Box is releasing a number of new features today, with the broad theme of addressing “the needs of our largest enterprise customers in deploying this kind of technology,” according to CEO Aaron Levie.

Those features include the ability to search files across an entire company, a new dashboard offering more granular controls for company administrators, mobile security options like passcode locks, support for multiple email domains, activity notification archiving, and a new enterprise licensing agreement. Altogether, Levie says this means big companies can manage organization-wide Box deployments “at a scale that was never before possible.” This should also help some of those larger customers address issues like regulatory compliance.

For example, Box’s search was previously limited to individual accounts. The new enterprise-wide search addresses e-discovery requirements, so if a legal issue arises, businesses can find content anywhere within the company.

The new ELA is crucial too, Levie says, because it means customers should have more predictable pricing as the exact size of their teams change, rather than paying purely on a seat-by-seat basis as in the past.

Levie adds that this is part of a larger trend, both within Box and across cloud industry. A few years ago, CIOs of large companies only wanted to use a service like Box in isolated pockets of the organization.

“Today what we’re seeing is, companies are doing the inverse,” Levie says. “They actually want their core systems to be cloud. … They would rather have the core systems be from vendors that can focus all of their energy on solving all of their core problems instantly.”

Hence the new features making that process easier. Levie also points to the successful IPOs of companies like Jive Software and Splunk as evidence of how the enterprise landscape is changing. That brings up another question: Given its growth and success, is there a Box IPO on the horizon? It may may be in the long-term playbook, but Levie says that for now, he’s enjoying the benefits of keeping the company private, so, “We’re definitely not going to do anything this year.

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.

Confirming rumors from last week, HP just publicly announced a layoff plan that will result in a reduction of 8% of its workforce. Shortly after releasing the memo to Wall Street, HP CEO Meg Whitman sent a company-wide video message explaining the future of Bill Hewlett and David Packard’s company.

She acknowledges throughout that HP is in trouble, stating in the beginning, “HP’s performance is still not where it needs to be” and “We have a lot of work ahead of us to get HP back on track.” She also explains, a bit comically and perhaps erroneously, that “[HP] is currently rebuilding credibility one quarter at time, and to do that, we need to consistently deliver on what we say.”

Whitman also reaffirmed HP’s commitment to infrastructure, PCs and printing, servers, storage and networking. “This is a differentiating strength for HP and one we can be proud of,” she said in the video.

However, the axe is about to fall throughout HP. Before Whitman attempts to justify the cuts, she explains that HP’s employee count has grown at a pace unsustainable by its low revenue as of late.

“We’re struggling under our own weight,” said Whitman in today’s internal video memo. “And we’ve got to restore a healthy balance in order to return HP to its position as a growing… thriving… innovating… industry leader. That’s what this is all about. And the workforce reduction is only one piece of a comprehensive effort. We see a lot of opportunity to remove complexity, streamline and reduce costs in a number of areas across HP.”

Like previous rumors speculated, HP plans on reinvesting the savings into the company. “We’ll be investing to drive leadership in the three strategic pillars – cloud, security and information optimization. And in each of our businesses, we’ll make investments to stay ahead of customer expectations and market trends.” This is a fresh move for HP who under previous leadership simply used the savings of a smaller company to help the ledger.

In the consumer-focused PC and Printing Group, “we’ll be focused on design, engineering, quality, and generating demand and desire with our customers,” she said. In Enterprise Servers, Storage and Networking (ESSN) “we’ll invest to drive R&D and innovation in our core businesses of servers, storage and networking. In Software, we’ll be investing to speed development across Security, Information and Management Infrastructure for both on-premise IT and in the cloud – with a key focus on software-as-a-service offerings. This will include the extension of Vertica and Autonomy across our entire portfolio. And in Services, we’ll improve processes and build-out capabilities in cloud, security and information. We’ll also be strengthening our industry practices, as well as our service quality and innovation.”

Whitman also detailed that HP is looking to better train their employees while providing a “career development and better tools and support.”

Like most leaders, Whitman ends the video with a reminder to her underlings that “In times of change, it’s easy to lose focus, waiting to see what happens next. We can’t let that happen. This a great organization, full of incredible people who are resilient, committed and who care about our customers and our company. I’m asking all of you to please keep driving forward. Close every deal. Leave nothing on the table. We need that now more than ever.”

Below is a transcript of the video. We are currently working on obtaining the video itself. Update: We have the video. Uploading now.

Within HP’s quarterly results today, a bit of a development for Autonomy, the company’s $10.2 billion enterprise software purchase from last year that was profitable when HP bought it but in the last quarter saw “significant” declines in its core licensing revenue: its founder and head Mike Lynch is stepping down, and he is getting replaced by a HP man: chief strategy officer and EVP of enterprise software Bill Veghte.

HP says in its Q2 earnings release that this is being done to help improve Autonomy’s performance. In an internal memo to employees, which TechCrunch has obtained, CEO Meg Whitman says that the move is being made to as a mark of how HP is “investing to speed development across Security, Information and Management Infrastructure for both on-premise IT and in the cloud – with a key focus on software-as-a-service offerings.” The same strategy will be applied to the company’s Vertica business, Whitman noted in the memo.

HP’s Q2 earnings saw revenues down by three percent to $30.7 billion. Within that, the company saw a mixed (but overall declining performance) in its different divisions:

• The Personal Systems group saw flat revenues with a 5.5 percent operating margin. Commercial revenues were up three percent but the bigger portion, consumer revenue, declined by four percent. Total unit sales were down by one percent.
• Services were down by one percent with 11.3 percent operating marging.
• Imaging and printing (which is merging with PSG) is down 10 percent.
• Enterprise servers, storage and networking also down by six percent.
• HP financial services up by nine percent with a 9.9 percent operating margin.
• Sofware revenue up most of all: 22 percent with a 17.7 percent operating margin (no wonder this is the part that previous CEO, Leo Apotheker, wanted to keep and ditch all hardware). However, within this Autonomy saw a “significant” decline in license revenue.

Autonomy’s performance probably represents something of a disappointment — and perhaps surprise to HP, since the unit seemed to be doing much better when the acquisition was announced in October. At the time of the deal, Apotheker noted:

“Autonomy presents an opportunity to accelerate our strategic vision to decisively and profitably lead a large and growing space…Together with Autonomy, we plan to reinvent how both unstructured and structured data is processed, analyzed, optimized, automated and protected. Autonomy has an attractive business model, including a strong cloud based solution set, which is aligned with HP’s efforts to improve our portfolio mix. We believe this bold action will squarely position HP in software and information to create the next-generation Information Platform, and thereby, create significant value for our shareholders…Autonomy is a highly profitable and globally respected software company, with a well-regarded management team and talented, dedicated employees. We look forward to partnering with a company who shares our commitment to solving customer problems by creating smart, cutting-edge products and solutions.”

Mike Lynch, the founder and current head, will be stepping down after a transition period, HP says, and it doesn’t look like it’s giving up on Autonomy any time soon: “the market and competitive positioning for Autonomy remain strong, particularly in cloud offerings,” the company writes in its statement.

Autonomy, founded in the UK, offers a software infrastructure solution in which enterprises can get different applications to “communicate” with each other.

It has 20,000 customers worldwide, and there are over 400 OEM companies that offer licenses to more than 500 products. Applications include those that handle information access technology, pan-enterprise search, information governance, end-to-end eDiscovery and archiving, records management, business process management, web content management, customer interaction solutions, and video and audio analysis.

Following are some other founder departures from other companies HP has acquired — as you can see it looks like all of the others may have been working through their earn-outs (typically two years; although Chris Lynch stayed for just over a year after Vertica was bought, to join Atlas Ventures). Between Autonomy getting bought in October and today, it’s been about eight months.

HP acquired Opsware for $1.6 billion in 2007.  President & CEO Ben Horowitz stayed a year before leaving in 2009 to launch Andreesen Horowitz.

HP acquired Vertica for $350 million in February 2011. CEO Chris Lynch left in March 2012 to join Atlas Ventures, a VC firm.

HP acquired Stratavia in August 2010.  Terms not disclosed.  CEO Thor Culverhouse left in February 2012 to found new company.

HP acquired ArcSight for $1.5 billion in September 2010.  CEO Tom Reilly left HP in May 2012.

HP acquired Fortify in August 2010. Terms not disclosed. CEO John M. Jack left in January 2012.

Business software giant SAP announced today that it will acquire Ariba’s cloud -based business commerce network for approximately $4.3 billion. SAP’s subsidiary, SAP America, Inc., is offering $45 per share for the platform, and plans to close the deal during the third quarter, pending Ariba shareholder approval of the sale. Ariba had 100.2 million shares on the market, as of March 31st, according to an AP report citing FactSet data.

The Ariba board of directors has already unanimously approved the transaction. The per share purchase price represents a 20% premium over the May 21 closing price and a 19% premium over the one month volume weighted average price per share, says SAP.

The deal will be  funded from SAP’s free cash and a €2.4 billion term loan facility and is expected to be accretive to SAP’s non-IFRS earnings per share in 2013. SAP says the acquisition will combine Ariba’s successful buyer-seller collaboration network with SAP’s own customer base and solutions in order to create new models for business-to-business collaboration in the cloud.

Sunnyvale-based Ariba has approximately 2,600 employees, $444 million in total revenue, and experienced 38.5 percent annual growth in 2011. Its business network recorded 62 percent organic growth in the same period. With the addition of Ariba, SAP will acquire the leader in cloud-based collaborative business commerce.

The focus of Ariba’s business is in procurement, spend management, and supplier discovery, and is partnered with major ERP suppliers, including SAP, as well as Salesforce, IBM and Oracle.

“The cloud has profoundly changed the way people interact. The impact will be even greater as enterprises connect and collaborate in new ways with their global networks of customers and partners,” SAP Co-CEOs Bill McDermott and Jim Hagemann Snabe said in a statement. “Cloud-based collaboration is redefining business network innovation, and we are catching this wave in the early stage of its evolution. The addition of Ariba will create the business network of the future, deliver immediate value to our customers and provide another solid engine for driving SAP’s growth in the cloud.”

Most businesses need to be able keep in touch with their customers and provide customer service over the phone, but rolling out a call center can be expensive. Not just that, but most call center software today isn’t very good at keeping tabs on customers and presenting all the information that businesses need to serve them better. That’s why Talkdesk is launching its cloud-based call center software Tuesday as part of the Startup Battlefield at TechCrunch Disrupt.

The startup enables call agents to know everything about customers when they call, based on reverse lookup of the customer’s phone number, without having to ask for their information. It also integrates with the existing CRM systems that companies use, such as SalesForce, as well as helpdesk software like ZenDesk and Desk.com. But it also hooks into Twitter and Facebook to find public information about customers from social networks.

Not only does Talkdesk handle CRM and help desk features, but it also allows agents to make, receive, record and transcribe calls. It gives a history of the customers’ previous interactions, including items purchased and searched, the amount of money spent, and previous calls made. Since the service operates in the cloud, all of this information is available in the agent’s web browser when a customer calls.

Talkdesk is based on Twilio technology, and was founded as part of the Twilio Fund contest last year. Launching today, Talkdesk is making its cloud-based call center software generally available to anyone who wants to sign up. Because of its cloud-based infrastructure, businesses can sign up in less than five minutes.

Talkdesk was part of last summer’s 500 Startups Accelerator class, and has raised $450,000 to date. It has three employees, based in Mountain View, Calif.

Disrupt Q&A

Q: What are the things that company buying your product gets ROI?

A: When you use Talkdesk, you have all the information about the customer, and you can quickly answer problems and make suggestions.

Q: Do people replace existing software, or layering on top?

A: Customers we have now don’t have call center software.

Q: Regulatory issues from recording phone conversations?

A: You have to tell the person, but you can add information before someone answers the call.

Q: Pick one customer and explain the use case?

A: Chevy, for example, using for support and one for sales. They have two numbers, and can see all information about the customer.

Q: What would a customer use instead?

A: In the example of Chevy, they have big call centers, but nothing for this type of solution. Out goal is to eventually to go big in the enterprise.

Q: Price points?

A: First agent is free always. So customer tries one agent, and then expand. We charge $49 per month per agent.

Q: A lot of your focus is on the telephony side of things and that’s important, but a lot is moving to social media.

A: For now, we are only voice, but integrate with email systems like ZenDesk. But the phone is still the main avenue of conversation for all businesses.

Software is eating another part of the world. (Or at least the next generation of software is eating the older 1970s-era kind.)

Sunglass, which is coming out of beta today at TechCrunch Disrupt New York, should bring a bit of joy to longtime CAD users and professional architects and designers. The company is launching very social, browser-based software for 3D modeling.

“This is like Google Docs for 3D objects,” said CEO and co-founder Kaustuv DeBiswas. “We’re taking traditional desktop software from the architecture world and putting it in the cloud.” Sunglass is undercutting existing computer-aided design software dramatically. Normally, this older software can cost anywhere from $5,000 to $50,000, he adds. In contrast, the most basic version of Sunglass is free and then designers can pay for extra apps or add ons.

This is not a total replacement, however. It’s meant to be a collaboration tool for teams of designers or individual hobbyists. “Software modeling has seen 30 to 40 years of development. We don’t want to compete on a feature-by-feature basis,” he said.

Inside Sunglass, designers can take a 3D model and rotate, flip or scale it without Adobe Flash. It’s built with HTML5 and WebGL. The team behind Sunglass comes from MIT. DeBiswas earned his Ph.D in design computation and was a TED fellow last year while his co-founder Nitin Rao is an MBA from Sloan that started his career out in social enterprise and microfinance.

DeBiswas has spent years thinking about the future of design technology. ”Sunglass is a product that’s fluid enough that everyone from a kid doing a Maker Bot to a professional firm can use it,” he said.

Sunglass works with more than different 40 different file formats, removing a hurdle that has long made it frustrating for designers to critique and give feedback on each other’s work. There’s also a Dropbox integration for storing and accessing 3-D files.

It’s also a bit social. Sunglass users can simultaneously access a single 3D model and suggest tweaks through chat or voice chat. There’s also a sketch tool for marking suggestions. It’s easier to share 3D models with embeds like this one on DeBiswas’ Tumblr. He says that helps with virally attracting new customers. There is also an API that lets designers build tools for others. Because Sunglass is a platform play, the company is hoping that developers will eventually build specific tools that others will want on an as-needed basis.

They’re not pursuing a classic monthly subscription model with one standard set of paid premium features. Instead, customers can pay for apps at a rate of about $25 a month.

“Our vision for software in the future is that it will be a collection selected parts,” Rao said. “It won’t be a big company giving you a one-size-fits-all set of toolbars.” He gave an example app that does very fast cloud-based rendering. It takes about 45 seconds per object.

Taking a page from Sequoia-backed Unity Technologies’ business model, there’s also a store where designers can buy one-off 3D models from others. Unity, which has a 3D gaming engine that powers titles like Shadowgun, has a store where game developers can buy 3D effects and models from other developers.

“After cutting costs and fixing interoperability, the third thing we want to go after is building a community with this store. We have a lot to learn from the gaming industry and we think the comparable opportunity in the product design and architecture market is really massive.”

Sunglass has raised $1.8 million in seed funding from General Catalyst, Sherpalo Ventures, Lerer Ventures and Maynard Webb.

Q&A

Q: What are the biggest technical difficulties in bringing this to the browser? And what are the benefits versus doing this on the browser?

A: Most of the computation doing computation are doing it back stage. We have super computers. If you think about it one of our clients, their reactions were my client gives me large BIM files which I have no use for except that we have to go ahead and re-model. We support 45 file formats and you can drag at 3D file. We are working on technologies which will give you data on demand. We’ve taken this constraint as an opportunity.

Q: Is this for professional users? Or for regular people? The presentation implies that you’ll have users who are not fluent with CAD.

A: This spans from kids playing with the motorcycles above to professionals who are modeling fluid dynamics. Starting off, it’s aimed at professional designers, but it’s easy enough that you don’t need complex training.

Q: Can you talk about price points?

A: Bite-sized modules and apps for anywhere from $25 to 100 per month.

Q: You guys are latching on to a huge trend in terms of designs. How do you help synchronous collaboration? Many of these designers don’t see themselves as early adopters. They may not feel comfortable with this or with their work in the cloud. How do you deal with this?

A: Asynchronous collaboration is important. We’re working with a version where you can store a version. We have a version on Tumblr. Other people could view it on Tumblr. We have all the persistence of data on the back-end. It’s not transient. It’s not just real-time collaboration. The second thing is about behavior. Two things. We think the product has enough virality in it. I would send you a link. You don’t need a plug-in. It’s just HTML5, WebGL. We’ve made the interface light. We believe that tomorrow that software will be a collection of small pieces. We’ve intentionally kept it very simple. This has happened to every other industry. We believe it will also happen in design.

If you are in the business of needing to process shopping for your ecommerce startup then this is going to be of interest. If not, look away now.

Today at TechCrunch Disrupt in New York the startup PayLeap, which is a payment platform for ecommerce, is reaching out with a new program to help fund the development of applications connecting to their payment gateway platform.

Whether it’s marketing spiel or not, PayLeap claims to have “set aside” $1 million in funding to cover developers upfront, as well as a residual stream back from referred businesses that have active payments with the company.

Here’s how it works: A lot of web and app developers refer their customers to some of the larger payment gateway companies, but they don’t get anything back for doing so. PayLeap program (P4) plans to collects these ongoing residuals through a referral relationship. That means the merchant, the partner, and of course PayLeap benefits.

PayLeap is going up against Authorize.net and Auth.net (a legacy gateway that’s been around a long time). The problem is the developers don’t get anything back for those referrals. PayPal, Google Checkout, Stripe and Square are also competitive but often involve additional fees.

P4 is supposed to help offset the development costs associated with certifying through PayLeap’s APIs and help cover co-marketing and promotional costs.

This could be useful for startups which need to handle electronic payments like credit, debit, check/ACH, gift card, and EBT because its connected to global payment processing platforms including First Data, TSYS and Paymentech.

Of course, it’s not just commerce, but could apply to mobile, healthcare, bill presentment, inventory management systems, and pretty much anywhere electronic payments are needed, according to Rod Katzfey, COO.

As they say, you pays your money and you takes your choice…

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.

The team behind Salesforce.com’s enterprise social networking app Chatter is making a big push for real-time communication with two new features — Chatter Messenger and Chatter Screensharing.

Chatter Product Marketing Director Dave King demonstrated Messenger and Screensharing for me earlier today and, well, they look like instant messaging and screensharing, just, y’know, in Chatter. King admits that there are other enterprise IM tools out there (there’s part the TechCrunch team uses HipChat, for example), but he says it’s the “in Chatter” part that’s really important.

After all, he says that most collaboration tools are “separate and siloed from each other.” When Salesforce acquired web conferencing company Dimdim in January 2011, it could’ve just launched these capabilities as a separate tool, but it would have “proliferated these islands of collaboration.”

Instead, King says the features are built into Chatter’s “core architecture.” So if you’re discussing a potential sale with someone in Chatter, you’ll be able to know whether they’re online, and if they are, you could start talking in real-time. You could also start a group chat. That gives the conversation more context than if you’d just reached out to them on an unconnected IM client. It also means you can tap into the connections and recommended connections that you receive in Chatter.

One downside of Chatter Messenger compared to, say, Gchat: It’s limited to people within your company. However, King points out that Chatter now includes spaces to interact with external customers, so it’s conceivable Salesforce would expand Messenger similarly.

Messenger has been in pilot mode since late 2011 (the company was talking about both Messenger and Screensharing in August.) It’s planned to become generally available for free as part of Chatter in June, with a pilot of Screensharing coming in the third quarter of this year.

King says there are now 150,000 active Chatter networks.

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.

How is data moved between systems? In the enterprise environment, point-to-point application interfaces are either handled with expensive and cumbersome utilities or, more likely, with custom code…and frankly, a lot of manual labor. BroadPeak Partners has a better idea. The company is today introducing its application known as K3 Server, a system that aims to disrupt the traditional enterprise interface market by making it easier for I.T. to build, and for end users to tweak, the way code is handled, transformed, reconciled, mapped and enriched as it moves in between systems.

BroadPeak is a software consultancy formed in 2006, whose founders have backgrounds in energy trading and capital markets. The idea for K3 Server came to them last year, when they saw the difficulties in how trades were being brought off an exchange and managed for one of their clients.

“It really wasn’t about retrieving trades from that exchange,” explains co-founder Vivek Pathak, “it was about moving data from one system to another system effectively, in a way that was transparent for the business users, and that had fail safe mechanisms to alert when things went wrong (as always does in big tech enterprises), and to give a way for a simple business user to manage the logic of that integration thereafter.”

And so K3 was born. But the product isn’t just meant for moving data off an exchange – the technology BroadPeak designed can be used for anything. Containing 140 open source components which are initially put to work by in-house I.T., the system can be purposed for moving and managing data between just about anything, from data stores in price repositories to electronic health records.

The system offers three main functions: transparency (allowing you to see what data goes through and what fails, so you can act upon that), mapping (field x in System A maps to field y in System B) and rules (if data meets this criteria, then take this action).

For IT, K3 Server means they no longer have to re-invent the wheel every time they need to translate data between two systems or develop a failover routine, for example. The framework allows them to call up the component instead of coding these pieces from scratch every time they’re used.

But while the main data highway, so to speak, is set up by IT, the interesting thing about K3 Server is how the data is handled afterwards. In a traditional environment every little tweak or adjustment would have users scrambling back to developers with a change request. But K3′s “Rules Manager” offers a GUI interface that lets end-users customize their own “if/then” statements for how the data needs to be enriched afterwards (add this reference, set this field, e.g.)

Pathak says that in early beta testing, the GUI was simple enough for an end-user to handle, even though this was someone for whom using an Excel spreadsheet was considered a technical feat. Plus, the company claims that using the K3 Server system instead of traditional processes results in a 50% reduction in deployment, operation and maintenance of enterprise integrations. And who doesn’t love less work, right?

Given BroadPeak’s wide client connections from their consultancy practice, they’re not worried about signing up their first users. However, others interested can sign up to beta test here. For those waiting for the public launch, it’s very close, we’re told, and the system will then be licensed on a per-server basis, renewed annually.

BroadPeak bootstrapped their efforts, spending around $500,000 on K3 Server’s development, and is not looking to immediately raise funding.

Disrupt Q&A

Judges: Adrian Aoun, Fritz Lanman, Dave Samuel & Michelle Zatlyn

MZ: What are the benefits of this?
A: Fast to deploy, really after replacing custom code. Market is around trading, primarily. Can move 30K trades per second through K3. Benefit to business: gets data to right place at right time.

AA: You know it’s not just about wrapping data, it’s about taking actions on data. How much extensibility is in the UI? And what happens when you pass the limits of that?
A: Have 65 integration patterns, plus open source components. We know that in the future we need to create UI transparency into those integration patterns.

FL: Which verticals are being targeted?
A: Trading is a great place to start, because there’s a low tolerance for losing data. Also looking at healthcare and CRM.

FL: Risks in sales process?
A: Developers are used to developing their own stuff. Wish I could say it’s been easy. Sales cycles are about 6 months.

DS: More about the team?
A: Trading biz and tech for long time. (See above)

AA: Is it easy to pitch CIOs?
A: Most boring part – mapping – is the bane of CIOs, they’re backed up all the time.

The web is a vast, mostly useless, wasteland with bits of information held in random silos scattered about. Cyfeon Solutions’ Answer Factory attempts to unite these locations in the spirit of increased productivity.

As I was told by founder Brandon Smith, its goal is to provide business users a solution that allows them to make better business decisions by pulling in data from multiple sources from across the web.

Smith was joined on the Disrupt NYC 2012 stage by Rod Taylor, EVP of sales at Cyfeon Solutions, to present Answer Factory for the first time. As they explained, Answer Factory acts as a single access point for the end user (most likely a business type) with access to big data and broad support for databases, .txt/.csv files, and popular APIs like Twitter and Google Docs — even weather data can be pulled in as need to help lay out travel plans. Answer Factory federates the data, models it, and then pushes it to the users, all in real time.

The idea is to give the business users a single access point for the various data and information sources needed for their job. Answer Factory is a Java-based software component that sits on top of the data source, which also allows for predictive answering. Say there’s a question concerning personnel. Currently, as Smith explained, a user would have to consult several sources — LinkedIn, Facebook, Skype and others — for the answer. This is where Answer Factory comes in — once the data sources have been added to the back-end, the user will have access to all the information.

It’s not a perfect solution yet. The interface isn’t the most consumer friendly — Smith and Taylor clearly state that this is an enterprise solution, targeting business professionals, but the UI could use some work nevertheless. Selling a database management tool is hard enough but selling a cumbersome database management tool is incomparably harder.

Disrupt Q&A

Q: What’s your elevator pitch?
A: We provide a way for companies to use all the data inside or outside the company at any time to help improve their decisions

Q: It sounds like answer quality is what you’re getting after. Do you have any metrics to prove that your answers are better?
A: I don’t have specific answers since just launching today, but I can talk about our skill set. A lot of our folks have enterprise app experience, and we couple that with strong data science ability, so we return some unique answers.

Q: Who are you targeting?
A: Business users, we’re not targeting technical side of the house. Think sales and operations teams.

Q: If a potential customer finds you on Google, what would their search query be?
A: What are solutions that allow me to make better decisions within my company, and specifically a way that takes advantage of internal and external data.

Q: How do you access the company’s private data? Do you copy it? Do you get on their servers?
A: We have about 20 out-of-the-box adapters that can plug into many different databases.

Brad Garlinghouse, who just took over as CEO of YouSendIt and used to be a senior vice president at Yahoo several years ago, has a few ideas for the ailing web giant. The company’s got a pile of cash including $2.6 billion in cash and marketable securities from the end of last quarter, plus $6.3 billion more from selling the Alibaba stake over the weekend.

“Yahoo has billions and billions of dollars. Yahoo can do anything that they want,” he said, adding that he thinks the homepage alone is worth more than $1 billion in search and advertising revenue. Garlinghouse thinks the company should be aggressive about acquiring young companies to bring in entrepreneurial leadership. At the top of his list are Flipboard and Gravity. He is, by the way, the Yahoo executive that wrote that infamous “Peanut Butter” manifesto from six years ago.

“As a leader, [Flipboard CEO] Mike McCue would be transformative to the culture of Yahoo,” he said at TechCrunch’s Disrupt conference in New York. Gravity would help with personalizing content, which Yahoo doesn’t do enough of with its homepage, even though it has a deep Facebook integration. In fact, Yahoo has poked around different news reader apps for acquisition targets. They had looked at Scribd’s reader app Float for between $2 and 8 million but walked away. But the ideas Garlinghouse is suggesting are more about acquiring leadership and talent instead of standalone products.

Garlinghouse adds that he doesn’t think Yahoo is totally doomed, unlike other naysayers out there. ”I’ll be a contrarian,” he said. “In 1996, the cover of Businessweek was about the death of an American icon and at the center of that was Apple Computer. Apple is now the most valuable company in the world. Period.”

Also for a non-contrarian opinion, Garlinghouse says Yahoo’s board did the right thing in tossing former chief executive Scott Thompson over his resume (cough) inaccuracies. “The board had no choice.”

He also gave new interim CEO Ross Levinsohn some credit for getting the Alibaba deal done quickly. “He managed to do in one week what at least two or three CEOs weren’t able to do.”

Michael Arrington, who interviewed Garlinghouse, also pressed him on how YouSendIt’s file-sharing can compete with enterprise-focused upstarts like Dropbox and Box.net. Garlinghouse said the valuations of both companies might hinder their progress forward. (He declined to reveal YouSendIt’s most recent valuation.)

“Raising a ton of money creates challenges,” he said. “You’ve got an employee problem because options are priced at a $4 billion valuation plus investors want a 2 or 3x return. How many companies can afford a $10 billion acquisition? You’re not going to pay $10 billion. You’re just going to build it yourself.”

Freshdesk is trying to make waves in cloud customer support. Launched in June of last year, the young company is on a mission to help businesses of all sizes manage customer service through both traditional channels, like email and phone, as well on social networks like Facebook and Twitter. Earlier this week, Freshdesk added to its customer support suite, launching support for private customer messages via the new Brand Pages Facebook launched back in February. This means that, using the new Pages, customers can initiate private conversations with brands, with the ability to share the kind of sensitive information they wouldn’t post publicly on Facebook or Twitter, like passwords and credit card numbers.

Freshdesk said that it’s the first customer support platform to offer this kind of integration, a shot across the bow of its two largest and well-established competitors, Zendesk and Salesforce’s Desk.com. To compete, the startup is making a push to differentiate its platform, adding private messaging via Brand Pages on top of what it believes is its core differentiator: Allowing its customers to support and manage multiple products and brands from one simple web interface.

In less than a year, Freshdesk has already raised $6 million in venture funding from Tiger Global and Accel, and, though it believes that the biggest market opportunity down the road will be in offering its brand of cloud customer support to the enterprise, Freshdesk wants to entice (and give back to) the little guys as well.

That’s why the startup is today announcing the first phase of its “Future Fund,” which will provide customer support services to 501 startups and early-stage businesses through a $10 million “fund,” which includes free support for one year. Freshdesk has teamed up with incubators and angel funds, like YouWeb, Tandem Entrepreneurs, Internet India Fund, 500 Startups, and Proudly Made to begin giving their early-stage businesses customer support tools so that they don’t have to worry about allocating their own money to CRM tools at those critical, early stages of growth.

Not unlike any other fund that provides growth services, value, or support to young businesses, Freshdesk is looking to give startups a painless way to start generating customer love early on in their growth.

So what does the Future Fund offer? Qualifying startups (any company that has under $1 million in annual revenues is welcome to apply, it’s not limited to the accelerators we mentioned earlier) will get up to three full-time customer support agents free for an entire year as part of Freshdesk’s “Garden” plan. The plan includes multi-channel support, which startups can use to support customer relation management through email, phone, their website, Facebook, and Twitter from one dashboard.

This means that they can view and manage queries, lead or sales questions, ticketing functionality, as well as community management capabilities that allow teams to engage customers in discussion forums and let early adopters suggest and vote on ideas. Startups with multiple brands or product lines can support their brands through a single account.

Freshdesk is supporting the fund from its internal revenues, and although it’s not disclosing rev growth, the team did say that it was supporting 700 companies as of April, which has doubled since February. With its Future Fund, Freshdesk believes that it’s doing a community service by way of a free service that lets young businesses focus on their product while maintaining quality customer support, but this is also very much an initiative that it hopes will introduce SaaS support to a new generation of companies, which it will try to convert to paying customers when the year of free service expires.

Like others, Freshdesk is free to start, with a tiered pricing scheme that escalates based on the number of agents and customization features a business needs. More on pricing here.

For startups looking to participate in the Future Fund, check out its landing page here.

HP is reportedly going to be announcing massive layoffs next Wednesday. Conflicting reports state somewhere between 25K and 30K jobs, between 7% and 8% of HP’s global workforce, could be eliminated in an effort to absorb losses from decreasing demand for the company’s products and services. The cuts could happen over the next year, rather than a mass layoff, according to AllThingsD who also state that the total number is still undecided.

Wall Street is reacting positively to the news. HP’s stock price dropped shortly after the news but quickly recovered and started climbing with word of the restructuring. During the writing of this post, the stock price dropped slightly but is still up for the day.

If true, this is the latest of new CEO Meg Whitman’s drastic changes within HP. When she took over for Leo Apotheker, she nearly immediately announced that HP would not spin-off its PC division, the Personal Systems Group, as Apotheker once considered. Instead, Whitman’s team combined the PSG with the profitable Imaging and Printing Group.

The layoffs will reportedly be announced alongside HP’s quarterly earnings. Whitman will, at least per AllThingsD, deem the layoffs as necessary to make much-needed investments. Rather than just cutting people, the company will cut its workforce and then reinvest across the company.

This comes as HP is struggling to regain its dominant position in the PC and services world. While still on top per the numbers, competitors, including Apple, are racing forward with hot products. This is something that Whitman previously acknowledged to the company, predicting that Apple might surpass HP this year, but 2013 will be the year HP employees can once again celebrate — except for the 30K about to get pink slipped.

Pearson, the educational publisher, today made a move to beef up its international professional IT testing business: it announced that it is buying Certiport, a developer, marketer and distributor of certification exams and practice tests for IT and digital literacy skills, for $140 million in cash from the private equity firm Spire Capital Partners.

The deal will give Pearson’s VUE unit, where Certiport will sit, much further reach into the retail distribution of testing services in markets outside of the U.S. and UK: Certiport currently sells its certifications and assessments through a network of 12,000 testing centers operated by 70 partners in 150 countries, serving the range of skills in the world of IT. In all, it delivers 225,000 exams in 27 languages every month, and generated revenues of $48 million in 2011.

Certiport, which was founded in 1997 in Utah, creates certification programs for software from companies like Microsoft, Adobe, HP and Intuit. With Certiport having 60 percent of its business currently outside of the U.S., the deal will mean not only a stronger profile in IT educational services for Pearson, but a window on to a wider geographic footprint, especially in Asia and the Middle East. The existing testing network will also become a channel that Pearson can use to distribute testing and certification content already in its portfolio.

“Certiport is a high-quality company serving the significant demand for foundation IT skills. That need is growing fast and is truly international,” said Rona Fairhead, chief executive of Pearson’s professional education businesses, in a statement.”The combination of Pearson VUE and Certiport will strengthen both businesses and will give us a unique portfolio of technology assessments and certification, serving everyone from a basic word-processing users to technology experts.”

Pearson notes that Certiport’s revenues have been growing at a compound annual rate of 20 percent in the last three years, with the integration costs for Certiport expensed in 2012 and the acquisition showing up in Pearson’s earnings from 2013.

Contactually, the lightweight CRM solution for email users which launched into private beta at the beginning of this year, is today announcing its public debut with a number of new features in tow, as well as $500,000 in angel funding from YouTube co-founder Jawed Karim, co-founder of CapLinked Chris Grey, and a re-up from previous investor, 500 Startups.

As for the new features, there are quite a few, but the major ones include the launch of “Contactually for Teams,” Microsoft Exchange support, a Gmail plugin, and additional integrations with other services and CRM systems.

Before delving into the details of what’s new, a little refresher on how Contactually works. When you sign up for the service, it pulls in information from social networks like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Klout, Quora, Flickr, Foursquare, Tumblr, Skype, and dozens of others, and integrates those into your new online address book. The address book tracks how often you and your contacts correspond and their priority. Another key part to the service are “Actions” – which are reminders to follow up with your contacts. These appear on the online dashboard and are sent out via email.

Prior to today, Contactually only supported IMAP-connected email accounts like Gmail, Google Apps, Yahoo, and AOL, but with its public launch, the service now adds much-needed support for Microsoft Exchange (2007+). Gmail users get an update, too, with the new Gmail plugin which shows reminders and lets you quickly categorize people. (Oh, and I checked – it works alongside Rapportive’s plugin, in case you hate to give that up). 

Team sharing is another new feature that allows users to see who on their team last contacted someone and see their contacts. It’s an interesting concept in making email less of a closed box, private to only the one person with access. Instead, users of the Teams product can share contacts and collaborate on follow-ups with each other.

Contactually is also rolling out more integrations, including support for messaging and contact import from LinkedIn, integration with SugarCRM, and plans to add CapsuleCRM, Producteev, and MailChimp in the next month. (Highrise and Salesforce are already supported).

Company co-founder Tony Cappaert tells us that the service now has 6,000 users, a “large chunk” of whom are paying, as well as a couple of enterprise deals of a couple thousand seats or so.

Interested users can sign up here. The private beta period will end at 12 PM ET, allowing anyone to sign up.

Contactually was founded by Zvi Band, Tony Cappaert, and Jeff Carbonella, and is based in Washington, DC. In addition to the $50K in seed funding from 500 Startups, Contactually’s previous angel round of $165K included investors Sean Glass and David Steinberg.

With Square yet to reveal when or where it might offer its mobile payment service in Europe, and PayPal apparently still only talking with would-be partners, the door is wide open for more local players to jump in and pick up some market share. Sweden’s iZettle, which often gets compared to Square, is now doing just that: today it is launching its iOS, dongle-based mobile payment service to the UK, four months after its pan-nordic live launch, and as it is preparing to launch an Android version of its product later this year.

iZettle kicking off its service by giving away 3,000 card readers to small businesses and sole traders in the country as part of its invitation-only beta, which it is running in cooperation with MasterCard, American Express and Diners Club. In its still brief life, it has seen some decent traction in Sweden, Norway, Denmark and Finland, where it now has 50,000 active merchants on its network.

iZettle is filling a practical need in the current market. The initial aim of the service, according to Jacob de Geer, the founder and CEO, is to target not those merchants that already take card payments, but those who have never signed on to using anything other than checks, cash and invoices to accept payments. There are roughly 20 million small businesses in Europe that fall into this category, he says, with the “uncarded” ranging from sole traders like carpenters to small independent cafes. “We’re not trying to go after those with existing infrastructure because switching costs are too high,” he says.

De Geer will not yet reveal the total number or value of transactions or how many consumers that have used the service to date, except to say that the company is building out its infrastructure to keep up with the demand and has grown by 10 percent in recent months. What’s interesting is that, for now at least, the service seems to be attracting high-value transactions: De Geer says the average value of a transaction is €60 ($76), compared to between €10 and €15 for the average NFC transaction in the Nordic region. (In comparison, he notes that Square transacts between $8-10 per day on any given reader, but that’s an average number and it has picked up a huge number of merchants now.)

The iZettle service works similar to PayPal’s Here and Square, in that a merchant plugs a card-reading dongle into an iOS device to process a card payment using an app downloaded to the device. Instead of reading the magnetic strip on the back of the card, iZettle reads the chip — these are now near-ubiquitous in Europe and tend to be more secure. Like other card payment services, you sign on the device screen to complete a payment, and the funds are deposited in a merchant account the next day.

Similar to other payment services iZettle works on a commission basis — in its case a percentage on each transaction, with that percentage varying by country. It actually dropped a transaction fee it used to take only days ago — perhaps a sign of how the area is heating up and so offering more competitive offerings is essential.

For now, the service is only on iOS but De Geer says that Android is coming soon, “this year for sure.” He says that the delay was due to (surprise!) fragmentation across too many versions of the platform, and too many devices. But the evolution to Ice Cream Sandwich — the latest OS — is definitely making things more standardized, he notes.

One expansion that is not coming soon is to the U.S. Not only do companies like Square and Here have a lot of early business sewn up, but he also notes that “The U.S. is not too interesting for us given that they use the mag stripe and we focus on chip-and-PIN services.”

More interesting, he says, are markets like Asia and Latin America, where there is good chip-card penetration but card payment facilities are still relatively low among smaller businesses. Still, the next launches are likely to be in Europe, with Germany, France, Italy and Spain all on De Geer’s roadmap, with “one or two of those” expected to come online this summer. To date, iZettle has received venture funding of $16.4 million from Index, Creandum and others to fund that expansion.

Interested companies can either register a request through iZettle’s web site, or via its iTunes app, and the first 3,000 will get a free card reader to get started.

Cloud-based telephony API startup Twilio has made significant inroads into VoIP and other carrier services like SMS by launching products that work on the web and in iOS apps, supporting 90,000 registered developer accounts in the process. Today it’s widening that net considerably with the launch of a new Android client, the first SDK from the company to work on Google’s platform. And it hints that Windows Phone may be next in line.

Considering that Android is currently the most popular smartphone platform globally, this potentially gives Twilio a much bigger opportunity to deliver services to the wider smartphone market — with Android and iOS together accounting for 75 percent of the existing smartphone market, according to Gartner.

Twilio is kicking off its Android service with features to integrate voice features into Android apps: as with Twilio’s existing APIs for iOS apps and websites, the Android VoIP APIs effectively let developers incorporate VoIP features directly into apps, to create features like in-app calling that work without needing to launch any additional apps or services. Other features in the SDK include real-time presence, with developers able to build buddy lists to let users know who is online, and who can voice chat; and app backgrounding, which lets users receive voice calls even if the relevant app is not being used.

But what’s potentially most interesting about the launch of the Android SDK is that it could lead to some interesting bridges built between Android apps, iOS apps, web apps and traditional voice calls.

“We now support the vast majority of smartphones globally,” Thomas Schiavone, director of product management for Twilio, noted in a statement. “With this many developers and our proven success on iOS, we know we’ll see some incredible and innovative cross-platform communication apps in the months to come.”

Schiavone further said that there will be SDKs for other platforms coming soon — and hints that the next SDK to come might be for the Windows Phone platform. “We are looking at what will be next,” he told TechCrunch. “Android and iOS are the leaders, but at this time there is no clear number three. However, we are watching all the other platforms and are particularly interested in Window’s Phone.”

That would also make sense, given the strategic partnership Twilio already has with Microsoft. That partnership was announced earlier this month and means that Microsoft now offers Twilio’s APIs to tens of thousands of Microsoft Azure cloud developers.

In addition to that development, Twilio has been releasing a steady stream of other news in the last month that points to the company looking to expand quickly and make good use of its $33 million in funding to date. Its services are now available in 12 countries — 10 in Europe and the U.S. and Canada — and in April, Twilio hired a full-time executive in Europe, James Parton, poached from Telefonica. But it has also seen one significant executive departure, too: Danielle Morrill, an early employee who headed up marketing, just this week left to work on her own startup, the Y Combinator-backed Refer.ly.

The Android SDK has been running in a private beta, the company tells me, and from today it will be available to all Android developers.