Aaron Levie, the 26-year-old CEO of Box.net, said the expansion round brings in strategic partners like Salesforce.com and SAP Ventures, as well as venture-capital firms such as New Enterprise Associates and Bessemer Venture Partners, along with former investors including Andreessen Horowitz. In total, Box.net has now raised $162 million.

Box.net, founded in 2005, gives businesses a secure way to share content online and on mobile devices.

Levie said the Palo Alto, Calif., company decided to raise new capital so soon after its February financing because the business did better than expected in the first half of the year. With so much change in the cloud computing and enterprise tech space, we wanted to capitalize on the size and scale of the opportunity, he said.

With the new round, Levie said the money will go towards initiatives like the Box Innovation Network, essentially a move by the start-up to bring in partners to build out a platform whereby people can build applications for enterprise. The platform effort launches next month, he said.

In addition, Box.net plans to ramp up its hiring. While Levie said he expected the company to end up with 250 employees by year end, up from 120 at the beginning of the year, he now expects the firm to have around 320 to 340 employees by year end.

Pearltrees, a French-based curation platform, today released an iPad app that lets users easily explore the curated collections of websites created by more than 200,000 people, via a unique visual and touch interface that serves a discovery engine based on interests.

The company has the world’s largest community of online curators on its platform. Many work in teams to create a Pearltree, which consists of “pearls” — each is a visual metaphor for a web page. Users can share and collect each other’s Pearltrees, creating an ever expanding web topology generated by humans and their interests, rather than algorithms.

The free application takes full advantage of the iPad’s touch interface to enable users to quickly discover collections of websites with simple swipes of their finger.

“This is the first time that you can see an interest graph in action,” said Patrice Lamothe, CEO and co-founder of Pearltrees. “Users can discover the curation work of more than 200,000 Pearltrees users. There is no other application that does this.”

Pearltrees is betting that many people are suffering from social network fatigue and the many chores of online relationship management. [Please see: The Tamagotchi Nature Of Social Networks]

“On Pearltrees there are no friends to collect or people to follow, it is solely based on your interests,” said Franois Rocaboy, Chief Marketing Officer, co-founder of Pearltrees, and inventor of its “pearls” visual interface. “It’s a way for people to curate their special places on the web, cultivating their own garden of interests, and taking their time to make a collection, a similar process to a curator in an art gallery. The iPad app is a great way to discover these curations.”

The iPad app can be downloaded here.

And here is a screen cast, you really have to see it because it’s a very visual app.

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Here is an example of a documentary I put together using Pearltrees and found video footage from the recent Outside Lands music festival. I chose the best videos from sites such as Youtube, to try to recapture some of the excitement and the fun of being in a crowd of people happy to be among so much great music.

You are in the middle of the action. At times the camera swings in the air along with everyone’s arms; sometimes you can’t hear the music because everyone around you is singing; while an other clip shows happy fans singing on the bus that’s taking them home — all wonderful vignettes inexpertly captured.

Pearltrees allows me to quickly organize the video clips and it has a media viewer that makes it easy to show to anyone, without them needing a user account. And it looks really good on the iPad.

Even better, my curation of Outside Lands can be easily shared and collected by other Pearltrees users. If I make changes to my Outside Lands documentary, those changes are automatically published to everyone that has that Pearltree in their collection — it’s a powerful and unique media publishing platform. Which is precisely why I chose to work with Pearltrees in late 2009.

Please take a look at my Outside Lands found-footage documentary. (And please let me know if you’d like to team up with me, I’ve still got a lot of curating to do, and many hundreds of videos to review. But it’s a fun project.)

Outside Lands 2011 - Found Fan Video Documentary in Outside Lands 2011
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About Pearltrees:

Launched in December 2009, Pearltrees has gathered more than 200.000 collectors and more than 10 million pearls. The company has been growing at average rate of 15% month over month, with over half a million visits in September.

Since being founded, the company has been recognized by OSEO in Europe as a “leap forward” and was selected as one of only five companies for the Launch Pad at Web2.0 Expo in 2010.

Pearltrees has raised 3.8 million Euros from a group of international entrepreneurs and angel investors.

—

Useful Links:

Direct Link to Pearltrees for iPad in the App Store: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/pearltrees-for-ipad/id463462134?mt=8&ls=1

Demo Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7zDkwN-_ySg

Short screen-cast: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zXU-IKS7KdA

Screen Shots: http://bitly.com/opOsVz

Karen Bleier/AFP/Getty Images

U.S. Targets WikiLeaks with Secret Court Order: The Wall Street Journal has learned that the U.S. government has forced Google and Internet provider Sonic.net to cede information from the email accounts of a WikiLeaks volunteer.

The secret court order comes as a coalition of technology companies lobby Congress to update the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, the law on which the U.S. government data seizure was based.The act was passed in 1986, three years before the World Wide Web was established. [WSJ, Digits / WSJ]

Netflix Drops Qwikster: After being criticized for spinning off its DVD rental business, the video company said that DVD subscribers will not have to access a different web site to order videos. All activity will remain on Netflix.com. [Netflix blog]

Targets Shift in Phone Wars: With its cheapest iPhone costing $0, Apple is becoming more a contender among price-conscious consumers. Meanwhile Android phones are aggressively pursuing business customers.Their efforts are putting even more pressure on onetime market leaders Nokia and Research in Motion.

Apple has confirmed that the company has sold over 1 million iPhone 4S phones in the first 24 hours they were made available.BoyGeniusReport says that last years iPhone4 launch saw 600,000 sold over three days. [WSJ, BoyGeniusReport]

Steve Jobs: Family Focus: The Wall Street Journal has two stories on Steve Jobss family. The first is on his biological father, Syria-born Abdulfattah Jandali, the manager of a Reno, Nev. casino. Jandali has never seen his son, but the 80-year-old is noted for his own marketing prowess. He also owns a number of Apple products. They produce the best, he said.

On the question of how Jobss fortune could be spent, The Journal looks at his wife, Laurene Powell Jobs, co-founder of an educational reform organization, whose charitable activities date back to the mid-1990s where she mentored high schoolers in the low income area of East Palo Alto, Calif. [WSJ]

Steve Jobs was Atari Employee Number 40: Game developer site Gamasutra has the story of how a very young and scruffy Steve Jobs showed up at the Los Gatos doorstep of gamemaker Atari in 1974. He was this real scuzzy kid, Pong engineer Al Alcorn once told video game historian Steven Kent. I think I said, We should either call the cops or we should talk to him. So I talked to him.

Jobs worked at Atari for five to six months before embarking on his spiritual quest in India.He returned to Atari with a shaved head, saffron robes and, according to Alcorn, a case of hepatitis.He worked on the game Breakout, although worked may be an exaggeration according to Alcorn. [Gamasutra]

It was a significant victory for opponents of net neutrality rules because the court has been skeptical of the FCCs authority to enforce such rules in the past.

The FCC stands ready to defend its open Internet order in any court of appeals, an FCC spokesman said Thursday.

Net neutrality backers wanted the legal challenge heard somewhere else because the D.C. Circuit torpedoed the agencys last attempt to enforce net neutrality regulations. They filed court challenges to the agencys rules in six different appeals courts in hopes of keeping the case out of the D.C. Circuit.

In April 2010, the D.C. court rejected the FCCs efforts to sanction Comcast Corp. for violating net neutrality rules by deliberately slowing some subscribers downloads in 2008, saying the agency overstepped its authority.

That decision prompted the agency to pass new rules in January to give itself more explicit authority over broadband providers. The rules prohibit Internet providers from deliberately slowing or blocking subscribers traffic and include some other consumer protections.

Verizon Communications Inc. wanted its appeal of the new rules to be heard in the D.C. Circuit so badly that the company sued the agency before the rules were even published. (Rules have to be published in the Federal Register before they can take effect.)

That lawsuit got tossed out, however, after the court found that Verizon acted too early. The company refilled its lawsuit last week.

By Intel Free Press

Back in 2009, they finished a distant 14th. This year, however, a small team of Cambridge students believes a more efficient aerodynamic design, better batteries and a technology arsenal will vault their car into the top 10 of the world’s most prestigious solar-powered vehicle race.

The Cambridge University Eco Racing Team (CUER) will compete against 35 plus teams from more than 20 nations in the Veolia World Solar Challenge. The solar car race, which some call the Formula One of eco-friendly motor sports, starts Oct. 16 at Darwin in Australia’s Northern Territory. Over the ensuing 4 days, the teams will traverse 1,800 miles across the Outback to Adelaide on the continent’s southern coast without using a drop of gasoline.

The vehicles are allotted just 5kW hours of stored energy — enough to power a single 60-watt light bulb for approximately 3.5 days. All other power must come from the sun or recovered kinetic energy from the car.

After the 2009 disappointment, the Cambridge team turned to technology to gain an edge in the next edition of the biannual competition. Because CUER lacked the deep-pocket financing of some others in the field such as the University of Michigan team, which according to Wired magazine has spent more than $1 million on its latest car in a bid to bring the United States its first world title since 1987, the team took a daring approach to redesigning its solar-powered car.

To do that, the Cambridge team had to look beyond solar panels.

“When you look at the car, you think that the only technology on it is the solar panels, but that’s definitely not the case,” said team manager Emil Hewage (above). “This car actually drives and thinks at the same time. It requires masses and masses of data to run the car properly.”

To reach peak performance, the Endeavour, named for the ship that took Capt. James Cook to Australian shores, harvests power from the sun and taps into a range of technologies, including a super computer, two high-end workstations, fast and rugged solid state drives for data storage, and a small, power-efficient in-vehicle computer according to Hewage.

CUER estimates that its car generates 2GB of data per day during the race. The in-vehicle computer, built with an Intel Atom processor, connects to the motor controller, solar array controllers, battery management system, steering wheel and lights.

Drive by algorithm…

The car’s computer records live video and constantly calculates the slope of the road while collecting weather data from the support vehicle’s telemetry system. It then runs real-time measurements through a software algorithm to determine how the car can complete the race in the shortest time. This so-called “cruise control” speed is used by the driver for more than 90 percent of the race.

“The car drives itself, and a lot of the time our driver is just steering to make sure not to hit things,” said Hewage. “In the past we had to sacrifice because we didn’t have the energy budget to let the car think. You had to send [the data] by radio, and often the radio would cut out. We’d have a big truck driving behind the car filled with desktop computers that did all of the number crunching. Now we can do all of this inside the car.”

Top speed: 75mph…

According to data from the team, Endeavour can generate as much as 1.3 kilowatts of power from the sun, and has a top speed of about 75 miles an hour.

Shaped like a giant surfboard riding above three wheels, Endeavour is covered by nearly 65 square feet of silicon solar cells. A single-person cockpit bubbles up near the front of the car, and the carbon-fiber canopy and wheel covers are decorated with a slew of stickers, including the British flag and logos from sponsors such as Ford, HP and Schlumberger.

“It looks like a baby space ship that hasn’t quite grown up yet,” said Hewage.

Access to Computing Resources Advance Design

The Cambridge team got access to some cutting-edge technology shortly after meeting Mark Green, an Intel technical marketing engineer, at a transportation-related exhibit at a nearby school.

Green gave the team access to an HPC cluster that is powered by Intel Xeon processors, consisting of 16 nodes and 128 physical cores.

Getting the HPC cluster was like a getting a bigger hammer to get around a problem, right when the team needed it most, according to Hewage.

“It’s the one thing that really puts us ahead of the other guys,” he said. “And that’s going to help us build for the next 2 years.”

Today the team completes computer simulations in a matter of minutes versus 24 hours, as having a supercomputer to help them crunch such data-intensive problems as computational fluid dynamics.

“It took 8 weeks to design the first version of the car in 2009,” Hewage said. “But this year, in a space of about 24 hours, we improved the performance by nearly 10 percent. That’s because of the HPC cluster that we used in our redesign process.”

According to Green, the additional computing resources helped the Cambridge team streamline the car’s shape, bringing the drag coefficient down to just 0.17. By comparison, a Porsche 997 has a drag coefficient of 0.28.

To build an in-vehicle computer, Green helped CUER get its hands on an embedded Intel Atom processor and 80GB Intel solid state drives (SSDs).

Hewage said that they don’t “really use the SSDs for their speed, which helps as does their power efficiency, but it’s actually for their rugged nature … their ability to keep functioning when a typical hard drive would probably not survive riding on our car’s stiff suspension.”

Green said the Cambridge team is showing how technologies can help researchers develop electric vehicles that could someday be more widely available.

“We all have to live on this planet, and technology can play a vital role in creating a more sustainable future,” he said. The Cambridge team is innovating quickly and they are grabbing the interest of more people leading up to race day.”

“We are an underdog,” said Hewage, “but we’ll be showing up with a car this year that will definitely be top 10. It’s about turning up with a really smart design, really thinking about your design and putting in the proper preparation.”

Watch out for kangaroos…

“Driving 3,000 kilometers, chances are you might hit a kangaroo,” he said. “You could’ve spent your whole time designing a car, the fastest thing on Earth, then you hit a kangaroo and it’s all over.”

See how the team does. CUER will be blogging, sharing photos and providing Twitter updates during the event, and is developing an application that will enable people to view real-time telemetry data during the race.

More than 35 teams from over 20 nations will compete in the Veolia World Solar Challenge. The solar car race, which some call the Formula One of eco-friendly motor sports, lasts about four days and spans some 1,800 miles. The race starts at Darwin in Australia’s Northern Territory and crosses the Outback to finish at Adelaide on the continent’s southern coast. Photo from The World Solar Challenge www.worldsolarchallenge.org/.

Filling the shoes of Mr. Jobs will be a particularly difficult if not impossible task since he was a benevolent dictator who exercised near complete control over the company, making practically every critical decisionfrom the design of the iPhone to the look and feel of the glass staircases in the companys retail stores. And since so little is known about the succession planning at Apple, that adds a degree of uncertainty to the question.

Still, management experts say Apple could benefit from taking a page from the playbook of International Business Machines. After all, the situation at Apple today bears some striking similarities to the management change at IBM nearly a decade ago.

IBM chairman Louis V. Gerstner, Jr. was also seen as a corporate visionary who revamped a technology icon on the verge of bankruptcy into an industry powerhouse. And when he stepped down in 2002 having completed a turnaround, he handed over the reins to a sales and operations whiz that skeptics worried would not have the vision chops to elevate the company to the next level.

But almost ten years after Mr. Gerstner stepped down, IBM under CEO Samuel J. Palmisano is doing better than ever, with shares of the company recently hitting an all-time high. How did IBM do it?

Former IBM executives say Gerstner groomed Palmisano by making sure he was given a broad range of top jobs, such as running its services, PC and enterprise system groups, before giving him responsibility for managing the companys day-to-day operations as president.

At Apple, Jobs groomed Cook in a similarly methodical way. Cook, a former IBM executive, joined Apple in 1998 as senior vice president of operations, overseeing the companys computer manufacturing. Later on, Jobs gave him responsibility for Apples worldwide sales and its Macintosh computer division. In 2005, Cook was named chief operating officer, positioning him as Jobss chief lieutenant. Making Cook the acting CEO of Apple while Jobs took three medical leaves over the last seven years, also helped pave the way for the August 24 resignation of Jobs.

The big question now for Apple, say management experts, is whether or not Jobs was able to take his instincts and DNA and build it into a replicable process inside of the company.

Innovation doesnt only have to spring from the head of the top, points out Rosabeth Kanter, a professor at Harvard Business School. A great CEO builds frameworks that allow other people to achieve greatness.

J. Bruce Harreld, a former top executive under Gertsner and Palmisano who now teaches at Harvard Business School and has studied Apple, says Jobs ran the company in a very individualistic way. You want to believe there is some process there but you are left scratching your head, said Harreld.

By contrast, says Harreld, Gerstner from the beginning created a process inside IBM that his successor could build upon. Gerstner broke down the fiefdoms at IBM and got the entire company to work together for the single purpose of solving customer problems. Palmisano took that one step further by extending collaboration to the world stage, creating a globally connected company instead of a corporation with entrenched country subsidiaries.

Apple observers say the 2008 creation of Apple University may have marked the beginning of an effort to institutionalize the thought process of Mr. Jobs, but very little known is about the initiative.

Palmisano also pushed the transformation of IBM by making the company culture more inclusive. In 2003, one year into his tenure, Palmisano organized a company-wide brainstorming session, asking employees what they believed the values of IBM should be. Out of that came the idea that IBM should play a bigger role on the public stage. This ultimately led to a new strategy, dubbed smarter planet, which is generating large contracts with cities and governments around the world to improve transportation, health care and telecommunications systems.

No question, Cook knows how to make the trains run on time. And the Apple product pipeline is set for the next few years, with great momentum and more Macs, iPhones and iPads in the works. But without Jobs, Cook will have to lean on other Apple executives to come up with the next insanely great products. Apple will also need to find someone who can negotiate game-changing deals with leaders of other industries, as Mr. Jobs did with executives in music, media and publishing.

Kanter said another big challenge for Cook will be to make Apples secretive culture more sensitive to the public. This will be especially important going forward as Apples growing power attracts the scrutiny of government regulators in the U.S. and around the world.

Apple cant sustain itself without playing that public role, said Kanter. To get the best employees and hearings of governments you need to do that. Apple is flying high on pure innovation but could still solidify here.

Apple, as the second largest (in market capitalization) company in the world, next to Exxon Mobil, is bound to take a hit in trading.

At around a $260 billion market capitalization, if Apple loses a billion or two in Thursday trading, what does that say about the value of Steve Jobs?

Can investors quantify the value of the loss of an executive such as Steve Jobs?

Whether we agree with the stock market’s reaction to the death of Steve Jobs or not, it is the wisdom of crowds at work. It’s very hard to argue with the wisdom of crowds that back up their opinion with real money. You have to pony up if you want to disagree.