AnyPresence, a mobile backend-as-a-service, is launching a platform that tailors front-end branding and functionality with a backend server that the company calls a “meta API.”

Richard Mendis, chief marketing officer and co-founder of AnyPresence, calls its “Meta- Platform” an evolution of API management. He said the first-generation of API management companies helped customers develop APIs. Today’s developers need the API but also the software developer kit (SDK) and a starter user interface.

The AnyPresence Meta-Platform pre-integrates a company’s product or services and out-of-the-box branding to create a mobile template that developers can then use to build their apps.

Using the template, an app will be generated with the code getting pushed to GitHub, which the developers can edit and customize for their own purposes. But there are constraints in the template. The developer has to conform to the pre-configured set by the provider. Mendis admits to these constraints but argues that developers can use their own branding and change the code as they wish.

There are third-party integrations built-in through Twilio, and SendGrid provides email integration into the app. Meta-Platform developers can also build in their own APIs. By default the app runs on Heroku and, by proxy, Amazon Web Services. Mendis said Heroku has a nice API layer that allows the user to stay within the boundaries of the AnyPresence platform environment. He said the company is working on building out its own PaaS.

Mendis said the Meta-Platform can run inside a company’s data center, offered as a virtual machine or with the capability to run with the raw source code.

Meta-Platform is designed for customers such as large technology companies that want to appeal more to developers but do not have the platform to do so.  These companies could conceivably integrate their software into the MetaPlatform, offering templates to developers for building apps that they can in turn sell ir use for internal purposes.

The AnyPresence Meta-Platform is a reminder of the influence the enterprise has on the emerging developer market. In the PaaS space, Heroku and EngineYard emerged by catering to the individual developer. In time, VMware built CloudFoundry, which quickly emerged as a leader, catering to the enterprise community. Apprenda’s core value comes from its enterprise roots and its private PaaS that customers can install in their own data centers. ActiveState has Stackato, which also caters to the enterprise, as does AppFog, which CenturyLink acquired last week. The purchase shows how developers are getting targeted, even by infrastructure companies looking to diversify beyond offering core compute and storage capabilities.

In the BaaS space, it’s a similar story with companies like Kinvey focusing more on the enterprise. In its earliest days, the company appealed to developers of all stripes.

Mendis states it has always had a focus on the enterprise. That’s what they say gives it an advantage. That is true but there is a bigger story here. Developer communities are growing fast, and the tools they need increasingly need to be more abstracted so apps can be built fast and deployed for a world increasingly using mobile devices.

In today’s tech industry, if you ask a startup founder to describe the biggest hurdles that stand between them and total world domination (or at least market penetration), it won’t be long before they begin grumbling about recruiting and the challenging process of hiring top-tier technical talent.

The demand is there, and it’s transparent. Every company is looking for great talent, job boards are littered with their listings. But, in recruiting, the supply side of the equation remains opaque. Recruiters still really have no idea whether or not someone is looking for a job — which may potentially explain the recruiting spam in your inbox. With so many companies having experienced this problem first hand, serial entrepreneur Jon Bischke and Squirl co-founder John McGrath co-founded Entelo to help mitigate your recruiting pains.

Launched in October last year, Entelo aims to assist companies of all sizes recruit technical talent by way of software that enables HR departments, recruiters and the like to leverage social data to search for and identify great candidates, even if they’re “passive,” meaning they have jobs but just may be looking for new opportunities.

Since October, Bischke tells us, the startup has seen more than 80 corporate customers adopt its recruiting software, including familiar names like Box, Groupon, Square and Yelp. To meet this demand, expand its team and expand its predictive analytics engine, Entelo is announcing today that it’s raised $3.5 million in a Series A financing round led by Battery Ventures and with participation from Menlo Ventures.

Entelo’s pitch to customers begins, of course, with the fact that it’s a card-carrying member of a new generation of startups hopping on the sexy bandwagon that is Big Data and data mining (“sexy” being a relative term, mind you). Who isn’t mining Big Data these days? All the cool kids are doing it: Waze, Google, Foursquare, Amazon, Yelp, Square, and so on.

Bischke and McGrath want to put a new spin on TalentBin and Gild and the like by allowing companies to join it in mining the Internetwebs for the best prospective talent. Said another way: Entelo has built a database of 10 million-plus potential job candidates, tracking the activity and status of each, like, say, their contributions to Github and StackOverflow, their location on Twitter or tweaks to their LinkedIn profile.

What differentiates Entelo, according to the co-founders, is that it’s essentially creating a more complete or robust resume than one would typically find on LinkedIn or Facebook. The data on our skills, job titles, achievements and projects is fragmented across a handful of sites, platforms and profiles. By pulling from those that are most relevant to highly-regarded technical talent, Entelo is betting that the resulting profile will hold more value to recruiters than the alternative.

Not only that, but the deeper its Big Data goes and the more it hones its predictive analytics, the more it understands the signals and footprints that developers who have just changed jobs or are clearly looking for jobs leave on the Web. And, as it goes, the more it understands those signals, the better it can predict which of those top-tier Facebook engineers are getting antsy.

Entelo not only wants to help companies identify passive candidates, but passive candidates that are more likely to be (actually) receptive to their recruiting efforts. The other potential use case Bischke says he’d like to see Entelo applied is in the huge back-log of resumes and applications companies keep on past candidates. While some of them were declined for a good reason, a number of them were probably great candidates, they just didn’t fit the bill for whatever reason.

Maybe that’s because they didn’t have enough experience. But, two years later, Bischke wants Entelo to be able to tell companies, “hey, you’d be an idiot if you didn’t take a second look at this woman.” Well, it probably won’t call them an idiot, but you get what I’m saying.

For more, find Entelo at home here.

ThousandEyes has raised $5..5 million from Sequoia Capital and angel investors for a service that pinpoints application issues between the enterprise and cloud services.

The service provides a view for how apps are delivered, and determines if the problem is the SaaS provider, the enterprise environment or the Internet. It can look across the network and determine where there may be packets dropping, high latency, bandwidth issues or other problems. This removes the guesswork that comes when cloud or enterprise parties are trying to determine how to respond to problems. A dashboard environment allows for SaaS and enterprise customers to communicate about problems and what actions need to be taken.

ThousandEyes customers are both SaaS and enterprise companies. SaaS providers log into ThousandEyes and test from different locations to determine how the app is behaving across public infrastructure. The enterprise uses ThousandEyes private agents to see what is happening internally with visibility all the way to the cloud provider.

The technology the company looks at the routing of the application by analyzing the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) and correlating it to the performance of the application.

ThousandEyes has customers that include members of the Fortune 500, Evernote, Priceline, ServiceNow, Twitter, Zendesk and Zynga.

ThousandEyes does not track mobile apps, which is a certain weakness. It only works between a company’s office locations and specific points where the SaaS provider has its operations.

Teambox has added high-definition video conferencing, adding to a list of providers that are adding video to their collaboration platforms.

The Teambox offering is of particular note, as it fully integrates video conferencing and screen sharing directly into the collaboration platform through Zoom, a video-conferencing service. The service allows for video conferencing of up to 25 people across desktops, tablets and mobile devices. It supports iCal, Outlook and Google Calendar.

Teambox has earned recognition for its capability to integrate third-party apps for an inline experience. It’s in some sense a framework for aggregating apps such as Box and Evernote.

But is it that much better than using third-party services in conjunction with a collaboration platform?

Tibco’s Tibbr activity stream product now integrates third-party web-conferencing tools. A customer can start a live meeting by choosing their own platform. The intent is to allow enterprises to leverage the platforms they have invested in.

So there are benefits to both ways of integrating video conferencing with a collaboration platform. Most of the services, such as Microsoft Office 365,  have integrated video conferencing, mostly as an add-on.

But the tide is shifting. Services such as Unison now offer video chat through WebRTC, the real-time communications technology that is native to the browser through a JavaScript API. Google Chrome, Firefox and Opera now support the open-source project.

Then there are the services like Pexip, which I looked at last week, which is making video conferencing available as a software.

In all of this, there is one theme. Video conferencing is now moving to software, making integration into collaboration services easier than ever before.

iZettle, the mobile payments company that has been described as a European version of Square, is today making a move that places it one national boundary away from the U.S. mobile payment company’s own backyard: iZettle is launching its iOS and Android service in Mexico. This is the Swedish company’s first move outside of Europe, and comes in the wake of a $6.6 million funding round from the Spanish financial services behemoth Banco Santander, announced just last week and made specifically to build out the solution into more markets globally.

Yes, the mobile payments market — like those chilies being sold by the small merchant pictured here, who probably only accepts cash payments today — is heating up.

To coincide with the launch, iZettle is also appointing a new MD for Mexico, Luis Arceo, who had been with Visa.

Jacob de Geer, the founder and CEO of iZettle, tells me that of the many markets where Banco Santander is active — the bank has operations across Latin America, the U.S., Portugal, Germany and Poland, in addition to the UK and Spain, with $1.86 trillion in managed funds, 102 million customers and 14,392 branches — it chose Mexico first for three reasons.

For starters, he notes that nearly all (99.8%) of the businesses in Mexico are small and medium enterprises, iZettle’s target market because, compared to bigger chains, they may be more likely to lack enough turnover to justify the investment needed for more tradition card payment processing services.

Similar to Square’s dongle and those of Here and many other competitors, iZettle’s smartphone accessory lets merchants and other businesses process credit cards using an app on a smartphone or tablet. iZettle’s particular service works on iOS and Android devices, and the company today is launching a new device that is all-in-one for all platforms and payment methods, be they chip or mag stripe. Interestingly, though, it looks like iZettle will be hiking up fees in the country. In Europe, the company charges a flat 2.75% fee, while in Mexico the fee for chip-based transactions will be 3.75% and for mag-stripe 4.75%. On top of that, merchants need to pay $499 (MXN) — about 40 U.S. dollars — for the reader, but Banco Santander customers will get a discount.

De Geer notes that 95% of cards in Mexico are chip-based. That, in fact, may be one reason why Square, whose dongle reads the magnetic stripe for transactions, may have yet to make a move here. (It’s thought that this is one reason why it has yet to launch in Europe as well.)

There is also the Santander angle: the bank is the third largest in the country and “growing rapidly,” deGeer notes.

And the third is perhaps the most contentious of all from a competitive standpoint: “Mexico is an interesting bridgehead given its geographical location,” deGeer notes. “With our new Chip & Mag reader that we’re launching, we could theoretically continue expanding north or south with the current infrastructure.”

Them’s fightin’ words, I think. iZettle, prior to today’s news, had operations in the UK, Spain, Germany, Sweden, Denmark, Norway and Finland. More specifically, in the past, deGeer has made a point of saying that it would not be looking to tussle with Square in any of the markets where it currently operates, which include the U.S., Canada and most recently Japan.

When iZettle picked up $31.4 million in June 2012 (it’s now raised $66 million in total), the intention was to be the biggest player of its kind in Europe.

“Our priority is to get the UK fully launched, and then look at other major markets like Spain, Italy, France and Germany,” de Geer told TechCrunch at the time. “We’re not interested in the U.S. They’re doing really well with Square and others.”

That tune has changed quite a lot in the last year. Rather than ruling out the U.S., now deGeer says, “Time will tell” when and if that move gets made.

Given that iZettle already has services in Spanish because of its operations in Spain, this will make one of the challenges of entering a new market a little less complicated. The backing of Santander will also help with connecting with and marketing to local small businesses. “The biggest challenge for us in any market we want to enter is always to localize the service in terms of language, currency, sign up process as well as finding the right distribution channels,” de Geer notes. “We live in a globalized world but to be successful you still need to act local. For those reasons, we believe our strategic partnership with Santander will be very valuable.”

For Santander, it will be one more way of picking up and locking in customers at a time of disruption across the financial services industry, as behemoths like Visa find themselves disrupted by much smaller startups, with everything else in between. “This partnership extends our offering of payment methods available on Banco Santander’s platform globally, and strengthens our position as the leading bank for SMEs,” noted Jorge Alfaro Lara, deputy general director of payment systems at Banco Santander Mexico, in a statement. “We are pushing the boundaries of banking with relevant technological innovation that helps small and medium businesses.”

Image: Flickr

GitHub is rolling out a major redesign over the next few days with the intent of putting more emphasis on content, speed and interactivity.

A year in the making, the new redesign is meant to be optimized for how people interact with GitHub on a daily basis. It will roll out over the next few days. Within a few weeks, every GitHub user will see this as its interface:

A user clicking on notification emails will get an interface that is less cluttered than what GitHub had before with a focus on icon-based navigation.

The goal, in every respect, is to make the code more accessible. The company has optimized the design for scanning and reading code. Icons are replacing text for developers to get thumbnail views of their repositories.

In terms of speed, GitHub says for most projects on typical connections it has reduced the navigation speed from one second to 300 milliseconds. The blog states it has done this by focusing on pjax and bettering its caching to reduce page load times.

GitHub gets pegged for latency issues, so the update is a welcome one. The design is what makes GitHub different. The company puts an emphasis on interaction design. It was the first to abstract Git, making it accessible for use on the web. This redesign follows those original roots.

Jottacloud, a cloud storage service based in Norway, is promoting itself as a safe and secure haven, free of the NSA’s long reach that it has with services such as SkyDrive, Dropbox and iCloud.

According to a company blog post, the files stored on Jottacloud’s service are protected under Norwegian law, independent of the U.S. Patriot Act. Under U.S. law, companies like Microsoft, Google and Amazon are required to turn over users’ data. The law is also applicable to local subsidiary companies operated around the world. Jottacloud has its own data centers in Norway, and they say users are protected against U.S. legislation.

I love it how companies are starting to tout their NSA-free capabilities. But here’s the thing. That file has a long way to travel before it can be in the safe haven of a Norwegian data center. It may run through countries that don’t protect it from getting snooped.

But that a file is like some fleeing object has its own fascinations. The Internet is more treacherous than ever. It’s getting cast as a place with its own fairy-tale world of both sinister evils and places of light. It’s a juxtaposition that paints the United States and its people as the monsters — the evil snoops. In contrast, the people of Norway are telling the world that all is safe in the land of the Jottacloud — as long as your files can make it there.

As we continue to see more details brought to light in how the government requests and uses information about what we do on the web and on our mobile devices, an ex-Googler and a consumer rights attorney, who have dedicated themselves to helping users remain private, have raised some funding to do this better and in more places.

Disconnect – the startup behind the Disconnect.me extensions for Chrome, Firefox and Safari browsers, which lets users of Facebook, Google and Twitter keep themselves from being tracked by third party sites, and the Disconnect 2 app that covers a wider range of sites — has raised a $3.5 million Series A round.

At the same time, as a measure of dedication to its principle of being positioned not for profit but for social good, Disconnect has been designated as a B Corporation, a semi-charitable certification. With the tax breaks and other help that this offers, it will let Disconnect dedicate time to raising awareness and campaigning as well as to creating for-profit products.

“As a B Corporation, we’re able to spend more time than a traditional company on activities such as consumer education, petition drives, and close collaboration with non-profits,” Gus Warren, a former Venture Partner at FirstMark Capital and part of Disconnect’s executive team, noted in a statement. “Disconnect is committed to benefiting not just shareholders but all stakeholders, including the public.” Warren will run the company’s New York office.

This most recent round of funding was led by FirstMark Capital, and comes on the back of a $600,000 seed round announced in March 2012. That round was led by Highland Capital Partners with participation from Charles River Ventures, and angels including David Cancel, Mark Jacobstein, Ramesh Haridas, Vikas Taneja, Chris Hobbs, and Andy Toebben.

Founders Brian Kennish, formerly an engineer at Google who left to work on this full-time, and Casey Oppenheim, a consumer rights attorney, say the startup will be using the funding first of all to help with the launch of Disconnect 2 for Safari and Opera browsers.

Disconnect 2, launched in April 2013 as a Chrome and Firefox extension, blocks some 2,000 third-party websites that track you across the web. That vastly expands the power of the extension when it initially focused on a handful of portals. Disconnect.me first kicked off when Kennish was still at Google and created the Chrome extension for Facebook specifically, in October 2010.

Kennish notes that Disconnect 2 has gotten more than 250,000 new users since launching in April and that all the startup’s apps combined have more than 1,000,000 weekly active users. Within the current range of software, it is charged on a pay-what-you-want model. “Like Humble Bundle,” says Kennish, who adds, “Some of our upcoming releases will also include freemium features.”

In addition to helping block some 2,000 third-party sites that track users’ browsing histories, the Disconnect 2 extension also helps filter out malware and encrypts data that you share on sites “to prevent wireless eavesdropping.” The company also promises that by cutting down on a lot of the tracking noise, users are actually able to see faster-loading pages and use 17% less bandwidth on average.

“Increasingly, people want to know who’s tracking them online and want to have a say about what information is being collected about them,” Oppenheim noted in a statement. “Our software is designed to put users back in control so they can decide how their personal data is used,” adds Kennish.

Longer term, the company also hopes to focus more on protecting users around the various features of data mining.

“We’ve always thought one of the biggest threats to people’s online privacy is just how big data mining is getting,” Kennish told TechCrunch. “There’s so much personal data being collected about us in so many places now and all that data is susceptible to being used in ways we don’t want. So our goal is to help people minimize the unwanted collection and use of their data. We started by tackling third-party tracking because most people don’t know their browsing history is being tracked by thousands of invisible websites they’ve probably never even heard of.”

Kennish says company is also becoming increasingly focused on security services. “We think there are way too many holes in online consumer security, which recent events have made even more obvious, and we want to help plug some of those holes.”

This coming Friday night, I’ll be at the API Days conference in San Francisco to talk for a few minutes about my perspectives of the API economy. I am not a developer — just an observer — so my views are not deeply technical. That just means I have to ask more questions and talk to more people about APIs and what they represent.

But then I have to simmer it down, collect my thoughts, and then ask some more questions. Here are two themes I am picking up on from all these conversations.

Speed: APIs are making things faster. They connect apps. Software is eating the world. APIs connect the software so it can eat the world faster. Distribution is a driver of speed. The more distributed the API network, the better it can scale and the faster it can work to connect apps and create a mesh that is increasingly more effective than content-delivery networks.

An API distributed from a central point can slow things down considerably if the load increases on the server. API management companies are pushing APIs to the edge in order to manage the billions of calls that they get daily from service providers that connect the apps into websites, mobile devices, cars — you name it.

Data-intensive APIs are doing something else. They are slowing the network. To alleviate the issue, service providers are looking at the I/O, trying to find ways to make the data connect faster to the APIs that, in turn, connect the apps so someone can post a picture or get a text message about an update from a blog. It’s this need for speed that cloud services are built upon. Scale out the infrastructure and app developers will use it to get better performance and overall quality improvements. What’s still emerging are the advancements of the networks themselves. Again, that’s where software enters the picture and the further need for APIs. The infrastructure needs to be programmed. How that’s done is the big question.

Automation: Once one part of a system gets automated, the rest of it soon follows. APIs are the glue that makes the automation possible. People want to connect their apps. It’s why services like Zapier and IFTTT have gained such popularity.

People want to connect apps to get work done and reshape their reality. Chris Dancy uses IFTTT and Zapier to connect apps that feed into Google Calendar, Evernote and Excel. He uses these services to quantify his life. Through automation, Dancy can program himself and the things around him. He can connect his dog into the network and track its movement in the house.

In this new reality, everything becomes a node. You, me, the lamp post across the street all can have sensors and APIs to connect with other people and things. If this is the case, then the API economy is more about how this new network makes for different forms of commerce that maximize these connected, automated systems. The questions: What are these new forms of commerce? What are the infrastructure and systems needed for this new reality?

These are two themes in particular I look forward to discussing.

There’s a third but it’s an open-ended one that may be better off ruminating about in the hallways or over a beer. And that’s how this new idea about data and APIs is better understood by more than 1 percent of the people out there. It’s not just the geeks who should be able to live in the future but everyone else, too.

Elastic Path has raised an $8 million debt round to fuel the development of its “commerce everywhere,” API — a hypermedia platform that abstracts backend complexity for the front-end developer and business person.  Wellington Financial out of Toronto provided the financing.

Elastic Path has traditionally served as an e-commerce company. But over the past few years, it has focused on  building an API platform that extends the capability for businesses to take commerce beyond a website.

Vice President of Marketing Matt Dione said the company will use the funding to invest in its API platform.

In particular, Elastic Path will invest in its Cortex API, a touch point broker that is designed to embed e-commerce capabilities where the experience takes place. That might be a website, a mobile platform, or through a car. The API brokers the capabilities on the backend.

The company will also use the investment to integrate with content management companies such as OpenText, with which it announced a partnership this past week.

Elastic Path is betting its future on the concept of the API Economy — this idea that the world is connecting deeper through APIs, which is in turn creating a new form of commerce that is built on a deep distribution network.

Is there aught the Raspberry Pi can’t do? Here’s another interesting implementation of the $35 microcromputer — or rather a stack of 56 Pis, linked together to form what its creators have called PiCloud, using LEGO bricks as bespoke racks for the Pi stacks. (Not the first time we’ve seen Pi paired with LEGO either.)

The project comes out of the University of Glasgow’s School of Computing Science, and is intended as a teaching aid so students can hack around with a model cloud platform and play with techs like virtualisation to learn about the infrastructure underpinning services like Amazon’s AWS.

The 56 Raspberry Pis in PiCloud are stacked in four mini Lego racks, each topped off with a top-of-rack-switch which has 16 Ethernet connections: 14 used to network the Pis and the other two for connecting the switches. At the software stack layer of PiCloud, each Pi board is running Raspbian Linux, with three LXC containers per Pi each running a Linux instance.

Hosted software on PiCloud includes running “simple workloads” within each container (such as lighttpd) and “artificial workloads” (like lookbusy) for experiments. Other experimental hacking on PiCloud has featured libvirt and docker. Hadoop is also part of the mix, although this is only currently working on the native Linux instance, rather than an LXC instance.

One of the computing schools’s students has also built an AWS-like web console interface for PiCloud (see screengrab below).

PiCloud’s creators describe it as a “never-ending work-in-progress”. Aka a teaching aid. Their future plans for the platform include using standard tools such as ovirt, “if/when we get libvirt working” — but they’re also asking for suggestions for research directions and collaborations. For more on PiCloud, check out the project homepage.

PiCloud is a great example of how the Pi is fulfilling the mission of its creators, as well as proving popular with the maker community. The Raspberry Pi Foundation originally set out to build a low-cost microcromputer to get more U.K. kids learning to code. PiCloud is certainly helping with that.

GoodData has raised $22 million in a Series D round, with funding led by São-Paulo-based TOTVS Ventures, the investment arm of TOTVS S.A., the largest enterprise software company in Latin America. Also participating were Andreessen Horowitz, General Catalyst Partners, Next World Capital and Tenaya Capital, who also participated in the latest round. This is TOTVS’ first investment outside Brazil.

The company offers a cloud-based data analytics service with pre-configured templates to analyze company data. A customer gets support from GoodData with the integration of the company data. Customers then track, segment and target their information using the GoodData platform.

A cloud-based business intelligence technology company, GoodData has now raised $75.5 million and looks poised to join the IPO crowd, at least at some point. Founded in the Czech Republic by Roman Stanek and headquartered in San Francisco, the company is one of the leaders in the emerging new business intelligence market.

“I prefer not to talk about specific exit strategies,” Stanek said in an email interview today. “But I can say we are absolutely focused on being the leading cloud analytics company, both in the U.S. and globally. If we continue to execute on our plans, then IPO could be possible in the next few years.”

Stanek said that the TOTVS team and its clout in Latin America were factors for Good Data in accepting the investment.

TOTVS describes itself as a software, services and technology company. It has 55.4 percent of market share in the Brazil technology market and Latin America with 35 percent, according to Gartner Research. Gartner calls TOTVS the biggest software company in emerging countries and the 6th in the world. In all, TOTVS is a consortium  of 25 companies.

GoodData competes with solutions from companies, such as IBM, SAP and Oracle, as well as a number of data analytics companies. It also competes with Birst and services such as Bime Analytics.

The ability to visualize geodata as a map is the latest feature GitHub is offering developers. The new capability adds to GitHub’s family of visualization tools that now includes the ability to render 3D models on the code-collaboration platform.

According to the GitHub blog, any “.geojson” file in a GitHub repository will now be automatically rendered as an interactive browsable map, annotated with a developer’s geodata.

GitHub is using Leaflet.js to render the geoJSON data and overlay it on a custom version of MapBox’s street view base layer. The base map uses data from the free wiki mapping service OpenStreetMap.

GitHub says on its blog that it supports the rendering GIS data as points, lines and polygons. Developers can customize the way data is displayed, “such as coloring and sizing individual markers, specifying a more descriptive icon, or providing additional human-readable information to help identify the feature on click.”

GitHub has a growing community of developers storing geodata — including Chicago ZIP codes, community radio stations and historic hurricane paths.

Geodata certainly is becoming a necessity for developers building mobile apps. It’s evident in the number of geocoding APIs available. Programmable Web has 68 APIs listed. Last year Programmable Web had 54 listed.

As high-profile sites like Twitter, Google, and most recently Evernote and LinkedIn turn to two-factor authentication to help their users protect themselves from malicious hackers and security breaches, Encap, a startup based out of Norway, has created an alternative it says is better and safer, using an app on a person’s mobile device. The company today announced a round of funding — we understand it to be $2 million — from Norwegian early-stage VC ProVenture Seed, which it will use to further develop the solution and take it to new markets outside of Scandinavia, specifically the U.S., where it has recently opened an office in Palo Alto. This latest round takes the total invested in Encap since 2010 to $2,850,000, with the earlier round coming from Alliance Ventures.

Most two-factor authentication services use codes sent via SMS or (in the case of enterprise services or some online banking) a separate physical device that generates a code, which a user then has to physically enter on a site to continue a log-in process.

While that leaves more room for error and customer frustration, Encap takes this process into a mobile app, and then improves on it: instead of generating new codes for users every time, it asks the user to enter a PIN into the app. Like this:

Encap then generates a code behind the scenes and sends it to the site in question — which then authenticates the user and lets him proceed to purchase goods, transfer money, or enter a site. “It’s two-factor authentication that feels like one-factor authentication,” says Thomas Bostrøm Jørgensen, the CEO of Encap. You can see a more complete video of how it works here.

The opportunity, as ProVenture sees it, is that user authentication and security are still relatively nascent areas that will continue to evolve as new threats emerge.

“Encap is a company with the potential to disrupt a market that will be worth more than $5bn by 2017,” said Herbjørn Skjervold, Managing Partner, ProVenture Seed, in a statement. “Multi-factor authentication combined with risk profiling is now seen as the replacement for passwords, but the exact mechanism to deliver this level of security is still in flux. This presents an enormous opportunity. Encap has all of the advantages of the systems currently being adopted by the big players, but none of the downsides – it is well positioned to take advantage of dissatisfaction from both users and service providers.”

The other key with Encap is that the main delivery of its service is via a white-label solution, meaning that it can be integrated via an API into any business’s mobile app to work with their online websites, or for transactions in the mobile apps themselves.

In its early days, Encap is aiming its solution at transactional sites and services, specifically banks, financial services and e-commerce companies. Its first customers include Santander Consumer Bank of Norway and payment card specialist EnterCard.

“We are targeting financial services companies, in particular banks and payment players looking to provide mobile and online financial services to consumers,” Jørgensen says about the company’s strategy in the U.S. “We are also targeting cloud and enterprise companies that are looking to offer their users, many of which are now mobile, banking-grade security balanced with ease of use.” Given that a lot of enterprises still use separate devices to generate secure codes for workers to enter the company site, but those workers are all also using smartphones, this could also help cut down on how many devices need to be provisioned and managed. Encap also notes that the service can also be used to authenticate a user at a point of sale, creating a secure way of initiating a mobile payment.

Longer term, you can see how this could work not just with these verticals but also more consumer-focused sites that are looking for a quicker way to authenticate users to complete transactions or simply to get into a site.

“We are working on deals with our partners in the U.S. and Europe and expect to make significant customer announcements by the end of the year,” Jørgensen says.

Thought Yahoo’s acquisition spree would culminate with a $1.1 billion deal for Tumblr? Nope, not so much. In fact, the buy-happy company just quietly made its second acquisition in 24 hours — in two different markets, no less. Yes, Yahoo followed this morning’s purchase of iOS photo app maker, GhostBird Software, by making a play into the enterprise conference calling space. Wait, what?

Yep, users of six-year-old free conference calling service, Rondee, were tonight informed via email that the startup has been acquired by Yahoo for an undisclosed sum. It will also suffer the same fate met by other recent Yahoo acquisitions — like MileWise, Astrid, GoPollGo and Loki Studios to name just four — in that it will soon be going the way of the dinosaur. After June 30th, the company’s website now reads, users will no longer be allowed to access their data or create new conference calls.

The startup will continue its progressive shut down from there, officially closing operations on July 12th, before ultimately cutting off user access to their calling data on July 30th, the startup said in an email to its customers today (copied below). However, to avoid stranding its users completely on such short notice, the company said that it’s arranging for “user Login ID and on-demand pins to work with InstantConference,” a company (and, previously, a competitor) it describes as a “highly reputable conference calling service.” Not sure that’s much consolation. “Hey, we may be forcing you to leave … but at least the place we’re sending you has electricity, right?”

What’s A Rondee

Rondee, for those who haven’t been following the crowded and congested conference calling market, launched in 2007 on a mission to build the “Evite for conference calls.” The startup set out to lower the barriers to entry in the conference calling arena and make it accessible to the masses. Today, that means it offers basic conference calling capabilities around the clock (for free) to anyone with an email address.

Granted, for those looking to get “fancy” with call recording, like having access to audio, custom tones, call directories and call scheduling, some account setup is required. But that’s about it. Users can choose between free, on-demand conference calling, or free, “Scheduled Rondees,” in which users can pick a future date and time to schedule a conference call and let Rondee send out email invitations to which invitees can respond to and use via the company’s website. Straightforward, easy to use and free.

Of course, while those are traits every company should shoot for, the VoIP market looks a little bit different than it did six years ago, becoming nearly ubiquitous thanks to companies like Skype and Google, meanwhile, startups like UberConference have moved onto free visual conference calling to compete with Hangouts et al. Today, Rondee’s basic VoIP model sounds very familiar.

So Why Did Yahoo Just Buy This?

While Yahoo nor Rondee has shared any real details on the terms of the deal or the motivation, we do know from a quick Google search (and a look at its press page) that the startup has been pretty quiet of late. Sure, it’s likely this wasn’t an exorbitantly expensive buy for Yahoo, but this also hasn’t been an area of strength (or focus) for Yahoo for a long time, which starts to make it seem like there isn’t really a good explanation for this one.

Maybe Yahoo wants to integrate Rondee into its internal conference solution, for internal IT use, seeing as it’s cheaper than buying an enterprise solution? Probably not.

Er, Maybe Because…

What may be more likely (and hopefully is the case) is that Yahoo liked the team and was eager to make use of its talent, so Marissa Mayer pushed Yahoo’s Acme Acqui-hire Button so that Rondee can join it in re-building Yahoo Messenger. Maybe? After all, on its website, Rondee says that it will be joining Yahoo’s Small Business Team, so while it may be a stretch, motivation could lie in the company’s has-been messaging client.

Marissa Mayer has made talent acquisition one of her top priorities since becoming CEO, and mostly her shopping spree has targeted mobile — in other words, showing the company understands that its mobile strategy and products have to evolve if Yahoo ever hopes to be truly relevant again. (And, really, it’s probably a little late, but…)

Right now, it’s easy to take a look at Yahoo’s product portfolio and sigh. Case in point: People used to Yahoo Messenger as their go-to chat app. (Well, some people did, somewhere. We’re still trying to find out who they are exactly.) But the point is that Yahoo’s messaging client used to be enormous, and now it’s about as cool as the Macarena. Meanwhile, sadly for Yahoo, gamified and chat-ified messaging apps are all the rage and continue to proliferate, especially in emerging markets. In some Upside Down World, this could mean that there’s still opportunity here for Yahoo.

Don’t Shoot The Messenger?

Though with Google’s assets like gChat, Google Voice, Gmail and Hangouts, just to name a few, Yahoo has a long way to go. A pretty long way. Sure, if anyone knows how to get Yahoo up to speed using Google’s playbook, it’s Marissa Mayer. But then there’s WhatsApp, iMessage, Viber and too many more to name. Google launched free voice calling from Gmail nearly three years ago, and adding similar capabilities and enhancements to Yahoo Mail would make sense — and wouldn’t hurt. Of course, even if it were somehow able to pull it off, weakly copying Googles Roadmap doesn’t do Yahoo any favors. It’s dangerous and, well, just sad.

Or maybe not. Maybe Yahoo will use Rondee as part of a foundation on which it will build a Hangouts competitor. Why the world needs that, of course, is another question entirely — sorry to say, Yahoo Mail diehards.

These are a few possible explanations for Yahoo acquiring Rondee, though I’m not sure they’re particularly satisfying. To this point, it’s worth reading this post (really, lament) on Yahoo Messenger from Yahoo’s former director of global tech initiatives. Marissa Mayer seems to be making an effort to address some of the internal idiocy Smith cites as contributing not only to the downfall of Messenger itself but to the downfall of products subsequently created (internally!) that might have saved it or at least prolonged its life.

Mostly, Smith attributes Yahoo’s struggles to crappy leadership, a management focused on preservation rather than trimming-to-grow or innovation, the ole “it’s hard to get stuff done at a big company” line and a lack of a unifying product vision. The latter of which, at least, fittingly smacks of the very product strategy currently at work in Google Land.

This seems to be a familiar tune at Yahoo, though it is heartening that some of that stuff is fixable. However, watching Marissa Mayer acquire all these startups that are on their last lifeline or just keeping their head above water is suspect. Now, it could be questionable in a good way, provoking media attention, buzz and providing a (relatively) cheap way to bring in quality talent. And maybe we’re watching a grand vision unfold, with Marissa acting as the Great Unifier it sounds like Yahoo desperately needs.

Sure, this could be akin to watching Tony Stark miraculously build an Iron Man suit from spare parts and scrap metal … or this turnaround strategy very well prove to be suspect in the same way that a bunch of bricks painted yellow does not gold bullion make.

For more, find Rondee’s email to users below:

Dear Rondee User:

We thank you for being with us over the last six years as we grew Rondee’s free conference calling service. It has been a privilege to work with you.

Yahoo! has just acquired Rondee, and we will be joining Yahoo! Small Business to continue innovating with technologies that help small businesses and groups.

Starting July 12, 2013, RONDEE WILL NO LONGER BE OPERATIVE. To minimize inconvenience to you, we have arranged for your Login ID and Rondee On Demand PINs to work with InstantConference, a highly reputable conference calling service. InstantConference has created a special free plan for Rondee users with unlimited minutes, unlimited conferences and up to 150 callers per conference.

You’ll do On Demand calls with InstantConference the same way you did with Rondee:

REDACTED
If you want to use advanced features such as audio recording, call scheduling using the Outlook add-on or real-time monitoring, you’ll need to log in to the account created for you at InstantConference.

REDACTED
There are three main differences between advanced features on Rondee vs. InstantConference:

Call recording works differently on InstantConference. Instead of activating audio recording in advance online, the organizer does it on the call by pressing *9 and entering the 4 digit code shown above, or by turning on audio recording through a moderator control panel. Learn More

InstantConference has a fully featured moderator control panel. You can monitor call attendance, mute, disconnect, or lock the conference in real-time. Learn More

InstantConference has a different way of handling scheduled conferences. Rather than the web-based format used by Rondee, InstantConference offers an Outlook Add-On which is convenient and easy to use. Learn More
BY USING YOUR RONDEE LOGIN AND PIN(S) WITH INSTANTCONFERENCE, YOU CONSENT TO THE INSTANTCONFERENCE TERMS OF SERVICE AND PRIVACY POLICY.

CLICK HERE for Terms and Conditions.

CLICK HERE for Privacy Policy.

For Premium users with balances in their PayPal account, we will be refunding those balances right after July 12, 2013. InstantConference also offers toll-free conferencing with plans as low as 2.9 cents a minute.

PLEASE NOTE: The Rondee service will soon no longer be operative and will no longer accept new sign-ups. Current users will be able to continue using Rondee for conference calls through July 12, 2013 and log in to access account information through August 12, 2013.

For questions about the Rondee service or your Rondee account, click here.

For questions about InstantConference, click here.

Thank you again for your support,

The Rondee Team

Last summer, word started to trickle out about a young, stealth startup called RelateIQ that was rumored to be one of the more ambitious players among the new (and expanding) class of Big Data startups. Adam Evans and Steve Loughlin had founded RelateIQ the summer before to tackle some enduring problems in the way we manage our professional relationships — the same ones that led to the birth of Plaxo lo a decade ago, and many more since. Though we live in the Digital Age of smartphones and cloud computing, Evans and Louglin were frustrated by the fact that people still manually entering important professional data into aging and stuffy relationship management tools.

On a mission to change that by using Big Data to automate relationship tracking and by taking mobile seriously, RelateIQ was able to attract $9 million from Accel, Morgenthaler and SV Angel in Series A financing, while recruiting key advisors like LinkedIn’s former chief data scientist DJ Patil, Bob Cohn (of Octel, Lucent and Sequoia fame) and current Apple board member and former Intuit CEO, Bill Campbell. Fast forward to today and, after two years of extensive and stealthy testing and fueled by a hefty new round of funding from a roster of familiar names, the startup is finally throwing open its doors to the public.

The new Series B round, which was first reported by former colleague Evelyn Rusli of the WSJ, brings RelateIQ’s total funding to $29 million and values the company at $100 million. The company has since confirmed these numbers, telling us that its new, $20 million Series B round was co-led by Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale’s new, “smart enterprise”-focused venture capital firm, Formation 8 (which just raised its first, $448 million fund) and Accel Partners.

The lead investors were also accompanied by an impressive supporting cast, including Battery Ventures, AMC Cloud Ventures (via Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang), Thrive Capital, Allen & Co. and Facebook and Asana co-founder, Dustin Moskovitz — among others.

Not bad for a startup that works out of the basement of a home decor business in Palo Alto, right? (Never you mind that Facebook used to house its servers in the same basement before “The Social Network” Era.) In fact, considering that CRM and relationship intelligence software isn’t exactly The New Kid On The Block, it makes one wonder what it is about RelateIQ that attracted this gaggle of tech industry veterans.

Traditionally, the Customer Relationship Management space (and to a lesser degree social CRM) has been dominated by veteran enterprise software companies like Salesforce.com, Oracle and SAP. Today, however, the Bigs find themselves being chased by a bevy of startups that are trying to beat them at their own game by using advances in cloud computing and data tech (among others) to offer smarter, more consumer-friendly experiences or by moving downstream to bring enterprise-grade tech to startups and small businesses.

As Evelyn points out, this has forced CRM incumbents to modernize, get more mobile and social either by building out their platforms themselves and acquiring (like Jive’s buying Producteev), or by turning to Big Data startups to help them make sense of enormous data sets.

RelateIQ, which has 100 clients already in tow at launch including companies like T3 Advisors and WellnessFX, wants to go after the incumbents by not only offering social integration and data enrichment out of the box, but by significantly reducing the amount of manual data entry required to get more insight into their professional relationships. Features like the ability to quickly deploy new workflows, the founders explain, are attractive to teams that manage their business’ external relationships, whether in business development, sales or product, allowing them to get started immediately.

Of course, using algorithms and machines to try to better understand and glean insight from the chaos of human relationships is an uphill battle. RelateIQ wants to close that gap by sucking in and analyzing faster, on a bigger scale, and by offering more nuanced analysis of the details in your professional relationships, than the next guy.

It does that by automatically capturing data from email, voice, social networks and calendars and analyzing language in those communications to identify words and phrases in an email that might indicate a lead is getting ready to take the next step, or just the opposite. In other words, the idea is to reduce the amount of work you have to do and only surface the critical stuff you can’t ignore.

The startup’s SaaS service also eliminates the headache that results from the fact that your contact information is scattered across multiple platforms or hiding in someone’s spreadsheet or address book. RelateIQ cleans your contact info and merges it from across address books to give companies one reliable source of contact info, along with offering features of a digital personal assistant, like email tracking and prompts when you forget to reply to important contacts.

The other key to RelateIQ’s value proposition is mobile, allowing teams to track and manage their professional relationships in realtime, collaborate with colleagues and access dynamic reporting and updates contact info from native Android and iPhone apps. By adding an automated intelligence layer to relationship management, it becomes easier for overworked teams to prioritize legit leads and save those that are falling through the cracks by automatically bubbling up forgotten leads in your contact list.

The ability to do that on-the-go while you’re on a business trip — without having to manually log calls from your iPhone — is huge. But what is this all going to cost, your ask? While its mobile apps are free, its SaaS product runs $49/user/month or $99/user/month for its premium version.

For more, find RelateIQ at home here.

Microsoft is now offering multi-factor authentication for Windows Azure to allow enterprises to secure employee, partner and customer access to cloud applications.

According to the Azure blog, the capability will allow customers to enable the authentication capability for Windows Azure Active Directory (AD) that will identify and help secure access to Office 365, Windows Azure, Windows Intune, Dynamics CRM Online and  other apps that are integrated with Windows Azure AD. According to the Azure blog, developers can also use the Active Authentication SDK to build multi-factor authentication into their custom applications and directories.

Here’s how it works. People sign in with their user names and passwords. They then open an app on their mobile device through an automated phone call or text message — the idea being that it will better identify the true user, prevent unauthorized access to data and applications in the cloud. That in turn will reduce the risk of a breach and enabling regulatory compliance.

Active Authentication is built on the Phone Factor service which Microsoft acquired last fall. There are different options for set up. A customer can add it their Windows Azure AD tenant and turn it on for users. They can also add the service to custom applications by adding a few lines of code. The service also offers automated enrollment.

Customers can choose to pay on a per user, per month basis or by the number of

• users enabled for multi-factor authentication each month.

Adding AD to Windows Azure has opened Microsoft customers up to a much deeper way for IT to manage the use of its cloud infrastructure. It centralizes permissions. With Active Authentication, an IT manager can have a bit more peace that the people logging in are actually the people who should be accessing the network.

Microsoft is by no means the first to offer multi-factor authentication for its IaaS. Amazon Web Services has multi-factor authentication. Google also offers two-factor authentication.

Google just launched Google App Engine 1.8.1 with a host of new features, most notable among them a long-awaited search API and push-to-deploy feature similar to pushing code to a Git repository.

The new features follow a busy Google I/O that witnessed the company showing its strongest push ever into the cloud services market. Until the announcements, Google had been quiet about Google Cloud Platform. But now with general availability, the team is pushing out new features weekly and  connecting different parts of the organization in a way it had not done before.

Today was similar with a number of new updates to Google App Engine:

Search API: About a year since the Search API release, Google has moved it to the preview stage — general availability. The Search API allows a developer to integrate Google-like searches over structured data such as plain text, HTML, atom, numbers, dates, and geographic locations. As we reported last week, Google will begin charging for operations and storage. Pricing details can be found here. Prices may change up to general availability.

Source Push-to-Deploy: App Engine now supports deployment of Python and PHP applications via the Git tool. The promise is that developers can deploy apps with the same ease as pushing to a git repository.

Google Cloud Storage Client Library: Google is improving access to Google Cloud Storage from App Engine through the preview release of the Cloud Storage Client Library. In its  blog post, Google says the client library contains much of the functionality available in the Files API but has stronger integrity guarantees and a better overall developer experience. There is some overlap so the Files API will be decommissioned in a future release. The Cloud Storage Client Library will be upgraded.

Task Queues: A popular request, developers can now quickly add tasks to any Task Queue without blocking, allowing a developer’s applications to process requests more efficiently.

Datastore: Google says there are two significant Google Cloud Datastore changes in this release. The team has changed the Datastore default auto ID policy to use scattered IDs. Also, the NDB library now supports ‘DISTINCT’ queries.

A fill list of features and bug fixes for 1.8.1 can be found in Google’s release notes.

ZenPayroll launched in December with $6.1 million from a group of new enterprise kingpins. Following the launch of a service for accountants in April, the Y Combinator startup today announced the capability to pay contractors through its platform.

The new service automates the process of paying contractors and doing the required filings with the Internal Revenue Service. With the new capability, the software-as-a-service (SaaS) covers the entire workforce.

With ZenPayroll, independent contractors can be paid through direct deposit and payments with reported at the end of the year on IRS Form 1099. Once a contractor is added, an employer can also record historical payments made outside of the software.

Contractor payments are available immediately through ZenPayroll and pricing is the same for both employees and contractors — $25 per company, plus $4 per employee or contractor, per month. When a company grows past 10 employees or contractors, the rate drops to $2 for each additional person

ZenPayroll will do the proper filing for the contractor workers. Zen Payroll will also make sure the contractor gets a copy for income tax reporting purposes.

There are more than 43 million contractors in the United States. Can you believe that? That’s one-third of the workforce. Most of the work to pay those people is done manually, said Co-Founder and CEO Joshua Reeves. And people make mistakes. Then the IRS fines them. No fun.

The traditional services like Paychex and ADP are just not flexible enough to pay contractors in the manner that ZenPayroll does. But a service like ZenPayroll makes automation inevitable across the entire back-office. Once a part of a process gets automated, it’s often the other parts that follow. We see it across the market. The human touch is great but the humanity can be too often lacking in old systems that treat the individual in a coarse, industrial way. Automation may seem scary, like some robotic sci-fi nightmare. But automation can often make life seem a bit more bearable as we just try to keep up to date and out of the crosshairs of the IRS.

Red Hat launched an enterprise Linux-based OpenStack platform today that provides a way to build out cloud services from either inside the data center or from a services provider.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux will integrate a vanilla version of OpenStack to create the new Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform. It will mean that Red Hat applications can run in an IaaS platform and provide support for web and mobile oriented applications that are more cloud aware. It will serve as the main platform for Red Hat’s cloud strategy.

The news is significant as it positions Red Hat as a clear leader for building out OpenStack clouds. The company is also using OpenStack to offer an alternative to the virtualized environments long dominated by VMware.

Red Hat has made a significant push in OpenStack over the last year. It is now the number one contributor to the open cloud effort. It will buttress its OpenStack cloud with a network of certified partners. It has also made investments in Mirantis, which will provide a services component to Red Hat OpenStack build outs.

The combination of Red Hat’s servers with OpenStack is intended to give developers more ability to differentiate the services they run while leaving Red Hat with the responsibility of maintaining Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server and the OpenStack code.

With the news, Red Hat is also making a big push into the data center, VMware’s place of power in the enterprise. The new offering integrates the open-source KVM virtualization platform with Red Hat Linux. It will also include Red Hat CloudForms, a hybrid platform that will give customers a way to gain visibility and control over their virtual infrastructures. According to the company, it will let users deploy, monitor, and manage cloud services across Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization, VMware vSphere, and other virtualization solutions, hypervisors, and platforms.

The enterprise has that sucking sound about it. You can almost hear the enterprise moving to the cloud. With that shift means a different power structure. Red Hat’s news today shows it has the technology and is positioned to be one of the winners in the battles ahead.