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

Former AOL executive Brad Garlinghouse will join cloud storage and file-sharing company YouSendIt as the new CEO, the company announced today.

Garlinghouse will replace Ivan Koon, who has previously served as YouSendIt’s CEO for six years. Garlinghouse was formerly AOL’s head of AOL’s Silicon Valley division and before that served as CEO of DialPad, which was acquired by Yahoo.

YouSendIt wants to be a major cloud storage player for businesses. But to do so, it will have to slug it out with Box, Egnyte, Accellion, and now Google with its Drive cloud storage product.

“YouSendIt is a rare gem — it has quietly built the leading business in this space by focusing on execution,” Garlinghouse said in a statement. “Used within a whopping 98 percent of the Fortune 500 and with more than 30 million registered users — the company is well positioned to continue its dramatic growth. YouSendIt has already demonstrated a track record of solid financial growth. I’m proud to lead YouSendIt into this next phase.”

Campbell, Calif.-based YouSendIt currently has 585,000 paid subscribers out of its 30 million users. The company says it generated a record revenue in 2011, and that it was up 61 percent year-over-year.

If you thought cloud companies lacked a sense of humor, think again. NetSuite’s SuiteWorld partner conference in San Francisco opened with a “Wayne’s World”-themed video, in which chief executive Zach Nelson (as Wayne) and founder Evan Goldberg (as Garth) talked about the company’s grand plans to change business software.

Those plans include a new e-commerce focused service, SuiteCommerce. Nelson unveiled the new “commerce as a service” offering, which manages online, mobile, and brick-and-motar transactions and customer interactions.

“We’re transforming how your business operates and how your business interacts with other businesses,” said Nelson. “Customers want to transact with several different devices and they want you to remember them across devices.”

SuiteCommerce includes enterprise resource planning services, customer-relationship management features, and support for global transactions NetSuite is also offering a SuiteCommerce API so it can integrate with a partner’s technology.

One the first companies to partner with the SuiteCommerce is mobile payments startup Square. NetSuite’s services will connect with Square Register, a mobile point of sale system using a cash register. On Square’s side, merchants will have a way to take payments and then they can use SuiteCommerce to manage sales and customer interactions.

“SuiteCommerce has support for any device, any business model, and it can modified for an ever-changing landscape,” Nelson noted. The hope is that any company can be the next Amazon, equipped with a full-featured online store.

NetSuite already has a strong e-commerce presence in its business, with 11.2 million products being managed on 2,800 websites run by the company, according to Nelson. Now it is branching out to manage online and in-store sales and reduce the “hairball” of communication that happens during every transaction. The company is also focusing on machine-to-machine business transactions, where humans aren’t involved.

“The human as a CRM system will be a thing of the past,” said Nelson in reference to the increasing use of machine to machine transactions.

NetSuites counts Evernote, Roku, Jawbone, and Airbnb as customers. Nelson also announced that SAP, a major competitor to NetSuite, has renewed its license with NetSuite to use its services for part of its business needs.

The company, founded in 1998 long before the likes of Salesforce, provides a suite of accounting, customer relationship management and other business software through the cloud. It calls it services ”enterprise resource planning” (ERP).

Photo: Sarah Mitroff/VentureBeat

If you’ve ever wanted to see how a single email travels from your account to someone else’s, Google has you covered with its new “Story of Send” site.

While the site appears to mostly be a push by Google to show off its green credentials, it is still cool in that it shows the actual process of something many of us do hundreds of times a week. Email travels from our computer browser over cables to Google’s data centers. There the email is copied, scanned for viruses, and sent back out over cables to the recipient’s email account.

Google Green team member Erin Reilly writes on Google’s blog:

“We’ve included videos and photos throughout the journey so you can explore certain areas more deeply. For example, if you’re curious what data center servers look like, we’ve included some photos. Or you can watch a video to learn about how we purchase clean energy from wind farms near our data centers. And because technology doesn’t always have to be serious, you might find a vampire or two lurking around or uncover other surprises on the journey.”

Check out the “Story of Send” video below:

Apple will soon unveil an update to its iCloud storage service that will add photo sharing and social features, the Wall Street Journal reports.

While Dropbox, Box, Microsoft, and Google have dominated the cloud storage conversation in recent months, Apple has mostly stayed out of comparisons because it offers the dumbest (maybe “easiest” is the right word) cloud storage. It syncs your media across all iOS devices (iPhone, iPod Touch, iPad), Macs, and PCs, but there is no way to manage what exactly goes where.

But with new functionality that is Apple is likely to announce at its WWDC conference on June 11, iCloud could take a leap forward with more fleshed-out features. First up will be easy photo sharing so others can access and download your photos. You’ll also be able to comment on these photos like you do on Facebook and other social sites.

The iCloud update will also reportedly let you sync notes and reminders using new web apps. That would tie iCloud with the release of iOS 6 and its many new features, including the dropping of Google Maps in favor of Apple’s own Maps software.

Let us know in the comments if you use iCloud now and if you’re looking forward to new features from the service.

The result of this merging of business and consumer applications is a new class of general and vertical apps that are as social as they are powerful. These new applications are increasingly easy to use, collaborative, and based in the cloud.

While IT managers may cringe each time they hear “can you help me connect my iPad to the company server,” here are seven reasons businesses should embrace the consumerization of IT.

1. Real-time communication
In their personal lives, people are becoming more and more accustomed to web-based communication channels outside of email. When people are used to FaceTime, chat, and instant messaging at home, the act of sending an email to a vendor, or even sending a fax to a lawyer, seems like an artifact from a different, and far slower, era. If I can chat with my friends on Facebook, why can’t I interact with co-workers on our CRM system? Why I can’t I have a secure instant message session with my lawyer?

The socialization of enterprise applications gives workers, clients, colleagues, customers, and vendors better tools to communicate in real time. These tighter communication loops should ultimately drive key performance goals for any business, including employee productivity, operational efficiency, and customer satisfaction.

2. Greater accessibility
While traditional enterprise systems trap data in a single location, the cloud makes applications and business data available to more users on more devices in more locations. For employees, this can be a game changer, as the information they need is right at their fingertips – whether they’re at a client location, on route to a meeting, at home, or on vacation.

3. End-user buy-in
Ultimately the success of any technology initiative hinges on the ability to convince employees to actually use the software, device, or process. When employees clamor to bring their own tools into the workplace, there’s no risk that a new tool will sit idly by.  Throwing employees in front of a stodgy application is hardly a recipe for success. Rather, end users are more likely to use those tools that evoke the same look and feel of their friendly social networks and consumer apps.

4. Shorter end-user learning curve
A savvy workforce, familiar with its own favorite tools, can dive right into technology that leverages consumer elements in the corporate environment. Training costs go down, and employees can be productive with their new tools right out of the gate.

5. Affordability
Cloud-based applications shift the financial costs from the upfront capital expense of purchasing software licenses to an ongoing operating expense. When calculating the total cost of ownership, the benefits of cloud-based tools go beyond the cost of subscription vs. software seat to include: lower management costs, lower provisioning and upgrade hassles, and lower hardware costs. A 2009 report from Forrester Research concluded that Google Apps costs less than a third as much as on-premise email for equipping 15,000 employees with email.

6. Security
While data is often the chief concern holding businesses back from the cloud, web-hosted applications can actually increase data security, particularly for those small to mid-sized companies that don’t have proper in-house technical expertise or resources like a dedicated, lockable server room. In these cases, off-premise storage removes the company’s sensitive data from on-premise risks, such as access by cleaning staff, employee error, even physical threats like earthquake and fire.

7. Productivity
Consider for a moment who is behind the consumerization of IT. While Apple may benefit greatly as iPads and iPhones cross over to the enterprise, it’s the employee and not Apple who is pushing to use these devices for work. At the heart of this trend is the simple idea that employees know which tools can make their work day easier and, hopefully, happier.

The key question to ask is: If employees are asking to use their own tools so they can be more productive in the office or catch up on work after hours, is that such a scary prospect?

Jack Newton is CEO and co-founder of Clio, a Vancouver-based company that offers web-based practice management software for solo practitioners and small-to-medium sized law firms.

[Top image credit: Goodluz/Shutterstock]

Adobe’s anticipated Creative Cloud digital hub, with access to CS6 software and cloud storage, is now available for anyone who wants to give it a spin.

As we’ve noted before, Creative Cloud promises access to the latest version of Adobe’s staple program, Photoshop, as well as upgrades to Illustrator, InDesign, Dreamweaver, Flash Pro, Fireworks, Premiere Pro, AfterEffects, Lightroom, Muse, Edge, and more. You also get 20GB of cloud storage with syncing options.

The service runs between $50 and $75 per month depending on whether you sign up for a full year or if you pay month-to-month. While that might sound a little high, buying a full license to the latest version of the Adobe Creative Suite runs between $1,300 and $2,600, depending on which programs you want.

The Creative Cloud subscription is a direct response to piracy of Adobe’s very expensive products. Design professionals who can’t get their employers to pay for it or strapped students who need the software for projects sometimes steal Adobe’s software via Torrent sites and file-sharing sites. But with Creative Cloud, Adobe hopes to get some of these would-be pirates to pay a more-affordable monthly subscription rather than steal the software.

Check out the pricing options below and let us know in the comments if you plan to sign up.

This sponsored post is produced by TiE.

Successes such as Instagram, has got the whole tech community up in restless excitement. At least 2 developers approached me the day the Instagram acquisition was announced. They needed to do something. If not here, surrounded by the startup frenzy in the Silicon Valley, then where else, they said.

This is the right time, the right economy, the right place and everyone wants a ride on the startup train. And TiEcon is the biggest Entrepreneurship Conference, which has something for everyone – from Entrepreneurs, Investors, to Engineers, Recruiters.

Entrepreneurship – What it takes

The rosy successes and all – there is a lot that goes into entrepreneurship. What people to hire, who to pick for your founding team, who to partner with, when & how much to take to market, when to raise funds and if you are lucky like Instagram & many others before, when & whether to sell. Do you have what it takes? The Entrepreneurship panel at this year’s TiEcon , gives you food for thought.

Entrepreneurship for Women

Entrepreneurship, is perfect for women! And here is why. For one, it destroys the myth of the Glass ceiling (A woman Entrepreneur – To be or not to be) exposes Gender socialization (Deborah Gruelfeld at TiEcon on Mastering the Body Language for Power and Influence) and only your technical, social and business skills are the ones on the line. There is no limit to your creativity.

What goes into making your startup a success

If you are on the entrepreneurial track, there are many things that go into making your startup, a success. Whether to bootstrap, or take money from Angels or VCs or How to take your product to market? A startup is about a team with the perfect complementary skill-sets. So how do you build your winning team or judge whether you are part of that winning startup team. Once your startup is off the ground, does it have the belts and buckles in place for the journey up the hockey stick curve? And well – if you are young, right out of or in school/college and wondering how you could start a company– there is the Young entrepreneur’s guide to getting started doling out advice on it, at the TiE Youth Forum.

For the Geeks in us

‘What if Im not an entrepreneur’, ‘What if I love coding and and, building things?’ Well, this year’s TiEcon fuels the developer’s passion and knowledge as well.

The Social Panels talk about the next frontiers in Social Gaming, how internet commerce has been impacted by Social media, and what the emerging trends and opportunities are in the Social space.

The Mobile panels talk about the latest mobile trends and opportunities. You could learn best practices from mobile companies for deployments in the enterprise space.

The Energy panels talk about the upcoming applications and emerging trends in energy fields, the hottest opportunities in the cleantech area, and the evolution of energy efficiency in the automobile sector.

The Life Sciences Panels talk about Medical device innovation in emerging markets, and opportunities in Mobile health.

The Cloud Panels talk about how Cloud & SAAS are being used in the real-world, emerging trends and opportunities in Cloud and how Consumerization in the Enterprise is driving opportunities in the Cloud.

What the Stars foretell

And that’s not all. This year’s TiEcon 2012 (May 18 – 19, 2012) also has some amazing Keynotes from Dr. Vishal Sikka, Head of Technology at SAP and Carlos Dominguez, Cisco SVP. In the Breakthrough Thinkers keynote, Dr. Deepak Chopra, talks about Prosperity and Leadership. And finally, Sam Pitroda tells the story of how innovation was ignited in India, which has led to the Internet revolution there and the new booming economy that we see there today.

And this isn’t all. At the TiEcon Expo you will find 100 or so startups displaying their latest products and innovations. And in the corridors of the convention, you will find endless opportunities to Network and talk to the smartest of entrepreneurs, investors, passionate developers who are on the cutting edge of technology. A boundless, priceless opportunity to connect, network, learn, grow and prosper…

Most companies use at least 4 different cloud services, according to a study by Cloudability, proof that the cloud has become a ubiquitous tool, whether chief information officers want it to be or not.

Cloudability (a provider of cost-management tools for cloud services) looked at data from its 3,200 customers in 80 different countries to gather this information that reaches back to 2005 — a time before “cloud” became a mainstream term for sharing and storage on the Internet. Today, companies are spending thousands of dollars to keep up with the technology, replacing on-premiss systems like customer-relationship management software and even local servers in favor of the Internet. Looking at the data, cloud really hockey-sticked in 2010. Prior to that, however, there were a few prominent cloud services: For instance, Mechanical Turk was released in 2005, Google Apps in 2006, and Github in 2008.

Today, 86 percent of companies use more than one type of cloud service, according to Cloudability’s data. The majority of those cloud services fall in the “hosting and computing category,” followed closely by storage needs. The data is surprising because of reservations that CIOs and chief security officers have about the cloud. Many are concerned that the cloud is not yet a safe place to store proprietary information, and could provide access to a company’s systems more easily. But as the technology evolves, more companies are jumping on board, solidifying the cloud as a core tool in businesses around the world.

Check out more about the cloud and how it is being used by companies all over the world:

Cloud server image via Shutterstock

Electronics giant Samsung has purchased streaming media startup mSpot, the companies announced today. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed, but the deal is rumored to be worth an estimated $8.8 million, according to South Korean news site Mael Business.

MSpot’s service functions similarly to Google Music or Amazon’s Cloud Player. Users can upload the digital media (music, movies, TV shows) stored on their computers into the cloud via an mSpot app. That media is then accessible on a handful of smart devices through mSpot’s app, which is available on iPhone, iPad, Android, and Google TV. Users get 5GB of storage for their media for free. The mSpot streaming music service also offers users a Pandora-style smart-radio functionality, while the video service is geared more towards making new movie purchases.

As part of the acquisition deal, Samsung will feature the mSpot app on its devices, including smartphones, tablets, and smart TVs. Strategically speaking, Samsung will likely develop the mSpot service as a way to compete more evenly with Apple, which offers a digital media store as well as plenty of streaming functionality via its iCloud service.

The move will also allow Samsung to steal attention away from the Google Play Store, which is easily integrated into Samsung devices running Google’s Android operating system. It will be interesting to see if Galaxy smartphones and tablet owners use the mSpot service instead of Google Play — and to see how Samsung plans to draw users away from Google Play to the mSpot service.

Founded in 2004, mSpot has previously raised $2.3 million from Trinity Ventures.

Apple is currently testing a notification system for its iCloud web service via iCloud.com, according to a MacRumors report.

The notifications look pretty much like they do on iPads and iPhones running iOS 5.0 or higher, and presumably, its how the notification system will look when it comes to the latest version of Apple’s operating system OS X Mountain Lion.

And while we know that the company really wants to push iCloud integration in the future, I’m curious if notifications on the iCloud site would be overkill. Sure, the notifications can handle calendar and email alerts, but why bother if you’re already using an iOS device to sync all of these things together.

If Apple were to add a news feed and support for iMessages to the iCloud site, it could make those notifications a worthy addition. However, it would also mean Apple was tiptoeing its way into building a social-media walled garden. Without social and news features, I’d have no reason to spend time on iCloud.com, and I’m guessing many others would feel the same.

At this point, the only clear takeaway is that Apple plans to make its customers use iCloud more often on the web. Let us know your thoughts in the comments.

Image via MacRumors

Cloud storage startup Dropbox will provide a generous 50GB of free storage to new owners of the just-announced Samsung Galaxy S III Android smartphone.

The move mimics Dropbox’s prior decision to team up with HTC to give owners of the HTC One X 25GB of free storage. But in this case, Samsung Galaxy S III owners are getting double the space. It’s also comparable to Box’s offer of 50GB free storage to any compatible Android device in a limited promotion, except Box targets businesses while Dropbox is mostly targeting consumers.

S III owners who take advantage of Dropbox’s promotion will get the free 50GB storage for two years, which is often how long many smartphone owners keep a phone before upgrading because of carriers’ two-year contracts.

The Galaxy S III smartphone will begin arriving in stores May 29.

Developing story. Refresh for updates.

Enterprise storage startup Nirvanix has raised $25 million in its third round funding, with a goal to bring enterprise cloud storage to the largest companies in the world.

Nirvanix offers its more than 1,200 customers across the globe access to the cloud storage in three forms, depending on their needs: public, hybrid, and private. The company claims it is the only one of its kind to offer and fully managed services with usage-based pricing. Basically, you pay for exactly what you use, rather than paying for a set amount of storage.

Scott Genereux, President and CEO of Nirvanix, told us Nirvanix separates itself from cloud storage companies like Box because it stores much, much larger data sets with its nine data centers. The largest data set being stored for a single customer is 8.5 petabytes (for USC Digital Repository). Other customers storing huge amounts of data include NBCUniversal, Cerner Healthcare, and Advocate Healthcare.

“We have one customer who has more data stored with us than what Box is hosting in whole,” Genereux told us.

Genereux said the company is in “hyper-growth” mode and its next big step is opening an engineering facility in Boulder, Colo. that will act as the company’s second office outside its San Diego home. The company chose Boulder because it has a strong startup community and quality engineering talent.

The new funding round was led by Khosla Ventures with participation from existing investors Valhalla Partners, Intel Capital, Mission Ventures, and Windward Ventures. Nirvanix has raised about $70 million to date, including the new round.

Nirvanix was founded in 2007 and now has 70 employees. Genereux said the company aims to double its employee number within a year.

Photo illustration: Sean Ludwig/VentureBeat

Original photo: brainpencil/Shutterstock

Google added a whopping collection of 450 fonts to its online document service Google Docs today — thus freeing your text from years of enslavement by the likes of Arial, Courier New, and the universally reviled Comic Sans.

Well, you know what Comic Sans? We’ll just see how comical you are within a sea of equally goofy font options now available to co-workers, friends, and family members who have zero grasp of basic design principles.

Google Docs users can add the new font styles by clicking on the font menu in the tool bar and selecting the “Add fonts” option at the very bottom. From there you’ll see the entire menu of web fonts available, such as Economica, Princess Sofia, Jolly Lodger, Happy Monkey, Dynalight, Wallpoet, Lobster one, Lobster two, and Esteban. All of your chosen fonts are displayed alphabetically in a sidebar to the right. You can click the “X” to remove any font you don’t plan on using. That sidebar will then appear in the “font styles” tool bar when you’re working within a doc.

Even with all these fresh new font options, it’s possible that bland white document background isn’t doing for you anymore. Thankfully, Google has added over 60 new document templates for you to choose from.

The full list of Google Docs updates is listed below, via the Google Docs blog:

• Google Drive launched as a place where you can create, share, collaborate, and keep all your stuff.
• There are now a few more options for inserting images in Docs, including inserting from Google Drive, searching for images from the LIFE Photo archive, or taking a snapshot with your webcam.
• Charts in spreadsheets now has support for minor gridlines and options to customize the formats of axis labels
• Accessibility in Docs got better with support for screenreaders in presentations and with the addition of NVDA to our list of supported screenreaders.
• From File > Page setup… you can now set the default page size for your new documents.
• It’s now easier for speakers of right-to-left languages by automatically showing bidirectional controls when you type in a language that might use them.
• Apps Script had many improvements, including
  • A new ScriptService for programmatically publishing your scripts and controlling when they run.
  • A new function to find the root folder of someone’s Drive.
  • An increase in the allowed attachment size in emails from 5MB to 25MB.
  • An increase in the size of docs files you can create from 2MB to 50MB.
• There are now over 60 new templates in our template gallery.

The company announced Wednesday that it is rolling out new Amazon Cloud Drive desktop applications for both Windows and Mac. The apps function very similarly to cloud-storage service competitor Dropbox’s desktop clients. Amazon’s Cloud Drive app allows you to seamlessly drag and drop files from your computer to the cloud with little work. Files are downloaded and uploaded in the background, but can be paused and restarted again should the need arise.

Amazon’s Cloud Drive service, which debuted last year, provides users with 5GB of storage for free. They can purchase more space at the rate of $1 per additional GB, per year.

With the recent launch of Google’s long-hyped cloud storage service Google Drive, Amazon will need every advantage to keep current Cloud Drive users from leaving. The new desktop apps also makes the Amazon Cloud Drive experience much more fluid, but nothing new in terms of what’s available by other competing services.

The new apps are available to download today on Amazon’s website, but you’ll need to sign up for the Cloud Drive service to gain the storage functionality.

Microsoft and cloud communications startup Twilio have signed a deal to bring Twilio’s APIs to developers who use Windows Azure, the two companies announced today.

Azure is used by many companies to host and build web applications through Microsoft’s data centers. Naturally, some of those companies and developers using Azure could benefit from the cloud-based phone and SMS technologies that Twilio offers. On top of API access, the deal will give Azure developers a credit of 1,000 free text messages or inbound voice minutes. Interested developers can sign up here.

“In line with our commitment to serving developers, Windows Azure welcomes support from Twilio to make their voice and messaging APIs available on Windows Azure,” said Scott Guthrie, Corporate Vice President at Microsoft, in a statement. “We’ve seen the innovation happening around Twilio, and we want to make it as easy as possible for Windows Azure developers to build great apps that use Twilio’s communications platform and take advantage of Windows Azure’s scalability, reliability, and flexibility.”

San Francisco-based Twilio has raised around $33 million to date, with its most recent funding totaling $17 million. Twilio recently revealed that part of that funding was humorously delivered via a touchtone term sheet created using Twilio’s API.

Cloud photo: basketman23/Shutterstock

Big data startup Birst has raised $26 million in its fourth round of funding, with a goal accelerating growth and product development, the company announced today.

Birst is part of a relatively crowded field of business intelligence players including QlikTech, SAP, IBM, Oracle, GoodData, and Microstrategy. But Birst claims it only allocates “one-third the cost, time, and staff of traditional big BI,” while still being available as in SaaS form and on-premise. That sort of flexibility is quite attractive, and Birst can connect to multiple data sources, such as CRM, ERP, financial, and operational systems.

The new funding round was led by big dog VC firm Sequoia Capital with additional participation by prior investors Hummer Winblad and DAG Ventures.

“This is an extraordinary time for us,” said Brad Peters, CEO and Co-Founder of Birst, in a statement. “We founded Birst to change the way the world used and interacted with BI and by pushing the envelope of possibility we are witnessing great success. This investment furthers Birst’s ability to continue to drive innovation and expand our solution to new markets and new audiences. We are thrilled to have world-class investors such as Sequoia Capital by our side.”

San Francisco-based Birst was founded in 2004 and has now raised a total of $46 million, including today’s funding.

Check out a video describing Birst’s dashboards below:

Google has graduated its message translation feature from Gmail Labs to all inboxes, as well as cutting some cool, helpful Labs features like Old Snakey and Mail Goggles, the company announced today.

During the past year, Google has been refining what it offers and getting rid of many of its side projects and products that never went anywhere. For example, last November it said good riddance to Wave, Knol, Search Timeline, and Google Gears. This appears to stem from CEO Larry Page trying to push the company to generate better revenue, which the company is doing well.

Google today is masking that it is killing lots of cool products in Gmail Labs by graduating its message translation to Gmail. When you get a message in another language, you’ll know be able to click on “Translate message” button.

“Since message translation was one of the most popular labs, we decided it was time to graduate from Gmail Labs and move into the real world,” Google wrote on its blog. “Over the next few days, everyone who uses Gmail will be getting the convenience of translation added to their email. The next time you receive a message in a language other than your own, just click on Translate message in the header at the top of the message.”

While this is helpful addition, take a look at this list of fun and helpful features being expelled from Gmail Labs: “Old Snakey, Mail Goggles, Mouse Gestures, Hide Unread Counts, Move Icon Column, Inbox Preview, Custom Date Formats, and SMS in Chat gadget.”

Google says these weren’t popular enough to stay, but frankly some of them were good. Mail Googles was a humorous way to stop you from “drunk e-mailing.” Inbox Preview let you see your inbox before it finished loading, which was great for slower connections. I’m sure there are others people will be missing too.

Translation picture: Helder Almeida/Shutterstock

Google’s BigQuery application has launched into general availability with an aim to help businesses crunch “big data” sets easier and cheaper than ever, the company said Tuesday.

BigQuery, as we previously detailed in November, gives companies of all sizes a powerful cloud-based tool to analyze data. Traditionally, crunching big data sets has taken more IT investment than simply spinning up and uploading data to a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) program.

The SaaS software stands in stark contrast to open-source data software Hadoop and companies like Cloudera that help companies get a handle on Hadoop. It’s also quite different from on-premise data crunching software like HP-owned Vertica and IBM-owned Netezza.

Google product manager Ju-kay Kwek, who is overseeing the company’s big data efforts, told me companies that rely on data and business intelligence would likely prefer BigQuery over other options because it’s easier to set up and it costs less.

“On-premise options like Netezza and Vertica are fast and powerful, but they will cost you,” Kwek said. “And with Hadoop, you need more heads and you have to build out a custom Hadoop system.”

Kwek said one of Google’s largest advertising customers used BigQuery verus its own on-premise Hadoop cluster as a test to see how well it worked. BigQuery crunched the data ten times faster, showing how much faster data crunching can be when using Google’s monstrous computing power.

While in limited preview, BigQuery was free to try for 30 days, but now that the service is all the way live, companies will have to pony up. Thankfully, the prices appear fairly reasonable. Here’s the breakdown:

Let us know in the comments if your company might give BigQuery a shot for its big data needs or if you prefer Hadoop, Netezza, or Vertica.

Data image: Toria/Shutterstock

Downloading a PDF or Microsoft Office file from the web is easily one of the more antiquated practices still being used today. It’s also something cloud document startup Crocodoc wants to abolish with its new HTML5 document embedding service, which launches today.

If you’ve ever viewed a document in Dropbox, Yammer, or LinkedIn, then you’re using Crocodoc’s product. The startup’s service takes PDF and Microsoft office document files and replicates them online for wider consumption. While this functionality is also available in Google Docs, Crocodoc’s service preserves the document in a way that’s very similar to how it looks and functions within native desktop software. With Google, I can technically see the document, but often times a documents style, images, and other formatting is altered.

“You’re essentially getting something that’s on par with Adobe Acrobat or Microsoft Word, but within a web app, ” Crocodoc founder and CEO Ryan Damico told VentureBeat in an interview. “When you view a document in Google Docs, its much slower to load in the browser, everything is blurry when you try to zoom in, and there’s kind of faked text selection that doesn’t really look right.” He adds that while Google Docs is a consumer-focused product, its main focus isn’t in translating documents perfectly, which is necessary for many people.

Crocodoc’s new service can be embedded into a variety of third-party apps by using iFrame or JavaScript, and without the need for plugins or additional software. Customers can customize the doc experience to fit specific branding, and offer commenting and markup tools for collaboration with others.

The startup charges by the document, so its service will probably be most useful for businesses, or organizations that produce a heavy flow of documents that need to be shared among a large group. The startup’s first product, Crocodoc Personal, is targeted at consumers and still available. Its new product is already powering the document viewing experience within Yammer, SAP, LinkedIn, Edmodo, and Dropbox.

Founded in 2010, the San Francisco, Calif.-based startup has raised about $1 million to date. Its funding comes from Y Combinator, SV Angel, and top Silicon Valley investors including Dave McClure, Joshua Schachter, Paul Buchheit, and Steve Chen. Crocodoc has four employees, but has plans to double or triple its staff within a year, Damico said.

Photo of the Crocodoc team (above) and screenshots via Crocodoc

South Korean electronics giant LG has introduced LG Cloud, a service that lets users store and access content across Android phones, smart TVs, and PCs, the company announced today.

LG Cloud arrives in beta form on tomorrow. The company will try to differentiate its offering from just-launched Google Drive and services like Dropbox and SugarSync by placing its emphasis on storing and streaming media rather than every type of file.

With LG Cloud, you can access and stream video, music, and photo files on Android smartphones, smart TVs, and PCs. The Android app is the most interesting app here, and it will automatically sync the files on your phone with LG’s servers. The LG Cloud Android app will be available for download from Google Play or LG Smart World shortly.

“Most companies today only see the cloud as a storage device or in the case of YouTube or Flickr, only for one type of content,” said Havis Kwon, CEO of LG’s home entertainment division, in a statement. “LG makes the devices that millions of people watch content on so we can set a new yardstick for ease of use by setting up our own cloud service

People that own LG’s smartphones or smart TVs will get 50GB free for six months, while everyone else who signs up for the service will get 5GB free, which is the same space that Google Drive offers and more space than Dropbox’s free 2GB per user. Other paid options will be introduced when service launches out of beta.

LG Cloud photo: LG

While the week has been dominated by cloud storage news in the wake of Google Drive’s launch, Dropbox has dropped in with its second new feature of the week: automated photo uploading from its PC and Mac clients and a new Photos page.

Tying to its February announcement of automated photo and video uploading from Android, the Dropbox team has extended that ability to just about any camera or SD card you can plug into a computer. Just plug in your device while the Dropbox app is running on Mac or Windows, and it will automatically detect and walk you through uploading.

“Getting pictures off your camera has always been a huge pain,” Dropbox Software Engineer wrote in a blog post. “So we put our heads down and worked worked worked to ensure that automatic upload would play nicely with anything that might have a photo or video on it. With the newest version for Mac or Windows, you can just plug your camera, phone, or SD card into your computer, and with a few clicks of the mouse all your photos and videos are in your Dropbox.”

Photos are copied from your camera to Dropbox in full quality and original size to your private “Camera Uploads” folder. Although, be careful, as that can eat away at your storage pretty quick.

The company also has a new Photos page on-site for easier browsing. There you’ll see larger thumbnails and photos now grouped by month. If you hover over a photo, you can see the date it was uploaded. Or you can click to see the photo in full-size and download it.

Earlier this week, Dropbox introduced an awesome new way to share content in the form of simple links, even if that content is stored in Private folders. Little did the company know that right after its announcement, Microsoft, Google, and Box would all follow its news with their own updates.

San Francisco-based Dropbox has raised around $257 million in funding to date, with the majority of that coming from its massive $250 million round last October. Investors include Sequoia Capital, Accel Partners, Benchmark Capital, Goldman Sachs, Greylock Partners, Institutional Venture Partners, RIT Capital Partners, Valiant Capital Partners, and Hadi and Ali Partovi. It also counts Bono and The Edge from U2 as investors.

You can check out the new Dropbox Photos page below:

Art credit: Dropbox

Big data and analysis startup Sociocast has launched two new Software-as-a-Service tools aimed at helping advertising and media companies better understand their customers, the company revealed today.

Sociocast’s software analyzes “big data” sets and delivers predictive real-time audience data to help companies make more informed marketing decisions. Sociocast CEO Albert Azout told VentureBeat that it can’t disclose specific customers yet, but said it works with many large data aggregators, ad networks, and agency trading desks.

The company’s significantly updated software tools are versions 2.2 of Sociocast Connect and Sociocast Signal, both of which advance the company’s mission of creating “actionable” intelligence.

“Unlike other companies, we’re not just creating intelligence and analytics,” Azout told us. “We’re also working with decision makers that are actually buying media. That means you get better and more meaningful data on the fly.”

Sociocast Connect, the company’s flagship product, now offers the following features:

• Data Transformation: Sociocast Connect translates brands, ad networks, and large data owners’ data into highly segmented, comprehensive user profiles and audience clusters using first and third-party data sources. These highly accurate data outputs can plug directly into clients’ decision engines.
• Enhanced Real-Time Analytics: The new platform can provide analysis on more than 2 million time-stamped interactions per minute. What’s more, this information will identify contextual attributes that serve as the basis of a brand or advertiser’s “signature”.
• Private Cloud: Sociocast Connect operates a multi-tenant framework that isolates clients’ data in order to ensure enhanced security. The platform also includes cutting-edge security features that prevent data leakages.
• Easy Integration: Sociocast Connect supports dynamic sFTP batch data transfers and seamlessly complements 3rd-party platforms including DMPs, SSPs, and DSPs.

And Sociocast Signal now offers the following:

• Mobile Detection Services: Sociocast will process mobile and app logs with greater speed and accuracy, as well as increased coverage of mobile sites for classification.
• Coverage & Granularity: The new platform introduces an extremely logical classification taxonomy, as well as classifications into 1 million different people, places, things, and brands.

Sociocast’s data-crunching acrobatics are run out of a data center with 100 servers in Virginia. Interestingly, Azout said the company had looked at Amazon’s highly touted public cloud as an option, but it was too expensive and had too much latency for Sociocast’s needs.

New York-based Sociocast has raised about $5 million since it launched in early 2010. Its latest $1.5 million round was led by Detroit Venture Partners and angel investors Bobby Yazdani, Joe Zawadzki, and Doug Imbruce.

Check out the diagram below to see how Sociocast’s services work together:

MetaMarkets originally analyzed prices for online ads on mobile and regular websites for media companies in real-time. Now the company has expanded its reach to offer big data analytics for social and e-commerce companies that need to crunch a lot of numbers. It’s data science-as-a-service helps analytics teams notice trends and forecast how future events will affect their data.

In this increasingly crowded big data startup market, MetaMarket’s competitors are any one of the big data companies, such as Connotate, InsightsOne, or OpenView. Each big data company is looking to find its niche in the market, but they are all taking huge amounts of unstructured data and trying to make sense of it.

Khosla Ventures led the round, which will used to push the company forward in its new focus. Existing investors IA Ventures and True Ventures also participated.

MetaMarkets is based in San Francisco, Calif. and has raised a total of $23 million.

Hard drive with data image via Shutterstock

After Google Drive finally launched Tuesday, it was only took a day for people to begin prodding Google about just how private stored files would be using the service. However, Google’s policy is quite similar to already established rivals Dropbox, Microsoft’s SkyDrive, and Apple’s iCloud.

Google has attracted much scrutiny in regards to the privacy of its users over the years. The concerns especially flared up a few months back when Google created a new all-encompassing privacy policy for all of its services. Drive becomes yet another Google service that falls under that policy, which is full of friendly yet broad language.

Here’s the part of Google’s privacy policy and terms of service that applies to Drive that people are in a huff over:

Some of our Services allow you to submit content. You retain ownership of any intellectual property rights that you hold in that content. In short, what belongs to you stays yours.

When you upload or otherwise submit content to our Services, you give Google (and those we work with) a worldwide license to use, host, store, reproduce, modify, create derivative works (such as those resulting from translations, adaptations or other changes we make so that your content works better with our Services), communicate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute such content. The rights you grant in this license are for the limited purpose of operating, promoting, and improving our Services, and to develop new ones.

Yes, the language sounds scary in a sense, and the broad nature of it almost gives Google the ability to do anything with that content. I sure as heck don’t want to give Google to right to read, publish, or distribute my work without my expressed permission. Just because it will keep my name on it and I will “retain ownership,” that doesn’t mean I want it on the Internet or thumbed through.

But as The Verge points out in a great analysis piece, these terms of service are extremely similar in nature to Dropbox, Microsoft’s SkyDrive, and Apple’s iCloud services. Those services don’t attract as much scrutiny on the privacy front as Google, but they’re scary in the same ways.

For example, SkyDrive’s service agreement says: “You hereby grant Microsoft the right, to use, modify, adapt, reproduce, distribute, and display content posted on the service solely to the extent necessary to provide the service.” Apple’s agreement reads: “You grant Apple a worldwide, royalty-free, non-exclusive license to use, distribute, reproduce, modify, adapt, publish, translate, publicly perform and publicly display such Content on the Service solely for the purpose for which such Content was submitted or made available, without any compensation or obligation to you.”

Essentially, to be able to let Google Drive (or SkyDrive or any of the rest) do all sorts of cool tech tricks, such as copying a file from one location to another, translating a document, or integrating it with other third-party apps, it needs extremely broad permissions.

Using cloud storage services creates a dilemma applicable to much of the Web. We have to give up some privacy and rights to do all the cool stuff we want to do. If I want to use Google and Facebook’s services, I have to accept that the companies can access that data at will and could give it to the Feds, if pressed. Basically, if you don’t want to give companies access to your data, don’t sign up.

Google Drive image: Google

Video editing startup Magisto has upgraded its young Facebook Timeline app with more social features in hopes to attract a flood of new users, the company announced today.

After launching its own Facebook Timeline app, social video sharing startup Viddy began to grow at a startling rate, eventually adding 5.5 million users in 11 days. Since that time, other startups have taken notice and hoped that their own apps can take off through exposure to Facebook’s 900 million users. Now that Magisto, another video-based application, has seen what Viddy can do, it hopes to follow down the same path.

Magisto’s service essentially automates the video editing process for short clips on the web and iPhone and lets you keep a cloud-based locker for all your edited videos. With the Timeline app, users can see several of your Magisto videos in one place so friends are more likely to give them a watch.

“I believe that Magisto timeline app’s improved sharing, organization, and discovery was the last missing piece that can now make personal video become wildly successful and social as photos started to be a few years ago,” Magisto CEO Oren Boiman told VentureBeat via e-mail.

The company is debuting the updated Timeline app at a Facebook-sponsored event in Amsterdam, which coincides with The Next Web Conference.

“Only a few apps are featured by Facebook and we are very proud that Magisto is one of them. Some of those apps have seen very rapid growth since launching their timeline apps (e.g. Viddy), so we’re very excited to see this happening,” Boiman said.

Israel-based Magisto received $5.5 million in second-round funding back in September following an undisclosed first round. Hong Kong investor Li Ka-shing‘s Horizon Ventures led the second round, with participation from prior investor Magma Venture Partners.

Box CEO Aaron Levie just can’t stop cracking jokes about Google Drive, even as the new service’s existence threatens Levie’s fast-growing cloud storage business.

At small dinner I attended last night with Levie, CloudOn CEO Milind Gadekar, ZenDesk CEO Mikkel Svane, and Enterproid CEO Andrew Toy, the talk was supposed to be about the challenges of the enterprise software market. Of course, the dinner instead coincided with the launch of Google Drive earlier in the day, and thus at least some of the talk drifted in that direction.

Before dinner and serious enterprise discussions got going, I pulled Levie aside and prodded him more about how Box would compete when Google Apps is used by so many businesses and is convenient for those users.

I asked him if Box could “out-feature” Google. “No, that’s Microsoft talk,” he said. “We don’t have to play in both worlds like Microsoft and Google do. Google wants to lock people into its services and needs a billion eyeballs to look at ads. We don’t.”

Levie drew this diagram for me to describe where Box was in the marketplace relative to Dropbox and Google:

The line in the middle is the divider between consumers (left) and businesses (right). Dropbox is a consumer-driven player, Google leans consumer but wants some businesses too, and Box leans business but want some consumers. But as it stands, Google (and maybe Microsoft too) could gobble up the smaller guys’ clients.

I told Levie I was worried there might be too many players and that something has to collapse. He let his guard down for a brief moment, and said, “I’m more worried than you.”

Usually Levie doesn’t say something like that. The armor was down, just for a moment. Right after speaking with me, he cracked a joke about the timing of the dinner, saying, “Google has been trying to launch this for six years, so of course it had to coincide with one of our dinners.”

And on Twitter today, Levie was back to his antics. There he wrote, “Haven’t heard someone say “Google Drive” in at least 7 minutes; a clear sign that it’s going nowhere.”

Aaron Levie (left) at DEMO conference: Heather Kelly/VentureBeat

Dropbox/Google/Box diagram: Aaron Levie

Infrastructure-as-a-service startup SingleHop has raised $27.5 million in its first round of funding, cash that will help it quickly accelerate growth, the company announced today.

SingleHop has been slowly making a name for itself in the cloud computing and cloud infrastructure arena. The company’s proprietary management platform, called LEAP, makes it possible for clients to deploy and manage their web infrastructure from a unified platform. Its traction has been so good that it was named No. 25 on the Inc. 500 list for fastest growing companies in the U.S., leaping up from the No. 58 spot a year prior.

The firm’s relatively large first round came from Boston-based Battery Ventures. Battery General Partners Dave Tabors and Morad Elhafed will join SingleHop’s board of directors.

“SingleHop is well positioned given the rise in cloud computing and demand for outsourced IT services. With its automated technology platform, the company has carved out a unique position in the market,” said Tabors, in a statement. “Customers are happy and sticking around, and that’s a direct result of the company’s business model, coupled with superior technology and a smart leadership team. We’re really looking forward to helping this company scale.”

Chicago-based SingleHop was founded in 2006, has 80 employees, and has clients in 114 countries. The company has two data centers in the Chicago-area and more than 10,000 servers online. Next on its to-do list is to open a data center facility in Phoenix.

You can watch SingleHop’s video describing the LEAP3 cloud infrastructure solution below:

Photo credit: Alexander Kirch/Shutterstock

Newvem, an Israeli startup we wrote about recently, aims to help startups by showing them exactly how they are using AWS and where they can save money. So take with a grain of salt their new study which shows rampant inefficiencies among the average AWS user.

Looking at dozens of customers running Newvem, the company found that small startups, the ones for whom cash is typically a big priority, are spending money on Amazon that they don’t need.

For customers with a monthly budget of less than $1,000 on Amazon Web Services, NewVem found that more than 50 percent of their rented servers were idle. This might make sense, since small startups are more likely to see big spikes in traffic and usage relative to their daily norms.

Companies who are spending more money tend to be more efficient, which is counter-intuitive in some ways . NewVem says the big chasm is around the $3,000, when companies graduate to a much bigger spend, and in this study

Joining this week’s parade of cloud news from Google, Microsoft, and Dropbox, business cloud storage startup Box has revamped its API for developers and signed 15 new partners to its striking OneCloud program, the company announced today.

While Box had no idea Google would be dropping its Drive cloud storage bomb yesterday, talk of the product and how it would disrupt the market has dominated recent tech news. But while Google is playing up its strengths to both consumers and businesses, Box is mostly focused on businesses because it knows that’s where the money is. And frankly, with Google being cozy with so many consumers with Gmail, it’s starting to look like Box could have much more longevity than Dropbox.

As a player for businesses who need cloud storage, Box has done what it can to be available across platforms and made its service available on PCs, Macs, and most smartphones and tablets. Since 2008, developers who wanted to tap the company’s API for applications have used basically the same one. But with today’s news, the company has launched a new API that will make the process of integration more streamlined.

“This update is dedicated to our developer friends, who are extremely important to us,” Box VP of platform Chris Yeh told VentureBeat.

With its API streamlining, Box is introducing a new feature called Instant Mode. This features makes it possible for sites to embed Box features even if a user doesn’t have a Box account. Users simply type in their e-mail address and get access to Box storage. If that user ever signs up on Box with that same e-mail, they then can access files stored on that other site. In a theoretical example, Yeh said LinkedIn could offer a Box-branded storage section where users could store resumes and cover letters, but you don’t have to own a Box account to take advantage of it.

In a related development, Box also announced that it has signed up 15 more partners for its OneCloud program, which helps keep files synchronized even when using third-party smartphone apps. New partners include the very cool CloudOn, Handshake, iAnnotate, and Breezly.

Along with streamlining its API, Box will make is making OneCloud easier to use as well. Yeh said that the company has made it so users will have less clicks to access and upload files to the cloud.

Check out the new partners below:

To celebrate the launch of its new API and OneCloud successes, the Palo Alto, Calif.-based company is hosting a party tonight in New York City. The company wants to put its foot down in NYC and make sure New York businesses know what Box can do for them. To help get the word out about Box and influence the NY tech scene, Box is partnering with General Assembly and TechStars organizations. All of TechStars’ startups will get a free 500GB Box account to work with, and it will provide mentoring for both orgs.

“This is a statement that we want to be here in New York,” Yeh said. “We will be here consistently going forward and building inroads.”

Box now has 10 million users globally and serves more than 120,000 businesses. The company claims 82 percent of the Fortune 500 use its service in some form. The company has raised about $159 million thus far and counts Andreessen Horowitz, Salesforce, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Emergence Capital Partners, New Enterprise Associates, and others as investors.

Check out Box’s new API announcement video below: