Simple.TV wants to help cord cutters record and have access to broadcast TV wherever they are, by connecting its device to an HD antenna and streaming those signals over the Internet. And it’s launching a Kickstarter campaign to help fund that vision, as it prepares to launch in mid-summer.

Simple.TV makes a combination DVR and streaming device — kind of like a TiVo meets Slingbox — that lets users record basic cable and HD over-the-air TV signals, then stream them over the Internet to apps the company has built for the iPad or the iPhone. The company has also just built an HTML5 web app that will let users connect on devices that it hasn’t yet built apps for — like Android tablets, for instance.

Simple.TV CEO Mark Ely says that the Kickstarter campaign will help fund the initial run of device sales. Rather than raising funding in exchange for equity, Kickstarter will provide some of the working capital required to start manufacturing the device.

There are some other advantages to launching on Kickstarter rather than opening with sales on the Simple.TV website and on Amazon.com. Ely says that the crowdsourcing service will help it with inventory management and gauging demand for the device before it starts selling direct to consumers. Kickstarter is also a great way to gain support through social networks and by word-of-mouth.

Simple.TV has multiple levels of support for the campaign, all of which will provide discounts for users who wish to sign up early and get one of the first devices to be shipped. With a goal of $125,000, the startup has a relatively low threshold of success — after all, it only takes about 1,000 unit sales for Simple.TV to hit its target.

• Pledge $25 or more – Stick it to the cable guy and get a “Cut the Cord” T-Shirt.
• Pledge $125 or more – Get the Simple.TV DVR at a $25 discount
• Pledge $149 or more – Get the Simple.TV box and a year of service
• Pledge $199 or more – Get a Simple.TV DVR with unlimited EPG service and a Mohu ATSC antenna
• Pledge $299 or more – Get everything you need to cut the cord: a Simple.TV DVR with unlimited subscription, Mohu ATSC antenna, and a Roku XS
• Pledge $349 or more – Get two Simple.TV DVRs with unlimited subscriptions, and two Mohu leaf antennas to allow you to send one to your family
• Pledge $399 or more – For the real big nerds out there. Get a Simple.TV DVR with unlimited subscription plus a Mohu antenna and a Roku XD, personally delivered and installed by Simple.TV CEO Mark Ely
• Pledge $499 or more – For developers, get three Simple.TV DVRs and API access to develop additional apps

After a rough day yesterday, RIMM’s stock opened down 10% today, trading at $10.05 at the opening bell. The stock price briefly recovered but it’s on a steady downward trend as of this post’s writing. If this slide continues, the stock is set to hit a low not seen since 2003.

Trading of RIMM shares was halted for 15 minutes yesterday in order to issue a what the company called a “business update“. CEO Throsten Heins detailed RIM’s recently challenges and also explained that the company is employing the help of Royal Bank of Canada and J.P. Morgan to evaluate financial strategies. The company also warned that it will report a loss for the fiscal quarter ending on June 2. This came on the heals of report that states RIM is set to layoff a major chunk of its workforce.

Things at RIM are set to get worse before they get better. It seems nearly every week another high-placed executive is leaving the company. The RIM of the future (if there is a future for RIM) will look nothing like the RIM of the past.

I still believe RIM can recover. The company has a good chunk of the enterprise smartphone market and the products in the pipeline are very compelling. However, RIM needs to make it through these dark days first and hiring bankers is a good start.

Much has been said about the Nokia 808 Pureview since its debut at MWC in February, but most recently the rumors have centered around delayed availability in the UK. The phone, and its 41-megapixel camera, weren’t expected to hit shelves across the pond until July.

But according to Amazon’s UK site, the phone will be available on June 21 unlocked for £499.98 (US$778). Camera happy customers are more than welcome to place their pre-orders now.

The big selling point for the 808 Pureview (if you haven’t already figured it out) is a 41-megapixel camera with a Carl Zeiss sensor. To be fair, that 41-megapixel figure is a bit misleading.

In actuality, the camera is taking 41 megapixels of raw data, shrinking it down to improve resolution, and churning out something closer to an 8-megapixel photo. That 8-megapixel photo, however, will be much better than an 8-megapixel image taken with a much smaller sensor (the Pureview 808 sensor is 1/1.2″).

The phone, on the other hand, is more of a beast than a beauty. It’s clunky, and it runs Symbian. But surely there are some early adopters out there waiting to get a taste of Pureview imaging — it will, after all, appear on Nokia’s Windows Phones soon enough.

[via SoMobile]

According to the IDC, 17.4 million tablets were shipped worldwide in the first quarter, with the lion’s share (68 percent) of those being iPads. As the iPad’s popularity has grown, it’s begun to find increasing adoption in the enterprise and among IT decision makers. As a result, some companies are looking to find better ways to utilize the iPad’s interface and unique display to present and visualize business data in more exciting and engaging ways.

Roambi, one of these slick new business intelligence (BI) apps, is finding success thanks to its enabling companies to transform their snooze-inducing Salesforce, Oracle, or SAP data (i.e. BI data) into interactive mobile dashboards, snappy charts and sexy graphs, and instantly deliver them to the iPad.

Building on its initial use case, last year Roambi released its so-called “Roambi Flow,” an app and content system that allows users to easily create and share original documents and interactive reports using analytics, text, graphics, video, and collaborative content.

Designed with the iPad interface in mind, those reports really look more like magazine-style publications, but based entirely on the custom content you provide. (Not unlike a BI data-version of Inkling.)

And today MeLLmo (the creator of Roambi) is taking its functioanlity one step further, moving from simply being a content creator to becoming a distributor and publisher as well, by launching a new platform that enables organizations to deliver analytics and multimedia content to anyone with an iPad. In other words, the key value proposition for the new platform is that companies can now not only create interactive reports in Roambi Flow, but actually turn those magazine-style reports into apps that can be published on the App Store, with customer logos, etc.

The platform also includes new licensing and features that give businesses the ability to distribute their custom Roambi reports both internally, just to staff, or externally to customers and consumers. They can also create and distribute co-branded materials in a single issue or series as iPad apps, saving money by removing the need to hire specialized designers, and, in turn, extending the reach of their brand thanks to the App Store’s massive, built-in user base.

As an illustrative example, an analyst firm, say, could upload a PDF, automatically transform it into a Roambi Flow document (i.e. a flip-style magazine for iPad), add interactive analytics, photos and videos, and then publish as their own app on the App Store — either for targeted customers or open download.

What’s more, companies can do this over and over, ad nauseam, publishing a bunch of separate apps or creating multiple editions within one. That company could also use its distribution mechanism to continuously publish the most up-to-date sales presentations for their sales force, for example, or use it as a marketing tool, publishing brochure-style content for open downloading.

In addition to its platform launch, the startup is today introducing Roambi Pulse — its tenth visualization tool for the iPad — which allows users to compare key performance indicators in animated, vivid display. By embedding historical performance of key metrics within interactive titles, users can swipe and tap their way through (what are presumably) more compelling and engaging insights. A Roambi Pulse sample is can be found in the free Roambi app now available in the App Store.

As for integration? Roambi’s platform connects with a mess of business information sources and integrates with existing systems from IBM Cognos, Microsoft, Oracle, SAP BusinessObjects, Salesforce Sales Cloud, and Google Docs.

MeLLmo raised $30 million from Sequoia in its first round of institutional funding back in September.

For more info, find Roambi at home here.

One of the nice little surprises at Samsung’s Galaxy S III unveiling in London was that the device would be preloaded with the fabled Android version of the Flipboard social magazine app. The news came from out of the blue — while the iOS version has garnered plenty of acclaim and some nifty new updates, Android users were (largely) left out in the cold.

Now it appears that the app will soon be finding its way onto other Android devices, but perhaps not in the way that most users would hope. According to a new report from Engadget, the Flipboard team is close to releasing a beta version of the app to a small number of users to gain critical feedback before launching the final product.

But why the slow and steady approach? Engadget’s sources say it’s because of the sheer number of devices they have to account for. As wonderful has having a device for every niche is, it’s pretty clear that the process of ensuring a consistent experience across multiple hardware configurations can be a real headache. It seems especially difficult when the iOS version of the app has become well known for its handsome design and solid usability — making sure that experience carries over to the hordes of Android devices floating around out there is certainly no trivial feat.

If all of this holds true, then Flipboard is being very smart about how it goes about making those final tweaks. There will always be people willing to go through the extra work of loading up an .apk on their device in order to be the first to have something, and using them as a testbed for a wider release down the line only makes sense. For now though, there’s still no official word on a release date — the Flipboard for Android page only says that the app will launch in “the coming months.”

Those of you who don’t care much for minor imperfections can dive right in though — the .apk was pulled from a Galaxy S III demo unit prior to launch, and you too can join in the fun provided you know where to look.

Do you ever find yourself wishing that the act of telling time was as simple, and tactile, as flipping a light switch in your home?  If so, then the folks at Watchismo have got quite the surprise in store for you. Aptly named the “Click Wall Switch” watch, it resembles a squared-off interpretation of modern wall switches.  Rather than firing up an incandescent bulb, however, you’ll be lighting up LEDs on the face of the watch display the time or date.

The LEDs shine through the plastic on the face, adding a bit of geeky charm to the proceedings.

Practical?  Absolutely not – this is firmly in the whimsical camp.  But, it’s certain to grab some attention (this sucker is 45mm x 47mm), and it’ll give you something to fiddle with if boredom sets in.

Watchismo has the 4 colors (black, blue, red, white) on sale for a tad under $100.

In the midst of Amazon’s recent moves to rapidly grow its content collection on Amazon Prime Instant Video, the company has also been brokering deals for another one of its video properties: European Netflix competitor LOVEFiLM. Today, the company is announcing a new multi-year deal with NBCUniversal International Television Distribution, which will offer LOVEFiLM members access to streaming titles from Universal Pictures during the second pay window.

The titles will be available through the LOVEFiLM Instant service, and will start at  £4.99 a month. As with Netflix, the streaming video service supports a wide variety of devices, including PCs, Macs, the iPad, internet-connected TVs and Blu-ray players, as well as game consoles like the Xbox 360 and Sony PlayStation. There are 175 devices, in total, which are supported.

The new NBCUniversal deal will bring familiar U.S. titles to LOVEFiLM’s members, like ‘It’s Complicated’, ‘Nanny McPhee Returns’, ‘Leap Year’, ‘Green Zone’, ‘The Wolfman’, ‘Robin Hood’, ‘Scott Pilgrim vs The World’, ‘The American’, ‘Paul’, ‘Fast And Furious 5’, ‘Bridesmaids’, ‘Johnny English Reborn’, ‘Snow White and the Huntsman’, ‘Bourne Legacy’, ‘Dr Seuss’ The Lorax’ and ‘Safe House’. However, Amazon did not announce the number of new titles the content deal offered. (Perhaps implying its not large enough to boast about?)

LOVEFiLM, which Amazon purchased back in January 2011, after having held a large minority stake in the company for some time, has also been trying to wean itself off of DVD rentals like its stateside competitor. The company now has over 2 million members in the U.K., Germany, Sweden, Denmark, and Norway, and hosts over 70,000 titles, DVD, games and streaming combined.

Amazon has previously signed streaming video deals for its Prime Instant Video service with Paramount, Discovery, Viacom, 20th Century FOX and others.

If any household product deserves a spot in the Apple Store, it’s the Nest Thermostat. Never mind the common denominator of long-time Apple employee, Tony Fadell, the Nest Thermostat exemplifies Apple’s mantra of making technology accessible. The Nest isn’t just a pretty face. Behind the shiny exterior are enough disruptive bits to make thermostat giant, Honeywell, attempt to sue the company out of existence. Starting today, the Nest is now available in Apple’s retail stores and the website.

The Apple Store sells the Nest at its full, $249 MSRP — Lowes sells it for the same price. But as the company promises, homeowners should recoup that high price with monthly savings on their utility bill thanks to the Nest’s learning and motion sensing features. Owners can also control the settings from iOS and Android devices, arguably allowing for even more savings.

As The Verge points out, this comes just one day after the Nest headed to the Great White North. Just yesterday, Nest Labs announced Canadian availability of its learning thermostat because, you know, even Canadians deserve lower utility bills by way of a beautiful device.

[Image via 9to5mac]

If you’ve been keeping up at all, you should know that we’re planning a tour of the Southeast during the second week of July. We’re hitting all the hottest spots, including Savannah, Atlanta, Raleigh, and Charlotte (in that order), but we seem to be hitting a tiny bump in the south-bound road.

As much as I’d love to hit up Mr. Armstrong for carte blanche on this whole shindig, we like to give you fine people as much control over the networking event as possible, including the venue, the alcohol, the food, and the friends you’ll bring along. It is, after all, for you. That said, we are still looking for sponsors, most desperately in the ATL.

We’re also still looking for a venue (no, not an office) in Atlanta, as well as more sponsors in Raleigh and Charlotte — Savannah, on the other hand, is a done deal. (Hat tip to Savannah.)

Prices are as follows:

$500 will get your logo and a brief description of the company in each post related to the meet-up. There are usually about three leading up to the event, and one during the event. This will also get you a spot on our TC Meetup Banner, which will be hung at the event.

$800 will get you all the benefits of a logo sponsorship, along with your own space at the event to demo and hang your own signage.

We understand that cost is an issue for startups, but so is publicity, which is the entire reason we’re doing this in the first place.

If you’re interested in a sponsorship for the Atlanta, Raleigh, or Charlotte meetups, please drop me a line at Jordan@techcrunch.com with the subject line SPONSOR – [INSERT CITY NAME HERE].

Here are the details that are already set in stone:

Savannah is happening on July 6th at the offices of The Creative Coast, 15 West York Street. It’s going to be a smaller crowd, I suspect, but considering we found Vinylmint at the Norfolk mini-meetup, I’m excited to see what Savannah has to offer. You can RSVP here.

Special thanks to Packard Place for hosting the event.

The Creative Coast is a non-profit organization supported by The City of Savannah and SEDA. We exist to nurture the members of our community engaged in creative or innovative endeavors and to cultivate an environment in which they can thrive.

Atlanta is happening on July 9. Location is still TBD so if you have any ideas, please drop us a line as soon as possible. You can RSVP here.

Raleigh-Durham is happening on July 10th at the Tyler’s Taproom in the American Tobacco Historic District. We will be taking over most of the restaurant and garden so roll on over. You can RSVP here.

Special thanks to the fellows at GBW Strategies who helped us organize the event.

GBW Strategies is a new era, Triangle-based public relations and marketing firm serving clients such as Facebook and the Cherokee Challenge.

Charlotte is happening on July 11th. We are still looking for a location although we’ll finalize it by Monday. You can RSVP here.

Special thanks to Packard Place for hosting the event.

Packard Place is the hub for entrepreneurship and innovation in Charlotte. Our mission is to develop fast-growth businesses and the professional community to drive them.

SkySQL plans to be something of a thorn in Oracle’s side. As you’ll recall MySQL, which as a free database platform annoyed Oracle, was sold to Sun and then Oracle bought Sun. That was supposed to keep a lid on things. Now with MySQL under its wing, Oracle plans to move those MySQL users over to Oracle databases in due course. But it can’t push things too hard due to EU competition rules in place for the next five years. So guess what? That gives SkySQL – backed previously by the former founders of MySQL – a window to come back and start re-supporting all those dedicated die-hard Sun/MySQL fans. They’re baaack…..

And to do it they’ve raised an additional €2 million in Series A funding from California Technology Ventures, LLC (CTV). This takes SkySQL’s war chest to €6 million and will mean they can expand their business supporting existing MySQL users.

At the same time they’ve brought in Patrik Sallner as new CEO, who was previously VP of Professional Services at F-Secure Corporation which delivered cloud storage solutions to large telcos. Ulf Sandberg, current CEO at SkySQL, will now move to head up the U.S. operation as President of SkySQL Inc.

Admittedly SkySQL has mainly a service business right now, serving old MySQL customers in much the same way that RedHat services Linux customers.

But they plan to put in place a Cloud based product (yes, they will turn into a platform startup) which will gradually take on the heavy lifting and provide an alternative migration path to people who don’t want Oracle.

This is one to watch. And watch Oracle get redder in the face as the years tick by…

Every year, Cisco issues its Visual Networking Index (VNI) to forecast the amount of data traffic that will be used worldwide. The latest VNI forecast shows a massive uptick in data usage, from the 369 Exabytes of IP traffic used worldwide in 2011 to approximately 1.3 zettabytes in 2016. According to Cisco, that rapid growth in data traffic will be driven by a proliferation of connected devices, ever-increasing broadband connectivity, and greater adoption of IP video worldwide.

Let’s put that into perspective: According to Cisco, the amount of data in 2016 will be more than all the IP traffic transferred between 1984 and 2012. And the rate of increase Cisco forecasts between 2015 and 2016 alone (330 exabytes) is nearly equal to all the data transferred last year.

So what’s driving that explosion in traffic? For one thing, an increase in the total number of devices that are connected to the Internet. With the proliferation of smart phones, tablets, connected TVs and other smart devices (think broadband-enabled washing machines, refrigerators and the like), folks are no longer just connecting to the Internet via PCs.

In fact, the number of network connections is expected to grow from 10.3 billion in 2011 to 18.9 billion by 2016. That represents nearly 2.5 connections for each person on Earth. More importantly, those devices are chipping away at PC dominance for amount of data transferred. In 2011, PCs accounted for about 94 percent of all consumer Internet traffic. That’s expected to fall to 81 percent by 2016, according to Cisco.

The total number of Internet users is poised to reach 3.4 billion by 2016, with ever-increasing broadband speeds increasing the average data usage among them. Cisco forecasts that the average fixed broadband speed will nearly quadruple, from 9 Mbps in 2011 to 34 Mbps in 2016.

As has been the case for the last several years, the fastest growing traffic type will continue to be IP video, which is expected to make up 86 percent of all data traffic by 2016. Cisco forecasts that the amount of video delivered via IP will reach 3 trillion minutes per month in five years, which amounts to about two years (833 days) worth of video transferred every second. That growth is predicated on the number of IP video viewers doubling over the next five years, from 792 million viewers in 2011 to 1.5 billion by 2016.

The massive growth in video online means that the influence of peer-to-peer file sharing will continue to decrease over time. While P2P files made up 77 percent of global consumer Internet traffic in 2011, that is forecast to fall to about 54 percent by 2016. That doesn’t mean actual file-sharing will decrease — in fact, traffic is expected to grow from 4.6 exabytes per month in 2011 to 10 exabytes in 2016. However, as a percentage of data usage, P2P traffic will grow much slower than video.

Anyway, so here’s the caveat: Cisco has a lot riding on this tremendous growth in Internet data usage because Cisco sells a bunch of networking equipment. So it’s a good thing for Cisco if network operators see this report and decide they need to buy a bunch of new gear.

That said, Cisco’s VNI forecasts have actually been pretty conservative relative to the amount of traffic that eventually showed up. In its initial VNI forecast of 2007, Cisco expected 28.4 exabytes of traffic per month in 2011, and that forecast ended up being low. Actual data transferred was 7 percent higher, or 30.7 exabytes per month.

Inkling, the San Francisco-based startup that’s known for making super slick interactive digital versions of college textbooks and other educational titles for the iPad, has debuted its first ever platform for the web browser.

‘Inkling for Web’ requires no Flash or other plug-ins, and is powered entirely by technologies such as HTML5, CSS and Javascript, Inkling CEO Matt McInnis said in an interview this week. This means that Inkling titles, which had previously been viewable only through Inkling’s native iPad app, can now be viewed on any up-to-date webkit-based browser such as Chrome or Safari by anyone with an Inkling account.

All current and future Inkling titles are now available through the new web interface — with things such as 3-D graphics, videos and audio features fully included. Every part of each title will have its own unique URL so that instructors can send out links to certain sections. Notes and activity on the web version will automatically sync to Inkling on iOS, and vice versa.

Increasing Its Potential Market By 10X — In A Snap

For Inkling, this is a very big deal. The company, which was founded in 2009, has up until now offered only e-books for the iPad as well as some connected apps for the iPhone. The scope of those platforms is sizable, but the web is still much bigger — the launch of Inkling for Web grows the company’s investable market by 10x, McInnis said.

For Inkling, a web application of some sorts was always in the cards, McInniss tells me, as students have always wanted to access their textbook content on the web in some way or another. But the company only recently realized that it just might be possible to build a web platform that would be just as fully-featured as its native iPad app.

“What was interesting was that when we started to build a prototype, the web app turned out to be way awesomer than we thought it would be… HTML5 has gone in the past 1.5 years from something that was nascent and shaky to something that’s stable, and that was serendipitous,” McInniss said. “It feels nice to stretch our arms outside of iOS ecosystem for the first time.”

Once the team got started, it really didn’t hold back when it came to utilizing HTML5′s newfound stability. According to McInnis, Inkling for Web is “probably the most sophisticated HTML5 software that has ever been written.”

The Open Web: Pros Outweigh The Cons

Now, being out on the web comes with its own possible drawbacks, and Inkling has implemented some security controls to safeguard against pirating — it will detect if someone is copy and pasting large amounts of text in a very short amount of time, for example. But in general, McInnis said, the company and the publishers it deals with are feeling very positive. “The web is open, so we’re being as open as we possibly can,” he said. “Publishers are very excited about the opportunity to package and sell things on the web… and this is a whole new opportunity for them to go out of Apple’s paywall.”

Scaling out to the wider web won’t be cheap, McInnis acknowledged. But according to him, it will all be worth it:

“We’re going to be paying a lot of money to our content delivery network and to Amazon [Web Services]. But the broader business implication is that the future is HTML5, and if you want to build a billion dollar business you can’t really do it under the thumb of another company. This was absolutely critical to us from a strategic standpoint.”

Those new expenses aside, Inkling maintains it is still well-capitalized to keep building itself out independently for the time being. The company, which has taken on $17 million in venture capital to date, has just under 100 employees at the moment, has been “very happy with revenue growth,” and will not need more venture capital at its current run rate until late next year, McInnis said.

Here are some screenshots of Inkling for Web (click on each to enlarge):

When Badgeville launched at TechCrunch Disrupt San Francisco back in 2010 and took home the “Audience Choice Award,” its mission to help companies big and small leverage gamification elements like leaderboards, badges, leveling-up, experience points, etc. to increase customer engagement seemed intriguing — if not a little gimmicky.

Fast forward to today, and some may still cringe at the word (and its overuse), gamification is reaching the tipping point. As Mayfield Fund Managing Director Tim Chang recently wrote in a must-read post, gamification is now moving beyond its early adopting verticals, like media and fitness, and is no longer content to just play in the realm of consumers and end users. It’s ready to play in enterprise.

Badgeville’s vision of a web and business experience being re-shaped by game dynamics is not only being validated by the media, but by investors, too. Earlier this month, mobile gamification startup SessionM raised $20 million from Charles River Ventures, Highland Capital Partners and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, among others. And today, Badgeville is leap-frogging SessionM, announcing that it has closed a $25 million round of series C financing.

The startup’s new investment was led by InterWest Partners, with participation from previous investors like Norwest Venture Partners, El Dorado Ventures, and Trinity Ventures, bringing Badgeville’s total funding to $40 million — all of which has been raised in the 20 months since its launch at Disrupt SF. As a result of the round, InterWest Partner Doug Pepper will be joining the startup’s board of directors.

So why all the hubbub? Among other things, Badgeville is capitalizing on the fact that gamification continues to represent a growing portion of enterprise social initiatives — doing so by giving businesses and corporations an embeddable gamification platform that focuses on proving real engagement. You know that “consumerization of enterprise” thing everyone’s talking about? Gamification is a part — or partial catalyst — of that. It won’t be long before everyone’s talking about the “gamification of enterprise.” (You heard it here first.)

After all, Gartner Research estimates that more than 70 percent of “Global 2000″ organizations will have a gamified app by 2015. M2 Research has drunk the same Kool-Aid, reporting that the gamification market will reach $2.8 billion in the U.S. by 2016.

Riding this trend, Badgeville wants to help enterprise understand and influence user behavior across platforms by speaking its language with a cloud-based Platform-as-a-service (PaaS) solution. The scope of the startup’s platform is also wide, compatible with a range of industries from retail and healthcare to education and financial services, bringing its database into traditionally private cloud environments by offering enterprise-grade security and scalability.

With that value proposition, Badgeville has attracted more than 165 global clients (up from 100 in January), which include Oracle, EMC, Dell, Samsung, NBC, Fox, Ford, and Disney to name a few. Using its “Behavior Platform” to identify user behaviors across a company’s network, allowing them create rewards in their enterprise apps, the startup built customized gamification integrations with companies like Yammer, Bazaarvoice, Klout, and Sharepoint, in addition to those for Salesforce.com and Jive which are currently in private beta.

Badgeville also claims to have launched the industry’s first ISV program, enabling companies like Oracle, Kaiser Permanente’s Avivia Health, and Saba to embed Badgeville into their core technologies. If building significant integrations and inroads into the services of companies like Oracle isn’t enough, the startup is also building a defensible position in terms of its own IP, having received patents for its Behavior Engine, Dynamic Game Engine, Reputation Mechanics, and Social Mechanics.

As to the level of engagement Badgeville is creating for its clients, Co-founder and CEO Kris Duggan says that clients have seen an average 500 percent increase in user comments, 140 percent growth in time spent on the business’ website, 60 percent increase in employee engagement, and an 80 percent jump in user registrations.

While Badgeville doesn’t share the cost of its offerings, as pricing fluctuates based on the implementation, audience size, among other things, entry-level prices typically start out at $3K to $5K per month. This may not meet the budgets of smaller companies, as you have to pay more to get more, but for enterprise the bill seems to fit.

Badgeville has grown its team to 70 and will continue to invest in human capital as well as its own technology. The startup’s growth, reflected in other gamifiers like Bigdoor, Bunchball, and SessionM shows that gamification has plenty of market opportunity (and opportunities for marketers), is moving beyond the early crush on easy features like badges, and will likely be coming to an enterprise near you sometime soon.

For more on Badgeville, check ‘em out at home here.

Today PayPal opened up a new front in its strategy to expand its role in mobile payments, a business PayPal projects will generate it $7 billion in revenue this year. The eBay-owned payments company today launched a new retail mobile payments app for iOS and Android devices, PayPal InStore, where users can create barcodes that get scanned to deduct payments from users’ PayPal accounts. Available only in the UK, clothing chains Coast, Oasis, Warehouse, and Karen Millen are the first to sign on to the service, and PayPal tells me there are no plans to add NFC to the app any time soon.

PayPal InStore underscores some of the challenges that remain with NFC technology. Yesterday, Gartner presented a picture of a $172-billion mobile payments industry that is still largely based around older technologies like SMS and web-based payments, with newer services like NFC chips playing a very marginal role. And Juniper Research today noted that transactions made on NFC phones in North America and Western Europe will account for less than two percent of all mobile payments this year.

PayPal InStore is one example of how retailers and others can use techonologies available today to offer mobile payments. In this case, a user creates a barcode for a product in the app. He/She then presents their device to get it scanned by the cashier. The amount then gets deducted from a users’ PayPal account.

I asked PayPal whether the door is open for the app to be upgraded to NFC when the chip technology is more ubiquitous — it would certainly make sense, given that it would speed up use of the service. The answer? Not really.

“We think that it will take years for NFC to get any kind of traction in stores, but we are helping retailers roll out mobile payments quickly and cheaply now,” said Ron Skinner, PayPal’s spokesperson in the UK. “We’re not dismissing NFC but our point is that the world may have moved on by the time NFC gets some kind of scale.”

This appears to be the first time that PayPal has launched a barcode-based app. It is not available in the U.S. and Skinner says there are no plans to roll it out elsewhere, either.

“This particular solution is not in the U.S.,” he said, noting that a region-specific service is all part PayPal’s 2012 plan: “It’s a test and learn year for PayPal and our retail partners.”

PayPal last week expanded its mobile payment services in the U.S. by adding 15 more major retailers to the list of those supporting the payments company’s apps in that market. In the UK, the company has a headstart with its branding: as TNW points out its main mobile app broke the 1-million user mark as far back as 2010. Skinner also points out that the high penetration of smartphone users in the UK makes it worthwhile to try out new payment methods here.

PayPal has been looking at a number of different technologies to enable mobile payments. It has trialled NFC, launched a dongle-based service called Here, and looked at ways of using pin codes and credit cards to complete the payments from users’ PayPal accounts — this is the service it has trialled with Best Buy and will likely be the basis of the expansion announced last week. As for PayPal InStore, the Inquirer notes that Windows and BlackBerry versions are also under development.

Meanwhile, Juniper’s NFC projections, in contrast to Gartner’s, are significantly more optimistic about how much NFC will be used, and about how much money will be generated from NFC.

Juniper predicts in its new report that one in four consumers in the U.S. and Western Europe will tap, wave and hover NFC-enabled handsets at points of sale to buy goods by 2017. Juniper’s principal analyst, Windsor Holden, says that works out to $180 billion in mobile NFC transactions by 2017 — just $8 billion more than Gartner believes will be made in mobile payments overall this year. Gartner says that the total transactional value for all kinds of mobile payments will be $617 billion by 2016.

One area where both analysts seem to agree is on the complexity and challenges in making NFC work. Chief among them is that there are a number of parties involved in enabling payments — mobile operators, handset makers, payment providers, retailers and banks — and as Juniper points out a “single point of contact to take responsibility” will be needed to make these services gain credibility with users.

So far, we’ve seen a lot of efforts, including Google Wallet, the Isis consortium, and several commercial projects in Europe (eg, France Telecom working with Visa) — but no clear leader in NFC emerging out of all of that.

Nokia today announced it is losing another senior executive: Esko Aho, who had once been the prime minister of Finland and is currently EVP, corporate relations and responsibility and a member of Nokia’s leadership team, is leaving the beleaguered handset maker for Harvard University. There, he will be the Senior Fellow at the Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Business and Government at Harvard Kennedy School for public policy. He had been with Nokia since 2008 and a member of the executive team since 2009.

In his role at Nokia, Aho had overseen the company’s global policies and activities regarding sustainable development and social responsibility. Although his departure may not appear as destabilizing as some other executive exits — Colin Giles, Nokia’s EVP of sales, is leaving at the end of June and is not being replaced —  it is still a sign of how much the company is shedding the old guard as it looks to turn its struggling business around.

On a wider scale, Nokia has lost about 9,000 employees in the last year, according to the FT, and may well reduce its 122,000 headcount even more in the months ahead.

Nokia said in an emailed statement that Aho will leave the company at the end of August, but that he will remain involved as a consultant on public affairs (i.e., lobbying the Finnish government, or advising on how best to?).

Nokia has been on a steady decline in its mobile phone business — and has struggled particularly in the area of smartphones, where it has lost market share to Apple and to Android handset makers like Samsung. This quarter, by many estimates, Samsung overtook Nokia as the world’s biggest mobile phone company.

Under its latest CEO, Stephen Elop, Nokia has been trying to turn that trend around and has put his former employer Microsoft’s Windows Phone OS at the core of that strategy, although judging by its latest quarterly earnings, where sales fell by more than $4 billion, that plan has yet to bear significant and ripe fruit.

We in the press haven’t heard too much from Five Stars, the customer loyalty startup, since it launched out of the Winter 2011 class of Y Combinator last year. But now that seems the silence has been for a pretty good cause: Turns out that Five Stars has been busy over the past year building a business with real clients, real users, and most importantly, real revenue.

Five Stars, which makes an all-purpose customer loyalty card and web platform that people can use at multiple different retail locations, has now processed more than 1.3 million check-ins, the company’s co-founder Victor Ho tells me. These check-ins have occurred across 250,000 users in the 700 or so retail locations in which Five Stars is active — 100,000 of these users use the Five Stars card once every two to three weeks, with 50,000 of those using it every week.

As a comparison, loyalty platform Belly recently announced it has processed 1 million check-ins across 200,000 users at 1,000 locations. Oh, the joy of keeping up with startup user number horse races! But really, the competition here in the customer loyalty space is pretty interesting to watch.

The Power In The Point-Of-Sale

According to Five Stars, the key difference that sets it apart from other modern loyalty platforms (including Belly) is that its technology is integrated into each store’s point of sale program, so retailers themselves can see metrics on their own screens when a Five Stars card is scanned and participate with the data on their own terms. This means that Five Stars is easier for stores to integrate, and it is easier for both the retailer and Five Stars to understand the behavior of customers, Victor Ho says.

“Loyalty is one of those spaces where there are a million companies trying to do it,” Ho said in an interview this week. “But if you want to be able to scale into the largest chains, you have to be integrated into the point of sale, but there is a lot of inconsistency across the technologies used by each different cashier. We’ve developed a patented way that lets us integrate across 90 percent of the retail market at the point of sale. We can get everything down to the SKU data, so we know who a customer is and what they buy.”

Keeping The Churn “Crazy Low”

According to Five Stars, that ease has been adopted eagerly by the local merchants who have signed on to the service in recent months — less than two percent of stores that sign on to use Five Stars quit the program each month. “That’s crazy low for the local space. We’ve had virtually no stores with more than 200 users of the card ever sign off,” Ho said. According to him, the reason merchants keep Five Stars around is because of the data they’re able to see when they use it. “When you’re on the point of sale, the merchant can actually interact with the loyalty program and the customer using it. If you’re just an iPad app tied to a credit card, the merchant has zero interaction with the whole process.”

Five Stars has had more than $10 million in revenue going through its program, and the current run-rate spend is around $25 million, Ho said. The company, which has 35 full-time employees, charges retailers a monthly fee to be a part of the program. Retailers can also do marketing pushes through the Five Stars program — email campaigns, text messages, targeted promotions to valued customers, and the like.

Adding Funding To Fuel The Fire? Maybe

Five Stars is currently strongest in the San Francisco Bay Area, where it is based, but word is that the company is in the midst of raising a healthily sized new round of funding to help scale its operations. To date, Five Stars has taken on about $2 million in outside investment.

Not surprisingly, Ho was mum on the topic of new VC funding when we talked this week, but he did say that more aggressive geographic expansion was certainly on Five Stars’ horizon. Belly, one of its chief competitors, is based in Chicago, for example, and seems to be getting a strong grip on the Midwestern market and beyond. Ho expressed confidence that Five Stars could win in new locations given the chance.

“There’s going to be room across the United States for loyalty programs, and it will get competitive in certain markets,” he said. “I think what will determine the ultimate winner is just how much the product get used. If you sign up a merchant and no one uses it, then the merchant will sign off. The user numbers are so important.” Five Stars seems to have that department under control, at least at the moment.

smartDIGITAL, a startup that makes interactive ad displays, has raised $2.7 million in a Series A round of funding.

smartDIGITAL displays are already available in Chicago and Miami, says co-founder and CEO George Burciaga, with plans to roll them out to 10 markets over the next 36 months. They’re essentially large kiosks with multi-touch screens that allow consumers to interact with an ad rather than simply staring at it as they walk or drive by. The goal, Burciaga says, is to “inspire them to do something” — whether it’s sharing a photo, purchasing a Groupon deal (yes, Groupon is a partner), or emailing something to their phone. That means the consumer is more engaged, and it also means the advertiser has a better idea about whether their ads are actually working.

And the early results are impressive. Thus far, Burciaga says the smartDIGITAL kiosks are usually active 6.5 hours a day. There are usually three people in front of the kiosk during an interaction, and they access an average of four services over a three-minute period.

The next step, Burciaga says, is to roll out a full product line called Elevate Digital, which include wall and glass displays for both indoor and outdoor installations, all with “the same core application.” It sounds like smartDIGITAL will be shifting its branding as well — so over time, expect to hear more about Elevate and less about smartDIGITAL.

The round was led by Advantage Capital Partners. Metropolitan Capital Bank also invested.

Since launching in mid-2011, doxo has been on a mission to make your life paperless. With its “digital filing cabinet” software, the Seattle-based startup aims to create a single place for users to manage their bills, be they phone, cable, or credit card.

Of course, the world is quickly going mobile, and payment solutions are going right along with it. So, in an effort to close the loop between web and mobile services, Doxo is today launching a new mobile payment and management solution, along with a new Android app, to finally allow users to both receive and pay bills from their mobile devices.

Doxo’s new Android app complements the updated iOS app the startup launched last summer so that the pair of apps now allow users to take advantage of mobile bill payment and management on top of its flagship “digital file cabinet” and secure backup offerings.

Both apps now include the startup’s new so-called “doxoPAY,” a feature that allows users to receive and pay bills with one account and one password from a single app. This means that you no longer have to set up separate usernames and access credentials to manage payment accounts across multiple websites, instead, you can simply create a free Doxo account to start organizing your household accounts and docs, connecting with service providers that include AT&T, Sprint, Puget Sound Energy, and Sound Community Bank — to name a few.

The startup is currently hard at work on expanding this list, signing up as many banks, public utilities, and major phone and cable carriers as it can. Obviously, while the value proposition is evident, for Doxo to truly become your default digital file cabinet and bill payment solution, it has to be integrated with all the providers you’re using. That’s half the battle, and it still has a ways to go there.

That being said, Doxo has the potential to significantly mitigate a huge pain in the ass for consumers. For most people, whether you receive bills electronically or in good old paper form, payment is a three step process: Read the bill when and wherever you receive it, open it again when you’re ready to pay, and then file through another system. Doxo’s mobile payment solution condenses that down to a single step by embedding payment options in the bill itself.

Users simply connect with their providers to pay bills, directly on Doxo Mobile, receiving bills from those providers while uploading documents and bills from home or on the go, with the added benefit of being able to manage, upload, and organize account information, important documents, and bills by account. Plus, you can use the apps to snap photos and upload bills and receipts into Doxo’s digital filing cabinet, while automatically backing up those critical documents to their hard drive or cloud providers like Box.com and Dropbox.

On the flip side, for businesses, Doxo is trying to eliminate the hurdles most often cited by consumers in regard to going paperless. Not only that, but it can streamline and reduce the additional costs inherent to most customer-provider interaction by speeding collection, cutting credit card fees (like overdue payments), and make it easy to go paperless. Which, for businesses, can mean eliminating the need for custom software — or having to develop their own standalone app.

According to Doxo CEO Steve Shivers, this translates to businesses saving an average of 80 percent on the cost of mailing documents, bills, and accepting payments. And, of course, the best part is that, because Doxo saves businesses money on paper, its mobile apps are free for the consumer — and available in the App Store, Google Play, and the Amazon App Store.

Founded in 2008, Doxo seemed to miss the memo on the whole “ship or die” approach, taking its sweet time to go to market, testing and developing for over two years before finally coming out of invite-only beta last summer. Better safe (and market ready) than sorry. Of course, it also helps one’s slow and steady method when there’s $15 million in venture funding from Sigma Partners, Mohr Davidow, and Jeff Bezos to fall back on.

For more, check out Doxo at home here.

Some eye-opening stats out today from McAfee, the Intel-owned IT security company: a study of 28 million computers in 24 countries has found that 17 percent of all PCs do not have any form of security at all on them against viruses, worms, spyware and other Internet malware – a transgression that McAfee compares to “walking around naked on the Internet.”

But McAfee notes that while the average worldwide figure for unsecured PCs works out to one out of every six users, some countries are taking their security more seriously than others…

In Finland, the most protected country, only 9.7 percent of PCs had no security software installed at all. But in Singapore, the most unprotected country, 21.75 percent of all PCs do not have any anti-malware products or other security coverage.

The U.S. is not the worst offender of all, but it isn’t that impressive, either: it’s in the top five least-protected countries, with 19.32 percent of all computers lacking anti-malware software.

“The freedom to browse the internet comes with the added risk of unwanted exposure, and cybercriminals are preying on unsuspecting victims,” Todd Gebhart, co-president of McAfee, said in a statement.  “With 17 percent of the world walking around naked on the internet, it is critical that consumers update their virus protection before it’s too late.”

Having expired or disabled software is nearly as bad as having nothing at all — but at least the number of PCs falling into this category are smaller. For example in the U.S., 7.07 percent of the country had disabled security software installed on their computers, McAfee said. Singapore again performed worst of all here: some 11.75 percent of computers in the country have installed, disabled, security protection

McAfee points out some of the very basic-yet-critical issues with people not remaining vigilant about their security software: identity theft, data loss and the fact that your own computer can become an unwilling participant in the ongoing spread of the malware in question.

The lack of security also seems to fly in the face of people’s own knowledge of how fleeting their data can be: globally consumers say that 27 percent of digital files are “impossible to restore” if they were lost and not backed up correctly: the average value of those lost files was just over $10,000.

The security industry appears to be getting more creative in how it speaks to unprotected PC owners. McAfee recently joined up with other security companies to offer their services via Facebook, initally as a trial and later as paid service. It will be interesting to see whether new route to pushing security will lead to a measurable rise in people protecting their computers.

Update. There is another point of view, too: it may not be lazy behavior or lack of knowledge, but skepticism that protection actually works, which keeps some people away from using anti-virus software.

As reader Rosen Sharma pointed out, with a hat tip to the “naked” analogy, “Anti-virus detection rates are bad; having AV is like wearing see through clothes.” (He should know; he is currently CEO of PC app player BlueStacks, but he used to be an SVP and CTO at McAfee.)

The famed Sand Hill Road venture capital firm Sequoia Capital is indeed in the process of raising a total of some $1 billion for a series of several new venture funds, we’ve confirmed with sources close to the situation.

The new raise, on which Dan Primack at Fortune reported earlier today, is currently underway, and its structure as of now underlines the storied Silicon Valley-based venture capital firm’s increasing focus on having a global footprint. Legendary venture capitalist Michael Moritz may be stepping back from day-to-day operations at Sequoia, but one of the things he’s been most proud of over the years is making Sequoia a global firm — so this is just the latest evidence of his continuing impact there.

Here are the facts that we’re hearing: Sequoia is raising money for up to four separate venture capital funds, and each will be worth between $250 million to $400 million. The total amount being raised across all the funds is in the $1 billion range at the moment. It’s unclear when this fund raise will close, but word is that the appetite from LPs (the entities that invest in VC funds) is strong.

Right now, my understanding is the focus of each these could be: A general venture fund mostly focused on United States companies, a China-focused venture fund, and a China-focused growth fund. Sequoia also is continuing its interests in both India and Israel, and is understood to be opening an office in Brazil, so its fourth fund could well be focused on venture funding in one or all of those areas, or the general international space. Earlier this year Sequoia closed on money for a general growth fund focused mostly on US companies, so that realm is not part of the current raise.

It’s very important to note that all of this is still forming as of now, and none of this has been confirmed officially by Sequoia itself or through things such as regulatory filings. When reached today, a Sequoia spokesperson declined to comment on any of these matters.

In all, though, this is just further evidence of Sequoia’s continuing aim of building out a truly international venture capital powerhouse. Long a big name here in Silicon Valley, Sequoia is clearly intent on expanding its clout to a worldwide audience of companies — in the tech space and beyond. While angel and seed investors have become increasingly important in today’s startup ecosystem, traditional VCs like Sequoia are intent on proving the worth of larger and more involved investments.

TechCrunch TV had the opportunity to speak with two Sequoia partners last week backstage at the Disrupt conference in New York City. Watch the videos embedded below to get insight from both Greg McAdoo and Roelof Botha on the state of venture capital, how it is impacted by seed investing, the larger international perspective, expanding beyond tech into retail and consumer, and much more:

Image of Sequoia trees courtesy of Flickr user henryalien.