Actian CEO Steven Shine told AllThingsD that the combined company will have revenue north of $150 million and 450 employees around the world.

It’s Actian’s third significant acquisition since 2011. In January, it paid $162 million for Pervasive Software, a publicly held software company. Late last year, it paid $37 million for Versant, beating out a bid from another company.

Financial terms were not disclosed, since both companies are private. But the deal marks an exit for ParAccel’s investors, including Amazon, MDV, Bay Partners, Walden International, Tao Venture Partners and Menlo Ventures, who had put in a combined $64 million since its founding in 2007. The most recent capital injection was a $20 million venture round led by Amazon that was announced a year ago.

ParAccel specializes in high-end databases, and has seen a handful of its primary competitors, like Vertica and Aster Data Systems, acquired by the likes of Hewlett-Packard and Teradata, respectively. Its Analytic Platform brings together an analytic database along with features to extend it and integrate it with other technologies for running big-data analytics. Its customers include Amazon, Royal Bank of Scotland, OfficeMax and MicroStrategy.

Amazon uses ParAccel’s technology in its RedShift cloud-based data warehousing service, while MicroStrategy uses it to power a business intelligence product.

Shine said that as more companies begin to struggle with their big-data and analytics problems, their choices first seem limited to large vendors like IBM and Oracle and EMC’s Greenplum. “When you look at companies that are focused purely on data, you see the behemoths, and most of those drag hardware along with them,” he said. “And then you look down below and see a lot of Hadoop spinoffs.”

Companies are looking for help in getting all the various threads of gathering, managing and analyzing big troves of data and then turning it all into useful business intelligence, Shine said. And they also want to do it in the cloud, and that’s where he sees the opportunity.

Actian was born as a database product called Ingres inside CA Technologies, one it acquired in the 1990s. In 2004, CA decided to turn it into an open-source product. And in 2005, during a fit of streamlining, CA’s Ingres assets were spun out as a privately held company, majority owned by the private equity firm Garnett & Helfrich Capital, and became Ingres Corp. It changed its name to Actian in 2011.

The company said today that it has closed a $17.1 million round of funding from its existing syndicate of investors, plus a new lead investor, Triangle Peak Partners. The round brings its total capital to $116 million raised since 2005.

It’s Vidyo’s fifth round of funding, the last being a $22 million series D led by QuestMark Partners. Networking company Juniper Networks later joined that with an undisclosed amount at the time, though a little back-of-the-envelope math suggests it was between $12 million and $14 million.

Previous investors include Menlo Ventures, Rho Ventures, Sevin Rosen Funds, Saints and Four Rivers Group.

In a statement announcing the funding, Vidyo said it saw billings increase by 68 percent year over year. This included a 77 percent surge in its health care business, and 67 percent growth in large enterprises. Since it’s private, it doesn’t disclose revenue.

Vidyo’s secret sauce is a technology called Adaptive Video Layering. Its hardware sits in a rack in the customer’s data center and constantly watches the underlying network conditions, and then adapts to meet them while video calls are under way. If there’s a lot of interference, the Vidyo system throttles up and down on the picture and sound it’s trying to deliver, based on the condition of the network. But it also adapts dynamically to the device that’s being used: It supports Apple’s iOS devices and also Google Android devices. It’s also the technology behind Google Hangout.

Image copyright Constantine Pankin

We Americans are at our best when we have faith in our ability to reinvent our future. From our founding days to now, we have been a nation of revolutionary wanderers, immigrants to a new land, filled with the wanderlust of what is possible if we only set forth and try to realize our dreams for our futures. America is a nation of entrepreneurial spirits. It is time for our government to reflect our entrepreneurial roots and spirit and act in concert and accord with us.

Luckily, we have elected a president in Barack Obama who has spent an incredible amount of time meeting with American entrepreneurs and listening to our ideas. As a co-chair of Tech for Obama, I helped conceive of and implement — with Jim Green — a series of Tech Roundtables throughout 2011 and 2012. Through eight roundtables with more than 140 entrepreneurs, I was able to witness President Obama’s deep commitment to listening to new ideas for America and American entrepreneurship. As a co-founder of the Startup Visa movement three years ago, I was witness to the transformation that occurred in Silicon Valley in our engagement in public policy, and our realization that we cannot stay in reactive mode, but must graduate to a proactive participation in our democracy.

Inspired by President Obama and entrepreneurs, I wrote “10 for 10,” which is a framework and proposal to galvanize American entrepreneurship to create 10 million new jobs in 10 years. This proposal is wholly my own, and is not endorsed by anyone in the government or any other organization.

“10 for 10” proposes that the government join forces with the American business and entrepreneurship community to sign up for a specific goal of creating 10 million new jobs in America in the next 10 years. The majority of these jobs will be related to the technology sector. The nature of these jobs will have hundreds of billions of dollars worth of sustainable impact on the American economy. The ideas in this proposal are the beginnings of a framework for the creation of those 10 million jobs.

I wrote “10 for 10” at the end of November 2012, weeks after the election, and shared it with key people in the White House — and now I share this plan with you. Here’s to hoping that some of these ideas take flight.

10 For 10 Proposal

Silicon Valley investor and entrepreneur Shervin Pishevar, a co-CEO of Sherpa Foundry and Venture Advisor at Menlo Ventures, has worked closely with a lot of Web 2.0’s hottest startups, such as Uber, Fab and Warby Parker, while also leading Menlo’s investment in Tumblr. An active angel investor, he has also started a number of companies, such as the Social Gaming Network, which was merged with Mindjolt and Webs.com, which was acquired by Vistaprint for $117.5m in cash.

Well-known Silicon Valley investor and entrepreneur Shervin Pishevar of Menlo Ventures and Goldman Sachs tech banker Scott Stanford are starting a new company that will focus on formulating a new model of how startups are created.

Pishevar confirmed his move, but Stanford did not respond to a query about the new effort.

That said, sources said he is poised to leave the investment bank and partner with Pishevar in a new venture called Sherpa, which has two parts.

One is called The Foundry, which is being funded by a number of major strategic corporations, who are presumably looking to gain a digital edge. It will also include well-known entrepreneur partners, but no investors or venture capital firms.

There will also be a fund related to invest in the new companies created, which will also include assets added in from the larger companies.

It’s not exactly an incubator or accelerator, said Pishevar in an interview, given the mixed record of those efforts to create startups. He would not give any more details as yet.

Pishevar will remain as a venture advisor to Menlo, as part of the change, and has also been named a strategic advisor to Uber, the fast-growing car service.

Said Pishevar: “I’m incredibly excited to announce my new endeavor, Sherpa and The Foundry. This is the biggest idea I’ve ever pursued. I’m also so excited about my new role as strategic advisor to Uber and very honored to stay as a venture advisor at Menlo to continue the epic work we have done together.”

The parting with Menlo appears to be amicable. “Menlo is excited to see Shervin’s new model come to fruition while continuing to work together in his role as a venture advisor,” said Menlo’s Shawn Carolan. “As anyone who knows him can attest, his talents in spotting great ideas, connecting and evangelizing are exceptional and his venture advisor role allows us to continue to collaborate on finding and creating value together.”

Indeed more than many in the tech scene, the incessantly networking Pishevar is perhaps well suited to such an ambitious effort like Sherpa. He’s has worked closely with a lot of Web 2.0′s hottest startups, such as Uber, Fab and Warby Parker, while also leading Menlo’s investment in Tumblr.

An active angel investor, he has also started a number of companies, such as the Social Gaming Network, which was merged with Mindjolt.

And Stanford is equally well known in Silicon Valley, having shepherded a wide variety of high-profile deals for the banking giant, while heading its global Internet investment banking business from San Francisco as a managing director.

He’s been at Goldman for a dozen years and has been involved in investments in Facebook, Zappos and LinkedIn. Before banking, he worked at pioneering search company, LookSmart.

Previous investors including Atlas Venture, Flybridge Capital Partners and Menlo Ventures are back as well; DataXu has now raised $65 million.

DataXu started out in life as one of many “demand side platforms” that helped marketers place their ads in “real time” ad exchanges and took a cut of the media they bought.

Now CEO Mike Baker says the bulk of his revenues comes from software he licenses, which is supposed to let ad buyers navigate that world on their own.

DataXu’s giant round is one of many we’ve seen in the last year. Last month, for instance, ad platform AppNexus pulled down $75 million; in June, publisher platform PubMatic rounded up $45 million.

All of these companies play in different parts of the complicated ad tech landscape, but all of these big dollar bets are headed in the same direction: Their investors think they’re going to end up bulking up — via growth and M&A — and going public.

A lot of these guys have now raised so much that they don’t really have any other option. At one point investors were assuming that all sorts of acquirers would step in and snap these guys up, but aside from Google and Adobe, most would-be acquirers have sat on their checkbooks. But some optimists/bankers are hoping to entice Yahoo and/or Facebook to come to the table…

The acquisition was reported by several media outlets, including The Wall Street Journal, which cited sources close to the transaction as saying that Chase paid $35 million for the San Francisco company.

Bloomspot’s roughly 100 employees are expected to be offered jobs at the lender and payment processor.

Together, the two should be a good fit.

In general, banks and card issuers are looking for new revenue streams after the Durbin Amendment capped the amount that they could charge merchants on debit card transactions. Additionally, many banks have already begun sending targeted ads or deals to consumers based on their spending habits.

In a recent story, I named financial companies, including Visa, MasterCard and American Express, as potential acquirers for Groupon. However, one impediment with Groupon is its price. Even though its stock is down around 80 percent since its IPO, it would still cost billions to acquire.

The purchase today by Chase shows that there is an interest, just at a lower price point.

In a release, Jeff Kinder, president of Chase Offers, said, “Merchant partners are continually looking for ways to engage the right customers, and consumers have shown a clear interest in receiving offers from their favorite merchants. We believe Chase has a unique set of assets to bring these customers together and deliver highly targeted, relevant merchant offers at scale.”

Over the past few years, Bloomspot, which was led by former Yahoo executive Jasper Malcolmson, has tried hard to disassociate itself from both Groupon and LivingSocial. Even though on the surface it seems as though Bloomspot distributed similar offers, Malcolmson said he was focused on bringing merchants profitable customers rather than just getting new people in the door.

The company’s motto was, “Great Offers. Great Customers.”

But this deal may not have been so great for investors.

Last summer, Bloomspot raised $35 million in a second round of funding just before Groupon’s public offering. Prior to that, it raised nearly $11 million, for a total of about $46 million. Investors include InterWest Partners, Columbia Capital, Menlo Ventures and True Ventures, among others.

Well, not all of them.

Cinemagram, a mobile social network for short, hybrid photo-videos, has received $8.5 million led by Menlo Ventures and including Atlas Venture, Khosla Ventures and Real Ventures. The round closed last week.

Cinemagram saw extreme growth over the past couple of months, adding 100,000 or more new users per day. That curve has flattened a bit, admitted co-founder Temo Chalasani — the daily numbers of sign-ups are in the tens of thousands now.

“It’s reasonable and healthy, as opposed to before, where it was an incredible spike,” Chalasani said of the app’s growth.

Further, many of those users are sticking around for long periods of time. The average daily visitor watches at least 50 “cines” per day, Chalasani said.

So why is Cinemagram different from and better than other shooting-star mobile apps? Chalasani believes that Cinemagram’s two-second cines are an ideal format for mobile.

The default Cinemagram format is for the tiny clip to play over and over again automatically. It’s not so novel if you’ve ever seen an animated GIF. Unlike full-length videos, which can be tedious to create and watch from phones, two seconds is not much of an investment.

Chalasani said these short clips should appeal to publishers and content creators, who can target mobile audiences with promos for their full-length material. A lot can be communicated in just two seconds, he noted. For instance, some Cinemagram users have taken to filming touchdowns when they’re watching football, and then posting them.

Another Cinemagram user has recorded, over the past month, his brother Jake’s progress after being hospitalized with an induced coma after falling down concrete steps. Where in the early days Jake’s progress was as little as moving his thumb, just yesterday he sat up and laughed.

The investors who participated in Cinemagram’s Series A round had previously provided $1 million in bridge funding for the company over the summer. Shervin Pishevar from Menlo Ventures is now joining Cinemagram’s board.

“We’re streaming tens of terabytes a week of data, so the funding will go towards that,” Chalasani said. Plus, the five-person Cinemagram team has just moved from Montreal to San Francisco, where it’s looking to hire. And they still need to make an Android app.

But, for once, as part of announcing its fourth round of capital today, Flurry is talking about how well its own business is doing — and things aren’t too shabby.

In an interview, Simon Khalaf, Flurry’s president and CEO, said the company’s revenue is on track to hit $80 million to $100 million this year, up 300 percent over 2011. The company is also cash-flow positive, and is on track to go public as soon as next year.

Crosslink Capital led the $25 million round, with participation from existing investors, including Menlo Ventures, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, InterWest Partners, Union Square Ventures, First Round Capital and Draper Richards.

Khalaf said Flurry selected Crosslink, in part, because of the firm’s experience in taking companies like Pandora and Omniture public. In all, the company has raised $51.6 million.

While many people may not have heard of Flurry because it is not a consumer-facing product, it is crunching numbers behind the scenes of some of the most popular apps running across Android, iOS and a number of other platforms. Today, 250,000 apps use its analytics tools for free, or are tapping into its ad network, called AppCircle, which helps developers acquire new users.

Khalaf said that two things are driving the company’s growth right now: The adoption of smartphones and tablets on a global scale, and a growing number of applications that need its services. In more mature markets, like the U.S., it’s mostly the growth of tablets. “It’s the trend that’s replacing laptops and 13-inch TVs and the gaming console and the magazine rack — all at the same time. It’s infinite growth,” he said.

Today, 65 percent of the company’s revenue comes from the U.S., with the bulk of international revenue coming from Europe. Next, Flurry plans to expand to Asia and Latin America. Its advertising platform reaches more than 700 million monthly unique visitors, and with the adoption of more devices, Khalaf estimates it will soon hit more than one billion.

Currently, the bulk of the apps using Flurry’s platform include gaming, social networking and dating, but increasingly, he expects that to change, with more interest coming from the traditional entertainment industry.

While there are many opportunities for growth, the CEO admits that there are still challenges ahead — the primary one being what kind of ad formats will be dominant on mobile. Since smartphones have smaller screens, banner advertisements don’t always work as well. Khalaf said Flurry is having some luck with video advertisements, but a lot of work still has to be done in figuring out the best way to catch a user’s attention.

“We can find really cool ad units that can engage consumers,” he promises.

Here’s the full release:

Flurry Raises $25 Million Series D to Solidify Mobile App Measurement and Advertising Leadership

San Francisco, CA — November 2, 2012 — Flurry, a leading mobile app measurement and advertising platform, today announced that it has received $25 million in an oversubscribed Series D round of financing led by Crosslink Capital. The round of funding, which included full participation from existing investors Menlo Ventures, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, InterWest Partners, Union Square Ventures, First Round Capital and Draper Richards, brings the company’s total funding to $51.6 million.  Nick Mignano, Partner at Crosslink Capital, will join Flurry’s board of directors.

Flurry will use the financing to accelerate the adoption of newly introduced platform products Flurry AppSpot, its supply-side platform, and Flurry Ad Analytics, its advertising effectiveness solution. Flurry will also use funds to grow its team and expand internationally.

“Flurry is powering a new wave of digital advertising with big data for the mobile app economy in an exciting way,” said Nick Mignano, Partner of Crosslink Capital.  “The scale at which the company is operating in terms of data volume, ad serving and revenue generation impressed our team. This enables one of the most innovative uses of data for business customers since our private investment in Omniture in 2006.”

Flurry has grown significantly over the past year, quadrupling the number of data points it measures, now over 32 billion per day.  Each day, the company measures 1.9 billion application sessions across more than 250 million unique smartphone and tablet devices. Over the last year, Flurry has doubled the number of applications using its services from 120,000 to more than 250,000.  In total, more than 80,000 companies now use Flurry services across iOS, Android, Windows Phone, BlackBerry, HTML5 and JavaME platforms.

Flurry AppCircle, the company’s data-driven ad network, has grown by more than 3 times in volume over the last year. AppCircle now delivers over 120 million completed monthly advertising conversions, including first-time app downloads, user app re-engagements and completed video views.

“Flurry is excited to welcome Crosslink to our board as we expand the reach and adoption of the Flurry platform,” said Simon Khalaf, Flurry president and chief executive officer.  “Flurry is a unique, mobile-first company playing at the intersection of big data, mobile applications and digital advertising. We look forward to using this new round of funding to significantly accelerate our growth in one of the fastest growing technology markets in history.”

Peer-to-peer car-sharing — a type of collaborative consumption service where car owners allow strangers to borrow their cars for pay — is one of those smart ideas that takes a good long moment to process.

And so the companies in the space — which has no clear leader — are experimenting with new business models, distribution partnerships, mobile apps and in-car technology to make themselves more accessible (for instance, RelayRides has a deal with OnStar, Wheelz is focused on college campuses). Nobody really has it figured out yet.

Getaround’s latest idea is a service launching today called Getaway, in which it manages lending of previously unused cars full-time. This would be for people who really aren’t using their cars for at least six months, for instance while they’re taking a long trip or on military duty.

For the first three months, Getaround guarantees $1,000 in payments to car owners who join the program.

In San Francisco and Chicago, Getaround will offer “instant rentals” on these Getaway cars, where renters can unlock cars with their smartphones.

Shervin Pishevar’s Porsche Cayenne rents for $15/hour on Getaround.

The program is a pretty big commitment on Getaround’s part: in addition to renting the previously unused cars, it will also clean them, handle maintenance, equip them with an in-car unlocking kit and pay for a designated parking spot with signage.

Getaround currently helps rent 10,000 user cars in San Francisco, Austin, Portland and San Diego, which are insured up to $1 million in coverage through a Berkshire Hathaway policy.

CEO Sam Zaid said he expects to use the Series A funding to expand to additional markets, to score partnerships and for product development.

Menlo Ventures partner Shervin Pishevar, who is joining Getaround’s board, is so enthusiastic about the service that he published the Getaround listings for two of his cars on his blog this morning, saying he’d already made $2,000 in one month.

Wrote Pishevar, who is also an investor in TaskRabbit and Uber, “Most cars are only used 8 percent of the time. This is incredible waste happening each and every day across the world, and Getaround solves this problem beautifully.”

Roku, the maker of a nifty device that plays a variety of content over televisions, is getting $45 million in a new round of investment from News Corp. and British Sky Broadcasting. (News Corp. owns this Web site.)

Current investors Menlo Ventures and Globespan Capital Partners will also be part of the new funding.

The company did not disclose the new valuation with the new investment. It has previously raised $22.4 million, including from Netflix.

The investments by News Corp. and BSkyB, in which the media giant owns about 40 percent, are separate. There is also another unnamed investor in the round.

As part of the deal, News Corp.’s Chief Digital Officer Jon Miller will be joining the board.

The money will be used for expansion, as well as for other initiatives, the Saratoga, Calif.-based Roku said.

It also said it will be launching the Roku Streaming Stick this fall, which it previously announced. It is a “wireless, dongle-sized streaming device that seamlessly integrates with newer TVs and consumer electronics devices. The streaming stick is Roku’s first step in expanding its platform from streaming players to Smart TVs and other devices connected to the TV.”

Here’s the official press release that is just going out:

Roku Raises $45 Million from News Corporation, BSkyB and Others
Strategic Round Underscores Roku’s Platform Lead as Content Distribution Moves to Internet

Saratoga, Calif. — July 26, 2012 Roku Inc. today announced it has received a $45 million strategic investment. News Corporation, British Sky Broadcasting (BSkyB), prior Roku venture investors Menlo Ventures and Globespan Capital Partners as well as an unnamed strategic investor joined the round. The new relationships include both financial backing and business agreements that demonstrate the industry’s confidence in Roku as the distribution platform to bring streaming entertainment to mainstream consumers.

Roku will use the new capital to build further brand awareness through advertising, develop new international markets, and increase engineering and production to support sales growth of both hardware and digital media services on the platform including advertising, games, transactional and pay-per-view video as well as content packages. In addition to its line of popular and award-winning Roku streaming players, the company will launch the Roku Streaming Stick this fall — a wireless, dongle-sized streaming device that seamlessly integrates with newer TVs and consumer electronics devices. The streaming stick is Roku’s first step in expanding its platform from streaming players to Smart TVs and other devices connected to the TV.

“We have watched Roku maintain market leadership since the launch of its streaming platform four years ago and we look forward to deepening our relationship, having already worked closely together on the launch of several products,” said News Corporation Chief Digital Officer Jon Miller. “Roku’s significant technology advantage, coupled with a strong market position, places them in a unique position to be an integral part of the television landscape for years to come.”

“We’re delighted to have entered into this strategic relationship with Roku. As an innovative content company we’re committed to embracing a wide range of complementary platforms to create more choice and flexibility for customers,” said BSkyB Chief Financial Officer Andrew Griffith. “Coupled with the on-going strength of satellite distribution, online and mobile help us unlock even more value for customers. Working with Roku we look forward to extending our multi-platform leadership.”

“Our philosophy is to give consumers the best streaming TV experience, with the most content and at the best value in the market; and it has served us well as millions of consumers have brought Roku into their homes,” said Roku Founder and Chief Executive Officer Anthony Wood. “With the News Corporation and Sky strategic relationships, we are poised to further grow our leadership position and to become the TV distribution platform of the future.”

Jon Miller will join the Roku Board of Directors. Anthony Wood will remain Chairman of the Board.

Porrini’s LinkedIn profile confirms the move, and shows that he has taken a job as general counsel and secretary at YuMe, a company that provides video advertising software and services. The company is backed by investments from Accel Partners, BV Capital, DAG Ventures, Khosla Ventures, Menlo Ventures and Intel Capital.

HP’s legal office has seen a lot of changes recently, since former CEO Mark Hurd left, ultimately to take a job as President of Oracle. Last December, general counsel Michael Holston, who had previously been seen as a key Hurd aide, left the company. His departure came about three months after the ouster of former CEO Léo Apotheker, and Meg Whitman’s taking over as CEO last year.

In April, HP named John Schultz as general counsel, replacing David Healy, who had the job on an interim basis after Holston.

Porrini (pictured from his LinkedIn profile) had been at HP since 2001. Before that, he worked at Bluestone Software, which HP acquired in 2000. Earlier, he was a partner at the law firm of Pepper Hamilton; before that, he worked at the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

And while some people called to question that assertion, there’s no question that something interesting is clearly happening at Vidyo. Today it will get only more interesting.

You may remember how, in that previous story, I mentioned that Vidyo had raised a $22.5 million Series D round of funding led by QuestMark Partners, with Menlo Ventures, Rho Ventures, Star Ventures and Four Rivers Group all participating. Vidyo left that round open and now Juniper has joined it though the precise amount is not being disclosed.

Today, Vidyo says its total capital raised has reached about $97 million, and that Juniper Networks is making a strategic investment by way of its Junos Innovation Fund. While Vidyo isn’t exactly saying what the terms of the investment are, it’s pretty easy to do the math. (Earlier I had portrayed this as a $97 million Series D. Clearly I got a little confused. Sorry about that.)

The investment round will basically help Vidyo boost its go-to-market activities, but it will also give Juniper a big benefit by allowing Vidyo to integrate its videoconferencing products with Juniper’s numerous offerings. That will likely give it some new competitive plays against rival Cisco Systems, which has considerable video offerings. We’ll see how that turns out.

Video Conferencing Seen as Important and Growing Sector

Hackensack, NJ – May 22, 2012 – Vidyo, Inc., the world’s fastest-growing video conferencing company, today announced that Juniper Networks, the industry leader in network innovation, is joining as a strategic investor through its Junos® Innovation Fund, alongside lead investor QuestMark Partners and other existing investors Menlo Ventures, Rho Ventures, Star Ventures, and Four Rivers Group. Though terms of the investment were not disclosed, Vidyo has raised $97M to date to accelerate its growth. The investment from Juniper Networks enables Vidyo to increase its go-to-market activities and integrate its video conferencing products with Juniper’s numerous offerings.

According to numerous analysts, Vidyo is disrupting innovation in the video communications and collaboration market, driving the industry forward with its paradigm-shifting platform. Vidyo delivers telepresence-quality conferencing to more than 1850 enterprise, healthcare, education, and government customers. Juniper Networks is leading the charge to architecting the new network based on a unique single architecture and single operating system, Junos®, that ensures performance, reliability and security without compromise and at the scale customers demand.

“As the use of video in the enterprise and on end devices continues to expand, our customers are seeking new ways to improve video delivery,” said Jeff Lipton, vice president, Venture and Strategic Investments, Juniper Networks. “Vidyo is an emerging player that is driving innovation in software-based videoconferencing, and we believe its leading technology will improve the experience and economics of video communications alongside advances in networking technologies.”

“Juniper Networks’ strategic investment in Vidyo is a solid endorsement of our vision and a recognition of how rapidly the videoconferencing market is expected to grow in the near future; Infonetics Research states the market will reach a cumulative $22 billion over the next 5 years,” said Ofer Shapiro, Vidyo’s co-founder and CEO. “We see Juniper as a kindred spirit, itself a pioneer in its industry, having revolutionized networking for over 16 years. Their investment validates the approach we have taken to successfully create new video conferencing markets and deliver superior value, accessibility and scalability to our customers and partners. We are extremely honored that such a world-renowned leader recognizes the unique strengths and proven abilities of Vidyo that are driving the video communications industry forward.”

The Vidyo Difference

The Vidyo communication and collaboration platform is software-based, highly flexible and can be easily customized for individual enterprise and vertical market video conferencing needs. The patented VidyoRouter™ architecture introduces Adaptive Video Layering™, which dynamically optimizes the video for each endpoint leveraging H.264 Scalable Video Coding (SVC)-based compression technology and Vidyo’s IP. Adaptive Video Layering eliminates the MCU and offers unprecedented error resiliency, low latency rate matching thus enabling natural, affordable, high-quality video to work over the Internet, LTE and 4G networks. The platform allows users to quickly leverage the latest hardware innovations, new consumer devices and partner applications that utilize Vidyo’s APIs, such as the recently announced partnership with Philips and AMD in the Healthcare industry. Vidyo has been active driving H.264 SVC and SIP videoconferencing interoperability in various standards bodies since 2005.

About Vidyo, Inc.
Vidyo, Inc. pioneered Personal Telepresence enabling natural, HD multi-point videoconferences on tablets, smart phones, PCs and Macs, room systems, gateways, telepresence solutions and affordable cloud-based broadcast solutions. Headquartered in the US, with 12 additional international offices, the company has more than 225 employees and has to date raised $97M. Learn more at www.vidyo.com, on the Blog or follow @vidyo on Twitter.

Pundits and others are using the B word — bubble — more than ever. Is it time to stop, or will this gain even more traction in 2012?

The San Francisco-based company is somewhat similar to the teen-oriented book series by Ann M. Martin, in which a group of middle-school students help parents find babysitters.

But in this version, instead of an elaborate phone tree, it uses modern communication tools like Facebook. The UrbanSitter site helps parents find sitters based on their availability, and even on their experience working for Facebook friends and friends of friends.

UrbanSitter has secured $1.75 million in seed funding from First Round Capital. Rustic Canyon Partners, Menlo Ventures and several angels also participated.

In September, AllThingsD’s Liz Gannes reported that the company had launched in one market, and had assisted with 300 babysitting bookings.

Since then, it has expanded to San Diego, Napa and Sonoma Valleys, Seattle, Boulder and Lake Tahoe. Next month, it will roll out in New York, Chicago, Denver and St. Louis.

The funding will be used for product development, such as mobile bookings, and new features, including online payments to sitters. The capital will also go toward expansion into new cities.

As has been widely reported, well-known TechCrunch columnist and Silicon Valley journalist Sarah Lacy has a new gig: Running her own new tech news site, which debuts today.

(She’s pictured here with another recent adorable start-up of hers, named Eli.)

Not so widely reported? The site, called PandoDaily.com, will feature three of TechCrunch’s most high-profile former bloggers: Michael Arrington, M.G. Siegler and Paul Carr.

That’s right, Lacy is Arrington’s boss this time around — even though his CrunchFund venture firm will also be an investor, in a funding round of more than $2 million for PandoDaily.

Other investors — whom Lacy described as “people I like and respect” — include a panoply of tech movers and shakers, including personal investments from Marc Andreessen, Peter Thiel, Matt Cohler, Jeff Jordan, Josh Kopelman, Zach Nelson, Andrew Anker, Saul Klein, Tony Hsieh and Chris Dixon, as well as seed investments from Greylock Partners, SV Angel, Lerer Ventures, Accel Partners and Menlo Ventures.

There will certainly be questions about all these funders who are also topics of PandoDaily’s posts, which Lacy acknowledged. She said the large number of funders was calculated so that none had undue influence.

Of course, many in Silicon Valley will be watching her carefully for any conflicts of interest or punches pulled. Lacy insisted that there will not be a problem and joked that she will definitely not become a VC, referring to the controversy around Arrington becoming one while at TechCrunch.

That issue blew up like a Roman candle, of course, leaving everyone with powder burns — I called the incident a “giant, greedy, Silicon Valley pig pile.”

Interestingly, Lacy did manage to stay out of the spotlight (she was, in fact, having her baby during the worst of the controversy, which was likely more painful).

Ignoring the delicious epic revenge part of this on AOL — which bought TechCrunch and then promptly presided over a tech version of the War of the Roses (and is, ironically, an investor via CrunchFund) — PandoDaily will focus on start-ups in Silicon Valley and everywhere else that homegrown spirit of innovations reaches.

Here’s a screenshot of the cleanly designed and handsome site:

In an inaugural post, titled ““Why I Started PandoDaily,” Lacy compared the site to a colony of trees in Utah, saying, “We have one goal here at PandoDaily: To be the site-of-record for that startup root-system and everything that springs up from it, cycle-after-cycle.”

Which is kind of like TechCrunch, which she left earlier this year.

“This is not TechCrunch 2.0,” Lacy said to me in an interview last week. “But, of course, we will be compared to TechCrunch.”

Of course, especially because of the presence of its star lineup on PandoDaily — who will write regularly, along with an initially small staff of other writers — and also its plans for conferences and other gatherings.

(An AOL source, by the way, said there were no contractual noncompete issues for PandoDaily to worry about.)

Here’s a longish interview I did about PandoDaily with Lacy, who has written two books focused on entrepreneurs, worked at Businessweek and was founding co-host of Yahoo Finance’s daily show “TechTicker.”

She talks about the site’s unusual name, her wrangling over leaving TechCrunch, and the prospect of now running her own show.

Welcome back, Sarah (and call me if you need help with those dudes, as we have wrangled before).

Here’s the video:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120116/sarah-lacy-debuts-new-tech-site-pandodaily-and-guess-whos-working-for-her-video/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20111207/uber-gets-uber-large-round-of-funding-for-mobile-car-service/ http://allthingsd.com/20111207/uber-gets-uber-large-round-of-funding-for-mobile-car-service/#comments Wed, 07 Dec 2011 16:31:00 +0000 Liz Gannes http://allthingsd.com/?p=151394 Uber today announced it had raised $32 million in Series B funding from Menlo Ventures, Goldman Sachs, Bezos Expeditions, Benchmark Capital and others, and it also launched in its first European city, Paris. The 18-month-old company says it wants to be a “global transportation and logistics brand.” For now, it helps users hire and pay private luxury cars to drive them around.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20111207/uber-gets-uber-large-round-of-funding-for-mobile-car-service/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20111115/benchmark-leads-investment-in-online-stationary-site-minted/ http://allthingsd.com/20111115/benchmark-leads-investment-in-online-stationary-site-minted/#comments Tue, 15 Nov 2011 14:00:24 +0000 Tricia Duryee http://allthingsd.com/?p=143949 Online stationery store Minted has secured $5.5 million in a second round of venture funding today. The round was led by Peter Fenton of Benchmark Capital, with IDG Ventures and Menlo Ventures, Marissa Mayer of Google and Jeremy Stoppelman of Yelp also participating. The capital will be used for recruiting and for new product lines. Minted is focused on printing custom greeting cards, wedding cards and other paper products, sourced from a community of independent graphic designers.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20111115/benchmark-leads-investment-in-online-stationary-site-minted/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20111003/mostly-sunny-with-100-percent-chance-of-apples/ http://allthingsd.com/20111003/mostly-sunny-with-100-percent-chance-of-apples/#comments Mon, 03 Oct 2011 21:43:00 +0000 Shawn Carolan http://allthingsd.com/?p=127816 The forecast is certain. Tomorrow, Apple will rain features from the Cloud, and it’s a very big deal. The iPhone 5 will be the first device that relies on the Internet and server farms to complete its functionality rather than a PC. The company that popularized the personal computer in 1977 is officially telling us we no longer need one. It’s the mark of a new age. The features will be awesome and the implications vast, of that I’m certain.

But I don’t know the details. Employees new and old keep their secrets close. That said, certain aspects of iOS5 have been made public for developers and speculation seems high that this is the juncture where Siri, a company on whose board I sat, will re-emerge as a core part of the operating system. Here’s a heads up on what’s coming now — and perhaps later — so you can prepare.

PC Free
Apple’s recently announced iCloud offers a host of new features but the most underappreciated is device configuration in the Cloud. It will have everything you need to configure and keep your iPhone up to date without a PC. Every Apple device you have will be linked with an Apple ID and iCloud will know the configuration of each one. No more long sync required before a phone upgrade, no more painful restore, simply enter the Apple ID and password and voila, good as new. This will make life easier for people with multiple iOS devices, but the implications go far beyond.

When configuration lives in the Cloud, modification to the configuration happens in the Cloud as well. That means you could install an app onto your phone while clicking a Facebook ad, reading a blog, or responding to an email. Every banner advertisement you see on the web will be an opportunity for app developers to entice you, and with your browser already cookied, a single click could make the new app magically appear on your devices.

This marks a major change for mobile app developers to promote their wares. Being on the Top 25 list won’t matter quite as much; there will be lots of ways to get the word out and drive downloads. The same PPI (pay per install) ad economy that multiplied AdMob’s revenues and led to the Google acquisition will be available to the rest of the Internet ad landscape. With the sophistication of ad exchanges today, app developers could bid on impressions of only Apple users and efficiently target the right people. Developers will need to have instrumented analytics all across this marketing funnel to maximize their opportunity and not get killed by others who have figured it out. Advice: App devs need an Internet acquisition animal in-house.

Assistant
Sixteen months ago Apple acquired a technology company named Siri. Siri was small, with three amazing founders — Dag Kittlaus, Adam Cheyer, and Tom Gruber — as part of a total of only 20 employees. Their size did not match their monumental ambition. Founded out of SRI where the technology originated and a Series A round from Menlo Ventures and Morgenthaler, the company was the first to make a “Virtual Personal Assistant” actually work. As an app running on the iPhone, users speak in natural language to book tables, order taxis, check flight times, and many other functions. In fact, their original venture pitch called the service “Hal” after the computer personality in the movie “2001: A Space Odyssey.” The app requires the Cloud because although voice is captured on the phone, the computation required to parse the words into intent and then invoke the chain of web services to accomplish the user’s goal is too much to run on the phone. Siri’s server farm does the heavy lifting.

The native integration of Siri into iOS could change the game in three ways. First, voice input will be a breakthrough for touch screen devices. Although users tolerate soft keyboards in exchange for larger screen size, typing anything of length is still painful and even short bursts are more convenient with voice. Siri found the overwhelming majority of queries were spoken rather than typed. High-quality voice recognition along with Siri’s semantic processing could allow a new level of instant gratification when capturing a reminder, queuing a playlist, or sending a text message, especially while driving.

The second game-changer could be voice access to apps. While Siri had to do all of its integration with other services (e.g., OpenTable) in the Cloud via web APIs, as part of iOS it would be possible to interact with any app on the phone seamlessly, with login credentials already there. Imagine being able to say “Checking account balance” and the banking app comes up to that page, or “Directions to Jim’s house” and the phone starts TeleNav to navigate you there.

The third implication is that Apple would be joining the search game and squaring off with Google. For the category of searches that people do on the go, the desired result is often a completed action rather than a page of blue links. Siri is a superior technology for getting the job done quickly. Both companies have a mobile operating system, a mobile device, an app store, and now an engine for navigating the web. It will be a fun one to watch. Advice: 2011 will mark the year a voice user-interface delivers real value and will rapidly become a must-have feature, prepare to respond.

Media on Demand
In addition to the PC Free features deriving from configuration in the Cloud, iCloud also stores media and data in the Cloud where it belongs. For personal media like pictures and videos, that means no more priceless baby shots at risk of deletion on the phone. All of the pics will get synced between devices and likely be shareable from the web.

Purchased media like music and videos will also live in the Cloud. For $25 a year, iTunes Match allows users to unlock pristine copies of all those songs they, um, ripped from CDs. Time will tell if it’s enough to stop the flow of people from iTunes to Cloud music services like MOG and Spotify. Movies will be in the Cloud too, allowing start times to be counted in seconds rather than the minutes required for download and sync. Apple already dropped the hard drive in their 2nd gen AppleTV to turn it into an Internet streamer like Roku, and I wouldn’t be surprised if a larger screened device resembling a TV appeared soon. To monetize all of this newfound cost, Apple has a model that seems inspired by Dropbox: Offer the first 5GB free and when users hit their limit they have little choice but to plunk down some extra bucks for an annual storage fee. Advice: Don’t waste your money on an Internet-enabled TV, it will be obsolete by the time you plug it in.

iNavigator
In 2007 after the iPhone launched, I emailed Steve Jobs to encourage him to take a meeting with TeleNav, a portfolio company who pioneered navigation on the mobile phone. Before TeleNav, the gigabytes of data required to render U.S. street maps was too large to put on phones so TNAV pushed the data, routing engine and traffic into the Cloud and streamed just the information required for GPS-enabled handsets to give turn-by-turn directions. They now power the majority of carrier navigation services in the United States. The fit with the iPhone was a natural. I fired off my carefully crafted note and got back a brief reply:

Shawn, Which provider does TeleNav get their map data from? Why would it be hard for Apple to also license this data and extend its own map application to do what TeleNav’s does?
Thanks, Steve

I replied with reasons of course, but never heard back. Apparently he decided Apple should do it themselves. Since that time, Apple has hired a number of engineers with navigation expertise. Though it has taken them several years, the service has been spotted recently in the wild and will likely show its face soon. Advice: Get an iPhone mounting kit for your car.

The move to the Cloud represents a tectonic shift in the IT landscape for both enterprises and consumers and the disruption is just beginning. It’s wonderful to see Apple embrace it wholeheartedly to drive value for their customers. For companies that are prepared, there will be great opportunities as a part of the ecosystem. The analysis could continue for pages, but I still haven’t found the iPhone5 pre-order page so you’ll have to excuse me for now.

Shawn Carolan is a Managing Director at Menlo Ventures, where he has been for nine years; he focuses on consumer Internet and mobile investing. He sits on the Boards of IMVU, PlayPhone, Roku, Talari, TeleNav (NASDAQ: TNAV) and YuMe.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20111003/mostly-sunny-with-100-percent-chance-of-apples/feed/ 3 http://allthingsd.com/20110802/vidyo-lands-a-telemedicine-deal-that-everyone-wanted/ http://allthingsd.com/20110802/vidyo-lands-a-telemedicine-deal-that-everyone-wanted/#comments Tue, 02 Aug 2011 12:30:33 +0000 Arik Hesseldahl http://allthingsd.com/?p=105217 About two months ago, in a piece about the rapid growth of the videoconference start-up Vidyo, I ended by saying that other players in the market — namely Cisco Systems and Polycom — should be a tad worried. Today I was proven prescient. Vidyo, the New Jersey-based video conference start-up, has just landed a deal to expand one of the world’s largest telemedicine networks into patients’ homes.

You’ve probably heard a lot about telemedicine over the years. The idea is that since doctors can’t be everywhere they’re needed, particularly when it comes to large yet sparsely populated areas, a good videoconference with a doctor is almost as good as an in-person visit — especially when it’s a routine visit, and the patient or doctor would otherwise have to travel. Obviously, it’s not always the optimal choice. But when you’re not feeling well and need to see a specialist, how much better would you feel if you have to drive 200 miles and back to get to an appointment?

The Canadian province of Ontario is a pretty big place, reaching from the Great Lakes to Hudson Bay. Most of the population is concentrated in the Canadian capital of Ottawa, and in what’s called the “Golden Horseshoe,” reaching from Toronto west to Waterloo (notably the home of Research In Motion) and northeast to Peterborough. But there are a lot of people spread out in smaller communities.

The Ontario Telemedicine Network has 3,000 health care professionals working at 1,175 sites around the province, and its Web site says it will deliver 135,000 patient visits this year. That works out to more than 500 visits per business day. The existing network is built primarily on gear from Cisco Systems and Polycom, and runs on a private network.

The plan is to expand the service so that patients can see a doctor from the comfort of their own homes. And that’s where Vidyo comes in.

One thing that helped Vidyo land this deal, CEO Ofer Shapiro told me, was that it was relatively easy to deploy alongside the OTN’s existing system. Vidyo has a rich set of APIs that allow programmers to marry it up with workflow and scheduling systems already in place. “It’s not just a simple matter of taking a call and connecting the patient with the doctor. It has to be scheduled, it has to be logged, there’s a lot of compliance issues that have to be considered, and it also has to be 100 percent private,” Shapiro told me.

The other thing in Vidyo’s favor is a technology called Adaptive Video Layering. And while it sounds like a bit of gibberish, it’s actually pretty useful. Since not everyone has the same kind of high-quality video network — either in the home or the office, or anywhere else, for that matter — the video stream can be adapted to the network conditions it encounters.

Howard Lichtman, an analyst and consultant specializing in videoconferencing technologies with the Human Productivity Lab, tells me that Vidyo essentially breaks a video stream into three segments, and then, depending on the network conditions, it will select the segment that’s best suited to the network in use. The end result is that even on slower networks there’s not the same loss of quality that’s experienced on other products.

Lichtman tells me this deal was a big one, which all the significant video players had bid on. “It’s one of the biggest, if not the biggest network like it in the world,” he told me. “Everyone was showing up to bid.”

Until recently, Vidyo was focused primarily on the desktop video business, but it has aimed its sights at higher-end office conferencing systems. Backed by $74 million from Menlo Ventures, Rho Ventures, Sevin Rosen Funds, Star Ventures and the Four Rivers Group, it has been going after the higher-end videoconferencing market, hoping to undercut Cisco and Polycom with less expensive solutions.

Just last week, Ricoh, the Japanese office equipment company, said it is using Vidyo’s technology as the basis for its office teleconferencing system. But it’s also showing up in other, more consumer-oriented places: Vidyo is one of the technologies behind Google Hangout on the social network Google+. Suddenly Vidyo is showing up wherever there’s video. Did I say the other guys might be starting to worry? It’s because of stuff like this.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110802/vidyo-lands-a-telemedicine-deal-that-everyone-wanted/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110613/shervin-pishevar-joins-menlo-ventures/ http://allthingsd.com/20110613/shervin-pishevar-joins-menlo-ventures/#comments Tue, 14 Jun 2011 04:47:53 +0000 Liz Gannes http://allthingsd.com/?p=86366 Entrepreneur and angel investor Shervin Pishevar has joined Menlo Ventures as a managing partner.

Pishevar, whose last start-up Social Gaming Network (SGN) was recently bought by MindJolt and who was most recently at Mozilla, elaborated that he’ll focus on consumer Internet investments, particularly mobile and social, and that he hopes to bring together exceptional entrepreneurs to share information and lessons learned, which may take the shape of an incubator though it’s not yet clear.

Pishevar said he didn’t have a previous relationship with Menlo Ventures but accepted their offer above others after hitting it off with the team and recognizing “their platform of knowledge and experience that comes from pattern recognition over the decades.”

Pishevar’s angel investments include Milo (bought by eBay), Aardvark (bought by Google), Likealittle, Klout, Qwiki, Votizen, Milk, Yobongo, Gowalla, Sprucemedia, Medialets and SolveMedia.

How you know you’ve made it in today’s tech industry: the New York Times profile about Pishevar’s news included testimonials from Yuri Milner and Ashton Kutcher.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110613/shervin-pishevar-joins-menlo-ventures/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110608/the-video-conferencing-business-just-got-interesting/ http://allthingsd.com/20110608/the-video-conferencing-business-just-got-interesting/#comments Wed, 08 Jun 2011 12:45:01 +0000 Arik Hesseldahl http://allthingsd.com/?p=84108 I have this week participated in two video conferences in as many days. Unless you count the occasional Skype video call, which for the moment I won’t, that’s two more than I did in all of 2010, all of 2009 and all of 2008 combined.

This occurrence brings into focus the apparent intensifying of competition in the enterprise video conferencing market between the networking giant Cisco Systems and several other players who hope to challenge it, among them Polycom and a start-up called Vidyo.

The second of these two video conferences occurred Tuesday in a telepresence suite at a Cisco office in Manhattan. The occasion was the announcement of Cisco’s latest ASR 9000 router, a powerful piece of gear that can move 96 terabits of data every second, sufficient bandwidth, it says in a press release, to simultaneously stream in a second video recordings of every Super Bowl game and World Cup and Cricket World Cup match ever played.

The meeting was held at multiple sites. Two telepresence rooms in New York were used, two more in California, one in New Jersey, one in Atlanta, and one in Milan, Italy. Execs from various Cisco customers from Comcast, Cox Communications, Tata and FastWeb, service providers all, testified about how great the ASR 9000 is, and how it’s making their business easier and so on.

You’ve probably attended a meeting like this, but if you haven’t it’s a curious experience. Attendees appear on large high-definition video screens arrayed on the other side of a conference table meant to create the illusion that they’re in the room with you. Holding a meeting like this is more effective than a traditional conference call, and cheaper than paying the travel costs that would normally be required to get the same people gathered in a room.

The launch event was meant to follow Cisco’s release last week of its Visual Networking Index forecast, its assessment of how big the Internet is, and how big it’s going to get a few years out. Video, hailed often by Cisco CEO John Chambers as a key strategic play that will eventually help Cisco work its way out of its current troubles, naturally figured prominently in the forecast. Consumers and businesses alike will be demanding lots of video, whether it’s for entertainment or for holding meetings.

If you’re a service provider seeing video demand, Cisco’s ASR 9000 line of routers are proving “increasingly popular” as the analyst Jess Lubert of Wells Fargo securities wrote in a research note to clients on June 6. “Several content, media, and service provider customers are deploying the platform to leverage its advanced video capabilities.” This bodes well for Cisco’s business on the back end of video. And Cisco also participates in the business of selling the front end. All the telepresence gear bore Cisco’s brand. Indeed, video conferencing–or what Cisco calls collaboration–is one of the things that is going right at Cisco these days. It’s on track to be a $4 billion business this year, and is growing at a healthy 25 percent clip.

But there are challenges. Elsewhere in Lubert’s note were some observations that Polycom is winning some business away from Cisco. Demand is strong for gear from both vendors, yet frustration among some customers and partners with Cisco and its Tandberg unit is causing them to steer more business toward Polycom for the moment, Lubert writes.

There’s no denying that Polycom is on a roll. Sales grew 26 percent in 2010 to $1.2 billion, and group telepresence products accounted for $796 million, or 65 percent of sales. Its shares have risen by 135 percent since October. And last week it spent $89 million to acquire Hewlett-Packard’s Halo video conferencing business, a rare divestiture for HP, the world’s largest technology company. HP, a latent rival to Cisco in the networking space, will resell Polycom equipment as part of the deal. Meanwhile Polycom said it will expand its relationship with Microsoft, whose Lync video conferencing software, as Lubert wrote in the Wells Fargo note, is turning out to be a big driver in sales of Polycom equipment. So when we talk about office video conferencing equipment, we know who the two main players are: Cisco and Polycom.

All this brings me to the first of those two video conferences in which I participated this week. On Monday I was introduced to Vidyo, a New Jersey-based video conferencing start-up that aims to upend both of the established players with a product that undercuts them on price and outdoes them on features and flexibility.

Till now, Vidyo was focused on the desktop video business, but it has aimed its sights at higher-end office conferencing systems. Backed by $74 million from Menlo Ventures, Rho Ventures, Sevin Rosen Funds, Star Ventures and the Four Rivers Group, it has now set its sights on the higher-end video conferencing market.

The first thing I noticed during the Vidyo meeting was what I called The Brady Bunch Effect. Nine screens were arrayed in a conference room, for nine different people against light blue backgrounds (as in the picture above) in a way that reminded me of the old TV sitcom. The company calls the product VidyoPanorama, and it can support as many as 20 screens at a resolution of 1080p with 60 frames per second. Vidyo CEO Ofer Shapiro told me that just such a system with nine screens could be set up for $60,000 compared prices in the $300,000 range for similar systems from the bigger players with fewer screens. Vidyo’s starting price for a four-screen system is $40,000. It also supports tablets and smart phones, including Apple’s iPad 2 and phones and tablets running Google’s Android operating system.

All a company needs to get started is a good Internet connection and a Vidyo router added to a rack in its data center. There’s also an application that must be installed on whatever Mac/PC/tablet/phone you want to use for conferencing.

Video conferencing and telepresence are the sort of technologies you keep hearing about, but they never seem to reach any critical mass. I’ve heard people say “This is the year for video conferencing” since about 2003, and yet in 2011, it’s still unusual, at least in my anecdotal experience, to participate in one. Yet the numbers don’t lie. Companies want it, and just as Cisco and Polycom are making a serious go of selling it to them, here comes a start-up ready to turn that business upside down. If I were Cisco or Polycom, I’d be worried.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110608/the-video-conferencing-business-just-got-interesting/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110209/visa-expands-digital-payment-options-with-purchase-of-playspan/ http://allthingsd.com/20110209/visa-expands-digital-payment-options-with-purchase-of-playspan/#comments Wed, 09 Feb 2011 19:40:31 +0000 Tricia Duryee http://emoney.allthingsd.com/?p=2613 Visa has agreed to acquire PlaySpan, which handles transactions for virtual goods in online games, digital media and social networks around the world. Visa will pay about $190 million in cash, plus undisclosed payments for hitting future milestones. The Santa Clara, Calif., company is privately held and backed by Easton Capital, Menlo Ventures and other funds.

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