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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Article by Kelly E.Mcneel

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We spend more and more time on social networks, but sometimes it can feel like work. I mean, scrolling through your news feed isn’t work work, but it’s not quite as easy as vegging out on your couch and watching TV.

That’s where a new startup called Stevie comes in, with a website launching today at Disrupt, along with mobile apps that function as remote controls. Stevie looks at content shared in your social network feeds and elsewhere on the Web, and it assembles that content into TV shows that you can watch, shows with names like The Comedy Strip, Music Non-Stop, and Celeb TV. Naturally, the shows incorporate video content that your friends have shared, but they also include things like Facebook status updates, tweets, shared headlines, and birthdays, running mostly as tickers under the video. Essentially, it’s a way to watch Facebook and Twitter on your TV.

Co-founder and Chief Creative Technologist Gil Rimon argues that this is the right way to do “social TV.” Apps like GetGlue, which offer check ins and other social interactions around existing TV content, aren’t a good fit for how people watch TV now, because they ignore its essentially passive nature. Stevie takes the opposite tack — instead of trying to encourage new types of behavior, it’s introducing new content into the traditional couch potato experience.

Rimon compares the app to Pandora. In the same way that Pandora learns your musical tastes and preferences, automatically delivering music that’s tailored to your tastes, Stevie uses something that the team calls “The Stevie Factor” to look at your social data (such as Facebook Likes) and automatically stitch together the videos and other content that you’ll probably enjoy.

When Rimon demonstrated Stevie for me, I was particularly impressed by the look and feel. Granted, I don’t watch much TV aside from Game of Thrones and Doctor Who, but the video content struck me as quite bubbly and polished, especially for something that was being algorithmically assembled on-the-fly. Rimon’s experience in TV writing, editing, and presenting probably helps with that. I expect Stevie will become even more appealing when it’s available on connected TV devices.

The company has raised $300,000 in angel funding from investors including Jeff Pulver and Gigi Levy, and it’s participating in the Microsoft Accelerator for Azure program in Tel Aviv. Oh, and if you’re interested in couples who run startups, here’s another one — Rimon is married to his co-founder and CEO Yael Givon.

You can visit the Stevie website here, download the iPhone app here, and download the Android app here. (Again, the apps aren’t standalone experiences, but remote controls for watching on the browser.)

Q: How do you connect the Internet to the TC?

A: We’re not delivering hardware — it’s a web-based experience, with more devices (starting with iPad) coming soon.

Q: Who is your competition?

A: No direct competition, though of course there are other video discovery companies. But they’re not replicating the TV experience. The real competitor might be old-fashioned TV channels.

Q: Why hasn’t connected TV taken off?

A: That’s changing — see, for example, the growth of Apple TV.

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.

A double-whammy in the digital video space today: Avail-TVN, a video services provider that works with companies like NBC, Univision, and brands like Mattel, has announced that it has picked up $100 million in financing led by the Carlyle Group, and it is using those funds to make an acquisition outside of the U.S., buying rival video service provider On Demand Group in the UK from its existing owner, SeaChange International, for $27 million. Avail-TVN says that the deal will make it the largest provider of digital video services in the world.

The move is a sign of how the digital TV industry is already fairly large in its geographical reach, but in many cases is still only providing incremental revenue on top of more traditional TV revenue streams — and so companies that work in this space, which can be capital intensive, are best suited to bulk up their scale to survive.

Carlyle is leading the round that also includes existing investors Columbia Capital, Valhalla Partners, Novak Biddle and Pioneer Ventures. With the round of financing Carlyle, which already has an extensive amount of holdings in the media industry, becomes Avail-TVN’s largest investor. Avail-TVN will also use the funds for product development and for wider international expansion targeting content providers and multichannel video service providers.

Avail-TVN already had a customer base extending outside of its U.S. headquarters, but this deal will extend that even further: it will now have customers in 25 countries covering 70 million households. Regions covered will be North America, Caribbean, Latin America, Europe, the Middle East and Asia.

“Our strategy has been to invest in leading players across the digital media ecosystem and incorporate them into one company to build Avail-TVN into the largest provider of advanced digital video services worldwide,” said Ramu Potarazu, Avail-TVN’s chief executive officer, said in a statement. “The Carlyle Group’s investment supports that vision, and provides the capital and global network to build upon this foundation both domestically and internationally.”

Avail-TVN already works with provides to provide enhanced interactive digital TV services: for example, it is powering the multi-platform video coverage that NBC will run during the London 2012 Olympics this summer. Adding ODG to the mix will bump up the kinds of services it can offer to customers: ODG helps broadcasters with a range of things from content acquisition and strategic consulting services, through to powering video-on-demand services for mobile, online and digital TV services. Its customers include Virgin Media in the UK, Disney, Cablevision and others. Its existing CEO, Tony Kelly, will stay on and become a part of the bigger executive management team, and will now report to Avail-TVN’s CEO, Ramu Potarazu.

There is also some debt funding involved in this deal from  Silicon Valley Bank, RBS Citizens, N.A. and Bank of America, N.A.

One of my least favorite moments of the day comes when my iPhone rings and the number isn’t in my contact book. Is it an important call from an entrepreneur? A random PR person pitching me? Or just a telemarketer? I won’t know until I pick up.

CallApp, a startup launching today at Disrupt, wants to eliminate those awkward moments, for starters. It’s creating what CEO and co-founder Oded Volovitz calls a “universal social contact book.” It’s drawing data from social networks and other data sources to give users more context about phone calls and other communication. The data also comes from CallApp users — users can edit CallApp listings, and if they choose, they can add their contact book into the company’s general database.

So when you get a phone call, even if it’s from someone who isn’t in your contact list, you should be able to see information about them — say a photo, their most recent update on Facebook, and your most recent email exchange if you’ve corresponded with them.

Of course, if your phone is already ringing, you’ve only got a few seconds before you need to pick up, but at least you can glance at your screen and go into the call with some basic context. CallApp should be even more useful when you’re about to make a call. Then, the social network updates can give you a way to start off the conversation, or tell you when someone has traveled out of the country, so maybe now isn’t the best time to reach them. You can also attach personal reminders to CallApp contacts, share your location with them, or set up a meeting.

In some ways, the concept is pretty similar to an email plugin like Rapportive (recently acquired by LinkedIn) or Xobni. However, Volovitz says that bringing this information to the smartphone puts it in a different context. After all, when he gets a phone call, “I cannot wait until I can go to the Internet to see who is calling me. This is about giving you real-time, immediate, the most relevant information you can get, and the tools to execute on that information.”

Volovitz also says CallApp, despite the name, isn’t just about phone calls — he estimates that he only uses it for phone calls 50 percent of the time. The app also lists and connects to other ways for reaching people, like WhatsApp Messenger and Viber. The core of the experience isn’t the phone call but the contact itself, Volovitz says.

Nor is CallApp limited to personal contact listings. It includes businesses too, showing you things like Yelp reviews, Google Street View, or a menu for a restaurant where you’re thinking about making reservations.

Moving forward, Volovitz says the company will be adding features that are more about encouraging “serendipity.”

The app is available on Android phones (you can download it from Google Play here). CallApp is developing a version for iPhones too, though Volovitz estimates that it will have 80 percent of the functionality of the Android version, due to “some technical issues.”

Volovitz says the company isn’t monetizing the app (which is free) yet, but there are a number of possible business models, including affiliate fees. The company has raised $1 million in funding from undisclosed venture capital firms and angel investors.

Q: How does the iOS app differ?

A: There are more limitations than in Android, like you have to use the built-in dialer rather than any dialer you want.

Q: What are the viral hooks?

A: If you use CallApp to share information with someone, they get an SMS message linking to the content and asking them to download the app.

Q: Tell us about the technology.

A: What we do is artificial intelligence, big data. The system knows how to link the right person to the right number, for example using location to narrow the search.

Q: Why do other improved contact books fail, and why will you succeed?

A: It’s all about the execution and the ambition. If you build an app on the client side, you only get a limited amount of information about contacts on your phone, versus CallApp’s crowdsourced, cloud-based approach.

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.

King.com, the European-casual-gaming-company-that-could, is cementing its ascendance on the Facebook platform by poaching one of the key producers responsible for EA’s Sims Social and opening a new game development studio in London. The company just hired Catharina Mallet away from EA to lead the new studio, which should have 40 people by year-end.

King.com, which started in Sweden and hasn’t taken outside funding since raising $43 million seven years ago, is one of two European gaming companies that have made a serious run on the Facebook platform in the last year. While Zynga has seen its revenue growth slow and other longtime Facebook developers like Crowdstar and Funzio have mostly moved onto mobile games, both King.com and Germany’s Wooga have both climbed up the developer leaderboards.

King.com has beat out EA and more recently, Wooga, for the #2 spot among game developers in terms of daily active users on Facebook, according to AppData. The number of game sessions has also blown up by tenfold to 3 billion per month, from 300 million a year ago.

The company has a long, long history. It’s almost a decade old and started out building casual games for a destination site at King.com (naturally). That made for a decent business that’s been profitable for seven years. But King.com got turbo-charged when it started building Facebook games too. The company’s long history of building for an independent destination site has given it a few competitive advantages. Launching games outside of Facebook ensures that only the very best and most viral games make it onto the platform.

“Because we see which games fail outside of Facebook, what we have managed to do is have a hit-proof business on Facebook,” said chief executive officer Riccardo Zacconi. It’s worth noting that Zynga and many other developers like Kixeye are ironically going in the opposite direction by pouring resources into standalone destination sites.

The business now has several legs to stand on. It has a destination site for casual games, Facebook games and then mobile titles. Like Zynga, it makes money through virtual currency sales and advertising. But it also has a third revenue model. The company also recently signed a deal with AOL to provide skilled tournament games. Those are games where players have to pay a very small entry cost (like less than $1) and compete with others. This deal is financially material to King.com, although the company won’t say how much the partnership will bring in.

All this said, King.com is starting to feel the competitive heat on Facebook. Zynga recently launched Bubble Safari, which looks a lot like Bubble Witch Saga, King.com’s top game on Facebook.

“We have the leading bubble shooter on Facebook. While there are a fair number of copycats popping up, we’re pleased with the continued audience engagement that we get with Bubble Witch Saga,” said chief marketing officer Alex Dale. “We think that will improve further when we launch the game on mobile.”

Zacconi adds that King.com’s model is more capital efficient than Zynga’s. “For one of their games, they might need 80 people,” he said. “But Bubble Witch Saga had a team of eight. To launch a new game on the web, we need two people.”

He also says that the company hasn’t been feeling the effects that other game developers have as Facebook clamped down on viral channels, notifications and requests for games. He says King.com’s K-factor or viral coefficient is roughly 0.8. “For every user we get, we get almost another one for free,” Zacconi said. Keep in mind though, that number is still way down from the heights of 2008 and 2009, when apps ran wild on the Facebook platform. Other social gaming companies, which still have the institutional memory of that era, have had a harder time coping with the Facebook platform’s new realities.

When Mallet comes on-board, she’ll be spearheading the development of casual games. Zacconi stresses that King.com is not going into resource management or sim games. Mallet was of the top producers behind Sims Social and she came to EA through the up to $400 million acquisition of social gaming company Playfish.

Over the last year, EA’s social gaming push has faced several management changes. After Zynga poached John Schappert to be chief operating officer, Barry Cottle followed him over to spearhead mergers and acquisitions. That made room for Playfish co-founder Kristian Segerstrale to move up in the ranks and become EA’s executive vice president of digital. Another key Playfish executive, John Earner, recently left to be an entrepreneur in residence at Accel Partners.

Following a jam-packed beta test and a jaw-dropping $4.2 million seed round, Ark people search is open for sign ups…at least for the next three days. Ark lets you sift through profiles on Facebook, Google, Twitter, and other services to help you find out which of your high school classmates live in New York, see which friends are single, and connect with strangers who share your interests by layering up to 30 characteristic filters.

The problem of too much social data and too little discoverability is so widespread that Facebook even discussed a possible acquisition of Ark. But instead its PhD founders decided to see how far they can ride their cute penguin logo. Soon it will launch native mobile apps with some of most useful push notifications I’ve seen. And as part of its limited launch today at TechCrunch Disrupt New York, Ark is accepting new users at ark.com/tcd until the end of the conference on Wednesday.

Last month when Y Combinator company Ark made waves taking a mammoth seed round, co-founder Patrick Riley told me it didn’t choose to raise a more typical Series A because “If I can get an amazing valuation at a seed round, not give up a board seat, and keep complete control of the company, why not?” Now it’s using that money to hire some information retrieval rockstars the founders spotted during their PhDs at Berkeley. Facebook was so impressed with how Ark repurposed its data that the social network loosely discussed the possibility of buying the startup or at least acq-hiring its founders. There was no offer extended, but Riley tells me “We didn’t even take it that far. We weren’t interested. We wanted to build something bigger.”

When he says bigger, he means searching beyond profiles, but moving into Greplin’s territory — allowing you to instantly search through all your social data, including public posts, private messages, and even email. If you needed to find an address of a party but weren’t sure if you received in a Facebook message or Gmail, or even any keywords, you could one day use Ark to filter for street addresses, find that apartment number on Haight street, and go have fun. Soon it will launch native mobile apps that take advantage of geo-fencing to show you relevant info about where you are. They do predictive search so when you travel to a new city, it pops up a push notification showing how many friends currently live there. Ark could lead to those offline meetups every mobile app wants to inspire.

There’s rabid interest, too. Ark got 234,000 signups in the first month, and already has 15,000 beta users. Now you can join them and start social searching at ark.com/tcd. (Ark’s having a little trouble handling all the traffic TechCrunch is driving them, so if they signup page errors out, cut ‘em some slack and try back soon)

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.

Article by James Coleman

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

For more, find GrowLab at home here.

If you have no experience of setting up and running a website or blog you might imagine that it is a difficult process requiring technical knowledge. However, this is certainly not the case these days and easy website hosting is something that anyone who can use a computer can easily setup so they have their own website or blog.

It will not be cost free as you need a domain name and a web hosting service. Whilst it is possible that you can obtain one of these free, by obtaining both from the same provider, it is worth paying more to get a domain name that is appropriate for your site.

The process is simple:

Decide on a Domain Name:- The extension you need will depend on the purpose of your site. If you are looking for an international audience then a .org or .net might be appropriate or .com if there is a commercial element.

In this case cheapdomainnames.com is a good place to start looking. It will almost certainly be cheaper to use a local extension such as .au, .co.uk or .de in which case you will need to search for a local registration site. Prices do differ so it is worth checking the registration costs on a few sites.

Choose your Website Hosting Provider: – There is a lot of choice here with varying levels of service. For a new user of such services I recommend going for one of the larger companies who have a good reputation for customer support. If any problems do arise you can then be confident that you will be able to get support.

Website hosting companies often also offer domain registration services and you can do this as part of the sign-up process with them. Be aware that whilst this is certainly the easy way forward it probably won’t be the cheapest. The alternative is to register your domain name first with another company and, later, enter the DNS information provided by your hosting company. This is easy, it just adds another step to the setup process. If you decide to do this you should register your domain name before setting up your hosting account.

Set-up Hosting Service:- Firstly you need to select the package you want and decide how far in advance you want to pay. The longer you pay upfront the lower the equivalent monthly cost will be. Your contact and payment information will then be required, pay by credit card or paypal as this simplifies getting a refund if you need to cancel later.

There is an additional step if you registered your domain name elsewhere. You will be given the names of your host’s name servers and you need to login to your domain registration companys site and enter these.

Creating your Site/Blog:- Your hosting company will give you access to your Cpanel through which you control everything, including your email and FTP accounts. To get started quickly open “Fantastico De Luxe” which is in the Software/Services section. This will enable you to quickly set-up WordPress, the very popular free software for creating websites and blogs. You do not need any technical knowledge to make a sophisticated site using WordPress given the number of themes and plugins available and best of all it is all free. To install it in your root directory (i.e. your home page will be at yourdomain.xxx) select WordPress in the left hand column of Fantasico. Click New Installation on the next page then complete the simple form leaving the Install in Directory box blank. The data entered on this page can be changed later and you will no doubt want to do so once you see what it is used for. Finish the installation and you will then get a page containing your database and login details.

You can now go to your Home Page and see the result. You can then log into WordPress and pick a theme you like and start building pages and/or posts.

Easy website hosting is therefore available to anyone, so get out there and start publishing!

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.”

House Beautiful is hopping on the Pinterest bandwagon today courtesy of digital watermarking provider Digimarc, which has just introduced technology allowing consumers to pin magazine images from the real world to their Pinterest boards. While functionally similar to the online “Pin It” button, the Digimarc solution uses the company’s proprietary technology to embed an imperceptible watermark in a printed magazine image. When scanned, users are immediately taken to the pre-configured Pinterest page for the image, allowing them to then re-pin it to their own boards.

The downside? Well, for starters, you have to use the Digimarc mobile app for this to work, or the magazine/advertiser can integrate Digimarc’s tech in their own app, if they choose. But the “pin from the real world” functionality is not available in Pinterest’s own mobile app, unfortunately, which is how most mobile users connect with the popular social network.

Plus, this re-pinning process only works with magazine advertisers who have partnered up with Digimarc before going to print, obviously. In other words, you can’t just scan any ol’ image from a magazine and then “pin it” via the Digimarc solution. So, yes, kind of a lot of work for end users.

That being said, Digimarc has kicked off the launch by partnering with House Beautiful Magazine, which they’re touting as the “world’s first Pinterest-enabled magazine.” In House Beautiful’s June issue, there’s a “Kitchen of the Month” editorial where the first page of the article is “Pinterest-enabled” using Digimarc’s watermarking. In this case, House Beautiful has actually integrated Digimarc’s tech within its own newly launched mobile app. Readers can either download the magazine app, or the Digimarc Connect app for iPhone or Android. They can then get connected to the House Beautiful “Kitchen of the Month” Pinterest pinboard by scanning the magazine photos with their phone’s camera.

QR codes, heads up: you’re looking a lot dorkier now.

In a fireside chat with MG Siegler at TechCrunch Disrupt Monday, Tumblr founder David Karp described how his company thinks differently about advertising than Facebook or Google, and how they hope to make it less distracting and more meaningful to users. In short, it’s all about telling stories.

Karp said that for Tumblr, the stuff that appears in the main feed is pretty sacred, as it’s all content that users have chosen to subscribe to. Instead of inserting branded content into the stream in the same way that companies like Twitter are beginning to do, Tumblr has instead reserved the right-side column for content that users may not have seen.

But the differences go deeper than that — Karp wants brands and marketers to use Tumblr as a way to tell stories that they can’t otherwise tell on other social networks or with search ads.

“The new revenue model we recently put in place is built around creative brand advertising, which is something that Facebook and Google don’t support,” Karp said. Rather than a/b testing a blue link to try to find the most effective direct response ad, Karp wants brands to use Tumblr to tell stories that create intent on the part of consumers — which is the type of advertising that they want to see anyway.

Also, while much of the available ad space being sold by other Internet companies goes to big brands, Karp sees an opportunity to make inventory available to individual users, who could use the space more effectively, and who might not annoy their friends in the way that brand advertising might.

“We want to make some real estate available not just to big brands, but to carve it out for people that are already a part of the network,” Karp said. “It’s problematic when that American Express post shows up in your feed, but it’s different when it’s one of your friends.”

In addition to talking about the new revenue products, Karp described the organizational transition which recently took place and enabled long-time Tumblr president John Maloney to resign. Tumblr has grown from 15 employees to more than 105 since the beginning of last year. A lot of those hires were made to add senior executives to the staff who could oversee various different parts of the organization. Not only did that allow Maloney to step down, but it also meant that Karp hasn’t really written any code over the last six months.

Karp said it took a while for him to embrace the change, but now he’s able to dream stuff up, whiteboard it, and a team of engineers who were “worlds more brilliant than [he] ever was can build it.”

Imgur has built a massive audience for the sometimes amusing, sometimes adorable images and memes that it hosts. Now it faces another challenge: Making money.

With 2 billion monthly page views, advertising seems like an obvious business plan. The problem, says CEO Alan Schaaf, is that “the Imgur audience has always hated ads.” So yes, the company runs a banner ad on each page, but the audience probably sees it as a necessary evil. They probably won’t be happy with a second ad, Schaaf says, so a different approach was needed.

That was the impetus for a new ad that’s running today, prepared by creative agency Mekanism for Brisk iced tea. Instead of just running another ad, Mekanism and Brisk created an image that borrows from the Scumbag Steve meme. It looks pretty similar to other Scumbag Steve images, with a photo of Steve accompanied by a dick-ish message — except this time, the message is promoting Brisk (you can see the ad above). Mekanism even got approval from the “real” Scumbag Steve (i.e., Blake Boston, the guy in the photo) to use the picture.

This is going to be Imgur’s first experiment with a new Promoted Image ad unit, where the Brisk ad will be featured in Imgur’s image gallery. The hope is to run campaigns that don’t feel like ads to the Imgur community, but rather just other pieces of content. And even though it may look like a whipped together image, Mekanism Brendan Gahan’s says the look and message was carefully considered, going through round after round of revisions.

The edginess of user-generated content sites can sometimes scare brand advertisers away, but Chris Oates, who manages the Brisk brand for owner PepsiCo, says this kind of ad made sense, since meme-style content seems to resonate with Brisk fans. Schaff admits that there’s some controversial or offensive content on the site, but he says Imgur works hard to make sure that the images featured in the gallery are advertiser-friendly.

“Most viral content is not offensive content, it’s not pornography,” he says. “It’s really good, quality content.”

Brisk plans to follow the Scumbag Steve ad with another ad, with a new meme, in a few weeks.

Fab.com CEO Jason Goldberg took the stage today at Disrupt, he laid out a grand vision for the site. Backing up that vision, he noted that Fab launched less than a year ago, and it already has 4.5 million members.

“That’s not an e-commerce site, that’s a movement,” he said.

If Fab.com is a movement, what are its goals? That goes back to the site’s beginnings, when the company was still working on gay social network Fabulis. “We just couldn’t get enough people to use it,” Goldberg said (it had about 150,000 users), so he and his co-founders sat down to discuss a new direction. He recalled drawing circles on a napkin showing their passions, the untapped opportunities, and what the team could be “best in the world at.” Those circles intersected in one area: Design.

And “everything design” is what Goldberg wants Fab to be known for. More concretely, he says that if you know exactly what you want, you should probably go to Amazon.com. But if you think, “I need a lamp,” or “I need jewelry,” and you don’t have a specific product in mind, Fab should be your first stop for “discovering things I didn’t know existed.”

As for turning that mission into a big business, Alexia Tsotsis, who was interviewing Goldberg, said she’d heard that Fab is raising a nine-figure round that values the company in the billions of dollars. Goldberg didn’t deny it, but he said he wasn’t going to “comment on a fundraising round that we haven’t closed.” He also said he doesn’t spend a lot of time worrying about valuation.

Goldberg added that he doesn’t care whether Fab makes $100 million or $200 million in revenue this year, because it’s all about “building a brand” around design: “We care more about making people smile than making money from them.”

He also talked about Fab’s recent redesign, which downplayed the flash sales angle in favor of social shopping.

“From day one, we never said Fab is a flash sale site,” Goldberg said. “We said Fab is design.”

Alexia compared the redesign to Pinterest. She meant that in a complimentary way, while also asking: What happens to Fab is if Pinterest starts to compete on the shopping front? Goldberg replied that he doesn’t use Pinterest regularly (he tried it out), but argued that the two products might be complementary: “We’d like to work with them.”