Under the terms of the agreement, Websense stockholders will receive $24.75 in cash for each share of Websense common stock they hold, representing a premium of approximately 29 percent over Websense’s Friday closing price and a 53 percent premium to Websense’s average closing price over the past 60 days. The Websense board of directors unanimously backed the deal.

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The Yahoo board has approved a massive $1.1 billion all-cash deal to buy Tumblr.

It’s not clear when the official vote was taken, but sources close to the board said the acquisition was a foregone conclusion and was unanimously approved by the directors of Silicon Valley Internet giant.

The deal will likely be announced Monday morning, said numerous sources.

AllThingsD.com initially broke the story of the acquisition efforts and later followed up with details of the exact price and the board meeting to approve the transaction.

There were no other competing bids, despite reports, to snap up the New York-based social blogging service. That said, Tumblr had held some very preliminary discussions about various deals with Facebook, Google, Microsoft and also Twitter earlier this year.

As part of the Yahoo deal, Tumblr CEO David Karp — who will get a windfall of cash from the acquisition — will stay at Yahoo for four years at least and retain a lot of control over the service, much in the same way Instagram CEO Kevin Systrom does at Facebook. But, as there, Yahoo will undergird Tumblr’s nascent advertising business with its large and established infrastructure, said sources.

Yahoo had been mulling some kind of deal with Tumblr, from a strategic investment to an outright acquisition, for about six weeks. Sources said that Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer had decided that buying the company was going to be “the stake in the ground of what her strategy is going forward for Yahoo.”

And that is to attract younger audiences with just the kind of user-generated content Tumblr has pioneered to impressive growth.

According to numerous sources, Mayer determined quickly in her research that the site was just the kind of property that Yahoo needed to make it both “cool” and relevant to new consumers.

Yahoo is looking to bolster its strong set of existing media offerings to appeal to a different demographic and also get into the social space via consumer-based software solutions that are both elegant and easy to use.

Tumblr’s mobile usage has also been strong, which also interested Mayer. While Tumblr started as a desktop-based service, its mobile offering has ramped up quickly in the last few years. ComScore says that a quarter of the service’s U.S. visitors now come from mobile devices.

At this price, it will be Mayer’s biggest acquisition so far. Since she became CEO last summer, Mayer has made only a series of small acquisitions of mobile startups at a low cost.

According to sources, the Tumblr brand will continue.

The deal, if consummated, will be a big win for investors. In a series of fundings since 2007, Tumblr has raised $125 million so far and is now at a reported valuation of $800 million. Investors include Spark Capital, Union Square Ventures, Sequoia Capital, Greylock Partners, Insight Venture Partners and the Chernin Group.

While Tumblr’s Karp has resisted various offers for the company over the years, Mayer spent a lot of time with him reassuring him that Yahoo could turbocharge his business. He has also been searching for a COO to help him build out the infrastructure of its business, especially its advertising one.

And as Peter Kafka and I previously wrote, Tumblr could certainly bring Yahoo a big, young audience. Its worldwide traffic was at 117 million visitors in April, according to comScore. On its home page, Tumblr claims it has 107.8 million blogs and 50.6 billion posts. U.S. desktop traffic to Tumblr was 37 million in April, close to LinkedIn and Twitter, although Twitter obviously has much more via mobile.

But figuring out how to make money from that is a task that the company has only recently started to tackle.

Like other recent Web startups that have seen rocketship growth — see: Twitter, Facebook — Tumblr resisted advertising for its formative years, and its user base seems particularly unwilling to accept standard banner ads. In addition, many industry observers think that Tumblr’s pages are packed with porn or other questionable content that would scare off advertisers.

But within the last year or so, Tumblr has started selling modestly sized “native ads” promoting brands’ Tumblr pages, on users’ “dashboards,” which has shown promise. Tumblr has said it had $13 million in revenue last year and sources said it could get up to $100 million this year.

Tumblr has been represented by Qatalyst Partners’ Frank Quattrone, while Yahoo’s Mayer, as well as M&A head Jackie Reses and CFO Ken Goldman, have been on the company’s side.

Interestingly, what got me first focused on Tumblr last week were Goldman’s comments at JP Morgan’s Global Technology conference last week, where he underscored the need for the aging Yahoo to attract more users from the coveted 18-to-24-years-old age bracket. Along with more marketing, he explicitly said Yahoo needed to be “cool again.”

“One of our challenges is we have had an aging demographic,” said Goldman at the Boston event. “Part of it is going to be just visibility again in making ourselves cool, which we got away from for a couple of years.”

Tumblr, apparently, fits the very expensive bill.

Airware, a startup that is creating a software platform for commercial drones, said it had raised $10.7 million in a Series A funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz. Google Ventures also participated. As part of the deal, Andreessen Horowitz partner Chris Dixon will join Airware’s board.

The Newport Beach, Calif., company said it would use the money to expand staff for its universal development platform as the market for non-military drones expands.

Airware founder and CEO Jonathan Downey said that uses of drones will be increasing for a wide range of purposes, from checking infrastructure to monitoring mining operations to preventing poaching.

In an interview, Downey said that he expects to compete with a range of ex-military efforts, but that the most successful companies will be those that provide a platform to allow for the widest range of innovations.

“This is going to be about a lot more than we know or can guess,” he said. “The industry is at its very beginnings.”

Dixon agrees. “Hardware is the new software,” he said about the investment in Airware, which he said he discovered after attending conferences about the fast-moving drones business, noting that the overall field of robotics has “overpromised and underdelivered.”

Airware came out of both the Lemnos Labs and Y Combinator incubators and had raised seed financing from First Round Capital, Firelake Capital, RRE Ventures, Shasta Ventures, Promus Ventures and several Y Combinator partners.

In that capacity, I learned to use the Bloomberg terminal that sits on some 315,000 desks in the financial industry and that makes the company all its money. And I learned early on that practically every move terminal users make is tracked and recorded. (Also, it goes without saying but I’ll say it anyway, this website is owned by News Corp., which owns Dow Jones, which is a competitor to Bloomberg.)

In a Sunday editorial on Bloomberg View, the company’s equivalent of an Op/Ed page, Editor-in-Chief Matt Winkler wrote, “Our reporters should not have access to any data considered proprietary. I am sorry they did. The error is inexcusable.” He opens the piece by quoting from a section of his book, “The Bloomberg Way”:

“The appearance of impropriety can be as damaging to a reputation as doing something improper. Because we hold others accountable for disclosure, we expect the same of ourselves. While disclosing errors of judgment may be embarrassing, the sooner the lapses are reported, the sooner there is nothing more to say.”

This raises the question: How fully will Bloomberg News disclose what it admits to be an “error of judgment” that is “almost as old as Bloomberg News.” How many reporters used the Z function — a software command that displays whether or not a customer is logged in and which functions he or she has been using the most — over the many years it was available to them? Chances are that Bloomberg has the data on precisely how often it was used and by which reporters. It could with some effort call in a third party to perform a detailed audit on this, and then disclose the findings of that audit to clients and the rest of the world.

I’ve asked Bloomberg about this. Spokeswoman Lauren Meller didn’t have an immediate answer. If I get one I’ll post it here.

If you’re going to properly understand the controversy that has emerged about the company in recent days, you need to understand the basics of the terminal itself. Bloomberg is at its very heart a financial data software company. In executing a “function” on its terminals, which are seen as status symbols of the financial industry, you type a command, usually one to four letters, and hit the Go key, which replaces the Return key on the conventional keyboard. When looking up, say, the price and fundamentals of Apple shares, you type AAPL, hit a key labeled Equity to indicate the first four letters are intended to indicate a stock ticker symbol, and then hit Go.

During the year I worked there I never heard about the so-called “Z function” at the heart of the current controversy, but its existence isn’t surprising. If you haven’t been paying attention, here’s what it’s all about. All 2,000-odd reporters at Bloomberg News have these terminals on their desks and use them to conduct research, report, write and publish their stories, and to communicate within the organization and without.

The Z function, now disabled for newsroom employees, showed when clients were and were not logged in to the system. When someone hadn’t logged in in a while, an attentive reporter might see that as a tip that the person was changing jobs or had left a firm, and then the reporter would start asking questions. Stories about executives moving between firms tend to be popular among terminal clients. It also showed what other Bloomberg functions these clients had been using, but in a non-specific way that wouldn’t show what stock or bond or other matter they might be researching or which news stories they had been reading. Bloomberg reporters are also said to have had access to transcripts of customer service calls clients made seeking help with functions.

Bloomberg is and has always been a “big data” company. The newly fashionable idea that you can learn a great deal and thus improve a software application by analyzing the big mass of data gathered about how it is used and where users run into problems has been been at the core of Bloomberg’s operational philosophy from the beginning.

Employees know from the moment they join the company that the amount of time they spend at their desks is logged. Building security systems are linked to the terminal and an access badge. When you “badge in” at any Bloomberg office around the world, this occurrence is logged. If you’re a Bloomberg employee based in New York and happen to be visiting London or Tokyo, your arrival and departure times are tracked, as is the amount of time your terminal is idle, should you be out gathering news or taking a lunch break.

I never experienced this first hand, but I heard privately shared tales from colleagues about their annual performance reviews, and discussions would at times turn to how well they used the terminal to do their jobs. As I was first joining, a friend who had worked at Bloomberg for a while told me that during one such conversation, he was mildly scolded for using Yahoo Finance to look up some bit of financial data — terminals also have Web browsers — rather than the terminal itself.

I point out this conversation for a reason. In its quest to make its products better — certainly a logical goal — Bloomberg clearly tracks how often its clients use its many functions. If that’s true, then it logically follows that it tracks how its reporters do the same thing. Historical data on the use by reporters of the Z function exists and can be examined.

As an organization, Bloomberg News is journalism as re-imagined by Fredrick Winslow Taylor, the philosophical father of factory automation. Its reporters are routinely gauged on how often they log scoops that appear on the terminal’s news service. Taylor believed that by analyzing work, the “One Best Way” to get it done could be found. As the founding editor of Bloomberg News, Winkler always struck me as an avid student of “Taylorism.” Every bit of data that can be gathered is analyzed to make the news gathering process better and more efficient. Indeed, Winkler’s 360-page book seems almost Taylor-inspired.

Scoops and other distinctive stories are further categorized into a taxonomy using an internal nomenclature, and the best of those are singled out in what’s known as “Matt’s Note,” a weekly memo from Winkler. An MMWin, or a market-moving win, is a story that beats a similar story by a competitor by several minutes and that after publication causes the market to react in some way. A Follow is when a competitor writes a story that follows up on a Bloomberg scoop. And there are many others.

All of these are thought to be tracked and used to evaluate a reporter’s performance every year. That means there’s data on how many reporters used the Z function and about whom, and probably data as well correlating to the published stories that resulted.

With at least two large banks complaining, and now two government entities — the Federal Reserve in the U.S. and the European Central Bank — asking questions about all this, you can expect concerns about the lines between Bloomberg’s business and news operations to persist.

The Times report quotes SAP co-CEO Bill McDermott as saying that HP had asked if SAP might be interested in buying Autonomy. The story isn’t clear on when the conversation between HP CEO Meg Whitman and McDermott took place, other than to say it was before Whitman visited London last month and said that Autonomy was not for sale.

I just got this statement from HP on the matter:

“Contrary to reports in the media, HP has no interest is selling Autonomy. During the past year, we’ve received inquiries from SAP about purchasing HP software assets, and time and again we’ve said ‘no.’ We believe Autonomy will play an important role in HP’s long-term strategy.”

I also reached out to SAP spokesman Jim Dever, who tried to walk back what the Times reported based on what he says McDermott actually said in the interview with reporter Nic Fildes:

“If you look at the quote, Bill doesn’t say anything other than we were aware when Autonomy was on the market. I was part of the conversation, and he never mentioned discussions with HP. In fact, he never said we were approached by HP.”

Sources familiar with the conversations tell me that since HP is such a big SAP customer — something its operational head John Hinshaw mentioned in a recent interview with AllThingsD — Whitman and other HP execs routinely meet with McDermott and his co-CEO, Jim Hagemann Snabe, CTO Vishal Sikka. She’s also met with founder Hasso Plattner, where they also discussed, among other things, HP’s naming rights to the HP Pavilion, home of the National Hockey League’s San Jose Sharks.

These sources tell me that the conversations on the topic of Autonomy potentially changing owners, if you could even call them conversations, were so informal as to be almost meaningless. “Autonomy was never shopped to SAP,” one source told me emphatically.

It’s not the first time chatter has emerged about potential buyers interested in taking Autonomy off HP’s hands. In January, there were reports that HP was getting “expressions of interest,” but HP quickly slapped them down.

And there is indeed a school of thought that Autonomy would have a more natural home within SAP. Former HP CEO Léo Apotheker had previously been a co-CEO at SAP, and before he was fired had steered HP toward becoming more of a software company. If SAP is trying to engage HP on the subject of selling Autonomy, it may be because it simply doesn’t like the idea of HP being in the software business.

HP is still a relatively new player in software, which accounted for a little more than $4 billion in sales last year, or 3.3 percent of HP’s total revenue of $120.4 billion. Small, but growing enough to constitute being considered a rare bright spot at HP. HP’s sales grew 43 percent from 2010 to 2012, though that includes the addition of the Autonomy business.

Update: After further reporting, I’ve updated the story above to reflect which SAP executives Whitman has met with. It turns out she hasn’t met with Jim Hagemann Snabe after all.

Department officials reviewing the proposed merger of Anheuser-Busch InBev NV and Mexico’s Grupo Modelo SAB recently approved a request to use software — rather than a horde of lawyers — to determine which documents needed to be turned over to the government.

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Startup image copyright white_board

In the early days of software, you had limited distribution opportunities. You might sell your software in boxes, distribute millions of free CDs, spend heavily on advertising or do a deal with a larger partner for distribution. With the introduction of the SAAS model, the hard costs were eliminated, but the advertising spend or sales team were still a must. Recently, the growth and openness of cloud storage platforms like Dropbox, Box, Google Drive, Evernote and Skydrive have changed the distribution model for some startups significantly.

At HelloFax and HelloSign, we’ve seen a lot of growth from our platform partners. We don’t release our internal numbers, but there are some public numbers we can talk about. Since Drive launched last year, HelloFax has had over 270,000 installs with Google Drive. HelloSign, which launched in August, has had over 50,000. Our new integration, HelloSign for Gmail, which launched in January, has had almost 30,000. That’s 350,000 installs worth of Google integrations. And we didn’t spend a single cent to acquire them.

The fundamental necessity for each startup is growth. Growth changes your company from irrelevant to relevant. Paul Graham wrote an essay, “Startups = Growth,” that every founder should read.

Building on platforms is one of your greatest opportunities for growth. Historically, a lot of companies have leveraged platforms to become great companies. Not all startups have platforms that are a good fit, but if you can find the right one, it can be a game-changer. The thesis for integrating is simple. Platforms provide an audience, you provide value. The better the value, the more potential for growth.

Here are four examples worth thinking about:

• Airbnb grew on Craigslist. Airbnb added significant value to the renting experience on Craigslist. Because short-term rentals are only one of the many classifieds on the site, Craigslist provided a generic experience. Airbnb improved it with pictures, maps, ratings and more.
• Google grew on AOL and Yahoo. Google was a great company. However, Yahoo and AOL were the big Internet hubs at the time and were capable of sending massive amounts of traffic. Since the platforms didn’t see value in search, they were happy to send that traffic to Google.
• PayPal grew on eBay. EBay was one of the few places on the Internet with a high concentration of purchases. EBay didn’t provide payments in the early days, which made it difficult for sellers to collect money. PayPal provided that experience.
• Dropbox and Box see significant growth on mobile. IOS devices don’t have a file system. Dropbox and Box didn’t have to be better than the current file system, they just had to be better than no file system.

The alternative to growing via a distribution platform is to go after the growth channels that everyone is pursuing. For many startups, search engine marketing, pay per click marketing, media buys and a large sales team can produce results, but it’s difficult to produce explosive growth with these methods. They’re helpful, but often incremental. You’ll absolutely want to pursue all marketing channels in the future, but for a small team, they can be capital intensive and often favor the incumbent.

Platforms also give preferential treatment to products with a good user experience. It’s a great equalizer. Instead of paying to rank higher in search, platforms are often built to be meritocratic. Better reviews will give you a higher ranking and exposure. We worked hard to add as much value as possible and invested a lot in the user flows and experience. Instead of hitting paywalls and a dozen required fields before signing up, we built in a simple onboarding experience. Startups that understand this ecosystem, and build for it, can have an advantage against less product-focused incumbents.

If you’re a SaaS company, follow in the footsteps of these great companies that were built on platforms. There are opportunities for companies that can add value to the cloud storage ecosystem. If you work hard to create value, the ecosystem will provide the audience.

Joseph Walla is co-founder and CEO of HelloSign and HelloFax. You can follow him at @josephwalla.

This week, I tested two new mobile apps, Kodable and Hopscotch, that are aimed at teaching young children the basic skills necessary for computer programming. Both are for iOS — specifically, for iPad — although Kodable plans to introduce an Android version of the app. And both are free to download, but Kodable does include advanced levels that cost $1.99 to access.

What is programming, exactly? Also called coding, it’s the execution of different languages that make computer software, websites and mobile apps run. A series of symbols, like text, are grouped together to imply or prompt something else. A very common example of this is the use of a semicolon to signify a break in a line of code. There are also visual programming languages, which use graphical blocks of code.

Coding tools for kids and beginners are hardly a new thing, but many earlier applications are browser-based, while these apps capitalize on the gravitational pull that tablets seem to have on kids.

Kodable, which launched late last year, is aimed at kids in kindergarten through second grade. It takes a levels-based game approach, reminding me in some ways of a popular app called Cargo-Bot, which lets you move cartoon robotic arms using commands. Or, think Angry Birds, except instead of slinging birds through the air using your finger, you’re moving a fuzzball using arrow commands. Kodable also sprinkles game coins throughout the app as an incentive.

I found it easy to get the hang of Kodable, which is based on Basic, an early and simple programming language. But to say it teaches “coding” is a stretch. It more or less teaches kids how to think logically to get an object moving.

Hopscotch, on the other hand, is more advanced, aimed at kids age 8 and up. It’s based on Scratch, a visual programming language created at MIT. Hopscotch offers colorful blocks of code with which to execute a program on what is basically a blank slate. This means Hopscotch can be as easy or as difficult as you make it, but it also works under the assumption that you already know some programming basics.

Since I’m a few years beyond fourth grade at this point, it’s tough for me to approach these apps exactly as a child would. But I’ve never learned to code, so I can claim beginner status there. Hopscotch was definitely more challenging for me than Kodable was. But I learned more about actual coding from Hopscotch.

Let’s start with Kodable, and then “graduate” to Hopscotch. Once you get past the intro animation with ambient music (maybe meant to lull kids into a total state of relaxation and quietude? Parents and teachers can only wish …), you’re asked to enter your name. From there, you’re taken to a “Smeeborg” of unlocked levels.

Kodable’s main character is a blue fuzzball with eyes and a mouth. There’s a short course laid out for you, littered with coins; as the levels progress, the course gets more maze-like. On the upper right there is a toolbox with arrow keys. On the left, there’s a “script” area where, using the iPad’s touchscreen, you drag the arrow keys to create a command. With each new level of difficulty, a small cartoon hand will simulate the commands for you to give some guidance, but that’s all there is in terms of tutorials.

I dragged a sequence of arrows over to the script and hit the play button. My fuzzball made it through the course, and I went on on to the next level.

I made it through about a dozen levels on Kodable, even unlocking a new fuzzball named Simon Fuzz — he’s green and wears hipster glasses — before I found out that by swiping to the left I could skip to new areas in the game. These are called Function Junction and Bugs Below. Each costs $1.99 and contains 30 new levels of varying difficulty. For example, Function Junction teaches you to create a second sequence of arrow commands under the one you’re already using.

Kodable says it plans to add more curriculum-like education features to the app in the next couple months, including vocabulary exercises, so kids can learn programming words. I think Kodable on the whole could be a bit richer, but I like the app, and there’s no cost to download it and try it.

On to Hopscotch: This app takes you through a quick tutorial at the start, showing how to put together blocks of code to program a little monkey to draw a line. At the top of the app is a plus sign that allows you to choose from one of 10 different cartoon characters, including the monkey. Then, there are “method blocks” of programming on the left, including commands like “move,” “rotate,” “leave a trail,” “repeat” and “scale by.”

You drag these blocks to an empty script on the right, building them on top of one another and squeezing commands in between other commands the way you might play Tetris. Then, you can choose different prompts from a dropdown menu. So, for example, I could tell the app to execute the program I built when I tap the character, or when I shake the iPad, or when I simply press play.

For my first project, I attempted to make a space pod draw a line. I got the space pod to move across the screen, but it didn’t leave a line trail as I thought it would. I tried the same thing with a cupcake character, but still, no line drawn. In another project, I made a gorilla run around the border of the app, scaling up in size every time he turned a corner, but again, I was missing something.

This is where a “debugging” mode — something that lets you see the code being executed in real time to help you pinpoint your errors — would help; Hopscotch says it’s considering adding this feature.

I finally asked the app’s co-creator what I was doing wrong. It turns out that I was putting certain movement-specific blocks outside of the C-shaped “leave a trail” block, instead of inside of it. This kind of troubleshooting might be obvious to some people, but it just didn’t click for me without some basic knowledge of how visual programming languages work. In addition to the debugger, Hopscotch plans to build out more tutorials for this exact reason.

After I completed projects, I could save and share my work with others via email. I still need to hone my Hopscotch skills before I deem anything shareable, but I’ve seen projects by others that are pretty creative, including a chess game in which the Hopscotch characters represent different chess pieces.

These are just two apps in the growing area of coding apps for kids, but both offer value for beginners at varying stages of their learning processes.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20130506/can-these-ipad-apps-teach-your-kid-to-code/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20130501/former-homestead-founder-returns-to-sv-curious-and-with-7-5-million-in-funding/ http://allthingsd.com/20130501/former-homestead-founder-returns-to-sv-curious-and-with-7-5-million-in-funding/#comments Wed, 01 May 2013 12:30:04 +0000 Kara Swisher http://allthingsd.com/?p=317167

Justin Kitch — the founder and CEO of Web 1.0’s Homestead small-business site that was sold to Intuit in 2007 — is returning with Curious, a lifelong learning startup aimed at connecting teachers and students on “subjects as varied as salsa dancing, integral solving, pipe soldering, jewelry making and knife sharpening.”

A little eclectic, perhaps, but the new company has raised $7.5 million from Redpoint Ventures, as well as prominent individual investors such as Bill Campbell.

That amount is a lot, but is part of a new rush to fund a range of educational startups of all kinds. Most recently, Lynda.com raised $103 million in January for its popular software, creative and business video courses. Other high-profile and well-funded MOOC — massive online open course — providers include Udacity and Coursera.

Curious will offer short-format video-based interactive lessons, noting that it currently has about 500 of them collected from a private beta phase, with 100 teachers and 10,000 learners in 140 countries.

In a post on the new effort, Kitch wrote: “To be clear, the earth would still be rotating on its axis without our launch today. But it would be without one little new idea that just might turn into something big.”

Here’s the official press release:

CURIOUS LAUNCHES NEW MARKETPLACE TO TEACH OR LEARN ANYTHING ONLINE

Platform Designed for Lifelong Learning Gives Teachers Tools to Easily Build, Market and Monetize Content

Already More than 500 Interactive Video-Based Lessons on Everything from Brewing Beer and Creating Excel Spreadsheets to Learning Conversational French

May 1, 2013 — Menlo Park, CA – Curious.com, Inc., today unveiled a new marketplace for lifelong learning where students and teachers can connect around subjects as varied as salsa dancing, integral solving, pipe soldering, jewelry making and knife sharpening. The company debuts as the home to hundreds of short, engaging video-based lessons for consumers interested in learning about anything, anytime. Founded by former Homestead CEO and founder and Intuit executive, Justin Kitch, Curious also provides teachers with the tools to market, share and monetize their lessons as well as interact with their students. The company has received $7.5 million in funding from Redpoint Ventures, individual investors Bill Campbell and Jessie Rogers, and a personal investment from Mr. Kitch.

“No matter what you want to learn, there is a great teacher somewhere in the world who could teach you. However, those teachers often don’t have the tools or the marketing expertise to teach online. The internet hasn’t caught up to them yet, which means that people trying to learn on the web are too often stuck wading through piles of low quality content and are then underwhelmed with the static way content is delivered,” said Mr. Kitch. “We believe online learning needs to be more fun and digestible for the lifelong learner in all of us, and easier and more lucrative for the world’s best teachers. Curious was designed from the ground up with those two objectives in mind.”

Curious Turns Passionate Teachers into Entrepreneurs with Free, Easy-to-Use Tools

With Curious, teachers don’t have to take out loans, deplete their savings or put their professional lives on hold trying to start a web business from scratch. At no cost, Curious offers teachers the Curious Lesson Builder which allows them to build, publish and market informative, entertaining lessons to attract followers and turn their passion into profits by earning supplemental income. Curious also links related lessons, tracks how many views a lesson has received and enables learners to submit projects and create “Curious Cards” to share their achievements and interact with teachers. Teachers can work with students on a highly personal level to answer questions, review projects and provide feedback.

“With Curious, we’re able to reach a whole new audience — and on a much bigger scale,” said Curious teacher Jennifer and Kitty O’Neil. “The Curious Lesson Builder makes presenting our videos easy. Curious takes care of everything else, and we can focus on what we do best, teaching. Now that we’ve connected with Curious, we’re taking our business to a whole new level.”

“I was once asked at a job interview what inspired me as a teacher and I said it was helping people to achieve something they previously thought beyond their ability,” added Curious teacher Guy Badger. “Curious helps show people that they really can accomplish more than they realize and, with the right teacher, learning can not only be fun, but can develop confidence and might just assist someone in landing that dream job.”

Bite-Size Lessons Optimizes Anytime, Anywhere Learning

Through the Curious Lesson Player, Curious allows learners to engage on their own time. Whether they have 10 minutes or several hours, they can watch short-format videos and interact with teachers and the Curious community through a host of multimedia features to discover something new, improve a skill, or follow a passion. No scheduling means students can take lessons at their convenience, stop lessons whenever they want, post questions as they arise, and share projects in-process or upon completion. Curious currently houses more than 500 lessons, adding more each day. Thanks to overwhelming interest during its private beta phase, the Curious community is already comprised of more than 100 professional teachers and over 10,000 learners from 140 countries who share perspectives, knowledge, and experiences at launch.

Curious includes free lessons as well as lessons that cost a few dollars. The company has introduced its micropayment system, Curious Coins, to make it easy for learners to securely purchase premium lessons whenever they want without repeatedly using their credit cards for nominal transactions. To celebrate its launch, Curious will offer new learners $20 of free Coins. Because most premium lessons cost only a dollar or two, learners have ample opportunity to explore all that Curious has to offer.

Founders Reunite and Secure Funding, This Time to Transform Online Learning

Curious rejoins the leaders of Homestead, which became the world’s largest small business website platform before being acquired by Intuit. Mr. Kitch, Thai Bui, (Homestead co-founder and CTO; Curious CTO), and John Tokash (Homestead Director of software development; Curious co-founder and Head of Engineering) applied their key learnings from growing Homestead, helping businesses quickly and easily build excellent, user-friendly websites, to Curious. The Curious founders have since directed their vision, energy and talents to develop an unparalleled interface and learning community that teachers and students will embrace. Similar to Homestead, Curious revolves around empowering the “little guy” with all the tools and marketplace presence of larger competitors to bring the best content to the largest audience.

“Justin, Thai and John wanted to create a home for learning where consumers make every second matter,” said Redpoint Ventures general partner and lead investor, Tim Haley. “As industry veterans, these guys know how to build compelling consumer products and services. Curious already offers a wide-range of outstanding content, an array of expert teachers from around the world, and a highly engaged user community — all from its beta period. The result is that anyone who comes to Curious on Day One will find compelling lessons on the topics they want and they’ll fall in love.”

To start teaching and learning now, please visit www.curious.com.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20130501/former-homestead-founder-returns-to-sv-curious-and-with-7-5-million-in-funding/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20130427/cboe-staff-knew-of-problems-in-advance/ http://allthingsd.com/20130427/cboe-staff-knew-of-problems-in-advance/#comments Sat, 27 Apr 2013 14:34:33 +0000 Jacob Bunge and Jenny Strasburg http://allthingsd.com/?p=316135 CBOE Holdings Inc. technology staff knew of software issues in the hours before the largest U.S. options exchange suffered a three-hour outage, according to people briefed on discussions among CBOE officials.

Staffers at the company, which operates the Chicago Board Options Exchange, were confident they could fix the issues, CBOE executives have told colleagues and others outside the company. One area of focus by CBOE Thursday and Friday has been whether the exchange should have moved to a backup system to be safe, the people briefed on the discussions said.

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]]> http://allthingsd.com/20130427/cboe-staff-knew-of-problems-in-advance/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20130423/vmware-earnings-fall-revenue-forecast-lowered/ http://allthingsd.com/20130423/vmware-earnings-fall-revenue-forecast-lowered/#comments Tue, 23 Apr 2013 21:39:15 +0000 Nathalie Tadena http://allthingsd.com/?p=314805 VMware Inc.’s first-quarter earnings declined 9.3 percent as realignment charges weighed on the software maker’s results, though services revenue and core earnings improved.

Shares fell 6.8 percent to $70.80 after hours as the company lowered its full-year revenue guidance and offered weak estimates for the second quarter. Through the close, the stock has fallen 20 percent since the start of the year.

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]]> http://allthingsd.com/20130423/vmware-earnings-fall-revenue-forecast-lowered/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20130422/ibm-acquires-urbancode-speeding-up-software-updates/ http://allthingsd.com/20130422/ibm-acquires-urbancode-speeding-up-software-updates/#comments Mon, 22 Apr 2013 16:47:18 +0000 Arik Hesseldahl http://allthingsd.com/?p=314343 Computing giant IBM said today that it would acquire privately held UrbanCode, a Cleveland-based company that specializes in automating the delivery of software and applications that run in the cloud. As is usually the case with IBM deals, financial terms were not disclosed.

UrbanCode’s play is to speed up the development and delivery of software. Big Blue says it will be integrated into its SmartCloud and MobileFirst offerings. UrbanCode’s technology, IBM said, helps businesses cut down the time between updates to applications.

The deal is IBM’s second of 2013. In a note to clients, ISI analyst Brian Marshall estimated that the company has spent about $12 billion on small tuck-in acquisitions during the last three years. Word of the deal comes a week after IBM reported a disappointing quarterly earnings miss that was interpreted as a bad sign for the rest of the IT industry.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20130422/ibm-acquires-urbancode-speeding-up-software-updates/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20130418/microsoft-cfo-peter-klein-to-depart/ http://allthingsd.com/20130418/microsoft-cfo-peter-klein-to-depart/#comments Thu, 18 Apr 2013 20:11:03 +0000 Kara Swisher http://allthingsd.com/?p=313635

Microsoft said CFO Peter Klein “will leave the company at the end of the current fiscal year, after nearly four years in role and 11 years at the company,” adding that the software giant will be naming a new leader from its internal finance team in the next several weeks.

In addition, reporting its third-quarter results, the software giant said its revenue was just under $20.5 billion on earnings of 72 cents. Wall Street analysts were expecting Microsoft to earn 68 cents on just over $20.5 billion in revenue, compared to 60 cents on $17.4 billion in the same period a year ago.

Strong results in its Business, Entertainment and its Servers & Tools units, and even its Online Services division, were bright spots, even as its flagship Windows business was flat when adjusted for upgrade offers.

But flat is not down. Many investors have been worried about the results, focusing especially on the negative impact of declines in PC sales on its flagship Windows software and the slower uptake of Windows Phone and Surface tablet devices that the company has introduced.

It seems as if Microsoft has calmed those critics, at least for now. Shares were up about two percent in after-hours trading to $29.36.

“The bold bets we made on cloud services are paying off as people increasingly choose Microsoft services including Office 365, Windows Azure, Xbox LIVE, and Skype,” said Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer in a statement. “While there is still work to do, we are optimistic that the bets we’ve made on Windows devices position us well for the long-term.”

Here are Microsoft’s financial docs on Q3 — Klein will be part of its conference call with analysts on the results at 2:30 pm PT (which I cannot cover today, but I wish the CFO a fond farewell):

PressReleaseFY13Q3

FinancialStatementFY13Q3

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20130418/microsoft-cfo-peter-klein-to-depart/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20130418/time-100-list-is-packed-with-techies-from-musk-to-systrom-to-sandberg-and-more/ http://allthingsd.com/20130418/time-100-list-is-packed-with-techies-from-musk-to-systrom-to-sandberg-and-more/#comments Thu, 18 Apr 2013 17:38:29 +0000 Kara Swisher http://allthingsd.com/?p=313554

While the tale of a print magazine embedded in a troubled media company makes for much better reading, everyone loves a listicle. So, Time has once again put out its annual countdown of the 100 “most influential people in the world, from artists and leaders to pioneers, titans and icons.”

And, as usual, global techies represent big-time on the list, including:

* Tesla and SpaceX’s Elon Musk — about whom Virgin Group’s Richard Branson wrote, “It’s a paradox that Elon is working to improve our planet at the same time he’s building spacecraft to help us leave it.”

* Instagram co-founder and CEO Kevin Systrom, who gets inexplicably feted by entertainment bon vivant Ryan Seacrest (we are down with this anyway).

* Netflix content chief Ted Sarandos (yay for Ted, who is Mr. Nice Guy, especially for Hollywood).

* Ren Zhengfei, CEO of China’s telecom giant Huawei.

* Oh-Hyun Kwon, Samsung CEO, about whom former Apple CEO John Sculley wrote, “As Samsung builds a campus in Silicon Valley, all eyes will be on Kwon to see if the CEO with a PhD from Stanford can be as successful with software as he has been with hardware.”

* Music manager and Internet talent discoverer Scooter Braun.

* Minecraft developers, Markus Persson and Jens Bergensten, whom my sons revere (and therefore are deserving of kudos!).

* OkCupid founder Sam Yagan, who is now CEO of Match.com.

* Microsoft and Apple irritant David Einhorn, who is the only hedge fund investor dude I like.

* Deservedly ubiquitous Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, whose “Lean In” is a bestseller.

* Apple design guru Jony Ive, about whom Bono noted, “Jony Ive is himself classic Apple. Brushed steel, polished glass hardware, complicated software honed to simplicity.”

* Coursera co-founders Andrew Ng and Daphne Koller, who are among many in tech trying to change education.

* Chinese tech investor Kai-Fu Lee.

* Google Ideas guy Jared Cohen.

* Afghanistan entrepreneur Roya Mahboob, who gets praise from Sandberg.

* Kickstarter CEO Perry Chen, about whom “Veronica Mars” star (and user of the fundraising tool) Kristen Bell said, “There’s something so smart and magical about that idea — connecting consumers with creators and letting them vote with their own money.”

* And listicle Olympian and Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer, garnering a major feting from Google’s Eric Schmidt, who wrote: “Google was lucky to have her help us grow into what we became, and Yahoo is lucky to have her taking them someplace new.”

(Cover photo by Mark Seliger for Time)

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20130418/time-100-list-is-packed-with-techies-from-musk-to-systrom-to-sandberg-and-more/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20130417/intel-acquires-api-manager-mashery/ http://allthingsd.com/20130417/intel-acquires-api-manager-mashery/#comments Wed, 17 Apr 2013 19:57:21 +0000 Arik Hesseldahl http://allthingsd.com/?p=313314 Marking another move in its ongoing shift toward playing a bigger part in software, chip giant Intel is acquiring Mashery, a cloud-based manager of Application Programming Interfaces, or APIs.

First reported by ReadWrite, the deal will bring Mashery’s 125 employees into Intel’s services division. APIs are the keys to working with different cloud services and software. For developers, access to an API is usually the first step to building enhancements and ancillary services and features, or getting two services working together.

Mashery had raised more than $34 million, according to Crunchbase, the most recent of which was a $12 million venture round led by OpenView Ventures and Cisco Systems. Prior investors include First Round Capital and Formative Ventures. Financial terms of the deal have not been disclosed.

The deal represents another example of Intel’s shift toward software development and away from a pure focus on building chips. In 2010 Intel acquired the software security firm McAfee for $7.7 billion. The idea behind that deal was to marry Intel chips that go into PCs and servers and other devices with McAfee’s various security capabilities.

The software and services group, which includes both McAfee and Wind River Systems, which Intel acquired in 2009 and which is run by Renée James, is a relatively small unit within Intel. In 2012, the company reported sales just under $2.4 billion, or about 4.5 percent of revenue. The group reported an $11 million operating loss according to Intel’s latest 10-K filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20130417/intel-acquires-api-manager-mashery/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20130412/rally-soars-27-percent-in-market-debut/ http://allthingsd.com/20130412/rally-soars-27-percent-in-market-debut/#comments Fri, 12 Apr 2013 22:11:52 +0000 Arik Hesseldahl http://allthingsd.com/?p=311589 Shares of Rally Software, the development tools maker that debuted on the New York Stock Exchange today, rose by more than 27 percent on the first day of trading.

The closing share price was $17.81, after pricing yesterday at $14 a share. Deutsche Bank and Piper Jaffray acted as lead book-running managers for the offering. Needham & Co., JMP Securities and William Blair & Co. are acting as co-managers.

Rally’s venture capital investors include Meritech Capital Partners, Greylock Partners, Mobius Venture Capital, Boulder Ventures, Vista Ventures and Mohr Davidow Ventures.

I think this constitutes the first tech IPO launch of the second quarter of the year. Others that have filed offerings recently include Marketo, the cloud-based marketing software company, and Tableau, the data visualization company. Violin Memory is also said to be readying an offering in May, though the date keeps inexplicably slipping. It raised some extra capital in February.

And speaking of IPOs, I saw some data from Silicon Valley law firm Fenwick and West showing that the pace of tech IPOs has been slowing down since a recent peak in the first quarter of 2012. Meanwhile, IPOs in the Life Sciences industry were on a slow rise as of the end of 2012. (You can get the full survey here.)

As recent tech IPOs go, a 27 percent pop is relatively small. The biggest opening day rise in the last two years was that of LinkedIn, which rose more than 109 percent on its first day of trading, followed closely by Splunk, which rose 108 percent. Workday, the cloud-based human resources software company, rounded out the top five companies in the study, rising 74 percent.

Some tech companies decline on their first day. Among those during 2011 and 2012 were Lifelock, which fell 7 percent, E2open which fell 9 percent and the adult site FriendFinder Networks, which fell more than 21 percent.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20130412/rally-soars-27-percent-in-market-debut/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20130412/infosys-profit-rises-3-percent-shares-slump/ http://allthingsd.com/20130412/infosys-profit-rises-3-percent-shares-slump/#comments Fri, 12 Apr 2013 13:30:40 +0000 Dhanya Ann Thoppil and R. Jai Krishna http://allthingsd.com/?p=311400 Infosys Ltd. reported that its fiscal fourth-quarter net profit rose 3 percent from a year earlier but revenue came in below expectations, sending the software exporter’s shares down sharply early Friday.

Over the last few years, India’s second-largest software exporter by revenue has been struggling to meet its own growth expectations as markets in the U.S. and Europe slow down and a new strategy by the company to transform itself into a high-profile consulting firm failed to work.

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]]> http://allthingsd.com/20130412/infosys-profit-rises-3-percent-shares-slump/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20130410/evernotes-phil-libin-talks-about-global-expansion-google-incursion-and-more-video/ http://allthingsd.com/20130410/evernotes-phil-libin-talks-about-global-expansion-google-incursion-and-more-video/#comments Wed, 10 Apr 2013 18:32:42 +0000 Kara Swisher http://allthingsd.com/?p=310730

Last week, I motored on down to Evernote’s spanking (and quite delightful) new offices in Redwood City, Calif., to talk to Phil Libin, its CEO and co-founder, about what has been happening of late at the popular note-taking software startup.

Things have recently been made more interesting with the entry of search giant Google into the sector, with a renewed competing mobile app effort called Keep (which is really a version of its older Notebook offering) for the Android mobile operating system.

Libin seemed sanguine about the move, noting that Evernote’s Android app has a much better user base than Keep. Instead, he said that the company — which has attracted about $250 million in total funding that has valued it at close to $2 billion — is more focused on bringing out new versions of Evernote, which allow a user to save text, Web links, photos and more, as well as on continuing to widen its productivity-app portfolio.

Also a priority is a recently launched premium, business-oriented version of Evernote, as well as even more international expansion, which makes up an increasingly large part of its user base of 45 million (a small number of whom currently pay to upgrade).

Libin talked about all this and more, including continuing to tout his “100-year” strategy for the company (it’s good to plan ahead!) in this video interview:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20130410/evernotes-phil-libin-talks-about-global-expansion-google-incursion-and-more-video/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20130403/mulesoft-the-clouds-super-middleman-lands-37-million-from-nea/ http://allthingsd.com/20130403/mulesoft-the-clouds-super-middleman-lands-37-million-from-nea/#comments Wed, 03 Apr 2013 13:05:18 +0000 Arik Hesseldahl http://allthingsd.com/?p=308773 There’s a new problem that arises when your company embraces cloud computing in a big way: Getting all your data residing in disparate applications to work together.

A company called MuleSoft specializes in helping companies do exactly that. It started out as an on-premise platform, but has since shifted to one based in the cloud. A textbook case: Getting data from one cloud-based application — say, Salesforce.com — working with another — say, Workday. You might want information about your sales team’s performance integrated with your human-resources information so you can keep track of who’s performing well and who isn’t.

Typically, you’d do that yourself, taking advantage of APIs provided by both companies. You’d assign a team of developers to create a custom process and workflow. It would take more time than you’d want it to, and would probably cost more than you’d like.

“All those problems about integrating data become exponentially greater in the cloud,” mainly because there are more applications and there’s also just more data, said MuleSoft CEO Greg Schott. There are, he said, something like 2,100 different companies offering software-as-a-service applications, plus a whole bunch of older legacy on-premise enterprise software products. And every company has its own mix-and-match combination.

The good news is that most, if not all, of these applications have their APIs, meaning that, in theory, a programmer can take advantage of them. And that’s where MuleSoft steps in. One API doesn’t natively talk to another API. At a high level, MuleSoft sits as the middleman between them all. It has a repository of 13,000 or more APIs, and has an SaaS platform that connects them all together. The time required to integrate data in two or more applications is cut from weeks or months to hours or days.

The problem isn’t getting smaller. The number of open APIs available is multiplying, and in a few more years will reach into the hundreds of thousands.

Founded in 2003, its timing couldn’t have been better. Companies like Salesforce, NetSuite, Workday, SuccessFactors and others all sought to shift important business applications out of the office and into the cloud. And now running things in the cloud is more often than not preferred, because in the long run it’s cheaper — cloud companies tend to charge on a subscription basis — and easier.

So MuleSoft has been on fire. Its customers run the gamut from banks to automakers to media companies: Barclays, J.P. Morgan and Wells Fargo are all customers, as are BMW and Tesla. Facebook and Box and Intuit are customers, too. More than 150,000 developers at more than 3,200 companies are using MuleSoft’s platform.

Today, the company announced that it has raised $37 million in a Series E round of venture capital funding, led by NEA. Salesforce.com is also investing in this round. Prior investors participating include Hummer Winblad, Morgenthaler Ventures, Lightspeed Venture Partners, SAP Ventures (the venture capital arm of software giant SAP) and Bay Partners. The round brings MuleSoft’s total capital raised to $81 million. An IPO is probably not far off.

Here’s one reason for Salesforce’s interest: One of MuleSoft’s newer products is an app called Dataloader.io, that is available on the Salesforce App Exchange. It’s designed to move data from pretty much any application into Salesforce.com. Within weeks, it shot to No. 1 on the App Exchange, and remains the most popular app there today, Schott told me.

Another new product was announced today. It’s called Anypoint, and it’s described as the only complete integration platform to cover applications across the entire spectrum of cloud or on-premise, and to get the data in them working together.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20130403/mulesoft-the-clouds-super-middleman-lands-37-million-from-nea/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20130402/matrix-partners-adds-two-new-eirs/ http://allthingsd.com/20130402/matrix-partners-adds-two-new-eirs/#comments Tue, 02 Apr 2013 15:06:52 +0000 Kara Swisher http://allthingsd.com/?p=308306 Matrix Partners has added two new entrepreneurs in residence, Kevin Barenblat and Mihir Shah. Barenblat founded social music app SpotDJ and Context Optional, a social marketing software startup which was bought by Adobe. Shah was the former CEO of mobile advertising platform Tapjoy, and also worked at social app firm RockYou and QuinStreet, a performance marketing firm. Both will focus on cloud, mobile, consumer Internet and ad tech at the Silicon Valley venture firm.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20130402/matrix-partners-adds-two-new-eirs/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20130328/gartner-raises-2013-it-spending-forecasts-to-3-8-trillion/ http://allthingsd.com/20130328/gartner-raises-2013-it-spending-forecasts-to-3-8-trillion/#comments Thu, 28 Mar 2013 15:47:36 +0000 Arik Hesseldahl http://allthingsd.com/?p=307485 The research firm Gartner is out today with its latest forecast for global spending on information technology in 2013, and the good news is that it’s higher than it was before.

Worldwide, Gartner says, companies and organizations will spend a combined $3.8 trillion on hardware, software, IT services and telecommunications. That’s $100 billion higher than the last forecast it made in October.

While the U.S. avoided the fiscal cliff that five months ago cast a pall over everything related to the global economy and thus IT spending, the automatic sequestration that has mandated sudden cuts in government spending has offset any gains. And while Europe has settled down, the latest sovereign debt issues in Cyprus have also served as something of a setback. Both are seen as short-term headwinds.

Spending on devices — smartphones, tablets and printers — has grown like crazy, which shouldn’t surprise anybody, and will continue to grow, the firm says. Last year, spending on devices was $665 billion globally, and is expected to reach $718 billion this year, or 8 percent more.

Spending on enterprise software is running a close second, and is expected to grow by more than 6 percent to $297 billion. Here, a slowdown in IT operations management software is being offset by growth in spending on database management systems.

IT services and data center systems are also expected to grow this year, but a bit more slowly than in the previous forecast. Spending is coming down in the near-term on external storage and in Europe. IT services is seeing some intense price competition and redirection of budgets away from new consulting projects.

The slowest-growing segment will be telecom services, which declined last year. Gartner says it will generate about $1.7 trillion in revenue, up about 2 percent from last year. Declines in spending on voice are being offset by mobile data.

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