Dave McClure’s 500 Startups has pretty much always been interested in world domination. Now it’s taking one step closer, by snapping up the Latin America startup accelerator Mexican.VC. By doing so, 500 Startups will gain an even stronger foothold in the LatAm market, as it brings Mexican.VC partners César Salazar and Santiago Zavala onto the team, making them its venture partners in Mexico.

The move comes as 500 Startups is looking to accelerate its international investments. Already, a significant portion of its portfolio companies came from outside the U.S.: According to McClure, about 10 percent of the investments in its first fund were international companies. But with its new, $50 million second fund, 500 Startups wants to increase that even further, with about 25 percent of the fund going to companies overseas.

With that in mind, it’s made some recent key hires to accelerate investment in international markets. While raising its new fund, 500 Startups also hired Bedy Yang and George Kellerman as venture partners. Yang oversees investments in Brazil and Latin America, while Kellerman has his eye on the Japanese market. Salazar and Zavala will aid in the LatAm market, where their accelerator has already invested in a number of Mexican startups.

Mexico has a lot of things going for it, from en entrepreneurial perspective: It’s the world’s 12th largest economy, according to Salazar, and might even be growing faster than Brazil. It also expects to see the number of Internet users double over the next five years, providing a huge opportunity for young tech companies.

Of course, this move is merely an extension of 500 Startups’ existing investment strategy, as 500 Startups has already been pretty active in Latin America. According to McClure, it’s made nine investments in Brazil, with another five or six in Chile, Argentina, and Mexico. With Mexican.VC, it expects to make an additional 20-30 investments in the region each year.

Social media dashboard maker MarketMeSuite, which targets SMBs with tools that help them better manage their Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn postings in order to target leads, has raised $1.1 million in new funding today, in a round led by Boston-area VC Jeff McCormick of Saturn Venture Partners. The company also recently uprooted from its home base of Norwich, U.K. to set up shop in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and the results of that move have already proven successful for the business.

According to company CEO Tammy Kahn Fennell, MarketMeSuite has seen its customer base grow from 15,000 in September to over 30,000 now, and since the relocation, which took place just two months ago, engagement has gone through the roof, she says. 70% of MarketMeSuite’s users now return daily – a metric which promoted them to ask their customers, what is it that we’re doing right here? Customers told them that company’s Inbox for Social Product was so usable, it just became a part of their workflow. “It’s almost like checking my email,” they said, notes Fennell.

“Most small businesses don’t want to spend hours reading Facebook posts and Twitter posts,” she explains. “They just want to convert new customers and improve their bottom line.”

The company, now a team of five, will use the additional funding to hire around half a dozen to expand their marketing, biz dev, and development team. Fennell had great words for her scrappy developers, who she says do the work of twelve. “But maybe they’d like to sleep at some point,” she adds.

Also in the works are changes to the company’s core products, which currently help small business owners stay on top of their various social media presences. While today, a lot of what MarketMeSuite does is focused on proactive marketing and helping businesses target incoming leads, the plan is to expand to help business owners find out who they should be targeting in their area. Some of these connections will come in through the “friend of a friend” social graph, but the new features will even expand beyond that into the greater social sphere at large. “The next step is to do more of the work for them,” Fennell says.

The company updates its products monthly, and plans to have phase one of this new development out in around three months, and part two by year-end. Also in the works are improvements to the analytics feature, still in beta. “We want to show users not just that their following and fan base is increasing, but what they’re doing that’s leading to these things,” says Fennell. “That’s very different than what you’re seeing in analytics these days.” That, too, will be out by the end of 2012.

If you’d been following Mat Honan’s harrowing story this weekend, you’ve learned that the Wired writer was completely hacked by a pair of 19-year-olds who targeted him because he had a cool Twitter handle. Honan has updated his tale and posted it on Wired where he goes through the seemingly innocent processes used to eventually wipe out his laptop hard drive, erase his digital identity, and essentially break the trust we all place in the cloud.

Like most hacks, the methodology was mundane. The hackers essentially reset his iCloud password, giving them access to other accounts including Gmail (which they erased), his idevices (which they locked), and his laptop (which they wiped remotely). It was a series of dick moves generated by two kids who had little understanding of what they did and clearly panicked. Then they reached out to Honan to explain their actions. They told him “I honestly didn't have any heat towards you before this. i just liked your username like I said before.”

Honan’s biggest failure here is that he didn’t back up. Because they remotely wiped his hard drive, all of the photos of his new baby daughter are gone as is most of his laptop data. It’s a lesson in data management: we can trust the cloud for a while, but always assume it will be gone. Always, always, always back up.

In the end we’re actually lucky that Honan got hit. He can raise a stink and Apple and Amazon and Google will listen to his tale of woe and hopefully implement improvements that will prevent this from happening again. But will it happen again? Absolutely. Passwords are like door latches – a dedicated opponent will defeat them eventually. They make us all feel safe, they encourage a sense of stability, and they more often than not offer some form of security theatre rather than real safety. But they’re the best we have. We have to hope that no one has “heat towards us” and that Honan’s terrible story – and it pains me to think that he’s lost his baby photos permanently – is a lesson to us all.

TUAW has some excellent information on keeping safe and I’d recommend installing The Prey Project rather than Find My Mac until Apple fixes this mess.

When peer-to-peer learning startup Skillshare launched early last year, it very quickly became a marketplace for knowledge, allowing anyone to create classes based on his or her individual expertise. The idea was to create a platform through which people could come together and learn new skills. But it was limited in that users could only participate in classes that took place in their local area.

Now Skillshare is allowing teachers to create classes through which that will be available globally. With the launch of its new hybrid classes, students will be able to take part in collaborative learning through local classes as well as online. While its existing model has proven incredibly successful, with more than 5,000 teachers signed up on the platform, founder and CEO Michael Karnjanaprakorn believes that the hybrid model of learning will make the platform available to a much wider range of students. Since classes are no longer tied to a specific city or geography, practically anyone will be able to participate in a hybrid class.

Teachers will also have more flexibility to have more project-oriented classes, rather than lecture-oriented classes that it currently offers. It’s a step toward what Skillshare like to call “collaborative learning.” That is, lessons aren’t dictated to students from a teacher, with students expected to memorize facts verbatim or to execute on projects alone. Instead, Skillshare is seeking to make learning more of a many-to-many experience, with students collaborating on projects, and thus learning from each other as much as they learn from the teacher.

Skillshare’s already got some high-profile teachers signed up to participate in the new hybrid class program: Union Square Ventures managing partner Fred Wilson, Kollabora founder Nora Abousteit, and Airbnb’s former Global Head of Community Ligaya Tichy are all teaching classes that anyone around the world will be able to sign up for. (Karnjanaprakorn himself has been teaching a class available to online and offline students as well.)

The launch of hybrid classes follows the recent introduction of Skillshare’s new “Classroom” tools, which make it easier for students and teachers alike to share notes with one another and to collaborate on various projects. In many ways, the Classroom is at the center of the new hybrid classes, as it was an online extension of classes that were previously being taught offline. And it also helped move forward Skillshare’s collaborative learning agenda, by creating a place where anyone could exchange notes and thoughts.

In addition to the new class structure, Skillshare is announcing a few new hires and advisors. Tara Kirchner, former Head of Marketing at Flickr, is joining, while Ligaya Tichy will be acting as an advisor to the startup. It’s also seen substantial interest as it’s expanded to the west coast, with SF-based teachers such as Square’s Joe Robinson and Quora’s David Cole signing up.

Skillshare, which is based in New York City, now has about 15 full-time employees. The startup has raised $3.65 million in total funding, which includes a $3.1 million round it raised last August that was led by Union Square Ventures and Spark Capital. Other investors include the Founder Collective, SV Angel, Collaborative Fund, Jason Finger, David Tisch, Karl Jacob, Rafe Furst, Phil Gordon, and Scott Heiferman.

Sprint is making solid headway with its new LTE network — it’s already live in 15 (mostly Texan markets) with another four slated to light up before Labor Day rolls around and the carrier aims to have 12,000 LTE sites online by the end of the year.

Sure, the process has been held up at least partially thanks to some damn birds, but now it seems another region should officially get the LTE nod shortly. AndroidPolice reported last night that users in the San Francisco Bay Area have been able to get up and running on Sprint’s nascent LTE network ahead of an official announcement.

This isn’t the first time that Bay Area Sprint customers have caught a glimpse of Sprint’s new 4G network at work — some people reported seeing 4G icons appearing on their LTE devices back in early July — but it’s finally gotten to the point where people can actually use the network. Suffice it to say that the network probably isn’t ready for prime time just yet, but initial speed tests seem promising enough.

Android Police’s tipster reported seeing speeds of roughly 13MBps down and 8MBps up around Palo Alto and Mountain View. Not shabby at all, but that could all change once Sprint makes its official announcement (rumors point to a November reveal) and users tempted by sweet new hardware start piling onto the network. If you’re in the area and have a compatible handset, I’d advise you to take it for a spin before then, if only you so can play the hipster card and claim to have been on Sprint’s LTE network before it went big.

The IPO market may be slowly opening up again post its Facebook contraction, but not all startups in their later stages are jumping. Care.com, the online marketplace for people to find helper for everything from childcare and tutoring to housekeeping, today announced an E-Round of finance worth $50 million, which it will use to continue its growth strategy specifically outside of its home market of the U.S. The round was let by Institutional Venture Partners, with participation from existing investors Matrix Partners, NEA and Trinity Ventures.

This brings the total amount raised by the company up to $101 million, and comes on the heels of the company buying Berlin-based Betreut from the Samwer brothers, and launching the Care.com brand in the UK and Canada. The site, founded in 2006, now has 7 million users across 15 different countries, it says.

Care.com competes with a number of startups that focus on specific verticals: for example DogVacay for pet-sitting; or SittingAround for babysitting; or the very straightforward-named Housekeeper.com to find cleaners.

Care.com, however, is a different beast, covering all bases where people offering any of these services can connect with those looking for them. This is useful, in that often it might be one person offering a lot of different services, or a person looking to fill several jobs at once. Care.com links up both with sole traders and larger businesses and agencies that offer these services.

That many-sided approach, rather than focusing on a single vertical, is in fact the company’s modus operandi, according to Sheila Lirio Marcelo, founder and CEO of Care.com. ”It is…a validation of our multi-revenue business model and multi-service platform, as well as our track record of growth,” she said in a statement about the funding.

Sandy Miller, General Partner of IVP, will join the board as a result of the funding. “Sheila and the team at Care.com have done more than identify a growing global need; they've delivered on a strategy to help fill that need for millions of families,” she noted in a statement.

You might argue that this latest round led by IVP may end up being the last before Care.com does list. IVP notes that of the 300 companies in which it has invested — it focuses on later-stage investments — 91 have gone public. Others have been snapped up by biggies. The portfolio includes ArcSight (bought by HP), Buddy Media (Salesforce acquisition), ComScore (IPO), Concur Technologies (IPO), Dropbox (still private and independent!), HomeAway (IPO), Kayak (IPO), Netflix (IPO), and Zynga (IPO).

Design shopping site Fab.com released new numbers today related to its European expansion, and brief details about its plans for future growth in that market. The company says that it now reaches 24 countries in the European Union, and it has grown its membership from 60,000 to 1.4 million in 7 months. Fab believes it’s now on track to be a $100 million+ business in Europe by 2013, with Europe contributing to at least 20% of Fab’s revenue this year.

In related news, the company also promoted Maria Molland, who has been instrumental in the European rollout, to Fab’s Chief European Officer.

Before Fab, Mollan was Global Managing Director of Lipper and Digital Ventures, two subsidiaries of Thomson Reuters. And prior to that, she was General Manager of Marketwatch and Barron’s online, two subsidiaries of Dow Jones. Fab CEO Jason Goldberg says she will be working out of Fab’s Berlin office, which now has 105 employees. By year-end, that number is expected to grow to 150.

Part of the European market’s growth, like the U.S. growth, is from repeat customers. Where the U.S. sees 67% repeat business on daily sales, Europe has climbed to 50% on weekly sales. Molland will be tasked with getting the European numbers more on par with the U.S. in the weeks ahead.

Keep in mind that some of Fab’s growth in this region came in via acquisitions. In February, the company bought German flash sales site Casacanda for a reported $11 million. And in June, it grabbed UK design store Llustre. Weeks later, and the UK is now accounting for nearly 10% of Fab’s European sales.

FreeMonee announced a $34 million Series B round today, led by Charles Ryan, Chairman of UFG Asset Management, and returning investors Opus Capital Ventures, Redpoint Ventures, Sutter Hill Ventures and Pinnacle Ventures.

While FreeMonee would not disclose terms of the funding, Chief Marketing Officer Jim Taschetta tells me the company valuation was in the "nine figures."

The round is more than triple the $11 million Series A the company raised in 2010. All investors from that round returned, according to FreeMonee; the company was self-funded for seed funding.

Describing the company as "Google for bricks and mortar," Taschetta says they have a three-pronged attack to help retailers generate new profits, consumers receive relevant incentives and card issuers increase card usage.

FreeMonee gifts, such as a $5 credit at a clothing store, link directly to a consumer's credit or debit card as a cash gift that can be spent at that store. Unlike a coupon, the credit has no strings attached (you can spend any amount you want, etc.).

FreeMonee says they have invested two years in developing an algorithm, which Taschetta compares to bank algorithms for loans, that matches the right gift, consumer, amount and time to make it profitable for the stores. The company claims that response rates are 10-50 times that of traditional promotions or coupons and merchants see 500-900 percent return on ad spend.

"Our mission is to change the economics of advertising," Taschetta tells me. "And we're doing it. We can prove beyond any question that we drove all those results. And I will challenge anyone else to do that."

FreeMonee has only been in the market for nine months, but already has four of the eight largest U.S. banks as clients (FreeMonee executives would only disclose Capital One and U.S. Bank). The company also has "over 100 merchants," but Taschetta declined to name them for privacy reasons.

The company says it will use the round to expand to more retailers and create more partnerships with U.S. banks and credit issuers. Taschetta says they expect to hire 25-30 new employees.

Today agile software project management Rally Software announced that it will acquire its longtime partner Agile Advantage. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. Agile Advantage makes that helps organizations track the return on investment of agile software methodologies. Features from the company’s Performer product will be integrated into Rally’s existing Portfolio Manager tool.

Rally CEO Tim Miller says his company has partnered with Agile Advantage on some of its larger accounts. “We’ve been in close collaboration with them in building their product, so it was a natural step for us to bring them in house,” he says. Rally also worked with Agile Advantage founders Brent Barton and Chris Sterling at their previous company SolutionsIQ, an agile consulting firm.

Barton and Sterling founded Agile Advantage about three years ago in Seattle, WA and was it “essentially bootstrapped” according to Miller. Rally, founded in 2002 in Boulder, CO, has taken a few rounds of funding — mostly recently a $20 million series D round led by Meritech Capital Partners. This is the company’s first acquisition since it acquired AgileZen in 2010.

Miller says that Agile Advantage will remain in Seattle and build a larger team there. “It’s three people now and we’ll see that grow to around 10 people to be an autonomous team in Seattle,” he says.

Rally Software is used by companies such as Level 3 Communications and CitySearch. Company representatives declined to disclose any of Agile Advantage’s customers.

Rally’s competitors include Atlassian, CollabNet and Serena Software

The worlds of ad technology and consumer engagement in games and other online activities moved a little bit closer together today. Affectiva, a startup spun out the MIT Media Lab with a way of measuring emotional responses from online users by tracking their faces, is today announcing a round of funding worth $12 million. It will use the funding to take its technology, first implemented to measure the effectiveness of ads, into the consumer market.

The Series C round was led by Horizons Ventures (investment vehicle for Hutchison’s Li Ka-shing and early backers of Facebook, Spotify, Siri and more) and the Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (KPCB) Digital Growth Fund (backers of Facebook, Twitter, Zynga, Groupon, Square, Klout, Waze, Shazam, Spotify, etc.). Some existing investors, which include WPP, Myrian Capital and the Peder Wallenberg Charitable Trust, also participated.

As part of the financing, Affectiva will be getting two superstar investors among its counselors: Mary Meeker of KPCB will become a board advisor; and Frank Meehan, who had been behind some of the most innovative mobile ventures at Hutchison before he moved over full-time to Horizon, joins the board of directors.

This brings the total funding raised by Affectiva up to $20.2 million, in addition to grants from the National Science Foundation and other endorsements.

The company says that this newest round of funding will be used to develop the ways that its technology can be implemented in future. Up to now, Affectiva has been working largely with the advertising industry to develop tools to measure the effectiveness of advertisements, with a product it calls Affdex. (WPP division Millward Brown is among those using it to test and tweak ads.) It also has created a wearable biometric sensor, branded Q Sensor.

Now the company, founded in 2009 by professor Rosalind W. Picard, Sc.D. and research scientist Rana el Kaliouby, is taking this to the next level. It wants to make the technology in Affdex not only something that can be used to measure user responses to all forms of online video content, but also something that could be incorporated into content outside of ads — for example into games.

“We're excited to bring the technology to a broader market,” David Berman, chief executive officer at Affectiva, told TechCrunch. “This round is about putting it into the hands of consumers and into the social environment and making it engaging to them.”

El Kaliouby and Picard originally developed the technology, interestingly, as a way of helping people on the autism spectrum make better sense of people’s reactions.

El Kaliouby acknowledges that these days, given how much time we spend solitarily looking at screens, a lot of people don’t have much of a strong reaction to anything. The aim for Affectiva is to make sense of even the smallest gestures. As the saying goes, a picture can tell 1,000 words: “The more expressive you are, the more likely content will go viral,” she notes. “But yes, for the blandest content, your face will show boredom.”

Something else that Affectiva is quietly building up is a big data-style repository of facial content, with clues to what it all means, something that can prove invaluable to content creators in our increasingly globalized world. (And yes, before you submit anything to Affectiva it asks for your permission, as you can see in this demo.)

“It's interesting to see the results across different cultures,” she says, noting that it has collected facial data on users from more than 20 countries. “We’re building out this database to see how people respond to content across those cultures.” For example, a small gesture between a man and woman nearly unnoticed in one market will cause outrage in another.

Creating ways of measuring user engagement beyond clicks is really only just starting to take off, but you can imagine it might see a lot of demand both as the products become more sophisticated, and metrics like CTRs continue to decline.

Facebook itself made an investment into this area, of sorts, last March when it hired away the two founders of GazeHawk, an eye-tracking startup — although at the time it didn’t acquire the product or technology that went into the original startup. And Facebook’s acquisition of Face.com, the face-recognition startup, meanwhile, also points to how it is thinking about automated systems to better order visual content on the site.

(It should be noted that when I asked Affectiva’s CEO, point blank, if it is talking at all with Facebook, he said no, but he did highlight that its newest investors do have strong inroads there.)

There is another element in this business, however, that is a bit more human. As technology continues to become the central fulcrum of our lives, emotion, and the ability to wrap technology around it, is not to be underestimated:

“The adoption of social, mobile and digital technologies is continuing to accelerate, and we need to bring real emotion back into online interaction,” noted Mary Meeker, a partner at KPCB, in a statement. “Affectiva's thought leadership and commercial traction make this a compelling investment.”

The company’s Q Sensor product, already used by “hundreds” of universities and corporations, will also see some of the investment. Gven the movement towards the Quantified Self and the rise of gadgets and services to help people track their physical lives better, this is another area to watch.

For the last three quarters, Facebook has been struggling to move the needle on its payments business, but today a new game has launched that could provide a clue to how that could change that in the future: the social network has, for the first time, allowed a gaming app on its platform that allows users to play with real money — not Facebook Credits. Called Bingo & Slots Friendzy, the app is an extension of the Jackpotjoy.com franchise from Gamesys, and will be available in the UK only, and only to users over the age of 18.

As with many other apps on its platform, Facebook is not directly involved in the creation and operation of the app. Rather, it has permitted Gamesys to offer the app, and that is a sign it is testing the waters for how it might allow for more games like this in the future. Financial terms of the deal, Facebook tells us, are commercially confidential, so it is not clear whether proceeds from the game will follow the 30/70 revenue split that applies to games using Facebook Credits.

“Facebook is a place that allows people to connect and share,” a spokesperson told TechCrunch in a statement. “Real money gaming is a popular and well-regulated activity in the UK and we are allowing a partner to offer their games to adult users on the Facebook platform in a safe and controlled manner.”

Apart from its own Jackpotjoy offering, Gamesys also makes other Facebook social games Sun Bingo and Heart Bingo.

The move to offer gambling services is a sensitive area — in some countries like the U.S. the rules against this are very strict indeed — and here it looks like Gamesys is taking all sorts of measures to try to make sure that only those allowed to use the app will be using the app:

Before being permitted to play, users have to verify their identity in their accounts, proving that they are over 18 and located in the UK. Also, Facebook has an age-gating technology that will mean that any activity related to the games will not appear in timelines of users who are under 18 years of age. “Young people are far more likely to see an ad for Bingo on the TV or in a betting shop window as they walk to school than they are on Facebook,” a source told TechCrunch. Ditto users from outside the UK — who also will not see any ads.

So why the UK first for this? Not only is the UK a good test market for Facebook (it’s European but also English-speaking), it has a pretty strong culture for gambling, with off-track betting shops littering many a high street around the country for anyone over 18 to come in and place bets on horses, football games, and whether it will rain during the Royal Wedding.

Facebook has had limited success with its Facebook Credits service. In its last quarterly earnings, the company reported payments revenues of $192 million, but that is barely higher than the $186 million of the quarter prior, or the $188 million before that. In that context it is not too surprising to see it exploring more avenues — akin to how Facebook is looking for new formats in advertising to bolster that side of the business.

Funium, a Provo-based startup that’s merging personal ancestry research with virtual worlds in its new game “Family Village,” has raised an additional $1.8 million in seed funding, the company is announcing today. This new investment is on top of the $1.2 million it raised in February 2011. The round was led by Family Odyssey, a company owned by early Ancestry.com investor and GeneTree co-founder, Jim Sorenson. A number of undisclosed angel investors also participated.

The idea for Funium’s flagship property Family Village occurred to CEO Jeff Wells around four years ago, when he began to research his own personal ancestry online. “I started at about 10 o’clock at night by joining Ancestry.com, and then literally, at 4 o’clock in the morning I was still red-eyed, and very excited about all the documents I was finding about my family members as I continued to research name after name.”

But even though he was enjoying the discoveries Ancestry.com produced, Wells felt that the overall process could use some improvement. “I noticed that I was interested in it because I liked the outcome, but the work was hard. It was like doing taxes or doing research,” he said of using the website. That’s when he had the idea: why don’t I make this process fun?

With the Facebook game Family Village, Wells is doing just that by combining the research process with something enjoyable – that is, social gaming. The game resembles something like Zynga’s The Ville or Sim City, but instead of just creating random avatars and having them interact, users create avatars who actually represent individual members of their own family, dating back through the ages.

Players can customize those avatars by dressing them in the style of clothing they would have worn during the time they were alive and can even tweak their features to resemble old photos or descriptions. As the game continues, the quests will be directly related to who that person was and what they may have been doing during their lifetime. For example, a Civil War era great-great grandfather may go to work as a soldier, which then generates in-game points. As players progress, they can collect awards, not in the form of meaningless virtual content, but in the form of actual historical documents.

The documents are housed in a “museum” in the game, where each ancestor gets his or her own room which includes things like old photos, files, and maps of where they lived, worked or traveled. The documents come from a variety of sources, including those created in-house, or through partnerships with other companies, like AncestorSync or NewspaperArchive.com, for example.

The benefit to merging something with real-world value with the virtual world, is that the game maintains a sort of stickiness for its players. A typical social game has a short life span, explains Wells. “People play it, get bored and move onto something else,” he says. “With this game here, the further you get into it, the more deep it becomes, the more likely that documents will be pulled up and ancestral connections will be made.”

This translates into longer play times, he notes, stating that players are generally engaging with the game for over 14 minutes their first time, when many games tend to think 3 to 5 minutes is a good first run. He says that re-engagement numbers on day one, seven and thirty are good as well, but declined to reveal specifics as the game has not yet had its public debut. Today, Family Village has around 22,000 to 23, 000 monthly active users and between 2,000 and 2,500 daily active users during its quite testing period. Although it has not yet had its “official” debut, Family Village is live now on Facebook here.

Hey, what are you doing reading TechCrunch at work? Unless, of course, reading TechCrunch is your job. I know, you’re on a break, right? Okay, continue as you were…

ShiftPlanning, which offers a web-based platform to help employers schedule and co-ordinate their workforce, has raised a $1 million Series A round led by Berlin-based Point Nine Capital. This follows an undisclosed seed round last September, which we pegged at around $500k, bringing the startup’s total funding to just shy of $1.5m.

Along with Point Nine Capital, existing investors Philip Gude, Ken Fyfe, Josh Billesberger, Amos Billesberger, and Jason Morrison, also participated in this new round. In addition, Point Nine Capital partner Christoph Janz, also a previous investor, co-invested, while David Charron, VP of Sales at Clio, participated too.

The new capital will be used to “fuel the company’s growth”, says ShiftPlanning. To that end, it says that its workforce scheduling software is used by companies in more than 60 countries, seeing a “700 percent year-over-year increase in clients” since its launch in 2010, as meaningless as that is without raw numbers.

However, putting a little more meat on the bone, ShiftPlanning can certainly boast an impressive client win. It recently won a contract to be the platform used to coordinate scheduling of volunteers at the 2012 Olympic Games taking place in London right now.

Available via the web or dedicated apps for iOS, Android and BlackBerry, ShiftPlanning’s features include file sharing, extensive reporting options, real-time schedule conflict avoidance, third-party integration, employee shift swapping and online time-clocking.

In other ShiftPlanning news: The startup has opened a new headquarters in San Francisco, and announced that Philip Gude has joined as VP of sales. He previously built the sales teams at Arkadin Global and Business Wire.

Okay, now get back to work.

From over in Germany, news of a cash injection in the fashion world that could have repercussions in e-commerce: the private equity firm AXA has taken a majority stake in Schustermann & Borenstein, a family-owned firm that focuses on exporting clothing, but also operates Best Secret, one of the more exclusive, and (by the sounds of it) lucrative, private buying clubs on the continent. The investment, thought to be worth some €200 million ($248 million), could see Best Secret expand its model beyond its current German home market to elsewhere in Europe, where private buying clubs have been a hit with consumers.

The AXA investment was first reported by Reuters, which noted first murmurs of the deal back in July. The investment values the fashion house at about €300 million ($371 million), and the two families who started the business will continue to hold on to the remainder of the business.

Schustermann & Borenstein has established a business in the area of clothing export to Eastern Europe and other parts of the continent, but it has also built up a business selling clothes at retail level through a members-only model. It has two private stores in Munich, this is where Best Secret fits in.

In an e-commerce market that has largely focused on scaling up to win (recent funding for JustFab and ShoeDazzle’s trumpeting of 13 million members yesterday are only the most recent examples of that), Best Secret takes a completely different approach.

According to Deutsche Startups, the site makes a point of limiting its membership to only 250,000 users — it stops accepting new people after that point until existing members leave — and it only lets people join by invitation. Those invites are generated either by the companies who feed stock into the site, or through other members. Memberships require users to spend a minimum of €150 annually on clothes, and in 2011 the company was reported to have made €60 million in sales.

As for the stock, the site notes that it currently features 7,000 products from 900 brands, covering apparel for women, men and children, with discounts of up to 80% on items.

Online private buying clubs have been a hit with consumers in Europe, with companies like France’s Vente Privee and KupiVIP in Russia. Vente Privee has been looking to take that model to the U.S. as well.

We have reached out to Best Secret to see if it can give us updated figures on its user numbers and revenues, and whether it will be using some of this new investment to extend Best Secret to other markets outside of Germany.

Looks like electronic signature company DocuSign wasn’t quite finished with its fundraising when its Series D was revealed last month — today it’s announcing a new investor.

The funding was first disclosed through a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, with the company then confirming that it had raised $47.5 million in a round led by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, with Kleiner partner Mary Meeker joining the board. Accel Partners, Comcast Ventures, SAP Ventures, and "a large global institutional investor" also participated.

Raising money from Kleiner is already pretty impressive, but DocuSign has added another big-name investor — Google Ventures, whose investment increases the round’s total size to $57.5 million.

The company has now raised a total of about $114 million. When the round was first announced, CEO Keith Krach told me that it would be spent on research and development, expanding into new industries, and international growth.

Founded in 2009, Kno began its career with ambitious plans to disrupt education with a little mobile hardware — by developing a tablet that was tailor-made for students. Unfortunately, thanks to the meteoric rise of the iPad and, later, Apple’s big re-entry into the textbook arena with iBooks 2, Kno’s hardware efforts didn’t pan out. Beginning early last year, the startup pivoted towards a more agnostic solution, creating an educational software platform and app to bring interactive textbooks to the college crowd.

But, with nearly $80 million raised from investors like Andreessen Horowitz, Mike Maples and Ron Conway, there’s more pressure on Kno to keep moving forward than there is on your average edtech startup. Today, the Santa Clara-based company took a significant step in that regard, expanding its scope beyond the college campus to bring digital textbooks into K-12 classrooms.

To take on grade-agnostic solutions like iBooks 2, Kno has struck a partnership with educational publishing giant Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. The deal is a big win for Kno, as the publisher comprises about 50 percent of K-12 market. Naturally, with $80 million-worth of pressure, the company will look to quickly follow with further publishing partnerships — with Pearson and McGraw Hill at the top of the list. Along with Houghton, the three publishers make up the lionshare of the market.

Kno is already being used by students in 5,500 universities and co-founder and CEO Osman Rashid (who is also a co-founder of textbook rental player Chegg) tells us that its free app has been downloaded over 500K times. Its new partnership with Houghton Mifflin will see the company begin offering the publisher’s textbooks in digital form both on the iPad and on the Web — with availability on Android and Windows 7 coming soon.

But what’s interesting is that Kno will offer its digital textbooks for $9.99, a significant change from its free app. What’s more, as Rashid admits, most public schools dole out textbooks for free, so it might seem backwards to expect students and parents to pay for content they’re already getting at no cost.

Compared to the cost of textbooks for college students, of course, $10 is nothing, but this isn’t the case for K-12. But the CEO believes that parents will be enamored with the opportunity to have their kids’ same textbooks available at home. It also alleviates the pain many parents experience when watching their kids lug around heavy backpacks, brimming with bulky hardcopy textbooks. With Kno’s new offering for K-12, parents can rent the textbooks their children are using in school without having to watch their kids develop Scoliosis at an early age.

Kno is essentially licensing its publishing partners’ titles and will thus be taking a cut of the sales of its eTextbooks, but at $9.99 a pop, it doesn’t exactly seem like the deal spells financial gold for the company. But Rashid said that he hopes that rentable, interactive textbooks (and skinnier backpacks) will help the startup win the parental vote. If parents are moved by the alternative, they could help spur widespread adoption of Kno’s platform and, in turn, push more schools to warm up to the idea of bringing mobile devices into K-12 classrooms.

The startup will also be looking to work with partners to begin the process of bringing online bookstores into K-12 schools so that digital textbooks can be bought and sold directly through a school’s network.

It’s definitely an exciting time for the intersection of technology and education, as a plethora of services are beginning to make educational tools and beyond available online. Colleges have really led the way thus far as they represent the low-hanging fruit for companies hawking educational software or services, but online bookstores, courses, and mobile textbooks are coming and coming soon — even in K-12. And Kno is obviously hoping that it can be among the early movers.

Of course, there’s a lot of noise around “interactive” textbooks, so what does that mean exactly in Kno’s conception? The startup’s interactive features provide students with a digital journals that automatically saves their notes and highlights them in a digital study notebook, along with flash cards for key terms within a textbook that help students study more efficiently and retain their reading, writing, and ‘rithmetic.

The new K-12 digital textbooks also feature 3D models that bring chemistry concepts to life, for example, a “Quiz Me” feature that turns a book’s diagrams into a multiple-choice quiz, and “SmartLinks” that deliver videos, images, and photos to both formulas and concepts in realtime for easy reference. Next up? Analytics that will help parents and students keep track and measure reading progress.

While there’s a lot of appeal to Kno’s educational platform, they’re hardly alone in this space. Inkling is busy developing a robust, enterprise-grade publishing CMS that lets any publisher turn their hardcopy textbooks into a digital product while bringing interactive learning content to the iPhone.

Meanwhile, BenchPrep has forged a number of partnerships with top publishers to create interactive study guides from publishers’ content, creating an educational platform of interactive, game-ified courses. Obviously, Kno and BenchPrep are taking slightly different tacks, but they’re both going after the same eyeballs and competing for the same content.

In the end, the more the merrier, as schools, students and parents are the ones who get to enjoy the benefits of this competition and the arrival of more engaging, digital educational experiences.

More on Kno at home here.

Qualtrics has released its Site Intercept technology. It’s a hallmark event for the family run Provo, Utah company. Now it’s time to see if it really will disrupt the stodgy world of market research and change the way we view the ways data gets collected and acted upon in real-time for online marketing purposes.

Accel Partners and Sequoia Capital have a $70 million bet that the company can do it. But it’s still a question mark. The market research world is one that does a lot of business selling phone-based and other traditional survey techniques. The projects get expensive, costing hundreds of thousands of dollars over the span of a year.

There are signs that the market is ready to pop. The buzz about big data certainly helps as it is fueling a deeper interest in data analytics. A DIY ethos is also spreading in the enterprise. And the more modern forms of market research technology are also being used for more general purposes such as lead generation.

Site Intercept  is positioned well in this converging market. The SaaS based offering, previously available through invite only, allows any marketer the capability to build their own market research and real-time marketing engine. Site Intercept is like a thin app that can be slid anywhere in a web site to get immediate feedback. It can be programmed for the time of day, geo-location, visit history, shopping cart content, etc. It lets brands display custom messages, surveys, promotions and other content to get immediate feedback. The  interface is entirely point-and-click and drag-and-drop. It includes nine types of creative intercepts that marketers can use to interact with their customers such as pop-overs, pop-unders, customer embedded content and A/B testing.

The Qualtrics story is also a reminder of the almost old-fashioned concept of the family run business but with its own characteristics of the modern startup.

Qualtrics is owned and managed by the Smith family. There is Scott, the dad,  an academic and pioneer in the field of market research who began experimenting with online surveys back in the 1990s. Ryan is the CEO and co-founder, who soon joined his dad to sell the hosted software developed by a group of graduate students. And then there is Jared, also a co-founder, who spent six years at Google scaling operations and leading all of the company’s product efforts for Greater China and Southeast Asia before moving on to Qualtrics full-time.

Qualtrics has more than 200 people in its Provo office. Its technology is used by a host of brands including Ebay, GM and Microsoft. The company competes with the likes of online survey companies like Survey Monkey and Checkbox.

But to really break through, it will have to become far more than market research technology. It will need to be viewed as a key method for capturing leads, personalizing content and getting that all important intelligence from the big data trove the market increasingly wants to explore.

(Smith family image via Forbes)

99designs, the polarizing crowdsourced design marketplace, announced its first acquisition tonight, as the Accel-backed startup scooped up its European rival, 12designer, for an undisclosed amount. In the near-term, 12designer will continue to operate as a standalone site.

Since raising $35 million from Accel, 99designs has focused on international growth, said Patrick Llewellyn, the company’s President and CEO. 12designer is based in Germany, which has become 99design’s top non-English (and fastest-growing) market, with European users now accounting for 15 percent of the site’s graphic design contests.

For those unfamiliar, the San Francisco and Melbourne-based 99designs launched in 2008 to bring a crowdsourced design marketplace to designers and small businesses looking to network and find and showcase quality graphic design work. The site now features work from over 175,000 graphic designers in 192 countries, allowing businesses to source work for their logos and web design needs by launching contests in the 99designs community or purchase design templates from the startups’ ready-made store.

Of late, 99designs has become increasingly focused on building out its international user base, and Llewellyn tells us that 12designers represents an important strategic opportunity to expand via localization, thanks to the German startup’s multi-lingual team and local marketplace expertise. Bringing 12designers on board allows 99designs to provide German customers with support in their own language and time zone (as well as in Italian, French and Spanish). 12designer has also built a solid base of 20,000 European designers, which helps boost 99design’s local talent pool.

The company is also creating a European base in Berlin, where 12designers is located, which it will use to continue its regional expansion plans and capitalize on Berlin’s growth as a local startup and design hub.

Because both sites operate on a similar model, allowing designers of all skill levels to compete for work and quickly sketch out proposals and concepts, the acquisition makes sense. And, by the way, 99designs has become “polarizing” as I mentioned above for exactly this reason. In other words, professional designers tend to believe that this speedy, pump-it-out model facilitates a misguided incentive system and doesn’t produce the best work.

Nonetheless, 99designs has grown steadily (and exponentially) over the last four years and it’s found many supporters among the amateur and young design crowd. The company’s CEO also says that it’s paid out more than $38M to its community to date, so it’s hard to say 99designs isn’t giving value back to the creative community.

As for the acquisition, it’s reminiscent of Fab.com’s recent purchase of its German counterpart, Casacanda. In both cases, it represents signs of things to come in Europe, giving the companies the ability to build on early momentum in Europe and set up a central base that allows them to better serve local clients.

For 12designers, which was the first business developed and financed by Grupo Intercom and has five employees, this seems to be a positive outcome. At least that’s the way founder and CEO Eva Missling is looking at it, especially as she will become 99design’s new General Manager of Europe.

She said of the acquisition:

With 99designs rapidly gaining marketshare in Germany and Europe, we had two options options: Try to compete or try to join the company. Our multilingual team has the regional marketplace expertise to contribute in a meaningful way to 99designs expansion in Europe … so the acquisition provided us with an opportunity to achieve a lot more than we ever could have done on our own.

From here on out, we can expect to see 99designs continue to try to take strides in Europe, as it plans to ramp up hiring out of its new European headquarters and may even continue to make talent-based acquisitions in the region. A year from now, the 99designs CEO said, the company wants to have doubled or tripled the size of its Berlin office. Clearly, there’s more where this came from.

When the iPhone launched in 2007, there were three key components of the device that relied on Google:

1) Maps

2) YouTube

3) Web search

Let’s look at that list today, following the news that YouTube has been given the boot in the latest beta build of iOS 6:

1) Maps

2) YouTube

3) Web search

Two down. One to go.

There is a good argument to be made that it’s actually more beneficial to Google that Apple is no longer including the YouTube app (which Apple, not Google, built, by the way) as a standard part of iOS. For one thing, the app hasn’t really been touched in years, even as Google significantly upgraded the YouTube experience on other platforms (and the mobile web). More importantly, Google was not able to monetize those YouTube app views with ads. With its own app, it will be able to.

With that in mind, it’s possible — perhaps even likely — that it was Google and not Apple which decided not to continue the relationship going forward. Maybe we’ll hear the whole story one day, maybe not. At the end of the day though, the reality is that the move is something that both sides probably wanted to some extent. Google for the reasons mentioned above. Apple because Google is now its chief rival in the mobile space.

And the move does follow Apple’s decision to launch its own mapping application this fall as the standard part of iOS 6. There should be no doubt that this maneuver was all about Apple removing Google from a key part of its devices. And the ramifications of this are actually bigger than you probably imagine at first glance. But they’re nothing compared to what would happen if Apple removed Google as the default web search engine in iOS.

To be clear, you already have a choice when it comes to search on iOS. There’s Google, Yahoo, and since the summer of 2010, Bing. But each iOS device sold comes with Google set as the default. And very few people change that setting. Let’s be honest, the default is all that matters.

That’s why Apple has the power to truly hurt Google where it counts. Just imagine if it made Bing the default search engine for iOS devices, and Google a mere option…

Of course, this thought is nothing new. In fact, as far back as early 2010, it was reported that Microsoft and Apple were in talks about this very possibility. We even followed up on this in mid-2010 (which ended up being the Bing option in iOS 4, not a change of the default setting). Clearly, it never happened. But as I laid out two and a half years ago, there are a lot of reasons why Apple at least had to consider this option. And actually, those reasons are now more true than ever.

Despite billions and billions of dollars being poured into Bing, Google still dominates search. And as the world goes increasingly mobile, Google threatens to own an even greater piece of the pie. The only two platforms that really matter in mobile right now are iOS and Android. Again, Google is the default search engine in iOS. And Google owns Android. You do the math.

Yes, Microsoft hopes that Windows Phone and the forthcoming Surface/Windows 8 tablets can change this equation. We’ll see — but I wouldn’t hold my breath. The more direct route to change the equation is to pay Apple a shitload of money to make Bing the default in iOS.

Two problems here.

One, Apple doesn’t need the money. Even a shitload. In fact, any shitload Microsoft can offer would pale in comparison to the shitload Apple already has.

It’s believed that Google now pays Apple upwards of $1 billion a year as a result of being the main search engine for iOS. (Just two years ago, the number was believed to be closer to $100 million, which is insane growth and shows just how important this area is.) But $1 billion is a drop in the bucket of the $150 billion (!) Apple may bring in this fiscal year. Even if Microsoft offered $2 billion, or $5 billion — it still probably wouldn’t be enough to be meaningful to Apple’s bottom-line.

This leads to problem number two — at the end of the day, Apple still cares first and foremost about user experience. If Apple was going to switch away from Google, it would have to be because Bing offers a better experience — or at the very least, one that is on par with the search experience that Google offers.

This is where a second religious argument could break out — there are some people who swear Bing is better at search, but seemingly still more that believe Google is better. I’m not here to argue about that because, quite frankly, I don’t use Bing enough to really know. My sense is that for most things, they’re pretty close. And if Apple agrees with that, it’s potentially great news for Bing.

In the broader search market, “pretty close” is worthless. This isn’t horseshoes. Bing has to be leaps and bounds better than Google to steal market share because Google dominates mind share. Despite the billions spent in marketing, “Google”, not “Bing”, is the verb. But in mobile, with a willing partner who owns a key platform and controls defaults, “pretty close” matters. Apple could pull the trigger to hand the keys of its search kingdom over to Bing. Again, if it truly is “pretty close”.

You could also argue that some of the social integrations Bing has been doing recently make the search engine more interesting to Apple. After all, now Twitter and Facebook will be fully baked into iOS. And Microsoft has search deals with both of them — while Google has deals with neither of them. My guess is that Apple does not care about Google+ search integration. In fact, that may be another factor tipping the scales in Bing’s favor, since you could argue that it makes Google search worse.

More important than the money, it may be worth it for Microsoft to agree to work closely with Apple to create a version of Bing that blows away what Google can offer in terms of web search on iOS devices. The question there is if two life-long rivals would put aside the many differences to battle an enemy that is even more hated by both? My guess is yes.

Two years ago, maybe such a partnership didn’t make sense. But again, everything that was true two years ago is more true now. Bing hasn’t made a meaningful impact in Google’s search share. Billions of dollars have been burned. Windows Mobile is dead. Windows Phone has gone basically nowhere. Apple and Google are fighting more than ever before (though proxy battles, even). And mobile is more important than ever before — especially for search.

And yet, Apple is directly responsible for billions of dollars being sent Google’s way via search on its devices. This will only continue to increase. It’s believed that Google makes more money off of iOS devices through search than they do through Android devices. In other words, Apple is indirectly subsidizing a portion of the major war against itself. Yep.

If a Bing deal ever happens, that may be the key factor. Apple is sending billions of dollars Google’s way. It doesn’t care about the money being sent back. It need to cut off that pipeline.

I can only imagine it hasn’t done such a deal yet because of the user experience issue. And perhaps Siri played a role as well. No doubt Apple thinks that Siri can help remove the need to search the web in the first place. But let’s be honest again: we’re nowhere near that. Siri will have to get much, much better for that to happen. And there would have to be a paradigm shift for that to happen. I’m not saying it’s impossible, but a Bing deal is more realistic.

Earlier today, news hit that Google’s Chrome browser has overtaken Microsoft’s Internet Explorer as the most-used browser on the web. This is significant because not even Mozilla’s Firefox was able to accomplish this feat — and Google did it in just four years. More importantly for the topic of this post, Chrome is like growth hormone for Google Search. No one types in URLs anymore, they simply search.

At the same time, with Mountain Lion, Apple added an “omnibox” to Safari, so people will be searching a lot more. The default search engine there? Google.

Microsoft needs Apple to make Bing relevant. Apple needs Microsoft in order to stop paying Google billions. This is so obvious. I think we may see a Google-free iPhone sooner, rather than later.

(Footnote: You could argue that Gmail is another key Google iOS integration, but it has always been one of a few email options and has never been the default one. Further, since it still doesn’t offer true push email, it sucks. Don’t try to convince me of the Exchange re-routing nonsense. Gmail on the iPhone sucks.)

[image: flickr/charliecurve]

Teambox is a collaboration platform that offers its own tools and integrations with third-party apps. Today it is offering the capability to integrate with Box, Dropbox and Google Docs.

You hear this debate a lot about what services people prefer inside the enterprise world. Consumer services are competing with more enterprise focused apps. Dropbox is wildly popular for its simple, elegant capability to easily move files from your desktop or through third-party services. Box is enjoying increasing popularity for its collaboration features. Evernote has legions of users who depend on it as a way to keep notes that can be tagged and synced with your smartphone.

Teambox calls its service a collaboration dashboard and the term seems to fit. Here’s a look at the variety of third-party services that work on its platform:

Teambox has project management apps such as a Gantt chart and time tracking. Today it has added a new service called Teambox Notes that is designed for large groups. It has a drag and drop interface to take note and collaborate outside of the email inbox.

Teambox roots as a task management system is evident in its chat feature, which allows end users to quickly create conversations between teams to assign tasks and due dates to projects enabling real-time collaboration.

But what I find most compelling is the combination of a collaboration platform with the capability to pull in Salesforce.com and any variety of  outside apps.

It’s this open platform that I find sorely missing from Microsoft Office 365. Microsoft does have some limited integrations but for the most part it serves as a Microsoft ecosystem more than anything else.

The Teambox service is proving to have its own appeal. The company has 900 paying customers and more than 300,000 users. It is one of the top rated apps in the Google Apps Marketplace.

I like Teambox but at first glance I think the trick will be convincing the market that at its core it has world-class collaboration capabilities with the added benefit of pulling in tools like Evernote, Box and Dropbox.