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.

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

Many game developers have moaned about the lack of quality and real gameplay in Facebook games. Checkpoint Studios was founded to do something about that, and the company is launching a high-end flight history simulation game today dubbed AviNation.

Inspired by Japanese titles where you can play as an airline manager or air traffic controller, AviNation lets players build an aviation empire through key decades of flight history from the 1930s onward. The game has rich 3D graphics and runs on the Unity 3D engine, giving it a leg up on other Facebook titles in graphics quality. And it’s the kind of game that hardcore player Brian Wiklem, co-founder and chief executive of Checkpoint, always wanted to play. AviNation will launch in June.

Your goal is to become a modern-day airline mogul. You manage your flight crew, run daily operations at the airport, and control air traffic by directing planes in and out of gates. You can open a network of friendly airports to increase your passenger traffic or ship freight. If you do your job right, the population of your town will grow, and you’ll earn achievements for completing quests.

“We’ve seen a lot of games that were flat and linear, ” Wiklem said in an interview with GamesBeat. “We were bored with point-and-click gameplay and virtual chores. They’re glorified activities, not games. You are led from one activity to the next, with no sense of discovery.”

Simulation games are still the biggest category on Facebook thanks to titles such as Zynga’s FarmVille and CityVille. But the airline genre is a fresher concept. It takes skill to run your airline and master the included minigames, Wiklem said.

The whole point is to move the industry forward from Social Games 1.0 to Social Games 2.0. That should increase engagement and lead to more loyal fans. The game is social because you can send flights to friends within your social network in real-world locations.

The 3D cartoon-style world has changing weather and day-to-night effects. The characters are cartoonish yet customizable and detailed. You can adjust the camera angle to zoom in close or get a bird’s-eye view.

The game has 250 aircraft, including authentic historic and modern aircraft that are licensed from Boeing and others. Other features coming include the ability to play any time, anywhere on smartphones and tablets. And Wiklem says the game has an innovative feature where spectators who watch messages from the game in a Facebook activity stream can click on the messages and actually help out. Such peer-to-peer interaction can happen even if your friends aren’t currently playing. Checkpoint has actually filed for patents on its cross-platform strategy.

The Costa Mesa, Calif.-based company was founded in 2011, and it has 30 employees. Rivals include Kixeye, Idol Games, 6waves, and Kabam. Larger rivals are Zynga, EA, and Disney-Playdom. Checkpoint’s investor is Marvelous AQL, a Tokyo, Japan-based publisher headed by Hayao Nakayama, former chief executive of Sega. Checkpoint has raised $5 million.

Wiklem said that he always remembered the answer that Pixar’s founders gave when they were asked why they made movies for children. They said they didn’t. Rather, they said they made movies that they wanted to see. By the same token, Wiklem said that social games don’t have to be crappy.

“I set out to change that,” he said.

Wiklem formerly worked at THQ’s Heavy Iron Studios and at Shiny Entertainment. He managed teams of 80 or more developers. He also spent eight years at Sony working on PlayStation and PlayStation 2 games. He’s a commercial aviation enthusiast and founder of Jet-X-Models, a maker of die-cast model airplanes. He is joined by Todd Morgan, executive producer and head of studio operations (formerly of Obsidian Entertainment, Super Villain Studios, and Shiny Entertainment); Chris Masterton, chief technology officer (formerly of Heavy Iron Studios); and Chris Naves, art director (formerly of Foundation 9 and Shiny Entertainment).

Game industry veterans David Perry and David Jaffe both liked Wiklem’s idea but told him he wouldn’t get funding unless he made a Facebook game. So Wiklem reworked what he had into an idea that could be executed on Facebook. He happened to know a friend who knew Nakayama. He made the pitch and after a 15-minute pitch that turned into two hours, he sold Nakayama on the idea.

Check out the art gallery below.

GamesBeat 2012 is VentureBeat’s fourth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. This year we’re calling on speakers from the hottest mobile, social, PC, and console companies to debate new ways to stay on pace with changing consumer tastes and platforms. Join 500+ execs, investors, analysts, entrepreneurs, and press as we explore the gaming industry’s latest trends and newest monetization opportunities. The event takes place July 10-11 in San Francisco, and you can get your early-bird tickets here.

Insomniac Games, makers of the successful Ratchet & Clank and Resistance series, just announced their first Facebook game, Outernauts.

Outernauts is an adventure role-playing game where players control the elite Outernauts force as they train exotic alien beasts and uncover the riddle behind mysterious “ancients.”  The game takes place across a number of explorable planets and lets friends team up together as they examine the untamed universe and combat pirates and evil corporations.

“We see a huge opportunity to reach an entirely different audience of gamers through Facebook,” Ted Price, president and founder of Insomniac Games said in a statement. “As we have demonstrated for nearly twenty years in the console games space, we’re confident we can help evolve the definition of a game experience on Facebook. With Outernauts, we are delivering a deep story with real RPG strategy, coupled with Insomniac’s signature sense of humor.”

For 18 years, Insomniac developed exclusively for the PlayStation platform until the company announced its first game for the Electronic Arts Partners program, Overstrike. Outernauts is another project for the partners program is currently in closed beta. Insomniac hopes to launch the game this summer.

It isn’t easy to move to a new city, launch a new studio, and create a new game at the same time. But LightBox Interactive has done just that, and now Sony is finally releasing LightBox’s new sci-fi western-style game, Starhawk.

The third-person shooter game debuts today on the PlayStation 3. The predecessor game, Warhawk, debuted on the PS 3 as a multiplayer-only title. But with Starhawk, LightBox has stepped up and created a single-player campaign along with multiplayer and cooperative play as well. The frenetic action game requires you to be a good shot and a strategist at the same time.

During the production, chief executive Dylan Jobe said, the company watched the game industry change and saw the rise of Zynga, which focused on learning from its social game analytics and immediately modifying its games as a result. Jobe said that even after today’s release, LightBox will have a big job ahead of it tuning the game to what the fans want. It will not only have to fix bugs but will also change the game and come out with new content to keep the fans coming back. Game design, it seems, is always changing and never done.

Here’s a transcript of our interview with Jobe.

GamesBeat: How does it feel to have gotten to this point now?

Jobe: It feels great. It’s kind of tricky when you release a multiplayer game like this. I felt the same way with Warhawk. There’s that good feeling of having it done, yet at the same time you know that when you release a multiplayer game, especially to the global community, there’s still a lot of work ahead. There’ll be tuning and fixes and all kinds of thing that we’ll have to address and take care of for the community. So in some respects it’s like we’re done, but in other respects, we’ve just started.

GamesBeat: Tell me about some of the development history here. And also about Lightbox and starting that up.

Jobe: Sure. We are a new studio. Starhawk will be our first game, even though I and my business partners have been working with Sony for many, many years. Even going back to the good old days of SingleTrac. Originally, I actually was not in the game industry at all. I worked as a product designer for AT&T and NCR, National Cash Register, of all places.

But I always really loved video games. So I eventually just thought, ‘Well, I keep making Quake mods and all these things, I want to get into the industry.’ I ended up leaving NCR and going to SingleTrac in Utah. I worked there for a little while and then worked at Incognito Entertainment, where I got to work on Twisted Metal Black and then produced and directed War of the Monsters, and then of course Warhawk, the PSN multiplayer game.

About the same time, Scott Campbell — who was at the time the president of Incognito — and Dave Jaffe wanted to start a new company, Eat Sleep Play. So they went off to create that new company. And I took 12 guys. We moved from Utah down to Austin and from there started LightBox and started developing Starhawk for Sony. We’ve been working on Starhawk for just over two and a half years.

GamesBeat: What were some of the hard parts about starting a company at the same time you’re starting your first game?

Jobe: That’s actually a good question. The hard thing is maintaining the production timeline, because you have milestones due to your publisher, yet at the same time you’re building your company. You have to contend with milestone deliveries, and you have to make sure that build gets out on time, but you also have to make sure that the actual build-out of your space gets done on time. We started doing a little bit of development while we were still in our small space in Salt Lake City. It was kind of a weird jumble, because we had some people still working in Salt Lake City, and we had a temporary space in very startup fashion, one of these rent-a-office places in Austin, while we were looking around for office space.

At the time, the economy was not super great. Credit was pretty much locked up. We were able to get LightBox started without having to take out any small business loans at all. It was tricky to find office space that could accommodate a new studio. That was one of the challenges, but one of the upsides, because it was such an economic downturn, we were able to get a really good price on some of our general contracting, furniture, some of the other costs that probably would have cost a bit more money had we started the company while the economy was doing well. So it was kind of a balance. Managing all that, working with our electricians and everything, and at the same time continuing to deliver monthly prototypes to Sony was definitely challenging. It felt like a strategy game, like a Sid Meier’s video game.

GamesBeat: It seems like it’s pretty tricky to get people to move for your company, too, down in Austin.

Jobe: It turned out way better than I thought it was going to be. So what we did was work with 12 people in Utah. I was very up front with them. I said, “You know, we’re going to be starting a new studio in Austin.” Because at the time we were still Sony employees, Incognito Entertainment was a wholly owned company of Sony’s. I wanted to make sure that I was very up front with all the new employees. I and the business partners ensured that we were able to give everyone a ton of notice, saying, “We’re going to start on this day, here are your new employee packages when you do become LightBox employees, let us know any of your thoughts.” We gave people a ton of fair warning and information.

And as it turned out, everyone moved down with us. It worked out great. So what we did was, we pulled our 12 people down from Utah, but at the same time we were doing remote hiring. So we were able to staff up with about an additional 20 headcount, by doing deferred hires. We were bringing people out to interview, having them come on board, letting them know what was going on, and then we set their start date a little bit later, about the time — and this was all very stressful — about the time that we got our studio done. The furniture was installed, the infrastructure was all in place. We had a bunch of new people start, for what amounted to a kind of overnight transition from about 12 to 30 people. I think we got lucky, actually. At the time there were some studios in Austin and in Dallas that had suffered some hardships. There were people who were looking, on the market, who were kind of fresh blood injected into the Austin scene, and we seemed to be an attractive place to start.

GamesBeat: So how many did you wind up with altogether?

Jobe: Right now we’re at 43. LightBox Interactive is a small team compared to other big shooters. Just like all game developers, we put in long hours.

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Microsoft has just released hundreds of pre-built mobile app components, open-source projects, and SDKs for Windows Phone development into the wild.

The new components and APIs come via Verious, a marketplace for plug-and-play bits and pieces for mobile applications.

And from what we’ve been hearing from mobile developers around the world, this library of goodies couldn’t have come at a better time.

Developers are intrigued by Windows Phone’s gorgeous interface — the legendary Woz even said his Nokia Lumia handset was more like a friend than a phone.

But at the same time, developers are hesitant to make big investments of time, energy, and company or personal resources when the platform is still relatively unstable. The Lumia line, which put all Nokia’s eggs in Microsoft’s basket, has been notoriously underperforming, even to the point that some shareholders are suing the company. Why would a developer have any confidence that a Windows Phone app might be successful?

Today’s news takes some of the edge off that roadblock, at least cutting down development time significantly. Verious worked closely with Microsoft to get these components together and launched, and here are some examples from Verious’ Windows Phone collection:

• The largest existing collection of Metro-style icons, which is generally sold for $499
• A package of eight Silverlight UI controls to greatly reduce development time
• A collision detection system/physics engine for games, simulations, etc.
• A few mapping and charting tools

Don Pitt is a VP at Verious; in an email conversation with VentureBeat, he said that now is, indeed, an interesting time to dip one’s toes into the Windows Phone waters.

“We’ve seen a lot of interest in the platform with developers. You are correct that the Metro interface has a lot of them excited. We’re hearing that the Metro UI is an evolution of Visual Studio, so it is an easy transition for many developers.”

Ah, Visual Studio — don’t get me started. I love Visual Studio, and I was surprised to learn as a fairly green developer that quite a few (non-Microsoft) developers appreciate Visual Studio, as well.

However, there’s an existing and quite large community of Microsoft developers out there, too, especially in the enterprise; and Pitt points out that they might also feel quite comfortable developing for Windows Phone.

And of course, there’s the millions-strong army of general developers who can create hybrid mobile web apps for Windows Phone — and just about any other platform. Verious is also releasing a slew of HTML5 goodies today for mobile developers, and Pitt sees the convergence as highly beneficial.

“Hybrid HTML5/native apps is a big trend, that only becomes more compelling when you add a third platform like Windows Phone to the mix,” he said. “For companies that want to be on all three platforms (iOS, Android, and Windows Phone), they have to look at leveraging web technologies so that they have some shared assets across platforms. This is helping drive our component model and is a big reason why we are launching both Windows Phone and HTML5 categories at the same time.

“I definitely think that companies looking to move to Windows Phone from other platforms will look to web technologies to ease the transition.”

Of course, native functionality is still necessary for accessing certain hardware components — for now. But the mobile web is gaining a fearsome amount of traction these days, and it looks like Verious is right on trend.

Editor’s Note: I’ve already made public my affection for TERA’s real-time action gameplay and museum-worthy art design, but there’s also a third layer to the ambitious game yet to be covered. In the following GamesBeat-exclusive developer diary, David Noonan gives an intimate look into what it takes to craft the story to a 500-hour-long game originating from Korea. I hope you enjoy the read and the exclusive art publisher En Masse Entertainment has provided! ~Sebastian

TERA: A Writer’s Labor of Love

by David Noonan, Writing Team Manager

Like most gigs in this industry, writing for a massively multiplayer online game (MMO) like TERA is a labor of love. And that timeworn phrase sets the boundaries for my work. When I sit down at my desk each morning, fingers poised over the keyboard, I never really know whether the day will be mostly “labor” or mostly “love.”

Today is mostly labor. I spent my morning going through TERA’s 4,238 quest files, checking recent updates from my counterparts in Korea against bug fixes from our team here in Seattle. I have hundreds of little red icons, and until I click on one, I don’t know what I’m going to get. Maybe it’s just the matter of an extra space at the end of a line, or maybe it’s a completely redesigned quest line.

Click…click…click…the music in my headphones gets louder, and I desperately try to stay focused. The file management required to make a game when the team is divided by an ocean, two languages, and eight time zones is mind-boggling. It’s necessary, but make no mistake: it’s labor.

But there’s lots of love, too. One of my favorite things to do is log onto the quality assurance (QA) server late at night from a darkened room, turn the run speed up on my character, and just explore the world on fast-forward. Over countless builds and iterations, I’ve seen some amazing sights. One day I found a southern ocean autographed by the designer in hundred-mile-long initials. Way to sign your work! (No, it’s not there anymore.) Another time, we had a zone where every non-player character (NPC) had a castanic female body, but the head of another race. That was much creepier than you’d think.

I also love every groaner of a pun in a quest title. I love the character arc for Fraya, a commander you meet about halfway through the game. I love little bits of dialogue in the cinematics, like when Jelena tells the white-haired Elleon: “You look pale—even for you.” I love naming hundreds of swords, axes, and other weapons. I love all those little world-building moments.

Most of all, I love the size of TERA’s “story hole” (the space for narrative in the game). For me, every game is a story-driven RPG. I hold imaginary post-game interviews after I’ve played a console sports game. When I play Risk, I imagine the speech the president gives before he attacks Kamchatka. TERA is a chance to indulge that urge every day when I (and my coffee cup) arrive at En Masse.

For me, TERA will always be that mixture of labor and love. I try to convince myself that the two elements are separate, but every once in a while, I’ll realize that “labor” and “love” are two sides of the same coin. A few weeks ago, my daughter peered over my shoulder at TERA on my laptop. “Daddy, are you working or playing?” she asked.

Darned if I know, kiddo. Darned if I know.

If you’d like to know more about TERA, check out our massive gallery and classes breakdown. You may also be interested in our exclusive Pre-Mortem series. 

Ravenshire Castle is launching today on Facebook. It is the final chapter in the Raven World series created by a team of developers at Lolapps, which was once on the top charts of Facebook gaming. The fact that Ravenshire Castle made it this far is a minor miracle, and the history of this series tells a lot about the evolution of Facebook games.

Most of the development team at San Francisco-based Lolapps lost their jobs last month after their acquirer, Hong Kong-based 6waves, decided to scale back on its internal development studios to focus on mobile games and third-party development by outside developers. But the team was so close to finishing that a determined group decided to finish Ravenshire Castle, said Brady Flynn, product manager on the game.

Arjun Sethi, former chief executive of Lolapps, and Lolapps co-founders Kavin Stewart and Brian Rue put up the money for a new game studio, Silver Lake. The game was so close to completion at the time of the layoffs that they wanted to see it through, and Silver Lake obtained a third-party deal with 6waves to complete the game. A dozen developers from the team stayed on to finish the work, and the final team has shrunk to six. Glen Dahlgren served as lead designer on the project for most of its duration, though he left after the layoffs.

“We felt we owed this to the team,” Sethi said, in an interview with GamesBeat. “A lot of them had worked on it for a year. We all felt like it was a groundbreaking title.”

Zynga, the arch rival that pretty much put an end to Lolapps’ run on Facebook, launched its own castle game, CastleVille, back in December. But Flynn says the resemblance is in name only. While CastleVille is set in an outdoor environment, Ravenshire Castle shows its characters inside the castle, which has been abandoned and needs to be spruced up by the player.

The game has pretty two-dimensional graphics, and it uses Sean Cooper’s Fliso engine, which allows Adobe Flash to display many more moving objects without slowing down. Fliso version 3.1 also enables players to go full screen with a high-definition map space that is about eight times bigger than the original Ravenwood Fair game, Flynn said. The castles are beautiful, and they float in the sky. Characters are more fully animated, and they can move in more directions than is typical in a Facebook game. The music in the game is based on ten different tracks that fade in or fade out and give the game a more dramatic feeling.

You can build and decorate your castle through more than 40 levels of the game. You can also engage in player versus player competition, a first for the Raven World series. You can, for instance, visit the castles of your friends and raid them. Instead of fighting, though, you simply sneak into their castles and steal things from them. Your job is to nab stuff before the guards stop you, Flynn said.

“We’re proud of how we created the stealth game mechanic in a social games,” Flynn said. “We wanted to push the boundaries to a new level.”

The series endured a long roller coaster ride throughout its run. It started with Ravenwood Fair, designed by veteran game developers John Romero and Brenda Brathwaite. About 2.5 years ago, they created the first game with a small team of developers from Lolapps and launched it in October of 2010. It was a smash hit that quickly rose through the charts and put Lolapps on the map as a serious contender in competition with Zynga, Playfish, and Crowdstar.

Romero conceived several more games in the series, and Brathwaite did the initial work on the Ravenshire Castle game. She came up with an idea for building castles and created the name, but the work she did never materialized. Both Romero, the co-creator of the original Doom game, and Brathwaite, an equally well-known game developer, left in the spring of 2011 to create Loot Drop, a third-party developer of social games. The teams that stayed behind to work on Raven World games went off in their own direction. Brathwaite agrees that the game is far different from what she originally envisioned. Dahlgren led the the team that conceived of ideas such as stealth game play and the player versus player part of the game.

“They worked on the ideas, but we went in a different way with a team that was created after they left,” Flynn said.

[Update: On and off, the final team included Justin Rosenthal (engineer),Tom Wu (engineer),Vivek Tatineni (engineer), Alex Chee (designer/product manager), Brady Flynn (product manager), Tony Schuster (engineer), Constantine Hantzopoulos (producer), Glen Dalgren (game designer), Shawn Stone (game designer), and Jaypal Sethi (product).]

The Ravenwood Fair game once topped 20 million monthly active users. By April 2011, Lolapps followed up with Ravenstone Mine, an expansion to the first game. Then, in July 2011, Lolapps merged with 6waves, which mostly published games developed by other developers that it didn’t own. Lolapps was supposed to be the internal development arm of 6waves. In October 2011, Lolapps launched Ravenskye City, a sequel to the Ravenwood Fair game. By this time, Lolapps’ audience had been shrinking while Zynga had grown into a billion-dollar giant.

After that game shipped, Lolapps moved on to Ravenshire Castle, which was the final game in the series. But in the meantime, the Raven World series’ audience has dwindled. All of 6waves’ games now have only 5.3 million monthly active users. Ravenskye City has 2 million and Ravenwood Fair has 1.1 million players. If you add the traffic from third-party developers, 6waves has 20 million players, the company says.

With a dwindling audience, 6waves’ management decided to do less internal Facebook game development. It laid off about 80 percent of its game developers (most of the San Francisco Lolapps team), and the founders and Sethi departed. Since almost a year of development had already taken place on Ravenshire Castle, Sethi wanted to see the game completed, so he and the Lolapps co-founders provided the money.

When asked if Silver Lake would continue on as a developer, Flynn said that the company was formed simply to finish Ravenshire Castle. The remaining developers will share in the success if the title is successful, Sethi said.

Whatever happens after the launch is unclear. 6waves owns the rights to the Raven World franchise, and it has no plans to build more games. Ravenshire Castle is the swan song. It will be interesting to see if the fans return.

“It’s a bittersweet ending, since this is the last game,” Flynn said.

Check out the gallery of screenshots below.

GamesBeat 2012 is VentureBeat’s fourth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. This year we’re calling on speakers from the hottest mobile, social, PC, and console companies to debate new ways to stay on pace with changing consumer tastes and platforms. Join 500+ execs, investors, analysts, entrepreneurs, and press as we explore the gaming industry’s latest trends and newest monetization opportunities. The event takes place July 10-11 in San Francisco, and you can get your early-bird tickets here.

Nearly 60 percent of iOS developers don’t break even with the apps that they create and market, according to a recent study by App Promo.

While we hear a lot about blockbuster hits like Draw Something or Angry Birds Space, it’s all too easy for apps to get lost in the crowd of more than 600,000 apps in the App Store. Application marketing firm App Promo’s “First Annual Developer Survey” indicates that 59 percent of developers don’t generate enough revenue to break even.

The survey said that only 12 percent of apps earned $50,000 or more and that this “top earner” subset spent an average of 14 percent of their time on marketing. On the side of app developers who weren’t able to break even, 52 percent of app developers set aside $0 and less than 5 percent of their time promoting their apps. That certainly makes the case that apps need at least some marketing to see any real returns.

Check out App Promo’s infographic below for more data on iOS app success and failure, keeping in mind, of course, that the company has a vested interest in having app developers spend more on marketing:

Photo credit: miguel77/Flickr

Whether it’s a project-management app or another Instagram, one rule is constant: A successful app must be deeply integrated with the underlying platform.

But what do I mean by “deep integration”? Think about your favorite smartphone app. Does it take into account the native capabilities of the phone? Does the camera open seamlessly? Can you use your fingers to draw and swipe? Can you easily share a game, photo, or drawing with a friend? The same questions and issues apply to enterprise apps because, let’s face it, if the application doesn’t seamlessly integrate with the product your users “live in” (like an email inbox), users will struggle to find value in it.

Take Yelp’s monocle feature for example. It works flawlessly with your phone’s camera, GPS, and map. You’re able to stay inside one application while accessing all the information you need — location, name of restaurant or bar, and diner reviews.

Now imagine a similarly deep integration between your email and CRM. A tight enterprise integration will pull contacts, calendars, and order history or active deals into the email inbox where workers spend the majority of their time. The same strategy applies to security apps, project management extensions, and more.

So, how can developers be sure they’re building something that will deliver value to users? Here are a few tips to ensure you’re building a deeply integrated (and useful) application.

1. Understand what your customers use and the integrations they need

Survey your current customers. Find out which email platform they’re using, which CRM system your sales customers interact with everyday, and the plethora of other cloud services customers touch on a regular basis. Once you know which platform to integrate with, take plenty of time to investigate what features are missing, which can be improved on, and most importantly which features your users rely on.

Once you’ve settled on a platform for integration, do some research to make sure the platform isn’t working towards the same feature. A good question to ask yourself is, does my product compete with the platform, or does it fill a need for a niche industry or specific job function? For example, Google Apps typically develops features that every user in a given organization can use. It’s pretty safe to say that they will not build an accounting product, since it touches only a few users in an organization.

And if your product already competes directly with the platform, make sure it plays on another level. Common ways to differentiate your app from an existing feature include building an improved user experience or enhancing the functionality of native features.

2. Understand the strengths of your team and product

If your product is the best-in-breed security software, stick with what you’re good at. Building on top of a new platform doesn’t mean reinventing the wheel. Your customers use your product because it’s good, and integration will only make the product more valuable to a larger user base. Stick with your niche and don’t lose sight of where you came from.

3. Take advantage of opportunities to integrate

Platforms like Google Apps and Salesforce — and iOS and Android for that matter — make hundreds of APIs available, so take advantage of them. If you can integrate calendar scheduling into your project management app, do it. If shared contacts would make your CRM easier to use, build off of the relevant API. There’s nothing worse than installing a third-party app and finding out the app contains little integration beyond “single-sign on.”

4. Does your integrated product make your customers more efficient on a day-to-day basis?

If you’ve come up with your strategy and can’t answer this question, you probably have some rethinking to do. Admins aren’t going to shell out for an app that won’t make their workers more efficient and productive. If your app adds another step to an already complicated process, it won’t gain traction with admins or end-users.

Building a great product is more than half the battle. Setting up a deep integration should be fairly simple as long as you know what your customers want and need. As time goes on and platforms like Google Apps and Salesforce mature and gain a broader user base, opportunities for even deeper integrations will appear.

David Politis is founder and CEO of BetterCloud, a developer of enterprise security and management tools that integrate with Google Apps. Follow David on Twitter @DavePolitis and BetterCloud @bettercloud.

[[Top image credit:  chaoss/Shutterstock]

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

Guess how much of LinkedIn’s new iPad app is actually mobile web and not native.

Go ahead — guess. We’ve had a lot of fun asking people to guess this over the past couple days. They’ll start with 40 percent and edge up to 70 percent, but no one comes close to the real figure: 95 percent.

Yes, only one screen in the entire LinkedIn iPad app is actually native. The rest is good ol’ HTML5-based mobile web technology, running in the browser and leaning heavily on Node.js.

We were shocked to hear this 95-percent figure from Kiran Prasad, who heads up LinkedIn’s mobile development team. Shocked, but not appalled — after all, Prasad was the engineering heft behind the company’s recent slew of gorgeous mobile apps, which were also heavily reliant on the mobile web.

But the new iPad app had struck us as so surprisingly sexy during our initial review that we had to know more about how Prasad and his team of four (yep, just four devs built this app) packed so much punch into a web app for a tablet.

Especially as Silicon Valley tech companies pick sides in the web-versus-native war, it’s fascinating to see the presumably conservative LinkedIn lean toward the more progressive side of mobile technology. But this is a stance this team has taken for a while now, and LinkedIn is currently one of the mobile web’s biggest supporters and strongest case studies.

LinkedIn and the mobile web

“Last year, we had just launched three different phone apps. We were starting to invest more in HTML5,” Prasad told VentureBeat yesterday.

“We had a 60/40 split where about 60 percent of any app was in HTML5.”

LinkedIn’s big news at that time was how it had employed Node.js in its at-scale mobile apps — what seemed to many to be a pretty big gamble for the company. But the other part of the story was how Prasad and his team combined native and mobile web functionality in iPhone and Android apps, creating hybrids that bridged the divide in the native-versus-web mobile debate.

Now, Prasad said the company relies on mobile web technologies more than ever. “Because we made that full investment, being able to get the mobile web on a tablet was really doable,” he said.

Of course, being able to have greater developer efficiency was a draw, but Prasad said that would never have come at the expense of creating a beautiful, responsive app that would be a pleasure to use.

“We always focus on user experience and app speed as a number one priority,” he told us. “If the performance wasn’t there, we wouldn’t have gone with the web.

“But with the iPad having the faster processor and being a more powerful mobile device, we felt like the web-based version could give us the performance we needed.”

In the end, Prasad continued, it came down to the little things: Did onscreen buttons depress and pop back up quickly when tapped with a fingertip? Was scrolling snappy? Did crossfades occur smoothly and without any lag?

“We did users studies in-house, and I don’t think people noticed a big difference. Nobody said, ‘Oh that’s native,’ or ‘Oh, that’s web,’” said Prasad. “As long as we can make the experience fast enough, nobody can tell the difference. It still feels right.”

And a lot of that performance, Prasad said, came from removing unnecessary design wankery (our verbiage, not his) — the rounded corners, the omnipresent gradients. By making things simple, clean, modern, flat, and even print magazine-like, the LinkedIn app only got faster and better on the performance side, as well.

“Our focus on trying to get a simpler design is actually helping us make things faster. It’s a good feedback loop,” said Prasad.

Here are some screenshots of those super-speedy mobile web pages for your reference. The first slide shows the sole native page:

Now, with more Node.js

In addition to seriously beefing up the company’s mobile web investment, Prasad is also leaning more heavily on Node.js — and with more confidence.

“We’re still full-on Node. We are excited that it can scale,” he said. “Over the past few months, we’ve made performance tweaks so we can scale even more. On four boxes, we can now handle 20 times the load we were handling before.”

Prasad said the company used to use nginx, an open source Web server and a reverse proxy server, due to the engineering team’s concerns about the stability of Node. “It was there to make us feel comfortable,” said Prasad. “If any of the nodes went down, nginx would report the errors.”

Today, however, Prasad no longer feels the need for the security blanket. “In the tablet version of the server, we’re still using Node, but now the clients are talking directly from the load balancers to Node, there’s no nginx.”

In addition to experiencing a growing confidence in the technology itself, Prasad et al. are also contributing to Node’s growing ecosystem of tools — stay tuned for those to be open-sourced.

“Some of the changes we’ve made are Node modules we’re going to release back into the community,” he said. “Some of it is application-specific… But overall, the tools for Node are becoming better.”

“Responsive design” just doesn’t work

Finally, Prasad wrapped up with an impassioned statement on a new trend in mobile applications: responsive design.

The core concept of responsive design is that the designer/developer would create a single design that can scale up and down fluidly across scores of different devices — laptops, tablets, TVs, mobile phones, etc. Many advocates exist for this solution to widespread connected-device fragmentation, and these advocates have founded companies and launched tools specifically to make responsive design simpler and faster.

But Prasad thinks it’s all wrong. Responsive design might work for uncomplicated, one-off websites, he said, but for applications or networks (such as LinkedIn is), responsive design is actually bad.

“We’re looking at the ‘entrenched’ use case [for desktop users], the coffee-and-couch use case [for tablet users], the two-minute use case [for mobile phone users],” Prasad said, rapidly outlining a few of the ways people are interacting with digital information and highlighting how unique each of those scenarios can be — and how different are the needs they present.

“You can’t take a mobile app and just scale it up to tablet or desktop,” he said. “A lot of responsive design is building one site that works everywhere, and that works for websites. But it’s bad for apps… You have to come up with a completely different design because of the use case.”

Top image courtesy of Yuganov Konstantin, Shutterstock

Slashdot, the original gangster of web-based news for nerds, has just launched yet another site: SlashBI. The “BI” stands for business intelligence, and this news, while still somewhat nerdy, will appeal to the enterprise types more than the, ahem, neckbeard types.

It’s a new audience for Slashdot — one with ample money from corporate coffers that needs to be spent on IT projects. If we didn’t know better, we’d swear these Slashdot guys were trying to make money or something.

Mere weeks ago, Slashdot also launched its YouTube-for-nerds-themed video site, Slashdot.tv. The video site features the kind of typical Linux/security/science fare one would typically expect from a Slashdot-branded web property.

SlashBI, on the other hand, is a different sort of animal.

“We’re going to publish every business day with a mixture of news and analysis from journalists, business leaders, analysts, etc.,” wrote Nick Kolakowski, senior editor at Slashdot parent company GeekNet, in an email to VentureBeat.

“SlashBI is a complementary destination to Slashdot, designed to not intrude on the latter. The new site allows us to give our audience something extra — namely tons of news and analysis on everything B.I.-related — without infringing on the news-for-nerds aspect that made Slashdot so popular in the first place,” Kolakowski continued.

SlashBI so far brings a smattering of news about big data, open-source in the enterprise, cloud technologies, and storage for systems at scale.

Hilarious stock image courtesy of .shock, Shutterstock

What do HP, Salesforce, AMD, VMWare, and Alibaba all have in common?

They’re all partners in the Facebook-led Open Compute Project, a group that aims to revolutionize computer hardware through the power of open-source collaboration.

Facebook’s Open Compute Project is having its third Summit event today, and it’s bringing together some of the best minds in the world to solve problems of data center efficiency, server design, and more.

Most of its partner companies have a stake in the issue, either because they use massive server resources, because they design and sell hardware and chips, or because they are involved in creating the software that makes all this hardware more efficient.

“The momentum that has gathered behind the project – especially in the last six months — has been nothing short of amazing,” wrote Frank Frankovsky, Facebook’s hardware design guru, in a blog post this morning.

Frankovsky notes that the OCP now includes HP, AMD, Tencent, Salesforce, VMware, Canonical, Vantage, Alibaba, Supermicro, and Cloudscaling among its members, and that HP, Quanta, and Tencent have also joined the project’s Incubation Committee. This committee is responsible for reviewing proposals for official OCP support.

As far as new projects are concerned, Frankovksy said OCP has accepted proposals for a vanity-free storage server called “Knox”) and two high-efficiency motherboards, code-named “Roadrunner” and “Decathlete,” designed with the specific needs of financial services companies in mind.

OCP is also merging specs with Baidu and Tencent for its Open Rack design for servers.

Finally, the OCP project is doing what most open-source projects do these days: It’s launching support services for customers to easily and comfortably get started with its Open Rack designs. The OCP Solutions Provider program will allow companies to sell and use hardware based on OCP specs.

“Companies currently pursuing Solutions Provider status include Hyve, ZT Systems, and Avnet, as well as new business units from Quanta and Wistron (called QCT and Wiwynn, respectively) that have been launched to sell directly to consumers,” Frankovsky concluded.

The OCP got rolling about one year ago. At that time, Facebook’s vision of open-source hardware got started because Facebook itself was having trouble scaling its servers out in a way that made business sense.

“We looked at why things were done the way they were, and it always came down to legacy. Challenging legacies and starting from scratch was the most innovative thing we did in the project,” Facebook OCP lead Amir Michae told VentureBeat in an interview last fall.

“It’s natural in an environment where companies are trying to remain profitable to keep some pieces of innovation to themselves. But they also need to be able to share and engage with the community,” Michael concluded, encouraging other companies to get involved in the open-source hardware project.

Stay tuned for more coming up soon from today’s Open Compute Project Summit.

Also, if this is a story you find interesting, you should check out what Facebook is doing with Ringark, its mobile browser testing suite, and the W3C Core Mobile Web Platform Community Group.

Image courtesy of Jolie O’Dell

If you’ve got a great idea for a BlackBerry app, you might as well go ahead and develop it. If you don’t make at least $10,000 in the first year, RIM will write you a check for the difference.

At the company’s annual hype-fest today in Orlando, Fla., RIM announced that any developer creating quality applications for the new BlackBerry 10 would be guaranteed the $10,000 sum, so long as a couple of key conditions are met.

First, the app has to be determined to be of good quality by a third party. Second, the app has to make at least $1,000 on its own to be eligible. If it gets the requisite quality certification and nets between $1,000 and $9,999, RIM will send the app developer enough to bring the app’s total proceeds to $10,000.

BlackBerry 10 is the company’s new platform. New RIM CEO Thorsten Heins (pictured) called it a “mobile computing engine.”

The OS is based on the QNX operating system used in RIM’s PlayBook’s tablet. The OS features a simple, clean interface; a pared-down selection of buttons and widgets; and a swipe-able notifications bar. Also, BlackBerry 10 apps never stop running, which means users will be able to easy juggle multiple apps.

Although tracing the tracks of RIM’s tears has becoming something of a sport among the tech press, contrarians see a chance of success for the mobile oldster. In addition to revamping its OS, the company has also taken on a new team of lawyers to assist with a corporate overhaul.

via CrackBerry; Photo via The Verge

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

This sponsored post is brought to you by the Intel AppUp developer program.

Ultrabooks promise ultra-long battery life. To make good on that promise, though, developers need to learn how to use computing resources the right way.

For instance, naively-written apps will run continuously, whether or not there’s something for them to do. More efficient apps will make use of tools built in to the operating system to “sleep” when nothing is happening, and wake up only when there’s data for them to deal with.

Fortunately, Windows 7 includes many tools for developers to make their software more power-friendly. Using event-driven code, deploying timers intelligently, making use of Windows 7′s timer coalescing feature, and using Intel’s Quick Sync feature to process video more rapidly can all help extend battery life for people using your software.

In addition, Intel offers a Power Checker and Battery Analyzer app to help developers, and Microsoft’s Joulemeter can tell you how much battery power your application consumes.

To learn more about these apps, read Intel’s brief, helpful white paper on green code development.

DreamIt Ventures is also moving into the old office of Fab.com, following in the footsteps of TechStars, who took Foursquare’s former office in search of some magic startup mojo.

Five of the companies selected are part of the DreamIt Access program, a dedicated effort to launch 15 minority-led startups over the next 12 months. Comcast Ventures, the venture capital affiliate of Comcast Corporation, is an investor in the DreamIt Access program.

Additionally, five of the companies participating in DreamIt NYC are part of the inaugural class of DreamIt Israel, the first Israel-US accelerator.  DreamIt Israel helps Israeli startups expand into U.S. and Global Markets. The DreamIt Israel program is already underway in Tel Aviv, and the Israeli startups will be in New York City working alongside the companies in DreamIt NYC beginning May 14th.

The companies are:

Bazaart, Haifa, Israel: personalized fashion catalogs for tablets

CallTrackingFox, New York, NY: data-driven inbound marketing platform

CampGurus, New York, NY: clearinghouse for kids programs

Cubiez, Tel Aviv, Israel: platform delivering desktop apps with a mobile user experience

FirstCrush, Boston, MA: personalized wine subscription service

Giver, Tel Aviv, Israel: turning employees to community through gamified solutions

Indiewalls, New York, NY: online marketplace connecting local artists and venues

JustUs, Tel Aviv, Israel: Weesh app helps romantic couples share mutual experiences

Saborstudio, Alajuela, Costa Rica: location-aware mobile games

Tripl, Stockholm, Sweden and New York, NY: connecting people through travel

Urban Cargo, New York, NY: personalized grooming product recommendations for men

Vantageous Video, Ithaca NY: apps for multi-angle video creation

Winston, Boulder, CO: a personalized social newscast

Seda Balci (pictured), marketing and PR director at Peanut Labs, has independently purchased the conference and will move it to the Bay Area. The Login 2012 conference will take place at the Bentley Reserve in San Francisco on Sept. 26-27.

“After hosting and planning countless high-level events, I wanted to make something bigger,” Balci said. “And I have been in this space for a long time now and thought Login would be a great opportunity.”

The conference will be about anything related to games, with topics including iOS and Android mobile games. Balci plans on inviting a who’s who list of speakers from the game industry.

She said that it made sense to move the conference to San Francisco because most game companies are in the Bay Area. Balci said Login has a reputation as an exclusive conference and it will remain so. At the same time, it will reach out to a larger audience. The conference has drawn around 500 attendees in the past.

The handy devs down at Twitter have just released some case studies into the wild. These eight case studies delve into the best practices of companies and products using the Twitter APIs.

Zappos, Etsy, Pocket Gems, Reuters, ESPN, Esri, Tiny Prints, and Feeding America were highlighted in the case studies. “In the future, we aim to add more examples that show interesting and high impact uses of Twitter’s platform,” writes Twitter platform marketing guy Seth Bindernagel on the company’s developer blog.

The case studies being released today include clever integrations of Twitter buttons, mobile features, curation via Mass Relevance, and more. The studies presented are light on technical details but do give some good general pointers and partnership suggestions.

For example, Reuters used Twitter to turn World Economic Forums attendees in Davos into citizen journalists. The news organization built a “Media Wall that Reuters could use at conferences, political conventions, sporting events, and more,” the Reuters case study reads. “They debuted the wall at Davos, capturing all the photos and videos being tweeted, allowing users to see full resolution versions of the photo or watch videos in-line.”

Feeding America, on the other hand, used some analytics features to more than double its site traffic. “Working with Performics and using BrightEdge technology, Feeding America combined information on Tweet volumes for specific topics with search engine rankings and web analytics data to determine what to tweet about,” reads the organization’s case study. “They then matched that with their most relevant web site content to reference in outbound tweets. By consistently tweeting about trending topics where they already had great content, Feeding America achieved great results.”

Some of the case studies contain links to more data and fuller explanations of best practices, as well. We’re looking forward to seeing more of these soon.

Freelancing has its upsides: flexible hours, working from wherever, calling the shots, and generally doing it for yourself. But there’s one major downside that almost no freelancer has escaped: the deadbeat client who refuses to pay an invoice.

That abhorrent phenomenon is the driver behind the World’s Longest Invoice, a running tally from stiffed freelancers to non-paying clients. The effort was organized by the Freelancers Union, and the bill currently sits at $8.48 million as of this writing.

What’s on the invoice? Michel B. was stiffed out of $21,000 worth of software development; Cullen M. lost $60 in PHP work; Kate C. did $450 worth of web design that she never got paid for. On the invoice, you’ll see the occasional complaint about unpaid-for T-shirt design or wedding invitations, but by and large, the legions of unpaid are complaining about a lot of “pro bono” web work.

“In 2010 alone, more than 40 percent were stiffed,” the union’s Jaclyn Kessel said in a conversation with VentureBeat today. “77 percent of freelancers are stiffed at some point in their career.”

Deadbeat clients are possibly the single biggest pain of freelancers’ work. In spite of contractual obligations and even legal threats, these kinds of clients will steadfastly refuse to honor previous agreements or even acknowledge your repeated requests for payment. They might string you along for months with promises to pay, only to leave you hanging.

Sure, you could take them to small claims court, but even after the hours of bureaucracy involved in that process, you still might end up empty-handed.

“Right now, freelancers have to sue, or walk away,” said Kessel. “They don’t have the same Department of Labor Protections that traditional employees enjoy — that’s why we sponsored first of its kind legislation in New York State giving freelancers equal protection from deadbeat companies.”

So, the World’s Longest Invoice is a campaign to bring awareness to the issue. Basically, it’s an online counter where freelancers can add the amount they are still owed by deadbeat clients.

Strangely enough, these clients aren’t all no-name mom-and-pop shops or shady SMBs. “We’ve seen blue chip companies like Time demand a 5 percent ‘on-time’ fee, and we’ve seen small boutique firms close shop and open under different names just to avoid paying freelancers what they’re owed,” said Kessel.

The Freelancers Union, in addition to providing its members with healthcare options and other benefits, also advocates for legislation to make it harder for non-paying clients to get away with their unbelievably rude and actually criminal behavior. The union estimates that last year, freelancers lost around $4,600 each due to non-paying clients.

“We want to demonstrate the scope and the toll of the problem on new workers and our economy, so we can build a new set protections that makes sense for 21st century workers,” Kessel said. “In New York, we sponsored first-of-its-kind legislation giving freelancers equal Department of Labor protection from deadbeats — we hope it’ll serve as a national model.”

The most successful companies are ones that are never satisfied with the status quo. They are too busy looking for ways to improve their products, personnel, and experience for their customers.

There are many approaches a company can take to improve itself. For us, it meant trying something revolutionary that would arm our employees with a new skill set, bring our technical and non-technical teams closer together, and provide the entire company with a deeper understanding and appreciation of what we do.

To accomplish this, we set an ambitious goal of having all of our employees learn how to write code in 2012.

Three months ago, we announced to our 60-person company that each employee was going to learn how to code in 2012. We named the initiative the “Codinization Project”. After the initial moments of surprise in the room faded, I explained to our employees the reasons why we were undertaking this initiative.

As leading technology companies have shown time and time again, being smarter than the competition and building superior technology is the only way a company can succeed over the long term. We felt that this Codinization Project was the challenging yet necessary step we needed to build a deeper understanding across the company of the intricacies of our technology platforms and products. If we could equip our employees with a solid foundation of knowing why our products do what they do, the more intelligent they would become in every element of our business, from product planning to client communications, implementations, and customer support.

We were also inspired by witnessing firsthand an example of similar dedication. Rakuten, our Japanese parent company, has been tremendously successful in pursuing its “Englishnization Initiative” in which Hiroshi Mikitani, Rakuten founder and CEO, is having the entire 12,000-person workforce learn English.

Rakuten’s dedication and their success with this initiative showed our team that with the right training and effort, we too could push ourselves to new heights that before had seemed impossible.

Last, we were confident that the project would encourage additional communication and collaboration between our technical and non-technical departments. Our engineers would serve as mentors, giving lessons, providing training and tutoring, and answering programming questions.

With the plan and motivations laid out for the company, we began our Codinization Project.

Knowing we could not embark on a project of this scale and complexity alone, we researched available programming training resources. After careful consideration we chose to partner with the web programming tutorial company Codecademy. The Codecademy training courses are free, formatted in a user-friendly approach, and offer custom creation tools which enable our engineers to develop specific coursework relevant to our products.

In the end, it made the choice for which training resource to choose a no-brainer. I called Codecademy co-founder Zach Sims and explained what we were trying to accomplish. He was instantly intrigued by our commitment and enthusiasm. We were the first company he was aware of that was having its entire workforce learn how to code. Zach graciously agreed to come to our Boston headquarters to help officially launch this project to all of our employees, including walking through a tutorial in the Codecademy platform.

Shortly after our official rollout to the company, our chief technology officer reviewed the programming lessons provided by Codecademy and established a project schedule which takes our employees through the JavaScript language. We made sure that the training was spread out enough (just four or five hours of coursework each month) so as in not to become a burden on our employees’ already busy schedules.

To promote collaboration, we also grouped our employees into teams of four or five, with an engineer serving as mentor for each group. This ensures that no employee feels alone while working their way through the project. Employees have colleagues they can go to with questions as well as a mentor who helps provide the additional assistance and training they may need. For our engineers, it provided them with an opportunity to share their knowledge and experience, teaching their colleagues.

To keep things fun, we’ve also hosted several “coding lunches” where the entire company spends an hour or so working in their groups completing the assigned coursework for that week. The employees enjoy the break, and it provides an opportunity to work through the lessons together, having their questions answered and being able to learn from each other.

We are also in the midst of rolling out additional monthly training sessions facilitated by our engineering team for any employee who wishes to receive more training on the subject matter being covered that month.

While we’re only three months into the Codinization Project, I am already noticing the impact the project is making. The dialogue and questions I am hearing from both the “learning” and “mentoring” sides has been inspiring to me. Technical and non-technical employees are enjoying working together to help raise the company’s collective product knowledge and understanding.

It’s also brought together teams that otherwise might not have had the opportunity work together. The Codecademy platform has met our initiative’s needs, providing non-technical employees with engaging, appropriate training lessons to introduce them to the JavaScript language.

I have faith in our team that we will succeed, and I am excited to watch our progression through our Codinization Project. With that in mind, I better go… I’m late completing my Codecademy homework.

Michael Jaconi is CEO of FreeCause, a loyalty and rewards platform for brands and consumers. He also serves as an executive officer at Rakuten, FreeCause’s parent company and one of the world’s largest Internet service companies in the world. While Jaconi possesses an extensive background in business, politics, and media, the Codinization Project represents his first foray into computer programming.

Top image courtesy of olly, Shutterstock

Mobile app downloads fell by 30 percent, or 2 million downloads, in March and returned to pre-iPhone 4S-launch levels. The cost of acquiring a loyal user (one who opens an app three times) fell slightly from $1.31 per user in February to $1.30 per user in March. That is a surprise since Japan’s new market entrant Gree supposedly spent heavily (a force that could driving marketing costs up) during March when it revealed its first U.S.-made apps.

The Fiksu App Store Competitive Index (which measures the average aggregate daily download volume of the top 200 free U.S. iPhone apps) dropped from 6.35 million downloads in February to 4.45 million in February. That’s a little alarming since Apple is a leader in the app market.

“With the novelty factor of the iPhone 4S launch and the holidays well behind us, and no other events in March to spark discovery, March’s download dip was expected,” said Micah Adler, chief executive of Fiksu. “An unexpected contributing factor could be the decline in the use of robotic install tactics by app marketers responding to Apple’s new policy.”

Apple announced in February that it would enforce an existing guideline that prohibited the use of bots to market apps and would frown upon other forms of chart manipulation.

Adler said that the “decline in competition and steady costs definitely presented app marketers with a ranking opportunity in March, driven largely through the cost-effective conversion of organic users into loyal users.”

Fiksu, based on Boston, sourced its data from more than 21 billion mobile app actions.

GamesBeat 2012 is VentureBeat’s fourth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. This year we’re calling on speakers from the hottest mobile, social, PC, and console companies to debate new ways to stay on pace with changing consumer tastes and platforms. Join 500+ execs, investors, analysts, entrepreneurs, and press as we explore the gaming industry’s latest trends and newest monetization opportunities. The event takes place July 10-11 in San Francisco, and you can get your early-bird tickets here.

Antti Stén (pictured left), the lead server architect for the original Angry Birds, and Tuomas Erikoinen (pictured right), lead artist, have left Rovio to create a new game studio called Boomlagoon. Successful creators striking out on their own and trying to do some original work doesn’t seem surprising, especially when their former employer seems content to continue to exploit an existing franchise.

“We know a thing or two about successful games and high volumes, and we’ll use this knowledge to spawn something very cool and new,” Stén said.

Stén is chief executive while Erikoinen is chief creative officer. Both men played important parts in the creation of Angry Birds. Stén was responsible for building the server infrastructure to support millions of mobile users. Erikoinen was the lead artist for Angry Birds, Angry Birds Seasons, and Angry Birds Rio, and he supervised the production of Angry Birds Space. During the time they worked on the projects together, Rovio grew from 12 people to more than 300.

They’ve dreamed about running their own company for a long time. The idea started during a poker game, and they discussed it once again over a drink. So far, the team consists of just the pair of founders, but they plan to hire more people. Stén refers to himself as Mr. Plan and to Erikoinen as Mr. Action. They want to create “convivial and intriguing” games.

“Through our experience of seeing multiple startups, we’ve gained the necessary skill set for founding and running a company with high values on all departments of the company,” Stén said. “Our core skills are in game development, but we’ve also had the opportunity to study fields such as PR, branding, recruitment, business negotiations, leading teams, HR, and networking.”

Their goal will be to create games for just about any device, both for the web and for mobile platforms. They will start with HTML5, the new lingua franca (working language) for the web. Their studio will be in Helsinki, and they have not raised any money yet. They are looking for potential investors.

“If we play our cards right, we just might end up with the next Angry Birds,” Stén said.

[Photo credit: Boomlagoon]

Dishonored might remind you of some video games of the past, but when it comes down to it, you probably haven’t seen anything exactly like it. That’s the refreshing thing about the first-person action game where you play a supernatural assassin in a Victorian steampunk metropolis known as Dunwall.

Dishonored is a relatively rare thing these days since it is a major original title from a big video game studio, the Arkane Studios division of ZeniMax Media. ZeniMax’s Bethesda Softworks will publish it. The title bears some resemblance to Assassin’s Creed, and it offers a wide array of weapons such as those found in the BioShock series. Its sci-fi fantasy world and gameplay might remind you of BioShock, Deus Ex, Thief, Dark Messiah, or Blade Runner, but it’s not a copycat of any of those works.

You start the game as the once-trusted bodyguard of the Empress of the land, but now you stand accused of her murder. You believe you’ve been framed, and revenge is your objective. You become an assassin, wearing a disturbing mask as your calling card. You move through the world of Dunwall, which plague has besieged and a corrupt government has run down.

The combat system allows you to play in stealth mode, stealing lives like a thief. Or you can fight in the open. If you choose the latter, the guards of the city will descend upon you and take you out. As you pursue each mission, you pick up clues about your alleged betrayal.

Each mission offers a whole set of challenges, and you can solve them any way you want. The gameplay encourages player creativity. For instance, you can use your supernatural power to possess the spirit of a fish. You can then swim into an open grate in the moat of a castle. Once you are inside, you can transform into a rat and then move further. You can sneak past the guards and eavesdrop on conversations to identify where your assassination targets might be. Then you can take out your targets with knives or guns in a most gruesome way.

“It’s a game about an assassin that you can literally play without killing anyone,” said Harvey Smith, co-creative director at Arkane Studios, in a recent demo of the game in San Francisco, Calif.”Every step of the way feels like you are crafting your own game design experience.”

The game is set in an 1850s alternate reality that resembles a Londonesque whaling city, but it’s not really London, Smith said. Bodies from the plague line the streets. The environment is gray and dark and full of cockroaches. The art is stylized — beautiful but not realistic. The 3D graphics look superb, and the game makes plenty of use of shadows, lighting, effects such as fog and search lights, and it has dark mood music.

There are hyena-like dogs that look like nothing you’ve ever seen.

I saw a mission where you infiltrate a castle partway through the game. If you perform well, you affect the next mission. For example, you might start on rooftops, where you have an advantage, said Raphael Colantonio, co-creative director at Arkane Studios.

When you get inside the castle, you have to find two politicians to kill. You can use a supernatural power dubbed a “blink” that allows you to cross a short distance practically instantly, evading the eyes of guards. But you have to spend energy on your powers, so you can’t use them all the time. You can explore upward into buildings and climb on the outside of walls to get around obstacles. If you find objects called runes, you can gain more powers.

The mission changes the locations of your targets every time you try it, so you can replay them as much as you want in a different way each time. Sound propagates through materials; conversations heard through a keyhole in a door will be muffled, for instance. You can blow out a candle, and a guard might comment that he can’t see anything. When you catch a politician with his woman in the steam room, you can lock them in and turn up the heat, killing them with the steam. Or you can plant a gadget known as a spring mine, which pops up in the air and then shoots spikes out.

As with Assassin’s Creed, you can drop from above and take someone out with a knife. You have a brief window of surprise to do so before they start yelling or fighting back. Guards will notice when a patrol route has been vacated because you’ve killed one of the soldiers.

If you don’t want to kill someone, you can wipe the person’s memory and sell them into slavery instead, effectively eliminating them. Once you are spotted, you can short-teleport out via the blink feature. And if you jump out of the castle, you can change into something that will survive the fall. But if the animal you are possessing dies, you’ll die as well.

In another level, the developers showed how guards can walk around on big mechanical contraptions (pictured above) and chase you down. They can shoot fire arrows at you, but you can shove them back using a power known as Wind Blast, which will reverse the arrow and send it in the opposite direction.

The game uses Epic’s Unreal Engine for its graphics technology. Dishonored will come out in 2012 on the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and the PC.

If you work at a major Silicon Valley tech company and that company isn’t Apple, you’ve got skin in the mobile web game. But advocating for and working on the mobile web is becoming increasingly politicized and divisive.

On the one side, you have Facebook drumming up a consortium of heavy hitters, including the vocally pro-mobile-web Mozilla, Microsoft, Verizon, Samsung, and around 25 other companies, to work within a W3C community group establishing benchmarks for the industry. On the other side, you have Yahoo and, even more conspicuously, Google, which are not participating in the community’s mobile web love-fest, but which have an incredible amount of weight to throw around in this arena.

Official statements from all of these companies show the same thing: They believe in the power and potential of the mobile web to flourish and eventually become more prevalent than native platforms.

You would think, given their identical aspirations, the three titans –Facebook, Yahoo, and Google — would pool their boundless resources to fast-track the mobile web from the janky, derided ghetto it is to the elegant utopia each of these parties sees in the near future. Yet they remain divided rather than collaborating, which means consumers lose and innovation stagnates.

So who are these players, what are they trying to accomplish, and why aren’t they all rowing together toward bright, happy shore of mobile web Elysium? As always, when corporate shenanigans don’t make any sense, you have to follow the money.

Facebook: The ringleader and the troublemaker

For the youngest company involved in the Great Mobile Web Push of 2012, Facebook brings a remarkable power and urgency to the work at hand. Facebook had no mobile presence whatsoever a mere four years ago. Now, its shoving its way to the front of the fray, most notably in its work with Ringmark.

“No one company can fix all of these, but We are very keen to work with the industry, browser vendors, OEMs, carriers, and developers themselves to smooth away those challenges,” said Facebooker James Pearce.

Pearce, a former physics teacher, now spearheads mobile developer relations for the social network. At a recent meeting of the unofficial Facebook press corps, Pearce led journalists through a rundown of Facebook’s views on the mobile web. While the company does invest heavily in Android and iOS apps, it sees twice the amount of traffic coming from the mobile web as it does from either of those native platforms.

“Users are actually wanting to use the mobile web version when it’s available,” said Pearce, “so for a third-party app developer, the same logic may apply.” However, he continued, mobile browsers and mobile devices themselves aren’t living up to their end of the bargain.

To that end, Facebook engineers created Ringmark, a visual demonstration that shows how well a given mobile device and mobile browser combo performs. Ringmark runs the device quickly through a series of tests and shows how many “rings” or levels of tests the device/browser was able to jump through.

Ringmark was catapulted into a W3C project, the Core Mobile Web Platform Community Group. The group’s goal is to get more developers to make mobile web apps, a feat it will accomplish by creating standards that will make mobile web development a more pleasant process and by holding mobile browser vendors and mobile device manufacturers to those standards.

“Responsibility is a big work, but pulling together this working group has been easy,” said Pearce. “I think the industry was ready for that to happen, and we think of ourselves as good industry citizens. We do think we have a responsibility.”

But organizing the group hasn’t been without its challenges. Apple and Google were invited to participate, but neither company chose to be involved, even though they make the two most popular mobile browsers in use today.

“Everyone else in the industry has the motivation to see this be successful,” said Pearce, carefully skirting any direct condemnation of the iOS and Android makers. “I can’t see any reason why a browser vendor would not want to maximize the number of apps that will run in that runtime.”

Mozilla: Forever the ally

Mozilla didn’t hesitate to join Facebook and is now one of the more important community group partners. For ages, Mozilla has spearheaded better standards for browsing the web, framing a consumer-friendly conversation and provoking older browsers like Internet Explorer into new and innovative territory.

First codenamed Fennec, Mozilla’s browser for mobile devices began its life several years ago as a buggy but still thrilling alpha product. Due to Apple’s policies of vertical lockout, you can’t download this mobile version of Firefox on an iPhone, iPad, or iPod, so Fennec eventually turned into Firefox for Android. The experience was revolutionary. The mobile browser could sync open tabs and bookmarks with the desktop version, and it made leaps of progress in the mobile browser territory.

“iPhone and iPad are clearly great experiences,” said Mozilla VP Jay Sullivan in a long and winding conversation late last year. “But certain pieces of hardware running certain OSes driven by a gatekeeper, we think that is not great in the long term for openness, choice and innovation… And it’s not great for developer innovation.”

Mozilla was in a unique position to improve the mobile browsing experience in ways that would prompt radical change on the part of more mainstream mobile browser makers (Apple and Google). And the Mozilla Foundation was in a unique position to champion the mobile web free of any bias or ties to a mobile operating system.

So, for Mozilla, nothing was more natural than partnering with Facebook (another OS-neutral tech company) to work on making the mobile web a better place to develop, to browse, to play, and to work. The Foundation is actively working on a distribution center for mobile web apps, as well — a sort of mobile-web version of the App Store and the Android Market put together — that Facebook says is one of the biggest missing pieces in convincing developers to take the mobile web as a platform more seriously.

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The event, dubbed Double Demo Day, brings together a couple of the most interesting personalities in tech funding: Peter Relan (pictured right), chairman of YouWeb, and Howard Marks (pictured below), founder of Los Angeles-based StartEngine.

Relan made his mark in social gaming by spinning out or starting companies such as OpenFeint, Sibblingz (now Spaceport.io), CrowdStar, and iSwifter. Marks, the former chief executive of Activision, was an executive at Playdom and served as CEO at Acclaim Games and eMind.

The demos will take place on May 1 at YouWeb’s headquarters in Menlo Park, Calif. The invite-only event will feature presentations from a variety of startups, including a number that are in stealth mode. The companies hail from industries including mobile, social, gaming, education, entertainment, and e-commerce.

“This is Hollywood and Silicon Valley actually working together,” said YouWeb Chairman Peter Relan. “We think that StartEngine taps into a different eco-system that complements ours here in Silicon Valley. In fact, our event is a vanguard of the inevitable convergence of technology, education, entertainment, and gaming.”

Relan said he believes that education, entertainment, and gaming will all converge soon, and that’s another reason for the alliance.

YouWeb was founded in 2007 and focuses on gaming, education, and entertainment ventures. It sold OpenFeint to Japan’s Gree for $104 million.

[Photo credits: Dean Takahashi and Liz H. Kelly]

GamesBeat 2012 is VentureBeat’s fourth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. This year we’re calling on speakers from the hottest mobile, social, PC, and console companies to debate new ways to stay on pace with changing consumer tastes and platforms. Join 500+ execs, investors, analysts, entrepreneurs, and press as we explore the gaming industry’s latest trends and newest monetization opportunities. The event takes place July 10-11 in San Francisco, and you can get your early-bird tickets here.

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

Apple has announced that its Worldwide Developers Conference has been set for June 11-15 and will take place at San Francisco’s Moscone West, the company said today.

Some speculation has suggested that Apple could move back to its original schedule of launching the iPhone in the summer at WWDC. But based on tempered expectations for the current quarter with earnings of $8.68 a share and revenue of $34 billion, it’s unlikely the company would plan for an iPhone release this summer and it will almost certainly shoot for a fall release.

Instead, we expect WWDC to be a lot like last year, where software is in the spotlight. Specifically, we expect Apple to announce iOS 6.0 and launch Mountain Lion OS for Mac.

“We have a great WWDC planned this year and can’t wait to share the latest news about iOS and OS X Mountain Lion with developers,” said Phil Schiller, Apple’s SVP of Marketing, in a statement. “The iOS platform has created an entirely new industry with fantastic opportunities for developers across the country and around the world.”

Activities at WWDC 2012 will include:

-more than 100 technical sessions presented by Apple engineers on a wide range of technology-specific topics for developing, deploying and integrating the latest iOS and OS X technologies;

-100 hands-on labs staffed by more than 1,000 Apple engineers providing developers with code-level assistance, insight into optimal development techniques and guidance on how they can make the most of iOS and OS X technologies in their apps;

-the opportunity to connect with thousands of fellow iOS and OS X developers from around the world—last year more than 60 countries were represented;

-engaging and inspirational lunchtime sessions with leading minds and influencers from the worlds of technology, science and entertainment;

-Apple Design Awards which recognize iPhone, iPad, and Mac apps that demonstrate technical excellence, innovation and outstanding design.

Tickets for WWDC 2012 sold out just a few hours after the announcement this morning. Apple has barred the re-sale of tickets. Developers who are unable to attend will be able watch all of Apple’s technical sessions free on its developers video page.

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: