GitHub is rolling out a major redesign over the next few days with the intent of putting more emphasis on content, speed and interactivity.
A year in the making, the new redesign is meant to be optimized for how people interact with GitHub on a daily basis.
Jottacloud, a cloud storage service based in Norway, is promoting itself as a safe and secure haven, free of the NSA’s long reach that it has with services such as SkyDrive, Dropbox and iCloud.
This coming Friday night, I’ll be at the API Days conference in San Francisco to talk for a few minutes about my perspectives of the API economy. I am not a developer — just an observer — so my views are not deeply technical. That just means I have to ask more questions and talk to more people about APIs and what they represent.
But then I have to simmer it down, collect my thoughts, and then ask some more questions. Here are two themes I am picking up on from all these conversations.
Elastic Path has raised an $8 million debt round to fuel the development of its “commerce everywhere,” API — a hypermedia platform that abstracts backend complexity for the front-end developer and business person. Wellington Financial out of Toronto provided the financing.
Elastic Path has traditionally served as an e-commerce company. But over the past few years, it has focused on building an API platform that extends the capability for businesses to take commerce beyond a website.
Vice President of Marketing Matt Dione said the company will use the funding to invest in its API platform.
Here’s another interesting implementation of the $35 Raspberry Pi microcromputer — or rather a stack of 56 Pis, linked together to form a model web platform called PiCloud, using LEGO bricks as bespoke racks for the Pi stacks. The project comes out of the University of Glasgow, and is intended as a teaching aid for students to hack around with cloud technologies.
As high-profile sites like Twitter, Google, and most recently Evernote and LinkedIn turn to two-factor authentication to help their users protect themselves from malicious hackers and security breaches, Encap, a startup based out of Norway, has created an alternative it says is better and safer, using an app on a person’s mobile device. The company today announced a round of funding — we understand it to be $2 million — from Norwegian early-stage VC ProVenture Seed, which it will use to further develop the solution and take it to new markets outside of Scandinavia, specifically the U.S., where it has recently opened an office in Palo Alto. This latest round takes the total invested in Encap since 2010 to $2,850,000, with the earlier round coming from Alliance Ventures.
Thought Yahoo’s acquisition spree would culminate with its $1.1 billion Tumblr purchase? Well, not so much. In fact, the buy-happy company just quietly made its second acquisition in 24 hours — in two completely different verticals, no less. Yes, Yahoo followed this morning’s purchase of iOS photo app maker, GhostBird Software, by making a play into the enterprise conference calling space. Wait, what?
Yes, users of six-year-old free conference calling service, Rondee, were tonight informed via email that the startup has been acquired by Yahoo for an undisclosed sum. It will also suffer the same fate met by other recent Yahoo acquisitions — like MileWise, Astrid, GoPollGo and Loki Studios to name just four — in that it will soon be going the way of the dinosaur. After June 30th, the company’s website now reads, users will no longer be allowed to access their data or create new conference calls.
Last summer, word started to trickle out about a young, stealth startup called RelateIQ that was rumored to be one of the more ambitious players among the new (and expanding) class of Big Data startups. Adam Evans and Steve Loughlin had founded RelateIQ the summer before to tackle some enduring problems in the way we manage our professional relationships — the same ones that led to the birth of Plaxo lo a decade ago, and many more since. Though we live in the Digital Age of smartphones and cloud computing, Evans and Louglin were frustrated by the fact that people still manually entering important professional data into aging and stuffy relationship management tools.