Today, thanks to the maturation of the web, digital tech, and smartphones now in seemingly every pocket, startups are finding it easier than ever before to build scalable solutions to finally address the many inefficiencies in our food manufacturing, production and distribution systems.

As interest in food tech balloons, one area in particular appears to already be at the tipping point: Online and mobile food delivery. Over the last few days, we’ve hearing about a merger between two of the largest companies in the space. Rumor has it that “arch rivals” GrubHub and Seamless are in talks which could see them join forces as part of a merger. While our sources tell us that the talks are serious, the terms of the merger are not yet clear and, of course, any potential deal could fall through.

Furthermore, it’s not yet clear what kind of synergies would take place, how management of the new entity would be structured or even what the new business will be called. The two companies would not confirm on the record on any of the above. But as far as the name goes, we’re hoping for Grubless. Or Hubless GrubSeam. But they have a nice ring to them, don’t they?

If these rumors are true, the merger comes at a good time for the arch rivals, who have been seeing mounting competition of late from a laundry list of new startups entering the space, including increasingly popular alternatives like Delivery.com, ChowNow, Munchery (meals from local chefs), Campus Special, eat24 or the bigs of Europe, like Food Hero and Just-Eat.

If the online food-ordering and delivery market is roughly where daily deals were three-plus years ago, then the deal essentially creates the Groupon of food delivery. Like the daily deals market, food ordering has traditionally had a fairly low barrier to entry, which helps explain why we seem to see a new startup pop up every week.

Plus, the business model isn’t particularly complicated, making it replicable. That being said, innovation and tech adoption have been slow to come to the food industry, and, at scale, this model (taking a slice of transactions) has the potential to be able to generate a lot of cash.

This is just one part of why the “food tech” business has been so hot lately. Just ask venture capitalists who collectively poured $350 million into food startups over the last year. (Compare that to 2008, when it was less than $50 million.) Plus, when you get right down to it: People need to eat. And, as it turns out, people are pretty busy. Uh, and lazy.

Of course, for those who remember the spectacular failure of online food companies like Webvan, Kozmo and HomeRuns, this whole “tech in your kitchen” and online ordering jibber-jabber probably sounds familiar — and not in a good way. But this time it’s different. Research from Cornell University recently found, for example, that over 40 percent of adults in the U.S. have ordered food online, and 10 percent of restaurant orders now originate online — and these numbers continue to head north. GrubHub and Seamless have built successful businesses on this very idea.

Both GrubHub and Seamless have been around for some time: The New York City-based Seamless was founded in 1999, while the Chicago-based GrubHub got its start in 2004. And for the most part, the two companies have catered to two different markets geographically. While both now have fairly expansive coverage, GrubHub has naturally developed a firm foothold in the Midwest, while Seamless focused its early attention on NYC, before moving into cities like Los Angeles and San Francisco. From that perspective, a merger would make sense, allowing the new, consolidated entity to gain penetration into markets where they lacked a major presence.

Writ large, the companies, while having some fundamental differences, do seem to have a lot of synergies on paper — at least “nominally,” depending on who you ask — likely why they’ve increasingly become rivals over the years. Both are of fairly comparable size, as GrubHub has more than 18,000 restaurant partners across more than 500 cities, while Seamless has over 12,000 restaurants and serves nearly 5,000 businesses and more than 2 million users. As of February, Reuters reported that Seamless was on track to generate more than $100 million in revenue this year as it expands into new cities and focuses more aggressively on mobile.

The company reportedly generated $85 million in revenue last year, growing its consumer business by 60 percent year-over-year and “will soon be processing $1 billion worth of food orders a year,” Seamless CEO Jonathan Zabusky told Reuters at the time. For the majority of its history, the company focused primarily on New York, but launched a major expansion effort last year, bringing its service to 10 new cities. According to the report, Seamless saw its transaction volume quadruple in Los Angeles during 2012, with transactions tripling in San Francisco.

Another interesting point to note: GrubHub was reported to be considering an IPO last fall. The company denied the rumors at the time, and if this merger is true, then they’ve been given the proper perspective. Certainly, it would seem that this wouldn’t take a potential IPO off the table, instead, likely making an opening price that much higher.

The IPO rumors for GrubHub came at a time when the company was reportedly doing about $60 million in revenue (this was in 2012) — a little less than half that of Seamless. Furthermore, Crain’s reported in December that GrubHub’s revenue has been doubling every year and, as the company reported $30 million in revenue in 2011, that revenue estimate would make sense and put the company on the path to crossing $100 million well before the end of this year.

That is all to say that, although the terms of the potential deal are unclear, these are two sizable businesses that are growing relatively fast, so any potential valuation has got to be fairly high. After all: The two companies were fairly comparably capitalized and staffed, with GrubHub growing to over 250 employees and Seamless over 300, while GrubHub raised about $84 million from a mix of venture and growth equity firms (including Benchmark) and Seamless raised $51 million, $50 million of which came from private equity firm Spectrum Equity.

While both companies have made a couple of acquisitions, this would be the second big M&A deal for Seamless, as the company was acquired by food services giant, ARAMARK, in 2006. Five years later, Spectrum bought a minority stake in Seamless from ARAMARK, and about a year later, the food services company spun-off its remaining interest in Seamless to its shareholders. Free from its corporate ownership, Seamless proceeded to go out and buy MenuPages for $15 million, showing up GrubHub, which MenuPages had initially targeted as its acquirer. When GrubHub and MenuPages couldn’t agree to a deal, and it seems that GrubHub was instead in the process of buying Dotmenu/Allmenus, Seamless swooped in — according to BetaBeat.

So, as you can see, the companies have a long history of jostling. While GrubHub had been out acquiring restaurant partners fast and furiously, Seamless stagnated a bit under ARAMARK, but since becoming an independent company (again) and with a new board/investors, the company seems to have been compounding its growth. Together, that growth could be exponentially higher.

Finally, if this deal is in fact a go, it’s worth looking at this quote from GrubHub co-founder and CEO Matt Maloney from back in 2011. In it, he shares his opinion on GrubHub’s top competitor, a little company called Seamless. He told BetaBeat:

I typically don’t talk this much about Seamless because we don’t view them as incredibly strong competition for what we’re doing … Seamless fundamentally is a corporate catering business. They were founded years and years and years ago to do just that. And they’re still best in the business for corporate. They recently got into the consumer and residential pick-up and delivery. And they do it well in New York, but they really have zero business anywhere else. We don’t even consider them competition anywhere other than Manhattan specifically.

So, there you go. A match potentially made in heaven, and one that’s sure to shake up online and mobile food ordering if it happens.

Find Seamless at home here and GrubHub here.

Yahoo has been on an acquisition tear of late, snapping up apps and mobile startups like they’re going out of style. Summly, Astrid, GoPollGo, MileWise, Loki Studios have all been acquired in the last month-and-a-half, while Yahoo simultaneously made a play for a significant stake in French video giant, DailyMotion. With that falling through, rumors have begun to swirl that Yahoo is making a bid for Tumblr, AllThingsD reported yesterday. Is this desperation or genius? Everyone has an opinion, which to Mayer’s credit is not something one has been able to say about Yahoo for a long time.

On Monday, it seems that we may get a better sense of what Yahoo plans to do with all these new acquisitions, as CNBC is reporting that Yahoo will be holding a “product-related” news event on Monday in New York City. Marissa Mayer will reportedly be speaking at the press conference, but that’s all we know about the contents of the event at this point.

Yet again, Yahoo’s CEO shows that she understands how to leverage the press to get the company back into the conversation. This has already led to speculation over what Yahoo will announce, if anything, at the event. Amidst the rumors of its potential billion-dollar bid for Tumblr, some are saying that Yahoo might use the stage to announce yet another acquisition.

Even if a blockbuster acquisition isn’t the focus of the press conference, people will still be talking about Yahoo. At the very least, let’s hope Yahoo begins to explain the strategy behind its acquire-and-shut-down approach and what its “big” plans are for mobile — “touching people’s lives ‘every day’” doesn’t quite do it.

Yahoo to hold a product-related news event in New York City on Monday; CEO Marissa Mayer to speak at event. $YHOO

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  (@CNBC) May 17, 2013

Google I/O, the company’s sixth annual developer conference, got officially underway in San Francisco on Wednesday, and it was an eventful day. It took the company every minute of its epic three-hour keynote to unfurl a laundry list of announcements and updates, seemingly across every product category in its arsenal — from Android, Chrome and Search to Maps, Google+ and Hangouts — each with a fresh coat of paint. We even saw the arrival of Google’s very own subscription music service, today, which is already being touted as a potential Spotify killer.

Amidst Larry Page’s triumphant return to the stage (after addressing his much-discussed vocal issues yesterday), Google’s soaring stock price and sexy smartphone demos, it was easy to miss an important announcement concerning Google’s foray into a considerably less sexy market: Education. (And K-12 education, no less.)

Android Engineering Director Chris Yerga took the stage to introduce Google Play for Education, through which Google hopes to extend Play — its application and content marketplace for Android — into the classroom. The new store, which is scheduled to launch this fall, aims to simplify the content discovery process for schools, giving teachers and students access to the same tools that are now native to the Google Play experience.

Teachers will now be able to search for and recommend learning content by category, grade level, and a variety of other criteria, and will have the opportunity to discover content recommended by other educators, for example. What’s more, every piece of content served within its curated portal is pre-approved by educators before being posted, so that teachers can rest easy knowing the recommended content is quality and school-appropriate.

Google has already begun to recruit content partners, with NASA and PBS among those that have already signed on to make their content available to users when the store goes live this fall. Yerga said that the team plans to begin accepting content submissions from developers at some point this summer.

Today, Apple is far and away the de facto leader in the education space, but with its new educational app marketplace, Google is clearly positioning itself such that it can begin to make a real play at challenging that dominance. To that point, the real key to Google’s new product is the fact that it enables administrators to distribute applications to their entire team. If a teacher wants to shoot content to a couple hundred Android devices, they simply have to type in their group’s name and voila, Google will push that sucker out to everyone on the list.

Another important perk for cash-strapped teachers is that the marketplace doesn’t require them to use credit cards to purchase content. Instead, educators have the option to buy apps and content in bulk and charge those purchases to their account. These are important features for educational users, removing a great deal of the friction around acquiring learning content.

Not only that, but, while schools and educators are eager to bring apps and other digital learning tools into their classrooms, it’s critical for them to be able to manage and to bring some oversight to the content distribution process. Plus, the Android Marketplace, er, Google Play, has had a long-standing malware problem, so that extra layer of teacher control can help get schools over the hump.

While the penetration of Apple’s mobile devices into education is significant, when it comes to other hardware, IT departments don’t want to deal with the hassle of networking iDevices. Plus, Apple products are expensive — and especially for bulk orders, schools will want to turn elsewhere.

Where Google can have a real advantage over Apple is in its ability to combine Google Play for Education with Google Appls for Ed. Small businesses have been adopting Google’s productivity software in droves, and the interest has started to grow among school boards who want to introduce tablets into their classrooms and use Google Apps as the standard.

Together these two products can work hand in hand in the classroom, with each becoming more powerful as a result. In turn this could help create the incentive or leverage that it needs to begin attracting new users.

The biggest takeaway: If it weren’t already abundantly clear, Google is no longer just a search company. The company has been exerting tremendous effort to achieve a unification among its products, not only in terms of design, but in the way its products interact with each other. That is best demonstrated by the fact that Google products now touch just about everyone. In a sense, Google is becoming a utility provider — for both consumers and developers — and, in turn, a data company.

While Apple has long been focused most of its attention on design over the years, Google’s focus on utility has allowed it to build a massive infrastructure, collecting data from across a broad range of software products at a nearly unprecedented scale. For me, there’s no better testament to the utility and wide application of Google’s infrastructure than Education.

Naturally, in juxtaposition with sexy new smartphones and mobile technology, streaming music services and re-imagined social networks, Google’s work in Education tends to end up in the backseat. But, for this reason, Google has quietly (and quickly) gained noticeable traction in Education, thanks to the adaptation of its utilities and gadgets, like Google Apps and Chromebooks, to the learning market.

For example, in February, Google announced in February that Chromebooks are now in over 2,000 schools across the U.S. For awhile now, Apple has grabbed most of the attention in the education space thanks to the rapid adoption of iPads among schools and teachers. Furthermore, when we talk about Google having positioned itself as a provider of essential utilities, there’s probably no better than the company’s recent announcement that the entire country of Malaysia — that’s 10 million students, teachers and parents — will use Google Apps for Education as part of the country’s effort to improve its education system.

Through its Google Apps products, Google allows students and teachers to collaborate in realtime through Web apps, while using already-familiar tools like Google search and Gmail. The other part of this is, Google’s cloud, its infrastructure, allows it to operate its software products at scale without the traditionally high costs. For that reason, the company can make its educational products accessible to cash-strapped IT departments, for example.

With infrastructure that allows it to run its software at scale from the cloud, Google’s products become more flexible. That foundation behind it, with Google Apps having found penetration among small businesses, it adapted the suite to address similar productivity and collaboration inefficiencies in education.

Apply that to Google Play and pair it with Google Apps, and you can start to see why EdTech entrepreneurs and investors, when asked what the biggest trends are in education (that no one’s talking about yet), more than a few have said “start paying attention to Google.”

And with the impending arrival of Google Play for Education, if Google can start to get Android tablets into the hands of kids, it looks like they might just be onto something…

Google Developer page here.

If there was any question as to Sebastian Thrun and Udacity’s resolve to re-imagine higher education in a more affordable, accessible virtual classroom — or their ability to actually make any real headway among the Ivory Towers of academia — we should probably just go ahead and put that to bed. This morning, Udacity continues to push forward with its plans to bring higher education online — and not just in bits, pieces and homework assignments.

Following 2U’s lead, Udacity has partnered with its first graduate program to apply the MOOC model not just to individual courses, but to an entire master’s degree program.

Granted, 2U has been doing this for several years with graduate programs in nursing, education, law, business and international service. However, Udacity’s partnership is significant because it’s the first to take MOOCs not just to graduate programs, but to computer science.

In what is no doubt an important symbolic moment for STEM education — which has seen a growing number of advocates over the last few years thanks to poor performance in the U.S. and the perception that the country is falling behind on creating the “next-generation” workforce — Udacity announced today that it has partnered with Georgia Tech to jointly offer an accredited master’s degree in computer science — completely online. Not only that, but thanks to support from AT&T, the program will be offered for less than $7,000. So, really, this is not just an important moment for STEM, but for MOOCs and online education as a whole.

The other point of note here is that Georgia Tech ain’t no safety school. According to U.S. News’ rankings of the best engineering schools in the U.S., Georgia Tech is tied for fifth place with Carnegie Mellon. So, it looks like Coursera and EdX aren’t the only ones providing online educational experiences with content from elite universities.

Furthermore, tuition (full-time, out of state) for Georgia Tech is $26,860 — which makes Udacity’s online degree look more than a little appealing in comparison. However, while anyone will be able to sign up and take Udacity’s Computer Science courses for free, only those actually enrolled at Georgia Tech will be able to earn credits towards a degree. The companies plan to launch a pilot of the program in the fall of 2014, beginning with a couple hundred students.

As for AT&T, it’s not exactly crystal clear what the company’s role in the partnership is, other than providing what the announcement calls “generous” support. Naturally, of course, AT&T Chairman and CEO Randall Stephenson thinks the partnership has transformative potential. He said:

We believe that high-quality and 100 percent online degrees can be on par with degrees received in traditional on-campus settings, and that this program could be a blueprint for helping the United States address the shortage of people with STEM degrees, as well as exponentially expand access to computer science education for students around the world.

Again, while the idea itself isn’t new, and Udacity isn’t the first to partner with an elite graduate program to provide quality education and an actual, graduate-level degree to students online, the quality of the academic program (and presumably its content), its focus on Computer Science, combined with its relative affordability and the ability to receive credit and complete a full, graduate-level degree online, is absolutely huge. Sure, the launch is still quite a ways off, which is at once makes the announcement perhaps a little bit premature, but is also evidence that they’re taking the development of this program seriously. No status quo.

This is also refreshing news, because, over the last year, there’s been a huge amount of buzz around massive open online course (MOOC) platforms, particularly around Udacity, Coursera, EdX and 2U, among a few others. With how much play MOOCs have gotten in education and in the media, it’s as if MOOCs are expected to employ some kind of techno-voodoo magic to totally “save” higher education from collapsing under its own weight.

Of course, since online courses are far from being new, some questioned just how innovative, effective (and collaborative) MOOC platforms actually are at the end of the day. And for good reason. Porting a lecture hall to YouTube or putting your professor in a Google Hangout probably won’t end higher education. At least, not on its own.

Is accessibility important? Yes, of course. But even in the traditionally offline world of higher education, “scalable” and “cloud” can only act as stand-ins for real “innovation” for so long before schools will want to see more. There still needs to be substantial proof that MOOC platforms offer a better learning experience (improve outcomes and retention rates), before higher ed simply turns over the keys to the kingdom.

Reservations aside, what Thrun and Udacity have done in a relatively short amount of time is impressive and everyone — not just teachers — should be keeping tabs. In January, Udacity already played a part in a potentially key symbolic moment for higher ed, as California Governor Jerry Brown approved a partnership with San Jose State University to create Udacity-powered, low-cost and lower-division online classes.

This was significant because it was really the first time a MOOC platform has been tapped to build a complete, automated (remedial) class experience online — let alone state-wide at the largest university system in the world.

As of April, the pilot had seen 85 percent retention going into midterms. At time time, EdSurge noted that it’s not the 100 percent retention rate Thrun has boasted about previously, but it’s not a bad start.

In the big picture, it may not seem important, but retention rates are critical for online courses and course platforms. If entire remedial classes are being automated/flipped, they need to be more effective than their offline counterparts. (Un)fortunately, our current education system has set the bar pretty low on this one, which will hopefully make it easy to leap over it.

But, on the other hand, universities have limited resources, and class sizes continue to grow as more and more people go (or return) to universities, community colleges and continuing education programs. Online platforms take the scale issue out of the equation, but droves of students now matriculate with little to no grasp of fundamental concepts, San Jose State Provost and Vice President Ellen Junn told TechCrunch in January.

If technology and online education are going to truly transform education, maintaining the status quo isn’t acceptable, especially if these automated courses replace or curb the need for real, live human teachers. So, not to be party pooper or anything, but while this program has significant implications, it’s still all about quality content/presentation, improving retention, outcomes and ye olde learning experience. Without that, scale and affordability don’t mean quite as much.

Find Georgia Tech’s announcement here and Sebastian’s blog post here.

As a fourth generation venture investor, Adam Draper was pretty much predestined to work with startups. The son of Tim Draper, the founder of global VC firm Draper Fisher Jurveston, Adam has made it his mission to do everything in his power to help entrepreneurs bring their ideas to life — without relying on his family name to do so. After taking the plunge as an entrepreneur himself, co-founding a capital raising and trading platform and an equity crowdfunding portal, the 26-year-old again finds himself back in the Draper wheelhouse: Early-stage finance.

In the summer of 2012, Draper launched his third venture, Boost.vc, a San Mateo-based accelerator that offers housing (in an on-site hotel), office space, mentorship and seed funding as part of its 12-week incubation program. But by today’s standards, considering the glut of startup accelerators that have emerged over the last two years, what was once an attractive model now almost sounds run-of-the-mill. I’d argue, and Draper would agree, that accelerators can provide more value for startups over the long-run by focusing on a particular vertical.

Today, Boost.vc is taking its first (experimental) step in that direction by focusing on one of the hottest verticals in the tech industry: Bitcoin. About three months ago, the decentralized, ungoverned currency became “an obsession,” Draper says, and since then, it’s been the focus of his blog, meetings and now, in part, his accelerator. Boost.vc will be dedicating half of its second batch (seven startups total) to companies building products and technologies around the Bitcoin ecosystem.

When it comes to Bitcoin, Draper unabashedly wears rose-colored glasses, calling Bitcoin “one of the most exciting innovations happening in the world today.” While the kind of endorsement might give some pause, Draper isn’t alone. Last month, Lightspeed Venture Partners’ Jeremy Liew penned a post for TechCrunch explaining why VCs “love the Bitcoin market.” Liew himself has been a champion of Bitcoin and its incarnations, having recently backed OpenCoin, the developer of open source payment protocol, Ripple, for example.

Now Liew and other VCs are ready to ante up and continue to put their money where their mouths are by helping to establish the “Boost Bitcoin Fund.” The Fund, Draper exaplins, is a follow-on or “start” fund for all Bitcoin companies that graduate from the accelerator program. Each of the fifteen companies in Boost’s cohorts receives $15K in seed capital (in exchange for a 5 percent equity stake), but with the new fund, Bitcoin startups will receive an additional $50K investment upon completing the program.

The fund is anchored by Lightspeed, Rothenberg Ventures, The Bitcoin Opportunity Fund and Beluga founder Ben Davenport, all of which have begun to invest more aggressively in Bitcoin startups. Draper says that the team began to toy with the idea of a follow-on fund when the founders decided to accept seven Bitcoin startups into its summer session.

In floating the idea for a Bitcoin Start Fund to the investment community, the team was surprised by the warm reception that followed. In fact, Draper says, the capital came together in a week. With the Bitcoin movement continuing to gain steam, both entrepreneurs and investors are eagerly jumping into the space and testing new ideas in hopes of finding business models that will stick.

True to form, Draper says that the Boost.vc team is fully “committed to pushing Bitcoin toward becoming the next digital frontier.” Even if, as part of that experiment, the eight startups not focused on Bitcoin have to look on with envy as the other half of their cohort pockets an additional $50K at the end of the program.

Not only that, but as part of moving to commit (half of) itself to the vertical, Boost.vc will be bringing in “a number of Bitcoin-focused mentors,” including Davenport, who has recently dedicated himself to the space, along with additional speakers, experts and investors.

As a testament to the growing interest in the Bitcoin market, the digital currency now has its own conference, Bitcoin 2013, which is scheduled to take place this weekend in San Jose. Naturally, the conference will also play host to a Bitcoin-focused hackathon, and Draper tells us that Boost.vc plans to pick one of the seven startups that will participate in its program from the field.

As to the program: Applications for Boost.vc’s second cohort are being accepted on a rolling basis, with a final deadline of June 1st. The program will kick off June 24th, concluding in a demo day in the middle of September (the date has yet to be set). Those interested in applying can do so here.

With the proliferation of smartphones, we’re now able to use these mobile, mini computers to do just about everything we would do on our desktop while on the go. Yet, in spite of this evolution, mobile payments seems to be lagging behind. We use our phones to capture pictures and video, and share them instantaneously, but the average smartphone carrier is less comfortable with the idea of paying for a meal by swiping their phone. People want a mobile wallet, and it seems only a matter of time before someone gets it right, even if a winner has yet to emerge.

Part of the reason for the slower rate of adoption is the perception that mobile payments are insecure, rife with hidden fees and are the very opposite of seamless — or cross-platform. Akimbo launched its eponymous card in March to take on the increasing number of players in the mobile payments space each taking a slightly different tack, from Green Dot and NetSpend to LevelUp and Dwolla. In contrast, the Akimbo Card is designed to be an alternative to your walled-in virtual bank account, with a social and mobile spin.

Like LevelUp, Akimbo wants to stand out from the pack by offering a fee-free platform through which users can send and request money to any email address, Facebook friend or mobile phone. Simply put, it’s PayPal meets a Visa pre-paid card. In other words, Akimbo allows users to access transferred funds from ATMs and any location that accepts Visa debit cards. In an effort to target the some 10 million young people who use prepaid credit cards, Akimbo enables users to link and load the card with their bank accounts with cash or via direct deposit.

This means that the startup’s proprietary platform not only allows cardholders to send money via email, Facebook post or SMS, but to reserve sent funds to be added to future card accounts, meaning all sent funds are guaranteed to the recipient. Once the funds are collected, the recipient receives the money, along with a depository account and payment tool to access the funds. The Akimbo founders believe that it is the first and only Visa payment product to offer this capacity.

By building a cardholder network, Akimbo believes that it can establish a more defensive position and benefit from some barriers to entry (and competition). Currently, almost 40 percent of cardholders use their Akimbo account to share money — a number Akimbo will look to increase as it moves forward to give it some protection from the growing number of competitors in this space.

Going forward, the founders want to turn Akimbo into the first prepaid card product with an account management portal based in HTML5, and the team is currently working to release a new website (and account management tools) that “auto-optimize” to all devices, be they mobile phones, tablets, TVs or desktops. With young people increasingly accessing the Web primarily from their smartphones, the founders see this mobile accessibility (and flexibility) as critical to the mobile payment user experience, overall, and to getting a step ahead of the competition.

Going forward, the startup also plans to integrate with PayPal and Amazon, along with adding credit and debit card-loading and card-linked discounts and deals. Akimbo sees the “prepaid industry” as one that’s been slow to innovate and has thus found it difficult to capture new audiences. So, by adding capabilities that enhance prepaid as not only a payment tool but as a budgeting tool as well, Akimbo sees the potential to create a prepaid card that’s actually valuable — something you’re not embarrassed to be carrying around with you.

To move forward with its planned integrations, discounts and HTML5 development, Akimbo is announcing today that it has secured $850,000 in angel funding. The investment was led by Rackspace Chairman and co-founder, Graham Weston, former CEO and Chairman Emeritus of Cullen/Frost Bankers and Akimbo co-founder Tom O. Turner.

The round adds to the $500K in seed capital that Akimbo raised around its founding back in 2010, bringing its total to $1.35 million. The startup spent the next two years building out its technology, officially launching its social and mobile bank account alternative in March. Since then, Akimbo attracted 50K users, as the company has grown to over 15 employees, and, if growth continues at the current rate, the founders say they hope to hit profitability in early 2014.

For more, find Akimbo at home here.

Desire2Learn is a 10-plus year old Canadian company that makes learning software — a learning management system to be precise — and here’s why, in spite of that description, it shouldn’t bore you to sleep. In a space that’s traditionally been controlled by bigs like Blackboard and Moodle, Desire2Learn has quietly managed to carve out its own growing share of the market.

Last September, the Waterloo-based company raised a sizable $80 million round from NEA and others, and today has over 700 clients and more than 10 million people across higher education, K-12, healthcare and beyond are using its learning software.

Although the company doesn’t disclose financial information, we’ve heard that its institutional contracts are now translating into millions in revenue, which along with its raise, has allowed it to expand its staff from 600 to over 750 over the last year. In turn, the company has been ramping up its focus on acquiring EdTech talent and is rumored to be planning an IPO in the U.S. at some point down the road.

While Desire2Learn has established a solid base, it’s strategic M&A that can help lead the way forward, fighting off a flattening growth curve and leading to better products. The company has been acquiring with more frequency of late, including two back-to-back in January and March.

Desire2Learn acquired course recommendation engine, Degree Compass in March and is already putting its tech to use to continue expanding its learning platform. This week, the company announced what it called “the biggest update to its Learning Suite to date” — an update in which Degree Compass’ tech plays a central role, not only by expanding its toolset but by potentially changing the way students navigate their academic career.

To do this, Desire2Learn wants to bring predictive analytics into play in education. But why? Well, first and foremost because, today, if students want to figure out whether a course is right for them — or how well they might perform in that course — they’re hard pressed to find a good answer. They can ask fellow students, check websites that rank faculty based on nebulous criteria or try to find surveys, but none of these options are ideal.

With its new analytics engine, Desire2Learn aims to change that by giving students the ability to predict their success in a particular course based on what they’ve studied in the past and how they performed in those classes. The new, so-called “Student Success System,” was built (in part) from the technology it acquired from Degree Compass; however, while Degree Compass used predictive analytics to help students optimize their course selection, the new product aims to help both sides of the learning equation: Students and teachers.

On the teacher side, Desire2Learn’s new analytics engine allows them to view predictive data visualizations that compare student performance against their peers so that they can identify at-risk students, for example, and monitor a student’s progress over time.

The idea is to give teachers access to important insight on stuff like class dynamics and learning trends, which they can then combine with assessment data, to improve their instruction or adapt to the way individual students learn. In theory, this leads not only to higher engagement, but also better outcomes.

For students, they use Desire2Learn as they normally would, using it to view course materials, take quizzes, submit homework and chat with their peers. The platform then collects and analyzes each student’s personal data and, by drawing from a wider set of inputs, the engine can more accurately predict which classes students will perform best in and what their grades will be.

The system is currently operating at about 90 percent accuracy when it comes to predicting performance by letter grades, CEO John Baker tells us — a number which should improve as the engine accumulates more data, he says.

In addition to its predictive analytics, Desire2Learn is also making some significant updates to its mobile app, including new integrations with Dropbox and SkyDrive to allow students to engage with learning resources in the same way they do outside the classroom. What’s more, Desire2Learn is moving into Patbrite’s territory through ePortfolio and its new tool which allows students to build portfolios based on their in-school projects, grades and achievements in a way that’s applicable to life after school and finding a job.

Essentially, the tool allows students to move their academic resume to the cloud so they can take it with them after they graduate, which the company is incentivizing by offering 2GB of free storage.

Basically, what we’ve come to realize, the Desire2Learn CEO tells me, is that the company’s initial approach to business (or academic) intelligence was off track. “Students and teachers don’t necessarily want more data, they want more insight and they want that data broken out in a way that they can understand and helps them more quickly visualize the learning map,” he says.

When I asked if building and adding more and more tools and features would dilute the experience and result in feature overload, Baker said that the company doesn’t want to build a million different tools. Instead, it wants to become a platform that supports a million tools and allows third-parties that specialize in particular areas of education to help develop better products.

Through open-sourcing its APIs, Desire2Learn along with Edmodo and an increasing number of education startups are beginning to tap into the potential inherent to the creation of a real ecosystem. Adding predictive analytics tools gives Desire2Learn another carrot with which they hope to be able to draw both teachers, students and development partners into its ecosystem.

While it would take you a million lifetimes to watch all the video on YouTube, the company relies on contributions from its amateur and professional partners to keep its content fresh. At the same time, its core business model revolves around providing advertisers with the ability to reach its billion-plus viewers. In turn, video creators rely (or want to rely) on a piece of that ad revenue to continue producing their content. The problem is, of course, that those ads are intrusive, annoying and, at the end of the day, its partners are finding that the revenue from those banners and clips isn’t growing nearly as fast as, say, the number of cat videos on YouTube.

In an effort to provide its partners with an alternative revenue stream, YouTube announced today that it is officially launching a pilot program that enables its video stars to charge subscription fees for access to their channels. Subscriptions will start at $0.99/month, and every channel will be able to offer a 14-day free trial, along with discounted yearly rates.

In its announcement, YouTube cites Sesame Street, which will offer full episodes through its paid channel, and UFC offering fans the ability to watch classic fights as examples. For more, here’s the list of its 53-odd pilot channels.

As of today, users can subscribe to paid channels from their desktops and laptops and watch across devices, but going forward YouTube will look to add the ability to subscribe from any medium/device. On top of that, YouTube will begin a broader roll out of subscriptions in the next few weeks for “qualifying partners,” and from the looks of it, it will be adding a paid channel recommendation feed — just as it does now for free channels.

If you don’t have a YouTube channel, why should you care? Well, YouTube has been telegraphing this for awhile, but it’s really the first (official) sign that YouTube is beginning to tiptoe into the paid video market. Granted, the subscription model isn’t a new idea for YouTube, considering the company just announced in March that it will be launching a music subscription service later this year.

The goal is much the same: Give musicians/artists/creators an opportunity to make some money, while improving the user experience for listeners by potentially removing some of those obnoxious ads that start every video. Of course, in the case of both video and music, it’s much more likely that YouTube is going to stick with both.

Amateur content creators are going to be hesitant about erecting paywalls around their content. Most viewers are going to balk at the idea of buying a subscription to a YouTube channel, and there’s a question of whether or not they’d really be able to convert enough of their viewers to paid subscriptions to make it worth it. In the end, it’s the same issue newspapers and publishers have struggled with for years.

There’s also the fact that every video producer is already offering their content for free, although behind ads. Now you’re going to tell viewers that they have to pay for the same content they’ve been getting for free? Sure, that will work for your superfans, but as is the way with the “freemium” model, if you’re going to charge, the content behind the paywall better be, well, premium. I want to see “Extras,” exclusive content/footage, and so on.

Of course, as Peter Kafka pointed out this week, amateur video producers likely don’t have the resources to produce that exclusive or premium content.

Nonetheless, the company is going to use paid subscriptions in an attempt to attract new partners, new content creator and, we assume, more dollars — although YouTube doesn’t specify whether it will be taking a cut of subscriptions or not. YouTube is clearly aware of the success Hulu, Netflix, Vimeo and other video sites have been having with subscription and on-demand models, and it wants to become more attractive to film and TV networks, studios and producers.

But for now, YouTube can’t make the jump exclusively to subscriptions, because it needs those ad dollars that are keeping the whole thing afloat. It’s a tricky line to walk, no doubt, but YouTube certainly isn’t helping its user experience by setting up the potential to have both a paywall and ads in and around videos for the foreseeable future.

Just speaking for myself personally, I probably most frequently use YouTube for search (and a little discovery), particularly around music. In other words, I’ll have a song or an artist in mind, will do a YouTube search, which inevitably serves a couple or dozens of choices for the same song, artist or even subject. There’s a high likelihood that I have no idea which video I want or is best, which requires some perusing, so having a 10 second ad at the beginning of each video is really disruptive.

Maybe that’s a niche use case, but I suspect not. YouTube ads, while tolerable because we consciously or subconsciously recognize their role in keeping millions of cat videos afloat and online, are frustrating. Sure, Hulu has ads, too, and they aren’t much better. But at least in Hulu’s case, the viewer knows they’re watching a 30-minute or hour-long episode of television online, and regular old offline TV has already conditioned us to expect ads every 5 seconds. Unfortunately. But for a 2-minute clip of questionable quality? Come on.

So keeping ads, while slowly throwing up paywalls is just a bad idea. So the roll out of paid video will end up being incremental and almost just a show of good faith — to keep from ruffling feathers — while the ads just keep proliferating.

BlueStacks, the startup known for bringing Android apps to PCs and Macs, has been growing like a weed. Last week, the company announced that it had passed the 10 million user milestone, nearly half of which were added in the first quarter of this year. Today, hot on the heels of the news that OUYA has landed $15 million from Kleiner Perkins to bring its affordable, $99 Android-friendly gaming console to the masses, BlueStacks is firing back with some news of its own.

Looking to tap into a huge new audience, BlueStacks is today bringing those 750K-plus Android apps not just to PCs and Macs, but to TVs as well with its own gaming console and subscription service. The new package, called “GamePop,” includes a custom console and game controller for free, as part of its $6.99/month service. Well, actually, the console is free through the end of May, at which point BlueStacks will slap on a price tag.

The price of the console has yet to be determined, but the company tells me that GamePop has an “estimated value of approximately $100,” so one can probably expect the pricing to fall in that range — or five times that, depending on how saucy BlueStacks is feeling. Of course, $100 is the “estimated” value, and gamers can get their hands on the whole package for $84 (for a year of the service) now, so take that for what it’s worth. After May, it will probably be more like $184 for 12 months of gameplay.

Right now, gamers can pre-order GamePop from BlueStacks’ homepage (which redirects to gamepop.tv), with consoles expected to ship this winter. Naturally, for this early flight, BlueStacks is selling GamePop exclusively through its own site, but after the first round of shipments, likely beginning next year, expect GamePop to begin showing up in stores.

As for who is responsible for manufacturing and producing BlueStacks’ new gaming console, the company isn’t revealing the man behind the curtain yet. But considering the startup has already struck distribution agreements with several recognizable names in the PC ecosystem, like Intel, AMD, Asus, MSI and Lenovo, it’s probably safe to say that at least one of those companies played a hand in the design, production and distribution. Asus, for one, has the most Android experience, but that’s just speculation at this point.

BlueStacks unveiled GamePop at GDC, allowing developers to take an early look at the gaming service, but has yet to put any in the hands of either developers or reporters. Though, from the looks of it, the industrial design appears to bear some resemblance to D-Link’s Boxee Box.

In the big picture, with today’s announcements, GamePop and OUYA seem to be proving that there’s plenty of demand out there for an affordable gaming console. As Jordan said this morning, OUYA very deliberately set its price at $99 and will be offering games on a “free-to-try” basis, which founder Julie Uhrman says is a core tenet of OUYA itself. Unsurprisingly, that’s resonated with people.

OUYA has seen more than 12,000 developers sign up for its platform, 4,000 of which have signed up since March. What’s more, GameStop, Best Buy and Amazon have already agreed to sell its console, with availability expected to begin in late June. That gives the Kickstarter-born open console a head-start on GamePop in terms of availability and distribution partnerships. And, depending on the price of games after trial, a price advantage, too. So, depending on OUYA’s success this summer and fall, it wouldn’t be surprising to see BlueStacks tweak its pricing accordingly.

With some competition afoot, BlueStacks will be trying to incentivize potential customers with its content deals, which include a handful of top game developers, like Glu Mobile, Halfbrick and OutFit7, for example, as well as Intellijoy, Deemedya and Droidhen. More will be announced over the next few months, the company tells us.

The announcement of GamePop follows the startup’s move in February to bring its App Player software to Surface Pro PCs and other devices running Windows 8. BlueStacks’ arrival on Windows 8, combined with its existing deals with AMD, Asus and Lenovo, will see its software preloaded onto over 100 million PCs over the course of the year, which could potentially help BlueStacks find a reach and scale that’s unusual for a startup — in software or gaming.

For more on GamePop, find the intro video below:

Today, Identified has unveiled its patent-pending, artificial intelligence technology called “SYMAN,” which aims to organize the masses of disparate, incoherent professional data that lives in our social media profiles in order to identify new insights into the job market. Essentially, Identified co-founders Brendan Wallace and Adeyemi Ajao tell us, SYMAN is an attempt to provide a solution to a problem many social media companies have struggled with for years: Unstructured, disorganized and inconsistent data.

In November 2011, Identified emerged out of public beta on a mission to create a better professional job search engine. Built on top of Facebook data, Identified set out to nibble at LinkedIn’s lead in this space by giving both job seekers and companies a better way to connect — and find talent. To do that, the startup offered a product that it promised would become something akin to the “Google Page Rank for people,” assigning a numerical rank (out of 100) to professionals and companies based on their education, career path, social footprint and more — a la Klout.

By the following summer, Identified had attracted three million active users and had imported 10 million profiles from Facebook, which it used to secure a sizable $21 million series B financing round, led by VantagePoint Capital and Capricorn Investment Group, along with participation from Tim Draper, Innovation Endeavors, Chamath Palihapitiya and more. After this early buzz and validation subsided, however, Identified was met with the challenge of having to convince and incentivize the younger generations to claim and fill out their Facebook-derived profiles on its platform — not such an easy task when so many people already have a litany of online profiles to manage.

But doing so is critical for Identified, because without users claiming their profiles and adding more data, an Identified profile isn’t worth much more than any other. Plus, it means the company has fewer data points with which to work when trying to assign an accurate score or effectively tracking a user’s career progress. As such, Identified has spent the last nine months in relative silence, hiring data scientists and designers and building out its team in an attempt to create technology that would set it apart from the field and enable it to begin monetizing.

For the enterprise, startups (or really any company) to make use of social media data in a way that’s actually valuable and contains actionable insight, that unstructured, messy social data needs to be cleaned and structured in a way that makes sense. For example, “dirty data,” as the co-founders call it, makes it difficult to deliver high-quality search or analytics products — part of the reason why Facebook’s GraphSearch hasn’t yet seen substantive adoption from recruiters and partly explains why LinkedIn’s career map didn’t take off, respectively.

By putting social media data in a clean, organized format, companies can more effectively ingest this data to power recruiting, human capital management, CRM, marketing and a host of other enterprise products. To help solve this problem, Identified partnered with a team of former LinkedIn data scientists to develop SYMAN. Inspired by some of the early work that LinkedIn did on its professional dataset, the startup is applying that methodology to a much larger trove of professional data: Facebook.

While one might not think of Facebook as being the go-to site for professional information (especially as many are keen to keep their social and professional profiles separate), with over one billion people on the social network, there’s still an enormous amount of professional data to be gleaned from its profiles. Facebook’s dataset is, as one might expect, more than five-times the size of that of LinkedIn, far less structured and much less complete.

That’s all well and good, but how does it work? Without revealing all the nuts and bolts behind the patent-pending technology, SYMAN’s data architecture enables a machine to draw inferences about the meaning of a particular data entry based on context in much the same way the human brain does. In other words, knowing that someone wrote “Analyst” as their job title on Facebook might not be of much help when making predictions about their ideal professional career. However, by considering complementary and related data, like their education, company and friend, SYMAN can infer that the person is in fact a “Systems Analyst” at Cloudera.

Comparing biographical, professional and educational data against the career path of a “typical” systems analyst, Identified can now predict that Palantir, for example, might be the best (and most logical) next step in the career path for that particular analyst. The data schema and learning algorithms behind SYMAN, Wallace says, are inspired by pioneering neuroscience research proposed by Jeff Hawkins (the founder of Palm and Handspring) and Ray Kurzweil, who recently joined Google to develop a similar technology and apply it to pattern recognition.

Identified has also developed SYMAN to create and inform a new product, which is currently in beta and being tested by 30 or so clients, called Identified Recruit. Just as LinkedIn used its enterprise recruiting tools to begin monetizing its dataset, the startup hopes to use its new product to enable recruiters to more easily and effectively search and identify candidates based on professional information culled from Facebook. In other words, Identified wants to turn Facebook into a candidate database just as LinkedIn has converted its own for similar uses.

The product is currently being used by enterprise health clients, like Kaiser Permanente for example, to find healthcare candidates who traditionally have shied away from building LinkedIn profiles, like nurses and patient care professionals, in particular. To give an example of how its new product is being applied in this context, SYMAN was able to find 562 ways in which nurses self-identify on Facebook (how they say “I’m a nurse,” in other words).

The technology then maps these 562 different terms to 15 unique categories or “15 different types of nurses that recruiters are actually looking for,” Wallace explains, enabling recruiters to find more in one search than they would be able to otherwise, using GraphSearch, for example. At present, Identified has only “cleaned” healthcare data via SYMAN, but going forward, the company intends to apply the technology to other industries, like finance, education and life sciences — to name a few on the near-term roadmap.

Moving forward, the co-founders tell us that they’re also keen on integrating other datasets, applying SYMAN not only to Facebook, but to LinkedIn, Twitter, Pinterest, Quora, Github and others. Though this will take some time, one can also see the company using its new tech to develop analytics products for professionals and companies, like, say, products that would them optimize their workforce and view leads, candidates and more in a centralized dashboard.

Also on the roadmap, Wallace says, is the development of an API for a variety of social media sites, which would allow companies to use SYMAN to clean and organize their data, on-demand. Data-cleaning-as-a-service, in other words. The founders also hope that, through its future API, SYMAN could enable companies to monetize their data for enterprise applications in a way they’re currently unable to do, as well as allowing developers and third-parties to build B2B tools, apps and tools on top of SYMAN’s technology.

Of course, in the big picture, the applications for SYMAN are just beginning to take root, so it’s still too early to say just how effective and attractive this kind of technology will be to other companies. But, based on where Identified was a year ago, it certainly feels like a step in the right direction, especially if it means to monetize in any significant way. Sure, it’s easy to talk about what could be, making Identified’s future plans for its technology seem like pie-in-the-sky-type conceptualizing at this point.

However, the startup does seem to have assembled a team of experienced data scientists and engineers, and the recent addition of two new board members from well-known recruiting and human capital companies may be a sign that the startup is at least moving in the right direction. To that point: This quarter, Wallace says, the company officially added Jobvite CEO Dan Finnigan and Max Simkoff, the founder and CEO of Evolv, to its board of directors.

As to what he sees as the potential for SYMAN, Simkoff says that he thinks the technology could solve a problem “that plagues big social data and which no other social or professional network has really been able to solve effectively,” and as such, could “uncover powerful insights and relationships buried deep within the Social Web, which have the potential to change how companies pursue talent, manage their workforce, and understand their competition.”

For more, find Identified at home here, more on its recruiting product here and a brief video demo below:

Since launching in 2010, HealthTap has been on a mission to bring the proverbial “house call” back to healthcare — virtually speaking, of course. With more than 80 percent of people turning to online resources (and to Dr. Google) for health-related information — from insurance to basic diagnostics — HealthTap set out to give people a better alternative to using Google or WebMD for their health queries.

Capitalizing the increasing ubiquity of mobile devices, HealthTap created an interactive mobile health network and Q&A platform to allow everyday people to connect with one of its 38K licensed physicians in realtime, via their smartphone or the Web. Over the last year, the startup has proven that there’s ample demand for a “Quora for doctors”-type service, with the founder telling us last month that the site is now serving over 7.5 million unique visitors every month, and more than 10 million questions have been answered on its platform to date.

In turn, HealthTap has served over 581 million answers to those seeking health device and, as of March, Gutman said, over 3K people had sent thank-you notes to HealthTap, saying that these doctor answers had saved their lives. While this may sound a little too saccharine to be true, doctors and hypochondriacs aren’t the only ones drinking the Kool-Aid.

Based on its recent traction, along with the growing potential of virtual health information networks, the startup announced this morning that it has secured $24 million in series B financing. The majority of the capital, the founder told us this week, came from its new lead investor, Khosla Ventures and, specifically, was led by its newest partner: Keith Rabois, the former COO of Square and early exec at Slide, LinkedIn and PayPal, among others.

The round marks Rabois’ first investment since joining Khosla Ventures in February and sees the new partner taking a seat on HealthTap’s board of directors. As further testament to the firm’s interest in its latest investment, Khosla Ventures founder Vinod Khosla, who has become an active HealthTech investor over the past few years, will be officially joining HealthTap as a member of its advisory board.

With contributions from HealthTap’s existing investors, like The Mayfield Fund and Mohr Davidow Ventures, the new round brings the company’s total funding to $37.9 million, which Gutman says the company will use to hire “top talent”, expand its web and mobile offerings, and accelerate growth.

The new capital will also allow HealthTap to begin taking steps to open the significant amount of health data the platform has collected over the past two years to third-parties — be they startups looking to build new tools and applications around healthcare, or healthcare players themselves. The startup has also yet to begin monetizing in any significant way, and Gutman sees these potential partnerships and integrations as the best way to begin generating revenue.

“The real question we want to answer going forward,” the founder says, “is how do we best tackle healthcare and health data in a post-Obamacare world?” With healthcare, insurance, brokers and all manners of health information moving online, the system is going to be hard pressed to handle the increase in demand. The goal is to put HealthTap in a position to be the de facto triaging system once Obamacare really kicks in, Gutman continued.

Over the last few months, the startup has been steadily moving in that direction. HealthTap’s platform provides health information primarily through its Q&A functionality which now connects users to a network of more than 38,000 registered doctors, offering a potentially more efficient and cheaper alternative to seeing a doctor face-to-face.

For doctors who join HealthTap, the platform provides tools to build an online and real-world reputation — the usual draw for those contributing to a Q&A site — and the potential to attract new patients while also improving the quality of health information online, which is noble in itself.

HealthTap claims that the new financing represents “one of the most substantial series B investments to date in the digital health industry”, and that the company has grown “rapidly over the past year, nearly quadrupling the number of doctors in its network, and serving tens of millions of people worldwide via its web and mobile apps.”

Testimony to this, the founder told us in March that doctors are now spending an average of over one hour per session (61.2 minutes to be precise) each time they log in — not only to answer questions, but to engage in peer reviews of other doctors’ answers, to build referral networks and vote on one another’s expertise.

Of course, HealthTap is far from being the first to go after these concepts — something that Doximity, QuantiaMD and a growing number of health startups will be quick to remind you. For the moment, HealthTap seems to have taken the lead, at least as far as investors are concerned; however, there’s a long way to go and much flux to come with Obamacare looming on the horizon.

Founded in 2010, Israeli startup JoyTunes has been on a mission to become the Rosetta Stone of music — to help those looking to learn play an instrument do so by turning practice into a mobile game, activated by playing the instrument of their choice. The startup’s first app, a free iPad app called Piano Dust Buster, enables wannabe rockstars to learn and play songs at their own pace, using a piano to play the game through their iPad’s microphone or by using the app’s 3-D virtual keyboard. To date, users have played 25 million songs using the app, with one million songs being played each week.

Today, based on the success of Piano Dust Buster, JoyTunes announced that it has closed a $1.5 million round of Series A financing, led by Genesis Partners. Founder Collective, Kaedan Capital, Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale, angel investor Zohar Gilon, Head of Yahoo Creative Innovation Center Eran Shir and former Steinway CEO Dana Messina, among others, also contributed to the startup’s Series A raise. The new round follows the $500K in seed capital the startup raised early last year from a host of angel investors, bringing its total funding to $2 million.

In conjunction with its raise, JoyTunes is also announcing the release of its second piano app, Piano Mania, which builds on the startup’s first app, while offering a deeper practice experience for those who’ve moved beyond entry level. The app aims to help users learn to read sheet music notation and symbols, play melodies in both treble and bass clefs, work on songs while focusing either on the left hand, right hand or both, while saving work to show to their piano teacher.

Like its first app, Piano Mania allows users to collect skill points as they play, progressing through the ranks and leveling up. Users can purchase a subscription to access the app’s entire roster of songs and levels, or play around with the free offerings and pay-as-they go.

While there are a bevy of apps out there that aim to help novices learn to play instruments, like Magic Piano by Smule, for example, JoyTunes co-founder Yuval Kaminka believes that the App Store still fundamentally lacks experiences that help people learn to play their actual instrument while incorporating game dynamics as a serious part of learning, rather than simply as a feature or superficial layer. Sure, apps like WildChords, Jammit and gTar all offer addicting musical experiences, but many of today’s apps focus on guitar.

Piano, as many musicians know, is essential to learning the fundamentals of music and is an important foundation before moving on to other instruments. There are plenty of youngsters out there that want to learn how to play piano and other instruments — wind, or otherwise — that are often overlooked by mobile gaming companies.

So, going forward, JoyTunes will be looking to build out the social elements of its gaming experience to more effectively create a community of aspiring musicians, while bringing its core piano learning experience to other instruments. It’s already begun adding new features, like the ability to record and share songs with music teachers, and Kaminka says that users can expect the startup to beef up this functionality with future releases and carry that experience over to new instruments.

For more, find JoyTunes at home here.

In this day and age, if you own a small business, you need a web (and mobile) presence. It’s just the way it is. Some might opt just to go for a social media approach, a Twitter account and a Facebook page, but the likelihood is that you want something a little more flexible, high-quality and something that gives you more control over the user experience. More and more, people are turning to Wix and Weebly. The two big “W’s” in the website creator world.

For those unfamiliar, Weebly is a service that lets you, your mom, grandmother, four-year-old cousin and anyone you know create a quality website for free. Launched out of Y Combinator in 2007, Weebly has had over 15 million sites created using its service to date, which collectively attract more than 100 million unique visitors each month. This week, Weebly has kicked its service up a notch with an all-new overhaul to its website builder — one that’s been a year in the making — and the launch of an interactive “Site Planner.”

This new site planner is designed to help give people ideas and a little lightbulb-style inspiration that will help them walk through the creative process and vision for the site. Plus, Weebly now offers an HTML5 site creator that offers new themes and pre-fab building blocks to customize their new site, and, most importantly, a new mobile new editor that helps them optimize their site for mobile devices, along with a now-globally available Android app.

In the lead-up to the big launch, co-founder David Rusenko tells us, Weebly surveyed several million consumers and found that about 56 percent of them, understandably, don’t trust a business that doesn’t have a website. And, yet, 58 percent of businesses don’t have a website. Pretty eye-opening in today’s world, when over a billion people are on Facebook and hundreds of millions have so much computing power in their pockets.

Ask the Weebly founders who their core audience is and they’ll tell you, proudly, that it’s entrepreneurs — people who are trying to build their own small businesses, across every industry, not just techies. And, regardless of technical proficiency, the problem that most small business owners struggle with is how daunting it can be to face that blinking cursor, the blank page. It’s the same issue we scribblers deal with in cases of “writer’s block.” When building websites, people want ways to test out their ideas, lay out their vision, and help bring it to life.

So how does it all work?

The new Weebly site planner offers people ideas and inspiration to help ‘em plan and think through the vision for their site, which is pretty cool, as it offers a step-by-step, interactive guide to help them identify goals, organize and layout their pages. According to the founders, 55 percent of people who visit Weebly have never built a website before, so the HTML5 site creator is designed to help make that process easy on n00bs and experts alike, give their site a personalized, unique design, photos, text and so on.

The new mobile site lets users customize how their site looks for their visitors on computers, phones and tablets, allowing them to create a separate design for mobile using a distinct theme, while editing their site in a mobile viewer. As they go, they can switch between different views to see how it will look on both Android and iOS.

In turn, the company’s new Android app basically brings everything that was already native to the Weebly experience to Android, including the ability to create blog posts on the go with drag and drop mobile blogging, add photos and text to their blog, social sharing, push notifications, commenting and analytics.

“For the first time, entrepreneurs around the world have a single place where they can easily
start a site that works across computers, phones and tablets,” said Roelof Botha, partner at Sequoia Capital who led Sequoia’s investments in YouTube, Square, Tumblr and more. “We believe demand for Weebly’s site creation tool is just beginning.”

Users can sign up for Weebly in a minute, pick their site address, whether or not they want to use the free service or a premium plan which starts at $4/month, and jump in. The service now helps you plan the layout, create the site, drag-and-drop-style and publish to the address of your choice. Weebly takes care of the cross-platform optimization and SEO, leaving you to do the rest. Pretty cool.

I’ve found that when people visit San Francisco, it’s not unusual to hear them ask something like: “No seriously, is there a coffee shop on every block in this city?” Yes, San Francisco likes coffee. So do a lot of cities. Busy people thrive on coffee, especially in the tech industry. In fact, some would even say that a substantial amount of coffee is an essential ingredient to success.

Phil Jaber would agree with that statement. After a long love affair with the brew and decades spent testing out his own blends, in 2003, he founded Philz Coffee. What was started out of a corner grocery store has today grown into a budding coffee chain, with 13 stores now open and serving across the Bay Area — one of which you’ll find in Facebook’s headquarters.

With all the coffee flowing through the Bay Area, Philz has stood out by combining varietals to make a bunch of fantastic tasting blends that are made without using a bunch of machinery. These blends were invented by Phil himself, and while they’re not patent-protected, they’re secret family recipes that you won’t find anywhere else, Phil’s son Jacob Jaber and current Philz CEO tells me.

Philz is a proponent of the drip coffee method and, while that may sound like a “hipster” practice to those outside of the Bay, it’s pretty fantastic and has taken off in the Bay Area. Some connoisseurs swear to it as the only way to make and drink it.

As a sign of just how hot the specialty coffee market is getting hot (at least in San Francisco), fellow Bay Area boutique coffee chain, Blue Bottle, took home $20 million in venture capital in October from Index Ventures’ Mike Volpi, True Ventures’ Tony Conrad and serial entrepreneur Bryan Meehan, among others. At the time, the coffee chain had expanded to ten stores of its own.

When asked if Philz sees Blue Bottle as a competitor, Jaber said that he doesn’t — that the success of one is a positive for the other, and that the market for this kind of branded, personalized coffee experience is huge. In other words, he thinks there’s plenty of room for both to get enough people caffeinated to pay the electricity bills.

Today, Philz Coffee is adding some growth capital of its own. Although the company isn’t ready to disclose the exact amount, Jaber says that the company has raised an eight-figure round that’s on the lower end of the spectrum. From what we can gather from sources, it appears to be in the $15 to $25 million range. The lead investor in the round is Summit Partners, and as a result of the firm’s investment, Summit Managing Director Greg Goldfarb will be taking a seat on the startup’s board of directors.

Jaber says that the company will also be looking to add a much smaller angel round on top of the growth equity investment, which they hope to close in the near future. While the angel investor list remains unclear, we were able to learn that it comes from entrepreneurs and executives in the consumer tech and retail spaces.

When asked why they decided to partner with Summit, the CEO tells us that the firm understood Philz’ ethos better than anyone else, both intellectually and viscerally, which was important to them, especially as it’s a family business and a passion of both Jabers. Of course, it also helps that the father and son duo will retain control of the company, with Summit taking a minority interest rather than a controlling share.

Philz’ name has slowly begun to spread of late, thanks to partnerships the company has struck with Virgin America, for example. If you’ve flown on a Virgin America flight recently and had a cup of coffee, you were drinking one of Philz’ blends.

With the new capital in its coffers, the company will look to strike a handful of partnerships like that one to increase distribution and awareness among coffee fans. To that end, Philz is also going to begin expanding outside of the Bay Area. Plans are still in motion, but Jaber says that you’ll likely see Philz begin to expand in California first, and into the surrounding states. They want to start close to home first. So you won’t be seeing Philz in Prague any time soon, unfortunately, but LA? And you cities on the West Coast? Look out. Philz crazy tasty blends may end up on your streets sometime in the near future.

For more, find Philz Coffee at home here.

Today, at TechCrunch Disrupt NY, Tumblr founder David Karp and Sequoia partner (and Tumblr investor) Roelof Botha took the stage to talk to TechCrunch founder Mike Arrington about how the blogging platform’s plans to take over the world. After a conversation about the merits of building a startup in New York City versus Silicon Valley, the talk turned to how Tumblr plans to monetize their platform.

What’s going to differentiate Tumblr’s advertising over the big honchos of online advertising? Karp says that, unlike the bigs, Tumblr is going after the “top of the funnel,” in other words, advertising that actually inspires you to go out and buy. That’s all well and good, but is it actually working? “Ten out of ten Hollywood studios are buying advertising space on Tumblr,” Karp says. Tumblr is seeing high six-figures per campaign, and “budgets are starting to ramp up.”

In fact, Tumblr really began its monetization push back in May of last year, when it first launched ads on its network. “We’ve had great early traction on our network,” Karp told Arrington, “because our story stands apart from the other big ad networks out there.”

When Mike asked just what it was that made Tumblr stand out, Karp said that he thinks most of the big networks are really focused on bottom-of-the-funnel intent — that is to say, harvesting intent by hitting viewers with blasts of those little blue links that take them to the website of the “right asbestos attorney.”

New media platforms building ad networks are using intent from demographic targeting, timeliness and other roughshod ways of serving the right ad to users, but really they just end up being a group of little blue links designed to convert. In other words, Karp isn’t exactly a fan of search advertising. Sorry, Google.

Instead, Karp wants Tumblr to offer advertisers their own canvas and the space they need to create ads that will actually win awards, he says, the kind of content that one would find in traditional advertising. “We want to give them the space to do anything, a four-second loop, an hour and a half video, a high-res panorama, whatever they need to help them build amazing, interactive ads.”

The problem is that creative brand advertising hasn’t had anywhere to live on the Web, the Tumblr founder says, and the startup wants to build tools to do that — and to build ad space that’s a comfortable fit for social advertising.

Yelp, the local online business and restaurant guide that first launched in the U.S. in 2004 and now lives in 21 countries and 12 languages, and has more than 100 million monthly unique visitors as of January this year, launched in New Zealand this morning. On the heels of bringing its review data to Kiwis and continuing its international expansion, Yelp announced its first quarter earnings at market close today.

In the fourth quarter, Yelp missed earnings expectations, with net revenue coming in at $41.2 million in Q4 of 2012, a 65 percent growth in new revenue from 2011, while it saw a net loss of $5.3 million, or $0.08 per share. Today, Yelp turned things around, as it announced net revenue jumped to $46.1 million in Q1, reflecting a 68 percent growth from Q1 2012, while cumulative reviews grew 42 percent year-over-year to more than 39 million, average unique visitors grew 43 percent y/y and local business accounts grew 63 percent.

Wall Street’s consensus estimates were that Yelp would see $44.5 million in revenue for the quarter, and $1.5 million EBITDA. Yelp hurdled over the bar, in fact, seeing a net loss in the first quarter of 2013 of $4.8 million, or $0.08 per share. This means that while net losses only fell slightly from Q4 2012, it saw a more significant reduction in losses year-over year, $9.8 million, or $0.31 per share, over the first quarter of 2012.

In addition, compared to Wall Street estimates, Yelp said that adjusted EBITDA for the first quarter of 2013 was $3.2 million, in comparison with an adjusted EBITDA loss of approximately $1 million for the first quarter of 2012.

In the quarterly earnings release today, Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman trumped up Yelp’s milestones in the last quarter, namely its hitting a record 102 million unique users over the last quarter, while touching on its plans to improve on its mobile experience. Something that should be music to the ears of anyone with a smartphone.

“We had a great start to the year and are excited about the large opportunity in front of us,” Stoppelman said. “This quarter we achieved many milestones including a record 102 million unique visitors on a monthly average basis, demonstrating the strength of our content and the trust we have earned from consumers. We provide valuable leads to local businesses because consumers turn to Yelp at the critical point when they are making purchase decisions. Looking to the rest of the year, we will continue to focus our product innovation around the mobile experience and new features to better serve the consumer and local business owners, and we will continue integrating Qype into the Yelp platform.”

Other business highlights?

Yelp mobile saw 36 percent of local ads shown on mobile devices in the first quarter, while the app was used on 10 million unique devices over the quarter, building on the company’s launch of display ads on mobile for the first time in Q1.

In terms of guidance, Yelp expects revenue in the second quarter of 2013 to be in the range of $52.5 million to $53.5 million, which would represent a growth of around 62 percent compared to the second quarter 2012. Adjusted EBITDA is forecasted to fall in the range of $4.5 million to $5 million. For the full year 2013, net revenue is expected to be in between $216 million and $218 million, representing a 58 percent growth year-over-year.

Brewster launched late last year with a simple goal: Replace your tired old A-to-Z contact list with an address book that actually understands your relationships and, in turn, helps you become a better friend. For some of us, this feels like a hopeless pursuit. We’re overworked, stressed, have terrible breath, and just can’t seem to find enough hours in the day to better manage our personal relationships. It starts in your twenties and gets worse from there.

Sure, Brewster’s mission sounds similar to the one that Plaxo launched with back in 2002, and there are enough smart, mobile address books out there to make your head spin. They’re all trying to simplify contact management, but there isn’t anything out there that’s based on the understanding of the people in your life and how those relationships fit together, which is how founder Steve Greenwood tells us he thinks that the team can actually transform the address book.

Today, Brewster launched its web application to let users enjoy a newly designed, fast Brewster experience on your phone, tablet or laptop. The app also introduces easier and faster contact sharing so that you no longer have to open your address book only to realize you’re missing a close friend’s number or have forgotten to update their work email.

If you’re anything like me, at least once in your life, this has probably happened to you. Or, you want to be a considerate friend and send them a birthday gift, but guess what? You have no idea what their address is. You scramble to find it, and a giant headache ensues and you send a birthday cake to the wrong house. Sigh.

When you scroll through your address book, Greenwood says, it’s almost appalling how much incorrect and incomplete information is in there for all the people you know, even for some of your closest friends. With its new contact sharing functionality, Brewster is looking to bring your relationships “to life” in your address book, enabling you to have each other’s current and complete contact info in your phone — or in your browser.

With one click, the founder says, you can take your contacts from static, probably out-of-date entities to something that’s at least a little more dynamic, and maybe even a realtime representation of the people in your life.

In terms of how it works?

Users sign on and create a personal contact card for the information they want to share with particular friends. You get to decide what information you’d like to share, whether it be phone numbers, emails, addresses, Skype IDs and usernames, etc. At any point, you can edit your contact card and the information you share with those friends and the card will update in realtime across platforms.

The app will list suggested friends based on its relationship algorithms, which Greenwood says “study each user’s closest relationships” in an attempt to streamline the connection process. If you don’t see someone in the list, you can add them yourself manually.

After sending requests to share info with friends and they accept (hopefully), you and those chosen will have complete and up-to-date contact info in your profile — and the same goes for them — or at least that’s the idea. If your friend gets a new job and updates their email address, for example, the new address will automatically update on each profile, for example, so you don’t have to worry about keeping contact info up to date for your close friends. Pretty cool.

Greenwood was sure to point out that users can disable sharing with any contact whenever you want, along with the ability to modify information that’s in your contact card and being shared with those select friends. Just in case you start to feel anxiety over lock-in. There’s a big market for the next-gen, automatically updated mobile contact manager, and, while there’s a lot of competition out there and many have come and gone trying to climb “Contact List Mountain,” but Brewster is off to a good start.

For more, find Brewster at home here or its iPhone app here.

With the growing demand for video-based online education, Curious.com is joining the crowd today with a marketplace that aims help students and teachers connect around a range of subjects, from pipe soldering and salsa dancing to jewelry making and knife sharpening.

With 10K learners logging 150K sessions during its five-month private beta, Curious launches today with hundreds of short, video-based lessons for people who want to learn a new skill or rekindle a favorite hobby. Founded by former Homestead founder and CEO Justin Kitch, who sold his company to Intuit for $170 million, Curious is taking a page out of Udemy’s book by not only offering learning content to students but by allowing teachers to market, share and monetize their lessons and engage with new students.

To support its launch, the company has raised $7.5 million in Series A financing from Redpoint Ventures, former Apple Chairman Bill Campbell and Jesse Rogers, including a personal investment of $500K from Kitch.

Kitch tells us that there are millions of teachers out there who are itching to share their expertise with the world but don’t have access to the tools or marketing skills to bring their knowledge online. The Web today, he says, is littered with low-quality learning content delivered in static ways that fail to keep students engaged.

With Curious, Kitch wants to make online learning more digestible and accessible to the average web surfer, while helping wannabe teachers make a buck or two on the side by helping them, say, learn how to brew a tasty Pilsner. The platform allows teachers to sign up for free and use the site’s “lesson builder” to design, publish and market their own lessons in under an hour.

Teachers can link their related lessons and track how many views their lessons collect, while enabling learners to submit projects they drum up during class and create “Curious Cards” to share their achievements with the world. Through its comment and messaging system, Curious allows teachers to work with students individually, while answering their questions, reviewing projects and providing speedy feedback.

While there are a ton of online lesson platforms out there, from Khan Academy and Skillshare to Udemy, CreativeLive and Lynda.com, Curious is looking to set itself apart by keeping videos short and serving content in bite-sized, episodic chunks. Students can engage with the content on their own time, as Curious eschews the traditional scheduling approach, opting for convenience and immediacy.

Learners can stop lessons whenever they want, share projects during the process or at the end of the lesson and post questions to the community or directly to teachers. At launch, the site offers more than 500 lessons from over 100 professional teachers, curated by Curious’ staff of educators and video experts.

The startup wants to help its teachers monetize their content, but it’s also looking to keep things inexpensive at the outset, so the most lessons will cost is a few dollars. Teachers can offer their lessons for free, or for a few bucks a pop.

In another twist for video-based education, Curious offers its own micropayment system and currency, called “Curious Coins,” which allow learners to securely purchase premium lessons without having to swipe their credit card 15 times.

Another nifty feature that helps it stand out from the crowd is Curious’ internally developed media player, which breaks each video up into short 30- or 60-second intervals. Each section is watermarked, which allow attachments to surface at the appropriate interval and makes it easy to flip back and forth between sections. Comments pile up below the videos in a river, while students enrolled in Curious have the ability to view comments by section.

Curious isn’t yet ready to provide its own studios for teachers, so educators have to provide their own video, but the platform takes care of everything else. The Lesson Builder helps teachers split their lessons into sections, add attachments and text and publish. Curious’ team is actively perusing the Web to find the best teachers in any given subject, wherever they live, inviting them to the platform if they pass muster.

Curious takes the standard 30 percent for all lesson sales in its marketplace, although that could be subject to change going forward.

To celebrate its public launch, the startup is offering new learners $20 of free Curious Coins. For more, find Curious at home here.

Because there are so many small businesses out there on Main Street that don’t have access to the same juicy venture capital rounds that seem pervade today’s tech industry, On Deck set out in 2007 to provide mom-and-pop business owners with an easy way to secure the capital they need to grow their businesses. Using data aggregation and electronic payment technology, On Deck aims to simplify the borrowing process for small businesses by offering them a fast, online alternative to the traditional old bank loan.

The startup’s alternative approach to lending and evaluating the creditworthiness of SMBs has seen it deploy over $450 million in loans and allowed it to raise $100 million in credit facility from Goldman Sachs and others in 2012. After declining offers from British online lender Wonga that were reportedly as high as $250 million, On Deck raised $42 million in series D financing in February, led by IVP, with contributions from its existing investors, SAP Ventures, RRE Ventures and First Round Capital.

As a result of the round, IVP General Partner Sandy Miller joined the startup’s board. Miller has been involved in over 100 tech IPOs over his career, which we surmised at the time could well be a signal of On Deck’s future intentions. This, combined with its growing credit line and traction, appears to have investors lining up at the startup’s door.

Today, On Deck announced that it will be expanding its Series D financing with $17 million in new capital, raised from a lineup of familiar names. The round was led by Google Ventures, with participation from PayPal co-founder, education contrarian and prolific investor, Peter Thiel and Industry Ventures. This brings the startup’s total Series D to $59 million and brings its total capital raised to date to $100 million.

The company says that the new infusion of capital will be used to support its growth, particularly by allowing it to ramp up hiring and product development. In the big picture, says CEO Noah Breslow, On Deck wants to power every U.S. small business loan and help make on-demand capital a reality for the five million businesses with 25 employees or less in the U.S. — a segment of the economy relied on for 40 percent of its jobs.

However, as we wrote in February, On Deck’s road forward (to IPO) isn’t necessarily going to be a walk in the park, thanks to competition from startups like Kabbage, which are looking to make it easier for online merchants to raise loans, and big players like Amazon have been moving into the lending game as well.

Not to mention that companies like Capital Access Network have been bringing loans to small businesses since 1998 and have deployed nearly $3 billion to SMBs thus far. It also has raised big money, $30 million from Accel for example, and has secured even heftier credit lines from Goldman Sachs and Wells Fargo — nearly $300 million.

So, On Deck isn’t without competition in the SMB lending space; but, that being said, the market opportunity and the demand for capital is significant enough that there seems to be plenty of room for more than one sizable lender. As mentioned above, there are millions of small businesses in the U.S., most of which will look to borrow at some point in their development and, all told, are pretty underserved when it comes to access to secure, short-term lending.

Main Street businesses are used to turning to banks when looking for business loans, but traditionally, banks have relied on personal credit scores to evaluate the creditworthiness of their business. While business owners may have perfectly legitimate, high-growth businesses in the making, they don’t always have the kind of personal credit scores that make them attractive borrowers for banks.

By providing banks with infrastructure that allows them to evaluate electronic performance data and pull up a credit score for the businesses rather than the owner, On Deck’s model aims to streamline the application and negotiation processes, adding value to both sides of the equation. Or at least that’s the idea.

To add some credence to this proposition, Breslow tells us that it is this streamlining of the application process (which takes about 15 minutes, he says) is a large part of the reason that On Deck was able to increase its “repeat customer base” by 34 percent in 2012.

Making on-demand, short-term lending a reality for the millions of small businesses in the U.S. is a tall order, but having Google Ventures and Peter Thiel on board certainly doesn’t hurt.

While some institutions of higher learning have grown skeptical of the MOOC phenomenon spreading through its ranks (and the startups responsible), you have to give Coursera credit for keeping its foot on the gas. In less than six months, the MOOC startup has taken meaningful steps towards monetization and toward becoming a legitimate MOOC university, adding career services, verified certificates for a fee, courses for credit, along with teh addition of 29 new institutions (to bring its total to 62).

With how quickly the MOOC universe is expanding, Coursera is now positioning itself to be the first to bring the MOOC model into K-12 market. It had to figure it was only a matter of time. But, rather than bring online courses directly to kids, Coursera is starting with teachers and filling a gap in its curricular coverage in doing so. Today, the Stanford-born startup announced that, beginning this summer, it will make teacher development courses available for free on its platform.

To do so, Coursera is partnering with another set of institutions, but this time it’s focusing on those with established professional development programs, like University of Washington’s College of Education, the Curry School of Education at UVA, Johns Hopkins University School; of Education, Vanderbilt’s Peabody College of education and human development, and the Relay Graduate School of Education, to name a few.

Alongside its seven new educational partners, it’s also teaming up with more recreational institutions, including The Museum of Modern Art, the Exploratorium, the American Museum of Natural History and New Teacher Center. In other words, not only is Coursera expanding its course catalog to include the fundamentals of teacher up training and development, but it will also be allowing teachers to dive into more specific instructional topics, like “Integrating Engineering Into Your Science Classroom.”

As one can see from its new course list, the platform now allows teachers to explore a wider variety of EdTech-related topics, to learn how to better incorporate technology, engineering and the humanities into their classrooms.

EdSurge also reports that the new training and development content are expected to be made available to teachers and institutions at a lower cost than what its general ed partners are paying, which usually run from $10K to $50K.

What’s more Coursera, reportedly plans to offer certificates of accomplishment for instructors who complete the courses. EdSurge speculates that the reason for the difference in cost is likely due to the fact that the courses will be offered in shorter durations (three to four weeks) than its traditional content.

As mentioned, this partnership represents Coursera’s first foray into early childhood and K-12 education (and one of the first among the most popular MOOC players) and the first time it has partnered with non-degree-bearing institutions to help make their content available across the globe.

Like its current model, the new courses will feature video lectures, supplemental materials, peer forums and a few other interactive features. But, perhaps most important to the big picture, is that it opens up the potential for schools and districts to integrate this content into their own professional training and development programs, blended learning-style.

While Coursera says that it doesn’t have anything in the works, the new professional development program seems to set the table for its future expansion into the world of K-12. It wouldn’t be a huge stretch for the platform to begin partnering with top high school and grade schools around the country to bring its MOOC education to younger generations. Especially considering that many high school students already use its content to prepare for college.

Given its rapid expansion, this affords Coursera the opportunity to sit back and survey the space, and make that move when and if it becomes necessary or advantageous to do so. It’s easy to take the view that Coursera is over-extending itself by operating in so many different capacities at once, but putting itself within striking distance without taking the plunge seems like a smart play.

Find Coursera’s announcement here.