Flexible screens, wearable computers, conductive ink, wires that move like muscles: These are the materials that will make up the gadgets of the future, and they’re being dreamed up and developed in do-it-yourself hacker labs and garages all around the world.

Sure, large manufacturers are working on these kinds of materials, too, but openMaterials co-founder Catarina Mota says the real innovation is coming from the bottom up as makers, hackers, and DIY enthusiasts figure out how to do “the future” for themselves in their own home labs.

Smart materials have one or more properties that can be changed by external stimuli, such as temperature, moisture, a magnetic field, or an electric current. And these kinds of materials are changing how we think about hardware and what hardware is able to do.

At a hardware-hacking workshop sponsored by Make magazine today in Silicon Valley, Mota said she and a partner began looking for these kinds of smart materials for an art installation, but they ran into more hurdles than expected.

“We quickly realized the materials we wanted weren’t available in quantities or prices for makers like ourselves,” she said, noting that when they could get their hands on the materials, they couldn’t figure out how to use them, nor did they receive any instructions from the manufacturers, who were used to dealing with large-scale OEMs.

So, Mota concluded, she’d have to make the materials she wanted by herself.

“The only way to go about this was trial and error,” she said. “We’d make our best guess and change one thing at a time until we got the material to do what we wanted it to do.”

Eventually, the art installation fell by the wayside as Mota and her cohort became more and more fascinated by making and using these materials of the future. openMaterials is the result of their efforts, which include research and workshops on DIY smart materials.

Mota said that in 2009, she was only able to track down two or three manufacturers of smart materials. Today, there are many manufacturers of all sizes — and better still, the web is replete with information, instructions, and community resources for makers.

Here’s a gallery showing handmade smart materials and where you can find out more about them (or even learn how to make them yourself):

Top image courtesy of luxorphoto, Shutterstock

Verizon Wireless will soon get rid of its unlimited data plans held by customers who were grandfathered in before the company launched tiered data pricing, according to a report from FierceWireless.

Verizon CFO Fran Shammo reportedly told an audience at the JPMorgan Technology, Media, and Telecom conference today that 3G unlimited data plan holders will eventually have switch to a “data-share” plan. The company’s data-share plans will launch this summer and effectively end single device/single data plan polices. But data-share plans are tiered and anyone upgrading to use a 4G-enabled device must have one.

It’s unclear if Verizon will force all of its users with unlimited 3G data to switch plans if they aren’t switching to a 4G-enabled phone. Apple iPhone 4S customers right now, for example, only use 3G data and have quite some time before their two-year contracts are up. Will they be allowed to use unlimited data until they switch to a 4G-enabled iPhone 5 or Android superphone?

Verizon ditched unlimited data plans last summer, in line with what AT&T has done. Sprint, notably, still offers unlimited 3G and 4G data plans and might even offer unlimited 4G LTE data when its second 4G network launches. T-Mobile still has some unlimited data offers as well, but does not have the iPhone.

We contacted Verizon for clarification on its upcoming data plan options, but a company spokesperson declined to add anything to Shammo’s comments.

Facebook’s IPO is being heralded in rather vague terms as the biggest tech IPO in history. But this initial public offering actually does break a few records, and not just in the tech sector.

This week, Facebook’s IPO will be the largest venture-backed IPO of all time, and not in the subjective Kanye West sense. If, as expected, the company’s valuation creeps toward $104 billion, it would be four times larger than Google’s 2004 IPO.

Facebook will also have earned the distinction of raising the most venture capital of any venture-backed company in the U.S. — a grand total of $2.2 billion from some of the biggest names in venture capital around the world. This is almost double the amount raised by the second-place company in this category, Clearwire, a wireless broadband service provider that raised $1.2 billion. It’s also exactly double the amount Twitter has raised to date, $1.1 billion.

Also, Facebook breaks the record for most companies acquired pre-IPO. To date, Facebook has bought 13 other startups, only two more than Twitter, which is the second-most acquisitive company that is still privately held.

“Facebook’s IPO could be the first of many pay days for venture investors,” said Dow Jones VentureSource global research director Jessica Canning in a release today. “With the company seeking to raise up to $15 billion through its exit and some of that capital likely to be spent on acquisitions, Facebook’s IPO could also be a boon for investors in companies that would pair well with the social media giant. We’ve already seen this with a few targeted mobile acquisitions recently and will likely see more as the social space continues to evolve.”

Some of the mobile acquisitions were part of Facebook’s recent shopping spree that signed, sealed, and delivered startups Instagram, TagTile, Glancee, and Lightbox into the Facebook fold all within the past few weeks.

“Facebook created a path through the venture capital landscape that no one has seen before,” Dow Jones VentureWire editor Zoran Basich said in a statement today. “It created a frenzy of trading in private-market shares, drew non-traditional players into its venture rounds, and established a template for blockbuster success that every start-up and every investor dreams of.”

Still, Basich continued, don’t expect any other companies to continue down the same path anytime soon — including the much smaller and younger Twitter.

“It’s a template that no one else is likely to reproduce,” Basich said. “In about every way you can think of, Facebook is unique.”

Image courtesy of Jolie O’Dell, Flickr

VeriFone’s Sail mobile-payments platform was clearly a Square wannabe from the beginning — now it seems that’s more true than we initially thought.

VeriFone apparently lifted significant chunks of its user agreement from Square, GigaOm’s Ryan Kim has discovered. While there are other competitors similar to Square, like PayPal’s Here and Intuit’s GoPayment, VeriFone is a latecomer to the mobile credit card swiping game. I gave Sail flack for not bringing anything new to the market, but today’s revelation makes it even clearer that VeriFone is more interested in following Square than doing anything truly original.

Writes Kim:

When I notified VeriFone that wholesale portions of its user agreement had been copied from Square Tuesday afternoon, the company promptly deleted about a third of its user agreement – including most of the offending text. The SAIL agreement went from 10,525 words and 43 sections to 6,452 words and 25 sections with a couple mistakenly numbered twice.

VeriFone then sent along a statement, saying, “While many legal documents tend to use and reuse industry-acceptable language, we took your feedback into consideration and have made revisions to the agreement so that there is no misunderstanding.”

While a seemingly good excuse, Kim points out that Sail’s user agreement lifted very specific portions of Square’s. A section regarding how the services handle account histories is identical, save for “Sail” replacing every reference of Square. After Kim’s inquiry, that section and others like it were removed from Sail’s agreement.

Square is still deciding how to respond to the news. Sean Kane, a lawyer at the firm Pillsbury, tells Kim that Square could conceivably sue VeriFone for copyright infringement, though that rarely happens when it comes to user agreements.

We’ve asked for further comment from VeriFone, and will report when we hear back.

The PC crapware problem has finally gotten bad enough that Microsoft is now charging users to fix it.

For $99 Microsoft is now offering to strip consumers’ Windows PCs of all unnecessary software pre-installed by PC makers, AllThingsD reports. Affectionally dubbed “crapware”,  the software  is installed by PC makers in exchange for cash from vendors and is almost universally hated by owners of new Windows PCs.

This makes the removal program an arrangement bordering on a racket: PC makers get paid to put the software on computers, and Microsoft gets paid to remove it. Perhaps this questionable situation is part of the reason Microsoft never made it a priority to advertise the offer, even though its been around since 2010.

To be fair, as Microsoft PR pointed out to VentureBeat over the phone, the $99 fee is more than just crapware removal. Also included in the offer are things like Windows 7 and Microsoft Security Essentials installation, data transfer, and 90 days of free phone support.

The program is offered via its Microsoft Stores, of which there are a disappointing sixteen. It’s an expansion of Microsoft’s “Signature” initiative, wherein Microsoft sells consumer crapware-free PCs directly to consumers. That program has been around since 2009, though its never been very well publicized. (Paul Thurott first reported on it back in February.)

A better solution? Prevent the software from being installed in the first place.

This sponsored post is produced by CASCADE SF.

Thanks to CSS3 web design techniques and font-foundries, the ability to create gorgeous typography and beautiful design for browsers, is more accessible than ever.

The web is about content — finding it, delivering it, exploring it, and experiencing growth and possibility within it. What’s the fun of using a site that takes forever to load and is difficult to read? A poorly designed product can be the single deciding factor for whether a user stays on your page or makes a dishearteningly rapid exit. Fortunately, with the use of new code, integrating gorgeous design and Web typography into various browsers is easier than ever.

Since 1996 when CSS1 was first enacted, the Web has seen historical changes. Initially, there were only 9 fonts browsers read by default. The focus was mostly on legibility and monitor-only interactive readability.

Fast-forward 15 years: Designers now have the ability to use a multitude of typefaces from various font foundries to make the Web a more beautiful place. Comic Sans can, for instance, have embossed effects and gradients. Pages load faster, and the Internet is more beautiful, more interactive, and (most importantly) more readable.

“We are in a time like no other. Through the use of CSS3 we are able to make art from code,” said Tantek Çelik, Web Standards Lead at Mozilla and representative to W3C HTML and CSS Working Groups, at CASCADE SF’s HTML5 presentation, on July 2010.

Want to make the Web more beautiful? Learn how-to Saturday, May 19th at Adobe HQ in San Francisco, CA.

This Saturday, May 19th, 2012 at Adobe HQ, Sean McBride, Engineer and Developer at Typekit will teach San Francisco how to create gorgeous web typographic posters, magazines, and effects using CSS3 text shadows, transitions, outlines, text-gradients, and a host of other need-to-knows. McBride’s talk at this year’s SXSW Interactive was highly recommended by developers who attended, and we anticipate a similarly enthusiastic turnout.

Sign up today.

CASCADE SF: San Francisco’s Web Design & CSS3 Organization

Founded in 2009, by Andi Galpern, web designer and technology events organizer, CASCADE SF, @cascadesf, promotes quality and innovation to teach latest tips and tricks from the top minds in the web industry.

Andi Galpern also recently launched “The Design Business“ dedicated to teach designers how to think like entrepreneurs and communicate more effectively with teams.

Typekit: The easiest way to add real fonts to your website.

Built around web standards, Typekit gives designers and developers a subscription-based library of hosted, high-quality fonts to use on their websites. They have over 250,000 customers including some of the largest sites on the web today: The New York Times, Conde Nast, IGN, Twitter, and many others. It is also actively integrating Typekit into hosted platforms such as WordPress, TypePad, and Posterous so that anyone with a website can use real fonts.

Finally, Google’s search algorithm is getting a huge boost from a source we can actually trust.

No, it’s not your dimwit friends and their Facebook shares. It’s Knowledge Base, a semantically structured body of data 500 million items strong and growing.

With Knowledge Base plugged into Google Search, Google is going to get a heck of a lot better at knowing what things (not just what words) you’re searching for and delivering better results — more useful, more visual results.

How Google’s new brain works

Briefly, Knowledge Base is Google’s attempt to change your search experience from strings (of characters) to objects, whole entities with collections of their own data.

For example, yesterday, Google could parse your search for “roots” as five letters that might have a connection to a wide range of URLs. Today, Google knows you are probably searching for The Roots (the music group) or or Roots (the TV miniseries) or roots (the biological feature of plants), and it will help you get to the best results for that object faster.

Here’s a quick tour of how Google Search will look with Knowledge Base powering it:

Knowledge Base takes structured data from Wikipedia, Freebase, and other sources, including MusicBrainz (an open encyclopedia of music facts), the CIA’s World Factbook, and many other repositories of publicly available open data.

“Our overall mission is to organize the world’s information,” said Google Search project management director Jack Menzel in a phone conversation with VentureBeat yesterday.

“We’ve done some really clever things when it comes to understanding your query, but computers don’t really understand what people are talking about,” he continued. “To a computer, it’s just a string of letters.”

While Google’s parsing of misspelled and incomplete search terms as well as synonyms and related terms has been helpful to users, Menzel has been working to give Google’s search engine a more useful, more advanced understanding of search terms as interconnected objects in a database.

“As a search engine, all the results might look like good web pages, they all contain that word … but it’s not enough,” he said.

Why we’re in love with structured data

Knowledge Base has been a Google project at least since the company acquired Metaweb in 2010. The San Francisco startup was the maker of Freebase, a massive open-structured database. While Freebase was a starting point for Google’s foray into structured data, it was just the beginning.

Web companies are having a very public love affair with structured data these days. Basically, companies like Google, Microsoft (with Bing), and Facebook (with Actions) are attempting to understand not just the letters and words you type into their systems, but also what those letters and words mean and how they’re connected to URLs, to each other, and to sets of facts.

“We look at all the publicly available information on the web, and we try to reconcile them into a representation of the real world,” said Menzel. “It’s a huge challenge, and we’re just getting started.”

But, the Googler noted, even at its initial launch to the public, Google’s structured database contains 500 million people, places, and things; and these objects are connected by 3.5 billion attributes. Menzel thinks this gives Google’s web search a competitive advantage over Bing.

And because of how those attributes are structured, Google search is now able to return fascinating chunks of information for many kinds of queries — think of it as rich snippets on mega-steroids.

“When you do a query for a specific, real-world thing, we can synthesize a summary on the fly based on what the most relevant information is,” said Menzel. “That acts as a map of all the information that’s available to you on the web.”

For example, if you search for “roots,” Google will ask you if you mean “The Roots” the musical act. If, in fact, you do mean to search for that group, Google will quickly pull up a slew of related data — stats, members, shows, pics — all neatly organized in a scannable table for you. Think of it as a mini-infographic each time you search for something.

Here’s a video Google made to show off some of the new Knowledge Base features:

The “Wikipedia Hole” is coming to Google

And the searches just keep coming, too. “When you’re doing a research task, you very rarely want to do just one query,” said Menzel. “We help people create a map of the topic they’re interested in so they can more quickly explore the information.”

Menzel and the Google web search team call this “serendipity.” You or I might call it a “rabbit hole” — a dark, delicious tunnel of information, a bottomless pit of trivia from which you may never emerge. This happens a lot to the casual Wikipedia reader, and while it can suck up a ton of time, it can also yield some fun facts and new knowledge for your sponge-like brain.

Also, just like Wikipedia, Google has built in some tools for reporting incorrect information. “This is a tremendously ambitious task that’s really, really hard, and the world is constantly changing … so we’ve built a feedback mechanism so that in two clicks, you can report any problems you find,” Menzel told us.

The long and winding rollout

The new search features are launching today and will continue to roll out over the next few days for Google search on all platforms and devices — in English only, for now.

“Ooh boy, languages are hard. And understanding how to rank this content internationally is hard,” said Menzel. Other languages and regions will be coming soon … ish.

“As you can understand more about what people and web pages are talking about, you can imagine doing queries that are pure science fiction,” Menzel continued, “like finding a Lady Gaga concert this year outdoors in warm weather. Today, that’s crazy. That’s going to take a long time to figure out. With Knowledge Base, we’ll be able to answer that very complicated and nuanced question quickly.”

Finally, we asked Menzel how Knowledge Base — that big, slick, data-driven machine — was going to mesh with Search Plus Your World, Google’s social approach to search, which launched earlier this year.

Ultimately, he told us, Google web search is just about getting you quickly to the best possible information.

“Sometimes, that best information is the private information that only you have access to, like the Search Plus Your World information,” he said. “And sometimes it’s Wikipedia, and sometimes it’s sports data, and sometimes it’s the weather. I don’t want to belittle the importance of social data, but knowledge overall does have a larger scope.”

Image courtesy of alpahspirit, Shutterstock

The venture-backed startup in Los Altos, California, is taking a manufacturer-centric approach to the automation market — so don’t expect to be able to buy an Imp to retrofit existing devices tomorrow. Electic Imp is releasing a developer preview bundle in June, giving manufacturers the tools to make their devices Imp-compatible.

The Imp chip

Think pre-warming your house when returning from a vacation, or watering your lawn via smartphone. Or turning on the TV and a few lights while you’re out for dinner to convince potential crooks you’re still at home. And maybe, a fridge that re-orders food as you’re about to run out.

In a statement provided to VentureBeat, founder and CEO of Electric Imp Hugo Fiennes said “Until now, creating connected devices was a huge challenge for any vendor.” The home automation category is a currently mess of competing standards and technologies. Device communication protocols include Wi-Fi, Firewire, USB, and infrared, and home automation product ecosystems include X10, UPB, mControl, HomeSeer, Control4, Vivint, PowerHome, and ActiveHome Pro, among others.

Electric Imp intends to solve that by reducing complexity. Install a tiny Imp card, connect it to your home Wi-Fi, and control it via the Imp cloud service. Each device in your home instantly knows about the other devices and can communicate with them. Then use your browser or smartphone anywhere on the planet to control your home.

The current reality is a little more complex: you have to choose control and automation software, find, purchase, and install  devices specifically rated to interoperate with that system, and install software or an embedded server to manage it all.

Fiennes says that’s all in the past. “Electric Imp changes all this by bringing the power of an easy to use, cloud-based service to almost any device and allowing the internet to interact with everyday objects.” Interaction will be possible on three levels: Imp to Imp, Imp to people,, and Imp to services.

The approach makes sense, since it’s embedding most of the intelligence of the system in the cloud. It’s reminiscent of developing nations skipping legacy telephone grids and moving straight to cellular communications. In addition, by  taking a manufacturer-centric approach, Electric Imp has a chance to disrupt currently consumer-focused home automation market. According to a company statement, integrating an Imp slot into a device should cost less than a dollar.

But there’s a great deal of existing competition in this space. In addition, powerful players like Microsoft are bringing solutions to market such as HomeOS, AT&T wants to provide our Digital Life, and Google would love us to all have Android@Home. Can an iOS or Apple iHome system be far behind?

To win, Electric Imp is going to have to innovate fast, go to market hard, and find some luck along the way. The company just closed a series A round of funding from Redpoint Ventures and Lowercase Capital, which should help. And the co-founders do have some impressive credentials: Hugo Fiennes is a former iPhone engineering manager, and Kevin Fox, another co-founder, designed Gmail. VentureBeat spoke to Tom Tunguz, principal of Redpoint Ventures, who said: “Every great product has a little bit of magic. This team has worked on two of the most successful consumer products in history.” If Electric Imp can bring some Apple and Google magic to bear, they have a shot at success.

If they do, perhaps by Christmas we’ll see devices labelled “Imp Inside.”

Electric Imp founders: Peter Hartley, Hugo Fiennes, Kevin Fox. Fiennes is holding an Imp.

Photo credit: Hakan Dahlstrom on Flickr

Dave Morin, CEO of social-network Path, has joined ticketing startup Eventbrite‘s board of the directors, a move Eventbrite claims will help it continue innovating on the social front.

While Path had a major privacy blowup early this year, the company has carried on with its head high by raising a new $30 million funding round. Eventbrite doesn’t talk about Path much in their announcement, however, and instead lauds Morin’s role as a former head of Facebook’s platform group.

“Eventbrite has long been a believer in the impact of the social graph, and the work that Dave did while at Facebook has had a profound impact on our business,” Eventbrite CEO Kevin Hartz said, in a statement. “Our integration with Facebook Connect in 2008 predicated an exponential increase in traffic and engagement among event attendees. We are thrilled to welcome Dave to our board and believe his expertise and guidance will be an incredible asset to Eventbrite as we continue to grow.”

Eventbrite is arguably the hottest startup today with an emphasis on ticketing and events. In February, the company said it had issued more than 50 million tickets and today the company says it has issued nearly 60 million tickets. Eventbrite also recently launched its first hardware product with an “at the door” credit card reader.

“Eventbrite is fundamentally changing the way people create, promote and find events and gatherings in their local communities,” Morin said, in a statement. “I’ve been more than impressed by their level of innovation, their commitment to their users, and by their long term focus. The decision to join the board as they forge into making event discovery more mobile and social was an easy one. At the end of the day, we all live for great events.”

Morin joins former Netflix CFO Barry McCarthy, former Ticketmaster CEO Sean Moriarty, Sequoia Capital Partner Roelof Botha, and others on Eventbrite’s board.

Dave Morin photo: Flickr/Joi Ito

What if your ads watched you while you were watching them? Microsoft is set to debut its new motion-sensitive advertising project NUads next month, which the company says will revamp the TV ad industry by doing just that.

The company’s natural user-interface ads, or NUads, use Xbox Kinect’s motion sensing technology to transform TV commercials into something you can actively participate in with minimal effort. For instance, people can vote in real-time for a product or service by waving their hand, schedule a calendar reminder for an upcoming TV show, or say “Xbox Near Me” to see a map of locations for whatever retail store just advertised to them. Microsoft first showed off its NUads project at the Cannes International Advertising Festival last June.

“During the Super Bowl, you’re watching TV, some great ads pop up,” said Microsoft manager Lyn Watts in a recent Cnet report. “You say something like, ‘Xbox share,’ it’ll share automatically, on Facebook or Twitter, whatever you like. Advertisers are really impressed by this.”

Essentially, the NUads platform wants to start producing commercials that “watch you” while your watching them. In doing so, Microsoft thinks it can lure people away from DVR devices that permit skipping through the commercial breaks that play throughout a TV show. Satellite television service provider Dish Network is even making new DVR boxes (the appropriately named “Hopper” box)  that automatically “hops” through those commercials.

The NUads launch couldn’t have come at a better time for the broadcast television industry, which has recently spoken out about how traditional advertising is failing to keep up with audience behavior.

Monday, Chairman of NBC Broadcasting Ted Harbert said “we can no longer ignore time-shifting” within the business model to drive ad revenue. The problem with “time-shifted” (a.k.a. DVR) devices is that the industry doesn’t have enough control to make sure those commercials will play for an audience the way they do for live broadcasting. With NUads, there might be a compelling reason for people to watch commercials willingly and prevent them from skipping through.

NUads could replace Nielsen TV ratings

Harbert also criticized the industry’s standard for content ratings through Nielsen, saying  “We’re participating in many initiatives to try and crack the measurement code because we just can’t wait — and wait some more — for Nielsen to do it.” This puts Microsoft as well as its new NUads platform in the perfect position to step up.

Using the Kinect device, NUads have a far greater means of measuring how people react to a piece of content as well as advertising. It can detect a person’s facial expressions, record/sense audio reactions, and even transmit pieces of video. If done right, Microsoft developers could anonymize this kind of data through the Kinect SDK, and give them an incentive to make sense of this information for advertisers. Basically, a person’s unique private data wouldn’t be shared, but their collective reactions could be turned into important analytics. For example, a laundry detergent commercial that evokes an emotional response in the form of “aww” along with positive facial expressions — not, “Sally from 505 Nowhere Street laughed and cooed obnoxiously at the puppy.”

Microsoft’s Watts did, however, warn all developers to stay mindful of potential privacy intrusion features by adding disclosure statements when appropriate as well as knowing what you’ll do with the data before its collected.

Cnet’s report indicated the NUads interactive advertising platform will launch in late Spring. My guess is that Microsoft will probably coincide the launch with its Xbox announcements at the E3 event in June.

Image via Microsoft

The problem with Facebook’s mobile app is that it doesn’t run games. The web-based site is built with Adobe Flash, but that runs poorly on mobile devices. As a result, Facebook can display its news feed and photos on its mobile app, but not the social games that are played by more than half of the social network’s users.

iSwifter plans to fix that with its own Facebook app that runs on tablets such as the iPad. iSwifter has created a game streaming technology that converts Flash games to video in a data center and then streams that video to the iPad. That enables users to play Flash games on the iPad. Now iSwifter is using Facebook’s own OpenGraph applications programming interface to create an app, TheWorx for Facebook, that duplicates the functions of the web-based Facebook on mobile, iSwifter chief executive Rajat Gupta told GamesBeat.

Facebook might not like being upstaged by Burlingame, Calif.-based iSwifter, but Gupta says the social network should be happy because iSwifter’s app enables ads that run on the right-hand side of a Facebook page to be visible on the iPad. It can thus generate money for Facebook, which doesn’t yet have mobile ads on its own app.

It isn’t clear if Facebook will appreciate another company creating a Facebook app, but Gupta says that TheWorx for Facebook is really just another iPad application based on the OpenGraph API. In the video below, you can see that Zynga’s Slingo game, which doesn’t ordinarily run on the iPad, runs just fine in the iSwifter application. It will be interesting to see the reaction of Facebook, Zynga, and Apple. Gupta says that the app is a win for all of the companies involved.

When you activate TheWorx for Facebook app, you see what appears to be a normal Facebook page. But in the left-hand menu, there is an app hub tab. If you tap it with your finger, you’ll see all of the games you play on Facebook. If you tap on a game icon, the game will load and you’ll be able to play it with your fingers.

TheWorx for Facebook will debut in June. Gupta notes that Facebook’s recent filing to go public says that 4 percent of Facebook’s revenue comes from ads shown next to Zynga games.

“It’s clear that Facebook users are moving to mobile faster than even Facebook predicted,” says Gupta. “TheWorx is intended to benefit Facebook users who can’t play games on the Facebook iPad app or on the mobile Facebook site, as well as Facebook itself who doesn’t display their ads to these gaming users on mobile. And of course game developers should be happy too because their Facebook Flash games now come to the iPad with no porting required.”

iSwifter is funded by the incubator YouWeb and generated more than $10 million in revenue in the past year.

TechStars 2011 alum Mocavo has raised $4 million in its first round of funding in a bid to help people find their ancestors through its search engine, the company announced today.

Mocavo started getting notice when it become part of the TechStars Boulder program in summer 2011. Its goals fall somewhat in line with major site Ancestry.com and it uses a powerful search engine to help people connect the dots about their genealogy.

“Since our launch in March 2011, we have focused on creating the most engaging and social experience in the research of family history,” COO Ryan Hunter wrote on the Mocavo blog this morning. “We’ve already created a custom search engine focused in genealogy, an automated system to send undiscovered content to users, and mobile/web apps to self-publish documents and photos.”

The coveted first round of funding comes from Foundry Group. Seth Levine, Foundry Group’s Managing Director, will join Mocavo’s board.

“We’ve had a great first year, and we’re excited that Foundry shares our passion and vision on the direction of the industry,” Hunter wrote.

Boulder, Colo.-based Mocavo previously raised $1 million in seed funds from a long roster of angel investors (most of them named Dave) including Dave McClure, David Cohen, David Bonderman, David Calone, Dave Carlson, and others.

Ancestry photo: Kateryna Larina/Shutterstock

HTC’s One X and and Evo 4G LTE may have been praised for their decidedly un-iPhone-esque designs, but the differences are apparently not enough for U.S. Customs.

The two devices have fallen victim to a surprising U.S. Customs ability to ban the importation of products that it suspects infringe on patents, The Wall Street Journal reports. In this case, the patent in question is Apple’s #5,946,647 patent, which has nothing to do with the phones themselves but rather the software running on them: The patent simply covers the ability to, for example, convert a phone number into a link that can launch a phone’s dialer. HTC calls the feature minor, but it’s clearly significant enough to draw lots of unwanted attention.

The delay and investigation are a result of a December International Trade Commission ruling that ordered a ban on the importation of any devices that infringe on the aforementioned patent. To avoid the ban, HTC was supposed to strip the functionality from its phones, but that apparently didn’t happen with the Evo 4G LTE and One series.

In a statement, HTC says it “believes” that its devices comply with the ITC ruling and that it’s working with customs to get the ball rolling on shipments. “The HTC One X and HTC Evo 4G LTE have been received enthusiastically by customers and we appreciate their patience as we work to get these products into their hands as soon as possible,” the company said.

“Soon as possible,” however might not be good enough for Sprint and its customers. The biggest Sprint device of the year so far, the EVO 4G LTE is scheduled for a May 18th release. Given today’s news, the device clearly likely won’t be able to make that time frame. Even Sprint has removed any mention of the release date from its website. Instead, the device is simply “coming soon.”

The One S, in contrast, was released on AT&T in April. The device is listed as “out of stock” on AT&T’s website.

We’ve reached out to Sprint and AT&T for comments on the situation and will update this space when the companies respond.

Wave, which offers free accounting software for small companies,  feels that managing “the books” is a complicated and dreaded task that isn’t any easier thanks to desktop accounting software.

“I experienced the pain first hand of trying to run your books and I really despise all those back office tasks,” said co-founder Kirk Simpson in an interview with VentureBeat. “[I wanted to] simplify the administrative tasks that small businesses despise.”

Simpson thinks high-end accounting software is so complicated that most business owners need to spend far too much time learning how to use it. He created Wave as a simpler solution that clueless business owners could use to manage their accounting.

“There’s a disconnect between small businesses owners who hate doing this and yet they are being asked to pay hundreds of dollars to pay for desktop and cloud [accounting] software,” said Simpson.

Competition in this space ranges from high-end offerings like Salesforce, Zoho, and NetSuite, to cheaper and free services from Kashoo and Outright. Wave bets on its completely free offering and super-simple design to help it stand out. Wave makes it money solely from advertising services to its customers.

Social+Capital Partnership led the $12 million round. Charles River Ventures and OMERS Ventures also contributed.

Wave Accounting is based in Toronto, Canada. The two-year old company has raised $19 million in funding in the last 18 months, since its launch.

Man with financial chart image via Shutterstock

We’ve heard it before, and we’re going to hear it again. The next version of the iPhone will replace its long-standing 3.5-inch screen with one that measures at least 4 inches.

The Wall Street Journal, citing unnamed sources, claims that production will begin next month on screens for the new iPhone (likely called “iPhone 5″) in Asian factories.

While it has drastically improved screen resolution, Apple has not changed the size of its 3.5-inch iPhone screen since it launched in 2007. But since that time Android phone screens have gotten much bigger. Two relatively new flagship devices, the HTC One X and Samsung Galaxy S III, feature 4.7- and 4.8-inch screens, respectively.

Personally, I’ve been clamoring for a 4-inch iPhone ever since Samsung launched the first line of Galaxy S Android smartphones, which had 4-inch screens. It’s the perfect size for reaching your thumbs across the screen and still lets you view content. If the endless rumors of the 4-inch screen for the iPhone 5 are true, I’ll be happy.

China Mobile deal

Also in the iPhone rumor pot today is word that China Mobile is in talks with Apple to finally carry the iPhone. China Mobile is the world’s largest carrier by customers, but the iPhone hasn’t landed on that network due to network incompatibilities. It has, however, signed with competitors China Telecom and China Unicom to offer the iPhone.

China Mobile Chairman Xi Guohua said at a shareholder meeting in that he wasn’t sure if the carrier and Apple would be able to finish up an agreement before the end of 2012. That said, with China Mobile’s 667 million subscribers, there’s a lot of incentive for both companies to hash out a deal.

iPhone 5 mockup photo: Fuse Chicken

Facebook’s initial public offering just keeps growing. The social network announced this morning via an amended S-1 filing that it will add around 84 million shares to its IPO, an increase of around 25 percent.

Come Friday, when the company is scheduled to begin trading on the Nasdaq under the symbol “FB,” Facebook will be floating around 421 million shares. The company’s stock is expected to receive its official pricing on Thursday, and Facebook says it will be in the $35 to $38 per share range.

If Facebook’s stock gets priced at the $38 high-end, its IPO would raise more than $16 billion and would make it the largest technology public offering ever, Fortune points out. AT&T Wireless, the current technology IPO leader, raised more than $10 billion in 2010.

The additional shares are coming from current Facebook investors Peter Thiel, Tiger Global Management, and James Breyer from Accel Partners, and not from Facebook itself. For that reason, the added shares won’t increase Facebook’s valuation.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s voting power will be reduced from around 57.3 percent to about 55.8 percent due to the new shares. That’s not ideal news for Zuck, but as long as he maintains his majority voting power, he’ll still be able to rule the company as he sees fit. The additional shares likely were a bid to appease the company’s existing investors.

Facebook yesterday added an additional $50 million shares to its IPO, with the caveat that they were part of an “over-allotment” option. We also heard yesterday that General Motors is planning to stop running ads on Facebook, after determining that they were ineffective.

Photo via Jim Merithew/Wired

Today, Fab.com is launching its third and most ambitious version of the site, and CEO Jason Goldberg said it’s going to remind you of window-shopping with your best friends.

“Imagine you’re shopping with your friends, and one of them picks up a shirt and says, ‘Oh, that’s cute!’ We think we can replicate that online,” the founder told VentureBeat in a recent phone call.

Fab is accomplishing this not just with a few dinky plug-ins or add-ons, but with a wholesale redesign that will “really get the experience of shopping with friends — not just what they bought, but what they’re tweeting, what their pinning, what they’re liking,” Goldberg said.

Fab.com 3.0

The relaunched Fab homepage will feature algorithmically derived featured products based on real-time activity from Fab members. It will also show you a ticker for what’s being bought at any given moment.

Starting today, members can see what their friends from various social networks are noticing and buying in real time. They can also choose to pin items on Pinterest or even make a purchase directly from this live feed.

And Fab is bringing a much-needed search module to the site, so you can drill down for specific products, designers, and categories.

The new Fab.com will also feature Smile pages to give members in-depth profiles and stories about the designers behind Fab’s product inventory.

“It’s about making people smile,” said Goldberg. “We’re showing them that e-commerce can be fun. … We care more about that, about the long-term relationship, than just about making money.”

Here’s a sneak peek at the new designs:

Getting social shopping right

“We want to take the fab product and design up another level … we want to reimagine social shopping.”

As a longtime Fab fan myself, I cringe at the thought of bringing more noise and clutter to the clean, lean shopping experience I’ve grown to appreciate. But Goldberg and the rest of the Fab team, ever focused on great design, are several steps ahead of me, natch.

“Everything we do has to be well-designed,” the CEO said. “Social can’t be a bolt-on; it has to be part of the core experience and designed really, really well. I personally design everything that goes on the screen … a virtual product doesn’t get on Fab unless I think it’s a great product.”

Last year, Fab brought its members a live feed feature to show Fab members’ buying, fave-ing, and liking activity in real time. The decision to focus on the social side was a direct result of Fab’s organic social activity: More than half its members as of last December had come to the site through social channels.

“It has to be authentic,” Goldberg told us. “Up to 40 percent of our traffic comes from social feeds. You can’t force that. Social isn’t just a way to get something from the user; it’s a way to give value to the user. The traffic will come when you deliver a great experience.”

In the end, the live feed turned out to be a huge success, with 15 percent of visits to the feed resulting in an actual purchase. That metric proved to the Fab team that a more social direction could also be more profitable.

The growth continues

As previously mentioned, Fab’s growth has been a bit legendary in the tech startup scene.

One of its more recent success stories involved integrating with Facebook’s Timeline. The startup saw a 50 percent increase in traffic from Facebook since its Actions integration) at the beginning of 2012.

As a result of that and other factors, Fab more than doubled its membership in the first quarter of 2012 (from 1.2 million at the end of 2011 to a whopping 3 million members in March 2012.

“Now, we’re at 3.25 million users in the U.S., nearly 4.25 million worldwide, and we’re a couple weeks shy of our first birthday,” said Goldberg.

One area of growth that’s still a bit mysterious is Pinterest. “We get about 2 percent of our traffic from Pinterest today,” said Goldberg. “That number came out of nowhere in February, and it’s held steady since then.”

But Fab users have expressed a deep and abiding love for Pinterest, and the Fab team is making pinning more integral to the Fab.com experience. That 2 percent might see a bit of an increase as a result.

Combating feature creep

Fab’s new-feature rollout schedule is unrelenting, but Goldberg said he and the rest of the team have an eye on feature creep and will always aim to maintain Fab’s simplicity — one of the things that makes the site such a pleasure to use in the first place.

“Keep it simple. The best design gets out of users’ way and lets them do what they want to get done,” he told us.

“A lot of sites end up building silos of features. If you go to Fab.com today, in our top navigation, there are eight different items. We’re simplifying that to four in the new release.”

He concluded, “Even when you add, you make it simpler.”

Fab.com launched in June 2011 and has received $51.3 million in funding to date. Its most recent cash infusion was a stunning $40 million Series B last December.

Image courtesy of Robbi, Shutterstock

“I think given the amount of money available, the shortage in Silicon Valley is in technical talent,” says Geurike, “I have no doubt that some European startups with strong talent and the right startup know-how will be able to out-execute Silicon Valley companies.” One of Geurike’s new tasks at EarlyBird will be to help European companies break into the U.S. market.

Geurike, who is German but studied engineering at Stanford and is based in Palo Alto, wants to support other European founders who could make a global impact. “My goal is to help portfolio companies to become a success on a global scale,” he explains.”I will probably end up working most closely with one or two founders who decide their best opportunities for global impact come from leading their business from Silicon Valley, while keeping most of the staff in Germany, where it is easier to attract and retain technical talent.”

I asked Geurike how European startups compare to their Silicon Valley counterparts. “European founders tend to think more about revenue early on. That can be an asset, but also somewhat limiting. However, given the greater impact you can have these days with modest or no funding, I think European entrepreneurs can break free of these constraints, and smart money will find them.”

Berlin has long been a startup hotspot and pulls in founders from all over Europe drawn by the cheap living costs, vibrant culture, and expanding startup scene. The founders of audiophile social network SoundCloud, for example, which recently raised $50 million, are Swedish. Ashton Kutcher’s latest Berlin investment Gidsy was started by a couple of brothers from Amsterdam. Kutcher, at least, makes following the smart money to Berlin look like fun.

Twilio has finally released its Android client with a new native software development kit that will allow Android developers to add VoIP features to any Android app.

The startup’s iOS client has been around since February, and today, Android developers are basically getting the same set of tools — tools that allow you to easily make voice calls a feature, if not necessarily the main event, of your application. You can use the Twilio client on any existing Android app, or you can use it to build a new app from scratch.

(And yes — we can smell the Twilio Android/mobile hackathon coming already. These days, you can’t throw a rock in San Francisco on a weekend and not hit a hackathon, and Twilio’s last hackathon went pretty well. Stay tuned for more on that this fall, when the startup will host its second conference.)

Features for the Android version of the client include voice calling on any Android device with a data connection, tap-to-call capabilities, analytics, and feedback from voice calls.

Twilio first introduced this concept (voice features with minimal code) almost one year ago for web developers. At that time, Twilio CEO Jeff Lawson told VentureBeat, “The existing telephony network is a big dumb audiopipe. … Skype is obviously amazing and transformed the way people interact, but Skype is only one client. We want to make that available for millions of developers.”

Since then, the company has been earning rave reviews from developers and has leveraged its hacker street cred into $17 million from Silicon Valley’s finest VCs.

The partnership kicks off with some impressive additions: You can listen to NPR and Public Radio International shows on Flipboard, even while reading other content on the graphics-heavy aggregator. You can find these programs in the content guide under a new Audio category. To play or pause your current audio track from anywhere in Flipboard, tap the music icon on the top of the screen (iPhone) or lower corner (iPad).

In another great use of sound, Flipboard has added VoiceOver features that let visually impaired users listen to articles on the app.

If you already use SoundCloud, just add your login on Flipboard’s Accounts screen and SoundCloud will appear as a new tile on your main Flipboard page, alongside your other topics such as photography, tech, or fashion. Tap, and you’ll be taken to a SoundCloud landing page where you can navigate to your stream and see what sounds friends and family have shared, as well as your SoundCloud Likes, Sounds, Sets, and Groups.

Just last week, SoundCloud unveiled the beta version of its new web app, Next, which featured continuous play and improved social features. The move towards social makes the company a natural fit for Flipboard, which already lets you add accounts for 10 other popular social services, including Facebook, Twitter, Google Reader, Instagram, Tumblr, 500px, and Sina Weibo.

Flipboard has also added support for Readability and Pocket to make it easier to enjoy content in-depth later. There is also a new Japanese version of the app, released today.

Dan Loeb’s Third Point is bulking up its stake in a few other technology companies besides Yahoo, according to an SEC filing. The firm, which edged Yahoo chief executive Scott Thompson out of office earlier this week, are now gobbling up shares of Apple, Cisco, and Google.

According to the filing, Third Point now has 360,000 shares of Apple stock, amounting to $217 million, 5 million shares of Cisco, and 280,000 shares of Google. The company also snapped up a couple more Yahoo shares, totaling its stake to 70.5 million (or a little more than $1 billion).

Third Point’s Loeb has been the driving force behind Yahoo’s recent CEO debacle in which Thompson was found padding his resume. The story unfolded after Yahoo publicly told Loeb that he was too inexperienced to sit on the board as a director. Loeb had suggested himself and three others be tapped for the positions and did not accept a compromise Yahoo executives extended because it didn’t include bringing him on.

After a couple weeks of investigation, Thompson stepped down from his CEO role and soon thereafter revealed he has cancer. Yahoo director Patti Hart also stepped down, as she was the one who vetted Thompson and failed to look into a falsified computer science degree, which later made its way to Thompson’s Yahoo bio.

With Loeb on a spending spree, companies may be concerned with the pressures that he and his firm are seemingly happy to apply.

via Bloomberg; Stock ticker image via Shutterstock

A week after previewing the revamped Bing, Microsoft has released the latest version of its search engine to people in the U.S. Head over to Bing.com/new to test out the new social features as well as annoy your friends with questions in the process. It doesn’t have all of the new bells and whistles announced last week, and you can only sign in with a Facebook or Windows Live account — though Quora, LinkedIn, and Twitter support should be coming soon.

New Bing has a gray sidebar on the right that, once you login with Facebook, shows all the new social features. When you search a topic, new Bing will list friends who might be able to answer your question and help with the search based on whether they’ve “liked” or mentioned something with that keyword in it. It even shows any relevant images they’ve posted.

You can then post a question directly to Facebook or specific friends in the know from the sidebar. If you find something useful while searching or want to answer a buddy’s question with a link, you can post the URL directly to Facebook from the sidebar. Relevant Twitter results from random people are also sometimes shown at the bottom of the box under “People Who Know”.

Most of my test searches showed no “Search With Friends” results, even for things I know my friends love and post about often such as cats, cheese, Dollywood, robots, or the Maker Faire.

Earlier this year when rival company Google first attempt to mashup your social graph and search habits via “Search Plus Your World,” the results seemed invasive and annoying. Second-place Bing seems to have learned a bit from Google’s stumbles, cordoning off the social element on the far right side of your screen.

However, even if the social/search feature was more helpful, I’m not sure there’s a big need for this kind of integration. Most people have mastered searching for things themselves, or posing questions to Facebook. If they haven’t, I usually send them to lmgtfy.com.

via Search Engine Land

We’ve known for a while that spam was jumping on the Pinterest train. Now, security software service McAfee is sending out an official warning to keep an eye out for fraudulent pins.

According to McAfee, hackers have created entire toolkits that make it fast and easy to deploy new spam campaigns on the social network. Pinterest displays “pins,” or images taken from around the Web, to a “board.” These images are outbound links to various websites, and are ripe for exploitation.

“These tools are so easy that many require only the attacker or scammer to change a couple of lines of code in the available kit,” said McAfee senior research engineer Hardik Shah in a blog post. “They can literally start a new Pinterest scam within minutes!”

The toolkits come with software that has the ability to “mass-like” pins, add an account creator, mass-follow people, automate fake commenting activity, and more. These toolkits have been behind much of the malware distribution in 2011. They allow hackers/scammers to automate the process of creating unwanted content (see: Internet-crap & spam), and then distribute it.

We found a scam on Pinterest in early March that showed a picture of a Cheesecake Factory coupon, promising free gift cards to all users. Scams are often touted as a “Pinterest special,” available only for users of this special, new social site. And because it is a special, new social site, people believe the fake offer. Many of these scams also ask a user to “re-pin” the image first (broadening the circle of lies), and will then prompt that user to take a survey. This kind of activity falls in line with phishing scams, as opposed to malware attacks.

McAfee warns that if a website asks you to re-pin before delivering the content, it’s most likely a scam. The security firm also makes the point that Pinterest users should beware of affiliate link spam, which is when scammers lure bystanders to an Amazon page that is associated with the scammer’s account. When that person subsequently buys something on Amazon, the company pays a commission to the scammer.

Beware of pins that lead you to website that masquerade as Pinterest as well. These will try to push the same, “You won this contest!” type of pin, and they are generally fake.

If you’re hankering more funding news throughout the day, you can subscribe to our Deals Channel RSS feed by either clicking the red RSS icon at the top of this page or adding the Deals Channel feed link to your favorite reader. And as always, send funding news our way at tips@venturebeat.com.

Qualtrics says your research is wrong, raises funding to fix it

Qualtrics received $70 million in its first round of funding from Accel Partners and Sequoia Capital today. The company’s main product allows customers to survey anyone on the Internet, asking for any kind of data that isn’t restricted by a certain database’s parameters.

Lenddo uses social influence to bump up your credit score

Lenddo raised an $8 million first round of funding Tuesday. The company helps people around the world build credit with small loans and a social-based Klout-like scoring system. Accel Partners, Blumberg Capital, Omidyar Network, iNovia Capital and Metamorphic Ventures participated in this round of funding, as did angel investors Geoff Judge, David Kidder, Scott Heiferman, and Barry Silbert.

Solar company Solexel raised $25 million

Solexel has closed a $25 million round of funding from Kleiner Perkins Caulfield and Byers, according to a form D filed with the SEC. The Silicon Valley based company produces high-efficiency solar panels.

Simplee manages your healthcare costs

Health care cost management startup Simplee has raised $6 million in funding. Simplee works with insurance companies to manage health care costs and insurance claims. The Social+Capital Partnership led the round, with participation from Greylock Partners.

SoMoLend closes $1.17M seed round

Social and mobile lending company SoMoLend has raised $1.17 million in seed money. Instead of borrowing from a bank, SoMoLend facilitates borrowing from friends, but you’ve got to pay the money back. CincyTech led the round, which participation from Queen City Angels, the North Coast Angel Fund, Blue Chip Partners, Shaker LaunchHouse, Eldar Investment LLC, Clarion Direct Investment LLC, Clifford Holekamp, Elizabeth Crowell, Bruce Terry, Bob Baron, Cheryl & Carlin Stamm, and many others.

Teen texting on bench image via Flickr user Ming Xia / Sarah Mitroff

Oh, boyfriend. Pop superstar Justin Bieber has joined video-sharing sensation Viddy.

The “Boyfriend” singer took a mini break from promoting his coming-soon album “Believe” on Twitter to solicit a little Viddy love from his almost 22 million Twitter followers — and give back a little something with footage of himself shirtless at a photo shoot.

Viddy is the Los Angeles-based startup that makes an iPhone application for shooting 15-second clips that can be enhanced through “production packs,” otherwise known as video effects. The service, which has more than 27 million users, is often likened to Instagram for its ease of use and simple sharing tools. The company just announced a massive $30 million funding round.

“Photoshoot was….well u will see. #viddy #abouttogoIN,” Bieber tweeted Tuesday afternoon. “Follow me on @viddy – @justinbieber,” he added.

Just a few minutes later, the teen heart-throb posted his first Viddy — an update of himself shirtless (we’ve confirmed that “justinbieber” is his official account). Clearly, the Biebs knows what the ladies like. The account added more than 3,000 followers in the first few minutes following Bieber’s tweets, and the viddy is racking up comments and likes as we speak.

The Biebs joins a growing cadre of celebrity Viddy users — some of whom have actually decided to invest — sharing stylized quickie vids with their fans. Viddy celeb members include Bill Cosby, Rihanna, Snoop Dog, Terrell Owens, and newbie Katie Couric. Even Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently got in on the Viddy action.

Viddy has more than 27 million registered users, and is adding 500,000 new users per day. It feels like it wasn’t that long ago when the startup first announced hitting 10 million users — oh wait, it wasn’t. In fact, just a little over two weeks ago the service touted the 10 million milestone. Today, that seems like small potatoes.

With Bieber on board, who knows what crazy member-milestone the company will surpass next.

Photo credit: Justin Bieber/Instagram

A month after Google introduced its multi-browser tab opening functionality for Chrome Beta, the new feature already set to make its debut in the stable release of the browser.

The new feature lets you manage open tabs across different computers and mobile devices running Android OS 4.0 and higher.

Tab sharing works by connecting all the open tabs in Chrome on several different computers. So long as you’re signed into Google via Chrome on each computer, a new menu — aptly named “Other devices” –  lets you view all the tabs open on every install of the browser across multiple platforms. It’s a small, albeit useful, update that will be helpful if you find something you want to read later while at work, such as a Yelp review while your on the way to a a restaurant.

Sharing tabs between computers will work with the latest Chrome update, which is due out in the next few days. To use the feature on your Android phone, it needs have Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich or higher and the Chrome Beta mobile browser installed. Those that don’t have Ice Cream Sandwich on their Android phone can use Chrome to Phone, an extension that sends Chrome tabs to the default browser on Android 2.2 or higher.

Somewhat coinciding with the news, Macquarie analyst Ben Schacter asserted Tuesday that Chrome for iOS is on its way, according to a Business Insider report. Schacter says that we can expect Chrome for iPads and iPhones by the second quarter of 2012, or slightly thereafter.

The news is almost completely bunk since Apple doesn’t allow third-party browsers on iOS, which is why you don’t see a full Firefox browser on the iPad or iPhone. Google uses its own version of WebKit to build Chrome, as opposed to Apple’s version. For this reason, Apple won’t allow it on iOS. While Google stands to gain some cash from getting its browser on iOS, it’s not likely to happen anytime soon.

Expect the Chrome update to roll out in the next few days. As for the functionality once you do get the multi-tab feature, Google says to be patient because it will take time for the tabs to sync.

For a small Portland, Ore.-based startup, AppFog has managed to build a huge fan base.

AppFog offers a platform-as-a-service for developers building web applications. What that means in simple terms is that if you’ve got a program you want to write, AppFog will take care of setting up a virtual server, installing all the services you need, and getting everything ready so that all you have to do is drop in your code and get it running.

AppFog uses cloud-based services, primarily Amazon Web Services, under the hood, but provides a more straightforward, managed environment than cloud services offer. Its pricing is radically simpler, too.

And AppFog’s tens of thousands of customers are clearly passionate about the company. VentureBeat held an (admittedly unscientific) reader poll in the weeks leading up to Under the Radar, an event produced by DealMaker Media in Silicon Valley. There were 32 startups presenting at Under the Radar, and we asked readers to vote on their favorite.

We collected thousands of votes, and AppFog was neck-and-neck with cloud-based enterprise storage startup Zadara until the final hours. But in the end, AppFog won the contest.

The startup’s prize: A profile on VentureBeat. I interviewed AppFog founder and chief executive Lucas Carlson at the event, and after some delays, I’m posting it here. Without further ado, ladies and gentlemen, here is your reader’s choice winner:

VentureBeat: What is it that you guys do?

Lucas Carlson: We make developers lives easier. That’s our mission and our focus, it’s what we’re good at. We do that by creating a platform as a service that connects developers with infrastructure and services in seconds.

VB: What kinds of services?

Carlson: MySQL, Mongo, Reddis, memCache, anything new and cool that you’ve heard about. Instead of figuring out how to compile it and get it up and running and managing it if it crashes, we do all that for you, and we hook it all together and make it seamless.

VB: Isn’t that the premise of existing cloud-based services, like Amazon, where they get everything together and spin up a server for you and run whatever you want on it?

Carlson: Yes, and there’s a big difference between what Amazon’s doing and what we’re doing. Amazon thinks of it like resources and services, and you have to figure out how to tie it all together and keep track of everything. And once you do that, you’re bound to it — you can’t move off the platform and you have no choice.

Instead of thinking of it as resources, we’re thinking of it holistically, like applications. So we can understand from an application downwards, the entire stack, the entire status of the program, and how it’s running, and what services it needs. That gives us a unique ability to do things like snapshot an entire app with its services, keep backups of it, and transfer it to other cloud providers in order to do disaster recovery and other services.

VB: So my apps will still be running on Amazon, or Rackspace, or HP Cloud, but you’re just giving me the ability to manage that and make it easier to create what I need and deploy the apps that I want?

Carlson: And not only that, we’ve incorporated Cloud Foundry, which is an open-source library that you can actually contribute to, so you have a say, for the first time, in the application life cycle that it runs in.

VB: Who’s using this?

Carlson: Tens of thousands of developers. Developers are our customers, they’re our bread and butter. We built something for developers, by developers. We’re not looking to switch that focus — we just want to make sure that we help. Developers live everywhere. We have developers that live in enterprises, in small businesses, in startups, even individual developers.

VB: Is there a particular platform or language that your customer base uses?

Carlson: Our company has specialized in PHP, and that was the first language that we supported. So we have a strong following in the PHP community.

VB: Still used for many, many websites.

Carlson: About a third of all websites run PHP. But since then we have actually, through Cloud Foundry, expanded to support Java, Ruby, Node, .NET, and others.

VB: So what does it cost?

Carlson: It starts out completely free, and from there it scales up with their needs. You can go as cheap as $29 a month. Unlike other cloud providers, scaling up is a linear process, instead of jumping to become very expensive as you go.

VB: As a proportion of what I’m spending on Amazon Web Services, or Rackspace, what would I pay?

Carlson: It’s very difficult to say, because the way that those services charge is by the hour of server time. That makes sense if you’re analyzing DNA, but most mobile and web applications live for a very long time. So charging hourly, it’s very hard to calculate. Our system is charged monthly, pro rata, so if you need to add capacity, you just add it for the part of the month that you need it.

VB: How big are you as a company and how are you funded?

Carlson: We’ve raised $10 million in funding from Ignition and Madrona and First Round Capital in two rounds. We’re about 28 people and still growing very quickly. We’re based in Portland, Oregon.

VB: There are a bunch of people here from Portland.

Carlson: Portland is heating up. It’s actually a great place for building a company. It’s a lot cheaper and the talent is really high quality.

VB: So you guys won the reader’s choice award in our poll. I was sort of surprised to see all these people piling into the comments saying, “Vote for these guys.” How did you do it?

Carlson: Our mission is to make developers’ lives easier, and if developers are saying these things, I guess we’re doing a pretty good job with that.

VB: So you’re saying this is purely grass roots? You didn’t send out a tweet saying “Vote for us”?

Carlson: No, we did send out tweets. But the love we did not ask for, that was purely their own doing.

Photo by Dylan Tweney/VentureBeat

Expect plenty more Nexus Android smartphones and tablets on the horizon from multiple manufacturers, as Google will reportedly expand its partnerships to squash fears surrounding its Motorola Mobility purchase.

Historically, Google has tapped a single device partner for its Nexus line (HTC for the Nexus One, Samsung for the Nexus S and Galaxy Nexus). But sources tell Bloomberg that the search giant is looking to add many more Nexus partners, and will also sell the devices directly to consumers. The Nexus devices are expected to run Android 5.0 “Jelly Bean.”

Google’s Nexus partners get access to early releases of Android before other manufacturers, which gives them a leg-up when designing their new products. And since they work directly with Google, Nexus devices aren’t riddled with carrier junkware apps, or clunky interface tweaks like HTC’s Sense.

Google may work with up to five Nexus partners, and the devices are also expected to be sold unlocked (a.k.a. not tied to any carrier).

Having more Nexus devices would give Google more control over the Android ecosystem, Bloomberg’s sources said. It would also allay fears that Google would play favorites with Motorola Mobility, which it’s currently in the process of purchasing for $12.5 billion.

While the move raises more questions about what Google will actually do with Motorola, it makes sense for the search giant to want more control over Android’s direction. Apple has complete control over the iPhone — carriers be damned — and Microsoft has also been strict about how both carriers and device makers treat Windows Phone devices.

If Google really wants to compete with the quality of its operating system — not just the number of units shipped — it needs to work with partners to make sure flagship Android devices aren’t hobbled by carriers, or anyone else for that matter.

The first fruits of a multi-year deal with Verizon are starting to pay off for live video-broadcasting startup Color. Thanks to Verizon’s match-making skills, sketch comedy show Saturday Night Live will be using Color to broadcast unscripted, backstage footage to show fans.

Color is the unproven $41 million-backed Palo Alto company betting the house on live video clips broadcast from mobile devices. The startup makes iPhone and Android applications, hooked into Facebook’s Open Graph, that stream 30-second video clips live to friends. Last week, the company connected with Verizon to release a special, Verizon 4G LTE network-optimized version of the application with higher quality video and audio.

Saturday Night Live will use the new-and-improved Verizon-Color technology to broadcast live clips (using a Verizon Wireless phone, of course) from this week’s rehearsals. The show will also put Color to use backstage during its May 19 season finale episode, which features host Mick Jagger and musical guests Foo Fighters and Arcade Fire.

Color users who are either fans of Verizon Wireless or SNL on Facebook will receive automatic notifications each time SNL starts shooting live video. We’re told this is the first time SNL, which has 2.5 million fans on Facebook, has used a mobile application to provide show fans with backstage access.

The backstage deal, which promises fans exclusive behind-the-scenes access, could go a long way in attracting new users to Color — the startup has roughly 1 million active users. It certainly doesn’t hurt that Verizon is also running an ad (seen below) to promote the three-way, late-night hookup.