The money was actually raised last fall in two rounds after the company completed the Y Combinator program, but for whatever reason it’s been kept under wraps. NetworkEffect took the opportunity to talk with co-founder Rudy Adler about his year-old start-up this week.

“The Internet was missing a past tense,” is Adler’s quip to explain the motivation for 1000Memories. The site offers a central place for mourners to contribute pictures, stories and the like, with the promise of becoming a permanent collaborative obituary and eulogy.

Sites like Facebook don’t have a great way of dealing with people who pass away, because they are designed for living participants, Adler said. Creating accounts for dead people can be awkward, but perhaps less so on a dedicated, nicely designed site.

Future premium products for 1000Memories may include custom domains, physical memory books, personalized designs and additional storage, Adler said. The company currently helps its users do things like rip and post DVDs, in part because they are often much older and less tech savvy than the average social media user.

1000Memories recently launched a groups feature that was used to memorialize those killed in the Egyptian protests. It went viral, with more than 400,000 page views, Adler said.

In addition to Greylock, participants in the $2.5 million Series A round included Caterina Fake, Ron Conway, Keith Rabois, Mike Maples, Paul Buchheit and Chris Sacca. It came through just a couple of months after 1000Memories had raised an angel round worth $500,000.

Many of us already pull out our smartphone to take a quick photo to document a shopping list, the diagrams on a whiteboard or the contents of a moving box. It’s just quicker and more informative than writing things down.

VisualList isn’t some massive feat of engineering; there’s no image recognition or anything like that. And it’s a lot simpler than other personal memory apps out there, like Evernote. What the iPhone app does is organize photos into checklists and let users tag items through the touchscreen, then formats the lists into emails and Facebook albums for sharing.

The app was created by Martin Gannholm, who worked at Apple on projects like the Newton for 10 years ending in 1995, then founded the hosted enterprise software company Allegis, and more recently worked on engineering projects at Microsoft and PopCap. The self-funded two-person company behind the app is called Way2Clever.

Gannholm is charging $2.99 for VisualList and anticipates selling future thematic versions–for instance, a wedding-themed app for users to take pictures of the dresses they try on or the centerpiece arrangements they want to re-create, or what have you.

Three bucks seems a bit much for something users can nearly do without an app, but perhaps not in the context of a big, expensive or ongoing project that’s helped by thinking visually–say, remodeling a home.

Having played around with the app, I’ll say it seems like the kind of thing Apple and other smartphone makers could think about making part of their own camera software.

Update: As of Feb. 10, VisualList’s price has been lowered to $0.99.

“We strongly believe that one or more very strategic opportunities may come along, that we are in a unique position to take advantage of because of our strong cash position,” he said. “You know, we’ve demonstrated a strong track record of being very disciplined with the use of our cash. We don’t let it burn a hole in our pocket, we don’t allow it to motivate us to do stupid acquisitions. And so I think that we’d like to continue to keep our powder dry, because we do feel that there are one or more strategic opportunities in the future. That’s the biggest reason.”

That remark spurred all sorts of speculation about what sensible large-scale acquisitions Apple might make. And while it was certainly reasonable to conclude from Jobs’s remarks that Apple is preparing itself for some big M&A plays in the future, there was another equally plausible conclusion: What if by “strategic opportunities,” Jobs was referring to supply chain investments–money spent to overcome impediments to growth? Apple has done this before, most notably in 2005, when it arranged to purchase up to 40 percent of Samsung Electronics’ holiday NAND flash output for use in it iPods. It inked a similar iPhone-related deal in 2008, forcing Samsung to reduce its supply to other customers to fulfill its obligation to Apple. And there was another half-billion-dollar deal with Toshiba is 2009.

And according to COO Tim Cook, Apple just did it again–but on a much grander scale. During the first-quarter earnings call last week, Cook said the company had invested $3.9 billion to secure component supplies and capacity.

“We’ve historically entered into certain agreements with different people to secure supply and other benefits,” he said. “And the largest one in the recent past has been we signed a deal with several flash suppliers back at the end of 2005 that totaled over $1 billion because we anticipated that flash would become increasingly important across our entire product line and increasingly important to the industry. And so we wanted to secure supply for the company, and we think that, that was an absolutely fantastic use of Apple’s cash. And we constantly look for more of these. And so in the past several quarters we’ve identified another area and come to some recent agreements that [CFO Peter Oppenheimer] talked about in his opening comments, in that these payments consist of prepayments and capital for process equipment and tooling. And similar to the flash agreements, they’re focused in that area we feel is very strategic. And so I’d prefer not to go into more detail about what specific area it’s in, but it’s the same kind of thinking that led us to those deals that led us to the flash deal.”

For what particular components, he wouldn’t say. There are some likely candidates, though: The high-res LCDs used in the iPhone 4 and iPad; solid-state drives like the ones in the new MacBook Air, which are presumably headed to other portions of the MacBook line as well; or perhaps some new system on a chip that will infuse the next-generation iPad and iPhone with significant performance gains. I’m sure there are others as well. And all fit quite nicely into Jobs’s vision of “strategic opportunities.”

I caught up with Li last week to talk about the way he sees the cloud shaping up in the enterprise, and where he’s seeing opportunity as it develops. If cloud computing turns out to be the fundamentally new computing platform that many think it is, then there’s a lot of different pieces–Li refers to these as layers–that have to be assembled to make it work. And it’s in those layers where he looks for opportunities.

NewEnterprise: So what do you mean when you talk about the “cloudframe”?

Li: “I keep telling everyone that every time there’s a new computing platform, you basically have to re-create all the pieces of the mainframe. The basic building blocks of computing don’t change. You still need provisioning, management, security, and you need networking. The pieces may change, and different layers get merged into others. I’ve been calling it the cloudframe, for lack of a better word, which allows you to redefine all the layers, from the data layer to the storage layer to the provisioning management layer. Some of the layers that may have been separate before are being merged into one. So I’m spending my time figuring which are the layers that you can build a company around and which are the ones that become features rather than products.

So what are you finding?

There are two layers I’ve spent a lot of time time on, and where we’ve made investments. One is the data layer, and one of the companies I’ve spent a lot of time on is Cloudera, which is built around the Hadoop ecosystem. With the new types of data and applications that are out there, it’s really challenging the idea about whether the relational database is the right data management solution of the future. If you look at the big Internet data centers, say at Google or Facebook, the answer is no. There are no Oracle databases running those applications. Instead they’re using things like Hadoop and MapReduce and distributed file systems on commodity hardware. So I think the whole data structure is moving because the types and volumes of data are changing so much. The data is a lot more complex, and there’s a lot more of it.

There’s been a lot of suspicion and resistance in the enterprise toward letting critical data and applications out the door to run on someone else’s hardware. Is that changing?

I’m less rigid with my definition of the cloud. It doesn’t have to all run on Amazon or something like that. This cloudframe idea is really about extracting applications and services from underlying hardware and resources. It’s about having things available to you anywhere, and having them scale up quickly. They can exist on both sides of the firewall. When we launched Cloudera we thought everyone was going to want to run things on Amazon’s cloud. But most enterprise customers are running large installations of Hadoop on their own servers.

So the data layer is clearly one place where you think businesses can be built. What are some of the others?

Once you have the data layer set, there will be a lot of innovation on the storage side. We’re doing a lot of things around flash memory storage. We’ve invested in Fusion-io, which uses flash memory to build high-performance storage systems. Before, you had to have a storage area network to get the performance and availability you needed to run a big database application. Adding flash memory to your storage lets you expand a lot and do it efficiently. If you look at a lot of the cloud data centers, there’s not a lot of EMC and NetApps gear running in them. There’s a lot of commodity white boxes with Fusion-io starting to get deployed in them.

Last year you joined the board of Nimbula after Accel made an investment in it. That must be part of another layer you like, right?

That’s the application layer. Nimbula is from the guys who first built Amazon EC2. Now they’re actually building a private version of EC2, for the enterprises who for one reason or another can’t go to the public cloud. If an IT manager wants to deploy an app these days they have to put in a request and then he may get servers in six months. With EC2, if you want to deploy something for testing or whatever, all you need is a credit card and you can get it going right away. The Nimbula guys are building a technology that provisions and manages cloud services out of your own IT resources. A lot of enterprise IT guys I talk to say their bosses point to Amazon EC2 and ask, “Why can’t you build me one of those?” Now they can.

All the layers are all getting reinvented. Some will be a service, some will be on-premise. For a new platform to emerge, a lot of things need to come together, and I think a lot of things have been in the making for a while. The environment feels as ripe as it ever has.

DRAM is the ultimate commodity chip market, and its boom-or-bust cycles are legendary. When demand picks up, manufacturers like Samsung, Hynix and Micron always rush to add manufacturing capacity–prices pick up; chips become scarce.

Everything seemed to be going well for the chip companies until the third quarter of 2010. After five straight quarters where the average price for a DRAM chip increased, it suddenly turned south as demand for notebook PCs slacked. That’s in line with what Gartner and IDC reported yesterday about the PC market.

There’s good news for consumers, however. All that stacked-up inventory has to go somewhere. If you’re planning to buy a notebook this year, the base models will now start shipping with four gigabytes of memory instead of two. And for those who bought a machine with only two in the last year or so, upgrades will be more affordable.

The one bright spot for the memory companies? You got it: Smartphones and tablets. Memory content in phones is expected to increase by nearly two-thirds. And the 57 million tablets that iSuppli expects will ship this year will also need some DRAM. More details here from iSuppli.

The event, at the Marriott Copley Place downtown, is just getting under way. I won’t bore you with every detail, but will post whenever things get interesting.

In the meantime, enjoy this take on Angry Birds for the BlackBerry.

Update, 10:17 am ET: The intro is still going on. RIM Vice President Alec Taylor is talking about the Cuban Missile Crisis for some reason. However, RIM was nice enough to pass out slides for the whole day. Here are some of the highlights:

BlackBerry Mobile Voice System
Launching in early 2011, this is an update to RIM’s effort to unify the desk and mobile phone, offering a single identity, voiceover Wi-Fi calling, a single voicemail box, dialing office extensions and more. RIM says the new version will support more types of business phone systems.

Other features coming later this year include automatic hand-off from Wi-Fi to mobile networks, a “move call from desk” feature and more.

BlackBerry Balance
A new effort to support mixing personal and corporate data on the BlackBerry. RIM is adding features such as the ability for IT to choose to wipe only corporate information from a device or to limit users from cutting work data and pasting it into a personal application or email. Other features include warnings when sending emails or calendar invites outside of the organization, the ability to encrypt media cards and options for preventing access to work data by third-party applications.

BlackBerry client for Microsoft SharePoint
Launching in early 2011, this will bring data from Microsoft’s portal software directly to BlackBerry handhelds. It will work with both the 2007 and 2010 versions of SharePoint and integrates into a number of BlackBerry programs, including E-mail, calendar, Documents To Go and the browser.

PlayBook
As for the forthcoming tablet, RIM says it will ship with 1GB of memory, have 16GB, 32GB or 64GB of flash memory, include a 3-megapixel front-facing and 5-megapixel rear-facing camera and have micro USB and Micro HDMI ports. (I can’t remember if they have said all of that before.) The slides say only that it will ship this quarter and will be “competitively priced,” reiterating past company positioning.

According to the slides, the company also plans to talk about cloud-based device management and changes to allow one BlackBerry server to support multiple corporations.

10:35 am ET: The Cuban Missile Crisis is apparently over, and VP Pete Devenyi is now outlining the company’s business product road map and making the pitch for its strategy.

“We really do have a great story,” he says, noting that the enterprise is different from the “arms race” of the consumer market.

“It’s not just about the number of apps in App world,” he says, noting that businesses can and are building programs just for use within the corporation. Some businesses, he says, have hundreds of internal apps, none of which show up in the public storefront. BlackBerry, he says, also allows businesses better control than rivals over what programs are on a worker’s device. For example, Devenyi says, when workers change groups within a company, the programs they have access to can be updated automatically with programs deleted and added from their devices.

“That kind of power is power that no one else has,” he says. “We don’t read about that much.”

10:43 am: In addition to both the paid BlackBerry Enterprise Server and the slimmed-down free “Express” version of the server, RIM plans to launch an email system aimed directly at small-to-midsize businesses–MDaemon Messaging Server, BlackBerry Edition. The idea is to give smaller businesses a full email server that has full BlackBerry support. The product stems from an acquisition RIM made a year or two ago and offers what RIM says are features similar to Microsoft’s Exchange Server but at a fraction of the price.

The company is also launching “very, very soon” a modest update to its flagship server product, BlackBerry Enterprise Server 5.0.3. It will add more support for employee-owned devices (including the BlackBerry Balance feature described earlier), support for encrypted attachments and certification for Microsoft’s Office Communications Server 2007 R2 and the latest version, known as Lync 2010.

11:18 am: RIM is launching yet another server this year, known as the BlackBerry Enterprise Application Middleware (BEAM). BEAM, which companies would have to buy in addition to their BlackBerry email server, aims to streamline enterprise content for use on a BlackBerry. ‘What that results in is a much more efficient application than you would otherwise have,” Devenyi says. It’s in beta now, he adds.

11:25 am: BlackBerry is launching its equivalent of Find My Phone, known as BlackBerry Protect, which will allow individuals to remotely wipe or post a message if a device is lost. Protect will launch later this year, Devenyi says.

Finally, the company is talking about a number of changes it is making to the core BlackBerry Enterprise Server so that it can run via the cloud. Launching later this year, RIM will have the ability for its server product to be remotely hosted and support more than one business. It’s not clear yet if this will be RIM offering BlackBerry as a cloud-based service or if this is a product for hosting partners, though it sounds more like the latter.

11:32 am: Devenyi told Mobilized that the company is just showing the architectural changes it is making, not saying how it will bring the cloud-based capabilities to market. “We’re still working through a number of those details ourselves.” Devenyi said. “It could be both, but we are not announcing.”

11:42 am: On to the PlayBook finally. Senior Product manager Ryan Bidan gives the spiel. He says there is a lot that the company isn’t ready to share. Addressing concerns around battery life, Bidan notes the PlayBook has a 5300-miliamp battery, but doesn’t give specifics on how much battery life that will translate to.

“We’ll have good battery life,” he says. “Don’t worry about the battery life.”

Other details:
Software updates will be pushed down to the device on an ongoing basis. There will be a version of App World on the device for downloading developer-created programs.

And with that, the formal part of the event is over.