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.

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.

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.

“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 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 30,000 developers 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.

As a culture, we are getting ever-more accustomed to using social networks as our primary hubs for all information, and that trend is leading to the rise of yet more services constructed like social networks to improve accessibility: one of the latest in that line is DoctorsElite, a new site aimed at linking up patients, general physicians and specialists through a social network framework to make it easier for people to find specialists in certain fields when they need them.

Started by a group of physicians working with other medical advisors and technology experts, DoctorsElite is entering the market bootstrapped and with a database of some 500,000 doctors and centers for advanced treatment in the U.S. — and with some strong firsthand experience of why the founders think this service fills a gap in the market.

What DoctorsElite is trying to do differently is that it is focused on being first and foremost a directory for doctors in specific fields — with that half-million strong database a good start. The database can be searched by diagnosis, treatment and speciality and then, beyond that, subspeciality, and is free to use by patients and their families. Patients also have a secure area where they can store their own medical records to keep them in a centralized place — accessibile by themselves as well as their doctors.

DoctorsElite is also offering a secure section where doctors can communicate with each other to find specialty care for their patients and advice from other doctors — which can be done in open forums or through direct messaging. Doctors and patients have free access to their own profiles, with additional services coming with fees.

As with many startup ideas, DoctorsElite came out of a direct need that the founders themselves experienced firsthand. One of them, a Gulfport, Mississippi-based interventional cardiologist called Cyril V.K. Bethala, had been working in a hospital that was closed down during Hurricane Katrina — not before Bethala himself got stranded in the hospital for days during the peak of the Katrina crisis.

With patients and doctors fleeing the area, it became impossible to track medical histories for millions of patients and for those patients to connect with doctors. Bethala wanted to create a system that could bypass crises like this in the future — and go one better by improving communication in the medical industry, all of the time.

“Every area of the country experiences natural disasters or other events that make connecting doctors and patients a challenge,” he said in a statement. “And even under normal circumstances, it can be difficult for patients and doctors to locate the right specialty care, particularly for uncommon or rare diagnosis.”

All too true, but whether that will be enough to propel DoctorsElite forward as a company remains to be seen: It’s joining a space more crowded than an ER on a Friday night: other sites offering social networks for patients and doctors include Sermo, Doximity, CareZone and HealthTap – the latter picking up $11.5 million from Eric Schmidt’s Tomorrow Ventures and the Mayfield Fund, among others, last December. Then on the more general medical portal front, there are more established sites like WebMD.

Box has been grabbing headlines lately because it has been nailing a big market: enterprise customers who need to easily share and store big collections of documents online. But a quiet Silicon Valley rival has also been winning a bunch of this turf — YouSendIt. Today, the company is backing up its position with some new stats, and a new chief executive, Brad Garlinghouse.

He’s coming off a two-year stint as the head of consumer products at AOL, and a previous five years heading up consumer and enterprise apps at Yahoo. He also has roots as an investor and entrepreneur, so this move is going back to that.

YouSendIt, meanwhile, says it has 98% of the Fortune 500 companies on it in some form (Box says it has 82%, for whatever this comparison is worth). More importantly, there’s quality revenue in this type of business. YouSendIt has nearly 600,000 paying customers on top of 30 million registered users; revenue has correspondingly shot up from $24.4 million in 2010 to $39.3 million last year. Those numbers are also very competitive with Box and other sharing services, from what I hear.

Garlinghouse — who will be on stage at Disrupt New York next week to share more details — says he’s particularly excited about some other data points. Registered users have gone up 71% from the first quarter of 2011, while the paid subscriber growth in the first quarter of 2012 beat the same period the previous year. The company isn’t sharing its revenue run-rate at this point, but these numbers indicate it is going up faster than ever.

All this is a big new public view of YouSendIt, which began life way back in 2004, and has managed to grow with little publicity (although TechCrunch has been on the case for years). One way it did this, as Garlinghouse tells me, was a cleverly placed link in email users would send each other. First a user uploads a file and shares it, then they send an email telling the recipient to go get it on the company’s hosted page. But, the email includes a link that says “click here to register and we’ll store it for you.” At some point after users register and start using the service, they’ll hit the paywall.

Garlinghouse is replacing six-year chief executive Ivan Koon (who is widely credited for building the guts of the business). Going forward, the new exec will be doing what some of its rivals have excelled at, which is creating an extremely simple user-facing product, and pushing the company’s brand in public.

The system lets you call out various aspects of the network using marker shape, color, and network lines. For example, you can change symbol colors depending on vulnerabilities and even change the shape and position of mobile devices. You can see a little more of the visualization over here.

Tenable released 2.0 of the software this month and sits on top of the company’s Nessus security scanner software. Sadly, the visualizer doesn’t show the “polychrome shadow, countless translucent layers shifting and recombining” of the average computer virus. Maybe we need to wait for the Kuang Mark Eleven.

As the software-as-a-service market continues to mature, there are companies emerging that are targeting specific sectors within the enterprise with solutions especially tailored and priced for them: the latest of these is InsightSquared, which has announced a Series A round of $4.5 million for its a business intelligence platform aimed specifically at small and medium-sized businesses.

The round was led by Atlas Venture, with participation also from NextView Ventures and new investors Bessemer Venture Partners and Salesforce.com. This brings total funding in the company since February 2011 to $5.5 million.

As part of the news, InsightSquared is also announcing that it is integrating with Salesforce for the latter company’s visualization services to be integrated into the service.

Other services included in InsightSquared fall firmly in the category of data analysis — typically the kind used by large enterprises and now becoming more affordable and accessible to smaller businesses, by way of the SaaS business model. They include activity tracking (dashboards to track activity from employees and clients in real-time, with trending options); sales forecasts; data quality monitoring (identifying, ranking and fixing data errors); ratios and KPIs; nightly emails; employee scorecards ranking each worker against his peers; tagging and filtering and integration with other data sources (eg voice tracking with M5 Networks); financial tracking and web tracking (with Google Analytics).

These services are offered in packages that begin at $99 per month, says the company.

The basic premise of InsightSquared is that data intelligence requirements for SMBs are different to those from larger enterprises — not just in terms of the kind of data that is covered, but in how the service is priced — because, as those who work with the SMB sector know, it is one of the most price-sensitive segments of all in the enterprise market.

“The requirements for making data intelligence useful to small and mid-sized businesses are much different than that of large enterprises,” Fred Shilmover, co-founder and CEO of InsightSquared, said in a statement.  “Our product is built with usability, data integrity and simple workflow as the central focuses.  Consequently, our cost-benefit proposition for the SMB market is compelling.”

Like its investor and partner Salesforce, InsightSquared is geared mainly at productivity and services around sales teams and those that are customer-facing in their businesses. Up to now, judging from the company’s publicly-disclosed customer list, it has made some inroads, through an integration with Bullhorn, into working with companies in the recruitment sector, with companies like Hireminds, Vertek, I-Technology and Hiregy among their customers.

If your response to virtual infrastructure installations is a derisive “Boring, Sidney, booring” then maybe AngelPad startup ElasticBox isn’t for you. However, if you love cloud computing like Nancy loved heroin, I think you may be in luck.

ElasticBox, founded by former Microsofies Ravi Srivatsav, Alberto Arias Maestro, and Amadeo Casas Cuadrado, is a service that makes setting up and running a cloud-based service quick and easy. With the service you don’t have to set up the environment in order to run an app. Instead, you can focus on the actual functionality and far less on server maintenance.

Ravi wrote us saying:

ElasticBox provides you with everything that is needed to deploy your applications where it makes more sense, whether your criteria is cost, performance or location all under a tight control of an enterprise grade policy management system

The company is currently bringing in a few hundred in revenue from actual paying customers, a surprising feat considering they launched on May 8. The service requires some onboarding right now but that will soon change. “We plan to open up for a self serve model in the coming weeks,” said Ravi.

“With the increased adoption of infrastructure as a service, enterprises are demanding software solutions that allows them to manage the execution of their applications in the cloud without having to deal with the challenges associated with server configuration and management. The ElasticBox team has seen this problems from the front line, at Microsoft, DynamicOps and MySpace,” he said.

The service supports multiple infrastructures including AWS and Microsoft servers. The goal, in short, is to allow folks to deploy their applications onto a clean, ready-to-run (dare I say “elastic”) box and let the company do all the IT maintenance and performance tweaks.

The service is open to customers right now although there is a waiting list of about 50 customers in the queue right now, making it a hot commodity. However, if you’d rather live at the quick and easy Chelsea Hotel of cloud computing environments rather than the staid estates of Lewisham, South East London, ElasticBox may be an interesting choice.

Three guys from Provo, Utah set out on a mission to make QR codes, those boring pixellated, black-and-white squares come alive — in other words, to extend their functionality by turning them into realworld “like,” “follow,” and “buy” buttons. And it’s been working. In February, Scan closed a seed funding round from Shervin Pishevar, Google Ventures, CRV, Start Fund, Social + Capital, Ludlow Ventures, and more. The company moved their operations from Utah to San Francisco, and is currently sitting at just over 12 million downloads across iOS devices.

How did it become one of the top downloaded QR code scanner in just over a year? Because, beyond the basic scanning functionality offered by a host of iOS and Android apps, Scan offers a variety of services and features that let SMBs and enterprise companies create mobile optimized QR code, NFC, and other tech experiences to let users can QR codes with their phone and immediately “like” products or businesses on Facebook, follow on Twitter, check in on Foursquare, etc. Check out how businesses are using it here.

As Scan is in the business of creating apps that extend the potential application of QR code tech, Scan is today leveraging the buzz around Instagram to let businesses, organizations, etc. build their Instagram user base via QR codes. The new app, appropriately called Scan-to-gram, lets users scan QR codes and instantly follow a company and its employees.

The company has already lined up a bunch of notable Instagrammers to be part of its initial launch, including Warby Parker, Zooey Deschanel, Nike, Marc Jacobs, GQ, Vevo, Audi, Nat Geo, and the L.A. Lakers — to name a few.

With Instagram’s acquisition by Facebook, the platform is becoming increasingly appealing — beyond what it already had. Brands are excited because it provides early adopter-types and mobile enthusiasts with a simple way to boost their followers, which gives them access to another social media channel and potential branding opportunities.

On top of that, it can be a clever way to draw users into the Scan.me ecosystem, which already allows businesses and individuals to create QR codes that represent their online presence — like an About.me for QR codes. Of course, QR codes have a less-than-terrific reputation, which is why Scan has focused on the content and the experience — in other words, what the person or business is trying to accomplish.

With Scan-to-gram, it’s Instagram, and obviously the potential permutations are numerous. Plus, they’ve expanded to 1-D barcodes, and are preparing for NFC and image recognition, whenever the mainstream becomes ready to adopt.

Currently, Scan is using barcodes as its rev stream, so that when a user scans a barcode, they are taken to a page where there’s a Google button, an Amazon button, and a third for an ad. Scan makes affiliate dollars as well as ad revenue, but the long-term model, CEO Garrett Gee tells us, is to build out more valuable mobile experiences, increasing the depth of its analytics and reporting tools, offering those to businesses at a price.

The barcode revenue is just starting to pick up, Gee says, at over $1K-per-day.

Oh, and even though Scan-to-gram was just pushed live this morning, the Instagram team reached out to them today, and has created their own page as well. Find it here.

For more, here’s Scan-to-gram at home, and an intro video below:

Mark Shuttleworth is the founder and former CEO of Canonical, the commercial company behind the Ubuntu Linux distribution. Today he holds the position “Lead Product Design”, a role in which he shapes desktop and cloud product strategy. I spoke with him recently by phone about the increasing role of Linux in the enterprise, and the shift from traditional enterprise computing to cloud computing.

Canonical and Ubuntu made a big splash early on by intensely focusing on a usable Linux desktop experience. They pared down the dizzying number of packages available in Debian and selected a few best-of-breed applications to install by default. The installation process was streamlined to be as easy and as intuitive as possible. Ubuntu was a huge success and quickly gained a passionate following.

Since its debut in 2004, Ubuntu has gone beyond just being an easy-to-install variant of Debian, and Canonical has worked to extend Ubuntu’s reach beyond the traditional desktop. Most recently Canonical has been pronouncing Ubuntu as the most popular OS for cloud computing environments; and they’ve also been trying to establish success in the enterprise data center.

Shuttleworth opened our conversation with a quick overview of what Canonical and Ubuntu have been doing of late. He articulates clearly that Canonical’s focus on quality is the same in desktop and enterprise markets. Just as consumer-oriented businesses are extremely sensitive to product flaws and issues that lead to customer dissatisfaction, so too are enterprise oriented businesses who focus on mission critical operations.

Canonical employs many practices that build a quality baseline that are good for both consumers and enterprises, asserts Shuttleworth. More specifically, any efforts Canonical might apply toward enterprise customers are not done at a cost to desktop success.

We’re in scale-out deployments
Ubuntu is now available as a supported operating system from Dell, HP, and other OEMs, which makes it much more viable for enterprise customers. But desktop and server certification is only part of the story: SAN systems, database servers and more all need to be fully supported before they can be used in an enterprise. I asked Shuttleworth whether Ubuntu was pursuing certifications from the likes of Oracle in order to gain more enterprise traction. “I wouldn’t use anything other than Oracle Linux if I was running an Oracle database,” was his response.

He told me that Oracle has made it clear to them that Ubuntu will not be a certified platform for Oracle databases. This didn’t bother Shuttleworth at all. “We’re in scale-out deployments, like Hadoop, OpenStack, nginx, Condor, etc,” he said. Shuttleworth believes that all of these technologies should be on every CIO’s roadmap for the next five to ten years, and that Oracle really isn’t relevant to this market.

Shuttleworth went on to say that virtualizing computing power is getting to middle age. In his opinion, there are good proprietary and open source solutions for compute virtualization. “That scene is settling down,” he said. But, according to him, storage and network virtualization are just getting going. Cloud solutions don’t often rely on SAN storage, but rather use Hadoop, Swift, Ceph, and the like. The commodity hardware underneath open source infrastructure — compute, storage, and network — is going to be key topic in next 5 years, and Ubuntu is right in the middle of this.

Ubuntu is the best place to consume these resources, thinks Shuttleworth — it offers frequent stable releases of these and other new technologies. Red Hat, Shuttleworth concedes, is still relevant for mission critical single server solutions. But he believes that Ubuntu is better for scale-out deployments. Similarly, in Shuttleworth’s estimation SUSE has a strong mainframe and POWER architecture relationship with IBM, and they remain relevant in those sorts of environments “but we don’t see them in cloud or scale-out conversations much.”

As popular as “the cloud” is, the reality is that many organizations aren’t yet embracing it fully (if at all). With this in mind, I was curious about Shuttleworth’s opinion of the value proposition for Ubuntu versus other, more established enterprise Linux distributions like Red Hat and SUSE. He acknowledged that traditional workloads were more likely to be deployed on those other distributions, but insisted that companies building internal cloud infrastructure are more likely to do so on Ubuntu.

And Ubuntu is still extremely popular for traditional web server roles, as well as a platform for handling big data and quick scalability. Shuttleworth mentioned Instagram’s use of Ubuntu with obvious pride.

One of the reasons Ubuntu is so popular as a cloud guest is that it is completely free. Red Hat doesn’t provide a free distribution, and CentOS doesn’t provide any support for their compiled version of the Red Hat sources. As such, Ubuntu offers the best of both worlds: free to deploy en masse, but with a paid support option available when it’s needed. This begs the question: if Ubuntu “wins” the cloud guest OS competition, how does that affect Canonical’s revenue stream?

Shuttleworth claims that as deployments grow, so too do paid support subscriptions. Without offering hard numbers, he said that Canonical has seen a very satisfying acceleration of paid customers. This is completely typical — first Linux gets deployed for internal development purposes, then it sneaks into skunkworks applications, and is finally recognized as a first class offering. At that time, support becomes necessary.

Ubuntu sits at the intersection of free software and users
My day job uses mostly Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and as such I track a number of upstream projects in which Red Hat participates and which might land in future versions of that distribution. I don’t track as closely the things that Canonical is doing. With that caveat, it seemed to me that a number of recent Ubuntu initiatives — Juju, Metal-as-a-Service, and AWESOME — had a decidedly Ubuntu-only feel to them.

I asked Shuttleworth about this, and what I perceived as the contrast between Red Hat’s upstream-first development policy. The Canonical founder got fired up in his response. I clearly struck a nerve with Shuttleworth. “There’s nothing Ubuntu-specific in any of these,” he told me somewhat curtly.

He went on to articulate that Ubuntu sits at the intersection of free software and users, and that they act on what they see — whether that’s fixing bugs or building new tools. Shuttleworth highlighted Canonical’s long-running support for GNOME, KDE, and XFCE, and observed that several patches were landed in Unity to specifically benefit other Linux distributions.

“I respect Red Hat, they’ve played an important role bringing commercial software to the mainstream,” Shuttleworth told me. But he took exception with the notion that Red Hat was somehow more “upstream first” than Ubuntu. He pointed out that Juju has been ported to Mac OSX, there’s nothing Ubuntu-specific in MaaS, and that AWESOME is simply a Python daemon not tied to any particular platform or distribution. Saying that any of these projects are Ubuntu specific is “like saying ‘DeltaCloud is Red Hat specific’,” Shuttleworth said.

He expanded on the issue of “contribution” by pointing out that it involves a lot more than just lines of code. Indeed, that alone is a poor metric for measuring contributions. There’s also design, quality, ease of use, leadership and other harder-to-track but vitally important contributions, all of which Ubuntu provides to different projects in different ways.

We are strengthened by diversity
I next asked what Canonical is doing, if anything, to encourage diversity in open source communities? Shuttleworth told me that Ubuntu had just recently updated their community Code of Conduct. Ubuntu, according to Shuttleworth, has led the use of codes of conduct in open source communities. This was an intentional decision based upon founding members experiences with vitriol, personal skirmishing in mailing lists, and other less-than-welcoming behaviour.

The Ubunutu community decided collectively to take a strong stand against this kind of behaviour. They wanted a community that was pleasant and focused on a shared view of bringing goodness to people, rather than one based solely on personal interests. “We are strengthed by diversity,” Shuttleworth said.

“Because we explicitly frown on flaming and hostility,” Shuttleworth said, “we have retained good people for a longer period of time.” According to him, it’s hard to participate long term in any open source project because of so much change: it’s hard to keep up. “If people are unpleasant to one another, the motivation to stick around diminishes greatly.”

He railed against what he called the “bad culture of ‘bro-gramers’,” where participants insult one another. Worse yet, according to him, was hostility between competing open source projects and companies. “If Microsoft said some of what Red Hat says about Ubuntu, the community would be outraged!” Shuttleworth exclaimed.

Society is not benefitted by software patents
I switched topics in our conversation, and next asked Shuttleworth how he felt about software patents, and how Canonical as a company felt about them? This was another topic about which he got fired up. He told me that he’s long been interested in the intersection of society, technology, and economics. The history of patents, he said, is grounded in the question “what will accelerate human progress?”

Patents were designed to get people to talk about their secrets, Shuttleworth opined. Industrial progress used to be all about keeping secrets — sometimes for generations at a time — but in Shuttleworth’s opinion science and society move faster if we can encourage disclosure. When one inventor talks about her insights, another inventor can build upon those insights in novel ways for the betterment of everyone. “You should only be able to patent those things you could keep secret,” Shuttleworth said.

“People have become confused,” Shuttleworth lamented, “and think that a patent is incentive to create at all.” No one invents just to get a patent, though — people invent in order to solve problems. According to him, patents should incentivize disclosure. Software is not something you can really keep secret, and as such Shuttleworth’s determination is that “society is not benefited by software patents at all.”

Software patents, he said, are a bad deal for society. The remedy is to shorten the duration of patents, and reduce the areas people are allowed to patent. “We’re entering a third world war of patents,” Shuttleworth said emphatically. “You can’t do anything without tripping over a patent!” One cannot possibly check all possible patents for your invention, and the patent arms race is not about creation at all.

“The challenge,” Shuttleworth continued, “is how to open up a legislative discussion not dominated by companies that have been successful in the past.” It’s no secret that the majority of funding and lobbying comes from people with a strong interest in blocking new entrants. The voice of the people — and the voice of the individual inventor — is simply not heard.

Canonical, Shuttleworth told me, is a paid-up member of Open Invention Network, but according to him this is “really quite distasteful.” “It’s like saying ‘I have friends with big guns’,” he remarked. According to Shuttleworth, Canonical does not file patents defensively or offensively; and although it would be straightforward for them to patent their work they don’t. They feel it would be actively harmful to what consumers want: ever improving products at ever lower prices.

I pressed the issue and asked about the Google vs Oracle lawsuit. I was specifically curious about the question of whether APIs were copyrightable. “As far as we’re concerned, this is a settled matter,” Shuttleworth stated. He said there are prior cases of people trying to copyright some kind of interface — mechanical, software, etc — and that these had all been resolved. “To countenance that would be to throw a spanner in the works of progress in general!” Shuttleworth exclaimed. “Technology should be easy to consume, and widely available. Innovation should respond to what customers what and need,” not to what established businesses feel they need to protect.

It’s fantastic up there!
No interview with Shuttleworth could be complete without the obligatory question: Would you like to return to outer space? His emphatic response: “Of course! It’s fantastic up there!” He proceeded to tell me how it was the experience of a lifetime. According to him, it wasn’t just the trip, but the entire experience of being immersed in an industry dedicated to exploration. “The folks I met were all wonderful, amazing people.” Despite his enthusiasm, he has no specific plans to leave the planet again any time soon.

Coupa, the creator of spend optimization software for businesses, which brings something of a Mint.com-like view into where a company spends on operating resources, is today announcing the close of a $22 million Series E round of funding led by a new investor, Crosslink Capital. Previous investors Battery Ventures, BlueRun Ventures, El Dorado Ventures and Mohr Davidow Ventures also committed to the round.

Although CEO Rob Bernshteyn says that Coupa could be profitable in a month if it cut back on its investments, the company is raising the additional funding to help it expand its product as well as move into new markets.

The new round comes on top of Coupa’s $12 million Series D from February of last year.

Founded in 2006, Coupa now has 250 customers using its service, which includes companies like Rent-A-Center, Salesforce, Pandora, Ross, The Limited, The Container Store, many Subway and McDonald’s franchises (35,000 locations at Subway, 3,000 at McD’s) and even some Fortune 50 companies like Toyota, Armstrong, and Gannett. Customers seem to be pretty happy with the service, too – Coupa’s renewal rate is 96%, Bernshteyn tells us.

“For all of the last three years [2009 to 2010, 2010-2011, 2011-2012] we’ve grown roughly 130% in our recurring revenue, well more than doubling every year,” says Bernshteyn. Plus, he adds, “we’ve had thirteen quarters of sequential growth in new, first-year subscription revenue.”

For those unfamiliar, Coupa is a platform for managing operating expenses, meaning anything that goes into running a business – the purchases, contracts, and suppliers who provide everything from office supplies to temporary labor. In Coupa, customers find the product or service they need, add it to the cart and then get the product approved through a workflow process customized to their business. Over time, Coupa builds up data on how the money is spent (which invites the Mint.com comparison).

But Coupa does more than give businesses insight into spending – it focuses on both the procurement and expense management side of things, and even includes interesting features, like being able to tweet from the platform, “thank” employees when their expense is below the category average, or warn them when they’re high.

On the product side, the company is planning to use the funding to introduce more capabilities around tracking contracts, building out its communities of customers, and improving its mobile footprint. It’s also working on bettering its budget approval app. Updates roll out quarterly, and since the service is paid for by annual subscription, the updates are free for current customers.

In terms of geographic expansion, Coupa plans to increase its presence in Europe, where it has seen “huge demand,” and it will build a channels organization that will help it get more reach, globally.