead padded out the lower end of their plan spectrum with a 2GB option. Verizon's Share Everything plans tend to look a hair cheaper than AT&T's too, but AT&T's Mobile Share plans also reduce device fees as data caps grow larger. Consider a two smartphone family plan that shares 6GB of data — before taxes and fees, that setup will cost both Verizon ($80+$40+$40) and AT&T customers ($90+$35+$35) the same base price of $160/month. Meanwhile, a 4 smartphone family plan would cost Verizon customers a total of $260 before taxes and fees, while it would set back AT&T customers $240.

All things considered, there’s no clear winner between the two since they both depend so heavily on the kind of setups people are working with. What’s perhaps more important is the big picture. Unlike Verizon, which decided to go all-in on their newfangled share plans (and miffing a few customers in the process), AT&T is trying something a little different: it's offering its new subscribers a choice.

In the event that a shared data plan doesn't make sense for you, there's nothing stopping you from keeping what you already have. On that same note, there doesn't seem to be anything stopping customers from switching into a shared data plan and jumping right back out of it in case things don't work out as planned. Meanwhile, new users looking to ink a two-year deal with Verizon have no other option aside from a Share Everything plan, and those looking to upgrade or change plans soon will face a similar dearth of choices.

The policy comes in especially handy if you’re still clinging to a grandfathered AT&T unlimited data plan — as Peter pointed out earlier, those aren’t going anywhere. Compare that to Verizon’s approach, which sees unlimited customers who want to keep their plans sticking with the devices for the long(er) haul, or paying the full unsubsidized price for new hardware.

AT&T's Mobile Share plans co-exist with their current offerings instead of replacing them, and that's arguably the way it should work. When it comes to this sort of thing, more options mean more control over your plan. Granted, not every option is one worth considering, but at least those doors aren’t closed to you right from the start. Sadly, the major carriers are still a ways off from offering what many consumers are clamoring for — a dumb pipe that doesn’t tie up data into proprietary packages — but unless there’s a dramatic policy shift in the works, we’ll have to take what we can get for now.

Prototype 035: it sounds like a nail-biting action RPG but it’s actually one of the first iPad prototypes, built years before the iPhone, and laid by the wayside as Apple kept experimenting with new form factors. The iPad in question, according to a great bit of digging by Yoni Heisler at NetworkWorld, is the one that Jonathan Ive remembers as being the true precursor to the first iPad model.

In December 2011, Samsung deposed Ive in relation to a patent case. The deposition is a goldmine of interesting facts about the growth of the iPad and its slow metamorphosis over the years. He recalled, in the deposition, that he had seen iPad prototypes as early as 2002:

The device shown above is clearly more of a MacBook cut in half than a real device, but everything is there: the port at the bottom, the big glass screen, and a smug, self-satisfied user imagining how great Angry Birds will be a decade later. There is also no home button, which is indicative of the direction Jobs and Apple were trying to take during that period.

It’s a fun little trip down memory lane, and, more important, it shows us that Apple prototypes the future sooner than most companies ship the present.

This morning, Zoho Office, the David to Google Apps’ Goliath, is announcing that it will now be integrated into Google Drive. To be clear, this is not an official partnership between Zoho and Google (Google isn’t that crazy), it’s an integration made possible by way of Google Chrome extensions. There are some challenges with that method, of course, but for those looking for the escape hatch from the Google Docs universe, this may be it.

The benefit to using Google Apps, but also the downside, is that it limits your ability to try other products and services on the market. Everything under Google’s umbrella is integrated to work together – you click on a document in your online cloud storage, it opens in Google Docs; you can click an attachment in your Gmail, and opens it in Google Docs; when you save a file authored in the cloud, it saves to your Google Drive. There’s not much benefit to trying a different, disconnected service once you buy into Google’s suite. There are areas where Google can improve these integrations (Calendar and Contacts jump out at me as lacking), but for the most part, they work well to keep you locked into the entire Google ecosystem.

Zoho, however, is positioning the new Google Drive integration as a challenge to Microsoft, which this week revealed the future of its own Office Suite and online offerings. Like much of Microsoft’s install base, Zoho also targets the corporate and enterprise market with its products. But Google is making its own inroads into these areas – according to Google’s own website, 4 million businesses now use Google Apps, in addition to 40 million active users. Zoho’s business install base is much smaller than that: 6+ million users (that’s users, not businesses), but the lot of those users are business customers, not consumers.

To use the new Google Drive integration, Zoho users will head over to the Chrome Store for the extensions. Unfortunately, each one is packaged separately: Zoho Writer, Zoho Sheet, and Zoho Show.

Bottled water is 2,900 times more expensive than tap water and burdens America’s environment and oil market with the equivalent of 37,800 gas guzzling delivery trucks. The House of Representatives alone spends nearly a million tax dollars a year on bottled water.

The funny thing is, bottled and tap water are nearly identical, separated mostly by a fancy label that triggers our psychological susceptibility to perceive a better taste from a prettier presentation. A new company, Vyykn, aims to end America’s addiction to bottled water with a subscription refill service, which allows customers to fill up on oxygenated and filtered water for a yearly fee of $30.

The subscription comes with a electronic keychain chip that activates the spout on a futuristic looking dispenser, complete with options for O2, filtered, and hot water. The still semi-stealth water service was on display at the Annual Aspen Ideas Festival*, where founder Steve Kuzara tells us that large corporations, such as Microsoft, have already become customers, to save money they would otherwise waste on bottled water. Perhaps more importantly, Kuzara estimates that restaurants and gyms that sell the subscription service to their customers make about 27% more than by selling premium bottled water ($3,000 net profit from 1,500 monthly bottled water vs. the equivalent of Vyykn refills).

Interestingly, the Vyykn Water business model has to overcome the same hurdle as electric vehicles: network effects, the more people demand it, the more refill stations there will be. It’s not inconceivable that Vyykn water could develop its own cool cachet, like Starbucks, where walking around with a branded cup is seen as a sign of environmental hipness.

When I was a teenaged grocery sacker, I used to get a kick out of asking soccer moms if they felt guilty paying for the most abundant resource on Earth while meticulously collecting coupons to save money. For the sake the planet and our shrinking wallets, let’s hope that Vyykn — or someone — can succeed in crushing the Dasani’s and Aquafina’s of the world. Screw bottled water.

*Disclosure: I consult for the Aspen Institute on a separate government innovation-related conference

Today Dell announced its official re-entry into the Linux laptop market. Project Sputnik, first announced in May, is graduating from Dell’s internal incubator program into a real product. According to project lead Barton Geroge, Dell will sell a special “developer edition” of its XPS13 Ultrabook starting this fall.

The laptop will come pre-loaded with Ubuntu, a user friendly distribution of the open source operating system Linux (or GNU/Linux to purists). George said the laptop won’t be able to dual boot Windows. But Dell made available an Ubuntu install image customized for the XPS13, so you could buy the Windows version and install Ubuntu yourself if you require dual booting. George says the developer version will be the high end configuration of the XPS13, with 4GB of RAM, an Intel Core i7 processor and a 256GB solid state hard drive. This model currently sells for $1,499, and George says the Linux version will sell for a little bit less than the Windows version.

Dell started offering systems with Linux pre-installed back in 2007, due to popular demand on its online suggestion box IdeaStorm. But the company quietly stopped advertising Ubuntu as an option on its online store sometime in 2010. The Ubuntu option was too confusing to average users. “It wasn’t reaching the right audience,” George explains.

But the demand from power users never really went away. Since the original announcement of Project Sputnik Dell has gathered extensive feedback on IdeaStorm – enough, George says, to justify bringing a Linux laptop back into production. He says that although Dell hasn’t fully decided how to market the new product, it will be more clear to buyers that this is a computer for power users.

Dell won’t be alone in the Linux laptop market. There are several “white box” vendors offering Linux laptops, but no major vendor is selling fully featured (non-netbook) machines with Linux pre-installed. The closest thing is EmperorLinux, which installs Linux on laptops manufactured by major vendors and sells them along with technical support (check out this site for a round-up of Linux laptop vendors).

With growing concern about locked bootloaders on Window 8 machines possibly preventing users from installing Linux or other alternative operating systems it’s refreshing to see a major vendor promoting computational freedom.

Disrupt has long been the birthplace of software startups – but that’s changing. With the launch of Hardware Alley at Disrupt NY, we’ve inaugurated a very cool opportunity for hardware startups to grab a little Disrupt floor space and we’re doing it again in San Francisco.

Hardware Alley happens on the last day of Disrupt and lets you get into the event at a discounted rate for one or all three days. Smaller startups should contact me directly at john@techcrunch.com but if you’re funded, ready to rock, and interested in holding court with some of SF’s preeminent VCs and thinkers, head over here to buy tickets.

Here’s the fine print and we hope to see you there.

AppDirect, a company that offers white-label cloud-based app stores, has today announced $8.5 million in funding to ride the wave of interest in cloud services and continue its expansion in partnership with third parties. And today the company also announced a new customer in that strategy: Rackspace, which has launched the Rackspace Cloud Tools Marketplace, an online store for cloud-based software and services to more than 180,000 Rackspace customers worldwide.

The Series A round was led by iNovia Capital with participation from existing investors, and comes on the back of a seed round of $3.25 million raised last year.

Cloud services have been steadily picking up momentum in the enterprise — Gartner just the other week noted that they will be the fastest growing segment of enterprise services in the years ahead and will total $109 billion this year.

Up to now, AppDirect has been winning some good deals in this segment among companies that are already serving enterprises with cloud-based storage, and now want to begin offering more value-added services on top of that — partly to differentiate from their competitors, but also for convenience.

In addition to Rackspace, AppDirect also counts Deutsche Telekom, Bell Canada and Appcelerator among its customers. In total, there are some six million end users worldwide accessing apps through its’ cloud platform, which acts as a kind of one-stop shop for cloud-based software like Google Apps, DocuSign, New Relic, and SendGrid.

Rackspace’s Cloud Tools Marketplace, the companies say, will include some 100 applications for customers to use: they include billing and file management solutions, as well as online backup applications and a range of business-critical applications have been fully integrated into the marketplace, including New Relic, SendGrid and Standing Cloud. AppDirect also runs the billing system in the backend to manage the buying process and can authenticate users of multiple apps with a single, encrypted sign-on.

The fact that end users do not have to “shop around” for apps and can get them from a single marketplace is already a compelling idea, but there is also potential for AppDirect to work directly with large enterprises to create app stores for their employees to access.

Daniel Saks, president and co-CEO of AppDirect, notes that the funding will in part be used to develop new services. “We’re going to have a lot of exciting news to announce over the next few months, from developer engagement activities to new partnerships,” he says. “This funding announcement is just the first in a long string of successes to come.”

This morning Google announced the launch of a new service that delivers Gmail messages over SMS. The service, simply called Gmail SMS, is currently available only in emerging markets where smartphone penetration is low and internet connections are unreliable. Ghana, Nigeria and Kenya are the first three countries where Gmail SMS is supported. However, although Google didn’t say, it’s likely that the service will begin to roll out to other regions in the near future.

Details of how the service works were shared on Google’s Africa blog, which demonstrates how users can set up a new Gmail SMS account. Unfortunately, configuration does require the use of a computer for the initial setup – it can’t be set up directly from a phone itself, which would have dramatically increased its potential to go viral.

For setup details, read the post, but it’s a relatively simple process involving heading into your account settings and enabling SMS in the “Phone and SMS” section. I checked this morning in the U.S. (just to be sure, you never know!), and, sorry U.S. feature phone users, we don’t appear to have this ourselves. Oh well.

The new service is free of charge, but standard SMS text message rates will follow. Google’s move to SMS-enable its Gmail service in these emerging markets is notable because SMS tends to be a preferred method of communication – even over phone calls, in many cases. The value for these users is that it allows them to continue with their usual text messaging behaviors, but also keeps an online archive of those messages for easy access the next time they are at a PC or in an Internet cafe, for example. It also provides a channel for them to reach out to others outside the area where texting makes sense – in other words, the world at large.

Lord knows niche and independent online publishers can sometime struggle to monetize what they do and over the last few years we’ve seen the rise of startups to address those problems in the market, from companies like SAY Media to Federated Media. In general they offer baked-in ad networks and publisher platforms. A new one has been plugging away since last year, but its traction has attracted the attention of investors. To whit, RollUp Media has announced it’s secured $1.4 million (€1.2 million) in funding from VC firm Arts Alliance and other investors, bringing total funding since its founding to €2M. The other investors are Assaf Topaz, Peter Read, Karim Attia, David Rosenblatt and former Googler Anil Hansjee.

The new investment will enable the startup to expand its service for publishers with their bespoke suite of platform, tools and services. The funding announcement follows the news of a partnership with Everyday Health Inc, in June, to launch and operate their flagship properties such as Everyday Health.

The idea is to give individuals and businesses with a blog or news site ad and publishing tools, plus RollUp can also help/support generate content.

RollUp Media was founded by a team drawn from Google, DoubleClick, Brightcove and Lycos and is headed up by Ben Regensburger, CEO.

It now services over 30 publishers spanning the health and lifestyle, family and parenting, style and fashion, and career verticals, in the UK and Australia.

Joshua Green, Investment Director at Arts Alliance says Rollup is “poised to benefit from both the rapid growth in the independent publishing market and in the process of content-driven advertising".

It’s also nice to see Arts Alliance appear, an investor we haven’t seen much of lately.

Microsoft continues to make a big push with the Windows Phone platform, but figures out today from Strategy Analytics indicate that it’s still barely moving the needle against the Android/iOS juggernaut. In 2012, Microsoft’s Windows Phone will account for only 4.1 percent of the 123 million smartphones that will be sold in the U.S. in the year. That’s a rise, but of less than one percentage point compared to 2011. In terms of actual unit numbers, this works out to 5 million devices sold in 2012, compared to 3.5 million in 2011.

This will not come as good news to Nokia, which has staked a lot of its future — and its ability to crack the U.S. market specifically — on the success of the platform. Nokia is expected to report its earnings tomorrow and people will be looking carefully at how well Windows Phone smartphones are selling compared to devices built on Nokia’s legacy platform Symbian: a sign of too few on the newer platform could be a sign that the new strategy is not sticking.

Nokia has been taking some drastic measures to bump up sales of its flagship Lumia 900 Windows-based smartphone. Just three months after launch, earlier this week it halved the price to $49 from $99 for a two-year contract.

That will at least help Windows Phone stay on track and keep from having an even smaller market share this year: “We consider four percent to be an achievable target. It only needs Nokia to deliver a few hundred thousand extra units to the US this year and the target should be met,” notes Neil Mawston, Executive Director at Strategy Analytics.

The news is not particularly good for other handset makers building on Windows Phone, either — the main ones include HTC and Samsung. However, these two have made far greater investments in their Android-based line of devices and that diversification will help offset that.

Strategy Analytics says that its 123 million figure for total smartphones sold in the U.S. is a rise of 21 percent compared to 2011, when 102 million units were sold.

Mawston notes that there may be more opportunity with Windows Phone 8, the next version of the OS, but it’s still lagging behind in terms of what it can support. His to-do list includes the need to support with multi-core chipsets, as well as an improved Marketplace app store and a much wider range of phone models. The last two of these will rely on consumers flocking to the platform — that will bring more manufacturers and more developers — but in case that doesn’t work, he has another suggestion: “consider reducing the license fees it charges per unit to smartphone makers.”

Apple uses the ARM architecture for its chip sets on its iPhones and tablets. Now we are seeing the first uses for ARM-powered architectures on servers to power cloud environments.

Contributors to OpenStack have developed the first ARM powered OpenStack cloud as a zone in TryStack.org, the free sandbox for exploring and testing OpenStack.

The ramifications are evident in a few ways:

• It shows the depth of the OpenStack ecosystem in its ability to attract engineers from the ARM ecosystem to make the project happen.  Contributors included engineers from Calxeda, Cisco, Core NAP, Dell, Equinix, HP, NTT and Rackspace Hosting,
• It demonstrates OpenStack’s drive to grow its community and diversify the architectures it can run on. For instance, TryStack cloud was developed to test software on the architectures supported by OpenStack.  According to OpenStack, users now have the choice to launch instances in two TryStack zones: an x86 zone running standard hardware and a new ARM-powered zone, both running the latest OpenStack Essex software release.
• And it signals that ARM-powered infrastructures are here to say, which could be a threat to Intel and its dominance in the market with its x86 technology.

The high costs of managing energy hungry servers will drive ARM adoption. Power and cooling costs dominate a server’s cost of ownership. It is more than the cost of the hardware itself by a factor of seven. According to ARMdevices.net, IDC reports that all servers worldwide consumed $44.5 Billion of electricity in 2010 and required ten additional Gigawatt power plants to be constructed.

The Calexeda blog frames the issue well:

In today's cloud architectures, virtualization is used as a means to provide elasticity, dynamic workload management, and multi-tenant security, all while sharing the same underlying physical systems (which tend to be very large servers).  What if, however, we took an opposite approach and were able to provide the same benefits through the use of many smaller servers – a phrase some  have coined as physicalization.  Suddenly, we move back to a model of dedicated hosting and guaranteed performance, but with the same on-demand access and cloud-based pricing customers are accustomed to.  As long as the end-user gets access to a compute resource, and the economics of the infrastructure make sense for the cloud provider, this could ultimately be a win-win for the future of cloud computing.

OpenStack is experimenting with these bare metal servers. The work points to the rise of the ARM-powered cloud and a coming move away from clouds dominated by high-end servers.

Usually when we think of a pivot, we think of a company that has decided to drop its core offering and market a different product or service. Obvious Corporation put ODEO up for sale and focused on Twitter. BRBN shuttered its location check-in service and became Instagram. But Nodeable‘s pivot isn’t that sort of pivot.

Today Nodeable launched a new service called StreamReduce, a cloud-hosted real-time big data analytics product. StreamReduce is based on the same architecture as Nodeable’s existing IT operations monitoring tool. The company is keeping its current service, but is expanding its scope by marketing beyond its current base of developers and system administrators.

At the heart of StreamReduce is Storm, a real-time analytics engine that was originally developed at BackType, a company that was acquired by Twitter last year. After the acquisition, Twitter allowed lead developer Nathan Marz to finish the project and open source it. Twitter is now using Storm internally.

StreamReduce is essentially Storm hosted in the cloud, with a few extras such as connectors to Apache Hadoop. Nodeable CEO Dave Rosenberg explains that Storm is meant to complement, not replace, Hadoop. Hadoop is great for running analytics on huge data sets that you’ve already collected, but it’s not good for processing streams of incoming data. That’s where Storm and StreamReduce come in.

Storm isn’t the only project trying to solve the big data streaming problem. Apache S4 is an open source project originally developed by Yahoo that provides similar functionality, and HStreaming offers a proprietary product that adds real-time capabilities to Hadoop. But Storm is the project that seems to be gaining the most traction. For example, the contact management startup FullContact chose Storm over other options.

“We wanted to try open source first, as it keeps our options wide open should we want to change technologies. That ruled out HStreaming,” explains FullContact CTO Dan Lynn. “S4 was very interesting, but I didn’t get the impression that it had captured the enthusiasm of the developer community as well as Storm.” Nodeable chose to use Storm as its base for similar reasons.

Nodeable launched last year as a challenger to Splunk, the big data company that IPOed earlier this year. Spunk sells an on-premise tool for collecting and analyzing large data sets. It’s become best known for handling machine generated data, mostly system log files from servers, but it could be used for pretty much any data set.

Nodeable offers a similar solution, but tuned specifically for IT operations data and hosted in the cloud, along with real-time capabilities and a Twitter-like interface. Rosenberg says the service had plenty of users – so why the pivot? “As the company grew we realized we needed to either go further into management, or further into analytics,” he explains. What users wanted was better analytics – there are plenty of IT management solutions available. As the Nodeable team delved deeper into analytics, they found the core problem with most analytics tools is a disconnect between the needs of business users, who want dashboards and alerts, and the needs of data analysts who want to run custom queries.

Part of this problem stems from a divide between the need to run batch queries on historical data, which Hadoop is good at, and the need to process incoming streams of data for actionable intelligence, which is what Storm is built for. What Nodeable needed was a way to get data in and out of Hadoop, and to process certain data before it even hit Hadoop. With those problems solved, the Nodeable team realized that they’d stumbled onto something more broadly applicable than its log-file centric service. “We ended up solving a problem that we hadn’t really set out to solve,” says Nodeable CEO Dave Rosenberg. He also says Nodeable will open source much of its code, including reference implementations for Storm analytics and an agent for collecting analyics from Amazon EC2 instances.

Nodebale will be going up against companies like HStreaming has a partnership with Microsoft to bring its real-time solution to Hadoop on Azure. Also, last year Amazon Web Services posted a job listing for someone “to lead the team that is building a disruptive new service for processing Big Data streams,” suggesting that we may see a real-time complement to the cloud provider’s Elastic MapReduce service. Expect strong competition in this space in coming months.