Category: Tech news

This week, in a letter addressed to “The Education Community,” Michael Chasen stepped down as the CEO of edtech software giant, Blackboard. In a way, it’s the end of an era. Whether or not it was an “era to remember” remains to be seen.

Why is this significant? Because of what Blackboard has come to represent — both for good and for ill. On the one hand, the company became one of the biggest success stories in the education space, bringing mainstream consumer and investor attention (and scale) to an industry that previously had little. But that’s only one part of Blackboard’s story.

Chasen co-founded Blackboard with his college buddy Matthew Pittinsky back in 1997. Chasen became the CEO in 1999 and held the position until this week, leading the company through multiple transitions, phases and continued growth — something that, while there are those that prefer founding-CEOs, is hardly the norm. Because it’s not easy, even if your name is Zuckerberg or Larry Page.

Between 1998 and 2001, the founders raised $103 million in venture funding. While those were Bubble Times, it was still unusually high for edtech companies. And when the dotcom bubble burst, Blackboard was doing $40 million in revenue and breaking even. In 2004, the co-founders took the company public, with the sale of its shares raising $70 million, at a time when Gartner was declaring the eLearning market to be unstable.

The following year Blackboard bought its biggest competitor WebCT for $180 million, gaining 1,400 customers and 274 employees in the process and increasing its share of the higher-ed market to as much as 75 percent. In terms of revenue growth, Blackboard reported revenue of $111.4 million in 2004, which grew to $447.32 million by 2010.

On July 1, 2011, Blackboard agreed to a $1.64 billion buyout at the hands of a group of investors led by Providence Equity Partners. The exit is one of the largest in the education space to date.

What’s more, from the time Blackboard started in 1997, the use of learning management software in education has increased exponentially, with Blackboard often given credit (in varying degress) for higher ed’s adoption of software.

Seen in this light, Blackboard almost seems like a wildly successful company, and its role in higher education’s software adoption seems closely linked if not in some way causative. In fact, some would say that the company is partially responsible for helping to accelerate “a transition to active learning at scale.”

But, wait…

Of course, leaving off there would ignore the fact that Blackboard is one of the most disliked — even detested — companies in education. Just look at this Google search or Amplicate’s measurement of the Blackboard hate.

This largely stems from the fact that Blackboard’s scale and reach brought its core learning management product to scores of higher ed institutions. However, between about 2006 and 2011, Blackboard management seemingly turned most of its focus to scale, expanding into new product categories and ramping up its acquisition strategy. By 2008, Blackboard lived (in some capacity) in over 6,000 colleges and universities.

It may not be correct to say that Blackboard’s push beyond learning management system market took its focus completely away from its core LMS platform, but whatever degree of focus remained on Blackboard’s LMS, it wasn’t the right kind. One is not hard-pressed to find more-than-one negative review of Blackboard’s major iterations over the past 5 years.

Personally, I’ve never met someone who gushed about the Blackboard user experience, which was handicapped by feature creep, while, over the course of your four years at college, the speed, agility and core user experience stayed the same.

And not in a good way. As a result, Blackboard’s competitors grew in size right alongside it, most notably Moodle, even though no one has yet even come close to supplanting it. But you ask any software-related (education) startup which company it wants to “take down” or disrupt, and 9 out of 10 will say Blackboard. Sure, that comes with being a leader, but it also comes when your products suck.

End Of An Era?

Matthew Pittinsky left Blackboard in 2008 to go back to school (he has since co-founded another fast-growing edtech company, called Parchment) and with Chasen’s departure this week, both Blackboard co-founders are gone, with the company left in the hands of its new owners. To replace Chasen, Providence Equity Partners et al have brought on Jay Bhatt, who was most recently the President and CEO of Progress Software and, before that, an executive at Autodesk.

In a blog post following the announcement, President of Blackboard Learn Ray Henderson laid out the upside of Jay Bhatt assuming control, and why it might be good for Blackboard. Of course, as he himself says, there are many challenges ahead for Blackboard — part of the reason Chasen wanted Blackboard to return to being a private company.

But, really, the mistakes that led him to feel compelled to pursue that course of action were of his — or at least Blackboard’s — own doing. Since 2007/8, Blackboard churned out a bunch of new product platforms and products and spin-offs and acquired a bunch more. While the departure of the co-founders and its escape back to private markets (after its exit) seem to represent the end of an era by themselves, it’s obviously far less dramatic in its finality should the future of Blackboard remain bright.

Considering the future of education itself is moderately to extremely uncertain in its own right, so it’s hard to say whether or not Bhatt and the new owners will be able to turn Blackboard into the educational Death Star it was once on track to become.

Tough Road Ahead, Love Lost

The apparent strategy behind Blackboard’s acquisitions were to give it an opportunity to become the all-in-one or OS for education. That’s obviously the holy grail for any space, and education is no different. As Joshua Kim so astutely points out, if Blackboard can integrate its stack, then perhaps that moves into the realm of possibility.

However, given the fact that Blackboard’s Mobile platform remains divorced from its core LMS platform and there’s an inconsistency in design and user experience particularly with these two, but, really, across products, it’s kind of hard to imagine that integrated stack going smoothly. What’s more, Blackboard’s platform is inflexible out of date and built to prioritize consistency of upgrades rather than modularity.

Blackboard would need to go the Google route, as one can see from the consistency in using Search, YouTube, Gmail, GDocs, etc. Blackboard has not yet become a web service, and as such, isn’t really tapping into the cloud in any significant way, meaning it’s still operating on crappier margins. Granted that transition will be painful, but as Josh might agree, I don’t think they have a choice if they want to matter in 5 years.

Whether or not the penultimate chapter is written yet for Blackboard, it’s definitely the end of an era. My perspective may be somewhat dated (or distorted) but it’s hard to imagine that, even if Blackboard were able to build the foundation for that eLearning ecosystem, it would be able to reverse the stigma (or Web 1.0 associations) now squarely associated with it, thanks to its much-maligned, core product: Blackboard Learn.

What do you think?

Michael Chasen’s resignation blog post included below:

Dear Blackboard Clients, Partners and Staff:

Fifteen years ago, my close friend Matt Pittinsky and I, not long out of college, started a company with the idea that technology could transform education. We had big ideas and lots of youthful ambition. Those dreams and that ambition grew into Blackboard – a company that today supports tens of thousands of clients around the world helping them bring teaching and learning online.

It’s been an amazing experience. I am extremely proud of the work we’ve done to date, and I’m excited about the bright future of Blackboard. After starting out as a pioneer in e-learning, we’ve expanded the company’s vision for supporting clients. We now offer a range of products and services to support education needs at all levels: from commercial to open source and from K-12 to higher education and beyond. And we will continue to make big investments in the next generation of solutions for education.

Today Blackboard is in a clear leadership position and will continue to grow and help clients in new ways for many years to come. While it has been a great privilege to lead the company for so long, the Board of Directors and I have decided that now is the right time to bring on a new CEO to help the company take the next steps to carry this vision forward.

I’m pleased to share that Jay Bhatt will join in December as Blackboard’s next President and CEO. Jay is currently President and CEO at Progress Software Corporation, a publicly traded global software company that simplifies the development, deployment and management of business applications on-premise or on any Cloud. He was previously at Autodesk, Inc. for almost 12 years, and ran Autodesk’s largest vertical business while helping that company grow to over $2 billion in revenue. Jay has an impressive background with extensive experience in the software industry. Additionally, Jay has a passion for education, which makes him a great fit for Blackboard and aligns him with the company’s mission to continue to improve and extend education globally.

In the next couple of months, I’ll be working closely with Jay, Ray Henderson, and the rest of our senior executive team to ensure a smooth transition. There will be no interruption to the work we’re doing on many fronts to support you. As you know, Blackboard has an exceptional team that is dedicated to meeting your needs.

I’d like to thank all the members of the Blackboard community – especially the clients, partners and staff that I’ve had the chance to work with over the years. We’ve done a lot to support education globally, and I’m looking forward to seeing that work continue and strengthen over time.

Please don’t hesitate to reach out with any questions at [email protected].

Sincerely,

Michael L. Chasen

It’s been a good year so far for venture capital investment in education, as both the total number of deals and total capital flowing into the space are expected to hit new highs. Yet, even so, those big financing rounds that have become the staple for consumer and mobile companies ($20+ million) tend to be more unusual in edtech. Edmodo, Desire2Learn, Echo360, SoFi, 2tor and Minerva are among this year’s big fundraisers, but, again, the list is relatively short.

Part of the reason for this is that, while education is becoming increasingly attractive to investors, there’s still a lot of uncertainty in the space and companies with viable business models, revenue growth and substantial user bases remain in the minority. Investors are still testing the waters with smaller commitments. But today, education technology added another big fundraiser to its short-list: Parchment.

For those unfamiliar, Parchment is an education data company, best known for providing high schools and universities with a SaaS platform that allows them to collect, share and digitize education credentials and student records, particularly transcripts. With over 9,000 schools now using Parchment to digitize and exchange student data, the company is announcing today that it has raised $23.5 million in venture funding.

Parchment’s fourth round, which brings its total funding to $35.5 million, was led by global merchant bank The Raine Group, with contributions from previous investors, including GSV Capital, Novak Biddle, ICG Capital Partners and Salmon River Capital. The announcement comes on the heels of The Raine Group leading GOGII’s $18 million round on Tuesday.

Parchment is led by CEO Matthew Pittinsky, who, along with Michael Chasen, co-founded education software giant Blackboard and led the company to an IPO in 2004. (Chasen contributed to Parchment’s $7.5 million round in February.) The Parchment CEO tells us that the round will be used to help the company build on strong recent growth and to allow it to beef up its investments in research and development, which currently at an annual rate of $6 million.

The company will also look to improve the student account experience and begin dedicating more resources to sales and marketing, as Parchment has largely remained under the radar up to this point, even though it’s been around for nearly a decade.

But the real reason behind Parchment’s recent growth (and its $25 million raise) is that high schools and colleges (and their students) it seems are finally ready to shift from paper to electronic transcripts. The number of transcripts being exchanged on Parchment’s network doubled this year, which Pittinsky believes is another indication that the digitization of education credentials is (finally) underway.

The company itself has become one of the largest “eTranscript” providers and now has 115 employees, with 6 million transcripts having been exchanged through its services and more than 30 percent of the secondary school market (high schools) and 1,800 universities and corporations using its technology.

When asked about the market opportunity and future potential of Parchment, Pittinksy said that he thinks the company could be bigger than Blackboard (which had a $1.7 billion exit, by the way). That’s because credentials are essentially the “coin of the realm,” he says, providing critical information on what people know and how well they know it, so becoming the network or platform of record for how credentials are exchanged and verified by academic institutions, corporations, etc. is a big idea.

The fact that Parchment also has a recurring revenue model very well may support this claim, as the company generates revenue in two ways: By a student when they want to send or receive their transcript or by a school or university via subscription to cover a certain volume of transactions. So, writ large, Parchment makes money every time a transcript moves from Point A to Point B, income that the CEO expects to continue growing as institutions transition from paper to digital.

The company also sees potential growth in analytics and workflow tools that require a subscription to access, or a freemium model, meaning that it’s free for institutions to enroll and receive a transcript, but they have to pay to receive the suit of analytics tools.

And to that point, over the past few years, Parchment’s sole focus has been to solve the core infrastructure problem in education of capturing and exchanging credentials electronically. But, going forward, the CEO said that he thinks this opens the door to a while set of services around data analytics, normalizing transcripts (as there are varying standards across institutions and countries) and growing the network.

Colleges and universities have only recently become comfortable with electronic channels as a valuable way to deliver transcripts, because of previous concerns over security and having official “seals” to prove authenticity, and so on. It’s been slow going as institutions become comfortable accepting transcripts from intermediaries (like Parchment) and are just beginning to recognize the value of the data that lives around transcripts and student records.

While many schools still use paper to send and exchange transcripts, the role of credentials in education is changing, as massive online course platforms provide learners with alternatives to spending their life paying for student loans. As the methods for measuring assessing progress and achievement improve, skill-based learning platforms could become an equally viable way to get educated in a particular trade and get hired.

As we earn more and different types of credentials, badges and degrees, we are going to want to be able to share those credentials, analyze them and the data they embody to find the right school or the right employer. Pittinksy thinks that Parchment has a role in that future, even as transcripts diversify and change, as employers will still want to verify credentials. Plus, if it’s able to maintain its lead as the largest database for credentialing and transcripts, employers and institutions won’t be able to ignore it.

Find more on Parchment at home here.

If you don’t know about Startup Health and you’re a healthtech investor or entrepreneur (or at all interested in the space,) you need to rectify that. After all, as evidenced by the launch of another solid, differentiated health-focused startup accelerator last week, there is a lot of public, private and entrepreneurial attention shifting to the industry.

Compared to the majority of business incubators, Startup Health has an unusual model, as it doesn’t offer seed investments and its startups stay enrolled in its program for three years. Rather focusing on demo days or seed rounds, Startup Health wants to help founders build a sustainable, growth business by providing a support structure, classes, courses (and a structured curriculum), a collaborative peer network and access to potential partners, customers and mentors.

The accelerator also works with sponsors, like AT&T and the California Healthcare Foundation, to provide scholarships that help cover the costs of the program. These sponsors and partners also provide potential funding channels for startups, as many of them operate in the space and can help provide beta testers and capital that allow teams to test products and models.

Startup Health takes two to ten percent equity in its companies, determining its stake based on how much it can improve their key metrics over the course of the three-year program, like revenue, team size, partnerships, key customer relationships, product success and fundraising. Last month, Jordan sat down with Startup Health co-founder Unity Stoakes to dig into the accelerator’s model and discuss, among other things, its addition of 12 more startups to its roster, bringing the total to 22.

Now, even if you’re a naysayer and don’t find much in Startup Health’s arsenal to write home about, it’s hard not to see the value in the accelerator’s latest announcement. Today, Startup Health opened up access to the “Startup Health Network,” a platform designed to help improve access to capital, customers and resources — both for healthtech entrepreneurs, investors and knowledge seekers.

Said in a sexier (and perhaps more telling way), the Startup Health Network is basically an AngelList for healthtech. With a splash of CrunchBase. At beta launch, the network features more than 1,200 healthtech startups, 700 entrepreneurs, 400 VC firms, 180 angel investors and a litany of customers, partner organizations, payers, providers, pharma companies, foundations, etc.

On top of that, and hence the CrunchBase comparison, the platform features a funding database that is tracking over $4.1 billion in healthtech investments and currently lists over 500 recent health and wellness investments. Plus, all users has access to the funding database, which means they can also view the deals, trends and profiles featured on the platform.

Like CrunchBase, AngelList (and more recently, Rock Health), users can segment the searchable database by date, stage, etc. However, this goes one step further by allowing you to search and segment by market, location and funding source. AngelList has a great-looking funding resource, but it only tracks AngelList companies, and you can’t break it down by “education” or “eCommerce” or “health.” The same is true of CrunchBase.

Startup Health’s newly-launched network is free to any entrepreneur, startup, investor or organization in the health and wellness space, Stoakes tell us, but it ain’t no free-for-all. Startup Health wants to curate the network to limit the amount of noise, spam and junk living on the platform.

This means that it’s invite-only, so users have to be invited by Startup Health, one of its entrepreneurs — or they can request access on its homepage after taking a pledge. Users are then verified and can claim and modify their profile.

As to use cases: Esther Dyson, a serial investor (especially in healthtech) and investor/advisor to Startup Health, said that she has been using the network to organize her investments, connect with startups and discover new companies. “The platform makes it easy for entrepreneurs to understand what I’m interested in and for me to quickly learn about what they’re up to,” she said.

The network also offers users the ability to message each other, but this functionality is only granted once a member completes their profile. At that point, as mentioned, users can go in and customize their profile, adding fundraising snapshots for their business, what kind of partners the need, while investors can show startups what they’re look for in potential investments.

Going forward, Stoakes tells us that the network wants to continue adding value to the ecosystem by providing entrepreneurs with, say, strategic thinking tools, like, “here are the ten things you need to do to drive equity,” or the areas you need to focus on at the beginning of each day to create value for your business.

The more data the network collects on startups, founders, investors and organizations, the better it will be able to target its connections and introductions. Eventually, the Startup Health founder wants entrepreneurs to be able to connect to the network, where a list of the “30 companies interested in doing business with them” will be waiting for them. It’s features like these that have the potential to turn the Startup Health Network into an extremely valuable resource for the space and the entrepreneurial ecosystem.

Helping to speed up the cycles of innovation by enabling startups to promote their business and connect with investors and customers is a valuable mission on any level, but it has even more relevance in an industry that is rife with complex and user-unfriendly systems, legacy vendors and bloated incumbents.

Although there are plenty of good reasons to have a doom-and-gloom perspective on the space, for investors and entrepreneurs focused on boosting the quality of treatment and improving outcomes, as I wrote last week, “there’s no better time to be looking at the health landscape, especially for those interested in having a hand in rebuilding a broken health system.”

Resources like the one Startup Health launched today help grease the wheels of this rebuilding process, and, in the long-run, that’s good for just about everyone.

More on Startup Health Network at home here.

Google just announced that it has added 25 million new building footprints to Google Maps. Most of the company’s recent announcement around mapping had to do with flashy updates like 3D maps and buildings in Google Earth or thousands of miles of updated street view imagery. Today’s update stands out because of the large number of footprints the company is adding. Among the areas included in this update are a number of major U.S. cities, including Houston, Los Angeles, Chicago, Miami and the San Francisco Bay Area, but chances are you will notice changes all across the U.S.

How was Google able to suddenly add this massive amount of new data to Google Maps? According to the announcement, the company is using aerial imagery and computer vision techniques to determine the shapes and heights of these buildings. “This process,” says Google, “enables us to provide more building footprints and a more comprehensive and detailed map than ever before.” The same aerial photography Google uses to render these footprints is, of course, also the basis of Google’s 3D maps and it’s probably no surprise that all of the cities Google is highlighting in this release are also included in its 3D maps.

Despite the fact that most of these shapes were created algorithmically, Google also continues to give its users the option to submit corrections through Google Map Maker.

Mozilla just launched the latest Aurora version of Firefox for Android and with this, the organization is also opening the Firefox Marketplace to early adopters and testers. The Firefox Marketplace is similar to the Google’s Web Store for Chrome. Users can browse the store to find mobile web apps and developers can showcase their web apps. These apps run in full-screen mode and can also be pinned to the home screen. Distant Orbit, Jauntly, Soundcloud and Twitter are among the first apps in the store, where all the apps are currently available for free.

As Firefox engineering manager Bill Walker notes in the announcement today, the goal behind this early release is to “collect as much real-life feedback as possible about the Marketplace’s design, usability, performance, reliability, and content.” He also stresses that this is meant to be an open ecosystem, where “users have choices and developers have control over their content, functionality and distribution.” In order to facilitate this open ecosystem, Firefox offers developers number of APIs for app submissions, payments and app discovery.

Mozilla hopes that the Firefox Marketplace will “allow developers to build, distribute and monetize rich, immersive apps that use Web technologies like HTML, JavaScript and CSS.” To get developers started, Mozilla recently published a design guide and a number of tutorials.

After this early release, the Marketplace will slowly make its way through Firefox’s Aurora and Beta releases. In addition, it will also become a cornerstone of Firefox OS, Mozilla’s budding operating system for mobile devices.

What happens if Google boycotts an entire country’s news content? We might get to witness such a trade war if Google excludes French news from its search results because of a proposed law that requires search engines to pay for displaying snippets of content. Google believes the law “would threaten its very existence.” France complains that Google is raking in advertising revenue off of others’ work, while Google counters that they’ve sent over 4 billion clicks to French sites each month.

This isn’t Google’s first fight. News Corp. head, Rupert Murdoch, once threatened to pull his media empire from Google News. Google called his bluff, designed an easy way to “de-index” from Google News, and hasn’t seen any action since.

France might be more stubborn than Murdoch however, as the policy has the support of French Culture Minister, Aurelie Filippetti, and leading French newspapers. Newspapers have seen plummeting profits since the rise of the Internet. Indeed, the once-mighty Newsweek announced plans today to cease its print publication at the end the year.

Pew estimates that Google drives 30% of traffic to top news sites, though that number could vary widely for local news sites and the increasing importance of social media. Whatever the actual number, a Google boycott could be a costly protest, especially if they face it alone.

When it graduated from Imagine K12′s edtech accelerator last year, Goalbook was tapping into the excitement over technology’s ability to personalize learning by embarking on a mission to give every student a single, shared lesson plan. The idea was to have students become part of a connected network of educators, administrators and parents through creating a database of goals, strategies and milestones — rather than their educational identities simply sitting in a manilla folder in a file cabinet.

After piloting in a group of Bay Area schools, co-founders and engineers Justin Su and Daniel Yoo discovered that their model might, in fact, work better if it were applied to special education, where a support network of educators, administrators and parents already lives around students — even if predominantly offline. Prior to founding Goalbook, Yoo himself left work at Oracle and Google to become a special education teacher in Palo Alto.

Today, the Imagine K12 grad is announcing that it has raised $915,000 in seed funding — led by NewSchools Venture Fund, with contributions from Rethink Education, Ed-Mentor, Patient Capital Collaborative, Wireless Generation co-founder Greg Gunn, former Magellan Health CEO Steve Shulman and Joe Gleberman — to fuel this transition and help it create the first social and mobile platform for special education teachers.

With the new infusion of capital, the startup plans to develop a “Goal Bank,” or a repository of individual goals (aligned with Common Core State Standards) that will include assessments, instructional resources and videos, that is designed specifically for special education teachers.

The word “disruptive” is overused in the description of new technologies, especially in regard to technology’s affect on education, as it’s begun to qualify anything with an API, dashboard and a mobile app. But perhaps the most significant “disruptive” effect technology can have on education is its ability to help the system move from a compliant culture to an outcome-oriented culture.

Bringing better learning analytics and tools that measure inputs and help teachers, administrators and parents communicate and collaborate effectively in realtime has the potential to transform education for the better.

This is true for education in general, but has even more application for students with learning disabilities and developmental problems. By creating the first special education management solution, Goalbook addresses a huge market, considering thirteen percent of students at public schools in the U.S. receive special ed services.

Federal regulations mandate that schools must provide these students with a signed “Individual Education Plan (IEP)” that must be reviewed annually to help determine how well district programs are meeting student needs. As part of these learning plans, teachers, special educators, administrators and parents form teams to assist students in meeting their individual goals.

However, as has been the case with the educational system, IEPs, while helpful, are generally static documents that are only updated a couple of times every year and many of those who work with students don’t even have access to these documents.

Goalbook aims to solve this problem for special education by helping educators and administrators to create a profile for special needs students and provide them with easy access to IEP summaries, more effective communication channels, less paper work and higher compliance rates.

What’s more, federal regulations for special education require schools to meet 814 compliance requirements, so it’s no wonder that schools struggle to meet these benchmarks nor is it surprising that it’s created a compliance-oriented culture in public schools. Instead of focusing on teaching their students, teachers have to spend an inordinate amount of time filing paperwork and worrying about meeting these standards.

Over the past year, Goalbook has developed two products that aimed at making teachers’ lives easier and get them back to teaching, including a “Special Delivery” module that tracks the amount of time teachers, therapists and specialists are spending with special ed students and automates this kind of reporting for administrators. The startup also offers a Timelines module, which allows them to easily track dates and deadlines.

With its new funding in tow and its platform already in hundreds of U.S. public schools, Goalbook plans to launch Goal Bank in November, piloting the special ed database with district partners throughout the U.S. The platform will enable special educators to find and customize Individual Education Plans and access instructional resources, assessments and accommodations. Along with rolling out Goal Bank, going forward, the startup also plans to focus on its mobile strategy and launch cross-platform mobile apps to give teachers and administrators access to its products while on the go.

“Without solutions like Goal Bank, we run the risk of once again segregating our students with special needs to a less rigorous and less rich academic curriculum,” said former Head of Special Education for DC Public Schools, Richard Nyankori. “Goal Bank can therefore be instrumental in providing students with special needs access to the Common Core.”

Today, special education lacks an equivalent tool to the Asanas and Basecamps of the world that focus on ease of use and help teachers and support groups manage goals, projects and timelines. Goalbook hopes that by bringing the utility and functionality of popular business and consumer tech products into the equation, it can potentially have a big impact on special education and actually help influence student outcomes. And what’s better than that?

More on Goalbook at home here.

Google CEO Larry Page spent a good portion of his time on today’s Google company earnings call to talk about multiscreen opportunities, and how Google is addressing them. He said that just as with search back in 2000, Google has “enormous opportunity” to drive new monetization routes, and talked about moving seamlessly in day-to-day computing from his Nexus smartphone, to his Nexus tablet, and now to his brand new Chromebook.

The opportunity for Google in cross-screen experiences will be best capitalized-upon by continued product focus, with Page saying sunsetting products was a key component of that strategy. All told, he said 19 products were sunsetted last month quarter. To emphasis the importance of screen independence to Google’s business, which he said is “at the core of [Google’s] strategy] Page discussed three key product areas: Chrome, Google+ and online advertising.

Page pointed out that Chrome can now seamlessly share content across platforms, with users picking up and leaving off browsing experiences at will. “Search on the desktop, and the result is right there on your smartphone,” he said. “Click the back button and it just works.” Other examples he discussed were Google+, in terms of consumer products, which offers the ability to sync photos across platforms.

But the big story for Google’s revenue picture is in cross-platform advertising. Google SVP and Chief Business Officer Nikesh Arora discussed how soon we can expect screens to combine, saying that “in the medium term, these screens will converge.” Page discussed taking away the technical concern from advertisers, noting that “advertisers should be free to think about their campaigns while we do the hard work of tailoring it to each platform.”

To do that, Arora says Google is putting the same focus on mobile and video that we have on search advertising in the past. The idea is to make sure that as users move to multiscreen computing environments  advertising keeps pace. To that end, he cited the example of a T-Mobile ad campaign that used location information to tailor ads to users and the devices they were on.

It’s clear this is an important area for Google, and a way in which it sees its $8 billion mobile revenue run rate being leveraged to benefit advertising and engagement across its various platforms. It’s clear we’ll see much more of a push and more innovation in the area of cross-platform advertising from this company in the near future.

During its Q3 2012 earnings call, Google’s Larry Page, whose voice still sounded very hoarse and is clearly not back to where it was a year ago, used the first couple of minutes of the call to highlight some of Google’s hardware initiatives. Not only did he put in a plug for Google’s new Chromebook, but also for the Nexus 7 tablet. Indeed, he told the assembled investors, press and analysts on the call that they should “all run out and buy the Nexus 7 for $199.”

One topic that was clearly on Page’s mind during this introduction was the fact that Google is trying to provide a full spectrum of devices for its users. Page noted that Google wants to help its users to easily transition between devices. He stressed, for example, how users can keep their searches in sync between different devices, as well as the advantages of using Chrome on Android.

“Most people,” Page said, “thought we were nuts” when Google launched Android, but he also stressed how mobile advertising is now a significant part of Google’s advertising revenue. Throughout the call, Google’s various executives stressed how multi-screen is now huge for video and mobile and how Google expects to improve its abilities to monetize better in this multi-screen environment.

Here is a transcript of this part of Page’s remarks:

I switch between my Nexus phone, Nexus 7 tablet and my new Chromebook that we just announced today many times a day.

While this abundance causes disruption, it also creates amazing opportunity. And Google is super well-placed to take advantage of these disruptive opportunities.

Why? Because our search query volumes have grown this quarter as measured year over year. And we are seeing tremendous innovation in advertising which, I believe, will help us monetize mobile queries more effectively than desktop today. Indeed our mobile monetization per query is already a significant fraction compared to desktop.

In short, as we transition from one screen to multiscreens, Google has enormous opportunities to innovate and drive ever higher monetization. Just like Search in 2000.

Now we took a big bet on Android back in 2005. We believed that aligning standards around an open source operating system would drive innovation across the industry. Most people thought we were nuts.

Today there are over half a billion Android devices-half a billion – with 1.3 million more being activated every day. You should all run out and buy the Nexus 7 tablet for $199. It’s had rave reviews and recently won “Gadget of the Year” from T3, the gadget experts. You’ll love the integration with Google Play. It is an amazing device.

M.dot, a startup offering small businesses a way to manage their mobile presence, beginning with mobile websites, has launched. The company is backed by $700,000 in seed funding, having recently closed a seed investment round of $600,000 led by Floodgate. The round also saw participation from SV Angel, Sean Jacobsohn, a partner at Emergence Capital, and Harris Barton, the SF 49ers football star-turned-investor. TechCrunch co-founder Keith Teare’s Archimedes Labs is also an investor in M.dot.

Based in Redwood City, and now a team of five, the company thinks of itself as more than just another mobile website creation service. Explains Dominik Balogh, who co-founded M.dot with Serbajlo Pavel, “M.dot is a first step in the segment towards helping small businesses be truly mobile, and manage their mobile presence from an actual mobile device wherever they are.” Mobile website creation is just the beginning and the core of M.dot, he says.

Currently, the service allows business owners to use an iOS app to create their mobile site, choosing from a gallery of included templates to do so. Users can turn on or off the features they need – like photo galleries, a blog, an “About” page and more. They can also tap to add new pages on the fly, and the interface makes it really simple to add key items like Store Hours, a logo, or social sharing buttons, for example. Everything about the app has been designed with a mobile-first mindset, and is optimized for a small screen.

But there are dozens of mobile website creation tools out there, is building a site via an app versus building one on the web really a big differentiator? Balogh insists it is. He says the company won’t have to deal with legacy complications or compatibility issues, which offers them a technological advantage over the competition. Plus, many small business owners may just feel more comfortable using an app than an online service.

There’s a real need for this kind of product. A number companies have sprung up to address the lack of mobile websites for SMBs with “mobilizer” offerings, already. For example, leading service DudaMobile partnered with GoDaddy and Google, where it’s white-labeled as Google GoMo. But Balogh says these types of services are not really M.dot’s competition. “Our approach is not applying a mobile CSS and JavaScript to an already existing website,” he states. “M.dot is a standalone service where the owner doesn’t even have to own any website yet.” However, if the business owner does have a website, M.dot can scrape the photos and text and let the user fill in a predefined mobile template and host it on the m. subdomain.

As for what’s next, the startup will work on mobile promotion and third-party service integrations, creating distribution channels, and building apps for Android, iPad and possibly the web. For now, M.dot is free. Plans for monetization in the future will involve paying a yearly subscription for a package which includes a site on the M.dot domain and promotion on third-party services. However, details and pricing info regarding those plans are not available right now. You can download the M.dot app for free here in iTunes.

In Google’s earnings call today, the search giant’s CEO and co-founder Larry Page revealed that its mobile run rate is now $8 billion. That’s up from $2.5 billion a year ago. That’s a pretty hefty lift-the company’s mobile ad revenue has more than tripled over the past year.

But Patrick Pichette, Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer for Google, clarified in the call that the new run rate for this quarter includes more than just gross mobile ad revenue. Now, the new mobile run rate includes revenue from sales of Google Play mobile content and gross revenue from spending on Play apps.

As we’ve written in the past, most of Google’s mobile ad revenues still come from search ads. But it would be interesting to see how much mobile display ads are bringing in. And of course, it would be helpful to see exactly how much mobile content and Play apps are bringing in as well.

Pichette added in the call that Google isn’t breaking down margins and details on the different sources. He says that mobile ads continue to represent the vast majority of the revenue. In terms of Google Play, Google counts revenue from everything that is content, including books, movies and more. And revenue tied to Google Play apps is booked on a net basis. And while Pichette declined to reveal specific numbers for each mobile source, he did say that revenue from apps and Play content is “a huge number”.

The company also emphasized that it is figuring out how to monetize ads using the same campaign across a user’s multiple screens, including mobile, TV, and web.

You can read Page’s prepared remarks here.

On Wednesday, Telenav bought Techstars NY grad ThinkNear for $22.5 million, making it the largest Techstars exit to date. This comes a bit later in the year of mobile ad exits, including Millennial Media’s hugely successful IPO and rumors of a JumpTap public offering.

Not to mention all those other M&As.

The company has been agile from the start, pivoting from a mobile ad company that focused on timing and inventory management to ad company that simply got really, really good at hyperlocal ads by leading clicked ads directly into the store. In fact, ThinkNear can target specific ads within 100 meters of the store.

That’s way more targeted than any other mobile ad network. Integration with Telenav’s HTML5 turn-by-turn navigation software only makes sense to offer the best product possible. Telenav already offers the embeddable software on all three major mobile operating systems to brands and developers, and now ThinkNear can help serve the ads via the rebranded Scout Advertising monicker.

Since launch in early 2011, ThinkNear has raised a total of $1.63 million from IA Ventures, Google Ventures, and Qualcomm, among many others, after graduating from TechStars NY in April of 2011.

We reached out to founder and CEO Eli Portnoy to discuss the acquisition and the future of mobile advertising:

TC: Why is ThinkNear attractive to a navigation company?

Telenav developed a fantastic browser-based navigation software that provides full turn-by-turn functionality without requiring any app download. As part of the combined company, we can leverage the scale and precise location targeting of the ThinkNear ad inventory to deliver the right ads to the right person and then point the ads to the Telenav GPS and actually help drive the customer directly to the advertisers business. This allows us to provide an amazing customer experience by showing relevant ads and providing turn-by-turn navigation for customers looking to take action on the ad, and it also helps us provide great value to advertisers by actually letting them know how many people we helped drive to their business.

TC: I know you were an entrepreneur before ThinkNear, founding a company in 2005. Will you stay on with the rest of your team or go do something different?

All 12 of us are staying with the company and we are going to keep building the product and growing the business.

TC: How did being in TechStars affect the acquisition? If it did?

Techstars was foundational for us. It helped us meet most of our investors, put us in front of many of our eventual partners, and generated a lot of press. But most importantly, it taught us how to find an opportunity and build a product that resonates in the market. Without TechStars we would certainly not have been able to get here so quickly.

TC: There’s a lot of competition in your space, with Millennial and JumpTap going public, the constant growth in mobile usage, etc. Where do you see yourself in the crowded mobile ad space?

The future of mobile ads is all about location and understanding the real world situations people are in when they see an ad. We are 100% focused on enabling this future by solving two critical issues in the mobile ad space that have prevented this from happening; 1) Working through the many data issues to provide precise location targeting and 2) aggregating enough inventory to provide advertisers with scale. These are not easy issues to solve and we have made huge strides. We can now target ads with 100 meters of precision and we have access to over 7 billion location-enabled impressions a month.

TC: What do you think the mobile advertising industry will look like in a year? Two years?

All mobile advertising will use location as a key data point for targeting and every ad dollar spent will be measurable and tied directly to ROI.

GitHub went down for the second time in the span of a month —  this time from a Distributed Denial of Service Attack (DDoS). The site is now back up. In all, the attack kept GitHub down for about 90 minutes.

The first report of the site going down came at 1:105 p.m. with the following  status update:

We’re experiencing some connectivity issues at the moment. GitHub.com is currently unavailable while we resolve this.

GitHub acknowledged the attack at 1:33 p.m:

We are experiencing issues due to a DDOS attack, working hard to restore service

Last month, a database migration went awry on GitHub causing an outage and poor availability.

Disruptions have nagged GitHub over the past week. Two minor disruptions occurred yesterday and the day before.

I bet Google is having a worse day than you are. First it was its earnings being leaked by its printer. Then it was a product announcement that leaked before its planned embargo time. And later in the day, YouTube went down for about 5-10 minutes at around 4:15 to 4:20 PM Eastern.* That was right before Google’s earnings call, which was hosted on — yep, you guessed it — YouTube.

Update: Annnnnndddddd… It’s back. I want to thank all my coworkers for alerting me after I published but before I managed to dig in too deeply.

Update 2: YouTube has issued the following statement: “Some users encountered errors, or a slower than normal experience on YouTube today. Our engineers worked quickly to address the issue and fixed the problem within minutes. We’re sorry for any inconvenience this caused our users.”

Glad to hear that there were engineers after all, and not trained monkeys, working on bringing YouTube back.

Update 3: Approximate outage times thanks to network monitoring firm Apica.

For those who care, this is what it looked like:

And to prove I wasn’t the only one:

Twitter just announced that it’s holding an online fiction festival that will run from November 28 to December 2. The announcement is being made on-stage at the New York Public Library, where Twitter’s Andrew Fitzgerald is on-stage with the New Yorker’s fiction editor Deborah Treisman, and there are now details on the Twitter blog.

The company says it will be looking for “creative experiments in storytelling from authors around the world.” That might include “short story in Tweets, a Twitter chat, live-tweeting,” or something entirely new.

If you’re having a hard time imagining what fiction looks like on Twitter, or if you just think it’s a horrible idea, recall that the New Yorker actually experimented with this back in May, when it tweeted Jennifer Egan’s story “Black Box”. (The company blog post has a few other examples of how authors have used Twitter.)

According to a blog post from serialized fiction startup Plympton (which will be participating in the festival), between 12 and 20 authors will be selected.

If you’re interested in participating, you can apply here.

(Post updated from original story with details from Twitter.)