As the old school gives way to the new, technology has begun to play an increasingly active role in the learning process — from primary to higher education. This has given rise to “blended learning,” or the strategic blending of face-to-face instruction with learning environments mediated by technology — be that by way of digital textbooks, video, learning management systems, social networking, and more.

Another enabler of this shift to blended learning comes in the shape of “lecture capture” solutions, which allow educational institutions to convert their professors’ lectures into digital media so that students can later have access to that content, on desktops and mobile devices. Last week, The Washington Post reported that one of the leaders in this area of blended learning, the Washington D.C.-based Echo360, had taken on a big chunk of capital to fuel an ambitious mission to “reach 50 percent of U.S. college students in the next five years,” said CEO Fred Singer.

Today, the four-year-old company already has 1 million students using its blended learning solutions in over 6,000 classrooms and 500 institutions, owns 54 percent of its market, and is seeing annual revenue of $15 million. Of course, all told Echo360 is only currently serving about 10 percent of the colleges and universities in the U.S., and, on top of that, its leadership sees big opportunities abroad.

Now, thanks to a big investment from some familiar names, Echo360 is looking to step on the accelerator. The investment comes from the $450 million Revolution Growth fund, founded by Steve Case, Ted Leonsis, and Donn Davis — all well-known entrepreneurs and executives in their own right and each a veteran of Aol leadership. (Case being a co-founder.) The fund, which typically makes $25 to $50 million investments in companies that it can help take “from niche to mass and scale to capitalize on huge market opportunities,” (i.e. disrupt big industries) sank $25 million into Vienna-based online auction company, FedBid, in January.

Yet, considering both the fund and Echo360 are located in Washington, and the startup’s CEO Fred Singer worked under Case and Leonsis at Aol as a lieutenant, the fund’s third investment was a bit closer to home. Although the Washington Post initially reported the funding, it wasn’t clear just how much Revolution Growth had invested.

But, with a little digging into the SEC’s filings, we’ve learned that the fund put up just under $31 million to become the startup’s largest shareholder, adding to the some $33 million Echo360 has raised since 2010. As a result of the investment, Donn Davis will be joining the startup’s board of directors.

So, beyond a familiar leader in Singer, what is it about Echo360 that attracted this sizable investment? Well, the company started out as a type of TiVo for the classroom, meaning that its core lecture capture product records classroom video and audio, converting them into digital modules that can be accessed anywhere, on desktops, tablets, and mobile devices.

The idea being to make any and all educational material more accessible to students, so that they can, for example, view missed classes, take advantage of special, personalized instruction, or use videos as study guides. But the team also realized that its solution can be of great use to teachers, and it has since added features that allow educators to create their own learning modules, screencasts, and tutorials, or can edit and publish their own rich media objects to their students — while working offline.

Plus, they can take advantage of video viewing stats, analytics, and courses in one hub, which translates not only into asynchronous feedback for the professor, but starts to give Echo360 a tighter grip on the entire blended learning environment.

While Khan Academy has done wonders for the so-called “flipped classroom,” Echo360 wants to use these supplementary features to expand the role of blended learning in the classroom, and engage students on their own terms by encouraging educators to design their approach to teaching based on what aspects of the learning process can be improved with video, what should be learned during class time and what should be learned outside of it.

The cost to the institution? Echo360 licenses its software to schools in annual contracts that range from $20K to $200K, depending on the size of the school, which works out to an average cost for students of about $15 per year. It’s an affordable price for higher ed institutions, the low hanging fruit for flipped classroom and blended learning solutions, but one that becomes a much higher barrier to entry for primary schools and high schools — one that Echo360 may want to enter eventually.

In the meantime, there is plenty of room for blended learning platforms that can play nicely with learning management systems to grow into goliaths and help push education forward. The other lecture capture players like Panopto, MediaSite, Tegrity certainly won’t be sitting back on their heels, and hopefully the competition means a better learning experience for all. And, hey, Steve Case is excited about it:

“Technology has had a transformative impact on many facets of our lives – but the one major area where we have failed to leverage technology to its potential is in education,” Case said via Echo’s blog. “Echo360 empowers universities and colleges to enhance and extend the classroom experience to bring a much needed revolution to higher-education. Blended learning really is about marrying the best of online with the best of in-person, and that is what Echo enables.”

For more on Revolution Growth, check ‘em out here, and find more on Echo360 here.

Nintendo unveiled the tablet-centric Wii U at last year’s E3. At the time the company was clear that it was a working name. A report earlier this year stated that Nintendo was exploring other options. E3 kicks off next week and it seems increasingly likely that Nintendo is sticking with the unusual moniker.

First off, Nintendo just launched a Wii U Facebook campaign complete with an intro video with Reggie Fils-Aime welcoming guests to the Wii U page. Second, and perhaps more importantly, the Wii U logo is now on Nintendo’s press site.

The Wii U name is a tad strange, but in retrospect, so is Wii. The next-gen system itself is still a bit of a mystery. Nintendo had highly scripted demos available for playing at its introduction at last year’s E3. It was the best thing at the show last year. But Nintendo no doubt hit the fast-forward button on the system’s evolutionary growth cycle; expect the Wii U shown at this year’s E3 to be a mature device.

Even with a better name, and with that, a better brand, the Wii U will still have an uphill battle to fight. Microsoft and Sony are clearly racing to a future where a home entertainment system is defined by its media streaming capability more so than its games. Nintendo on the other hand seems to be building just a gaming system. With E3 kicking off next Monday Nintendo better bring the goods. They need a good showing to kick off the Wii U — or whatever it’s called.

Ace Metrix, a company promising brands and agencies a smarter, faster approach to testing their TV ads, has raised $8 million in new funding.

CEO Peter Daboll, whose resume includes time as Chief of Insights at Yahoo and CEO of comScore Media Metrix, says the idea behind Ace Metrix is to “apply what we’ve learned in digital targeting and evaluation to television, which is the big kahuna in terms of spending.”

The traditional process for testing the effectiveness of TV ads with an audience is full of inefficiencies, Daboll says — such as the approvals needed to release each survey, or the length of most audience questionnaires. Thanks to streamlining every part of the process, Ace Metrix can deliver survey data about an ad’s effectiveness within a day or two — something that previously took four to six weeks. And it’s not just doing that for its customer’s ads, but for every ad that’s hitting television, so advertisers can see how their ad stacks up against competitors.

As an example of why this kind of real-time data is important, Daboll recalls a controversial campaign for Kraft that ran last year, showing parents terrifying their kids in order to steal back their Jello desserts. The next day, 350,000 people had signed on to a Facebook page protesting the ad. But did that mean Kraft should pull it? Did those 350,000 represent the general trend, or were they just a small, unhappy minority? Daboll says Ace Metrix had analysis on Kraft’s desk the next day showing that despite making a few people unhappy, the ad’s edginess made it the most effective thing the company had done in ages.

“These guys had 24 hours to make an $80 million decision,” he says.

Daboll says the new funding is an extension of the company’s Series C, with investors WPP (whose involvement shows the interest from the ad world), Hummer Winblad Venture Partners, Leapfrog Ventures, and Palomar Ventures. There are some big launches on the horizon, he says, including Ace Viva (for Spanish-language audiences) and Ace Kids.

According to a very short, very rumor-filled VG24/7 piece, Sony is looking at adding cloud-enabled gaming to the PlayStation line, presumably in the form of an Onlive or Gaikai partnership.

Given that we won’t see much new this year at E3 – aside for official Wii U availability and perhaps (just perhaps) whispers of next gen Sony and Microsoft consoles, this bit of news could carry the show. The Vita is powerful, to be sure, but it’s hardly nailing it in terms of game availability and to be able to play a game on the handheld and then pop over to the console is pretty compelling. Presumably the console can also act as a conduit for a definitively more interesting gaming experience.

Whatever Sony chooses to do, I’m actually not expecting anything in the way of blockbuster news this year, which is, in the end, just fine. The next generation consoles have to make a huge splash next year and the more fully baked the concepts the better.

10gen, the company behind the increasingly popular NoSQL database MongoDB today announced that it has secured a new $42 million financing round let by New Enterprise Associates. This round also includes participation from existing investors Sequoia Capital, Flybridge Capital Partners and Union Square Ventures. 10gen says that it plans to use the financing to “invest in product development for MongoDB and the MongoDB Monitoring Service and to better support its rapidly growing community and user base worldwide.”

Including this round, 10gen has now raised more than $73 million.

10gen doesn’t discuss its revenues, but according to the company’s own data, its sales increased 50% quarter over quarter for the past five years. The company has also grown its team to 130 employees since early 2011. The company has offices in Palo Alto, New York City, Dublin and London. Among the company’s clients are startups like Foursquare, as well as major players in the telecommunications, financial services and media markets.

It’s hard to get exact statistics for the number of MongoDB deployments, but according to analyst firm RedMonk, MongoDB is leading the pack with regards to companies looking for NoSQL database developers and the demand for MongoDB specialists has exploded over the last year.

Since it was founded by former DoubleClick founder and CTO Dwight Merriman and former DoubleClick engineer and ShopWiki founder and CTO Eliot Horowitz in 2007, the company has been at the forefront of the so-called NoSQL movement. The database itself is available for free as an open source product under the GNU Affero General Public License. Similar to other open source businesses, 10gen focuses on providing its customers support, training and consulting services.

As Sequoia Capital’s Luis Robles told me, his company believes 10gen “is going to be a winner in the noSQL space, and the database market in general because MongoDB is easy to adopt and developers around the world are choosing it more frequently than the alternatives for a variety of ‘big data’ use cases across many verticals (web, enterprise, media, gaming, medical). Millions of downloads and thousands of production deployments are evidence that 10Gen is emerging as a market leader in the big data ecosystem, and we are excited to be their business partners.”

Asked about 10gen’s open-source model, Robles noted that he believes “open source as a development and commercialization model is something that has matured significantly in the last decade, and which we believe will continue to help 10Gen build an ecosystem of partners around MongoDB, and will help the company innovate quickly to address customer requirements and feature requests.”

One more Y Combinator startup from the March 2012 class has bagged a seed round of funding. PlanGrid, which has created a groundbreaking app for the construction industry, has raised $1.1 million from a notable list of backers. They include Suleman Ali, founder and CEO of TinyCo; Sam Altman, founder of Loopt; Paul Buchheit, the creator of Gmail; Matt Cutts, the head of Google’s Webspam team, and Ray Levitt, Director of Stanford University’s Construction Engineering department; 500 Startups; and Y Combinator itself.

Plus, here’s a twist: the funding marks the first investment in a startup (outside of acquisitions) by the cloud-services company Box, as part of its /bin Box Innovation Network initiative.

Ryan Sutton-Gee, one of the co-founders and CEO of PlanGrid, tells me that the motivation for Box is to foster cloud-based enterprise apps. “Box and PlanGrid initially started talking simply to discuss possible integration,” but they were impressed enough with the product and team, and so they offered to help with fundraising, he said. Since launching its first app in March, PlanGrid’s customer base has shot up. Sutton-Gee says that it is now being used by over 2,900 construction projects worldwide.

The app, which we detailed in length we first covered PlanGrid, in its basic concept is aimed at taking away some of the pain points and costs in creating blueprints for construction workers, in itself, $5 billion industry, Sutton-Gee says. The idea: transfer the whole “analog” process of printing out and distributing costly blueprint sheets into a slick and easy-to-update iPad app. (And expensive/inefficient it is indeed: for every $1,000,000 in building costs, there are $3,500 of printing costs, Sutton-Gee says.)

The funding will be used to expand PlanGrid’s team and add more features to the app. “Raising this round is a major milestone for us, and it will add a lot of fuel to our fire in bridging the gap between good, intuitive software and the construction industry,” says Sutton-Gee.

At the time of the launch, I wondered aloud whether the construction industry would be a challenging market — the iPad doesn’t seem like the most rugged of gadgets — but PlanGrid’s calculations that their product would be a game-changer have borne out:

Apart from the fact that their customer base is growing, it seems like PlanGrid is actually changing user perception. “Customer feedback has continued to be really great, especially from our in-field users,” says Sutton-Gee. “We’ve had many customers tell us that PlanGrid is the reason they decided to buy iPads, and that we are the killer tablet app for the construction industry. We’ve even  had a couple customers tell us they were going to buy Android-based tablets until they found us, and decided to change their IT strategy to incorporate our product.”

And there will be more features to make PlanGrid even more sticky: since launching Sutton-Gee says his team has added several new features, including the ability to pin photos taken with the iPad to blueprints (“finally a sensible use for the iPad camera!” he quips), the ability to attach any .pdf to individual blueprint sheets, and adding retina support for the new iPad (“which makes blueprints look really fantastic”), in addition to a redesign of the UI of the app.

He notes that a new version of the app is now with Apple with more enhancements. Users will be able to share markups across iPads and back up to the web (similar to Google Docs sharing, he says). Plus photos taken with the camera will automatically upload to the PlanGrid cloud (“a la Instagram”). Users will also be able to build an automatic archive, and PlanGrid has created a web-based version of its .pdf renderer to keep track of everyone’s documents.

Sutton-Gee says that in terms of take up, PlanGrid is seeing the most usage in California, Texas and Massachusetts in the U.S., “but have paying users in pretty much every state, and we also have paying users in Australia, Mexico and Canada.”  The app is being used on a wide variety of projects, he says, with the biggest on large buildings such as hospitals and manufacturing facilities.

No, NFC still hasn’t come to the iPhone — or many other devices, for that matter. But this does not appear to be stopping the momentum in the world of mobile payments. Research out today from Gartner says that this year will see more than $171.5 billion in mobile payment transactions — a rise of over 60 percent on 2011′s $105.9 billion — with 212.2 million people (up 32 percent from 160.5m in 2011) using some form of mobile payment service. And what’s fuelling the rise? Despite the rise of smartphones, it’s legacy-based services like SMS and web-based transactions.

Longer term, Gartner believes that transactions will reach a volume of $617 billion by 2016 — with average growth slightly slowing down to around 42 percent — with 448 million users using such services.

SMS, Gartner research director Sandy Shen notes, remains the “dominant” access technology for making payments in developing markets, while in more mature markets, the vast majority of transactions are made via mobile internet portals. In North America in 2012, 80 percent of all mobile payment transactions will happen via Web/WAP routes, Gartner predicts; the figure in Western Europe is an even higher 88 percent.

That’s not to say near-field communications — the technology that will let people wave their phones in front of a payment terminal to pay for goods and services — is completely absent, but use of it will remain “relatively low” through 2015. (My theory is that if Apple puts an NFC chip into an iPhone and activates a service with it sooner than 2015, these forecasts could change: I’ve heard more than one mobile payments industry person tell me they are “just waiting for the iPhone to get NFC” before things really take off.)

Interestingly, Gartner doesn’t put slow adoption of NFC on the doorstep of handset makers, but does seem to refer to challenges among other players: ”NFC payment involves a change in user behavior and requires collaboration among stakeholders that includes banks, mobile carriers, card networks and merchants,” Shen notes.

Her prediction: NFC will be used but not for payments: “Tticketing, rather than retail payment, will drive NFC transactions,” she says.

– Fragmentation. This seems to be a double-edged sword. On the one hand, fragmentation in offerings — both from the point of view of service providers and technologies (NFC, SMS, dongles from the likes of Square and Paypal among them) — seems to keeping any one solution or group of providers from properly scaling up as the de facto standards for mobile payments. That has a knock-on effect for merchants and consumers, of course, who trust such solutions less. Gartner believes these kinds of fragmentation issues will continue for the next two years.

But on the other hand, fragmentation may be a necessary evil for success. Gartner points out that as mobile payments continue to mature, providers will need to tailor offerings to local markets, or “local demand patterns to customize their offerings,” says Shen. That goes not just for regulation and getting approval to offer services in specific markets, but also different retail business models, existing embedded technology, and local preference. For example, while U.S. customers may love Square, the jury is still out whether Jack Dorsey and Co. will be able to take that solution further afield with such success.

That’s not to say that there will not be behemoths in mobile payments are there are in the world of credit cards, but that local companies may have a stronger role in mobile payments than we have seen in credit up to now. “There will be a few global players that have the scale and resources to serve large customers and the mass market whose requirements can be readily satisfied by standard solutions,” Shen notes. “However, there will always be segments that cannot be sufficiently served by the global players. The demand of these segments can only be satisfied by specialized or local players who can better understand the segment and have specific solutions to meet the unique challenges.”

– Who is in the driving seat? In North America and Western Europe, it will be merchants, says Gartner, who will be seeing mobile payment transactions both in physical stores as well as in online payments. Online it will be led by companies like eBay and Amazon, who are already going at a fast clip in mobile payments. Offline, the Starbucks model of using an app to work as a payment method/loyalty card will be the route that others will also take.

Developing markets are another story. It won’t be merchants as such setting the pace for and using mobile payments. Rather m-payments will be used mainly for other kinds of services like money transfer and top-ups of mobile calling and text minutes. An interesting area I’ve not seen mentioned before is ticketing: apparently mobile payments are used to improve the efficiency of buying tickets for public transportation in markets like Africa and South Asia, Gartner says.

– Regional breakdown. North America may make the most noise, but by 2016 it will only be the third-largest market for mobile payments, Gartner says. Asia Pacific will be the biggest region, with Africa at number-two, with the pair accounting for more than 60 percent of all mobile payments in four years. The full table below

[Image: Steven DePolo, Flickr]

The Facebook IPO was supposed to be Silicon Valley’s shining moment. It’s the book-end for the decade of recovery that followed the first wave of consumer Internet companies. It was the debutante ball for the next great Silicon Valley company, the one with the most potential to last a generation or longer.

Instead, it’s turned into a public relations disaster. If we look a little more closely though, the Facebook IPO probably has more devastating consequences for the rest of the late-stage private market than it does for the company itself.

The late-stage market may have to reprice: Facebook is the latest major consumer Internet IPO that has underperformed compared to where it traded in secondary markets. In the final weeks of secondary market trading, we were seeing shares change hands at $40 and $44 a piece. Even though trading volumes aren’t that high in these secondary markets, Facebook had the most activity and it had years of pricing history.

The thought was that those prices were probably close to the public market prices. It was going to be hard to gauge what turned out to be an abnormally high amount of interest from retail investors. Those secondary markets may have helped convince Morgan Stanley and Facebook to raise the range from to the original $28 to $35 to the higher $34 to $38 range.

But actually, later-stage valuations were kind of wrong. Zynga and Groupon are in similar positions. Investors like T. Rowe Price who went in on Zynga’s Series C round in February 2011, bought shares at $14.03 a piece. They’re now at $6.61. (Sad face.)

Secondary market buyers just need to be a little more cautious about investing in pre-IPO companies if they are not in it for the long haul. It’s still possible to make money. It’s just that public markets are not blindly going to 2X or 3X a late-stage valuation. Investors that gave Groupon, like, a billion dollars a year and a half ago are still in the black. They paid what is now $7.90 a share, if you factor in stock splits. Now the shares are at $12.05. The last big financing round in Facebook is also up by about 80 percent from a year ago, when Goldman Sachs went in on Facebook at a $50 billion valuation.

Last week at TechCrunch Disrupt in New York, Union Square Ventures’ Fred Wilson said, “Wall Street is going to value your business on your growth rate and your cash flow. Once you go public, you’re going to have to deal with a different kind of investor.”

He added, “The IPO market is back. But what people have to recognize is that companies are not going to get valued in public markets the same way they were valued in the late-stage market. The late-stage market is giving higher valuations than the public market is, so that means that the late-stage market is going to have to settle down.”

So investors need to be more conservative about how they think public markets will ultimately value their late-stage deals. Evernote at $1 billion? Dropbox at $4 billion? Spotify at $4 billion? These companies can only go out to public markets at those valuations if they have the current run-rate and growth trajectory to support them.

Facebook can overcome this if it has another “Calm down. Breathe.” moment:

If we’re debating about whether this was a “good” IPO or a “clusterfuck” of an IPO, it really depends on whose point of view you’re taking.

If you’re looking at the long-term picture for Facebook, the IPO was not bad at all. They raised $16 billion, with about $7 billion going directly into the company and the rest going toward early shareholders. Even though Facebook had the worst five-day start for an IPO out of the largest deals of the last decade, the company is washing out more of the short-term speculators, leaving room for believers who will hold the stock for the long-haul.

Also remember: Pissing people off, then apologizing and iterating your way out of it is classic behavior for Facebook. Facebook usually does one thing a year ago that really pisses people off. Then they fix it. It’s what they do. It’s never really intentional either. The euphemism for this is, “Move Fast. Break Things.” The only reason they can’t address the situation is because of the quiet period, but they’ll have a strategy once they’re out.

If we’re looking at Morgan Stanley, it’s complicated (hah). They’ve demonstrated to pre-IPO candidates in Silicon Valley that they will stand by their clients, support the price and take some bad publicity. If I were a company thinking of going public, it might be pretty attractive that Morgan Stanley appears willing to eat dirt for Facebook. But on the other hand, if I were a retail investor, I would be more skeptical of technology offerings they bring to the market in the future.

The next several quarters will be tough. Facebook has to prove it has more than display advertising:

While some analysts have already lowered second quarter estimates, I’ve also heard that the third quarter is projected to be soft too.

Chris Dixon said it best. Advertising that is about generating intent has lower value because it’s farther from the point of purchase. For a few years, Facebook’s theory has been that the sheer number of ads that generate demand on the web is something like 10X larger than the amount of ads at the bottom of the funnel (e.g. Google’s search ads). They believe the volume makes up for lower cost-per-click numbers.

But the sequential quarter-over-quarter decline in advertising revenue suggests that Facebook will need more legs to stand on. Flat quarter-over-quarter revenue growth in payments also suggests that the gaming vertical is mature and that Facebook will have to expand payments to other areas very, very soon.

The company will have to rebound on other business models. The Karma acquisition could lay the groundwork for a real gifting service across the entire site tied to birthdays. If even a single-digit percentage of Facebook’s 901 million users start buying birthday gifts for their friends multiple times a year through the site or mobile app, that’s not an insignificant revenue stream.

They could also launch a web-side display advertising network, an AdSense-killer if you will. But it’s not clear how much extra revenue that would add since Facebook already has a significant share of all display impressions across the web.

Even though mobile is tough right now, Facebook actually has a notable competitive advantage over rival mobile ad networks. If Apple fully removes the UDID soon, it will damage everyone else’s targeting abilities. But since Facebook knows who its users are and has recorded their tastes and preferences for years, that’s not as much a problem for them. They could launch a mobile display advertising network for all apps. Again, mobile display advertising is a tough business that isn’t producing that much revenue for anyone (even Google and Apple), but Facebook could take the lead if it pushed hard enough.

But remember that Facebook is a company that is built for the long-term: Despite the noise right now, Facebook is the one company out of the last generation of Silicon Valley startups that has enough untapped opportunities and is sufficiently mission-driven to keep attracting the best talent for years to come. Apple CEO Tim Cook even said that Facebook is the company that’s “closest” to being like Apple, according to Fortune.

If the shares fall too much by the six-month lock-up date, I would not be surprised if the company did something to make its employees feel more comfortable with their compensation (especially as the headhunters come out). This is an industry where it only takes a decade to become a geriatric company (see Yahoo). Facebook is eight. Talent is everything.

Internally, it doesn’t sound like Facebook employees are paying too much attention to the media fracas surrounding the IPO. It’s funny because the Hackathon leading into the IPO actually had a dual purpose. It wasn’t just to celebrate and maintain Facebook’s culture. One source told me it was to tire the employees out so much that they wouldn’t be able to pay attention to stock fluctuations the next morning. Good advice, indeed.

Faster than you can say “Can I borrow your copy of ‘How To Win Friends And Influence People,’” it’s tech conference season again. There hasn’t been a week during the month of May where I haven’t attended a tech conference or traveled to something tech conference-related. And judging by Techmeme’s events calendar the state of affairs only gets worse as we get deeper into summer.

Between Disrupt NYC last week, D10 tomorrow, NY Founders and Le Web London in June, Allen & Co, Sun Valley in July, the CrunchUp in August and TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco in September, the tech community is pretty much spending the next couple of months checking in and out of airports on Foursquare, Path, Instagram or whatever their social/mobile/local drug of choice currently is.

In between this barrage of formal tech conferences, I briefly popped into F50 earlier this month … Founders Fund’s first attempt at a tech conference, F50 is the ultimate “un-conference,” where fifty of the technology industry’s “most promising” engineers and entrepreneurs were brought together on the Hawaiian island of Lanai. Founders Fund partner Bruce Gibney called it “intellectual exchange without the structural nightmare that’s gone up around it” and INC magazine dubbed it, “The Most Exclusive Tech Conference Ever?”

The elite group of fifty technologists were hand-selected by the Founders Fund partners and sent invites to save the dates between Friday May 11th and Sunday the 13th. Those from out of town were flown out to SF and put up for Thursday night at the Westin St. Francis Hotel, and both the East Coasters and the West Coasters were picked up by black car or bus and taken to Oakland’s Private Airport on Friday.

There they met the other F50ers for the first time, in addition to about a dozen Founders Fund friends and mentors, and all traded in their fancy steel invites for a spot on one of two planes. None of the attendees knew exactly who else was on the trip or who they were flying with prior to their arrival and the group didn’t even know their destination as they boarded the jets.

The seating on the private flight was arranged, and upon each seat was a personalized engraved iPad, complete with a .pdf deck of photos and bios of the rest of the attendees. While Founders Fund won’t let me publish the full list, it was very thorough and ran the gamut of world-changing innovators — from a guy with a serious plan to cure Cancer to a rocket engineer to a 3-D printer with a gaggle of rockstar computer scientist thrown in for good measure.

Also worth noting: Founders Fund footed the bill for the entire fifty, turning the traditional model of “conference as a business” onto its axis (Note: As the only press invited I flew in coach and Aol paid most of my way). “Invest early and often” at its most extreme.

Aboard the incoming flight, the menu was geek-themed, and guests could choose from the paleo friendly “Contemporary Nerd” (Filet Mignon and Tomato Basil salad), “Classic Nerd” (Pizza Pockets, Chicken Nuggets, Pringles and Red Bull) and “Vegan” (Pasta with Grilled Vegetables in an herbed Olive oil) meals. I guess whoever set up the menu thought vegan was nerdy enough to stand on its own.

In order to encourage interaction between the attendees, Founders Fund made everyone switch seats halfway through the flight. In addition, Founders Fund partner Auren Hoffman, who has an obsession with questions apparently, had written out an ice-breaker question tailored to each attendee’s interest next to the iPads, like “What could be invented if energy were freely available everywhere?,” How will the human body change over the next thirty years, and how should we change it?” and “What turns human passion into money?”

(Mine, which Hoffman handed to me the next night, was appropriately enough, “What makes you weird?”).

After the very informal in-flight networking, the plane landed on the Hawaiian island of Lanai, and, finally finding out their destination, the fifty were driven to the Four Seasons, where they disembarked and picked up a simple swag bag filled with orange flip-flops and F50 t-shirts. They then were herded to a dinner where the conversations between these brilliant young minds were spearheaded by either a Founders Fund member or mentor at each table.

“I had more great conversations per hour than I’d had in years,” Hoffman later told me.

The mentors, who flew in on a different plane along with Founders Fund partners Peter Thiel, Ken Howery, Luke Nosek, Brian Singerman, Bruce Gibney and Sean Parker included Yelp’s Russell Simmons, Palantir’s Stephen Cohen, World Economic Forum CTO Brian Behlendorf, and Airtime co-founder Joey Liaw. From what I heard the mentors really didn’t feel like there was that much difference between them and the attendees — as in, both groups were just as in awe of each other and eager to partake in dialogue.

In lieu of the artifice of talks or anything even remotely structured the next morning, the attendees were given the option of going snorkeling or off-roading in Jeeps, and those that chose snorkeling got to explore the ocean floor with industry visionaries like Parker and Thiel. Because this was Hawaii, some of the group even informally went golfing, on a whim.

To give you a sense of how casual everything was, when I arrived in Lanai, Island Air informed me that it had lost my baggage and I was stuck wearing my default airplane outfit to the conference: a Coachella hoodie, a pair of cut-off shorts, ballet slippers and a tank top. When I asked the hotel guest reception whether or not my attire was appropriate for dinner, they responded, “Yeah, everyone else is also dressed like you.” I ended up buying a Hawaiian themed dress from the gift shop anyways.

I arrived at the dinner 15 minutes late, and immediately one of the F50 kindly helped me get situated. My table was a cornucopia of super-impressive people, to my right Eben Bayer, a entrepreneur who is trying to make mushrooms “the new plastic” with his company Ecovative Design, to my left Founders Fund partner Gibney, and across from me was child prodigy Taylor Wilson — a kid who created nuclear fusion in his garage at 14 and currently owns one of the largest private collections of radioactive materials in the US.

At 18, Taylor wasn’t yet old enough to drink the wine and margaritas being offered to the table. He really wasn’t missing out on much, we insisted.

Sometimes I like to think of the technology industry as what high school would have been like if the nerds were actually cool, and this exactly was the vibe at F50. The next morning when I donned my swag shirt to breakfast (I still didn’t have normal clothes) I came across a girl who was also wandering aimlessly about the Four Seasons, also looking for the F50 breakfast, I assumed.

Ariel Garten was slight and about as un-intimidating as possible until she opened her mouth to respond to my cliche, “And what do you do?”question. “Thought-controlled computing,” was her answer and it made me do a double take. As CEO of InteraXon industries, Garten is making hardware products that can be controlled by the human mind (Seriously). She is also part owner of a Fashion Boutique in her native Canada.

“I can pick any one person here and they’ll be amazing,” she quipped as we headed to breakfast.

“Neither haphazard tossings of business cards nor random people’s elevator pitches blessed the event, where, profoundly brilliant people exchanged world-changing ideas,” explained attendee Meredith Perry (who, as the founder of Ubeam, is working on a ground-breaking wireless phone charger), who I got to know over a breakfast buffet replete with scrambled eggs, bacon and mangoes and more.

Perry set F50 in a league apart from other tech conferences, “[It] was small enough so that people felt intimate and uninhibited, and unstructured enough so that violent ideation could unfold … The relationships formed between the eager minds in attendance will lead to future-changing partnerships.”

And indeed I already know of one (off-the-record, for the moment) partnership to stem from the event — just weeks or so after. “The real ‘results’ of the F50 weekend won’t materialize for several years,” Perry said.

So who exactly were the chosen fifty?

“We asked our friends to identify the smartest, most entrepreneurial people they knew who were not already directly known to Founders Fund,” Gibney told me, “And then we made sure that these were people who wanted to go out and change the world – people who hadn’t succumbed to irony, boredom or cynicism, but had a real plan for how to make things better through technology .. The result … really was one of the half dozen most fun and interesting things I’ve participated in (and this in a week that includes the FB IPO and a Falcon 9 launch).”

Whether or not any of the F50 will actually end up changing the world remains to be seen, but the conference has already proven to be the gift that keeps on giving for many (and I have a slew of new, smart friends in my inbox). The bonds forged between attendees through a mere couple of days were strong enough that when the plane that was supposed to take us back to the mainland broke down, one attendee remarked, “Well if you’re going to be stuck on a deserted island, it might as well be with these people.”

Another said goodbye to a new friend thusly, “Good luck with saving the world and curing Cancer and everything.”

Indeed.

Images via: Jason Purtorti and Michael Solana

Earlier this month, Y Combinator held its Work At A Startup Event, where many of its alumni took the stage — not to pitch investors (as is the case at the incubator’s enormous demo day), but instead engineers who might be lured to work at the startups in question. After the presentations, I grabbed some one-on-one time with a few of the presenters (Weebly‘s David Rusenko, Codecademy‘s Zach Sims, and Stripe‘s John Collison) to answer some basic questions: Why should someone work for your startup? And what’s it like to recruit right now?

The fact that Rusenko, Sims, and Collison were at the event is itself a sign of the recruiting challenge that startups are facing. As Collison put it, “Right now is a really good time to be a software developer.” He painted it as a simple issue of supply and demand, with the demand for “a huge amount of software to be written” outpacing the supply of developers. However, he noted that thanks in part to startups like Codecademy and Udemy, getting a degree in computer science isn’t the only path to becoming a developer — Collison himself studied physics at Harvard.

Speaking of Codecademy, this was shortly after Jeff Atwood published his blog post “Please Don’t Learn To Code“, which offered a skeptical view on the idea that everyone should learn programming. Since Codecademy was one of the main targets, I asked Sims respond. He argued that what Codecademy provides is not just to “learn to code per se” but also “a better way to understand the world.”

Editor’s note: This post is written by guest author Darius “Bubs” Monsef, who is founder & CEO of the new design marketplace CreativeMarket. He is also the founder of the popular creative community COLOURlovers and is a mentor with 500Startups & PIEPDX. Bubs blogs at HelloBubs.

I’d started raising 3 rounds. One fell apart and the others raised $1M & $1.3M in a few weeks each. The startup game is a marathon and while I’m not yet qualified to give advice about crossing the finish line, I feel like I know a lot about the first 5 miles… It’s from that perspective I give the following advice to fellow founders who are looking to raise their seed rounds.

I learned a ton when the first round fell apart. We didn’t need it, which is why it fell apart… but the interactions & lessons learned were invaluable in us later successfully raising two rounds. When we set out to do our first, we had just completed YC and were bootstrap profitable. We had some ideas of where to take the business, but they were largely influenced by what we thought investors would want to hear. That didn’t sit well with us and made my pitch less impassioned. And we weren’t sure we wanted to raise… So I took meetings and got some interest from investors, but those meetings were scattered over the course of a few weeks. (We were dealing with an acquisition offer at the same time, so my full energy wasn’t in raising.)

As weeks went on, investors that were interested and had given us verbal commitments started taking longer to respond to emails and some were never heard from again. You could feel things going cold. After we closed that big partnership deal, I proactively shut down the round. I reached back out to investors to tell them we had some capital to take us further down the road and that we would circle back later on. I wanted to shut it down from a position of strength instead of letting it fizzle out.

There’s a lot more to say, though.

Below are the lessons I’ve learned. I hope they help you raise your rounds.

Manufacturing Heat

Let me first be very clear: This isn’t about lying or being dishonest. It’s about preparing yourself and your strategy for a key time in your startup’s life. The same way you should optimize a landing page for conversions, you should optimize your pitching for conversions.

It’s a lot like dating. Attraction matters. And you can’t just Photoshop your Match.com photo for your seed round. You’re going to have to meet people in person, so make sure the person you present in your deck is the person you are… the best version of who you are.

I heard advice once from a fellow founder that agreed that manufacturing heat is important, but he took it further and said something to the effect of… “Take meetings just to cancel them.” That kind of move can work for some people, but that’s not how I roll and in my opinion you don’t want to start any kind of relationship by being dishonest. If you can’t raise your round without lying & trickery, then maybe you should reevaluate what you’re trying to do.

Some founders are lucky to bathe in the light of hype. They raise big rounds fast. The rest of us, however, have to really work at it.

When my company is in fundraising mode I’m dedicated to that 100% of the time. My team knows I’m not on product or other biz dev tasks. For a solo-founder company or one where the person pitching investors is also the sole developer, this can be a big drag. But you can’t half-ass making heat and without the heat you probably won’t raise your round.

One Does Not Simply Walk Into Fundraising

The moment you tell anybody you’re raising a round, the clock starts ticking.

The longer it takes you to close your round, the less likely it will actually happen. If you’re hot you should be able to get interest and close a round pretty quickly. If you’re still dragging ass two months in, things can get cold and often freeze up.

An honestly packed schedule forces you to be busy and appears less desperate. “I can talk to you anytime this week” sounds like nobody else is interested. “I can talk to you at 1pm on Wed or 3pm on Thurs” sounds like your schedule is full (and it really should be). “My schedule is pretty full, but I really want to connect and will move things around” is your first line if the meeting is really important.

So, don’t say you’re raising until you’re really ready. Here’s how you’ll know:

- You have an early commitment.

- You have your list of 30-50 investors in a spreadsheet ready to work.

- You have intro requests queued up from 3-5 people for each investor you don’t know.

- You have your calendar cleared for the next 4 weeks of intensive fundraising.

Now go.

How to Raise Before You Raise

It might not make sense to have an early commitment before you start raising, but it’s hugely helpful. Flex your networks and figure out what investors you have the best relationships with. If you don’t, then start working on it now. And don’t stop.

Months before we started raising our first successful round I thought a lot about who we could get in early and how we’d round it out. I’d met Dave McClure a few times and thought he and his newly created 500Startups would be a good fit. So I reached out to offer my help as a mentor in design & community for 500Startups. And for a couple months I added value and got to know him. I also knew Alexis Ohanian and had talked to him a few times about our personal alignment around our philanthropic work.

Then when I knew we were getting ready to raise, I approached Dave and Alexis about being in our round. Remember to get verbal commitments for the round before you start.

Let’s be clear, not everyone may be able to get a verbal commit before they actually start publicly raising and in that scenario, what you should do is front-load your calendar with the meetings that will most likely convert. Start with the investors who most understand your product and market fit. Or the investors that are capable of making split decisions (i.e., Angels, not VCs.) and those you have the strongest ties to.

If you’re lucky enough to have family or friends or anyone willing to invest early on, it’s super helpful in being able to approach early investors and tell them “we just started taking meetings about our round and already have $50-100k committed.”

Matching the Right Patterns

Investors, especially the great ones have what’s called ‘deal flow’. They’ve see a ton of deals. In order to be able to get through checking out every opportunity, they look for patterns. They look for things they’ve seen in other successful companies… Harvard, MIT, Stanford educations… Google, Apple, Facebook former employee… up and to the right graphs…

Every abnormality from these patterns, though, is a negative mark for you.

But, this doesn’t mean your deal is dead, it just means you need to position yourself where your strengths are. If you have the pedigree, put it out front; if you don’t but have traction, put that out front.

I went out to raise a seed round for a color website… at a time when game mechanics & social analytics were all the rage. There is now a design renaissance that makes us more appealing as a pattern match because of the success of both Pinterest and Fab.

I didn’t graduate from a great school with a CS degree… I didn’t graduate at all. None of our founders have a CS degree. (We’re all self-taught.) In fact, I was recruited by Microsoft and went through YC, so that’s what helps qualify us to investors. But what we have to show for our team is a track record of building great product and growing passionate communities. So… My team bio slide is not first in our deck.

This is:

How Much to Raise

I’ve talked to lots of entrepreneurs that think they want to raise $200k or $300k. But these are abnormal amounts for legit seed rounds. Again, when hot startups are all raising seed rounds of $750k-$1.5M and you say you’re raising $200k, it’s not a good look. Investors don’t hear “we’re smart & capital efficient” they hear “this is a small idea and we don’t need much money because their isn’t a big opportunity to go after.”

So, set a realistic target round size and then try and get oversubscribed. You’d rather be in a position where you have more interest in your round than room to fit investors in. This gives you the option of raising more, or being selective about what investors you really think are the best fit for you. For our seed round we set out with a target of $750k and ended up raising a million. We had some great investors that we wanted to fit in, and the difference between raising the extra $250k was only a couple points of equity.

Again, this isn’t about being tricky and or dishonest. I know a lot of investors that are pretty annoyed at how much founders are pushing the whole oversubscribed thing. For any investor who takes the time to get interested in you and evaluate your deal… to get pushed out because you were just talking to them to inflate interest is a pretty shitty move.

Shoot for a reasonable target, and if you’re not able to get enough interest to close the higher amount, at least you’ve set an amount you know you can close. If you went out to close a $1M round and got stalled out around $800k, it can be a painful road to get that last $200k. At that point you’re not hot. You’re desperate to close and that sends all the wrong signals.

Also, make sure you really are raising enough. Push for explosive growth, but assume a slow rise. “Seeing seed funded startups that raise less than $750K have a very high rate of mortality. Not sure if its correlated or causative.” @georgezachary

Advisors & Investors

Be careful about your advisors. People often like to have big amazing advisory boards… but if any of your advisors are also investors (who aren’t investing in you) it sends up a big red flag. Paul Graham once told me that an advisor is an investor that doesn’t believe in you enough to put cash in. To be fair this isn’t true of all advisors. I advise a couple startups about early stage design & community building stuff… but I’m not investing right now, so there is no conflict. When you have a known investor as an advisor but who doesn’t have some skin in it, other investors are going to take that as a bad sign.

So either get your advisors to invest some cash or don’t count them as an advisor.

When You’re Raising… Rainbows & Cupcakes.

One thing that bothers me about Silicon Valley is how people talk about how they’re doing. Even in friendly conversations rarely do people say anything negative… even when things are on flames and 10 feet from crashing into the ground. This is because the startup world is small. Way smaller than you think. I try to be a pretty direct and honest person, when things are bumpy I’ll tell you about it. I’m confident about what we’re doing and humble enough to ask for help when I think people are smarter than me. But this has come back to bite me in the ass more than once.

When we were first out of YC talking to investors, a prominent investor who was friendly with us suggested we talk to one of his buddies who also ran a thriving community site. So we met this other founder for beers and what I thought was just hanging out. We talked about our startups, ideas, random thoughts about opportunities, etc. It was just a few founders out for drinks and shooting the shit. But it really wasn’t. What was communicated back to that investor was that we didn’t know what we were doing. That we had a scattering of ideas and weren’t confident. And that investor, although he had verbally committed to be in our round backed out. Causing the round to fall apart.

In a world where everybody says things like “awesome, dude. growth is amazing and the team is killer.” It’s not a good look when you say something less confident and that apparent lack of confidence is often the only thing that is heard.

So when you’re raising, and sometimes you’re always raising. Be careful about what you say and to who. This world is small and everybody knows everybody else. Just assume whatever you say is going to get to the ear of an investor.

Not sure I need to point this out again, but this isn’t about lying. Just find a way to see and talk about what’s in your glass… even if it isn’t half full and closer to only a drop left in it.

Convertible Note Or Series Seed

I don’t have a strong opinion on this. Both rounds I’ve raised were done as notes, but I would have been fine doing series seed docs. As a founder with hundreds of things on my brain, the conversion details of the note are just one more thing to have knocking around versus the clear cap table of a series seed round. I think you can also have series seed docs that are just as friendly to founders as notes but notes can be cheaper and quicker to get done.

The Pitch Deck Is The New Business Plan

Pitch decks are almost required for raising a round, but they don’t have to be a required part of your pitch. I’m good in conversation and presenting to small groups, so I’d prefer to have a conversation as opposed to doing the pitch dance. The risk in presenting your deck is that your pitch has to be perfect for any investor. You can say one word about your market that can derail the whole rest of your conversation and it’s hard to course correct when it’s written right there in your slide. During my first round I started getting my laptop set-up to pitch an investor but by the end, my laptop stayed in my bag until I needed to demo something. My pitch deck was really only sent out as a reference tool for partners.

There is also caution in letting your deck speak for you. Even if you’re the best slide crafter in the universe, it’s hard to get 10 slides to be more passionate, inspiring and intelligent than you are. So don’t send your deck out with your cold emails. I only send it out after I’ve spoken to somebody, or if a lead is already really hot and just needs some reference points. My decks are also purposefully not great without me there to weave the story. They’re just a few words on a slide, or a graph, or a picture. I don’t want my deck to tell my story. I want to tell it in my voice.

But if you’re a bit shy or don’t freestyle conversation that well, using a deck to help you tell your story is fine. Like with all founder advice use what works well for you, and don’t worry about the rest.

Exactly How I Made Our Seed Hot

We got early verbal commits from well known and respected investors BEFORE we started raising. (Don’t tell Dave McClure I said he was respectable. That would ruin his image.) We agreed to terms with Dave and then went out to raise.

(Note about terms. The valuations that companies are raising right now are pretty crazy. If you’re lucky to be a YC company your valuation can be close to $10M. For a brand new idea this seems a bit nuts to me… but hey, if you can get it, good for you. We had an established site, millions of users and we raised our first round at a $5M cap. Although we could have raised at a higher valuation, we prioritized investors over a higher cap. The dilution wasn’t substantially different but we ended up with the investors we wanted to and not just the ones who would accept different terms. Do your own math and figure out what’s right for you.)

With our terms set, we put our profile up on Angel.co and they blasted us out to a thousand investors. Because of our advisors & early commitments, we got 25 inbound requested intros and that interest created heat. Enough heat to push our inbound intros to about 65 in the first week or so. (An Angel.co record at the time.) Then I packed 60 meetings into the next couple weeks. Often with 8+ a day. I’m not a bullshitter and I hate sales-y jargon and when a potential investor was giving me grief or not understanding the opportunity, I simply said,  “No worries, I appreciate your time” and quickly removed them from my target list. When you have 50 other meetings to take, you can rebound immediately from a crap meeting. When you only have 3 scheduled and take a downer… it’s hard to get back up.

From those 65+ intros we ended up closing a round with about 10 investors. Some large VCs, some growing syndicates and some small angel founders that I respect a lot.

Leverage the Tools You Have

I’ve technically tried to raise four rounds but I really can’t count the first. It was 5 years ago before I knew anything about startups. I lobbed a couple cold emails into top tier VCs and hoped to talked to them. They didn’t get back to me.

Nowadays there are amazing resources like Angel.co (who I credit with largely helping us raise our first round) and CrunchBase (where I go to see who’s invested in who when compiling my target lists).

I’m just one of hundreds of founders who’ve raised a round but feel free to ask for help. Need help putting your deck together? Want an intro to an investor? Want advice about terms / round size? Ask us. We’re busy, but I think most of us are willing to carve out a bit of time to help a fellow founder getting started.

All the best. Build great companies and change the world. Let me know if I can help you.

There goes another one — RIM announced today that Chief Legal Officer Karima Bawa will soon be leaving the company. This is RIM’s second major departure in as many weeks, with RIM sales head Patrick Spence leaving the ailing smartphone maker last Wednesday.

At the time, sources pointed to audio electronics company Sonos as his likely landing spot, though neither Spence nor Sonos have officially commented on the situation.

Unlike Spence, who reportedly jumped ship after being passed over for the company’s vacant COO spot (Sony Mobile EVP Kristian Tear eventually got the job), Bawa’s situation seems much less contentious. After spending nearly twelve years with the company (two of which were in her current spot), she’s finally looking to retire.

According to Reuters, Bawa’s departure was no surprise — she apparently revealed her desire to leave months in advance, and will be sticking around long enough to get her successor up to speed.

Still, a loss is a loss, and if recent reports are to be believed there are plenty more to come. Rumblings of a new round of layoffs have making the rounds lately, with the Financial Post reporting yesterday that nearly 6,000 employees are said to be on the proverbial chopping block.

RIM laid off 2,000 employees as part of a drastic cost cutting measure in July 2011 which acccounted for 11% of the company’s total workforce at the time. If these latest layoffs indeed come to pass, RIM will (for better or worse) be smaller than it has been in years. The Waterloo-based company needs to put as much of their effort as possible into crafting their forthcoming BlackBerry 10, and it remains to be seen whether or not this new, lean RIM is up to the task. Their early focus on luring developers to the platform with developer-friendly hardware and tools was a smart one, but market share shrinking and a launch window that could put it up against stiff competition, RIM can’t really afford for it to be anything other than a homerun.

Your Powerpoint pitchdeck is so boring. So. Freaking. Boring. Although tech bloggers aren’t sent startup’s actual pitchdecks as often as investors are (thankfully), we’re still walked through them on dreadful, “let me read to you from my Powerpoint” phone calls more often than should be socially acceptable. That’s why when image aggregator Piccsy, which is simultaneously a competitor to Pinterest as well as a top 20 content source for the site,  pinged us to take a look at its pitch deck, we were pleasantly surprised. A pitchdeck that’s actually fun to read? Can such a thing exist?

Piccsy.com/investors hosts the company’s public pitchdeck, and it’s a striking, visual representation of the data that would be typically found in bullet-pointed slideshows. The format leads you to wander through content and explore, much like Piccsy itself does. CEO Daniel Eckler admits that he doesn’t even know how to use Powerpoint. “I’ve only ever opened the program once or twice in my life,” he says. But it wasn’t just lack of know-how that led the company to ditch the idea of the traditional deck. As outsiders from Toronto, they wanted to stand out, Eckler says.

“We began with a problem (how to get investors to see our deck) and came up with a solution (create something unique, beautiful, informative, and easy to share), as opposed to going with the status quo,” Eckler explains. “This is conceivably the first thing investors are going to relate to when they see a company. Lots of companies that are innovative in other areas are sticking to an old model with their deck, even though they have the resources (dev/design) to do something special.”

Plus, he adds, a generic, Powerpoint-style deck wouldn’t be right for a site that’s all about discovering beautiful imagery.

For what it’s worth, the novel deck has been working. 50,000 pageviews and 15 inbound investor requests came in over the weekend, and the site got linked on Hacker News (where discussion delved into criticisms over content, however, but not the style.) Said one commenter, “it’s a beautiful presentation. I’m jealous….I’d absolutely pay to get a site like that.”

Say, Piccsy – if that whole image aggregation thing doesn’t work out…

The screenshot above is just a snippet. The full site is here.

(And yes, this is probably just a nifty trick to get an investor link posted to TechCrunch, but a tip of my hat to you then. Well played, Piccsy, well played.)

We’re currently used to more drama-oriented stories coming out of Yahoo!, but that doesn’t mean business hasn’t entirely halted there.

Yamli is a service which offers a smart Arabic keyboard that allows users who type in Latin characters to find -in real-time – the most accurate equivalent Arabic term. It debuted in 2007 but has become an important part of a market which serves hundreds of millions of users worldwide. The platform also offers services to help navigating the ‘Arabic web’.

Today Yahoo has acquired a license to use Yamli for its Arabic service, Yahoo! Maktoob, which will see it integrate Yamli’s existing technologies into a new product, “3arrebni,” or “Arabize me” in other words. This will be featured on Maktoob’s homepage will be integrated into Yahoo! Messenger, Yahoo! Mail in Arabic, Yahoo! Search, and Yahoo! Maktoob Forums as well as in the comments section of media products such as Yahoo! Maktoob News.

The move marks a pivot for Yamli away from consumer services into B2b. It’s a nice deal for Yamli and a way to scale in the Arab world for the ailing Yahoo but a far cry form the acquisition we predicted might happen in 2010. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Since about 60% of Arabic-speaking Internet users dislike using an Arabic keyboard, many users have to use a Latin keyboard for their jobs or school, which makes the keyboards impractical. That means they have adopted a phonetic web language that spells out Arabic words with Latin letters. So Yamli lets users enter words phonetically into a special text box that displays a list of matching words that are written in Arabic. This allows them to keep using their Latin keyboard, without having the resulting text look like rubbish. And although there are around 22 dialects in the Arab world, Yamli can deal with multiple different phonetic spellings.

Yamli claims to have 5 million words pushed though its platform a day day, mostly from Saudi Arabia, Tunisia, Egypt, Lebanon, Morocco, and Jordan.

Co-founder Habib Haddad, now CEO of Wamda, says its a nice continuation of Yahoo!’s reputation amongst startups in the region which is established when it acquired Maktoob.

The company launched an Arabic frontend to Google in November 2007, and released an API in March 2008.

Face.com’s CEO has shrugged off rumors that it is being acquired by Facebook for up to $100 million when we asked. But the addition of its facial recognition tech to Facebook’s mobile apps could make sure friend tagging continues as the social network’s user base shifts away from desktops.

In fact, about 45% of users of Face.com’s app KLIK end up sharing their photos on Facebook, which shows how popular mobile facial recognition could be.

For the record, Face.com people are keeping their cards close to their chest. Face.com’s CEO Gil Hirsch flatly tells TechCrunch: “We have nothing new to announce or share at this time.”

But even while Facebook has been pushing a lot of fancy new enhancements to its mobile offerings (its Camera mobile app being the most recent) there are still a surprising number of features that have yet to be covered by the company.

So, perhaps because nature abhors a vacuum, we’re now getting a full whack of reports of what the company might buy or launch to make up for that, including today’s Face.com news that Facebook is looking to buy mobile/PC browser company Opera and hiring ex-Apple hardware engineers to work on its own phone. (Btw Opera is also giving a similarly no-news line: “Everything I’ve read has been news to me,” one Opera person told me.)

We may just, quite possibly, be in the middle of a Facebook news bubble and that half of what we are reading about Facebook and mobile may never come to pass — or could take ages to come to fruition: Buffy the Android slayer is reportedly still six to 12 months away going by the timing in the AllThingsD post from November. And this is not the first time we’ve heard that Face.com is in the Facebook acquisition line.

But, if you swallow that large grain of salt, there is a huge amount of sense in the social network looking at beefing up its mobile arsenal with companies like these, which offer features that Facebook currently does not, and therefore offer the promise of getting mobile users to spend more time on the social network — something that is a concern for the company.

At the moment, Facebook’s popular photo tag suggestion feature does not work from mobile, only on web uploads on PCs; on mobile, users can tag by starting to type a name for tagging options to appear, a spokesperson notes to us.

Face.com meanwhile offers facial-recognition software both for PC-based and mobile usage, with the key being that it covers mobile.

Face.com has its own iPhone mobile app, KLIK, beta-launched in January, and then rolled out as a 1.0 version in the app store earlier this month, which shows off the full range of its features.

These include facial recognition, facial-friendly photo filters and a location-based photo network — all services you could see sitting naturally in Facebook’s existing services.

Face.com tells us that Klik had over 100,000 downloads of the app in the first three days — signs of stickiness and popularity.

Equally interesting, Face.com also offers an API to integrate its technology into other apps. (One company suggested for an integration: Path.)

The API functionality could come in handy as Facebook looks at more ways of extending its functionality and touchpoints outside of its walled garden, especially since an Android version is likely to come soon from Face.com.

Opera, last week’s acquisition rumor, offers a similar promise of covering new ground for Facebook.

In its case it’s about a web browser — which, as others have reported, would be an essential feature if Facebook were to launch its own mobile platform.

That would be to compete against the likes of Android from Google and iOS from Apple in smartphones. But having web browsing capabilities could also help Facebook make more of a push in the lower-end feature phone space — an area where it has already made advances with services like Facebook Zero and its acquisition of Snaptu to improve the feature phone experience to target users in developing markets.

Coincidentally, Opera pushed itself as a “social mobile” company in February, when it launched the Opera Mini Next browser, offering “Smart Page” social media sharing features specifically for feature phone users.

Opera says it has some 200 million users of its browsers today, but if its social functionality that Facebook is after, there may be others worth watching, too. For example, the social mobile browser company Rockmelt, which has raised nearly $40 million from Andreessen-Horowitz, Accel, Khosla Ventures and others, currently offers an iOS app.

In the meantime, Opera has seen a little lift in its fortunes since the rumors broke last week: today its share price appears to have been its highest in a year, rising by 24.4 percent and closing at €5.70 a share.

[Additional reporting by Josh Constine]

Every gadget that graces our shelves goes through plenty of tweaks and changes during its design phase, but it isn’t too often that we get an actual glimpse of those scrapped iterations. It can be tremendously cool to see what our stuff could have looked like in some alternate timeline, and a new eBay listing reveals a peculiar iPad that may have been.

The listing is for an early first-generation iPad prototype, and unlike the final model it sports two dock connectors, allowing the iPad to be docked in either portrait or landscape mode.

Astute readers may recall that some of Apple’s earlier iPad-related patents pointed to a dual-docking device, and nearly three years later, we’re finally getting our first real look at one. Long story short, it looks just as dumb as you would expect it to. While the ability to dock the iPad in either orientation is arguably useful, it makes for a design that isn’t as clean or as thoughtful as Apple is (usually) known for.

It probably goes without saying that this early 16GB iPad is more of a conversation piece than a fully functional gadget, though. The seller notes that the touchscreen doesn’t work properly thanks to some funky digitizer issues, though it’s possible that someone with enough gumption (and the right tools) may be able to get it running again.

The prototype also runs an early build of iOS 3.2 along with Apple’s Switchboard hardware testing suite. It’s nothing that will make its eventual owner’s life any easier, but it certainly lends a bit of credence to the notion that it is actually some in-house Apple hardware instead of a carefully crafted hoax.

Between this and that Atari-era Steve Jobs memo, Apple aficionados have plenty of Cupertino memorabilia to lust after. Of course, it’ll cost you a pretty penny should you try to score this piece of iPad history — the prototype currently sits with a $4,800 bid, but it could be yours for a cool $10,000 if the whole bidding-on-things bit isn’t your style.

[via MacRumors]

It may not be the end, but the prognosis doesn’t look good. Social micro-payments platform Flattr is taking an unkind hit in terms of its future growth opportunities on mobile, the company details on its blog this morning. After being integrated into popular third-party podcast manager Instacast back in February, Apple decided at the beginning of May to reject the app from the iTunes App Store due to its Flattr integration. The result? The only way Instacast could get back into the app store was to change the user flow in the app to direct the actual “flattr” (as the micro-payment process is called) to take place in the Safari web browser instead. Not an ideal user experience, Apple admits, but it’s as required by the App Store Review Guidelines.

Flattr, for those unfamiliar, lets users click to donate funds directly to a content creator. It’s a “like button with cash,” TechCrunch’s Mike Butcher once said of the service. To use Flattr, a user decides how much they want to spend per month, then, whenever they see a Flattr button on the web or mobile, they click to donate. At the end of the month, Flattr counts up all your clicks and distributes the funds evenly. The company scored a high-profile partnership with web video giant  Dailymotion at the beginning of this month, which targeted Dailymotion’s top content creators in its “Motionmakers” category. (Butcher, however, still questioned Flattr’s business model at the time).

With the Instacast integration, the Flattr feature allowed listeners to “flattr” (donate to) podcast creators after having finished listening to a show. There was also an “auto-flattr” option, which allowed users to automatically flattr podcasts after the episode began playing.

According to Flattr’s community builder Siim Teller, Apple rejected Instacast on May 6th, citing the App Store Guideline 21.2, reading: “The collection of donations must be done via a web site in Safari or an SMS.” Flattr, of course, was permitting in-app donations. Apple itself says: “We understand that directing your user outside your app may not be the user experience you prefer to offer your users. However it is a common experience in a variety of iOS apps.”

Apple’s final ruling on May 24th was not in Flattr’s favor. Vemedio, Instacast’s maker, was forced to remove the in-app Flattr integration in order to push their critical bug fixes for their app into the App Store.

Although the Flattr blog post is in-party titled “it’s not the end,” the goings look rough – at least in terms of iOS. The guidelines are clear. Despite Teller’s reporting that Vemedio will “continue a dialog with Apple regarding their Flattr integration,” and his promises that Flattr will continue testing different ways of integration, it’s probable that Apple will not change its mind here.

As pointed out on the post burning up Hacker News today, Apple, after dealing with fallout from angry parents whose kids racked up huge iTunes bills through in-app purchases, may just be protecting its back here. Although Flattr users themselves set the monthly donation amount, and would have to manually enable the integration, there’s a chance that confusing dialogs or UX flow could lead to unintended donations.

More importantly, however, is the idea that Flattr could become an alternative to Apple’s own in-app purchasing system, allowing users to “flattr” in exchange for virtual goods, perhaps. That would be a huge no-no, considering Apple’s 30% cut of in-app purchases are a key revenue generator for its app business. Rather than police all future apps with Flattr integration, Apple has decided to break the user experience instead. Developers, users, and content creators may not be happy with the decision, but the end result is worse news for the Flattr ecosystem than it is for Apple’s.

Google just announced that its Google Apps for Business service has earned ISO 27001 certification. This certifies that Google is following the standard ISO information security management protocols and best practices “for the systems, technology, processes and data centers serving Google Apps for Business.”

If you’re a startup or individual user, chances are you don’t care too much about whether a company you are working with is following any of the ISO’s over 19,000 standards. This certification, however, will likely give larger and more highly regulated businesses (and the executives who sign off on these deals) the necessary reassurances that moving to Google’s cloud solutions is safe.

This ISO 27001 certification, which was certified by Ernst & Young CertifyPoint, an ISO certification body accredited by the Dutch Accreditation Council, follows Google’s previous FISMA certification for its Google Apps for Government product. Google also regularly submits itself to third-party audits according to the SSAE 16 / ISAE 3402 standard, which is quite comparable to the ISO 27001 standard.

It’s important to note, though, that this certification is not a security “seal of approval,” as security consultant Alec Muffett told Computer World UK’s Anh Nguyen, and does not “guarantee that the applications are 100% secure.” Instead, says Muffett, companies that apply for ISO 27001 certification get ” to design their own high-jump bar, document how tall it is and what it is made of, how they intend to jump over it and then they jump over it.”

Google’s Eran Feigenbaum, the company’s director of security for its Google Enterprise group, believes that “businesses are beginning to realize that companies like Google can invest in security at a scale that’s difficult for many businesses to achieve on their own.” While most of Google’s competitors focus on getting their data centers certified, it’s worth noting that Google also argues that its certification is broader and also includes its networking infrastructure and applications.

Given that all of this isn’t the most exciting news in the world – especially not on a national holiday in the U.S. – here is a video of Feigenbaum, who is also a mentalist – playing Russian Roulette with a nail gun:

So now we’re in for an apparently unlimited amount of blaming Facebook for just about anything that needs a scapegoat. Take the story that crossed whatever we call the wires these days about how social readers are being destroyed by some tweaking of the Facebook engine. I followed all the links on Bruce Francis’ Cloudblog story and now realize this is actually about Facebook social readers. But the net seems to be: don’t trust your friends when they have something to share with you.

I thought this was already well known, starting and ending with Digg and its tyranny of the crowd. Trending topics for me is another way of saying here’s what to find out enough about to ignore everything else until something new happens. All you need to know about this is to see how many unfilled programming jobs there are out there that involve dedupping.

I’m not looking for a social reader in any case. What we really need is a social limiter, a version of the Beatles’ favorite studio tool, the Fairchild limiter. I once sequestered myself for months at the Band’s ShangriLa studio in Malibu, where the producer who ran the place had assembled as many Fairchilds as he could get his hands on. These babies were like some velvet glove you could wrap around guitars, vocals, even drum tracks — and out would come this warm glowing sound bursting with overtones, that felt better than what went in.

Translate that into a stream that discarded the latest rehash of a trending article, the latest numbers why RIM is screwed, why Facebook is the worst IPO in history. How about a size-shrinker that offers some visible clues as to the amount of actual information in the few truly interesting headline grabbers. How about some metrics on what actually is the amount of information we’re looking for per inch. The Fairchild limiter didn’t limit the music; it expanded its impact and clarity.

Social reader is really a misnomer, though. What’s social is the path travelled to the push notification that triggers your awareness of the next thing to absorb. And I’m the reader, not some app on Facebook or anywhere for that matter. More and more, I’m the detective, intuiting what I don’t see in the space between the lines, the posts, the tweets. Now that House is over, we only have his mantra to employ: the relentless odyssey in sea rch of completely irrelevant revenge for some dimly perceived slight that suddenly explodes in insight based on a random piece of dialogue. Remember: everybody lies.

Take Facebook. Supposedly the IPO was rigged to protect the house, as in every other form of legalized and otherwise gambling. The interior logic of the show was that because Facebook has 900 million subscribers, they by definition are inevitably going to be profitable, maybe more so than their competitors present and future. I actually feel that’s kind of right, but have much less clarity as to how I personally can profit by the insight. For example, if everybody who invests $1000 can flip it ten minutes later for $1100, at what point do you run out of suckers?

But just because the stock dove, then recovered, then dove, then barely got back to square one, doesn’t mean we don’t still have that same intuition. Waiting until Monday, Tuesday, even Wednesday and Thursday’s half bump, and Friday’s mini-dive, does nothing to change our minds about the big picture. 900 million, it’s like Sam’s Club, isn’t it? Who’s gonna do better anytime soon? So we didn’t do the flipitydip… it’ll just take longer. Meanwhile, the patient, this means us, is in a coma.

OK, let’s blame Scoble then. Doc Searls does a wonderful job of that in his new Techmemed post, but he somehow misses the point that Robert represents a fairly good bellweather of what actually is going to happen, namely that Facebook will succeed at whatever the hell it is experimenting with right now. Maybe the last minute warnings about mobile cluelessness are true, but I doubt it. My wife’s iPhone is off the hook with Facebook alerts from family, friends, and such. It’s not mobile they don’t get, it’s push.

That’s the big secret Wall Street is struggling with, that push is the monetization model of mobile. Who cares what the UI is, or what the advertising surface is. The moment a push hits your screen, it comes down to a binary decision: do I want to know more, or do I already know enough. To make that decision, we need social metadata to help out. Who said this, who retweeted it, who @mentioned it, and how are these signals parsed to prioritize the queue.

This is why micro-communities like Path and FourSquare persist. Their signal to noise is scoped by the care with which we follow our peers and the precision of the resulting clarity of pushes. In a world of push, the most valuable signals are the ones that don’t interrupt, don’t repeat, don’t strangle the message in a sea of marketing. Push is about permission, which turns advertising into information on request and marketing into paid subscription.

Push requires a PLA, or Push Level Agreement, where we populate our social channels with enough signal from which to derive educated guesses about our intentions and intuitions. Yes, Facebook has plenty of data, but little understanding of how to leverage it because we’re not allowed to tune the inference algorithms. Metadata farming requires not just permission but incentives for broadcasting rich metadata and priority context.

This is why Google + Circles are so brain dead. Yes, they let you know who you are broadcasting to. But no, they don’t let us know who you’re broadcasting to. I can’t intuit the effect a post has on the implicit group, so I can’t tell how important it is to know about in the push queue. Since you’re not telling me how important you think this is, why should anybody else weight it? There’s little incentive to create those signals, and the end result of a push notification of a Google + item is to perceive it as an interruption.

Push is the cloud’s security blanket. It implicitly says, those who trust you will be trusted by you. Everybody else loses. Push capital punishment is to go to the Settings page and turn off an app. SocialCam may be the first if they don’t watch out. I like the early days feeling of the app, but I’m not sure the trust signals coming from its users are visible enough for me to understand. Photo apps are only push friendly to the extent that they don’t go viral, which seems contradictory unless you believe that push is the new money. I do.

Editor’s Note: TechCrunch columnist Semil Shah is based in Palo Alto. You can follow him on Twitter @semil

Cornell University made big news earlier in the year when it was announced the Ivy League school, located in upstate New York, would open a technology campus in New York City. Leading the charge for Big Red will be Dan Huttenlocher, dean of computing and information science — and a former Silicon Valley entrepreneur. Dean Huttenlocher was kind enough to come backstage after his session to discuss more details about the campus and program. Cornell will build a technology campus on Roosevelt Island in New York City, which will house a full master’s program that combines academic research in computer science and engineering along with a variety of practical training programs. While the curriculum will focus mostly on software, Huttenlocher did hint at the possibility of having programs focusing on smaller-scale hardware, as well. This video would be of interest to folks who are in the New York technology community, as well as those could have some type of relationship with the campus in the future.