Category: Tech news

Really? I mean, really?

Yesterday, 1,900 T-Mobile employees got some very bad news — they would all soon be out of jobs, as the company announced their intention to shut down seven call centers. That in and of itself is a shame, but AT&T’s reaction to the announcement is even more shameful.

You see, AT&T’s Jim Cicconi (their Senior Executive Vice President of External and Legislative Affairs, no less) took to the company’s public policy blog to say that “AT&T promised to preserve these very same call centers and jobs if our merger was approved.”

Don’t you see? AT&T could’ve saved those jobs, if only the merger was approved! This didn’t need to happen!

Please.

“We also predicted that if the merger failed, T-Mobile would be forced into major layoffs,” he went on to say. “At that time, the current FCC not only rejected our pledges and predictions, they also questioned our credibility.”

I’ve read the thing a few times, and I sort of get where Mr. Cicconi is coming from — the FCC called them out specifically on their stance on the merger creating jobs, and AT&T was (sadly) correct in this case.

But really, Mr. Cicconi, 1,900 people just found out they would be out of a job in three months. Did you really, honestly think that this was the best opportunity to give the FCC an “I told you so?” It apparently almost didn’t happen, as Mr. Cicconi notes that the company wouldn’t comment on a matter like this. Methinks you should’ve gone with the standard protocol on this one, Jim.

AT&T doesn’t always occupy the most favorable spot in consumers’ minds (their performance in the J.D. Power service rankings speak rather nicely to that), and shit like this doesn’t help their case at all.

[hat tip to The Verge]

Pando Networks is releasing new data today about American broadband speeds, taken from over 10 million downloads facilitated by the company’s consumer-facing software throughout the course of 2011. The study’s goal was to discover which cities in the U.S. had the fastest average download speeds, and not surprisingly, major tech hotspots like San Francisco, Austin, Seattle and New York all led the pack.

But topping the list? Not San Francisco. Instead, the honors go to Austin, which saw speeds of 841 KBps, Pando found.

Pando has good reason to track metrics like this, as it provides software to both consumers and businesses that enable downloads of large files. Game companies contract with Pando to have their games distributed using Pando’s software, which then measures the speed of the download as the data is delivered to end-users.

The client runs in the background on users’ computers, and while its use case biases the study a little bit towards a certain type of computer user, the large sample size still makes it possible to paint a decent picture of comparative speeds in the states and cities the study analyzed.

Among the largest cities in the U.S., (those with populations greater than 500,000), the fastest speeds were recorded primarily in tech hotspots, with Austin, as noted above, arriving in first place. Following that were San Francisco (828 KBps), Boston (827 KBps), Seattle (805 KBps), and New York (787 KBps).

Meanwhile, El Paso, Texas had the slowest speed, at 483 KBps – or, about half that of Austin. Other pokey towns included Fort Worth (517 KBps), Oklahoma City (518 KBps), Albuquerque (537 KBps) and Denver (550 KBps).

In terms of regions, the densely populated Northeast and mid-Atlantic fared well, while more rural areas suffered. The fastest state was Rhode Island, with an average speed of 963 KBps, which topped Delaware’s 923 KBps and New Jersey’s 897 KBps.

Idaho was the slowest state, averaging 387 KBps, followed by Oklahoma (443 KBps) and Montana (452 KBps). South Dakota, however, surprised with a speed of 712 KBps, topping both Florida and Illinois.

The study also rated ISPs, finding Comcast delivered the highest average download speeds (941 KBps), followed by Optimum Online at 874KBps,  Charter Communications at 868KBps, Cox at 800KBps, Verizon at 799KBps and Time Warner’s Road Runner at 737KBps.

The full list of top cities (those with populations over 500,000) is below. Speeds are KBps:

1. Austin 841
2. San Francisco 828
3. Boston 827
4. Seattle 805
5. New York 787
6. Baltimore 781
7. Washington DC 750
8. Philadelphia 723
9. Louisville 701
10. Chicago 692
11. Los Angeles 665
12. San Jose 661
13. Indianapolis 657
14. Milwaukee 635
15. Fresno 633
16. Portland 630
17. Sacramento 629
18. Tucson 625
19. Nashville 624
20. San Diego 612
21. Dallas 604
22. Jacksonville 600
23. Columbus 595
24. Las Vegas 592
25. Phoenix 581
26. Memphis 581
27. Houston 579
28. Detroit 565
29. Charlotte 560
30. San Antonio 555
31. Denver 550
32. Albuquerque 537
33. OK City 518
34. Fort Worth 517
35. El Paso 483

CrowdIPR, an Estonian-origin startup developing a crowd-sourced intellectual property research platform has received an investment of $135,000 from the UK’s Northstar Ventures and IP Group.

The platform, one might call a “collective IPR brain”, currently connects over 450 technology and intellectual property professionals around the world. To date, over 20 research projects have been completed for universities and companies from the UK, Estonia and Russia.

Taavi Raidma, one of the founders and the CEO of CrowdIPR says the pricing starting from today will offer basic IP research for free, with the option of upgrading to receive more in-depth research and statistics.

CrowdIPR also brings on board Donal O’Connell, Adjunct Professor at Imperial College Business School and formerly of Nokia, as advisor.

Previously he held the positions of VP of R&D and Director of IP at Nokia.
CrowdIPR went to private beta in October 2011 and has thus far carried out over 25 crowdsourced IPR research projects, coming from areas such as chemistry, substances, IT and energy. The clients come from UK, Estonia and Russia as the company is targeting its service to technology companies and universities, but also patent offices and investment companies.

The Echo Nest is possibly the hottest music data company around right now. They’ve signed deals with Nokia, EMI, Clear Channel, Spotify, and most recently, Vevo.

So chances are if you enjoy music, The Echo Nest has something to do with what songs you’re recommended.

Knowing this, I couldn’t resist sitting down with CEO Jim Lucchese to chat out what the music industry will look like in the next couple years, and how The Echo Nest may shape it.

Lucchese believes that the songs you listen to say something about your identity, and that music services have a huge problem ahead of them in the form of millions of listeners and millions of digital music titles. Being the middle man between such huge pools of information is nearly impossible without a deep understanding of the music itself.

But Lucchese believes that the real shift will come by way of understanding the listener, too. We’re getting to a point now where music can be analyzed and categorized in a number of different ways, but little is known about why someone would enjoy Nicki Minaj and Florence + The Machine at the same time. That’s what The Echo Nest is trying to figure out, and it would seem that the company is doing so ahead of the rest of the industry.

SHOTS FIRED=2700 blk Eaton Place, 6 shots heard, nothing seen. #Flint.

It’s just another night in Flint, Mich. A concerned citizen heard gunshots and called 911. That’s where the story used to end.

There is a shockingly low number of police officers in Flint. The department was gutted over the last 10 years. That 911 call will likely go unanswered. But now, through the power of social media and the tweet above, a neighborhood is at least on alert.

Flint is a proud city. Auto workers first sat down for their rights in Flint. Tanks were built on Buick’s lines to battle Hitler. But as Michael Moore documented, the jobs left. Now, 30 years after Moore himself left, there are even more empty factories, neighborhoods, and with them, lives. But there’s plenty of crime to fill the void. That’s where 21-person strong Flint Police Operations social group comes in. They’re aiming to restore Flint. Social media is their tool of choice.

This group of crusaders, seemingly fueled on just passion, is working to turn Facebook, Twitter and Google + into a sort of online police neighborhood watch. Calls come into 911 dispatch, which are then broadcasted out to the appropriate response unit. This radio chatter is streamed live online. The Flint Police Operations volunteers monitor these streams 24 hours a day and pass the info along to their followers, which in turn puts more eyes on the street.

Despite the official-sounding name, Flint Police Operations is not affiliated with Flint’s police force. The group was started two years ago by a military staffer who was concerned about his family back in Flint. He took to Twitter, transcribing police scanner traffic on the social media site to make the information more accessible for his family. Then, last August, the group expanded its operation and created a Facebook page, which now has 27,000 followers. Minus some curious outsiders, that’s nearly 27,000 residents of Flint and the surrounding area watching crime, fire, and paramedic incidents as they happen. Awareness is a powerful tool.

Flint is a city struggling to survive. One hundred years after Billy Durant founded General Motors in Flint, the city is crumbling. The city swelled to 200,000 people in the ’60s. But then GM started shutting down the factories, leaving behind a workforce trained only to assemble cars, but nowhere to build them. Now, in 2012, there are only about 100,000 residents and the city is broke. Crime is at an all-time high. Arsons happen almost every night. Unemployment is so high that it cannot be properly measured. But the city has a rich history and the remaining residents do not want to see it fail.

Kat VanSickle is a paramedic by day and Flint Police Operations administrator by night — or vice-versa if the duty calls. I spoke with her at length about the FPO. She, and the group she belongs to, have lofty goals. “Bring Flint back. Clean up the streets. Save Flint,” she said in one breath. She went on, “The police are strapped. We have the citizens out there helping.”

It’s true. The City of Flint is in the red and thus dangerously low on police officers and firefighters. There simply isn’t enough money to employ the number required. The departments have seen drastic cuts due to shrinking budgets. A Michigan State University study found Flint police spending, on aggregate, 57.5 minutes an hour reacting solely to calls. Only 2.5 minutes — “a token amount of time” the study stated — is devoted to community policing. Michigan State Troopers are picking up some of the slack, but as the crime stats show, Flint is a dangerous place.

Enter the Flint Police Operations. Think of the group as a social media-based community watch. Concerned citizens call 911, activating the police. One of the FPO administrators hears the radio call (6-7 are on duty 24 hours a day) and immediately puts the information out to its social media sites. Between Facebook, Google+, and Twitter, 32,000 followers are immediately made aware of the incident. This isn’t about vigilante justice. This is about watching the streets.

Flint Police Operations expressly discourages vigilantism. “We’re totally against that,” VanSickle told me. But much as a community watch organization keeps safe watch over a neighborhood, FPO is encouraging the residents of Flint to do the same en masse. “See something, say something” is FPO’s underlying message.

It’s hard to say if the group’s actions are directly affecting the crime rate. VanSickle told me that their group led to the arrest of two criminals last year — a drop in the bucket for Flint, really. FPO does more than just report crimes, though.

The group is composed of paramedics, firefighters, ex-military personal and concerned citizens. Between the 21 administrators, they actively monitor and report police activity, fires, health emergencies, weather alerts and hazardous road conditions — all relayed as they happen to the FPO’s followers’ social media feeds.

The best part? The actions of the FPO can be replicated by nearly anyone. The group does not have any special ties with police or emergency dispatch. They use free services readily available online. The only special requirement, which the FPO seems to have plenty of, is a passion for their hometown.

Flint Police Operations uses scanner traffic from RadioReference.com. They use existing police shorthand for their updates and constantly post reminders what the abbreviations means. The group slowly trained its followers to act respectably and only comment on posts if they have a previously unannounced update on the incident. Liking a post does not mean the user likes the fact that gun shots were fired. As an early subscriber to FPO, I can attest the group has worked very hard to create an invaluable tool for the community.

It’s a clear goal: Save Flint. But it’s a tough job.

Police, firefighters and elected officials cannot save cities like Flint without help. Dedicated residents like Kat VanSickle and her fellow Flint Police Operations administrators are needed to save a dying city from within. It must start with the citizens. Flint might be a empty shell of a once great city but it’s not going to become a lawless wasteland on FPO’s watch.

[photo credit: Christa VanAmburg]

Remember Batch, the photo-sharing app that lets you share iPhone photos on Facebook, Twitter, and via email? Wait, before you roll your eyes – photo-sharing app? Sigh… – let me stick up for Batch: it’s one of the good ones. But today’s update makes Batch even better than before because it addresses one of the major pain points I had in using the app – something that I’ll admit led me to drop it after initial tests – Facebook album support.

Prior to the newly updated version, Batch allowed you to create albums and share them on Facebook, but the photos themselves remained within Batch’s service. When users clicked a shared link, they were taken to Batch, not a Facebook album. But with the update, that has changed. Batch now uploads all of the photos to Facebook for you. And it does so incredibly fast.

I also have to point out that Batch actually lets you name the Facebook albums whatever you want. It doesn’t just lump all the photo uploads into a bucket called “Batch Photos,” or something dumb like that (which I’ve seen other apps do).

The change may finally allow Batch to live up to Mike Arrington’s earlier suggestion that Batch “may be the perfect mobile photo sharing app.” I’ll admit, it definitely had a lot going for it when it launched last fall, but I (like many of Batch users, apparently), found that I still wanted to share photos directly on Facebook. That is, I wanted the photos to reside on Facebook itself, not within a third-party service.

Batch’s lack of support for that particular option, had even allowed newcomers to come in and try to fill that need. For example, with Popset, a new YC-backed mobile app, one of the app’s key selling points was its support for exporting entire albums to Facebook.

Says Batch CEO Brian Pokorny, the latest update is in line with the company’s orginal direction.

“We always have allowed users to share links to Facebook and Twitter, and heard from our users they’d like to be able to upload the entire album as well. We found this to be a better experience that enables users a more robust utility to share multiple photos from their phone,” he explains.

Batch’s update now fleshes out what was already a well-built service. Working on top of Facebook’s social graph, the app would automatically match you up with your Facebook friends upon first launch, and with its year-end update, it even took pains to make the entire onboarding experience clever and inviting.

The app also supports thumbs up/down, comments, private sharing, automatic album updates, a news feed of shared photos, and more.

The new version has added support for photo tagging, too, including photo tag notifications, but these appear to work in-app only. I tagged folks in my latest batch, shared to Facebook, but those tags didn’t copy over. Surely that’s coming next, though. (And sorry, I’d link, but my photos are private. Just try it yourself.)

The new version of Batch is available now. For our earlier review, check out the Fly or Die episode here.

Adobe is previewing the latest version of its flagship photo editor as a free beta edition. Anyone who is interested is welcome to download it and try it out.

The free public beta of Photoshop Creative Suite 6 is now available for Windows and Mac. It’s stacked with new features like some video editing tools and revamped brushes for editing photos, as well as interface enhancements that improve productivity.

It will remain free until the full version of CS6 ships later this year, at which point you’ll need to purchase the commercial version, which we expect will cost about $700 (or a $200 upgrade).

However, before you download it, you may want to ask yourself: Do I really need Photoshop?

In an age when you can edit photos on your phone or a tablet using apps as cheap as $1, is there still a place for a $700 desktop behemoth? The image-editing apps found on iOS, Android and other mobile platforms are increasingly capable, and they offer user-friendly features like one-touch filters and easy ways to share your photos with friends. Perhaps more importantly, those editors are always close by, right there on your mobile device.

Also, adding Photoshop to the mix requires not just an investment of money and time, but the extra step of moving your photos to a better-than-average desktop or notebook computer. To be fair, Adobe does offer a cloud photo-syncing service that makes it somewhat easier to move photos between devices, but it still isn’t as easy as snapping a photo, applying a quick “good enough” effect and then immediately sending it on to Instagram or Flickr.

For digital imaging professionals, that question of “Do I need it?” is irrelevant. While Photoshop is probably no longer a necessity for most, the professional photographers, graphic designers and production workers whose livelihood depends on software that can streamline a workflow and push the image editing envelope at the same time, Photoshop remains an indispensable tool.

If that’s you, you’ll be happy to hear Photoshop CS6 brings a slew of new features, covering a range of common Photoshop tasks, as well as new “sign of the times” features like video editing. But the focus is certainly on professionals — many of the less flashy, but most useful, new features in this release are aimed specifically at pro photographers and graphic designers.

Bryan O’Neil Hughes, Senior Project Manager of Photoshop, tells Wired that Adobe’s focus in this release has been on making Photoshop more productive.

“We’ve been fine-tuning workflows,” Hughes says, “not just adding, adding, adding. There’s a lot of working with what we’ve got and making sure it works as best it can.”

To that end, Photoshop CS6 is one of the most useful releases yet for pro photographers and graphic designers. The real appeal isn’t in the new features like the Content Aware Patch tool or Content Aware Move tool, both of which were previewed last month to great fanfare. While both of those features are nothing short of amazing the first time you play with them, neither does much to improve the day-to-day workflow of the professional photographer or graphic designer.

Instead, the real power in Photoshop CS6 is found in the less-showy features. For instance, take the new search tool in the layers panel. It’s not uncommon for designers to work with Photoshop documents containing hundreds of layers. Even with well-organized and well-labeled layers, it can be a pain to find a specific layer when you need to change something. In Photoshop CS6 you can now search layers by layer type, by mode or even by the various attributes of a layer. If you’re using Photoshop day in and day out, this small new feature will save you hours a week and completely change your workflow.

Other nice touches for designers include a built-in Lorem Ipsum dummy text generator, an easy way to create dashed or dotted lines (finally) and a rewritten vector engine for working with shapes.

Photographers will find similar small tweaks designed to speed up workflows. For example, the “auto” feature attached to adjustments like level and curves — you know, the button you avoid because it always messed up the histogram, and besides, you can do a better job by hand anyway. Well, the auto-adjustment features are no longer brain-dead. There’s now a very good chance Photoshop CS6′s auto-adjustment tools can do a better job with a click of a button then you can by spending hours applying tiny tweaks by hand. The Auto engine has been rewritten. Not only does it no longer discard any data, but in some cases, it’s actually doing monochromatic content-aware adjustments behind the scenes. The end result is a vastly more usable set of auto-adjustment features that make developing and fine-tuning images much faster.

Similar speed improvements can be found in the new Liquify filter, which is now capable of rendering effects in real-time. Photoshop CS6 also has the ability to save documents in the background, which means you no longer have to sit there waiting for the dialog box to go away as Photoshop finishes saving a massive file.

While the smaller new features and tweaks make up much of what’s great in Photoshop CS6, that doesn’t mean there aren’t some big changes as well. One of the most radical changes: Photoshop now contains some video editing tools. They aren’t anything big — just some rudimentary tools for making fast edits — but they are enough for most of us to get by. If you’re a “video person,” you won’t be swayed to ditch your full-featured suites like Final Cut Pro or Premiere, but Adobe has included enough here for photographers shooting HD video on their DSLR to be able to make some simple edits without leaving Photoshop, where they’re probably much more comfortable hanging out anyway.

The more noticeable of the radical changes is the new user interface. Photoshop CS6 sports a new, dark gray default interface that will look familiar to users of Adobe Lightroom. Photoshop’s Mini-Bridge feature is also now displayed as a strip across the bottom of the workspace, also very reminiscent of Lightroom. I prefer this new interface, it’s an improvement.

Of course, not everyone using Photoshop is a photographer. So, fear not — the new Lightroom-style interface is easy to change in Photoshop’s preferences panel. In fact there are a variety of interface shades to choose from in Photoshop CS6, including one that will look just like the good old light gray interface Photoshop has had for the last twenty-two years.

Adobe has also been busy fixing some of the many interface inconsistencies that have plagued Photoshop over the years: varying color pickers, different types of sliders and so on. Some people might find such nitpicking bordering on ridiculous, but Adobe has addressed them by rewriting nearly every single widget in Photoshop with an eye toward greater consistency.

For professionals, the upgrade to a new version of Photoshop is often a foregone conclusion — of course you need the latest version. But what about the rest of us? Do we really need Photoshop CS6? As Hughes says, the nice thing about Photoshop is that it “does not assume anything about the person that’s using it. It just says, ‘Here’s a whole set of tools you can use.’”

Though he’s a corporate mouthpiece, he has a point. This release has video editing tools, a more photo-friendly interface, better production-minded features, and some cool whiz-bang brushes for “magically” editing people, objects and backgrounds out of photos that anyone can find a use for. It’s a more capable program designed to appeal to a wider range of potential users. If you’re on the fence, the free public beta makes a great way to try it out for free and see how well it works for you.

WIRED New Lightroom-style interface makes photos more attractive. Video editing tools mean you don’t have to leave Photoshop to handle your video clips. Content-aware brushes, Liquefy filter and new Blur tool will amaze. In-app search is a huge time-saver for sifting through giant stacks of layers. Improved Camera RAW tools. The beta is free, so you can try before you buy.

TIRED A beast of an app, which seems less vital in light of the emerging mobile tools. Video editing tools are only rudimentary. It’s a beta, so there are bugs. But it’s a beta, so whatever.

Screenshots by Scott Gilbertson/Wired

Photo: Greg Broom

Zero to 100 in under five seconds. OK, don’t cancel your Veyron order yet. The Traxxas XO-1 is just a radio-controlled car. But it’s a 10-pound, 27-inch-long beast of an RC car — big enough to convey the muscle (and to be seriously dangerous should things go wrong at full throttle). The brawny custom motor can handle a gear ratio that would stall most RC toys — hence the pickup and the top end. The rear wing and ground effects do an admirable job of keeping the rubber on the road; we got some great four-tire drifts but never rolled the thing. Just watch your ankles.

WIRED Transmitter range is farther than you can see. Sensors feed speed and rpm data to free iPhone app.

TIRED Transmitter range is farther than you can see. Needs near-perfect road surfaces. Hit top speed anywhere but Bonneville and you will crash. Sub-15-minute battery life.

Google has made some significant strides getting Chrome, in relatively short time, to become one of the most popular web browsers around. Now, some numbers from StatCounter indicate that it has, for the first time — and for one day only! — become the world’s most popular browser, overtaking Internet Explorer.

On March 18, Chrome just edged past Internet Explorer before Microsoft’s browser quickly regained its lead. What’s interesting is that Chrome’s ascendance was down to its popularity in India, Russia and Brazil, where it topped the polls, according to the analysts.

That is in contrast to markets like the U.S., China and Germany, where StatCounter says Google’s browser is regularly in second or third place, with Firefox and IE taking the top slot.

Two other notable trends emerge out of StatCounter’s data, which is based on 15 billion page views per month (4 billion in the U.S.), covering 3 million websites:

– Chrome’s rise is almost totally at the expense of Internet Explorer: as you can see in the graphic below, usage of these two is almost the mirror opposite, while the other big players — Firefox, Safari and Opera — have relatively consistent usage.

– Chrome seems to be getting used more on weekends. That likely points to the fact that in office environments, IE continues to rule the roost, while when consumers are at home, they go for Google.

This points to Chrome possibly still finding it hard to make inroads into the enterprise, although if you subscribe to the theory of “consumerization” in IT, it’s just a matter of time before that tips to Google as a browser as well.

On the other hand, it also underscores how significant emerging markets have become in terms of swaying larger global use of internet products: something that will also increasingly get reflected in how they are developed.

Yummly, a semantic recipe search engine, has raised $6 million in Series A funding led by Physic Ventures and Unilever Corporate Ventures, the venture capital arm of food giant Unilever, with contributions from returning investors Harrison Metal Capital and the Harvard Commons Press, among others.

Yummly aggregates over hundreds of thousands of recipes from around the web and allows you to filter results by type of food, course, and ingredient and break down recipes by diet, allergy, nutrition, price, cuisine, time, taste, and sources.

You can also edit and save any recipe with ingredient substitutions and adjustments based on your preferences; Yummly will recalculate the recipe to reflect the new ingredient amounts. So if you wanted to cut a recipe down to one portion, Yummly will recalculate the ingredients you need for a smaller version of a dish.

And Yummly calculates the nutritional value for each recipe, showing you the breakdown of calories, fats, proteins, and carbohydrates. Users can also import and add their favorite recipes from other websites and save them in their Yummly recipe box.

The company says it is now seeing 4 million unique visitors a month, and also launched a Facebook app as well. Yummly has around 1.4 million Facebook subscribers and has seen a 75 percent uptick in Facebook referral traffic since launching the Timeline app last year. The new funding will be used for hiring and product development.

Dell has been operating IT community AppDeploy since it acquired the platform’s owner Kace Networks in 2010. The site itself has been operating for 13 years, and receives around 450,000 monthly visitors per month says Dell, but growth has stalled. And Dell hadn’t invested much into the site. Today, the company is completely revamping AppDeploy and relaunching the community as ITNinja, a more social, Q&A-focused product-agnostic resource for front line IT administrators.

AppDeploy.com, which was the brainchild of Bob Kelly, was previously a forum-focused community knowledge base that was updated by IT professionals around how to deploy and automate software applications. While the community will continue to revolve around the sharing information and answers around critical IT decisions and support, the new site ITNinja is focuses more on engagement, reputation and social interactions.

Despite the fact that visitors to AppDeploy aren’t growing Dell says that an online survey of IT professionals sponsored by KACE in February 2012 revealed 80 percent of IT professionals engage in online communities with 70 percent of them visiting several times a week. And 95 percent of front-line professionals say they save time and do their job more efficiently by using these same online communities.

ITNinja focuses on software topics such as application deployment techniques, configuration settings, and management solutions. Users will be able to leverage the community to find answers and best practices on a range of these complex issues.

The new platform features a Q&A system (as opposed to a forum like interface), rich content pages, personalized activity feeds, and a reputation management system to encourage use. Dell has also added a tagging system to support better navigation between topics.

In particular, the activity feed highlighting users’ contributions and providing a customized view
of all software, topics, contributors and blogs that they follow to keep them up-to-date on the content they care about most. The reputation management system uses gamification elements to reward users with points and prizes for their contributions (past and present). Points determine one’s “belt” level which is attached to their identity on the site.

Dell KACE customers will also be able to access the same information directly through the interface of their KACE Systems Management Appliance Console offering users a quick reference for common system administration tasks.

CTERA Networks, a company that provides managed cloud-based storage and data protection for SMBs, has raised an undisclosed round of funding led by Venrock, with a strategic investment from Cisco Systems and participation of existing investor Benchmark Capital. Venrock partner Ray Rothrock will join CTERA’s board of directors.

CTERA Networks helps bridge the gap between cloud and local storage for small to medium-sized businesses as well as large companies. The company provides solutions to cloud service providers to better serve customers, allowing them to provide cloud-based data protection and other services. Service providers and enterprises use CTERA to deliver services such as backup, cloud on-ramping, file sharing, folder synchronization, and mobile access based on the storage infrastructure of their choice.

The company’s CloudPlug computing device transforms any external USB hard drive into a NAS device with automatic backup. The contents of any attached USB drive are automatically backed up online.

CTERA says that it has seen seven consecutive quarters of double-digit revenue growth and now reaches more than 100,000 business end-users, primarily in North America and Europe. The new round of funding will be used to further accelerate the expansion of the CTERA team and towards meeting product demand.

With the world of apps no longer in its early days, we are starting to see the emergence of a lot more services that give developers more sophisticated ways of interacting with users, and monetizing what they create. One of the more popular has been the rise of real-time messaging within apps; and today, one player in that space, PubNub, has picked up $4.5 million in funding to expand that line of business even further.

The Series A round was led by mobile-specialist VC Relay Ventures, itself just launched today as the rebranded, $150-million fund formerly known as ATP Capital (the firm that runs JLA Ventures, Clairmont Capital, and BlackBerry Partners Fund. There was also participation from TiE Angels.

PubNub, which was founded in August 2010, has seen more recently a surge in activity on its platform, which provides push-based, real-time messaging both for mobile apps as well as online — either from a publisher to many subscribers, or from subscribers to each other (acting as the ‘publishers’ in the S and P diagram above).

It currently has some 1,000 customers who use the service in apps for multiplayer games, social media services, e-commerce websites (where “live chat” has become almost a given) and in more enterprise environments around business collaboration.

And one area where it has seen particularly high usage is in events-based messaging. It has provided the platform for messaging around some of the biggies, such as the  Super Bowl, the Grammys and the Oscars, and it recently passed a peak of 100,000 messages per second on its platform.

While PubNub is not a consumer-facing service in itself, you can see how it might potentially go up against those that are consumer-facing and offer similar a similar kind of real-time, collaborative messaging option. The one that comes to mind first is Twitter — which has long been touting how well it gets used around certain events, and has recently seen significantly more native integration on the iOS platform. And that’s not to mention other B2B companies doing the same thing as PubNub.

Given that competitive environment, it makes sense for a company like PubNub to potentially use its platform for more than just the messaging it currently provides. Indeed, you can see how the platform could be used for other kinds of interactive services, or even using the messaging as part of a wider interactive service involving, say, marketing. Interactivity is a key area for publishers looking for more ways of keeping users in their apps, and potentially making more revenue out of having them there.

One attractive thing about PubNub is that, with its small team of just 10 employees, it seems to have covered all bases early on in terms of developer environments. The company says it works with iOS, Android, JavaScript, Blackberry, Windows Phone, Node.JS, Python, and Ruby among others, and its cloud-based service works “from any point on earth.”