Entrepreneurs, please start paying more attention to healthtech. Rather than trying to build the next billion-dollar mobile photo app, go lean and deep into bigger problems. As ZocDoc CEO Cyrus Massoumi said recently, healthtech is underrepresented among startups, with many (and founders are not alone) failing to recognize the size of the market (and the corresponding opportunity): Healthcare alone is a $2.7 trillion industry in the U.S., for example.

Yet, healthtech is just as desperate in its need for brain power, entrepreneurial enthusiasm, and a little elbow grease as it was five years ago. Speaking to a crowd at TechCrunch Disrupt yesterday, the ZocDoc CEO essentially issued a call-to-action, declaring that access to healthcare “is one of the greatest challenges to face our generation.”

Today, thanks to the increasing number of health-focused startup accelerators, like San Francisco-based Rock Health and New York City-based BluePrint Health, to name a few, lacking intimate familiarity with HIPAA or med school experience is no longer a categorical disqualifier. What’s more, there are plenty of problems to tackle, some of them low-hanging, and there is in fact growth capital to be found for healthtech.

To that point: One of the first graduates of BluePrint’s healthtech accelerator is a startup called Meddik, which wants to give consumers a better way to search for health information and find targeted and personalized support. The startup is still in the early stages, so the fine points are still gelling, but the idea is to build a platform that aggregates user-submitted content, identifying the best advice, articles, and solutions based on the specific conditions and topics of interest of the individual.

Thought it’s still early in the cycle, Meddik is already finding validation from investors, as the startup is today announcing that its has raised $750K in seed funding from a flock of notable angels and early-stage VCs, including Chris Dixon, Nat Turner, Zach Weinberg, Bob Stern, Vivek Garipalli, as well as Collaborative Fund, Founder Collective, Great Oaks, and Silicon Badia.

Co-founder Tim Soo, who’s currently on leave from the University of Pennsylvania as he and co-founder Ben Shyong work towards to launch Meddik later this summer, told us that they had originally set out to build a kind of Google Search for health. Much in the same way that Noodle is currently doing for education.

But the co-founders eventually came to the realization that their scope was too wide, as crawling the entire web resulted in an unfavorable ratio of spam and junk to quality health content. Of course, this touches on a problem that’s fundamental to online health portals. Unless your leg is falling off, thanks to the high cost of health care and doctor/hospital visits, when it comes to basic health questions, our first move is to ask Google. Just as true now as it was then.

Naturally, that Google search then leads to general answers, confusing encyclopedia entries, or long-winded forums. But, what if you find someone just like you (a clone?!), who had experienced the same medical issue, ailment, or had already asked the same question and could tell you what worked — and what didn’t.

Of course, while this is a great start, that information is still anecdotal. Thus, the key, Shoo said, is to scale that experience, adding personalized, aggregated public and academic information, traditional and alternative remedies, in an effort to not just find a good answer to your health questions, but find the right answer. Which is so much easier said than done.

We still haven’t applied Web 2.0 answers where they matter most, the co-founder continued, so a health networking play “doesn’t just mean a better news feed, or a good restaurant recommendation, it means making the right health-related connection can save lives.”

Of course, even though Massoumi reminded us of the fact that health startups are underrepresented in the ecosystem, Meddik has plenty of competition — at least nominally. WebMD and PatientsLikeMe, and Healthline each offer extensive resources for patients, yet the majority of existing health solutions tend to focus on specific conditions (like chronic illnesses), which makes them inherently boxed-in. And in the case of the above examples, the barriers to entry can also be high, requiring users to fill out involved online profiles.

While solutions like Fitbit and Fitocracy are finding adoption among mainstream audiences, there’s a lot of focus on Considering most health attributes are intrinsically interrelated, the co-founders began building out a large ontology table that connects all common health language (via a Wiki and internet scraping) to actual medical code.

Companies such as WebMD, PatientsLikeMe, Healthline and Alliance Health also provide an online heath resource for patients, but Soo said those sites either have higher barriers to entry (in that users have to complete more involved profiles) or target patients with more chronic illnesses. Fitbit, Fitocracy, Nike’s Fuel band and others appeal to a mainstream audience, but they only focus on general fitness, not the larger category of personal health. Meddik wants to play across that spectrum, Soo said.

Based on those codes, Meddik calculates a clinical similarity index between the searcher and every other user connected to the site, with the goal being to create a health network, in which users remain anonymous while being able to connect with those who will be best suited to help you.

At this point, as you may already be able to tell, Meddik is still in the early stages of building its MVP. The service is in closed beta with a limited number of beta testers beginning the process of seeding its content. When the site is up and fully functional, Soo says, it will likely monetize by leveraging its unique data set to serve targeted health advertising — not unlike Facebook’s social data/advertising model.

To give readers a taste of the site, Meddik will be peeling the doors back the foor a opening its doors over the next few days to a few hundred early participants. Check them out at home here, and let us know what you think.

While it’s far from being the only offender, the online travel industry (particularly travel search engines) is in dire need of better segmentation and targeting — for offers, deals, and all their related services. For example: Currently the top 10 percent of travelers are responsible for 40 percent of revenue and 50 percent of the profit in the industry, yet, generally speaking, they still see the same promotions and deals as everyone else.

In fact, Orbitz, Kayak, American, United, and a handful of other top travel sites still get most of their flight inventory info from ITA, which they sort and serve based on price, i.e. the cheapest ticket. Yes, cheap tickets are appealing, but if we’re looking for that which characterizes the next generation of travel sites — like the proliferation of user data profiles, personalization and granularity — then the experience demand more than basic price comparison. (Plus, let’s be honest, the cheapest ticket doesn’t always offer the best value, anyway.)

Today, Israeli startup Superfly, which offers a secure tool that combines worldwide flight information with personal travel preferences to help people organize and maximize the value of their travel rewards among other things, is quietly launching a shot across the bow of the industry’s giants — in this case, the uber popular metasearch engine, Kayak.

That’s because the startup is now able to call on the significant operational and financial experience of Willard (Bill) Smith, who was, until recently, Kayak’s CFO. Smith joined Kayak in May of last year (as the company’s first-ever CFO) to help the startup prepare for and actually move forward with its perpetually-delayed IPO.

What do we mean by “perpetually delayed”? Well, Kayak first filed its IPO docs in November 2010, and it was reported last week that the company may, just may, embark on its road show next week. Why has it taken a year-and-a-half? The answer varies depending on whom you ask, but it would be safe to point a finger at both the long-running unsteadiness of IPO market conditions and the company’s erratic earnings.

As to Smith and Superfly, the CFO officially stepped down from Kayak in March, and although he declines to reveal the reasons behind his departure, he has definitely been clear about his growing interest in Superfly. Regardless of how one paints the CFO’s departure from the most popular (but erratically performing) metasearch engine for travel pre-IPO, along with his ensuing interest in advising a next-gen travel search engine that could spell trouble for that very incumbent (although a number of pieces would need to fall into place before one could consider Superfly a legitimate threat) — but in the end it would just be speculation and innuendo.

However, it is fair to say that the above, alongside Smith’s genuine interest, equates to some great early validation for Superfly (especially as it’s operating in a crowded space where startups have to work even harder to stand out), and at the very least implies that there could be significant opportunity for travel sites that can improve upon the Kayak model. As to Superfly, Smith said of its value proposition:

Superfly is a fresh take on a common task — travel search — and while other sites may offer good results for a broad base of travelers, Superfly gets YOU the best results based on how YOU travel.

Superfly first debuted at TechCrunch Disrupt SF in 2010 and later launched its flight search beta. Today, the startup is taking another step forward, with the official removal of its “beta” tag, finally making its flight search tools available to non-users.

Travel search right now is in the process of being commoditized, the former Kayak CFO says, which unfortunately results in users being treated the same way — as a commodity. However, a new generation of startups is emerging that will leverage Big Data to collect and create segmented profile data on its users to better target ads and offers to elite travelers.

For frequent fliers, earning miles and an elite status is the result of hard work, so Superfly aims to provide value by making it easy for them to organize their rewards and find flights that consider their frequent flier status. As the space stands today, 95 percent of travel search lacks segmentation and Superfly wants to help change that.

Of course, without creating value for airlines, this line of thinking means nothing. That’s why the startup is looking to tailor its approach in such a way as to transform the entire dynamic between channel and supplier from one of cutthroat competition (by showing results based on fares or distance) to one of value for both the consumer and supplier, Smith says.

With Superfly’s new tools, suppliers can now leverage its aggregated traveler data to provide valuable offers and promotions to the most influential and active members of its user base, and, in turn consumers will be able to receive these offers by joining Superfly and beginning their travel search. From there, Superfly’s suppliers can begin targeting their elite customers as they search, providing offers, deals, and more in realtime — at times when they are most useful.

Superfly also recently integrated with Facebook’s Open Graph to allow its users to share their achievements to their Facebook pages. While social functionality is essential, the real winner both Smith and Superfly CEO Jonathan Meir said, will go beyond intent to build meaningful customer profiles based on social activity, travel interests, and more.

For more on Superfly, check ‘em out at home here.

Kony Solutions, the unfortunately named makers of a write once, run everywhere mobile app development platform today announced that it has closed a $15 million series C round of financing. The funding was led by New York City-based venture capital firm, Insight Venture Partners, a 17-year-old firm that has invested in companies like Tumblr, Buddy Media, Wix, Chegg, and Twitter — to name a few.

Insight also led Kony’s $19.1 million series A financing, which it closed in January of last year. With its latest infusion of capital, which brings total funding to nearly $39 million, the startup is looking fund the deployment of new sales and marketing programs, regional expansion, and to ramp up hiring.

For those unfamiliar, Kony is on a mission to develop technologies and apps that both facilitate and accelerate customer engagement on any mobile operating system, device or channel. Through its flagship product, KonyOne, the startup offers a development environment and mobile middleware that allows big businesses to build and launch both enterprise and consumer apps.

As a result, Kony now offers support for nearly every technology and deployment option out there, from native apps on all native OSes, HTML5-capable browsers, single page apps, wrappers, hybrids, and more — even support for BYOD deployments. The agility and scalability of its platform have attracted more than 70 Fortune 500 companies, banks, airlines, as well as automotive and insurance companies.

Kony CEO Raj Koneru says that the startup will use its newest round of funding to continue managing and expanding on its recent growth, which (as of the end of its FY2012) had seen more than 200 percent growth in bookings and has added more than 30 new global customers, including Aetna, CIBC, Independence Blue Cross, Scottrade and Sun Life Financial.

What’s more, the company recently launched a suite of off-the-shelf, vertical-specific apps for banking, healthcare, retail, and travel, while earning the business of more than 30 new customers, including Aetna, CIRC, BlueCrossBlueShield, Scottrade, and Sun Life Financial.

With patents-pending for its flagship product, KonyOne, support of more than a billion user sessions annually, and its being named a “Visionary” startup by Gartner, Kony is really starting to find the kind of traction it will need to compete in a crowded space.

For more, check out Kony at home here.

Just over a week ago, the jury began deliberations on the ongoing patent infringement case between Google and Oracle. After waiting in the wings, with bated breath, the verdict is finally in, as Judge William Alsup of the U.S. District Court of Northern California dismissed the jury this afternoon after a unanimous decision that ruled in favor of Google’s mobile OS — declaring that Android did not in fact infringe on the Oracle patents in question.

The decision follows an opposing verdict earlier this month, in which the jury in the long-running infringement case found that certain components of Android APIs had too close of a resemblance to code used in Oracle’s Java programming tools. However, the jury ended up splitting on the notion of whether or not Google could in fact claim fair use in its defense (which could have then led to a mistrial.)

The jury’s decision was obviously a laborious one, following two years of a legal back-and-forth between the two tech giants. Oracle had initially filed the lawsuit back in August 2010, in which the company asserted that Android infringed on Java patents that Oracle acquired as a result of its purchase of Sun Microsystems. Google responded by saying that, at the time of development, it was not aware of Sun’s patents and that Android was in fact free to use.

Of course, that decision was only the first act in the three-part deliberations, in which the copyright infringement issues were to be followed by consideration of Oracle’s patent infringement claims (the focus of today’s hearing) and, finally, the damages Google might be liable for were it found found to infringe.

However, much of that speculation was rendered moot today, as a week of deliberation came to a close today at the U.S. District Court of Northern California, with the jury unanimously declaring that Google did not in fact infringe on the six claims set forth by Oracle in regard to U.S. Patent RE 38,104 as well as the two claims regarding U.S. Patent 6,061,520.

Of course, this does not mean that the whole case has been decided; instead, the decision marks the end of the trial’s second phase, which, again, focused solely on Oracle’s claims of patent infringement.

While the jury had previously found that Google was in violation of Oracle’s copyrights, as stated above, it could not come to a unanimous decision on the issue of fair use. Meaning that, although Oracle ostensibly “won” its copyright case, it effectively has a hold on its ability to collect on any of the $1 billion in copyright damages it is seeking from Google — a conclusion that was supported by the tweets of legal reporter Ginny LaRoe, who attended today’s hearing.

And #Googacle The Trial is over. Judge Alsup dismissing jury. Since Oracle won virtually nothing, no damages phase at this point.

— Ginny LaRoe (@GinnyLaRoe) May 23, 2012

On top of that, there are a number of other legal questions surrounding the copyright case on which Judge Aslup has yet to issue a final ruling, although he is expected to come to a decision next week.

Updating

Well, well, well. As if you couldn’t get your fix of sling-shotting irascible fowl on every other mobile and social platform known to man, Rovio announced this morning that Angry Birds for Facebook (officially known as Angry Birds Friends) has finally done flown the coop and left the warm nest of its beta. Avian double-speak aside, what does that mean exactly?

It means that, having gone through the requisite user testing, tweaking, and multi-billion-dollar IPO-ing, Rovio’s Facebook app — with a handful of new features in tow — is finally ready for public consumption. As to those features, Angry Birds Friends brings a number of trendy social gaming features to Angry Birds, including tournament mode, new weekly levels, new ways to earn power-ups, rewards, and, of course, tons of social integration.

As Angry Birds fanatics are well aware, Rovio launched Angry Birds Friends in beta earlier this year. On top of those things I mentioned earlier, the beta version of Angry Birds Friends has also been a testing ground for Rovio to test out new business models, like offering $1 power-ups beyond pay-to-download options or the infamous Mighty Eagle.

The game’s port to Facebook likely had the social network excited, considering that Angry Birds has been a presence on Google+ and other Google products for awhile now — not to mention the fact that massively popular games like Angry Birds could mean good things for Facebook’s revenue.

But, as to Angry Birds Friends’ (what an awkward and clunky name to say aloud, by the way) new features, they’re pretty much self-explanatory, but its new tournaments feature allows users to compete with their friends on four different levels — from Monday to Sunday. The pig-popping user with the highest overall score earns a gold trophy, with silver going to second, etc, etc. And, thankfully, unlike crowns, users get to keep their trophies forever. For. Ever.

The “New Weekly Levels” refer, specifically, to those four new levels being offered in tournament mode, although Rovio hinted that it will be launching further levels every week. Third of all, there are those power-ups, which, on top of the daily rewards users can already collect, users can now earn power-ups in tournament mode. Earn three power-up bundles and you’ll receive a shiny gold trophy.

As for context, in case it wasn’t already abundantly clear, Angry Birds is popular. More than five people use it. In fact, earlier this month Rovio announced that its coven of Angry Birds apps had amassed 1 billion downloads. To date, Rovio has released the original, Angry Birds, Angry Birds Seasons, Angry Birds Rio, newer arrival Angry Birds Space, and now, what one might consider its newest arrival, Angry Birds Friends.

If you’d asked me two years ago if Angry Birds merchandising would be extremely popular, and that an Angry Birds movie would be in the works, I would have laughed at you. But, considering I’m wearing an Angry Birds t-shirt right now, eating Angry Birds cereal, and that Rovio’s 2011 earnings were about 10-times its estimated revenues from the year prior, with 30 percent coming from merchandising, well clearly I didn’t get the last laugh.

More on Angry Birds Friends in Rovio’s blog post here.

Updating in realtime

Over the last few years, a number of startups have begun to tackle the musty old industry that surrounds fine art. While approaches vary, they all in some way seek to capitalize on the Web’s ability to level the playing field, leveraging digital technologies to make art more accessible to a broader range of consumers. Paddle8, Artsy, Zazzle, and Art.com, for example, are all taking steps to democratize the purchase, discovery, and enjoyment of art by bringing it online.

In August 2010, Boston-based TurningArt launched its own unique spin on the democratization of art commerce with a Netflix-esque model that allows any and all to “rent” and enjoy contemporary art. To support its mission to transform the way people buy artwork, the startups is today announcing that it has raised $1.5 million in funding from a number of institutional and angel investors.

As a result of its new round, one of its angel investors, Fouad Elnaggar, who is currently an SVP at CBS Interactive (as well as a former VC at Redpoint Ventures) will be joining TurningArt’s board of directors. Elnaggar joins NextView Venture’s David Beisel, who was added to the board when his firm invested in TurningArt’s $750K seed round in May of last year. Niraj Shah, Steve Conine, Thomas Lehrman, and Will Herman also contributed to the startup’s initial seed round.

While TurningArt declined to disclose further information about the participants in its latest financing, we do know that NextView re-upped its investment this time around and that angel investor Andy Rankin joined as a new investor.

All in all, with $2+ million in outside funding raised to date, TurningArt plans to build on the 350 percent increase in its customer base its’ found so far this year, using the capital to expand its artwork collection, build up its core team, and introduce a handful of new delivery options.

As to how it works: TurningArt partners with independent artists from across the country to allow consumers to test out (i.e. rent) prints of their original artwork, without having to commit to purchasing the piece, which in many cases would be far more expensive than one is willing (or able) to afford. For $10 a month, customers can search the startup’s repository of thousands of independent works, with the option to ship whenever a particular piece strikes their fancy.

The print arrives framed and ready to hang on the wall right out of the box (it even includes a nail) and users can keep the piece for as long as they’d like — although, admittedly, this sounds like the same policy that got Blockbuster into trouble with its late fees. However, as you show the piece off to your friends, loved ones, and cats, leaving it to hang on the wall, you earn credit towards a purchase.

If you don’t like the print, you can just head over to your Netflix-like queue and prompt TurningArt to send you the next piece on your list. What’s more, the startup’s handmade frames make switching prints easy — no tools are required — so you don’t even have to send the prints back, as you might with a Netflix DVD.

Obviously, TurningArt’s value proposition is twofold. The thousands of consumers now using the startup’s platform have a simple way to discover cool contemporary art, test those artworks at home, live in 3-D, and then purchase the piece if they’re so inclined. However, on the flip side, the company has already attracted hundreds of artists for the simple reason that TurningArt provides them with an easy way to expose their work to a whole new set of customers — at no cost.

What’s more, since all of the original works that the rentable prints represent are available for purchase directly through the startup’s site (prices for the works tend to frange from $50 to $5,000), artists have the opportunity not only to reach new customers and increase their own brand recognition, but to convert renters into buyers.

TurningArt gives the lion’s share of all sales to the artist, on top of a portion of the subscription revenue that comes from users “renting” their prints.

Going forward, the startup will look to introduce its platform to a broader segment of the $26 billion art market, iterate on its delivery options, and go after more high profile contemporary artists. While companies like Zazzle offer cool AR technologies that allow customers to customize and visualize their products online, the potential market for actual, in-home art test-driving has to be huge.

Applying a Netflix-style rental model to the ways by which consumers experience and purchase art is appealing, of course, it’s all about inventory. Scaling this distribution model, Netflix style, can be expensive, but it all comes back to quality. Too many steps in the process, or art that’s equivalent to something that can be found at Walmart likely won’t result in any significant customer retention.

What do you think?

Also: For readers interested in taking the service for a test drive, TurningArt is offering a TechCrunch sign-up code, which will give the first 100 people to follow this link to try their first month of TurningArt for free.

MapMyFitness is a veteran of the online health and fitness space, with the first iteration of its website appearing back in the summer of 2005. Since then, the startup has developed a suite of fitness-oriented websites (like MapMyRUN.com, MapMyRIDE.com, MapMyWALK.com, et al) to let users track and store their running, cycling, walking and hiking endeavors, along with accessing a database of international routes, fitness calculators, nutrition tracking, events listings and more. MapMyFitness has long had a stable community of committed users, but over the last year, things have been moving steadily north.

CEO Richard Jalichandra (who joined the startup from Technorati last year) tells us that MapMyFitness recently passed 9 million registered users, and that, collectively, its mobile apps have amassed over 30 million downloads, making it one of the biggest players in the fitness tracking space.

The good news for MapMyFitness, however, has been the recent telescoping growth in registrations (not downloads), with the latest 1 million registrations occurring over the last 40 days. That’s an increase from the 54 days it took for the site to go from 6 million to 7 million users, and the 47 days it took to pass 8 million users. All in all, that’s 3 million new users in the last 5 months, and the CEO says the company is today seeing 25K new registrations a day, significant when viewed against its nearly 7-year history.

It’s based on this recent uptick in activity that MapMyFitness is today launching one of the biggest feature updates the platform has seen since rebranding in 2007. The startup has completely rebuilt its portfolio of websites, and is now beta testing three big new features: Updated routes, personal challenges, and courses, with the main attraction, Jalichandra says, being the latter.

The CEO claims that the introduction of its new feature makes MapMyFitness the only online fitness service to have integrated Google Maps API v3.9 (the latest version of its API) and leverage its full functionality.

What does that mean? While MapMyFitness users could already plan, track, and share their routes, Jalichandra says that Courses adds a notable difference in performance and user experience, enabling users to go beyond the actual route. By incorporating realtime info on traffic, weather, safe routes, directions, realtime elevation, and custom markers, now users can go beyond the route, planning the best Segway route home from work, for example..

Really, the feature is intended to bring MapMyFitness into the gamification/Foursquare era, as it provides both hardcore and casual athletes with both leaderboards and check-ins. Courses offers an automatic “check-in activity” for every exercise logged to track the speed, distance, consistency, and intensity of workouts, ranking users by gender, age, and weigh on the platform’s new leaderboard.

There’s also a group segmenting feature that allows users to compare themselves, leaderboard-style, against specific groups, be they local clubs, friends, or fierce cycling rivals, backed by a points system that incorporates personal best times and monthly consistency, awarding badges to the users with the most overall points on climbing courses, those with the most completions of a course, the fastest time, etc., etc.

Courses will span MapMyFitness’ five primary categories, including cycling, running, walking, hiking and winter sports, as well as hundreds of subcategory specialties (like unicycling) and enables users to create new Courses directly from their iPhones, BlackBerrys, Androids, Windows Mobile phones and iPads.

It also helps that Courses leverages the startup’s database of more than 50 million routes, 1 million climbs, and 30K event courses through realtime processing, allowing users to measure fitness and track progress in realtime or over time.

With RunKeeper on a laudable mission to build “the health graph,” alongside an API that’s already attracted 50+ integrations, big funding, and a platform that’s quickly becoming one of the top destinations for tracking and sharing fitness routines, incumbents are feeling a little bit of pressure.

But, as its name implies, MapMyFitness does maps better than most, especially now that it is powering its new features with Google’s latest mapping technology. According to the startup’s CEO, other than Strava, MapMyFitness is the only platform that offers realtime GPS activity leaderboards, and he thinks that components of the service, like route mapping, the ability to send a route to your phone to route with directions, along with the ability to choose from over 40 sports give its service a leg up on the competition.

MapMyFitness also capitalizes on three revenue streams: Media, digital commerce and subscriptions, and enterprise software, with this diversity resulting in the startup’s revenue doubling each of the last four years, the CEO says, and is projected to triple in 2012. This has allowed the startup to avoid raising outside investment beyond its Series A in 2010 and to grow, under its own volition, to a team of 78, giving it an advantage over its competition in terms of good old human capital.

With its deep database of courses, routes and trails, some added stickiness thanks to leaderboards and check-ins, and some big data collection and storage capabilities on the back-end using postGIS, it wouldn’t be surprising to see MapMyFitness continue in its accelerating growth trajectory. And maybe even find a little funding waiting in the wings.

Also, don’t be surprised if MapMyFitness ends up being featured by Google at some point. My guess would be here.

Courses will be available initially through a private beta test for first 100,000 users
who sign up here. iPhone and Android MMF users will only see superficial changes reflected in its new site — now available to one and all — at new.mapmyfitness.com. Widespread access to Courses et al will be offered later this summer.

What do you think?

One of the hottest trends in gaming right now isn’t mobile, social, or massively multiplayer games, but online casinos. This may seem somewhat surprising considering that it was only a year ago that the Justice Department seized the domain names of some of the country’s largest online poker platforms, like PokerStars, Full Tilt Poker, UB.com, and Absolute Poker, charging their founders with bank fraud, money laundering, illegal gambling, among other offenses. And five years prior, the Unlawful Gambling Act effectively putting a stop to online gambling in the U.S. and sending the market into a tailspin.

However, in December, the Justice Department reversed its stance on many forms of online gambling, paving the way for what is becoming a revitalization of the social gambling market. Naturally, with activity in the space increasing, a number of startups have popped up to take advantage, like the rebranded Titan Gaming, for example.

Today brings another entrant into the social gambling space with RocketFrog, which is setting out to bring casino entertainment to Facebook with the launch of a free-to-play online casino that offers players the chance to win real prizes. Traditionally, online casino players participate in the casino gaming experience recreationally, with the rewards being the opportunity to socialize with friends or earn a few virtual badges.

So, RocketFrog wants to change this by leveraging the Facebook platform — where all of your friends are already — to create social tournaments, where players can interact and compete against their friends to win real prizes, not just accumulate points on leaderboards or vie for status increases.

Each day, the startup will run poker, blackjack, and slot tournaments in small-ish fields of 80 to 300 players, with levels lasting two to five minutes. In a somewhat unusual business model, RocketFrog plans to recruit a different advertiser each day to sponsor a variety of prizes, including movie tickets, music, and good, with prizes obviously being related to whatever company happens to be paying for the ads. If it’s Pizza Hut, prizes will likely include coupons, meal offers, and probably some free pepperoni.

The platform intends to accomodate gamers of all abilities, so that if a user is new to a game, for example, they can peruse through the startup’s suite of learning tutorials, game strategy articles, and expert tips. Its games also allow players to choose their stakes and limits in an effort to customize the overall gaming experience, while challenging friends, tracking their bank roll, sharing achievements, earning loyalty rewards, and comparing game stats and rankings.

RocketFrog was founded in 2010 by Brett Calapp, Matthew Osborn, and Uri Kozai. Calapp is the former CEO and co-founder of Centaurus Games, a subscription-based gaming network that sold to PartyGaming in 2010.

The startup’s leadership, along with the potential market opportunity, has attracted a familiar face in social networking. Tom Anderson, also known as the co-founder and former president of Myspace, has joined RocketFrog’s advisory board alongside reality TV star and celebrity poker player Brody Jenner.

When asked what he sees as RocketFrog’s core value proposition, the former Myspace president said that few have “really pushed incentive-based gaming on the Facebook platform.” It’s as simple as the fact that millions of people play online poker for free, he says, so if they’re given an engaging platform and gaming experience, why wouldn’t they want to play for realworld prizes? What’s more, “RocketFrog is also giving advertisers what they always want but can’t seem to get — an immersive and deep experience that actually features their brand — banners alone aren’t enough.”

CEO Brett Calapp says that, while legislation and regulations will take time to iron themselves out (legislation may not be put in place until next year, or 2014) and casino platforms are popping up by the minute, RocketFrog’s core strategy is to avoid making players feel inferior about their bankroll in order to drive sales of virtual currency, but instead to reward its players by offering them the ability to compete in tournaments for quality, realworld prizes.

Rather than relying on a small, obsessive segment of addicted players, Calapp says that RocketFrog wants to expand its community to include new players, those not typically classified as gamblers, but who don’t want to just play for meaningless virtual rewards.

RocketFrog has a steep uphill climb to track down the bigs in the space, like DoubleDown Casinos and Zynga’s Texas Hold ‘em, but with some influential advisors and a mission to bring social, tournament-style gamble-gaming to the masses, the startup may just be onto something.

For more, check out RocketFrog at home here.

Getable, the artist formerly known as Rentcycle, started out with a mission to bring the rental industry online, offering free, realtime reservations for consumers along with business management tools for local rental shops. It’s an ambitious goal, and one that found almost immediate support from investors. However, in tackling such a big obstacle, the startup quickly learned that it would need to go deeper, so in March, it re-branded as Getable, rebuilt its website, and took a page from OpenTable’s book, launching a more robust in-store rental management solution for local shops.

In so doing, Getable made its cloud-management tools available to businesses through both web and iPad apps, allowing businesses to organize inventory data, customer information, payments, view analytics, while managing in-store reservations through the same system they use for online reservations. Like Square meets OpenTable for the whole rental industry.

The OpenTable influence in Getable’s solutions for the rental industry is no accident. As part of its seed funding back in August, OpenTable Founder Chuck Templeton joined the startup’s board of directors. In turn, Getable co-founder and CEO Tim Hyer also struck up a relationship with Jeff Jordan, the former chief exec at OpenTable and current partner at Andreessen Horowitz, and both Jordan and Templeton have since, to varying degrees, helped to shape the startup’s approach to the market.

And, while it’s certainly a steep hill to climb, that market is a big one, as rentals collectively represent an $85 billion industry. Unsurprisingly, Templeton and Jordan are not alone in seeing both a huge market opportunity and big potential for Getable’s business model.

That’s why the startup is today announcing that Marc Randolph, the co-founder and visionary behind Netflix will be joining Templeton and Collaborative Fund Founder Craig Shapiro on the startup’s board of directors.

Obviously, this will not be Randolph’s first experience with online rental platforms, having been at least partially responsible for the video rental industry moving online, much to Blockbuster’s chagrin. He also currently serves on the board of BookRenter.com and has invested in P2P car rental marketplace, Getaround.

“The idea of shared access is a concept I first embraced at Netflix,” Randolph said in a statement. “I’ve since had the chance to deepen this commitment through my involvement with Getaround, BookRenter, and Quintess. Getable brings the same kind of access to consumer products, everything from tuxedos and power tools to sporting goods. Moving a traditionally offline industry online is always an exciting challenge.”

If payment systems are played correctly and find the right fit for the type of business they serve, they can have the potential to completely alter the customer experience at that local store, including the entire flow of business on the floor. But it’s not easy introducing small merchants, who are used to their offline systems, to a new model. It requires them having to put their entire store, including the way it operates, and flows, in the hands of a new system and technology — in this case, Getable.

It’s for this reason that the startup has cleverly decided to focus on a particular geography and a particular vertical. In conjunction with Randolph joining its board, Getable is announcing its first official vertical focus: Bike rental.

Like so many others, the majority of bike shops still organize their rental reservations with pencil and paper. And considering Hyer estimates that 2,500 bikes are rented per day to tourists in San Francisco, Getable is focusing its efforts at home, forging partnerships with top bike rental chains like Blazing Saddles, Bay City Bike and Big Swingin’ Cycles, all of which will be using Getable’s tech to run their store operations.

Since rolling out its in-store solution last month, Getable has already received commitments from businesses representing more than 50% of all bike rental volume in San Francisco. And with some veteran leadership experience on its board, Getable will be looking to accelerate expand its reach to an even greater extent in the coming weeks.

OpenTable and Netflix have both followed extremely successful trajectories in their push to digitize rental services, so you can’t ask for much more than to have their founders in your corner.

For more on Getable, check ‘em out at home here.

As people become increasingly comfortable using web platforms to swap homes, cars, and everything in between (spouses?), some have said that the collaborative consumption movement has the potential to be as profound as the industrial revolution. But, before that can happen, marketplaces and platforms that deal in collaborative consumption need to recognize the importance of ensuring consumer protection, a lesson Airbnb learned the hard way last year.

After multiple users’ homes were trashed last summer (and a slew of bad press followed), Airbnb apologized and offered a $50,000 guarantee against damages to hosts. The startup dropped the ball the first time around, but today it’s proving that it has learned its lesson, making good on its promises to protect users by announcing that it will now cover up to $1 million in property damages for every host.

Partnering with insurance giant Lloyd’s of London, Airbnb now guarantees that every booking on its platform is covered by its “Host Guarantee,” which states that Airbnb will reimburse users for damage to their property up to $1,000,000 — at no cost to them. As it would seem, this is a fairly unprecedented move for the industry, and a very important one given Airbnb’s symbolic (and literal) position as a mediator between two parties who are inherently moving their online relationships into the real world.

Nothing is more imperative than the trust of that relationship, and Airbnb’s move to renew its commitment to expanding its safeguards goes a long way towards securing that dynamic.

However, it should be made clear that those seeking payment under the Host Guarantee will have to cooperate with Airbnb and its insurers, and that the Guarantee itself does not qualify as a replacement or substitution for homeowners or renters insurance. The Guarantee does NOT cover cash and securities, collectibles, rare artwork, jewelry and pets.

For more, check out Airbnb’s new guarantee here.

Quikr, India’s largest online and mobile classifieds portal, announced today that it has raised $32 million in series E financing, led by New York City-based private equity giant Warburg Pincus. The company’s existing investors, which include Matrix Partners, Norwest Venture Partners and eBay, also participated in the funding.

The investment is Quikr’s fifth and largest financing to date, following an $8 million raise in May 2011, led by Nokia Growth Partners, Norwest and eBay. The latest capital infusion brings Quikr’s total funding to $46 million.

Quikr was known as Kijiji (of www.kijiji.in) until a re-branding in 2008, when the company decided it wanted to adopt a name that more readily reflected ease of use and speed, with a slightly more universal (and vowel-less Web 2.0) feel. Apparently “Kijiji” didn’t inspire that. No idea why.

Kidding aside, the company was set squarely on the long-term goal of becoming a fast, easy-to-use consumer-focused platform for the Indian community, and in turn providing it with a resource by which to buy, sell and rent in any category. And, since its launch in 2008 (and its re-branding shortly thereafter), the Mumbai-based startup has grown into a sizable platform, which is now used by some 17 million people and businesses each month — across more than 83 cities — and offers listings on everything from real estate to electronics.

Today, more than 50 percent of the Indian population is under the age of 25, which equates to an enormous number of savvy web and mobile adopters. As a result, many see huge opportunity in Indian eCommerce, especially that which is targeted at a younger audience. Unsurprisingly, Silicon Valley investors have been paying more and more attention to the startup ecosystem in India, the growing web penetration, and adoption of mobile devices.

What’s more, as demonstrated by this sizable investment in Quikr, not to mention the $40 million round that Bessemer, Nexus and others sank into fast-growing Indian eCommerce and deals company, Snapdeals, American investors aren’t afraid to send their money abroad.

For more, check out Quikr at home here.

Yottaa, the Boston-based startup that offers cloud-based web performance monitoring and optimization services for small businesses, is today announcing that it has closed a $9 million series B financing round. Each of the startup’s existing investors, including General Catalyst Partners, Stata Venture Partners and Cambridge West Ventures, re-upped for Yottaa’s series B, joined by additional undisclosed investors.

Yottaa’s new round brings its total funding to $13 million and will be primarily allocated towards product development and increasing the rapidity of its product release cycle, as Yottaa gears up to add further features and components to its suite of services that aim to optimize, protect, and monotor websites and critical web apps for organizations of all stripes, but particularly the little guys — startups and SMBs.

Certainly, this is no easy task, especially considering that Yottaa is now straddling two continents, with the majority of its near-50 employees based in China while its headquarters are to be found in Boston. Yet, in spite of this — and in spite of the rising star that is the popular and well-funded Cloudflare (nominally, a Yottaa competitor) — the startup has been growing fast.

Led by Coach Wei, the former Chairman of Nexaweb, Yottaa has attracted over 80K businesses, thanks to its affordable software that allows businesses of all sizes to accelerate their websites and critical web apps. What’s more, over the last six months, Yottaa’s Site Speed Optimizer has grown to serve over 100 million unique visitors per month, and, as of last month, five percent of web users have visited sites accelerated by the Yottaa network.

Back in February, the startup announced its Content Delivery Network (CDN) service, which leverages the startup’s patented cloud-routing technology and global infrastructure to automate realtime, front-end optimization for the websites of startups and small businesses.

And speaking of that, adding to its value proposition and giving it a more defensible position in an attractive and growing market, Yottaa has been granted two patents, one being the aforementioned cloud routing technology, with a second granted in web performance and front-end optimization. What’s more, the startup has another eight patents pending approval.

Two months ago, Yottaa added some impressive talent (and experience) to its team, including the addition of former Yahoo CTO Raymie Stata to its board of directors. At Yahoo, Stata helped develop the company’s technology strategy and drive key projects like Hadoop. Prior to joining Yahoo, the CTO founded Stata Labs, which developed content management technology relating to email, leading the company until it was acquired by Yahoo. Along with Stata, the startup also hired Morris Porter as VP of Sales and Business Development, who formerly led sales operations for Citrix Online and served as VP of sales at Intranets.com, which he helped transform into a $600 million business unit within Cisco Systems.

On top of all this, Yottaa has been continuing with what its CEO describes as an aggressive product release cycle, turning its attention to the mobile web, launching a solution that allows users to bring a speed boost to their mobile web sites. Combining its patented front-end optimization service with a global content delivery network (CDN), the mobile acceleration software aims to address the mobile performance bottlenecks that have become endemic to the delivery and execution of the code that drives mobile applications, solving these challenges in an automated fashion.

The startup’s mobile performance solution was developed in partnership with another Boston-based startup, MocoSpace, a social gaming platform that today boasts over 25 million registered users. With MocoSpace in tow, the solution has been developed to help ensure that MocoSpace and other mobile companies can offer a great users experience in both mobile apps and HTML5 games on increasingly speedy mobile devices and networks.

With its growing suite of optimization and performance solutions for websites and web apps, one could see Yottaa as increasingly looking like a small-business-oriented version of Akamai. Either way, there is plenty of talent and competition in the space, but Wei thinks that the scope of the problem is huge and is only getting bigger thanks to the skyrocketing adoption of the mobile web. One could build a big company just by focusing on a particular link in the chain, he says, like mobile.

It’s taken Yottaa a long time to get to a place where the team (and Wei) feel like they’ve developed a steady foundation on which to work. But Wei says that he believes the team has arrived and, instead of taking the lean startup, fast iteration approach to product development, the team is focusing on solving these thorny optimization issues with a bigger team that will focus on rolling out bigger products every three months or so. It may be an alternative approach given the popularity of the lean startup dynamic in Silicon Valley, but with one foot in China already, a handful of patents pending, and more products on the way, Yottaa may very well be following Cloudflare to a lofty valuation.

For more, find Yottaa at home here.

Back in October, GroSocial raised $450K in seed funding from the Kickstart Seed Fund, Monarch Ventures, Rock & Hammer Ventures and a handful of angel investors. The seed funding acted as early validation and fuel for the Utah-based startup, which is on a mission to help SMBs — and organizations that lack the resources to train or hire dedicated social media teams — boost customer engagement and monetization via social media.

Today, the Utah-based social media marketing company has officially received further validation from investors, with the announcement that it has closed an additional $1 million in funding. Each of the investors that participated in the startup’s initial financing have re-upped, along with a handful of newcomers, including HubSpot Co-founder and CTO Dharmesh Shah and HubSpot CMO Mike Volpe.

Thus far, GroSocial has focused its efforts primarily on Facebook, but with the new capital, Co-founder and CEO Zach Mangum tells us that the startup will be expanding its scope to include integrations with other social networks in an effort to become the “Buddy Media for SMBs.”

Since October, GroSocial’s partner list has grown to include Yellow Pages, LegalZoom, SurveyMonkey, and HubSpot, among others, adding to the thousands of businesses (across some 20+ countries) already using its products. The startup is also in the process of working with a number of SMB aggregators to white label its platform and sell it as their own social media marketing product.

For some context, GroSocial has been primarily focused on its flagship “Customizer” platform, which allows brand managers to launch custom-designed promotional tabs on their Facebook partner networks. Partners can use those tabs to run contests, offer promotions, coupons, services, or to add videos. Managers can choose to add a “like gate,” meaning that customers must “like” the company’s brand page in order to access the promotions that live on the tabs, and have the ability to choose which parts of its tabs can be modified by partners and take advantage of engagement statistics.

And, thanks to integrations with services like SurveyMonkey, users can not only use the drag and drop application to design custom content for Facebook pages, but take advantage of social distribution of surveys, collecting feedback from Facebook fans as they visit your brand pages.

As for what’s next, according to David Cohen of AllFacebook, GroSocial will be looking to expand its offerings to small to mid-sized marketing agencies, enabling access to white-label services — something traditionally reserved for larger agencies with more sizable social marketing budgets. Agencies will be able to resell GroSocial services at a price point that begins at $200 per month, making it easy to turn a profit and recoup costs.

This new functionality will allow GroSocial to become both a content and training provider for the many small-to-midsize marketing agencies out there, allowing the startup to monetize as it scales, while reducing the headache agencies find when trying to juggle the implementation of their clients’ social media marketing initiatives while managing their accounts.

Though GroSocial has been targeting SMBs, using Facebook as the foundation for its apps, with its new funding in tow, the startup will be looking to expand to other social networks as well as court larger companies, building on the recent additions of eBay and SkullCandy to its client roster. Mangum said that he expects GroSocial to pass 50,000 paying customers by the end of the year, which, along with the funding, will enable the startup to double its headcount.

For more, find GroSocial at home here, or check out a few of the apps that were created by some of its SMB users. Video on Customizer below:

Like Milo before it, Wishpond launched in late 2010 to build a local search engine that aggregates realtime inventory and product listings from brick and mortar retail stores — from big chains to mom and pop shops. The startup has since focused its efforts on developing social commerce solutions for retailers, launching tools like Social Store, which allows any business to quickly create and deploy a storefront for their businesses on Facebook.

While Wishpond, like so many others, is looking to capitalize on the growing interest in social commerce, its solutions have really been developed as means by which to expand on its core competency: Consumer-facing product aggregation and search for retailers. And today, Wishpond is leveraging its technology for the sake of a segment underserved by eCommerce solutions: Shopping malls, launching Mall360, a service that enables malls and shopping centers to offer their shoppers a browsable, searchable product discovery app that works across their Web, social, and mobile properties

As eCommerce solutions mature, more and more consumers are doing their shopping online, from start to finish. However, while 90 percent of shopping begins online today, the majority of people still prefer to buy products live, in local stores, rather than online. For the most part, shopping malls are still in a past decade when it comes to their approach to eCommerce, even though customers continue to visit their stores when they’re ready to buy.

Mall360 gives shopping malls a way to increase their visibility online in a way that lets them better understand and influence potential customers while they’re in the process of making their purchasing decisions, while they’re searching, talking about products with friends, and planning their next excursion to the mall.

For outlets that may house dozens of brick and mortar retail stores, Mall360 lets visitors search and browse through all the products found at the shopping center through visiting the mall’s Facebook page and clicking on a “Shop Our Stores” button, for example.

To enable this cross-platform service, Wishpond is leveraging RetailConnect, its scalable platform that imports, aggregates and processes large volumes of product data from websites, point of sales systems, and eCommerce platforms. It then uses this data, along with its search and publishing capabilities to enable malls to instantly deploy its product discovery app on their mobile and desktop websites, mobile apps, and Facebook pages.

The goal is to be able to give consumers an easier way to search for and discover products at their favorite local retailers, while in turn, giving retailers the ability to boost social interaction, traffic and both website and social engagement. According to the Wishpond team, malls can choose to deploy some or all of the components of its solution, and over the next few weeks, participating outlets will begin to deploy the solution across their digital properties.

For more, check out Wishpond at home here, Mall360 here, or see the video below:

GitHub, the source code hosting and collaboration service, has been growing like gangbusters. The site now has over 1.6 million registered developers, hosting over 2.8 million repositories on everything from jQuery and Ruby on Rails to node.js and Redis. At the outset, Github was just a side project, a tool to make developers’ lives easier (its first slogan: “Git hosting: No longer a pain in the ass.”) Github is still a boot-strapped operation, but as both its user base and its own hacker collective (now at 73 strong) have grown, there has been an increasing demand for tools that fall outside Apple’s domain.

Today, about 50 percent of GitHub’s traffic comes from Windows users, and, as a result, the startup has finally heeded demand and is now officially bringing the party to Windows, launching a desktop app to address the challenges of developing on Windows and to make it easy for Windows developers to collaborate in open-source and private repositories.

GitHub released a similarly-targeted Mac client last year, which has since seen wide adoption. However, as popular as Apple has become, the majority of enterprise development still takes place in a Windows environment. As a result, GitHub has been looking to make its platform more appealing to corporate developers and enterprise, and its new Windows app intends to do just that.

Developing in private or open-source for Windows has lagged behind in terms of adoption among developers because they’ve lacked a full toolset for project collaboration, GitHub CTO Tom Preston-Werner says, so, with its new Windows client, the startup just made it easier to get up and running using Git and GitHub on Windows machines.

GitHub for Windows is a native app that runs on Windows XP, Vista, 7 and even the pre-release Windows 8, and includes a complete installation of msysGit. The app syncs users’ code to the cloud and allows developers to clone their repositories right from the app or directly from GitHub.com with its new “Clone in Windows” button.

Of course, anyone who’s been following GitHub’s progress will notice that it took the team more than a few days to finally release its Windows client. As one might expect, the reason for this was, besides a need to tear down development hurdles for Windows developers, that the team wanted to create an app (and a toolset) they would actually use themselves. In order words, to build a Windows app by Windows developers — for Windows developers.

To do that, GitHub has been amassing a pretty serious team of developers who collectively — aside from having cache in the community — own quite a bit of experience developing on and for Windows. For starters, GitHub brought on Phil Haack and Paul Betts, both of whom left Microsoft to join GitHub to help ship the app.

Before GitHub, Haack led the development of both ASP.NET MVC and NuGet, among other things, during his four-plus year stint as a senior program manager at Microsoft. Paul Betts joined Github following a four-year run at Microsoft, where he worked on Vista, and created development tools, among other things.

GitHub for Windows also relied on help from Tim Clem, Cameron McEfee (the guy behind GitHub’s Octocats), and Adam Roben to get the startup’s new app ready for shipping.

Developing tools that are useful to Windows developers right out of the box is essential to the success of GitHub. Of course, most big companies are still hesitant to put their code in the cloud, and although the startup puts most of its focus on open source project hosting, it’s free. The company makes its money off of its private repositories, and so better tools for companies and corporate developers could mean a significant boost in revenue for GitHub.

Of course, it’s also for the love of a challenge.

For more, find GitHub’s announcement here.

When you think entrepreneurial ecosystems, you probably think Silicon Valley (and the Bay Area), New York, and London. But Canada has something to say about that. In Startup Genome’s list, one finds three Canadian cities in the top 25. Naturally, startup accelerators have been taking off in Canada of late, with FounderFuel and Year One Labs opening their doors in Montreal, Extreme Startups off and running in Toronto, and last year, Vancouver got its very own accelerator in GrowLab.

GrowLab, which officially launched last May, has been off to a good start, launching 5 companies since its program began. And, today, the accelerator is ready to announce the five companies chosen to participate in its spring 2012 program, its second cohort, which kicks off tomorrow.

For those unfamiliar, GrowLab was founded by Boris Wertz (W media ventures), Lenonard Brody (Clarity Digital), Debbie Landa (DealMaker Media), Jason Bailey (East Side Games), and offers up to $25K in equity investment for its portfolio companies (in exchange for a 5 to 9 percent stake), plus a $150K convertible loan (backed by the Business Development Bank of Canada) upon completion of its 12 week program.

Startups spend 10 weeks at the accelerator’s headquarters in Vancouver, where the accelerator hosts its “Demo Day,” after which the startups travel to San Francisco, where they are led through two weeks of targeted introductions to Bay Area investors. According to co-founder Boris Wertz, the team founded GrowLab to give growing Canadian tech companies a mechanism an opportunity to leverage their extensive network and to help them secure follow-on funding to execute as they grow.

Wertz tells us that the GrowLab founders are each successful entrepreneurs in their own right (Jason Bailey sold SuperRewards to Adknowledge, Len Brody’s NowPublic was acquired by The Examiner, and Wertz sold AbeBooks to Amazon, for example) and are all actively involved in the program as mentors.

The accelerator is also announcing today that it has hired Canadian super angel Mike Edwards as executive director. Since 2010, Edwards has invested in more than 40 technology startups, including Punch’d (sold to Google), Summify (acquired by Twitter), as well as LaunchRock, Wander, and 500 Startups VC fund, to name a few.

But what is the accelerator looking for in its participating startups? Wertz tells us that the accelerator had hundreds of companies from all over the world apply (as far flung as Eastern Europe), but when it came down to it, GrowLab chose four Canadian startups (all of which are from Vancouver) and one San Francisco-based team.

As one might guess, GrowLab gives preference to strong Canadian companies, but is open to startups from all over the map. The accelerator primarily focuses on mobile, social gaming, eCommerce, SaaS, and enabling technologies companies, though, again, there are no set boundaries. Teams can be at any stage of development, but the program centers on agile development processes and building and developing MVPs.

With that in mind, here are the five companies chosen as members of GrowLab’s second cohort:

• BlueBat Games, the team behind BlueBox, an engine that allows game developers to easily build on social platforms
• Cinecoup aims to disrupt how feature films have been created, financed and distributed
• Food.ee, a new product from Invoke Media, the maker of HootSuite, Food.ee simplifies group ordering of delivery food for offices
• Skyscrpr makes it easy for bloggers to sell ads directly to advertisers with a user friendly interface and automated media kits
• Wantering, lets you visually browse, find and buy the latest trends from fashion blogs and curation networks

GrowLab’s program concludes with its invitation-only Demo Day, which kicks off Vancouver’s third annual Grow Conference on August 22nd. That same weekend Edwards will host an Accelerator Symposium, bringing together Executive Directors at accelerators and incubators from all over the globe to discuss best practices and challenges these organizations face in the ever-changing landscape of scaling companies.

For more, find GrowLab at home here.

This morning AnchorFree, the makers of the popular virtual private network Hotspot Shield, is announcing that it has raised $52 million in series C financing from Goldman Sachs. All in all, this brings the Mountain View-based startup to over $63 million, following the $11 million the company raised in series A and B rounds, dating back to 2006.

As part of its whopping series C round, Goldman is joined by existing investors former chairman and CEO of MCI Bert Roberts, RENN Capital President Russell Cleveland, angel investor Esther Dyson, former president of the Huffington Post Greg Coleman, Doug Maine, the former CFO of IBM, Rick Roth, and Kevin Cook, to name a few.

For those unfamiliar, AnchorFree was founded back in 2005 with a simple mission: Provide secure, anonymous, and private browsing to internet users the world over. Over the years, the company has become best known for its flagship software, Hotspot Shield, an ad-supported virtual private network (VPN), which enables users to protect their privacy and identity while surfing the Web.

Securing each page one visits by turning all HTTP traffic into HTTPS, creates what is essentially a personal, secure tunnel for each user, allowing activity, sites visited, and personally identifiable information, for example, to stay private.

The software, which is available for PC, mac, and on mobile platforms, has also become widely used in regions and countries that censor web activity, as Hotspot enables users (both for those traveling abroad and for locals living amidst censorship) to circumvent that censorship and gain free, uninterrupted access to information.

Hotspot has become one of the most popular security tools for public WiFi hotspots, having been downloaded by more than 60 million people across the globe. Since being released 6 months ago, its iOS apps have crossed 1 million users, and Hotspot is tracking over 100 million monthly user sessions and more than two billion page views per month.

Hotspot has become increasingly relevant in countries where government tracking and crackdowns have become the norm, like when Libya flipped its kill switch last year, taking the entire country offline. The software offered the world a better sense of the breadth of that government intervention, and has become increasingly appealing to both first and third worlders accessing public hotspots.

For those using AnchorFree’s mobile apps, Hotspot also offers data compression, allowing users to decide between low, medium, or high compression — especially relevant to image quality — to help users save money on mobile data plans. (AnchorFree claims that it can help users cut data usage by as much as half.)

As to Goldman Sachs, the investment bank has been busy of late, dumping $500 million into Facebook as well as a more recent $35 investment in BeachMint, the popular social commerce startup.

For more on AnchorFree, check ‘em out at home here.

Two years ago, WhiteyBoard founders Saachi Cywinski, Sherwin Kim and Jason Wilk set out to re-think those clunky, inflexible whiteboards found in classrooms and offices around the country. They developed a portable, flexible alternative: An inexpensive, “instant” plastic board that weighs less than two pounds and adheres to any surface without screws.

The idea, and the fact that co-founder Jason Wilk was (at the time) hard at work on a Y Combinator backed startup, attracted offers from people like Bill Liao, the co-founder of Xing.com. The startup turned down the offer but continued developing their whiteboards, along with a new product, called WhiteyBoard Paint, which they launched late last year.

Wilk tells us that WhiteyPaint has since found an eager audience, leading to the fortunate problem of demand quickly outpacing supply. Struggling to finance demand on a bootstrapped budget, the founders reached out to Dallas Mavericks owner, Shark Tank investor, and HDNet Co-founder Mark Cuban. Seeing a billion-dollar market dominated by a few bloated players, Cywinski said, Cuban believed WhiteyBoard was onto something.

So, today, the startup is officially announcing that it has raised an undisclosed round of seed financing from the billionaire entrepreneur. Cywinski tells us that WhiteyBoard has already sold to over 10K businesses, and smaller versions of the product are currently in stores at retailers like Urban Outfitters and ThinkGeek as well as at fulfillment centers around the world. (What’s more, its products are now made exclusively in the U.S. of A.)

Since last November, he says, sales for both its whiteboard and paint have quadrupled, and with the new funding from Cuban, the team is this week launching version 2 of its WhiteyBoard paint, which the founders say not only has better performance and more durability, but is “the best dry-erase product the world has ever seen.

That remains to be seen, but it certainly helps in the validation department to have Cuban on your side. For now, WhitePaint is for sale on the startup’s website here. And, as compared to competitors like IdeaPaint, the startup believes it can gain a leg up because its product is clear, allowing you to keep your wall colors and even have your logo show through. Plus, once painted on, WhiteyBoard paint is ready to go in 24 hours, compared to the competition, which generally takes 7 days to cure and isn’t able to erase things like spray paint.

Teaching. In spite of George Bernard Shaw’s now infamous “those who can’t do” proverb, teaching is one of the most important professions out there. Even for the many self-taught coders among us, at some point along the way, we’ve all had our lives shaped by a great teacher — in the classroom, or out. That’s why, on the whole, teacher compensation in the U.S. is embarrassing. To pick on marketers, some might see the fact that the average marketing manager makes twice the average salary of most teachers as just a wee bit backwards.

Luckily, there are a number of startups that are starting to change that, thanks to the Web and the growing popularity of open, online educational platforms. For example, Udemy, a web platform that allows anyone to host and take online classes, this morning announced that its top ten instructors earned a combined $1.6 million over the last 12 months.

Of the top ten, all made over $50K in the last year, with highest earner at over $200K. Though Udemy courses focus on everything from design and corporate training to programming, most of Udemy’s top ten teach courses on the latter and are heavy on entrepreneur-focused content. And given the popularity of CodeAcademy and others, this isn’t surprising.

And the number of platforms offering or facilitating online courses, video and otherwise, (often free) is growing fast, including Khan Academy, 2tor, Udacity, Pathwright, StraighterLine, TED Ed, Course Hero, etc. Considering the high cost of education, the more, the merrier.

But the number of platforms where teachers make money is far smaller. Udemy offers courses for free, or for $20 or $250 a pop, and take 30 percent of those fees. Since Udemy is available to all teachers, and content on most subjects, there’s a lot of potential, and based just on the platform’s top earners, the startup is making money.

Give teachers technology that makes their lives easier, flips their classrooms, or allows them to make extra income, and you’re on the right track. It’s a little known secret that teachers are/can be extremely active and supportive early adopters. ShowMe’s CEO San Kim talks about this a lot. Given this to be true, it’s no surprise that Engrade founder Bri Holt told us that, since teachers generally don’t get much discretionary spending from schools, they tend to pay out of pocket for new technologies.

While they love to be early adopters and early testers, Holt says that banking on teachers isn’t such a great business model. Instead, for ed software (as in Engrade’s case), make schools and districts pay — they have budgets. Or, there’s Top Hat Monocle, which is finding success (surprisingly) charging students for their learning tools, while teachers use it for free.

If not saving teachers money, then help them make money. Of course, for Udemy, most of those instructors outside the top ten aren’t making nearly enough for it to be a full-time salary, and those who do make money are generally experts — established names. It’s a model that’s been proven out by Lynda.com, which has been around for years, and saw $70 million in revenue last year without having taken a penny of outside funding.

Lynda.com makes sure that the quality of its affordable, paid online course material is high by hand-picking instructors who are experts in their field. And not just experts, but those who are experts and great teachers, which don’t always go hand-in-hand. But the Lynda co-founders told us that nearly 90 percent of its educators earn their entire annual income by producing videos for the platform.

But it’s not only video. One big, under-the-radar success story is TeachersPayTeachers, an open marketplace in which teachers can buy, sell, and share their original lesson plans. Like Lynda.com, the startup is not only making money, it’s profitable and self-sustaining without having taken any outside investment.

Teachers on the site passed $7 million in earnings last week, with the highest earner (a kindergarten teacher from Georgia named Deanna Jump) having made a total of $700K on the platform. She’s currently earning $60K per month, the startup’s founder Paul Edelman tells us. Yep.

For a historical perspective, Edelman tells us that, in 2011, teachers on its platform collectively made $3.4M. Today, that’s jumped to $7 million, and since sales are growing at an average of 300 percent annually, the founder expects to hit $10 million by the end of the year and $24 million in 2013. Edelman has to be feeling good about the way things have worked out.

A former teacher, Edelman launched TeachersPayTeachers in 2006 and sold it to Scholastic later that year. But the recession saw the site’s growth dwindle, so Edelman offered to buy the site back from its acquirer. Scholastic agreed, and it’s been profitable ever since.

As to the business model? The site is subscription-based, with two plans: A free option, which gives teachers 60 percent of all sales, and a premium membership that runs $57 a year and allows teachers to keep 85 percent of their earnings. Compare that to Udemy’s flat 30 percent cut, Pathwright’s 4 percent cut of sales, and Lynda’s $25 subscriptions (granted these three sites focus on courses, not lesson plans), and it might seem surprising that TeachersPayTeachers is growing like it is.

But Edelman tells us that the site hit 700K registered teachers last week, which is about the same number of teachers as the popular, venture-backed Edmodo, and 3.5x the size of Udemy’s entire user base.

Regardless, each of these sites, along with WeAreTeachers — an online community for teachers which allows them to collaborate and submit ideas for cash and prizes — are finding traction, adoption among the world’s savvy educators, and more importantly, are offering them supplementary online revenue streams. It’s still too early to say just how big these platforms will become, but with startups like Pathwright and Udemy opening the doors of online courses to one and all, there’s a lot more competition for eyeballs and dollars ahead.

For more on Udemy’s high earners, go here, and for TeachersPayTeachers at home, go here

Twitter does a lot of things right, but it still hasn’t solved the problem of turning its noise into signal. After joining Twitter, it can take a lot of following and unfollowing scores of accounts before you’ve curated a stream that makes sense for you. With its platform growing fast, Twitter is looking to make the onboarding process a little easier (and more personalized) for new users, which is why it announced today via its blog that it will begin serving users tailored suggestions of who they should follow.

Twitter is calling its new personalization features “experiments,” (in other words, they’re in beta), which will manifest for users in several ways. The first being that it will show new users a list of recommended accounts, which will be accompanied by a timeline that features tweets from those recommended accounts. New users (who are part of the beta testing) will see the list as soon as they sign up, but will not be required to follow their suggestions.

For those of us already using The Twitters, if you’re a lucky winner, you’ll begin to see Twitter’s suggestions in the “Who To Follow” box on the left side of your homescreen. From what we can tell, the box won’t be altered from its current placement/design, but will instead just start showing more relevant suggestions. To see who Twitter will recommend for you, check out their preview page here.

So, how exactly is Twitter going about serving you these recommendations? The suggestions are “based on accounts followed by other Twitter users and visits to websites in the Twitter ecosystem,” meaning that Twitter is culling the data that it receives from other websites that are utilizing its buttons/widgets, identifying the accounts that are most followed by people who visit those sites, and recommending it to you based on similarities with those users in your own Twitter activity.

Twitter will be offering the ability to turn this functionality off. This comes with the context of the announcement earlier today that Twitter will be supporting Mozilla’s “Do Not Track” feature, which allows users to opt-out of those pesky third-party cookies, including … wait for it … those used in advertising.

This morning, that seemed just a symbolic gesture on Twitter’s part, because they weren’t really tracking you anyway. With the addition of their follow recommendation engine, now this move makes perfect sense, and is obviously timed perfectly. Now Twitter can just say that, hey, if you don’t like it tracking your activity, turn on Do Not Track. As to who’s supporting: Firefox, Safari and IE9 already have some form of Do Not Track features built-in, but it seems that only Firefox is really evangelizing. However, all three browsers should be compatible with DNT, and allow for opt-outs.

There is more information about Twitter’s integration with Do Not Track reflected in its privacy policy, so, as mentioned, if you’ve got it enabled in one of those browsers, you won’t see any tailored suggestions. With the heightened interest and concern over the way social networks (and beyond) are using our personal data, this is a smart move on Twitter’s part to ensure users that it’s taking transparency (and privacy) seriously.

The other important piece of this is that people who are new to Twitter will see an option to tailor their feeds based on the sites they’re visiting from twitter, accompanied by a “learn more” link, whereas current users will find a “personalization” section added to their account settings.

Users can disable personalization at any time, which prevents Twitter from collecting information on your activity, and as the blog post adds, “You can even choose to turn off tailored suggestions from the preview page (which shows some suggestions we’d make for you).”

What’s really interesting here is that this is the first sign of Twitter getting serious about building its own interest graph, as if you’d ever get tired of all this “graph” talk, right? But this is the social network’s first big move that shows it following in the footsteps of Facebook, as the more personal info they collect on your interests and activity on their platform, the more info there is to feed targeted advertising and tweets.

For more, check out Twitter’s blog post here, and current users can test out preview here. Do Not Track info here. Do Not Track info here.

Additional reporting from Frederic Lardinois