Like Weebly, Yola, and others, DevHub makes it easy to build a website by just dragging and dropping the elements into place. But the people who use those services tend to be individuals who want a personal website, or small businesses in need of a web presence and maybe an online store. (I built my personal site using Weebly.) DevHub, on the other hand, says it can help you make money through advertising. To that end, all of its services are free (DevHub takes a cut of your revenue), and it also offers modules that make it easier to add content and advertising, such as affiliate offers, job listings, RSS feeds, and more.

If that sounds like a recipe for throwing up a bunch of not-terribly-useful sites that make money off search engine traffic, well, you can check out the gallery of featured sites. The content on the sites is certainly uneven, but DevHub says it limits users to 10 sites at first, and only allows you to create more if the sites are high-quality.

The DevHub service launched in February of this year. The company says it now more than 30,000 users whose sites draw more than 2 million unique users per month — and it’s profitable.

The funding comes from an undisclosed private equity group and individual angel investors, including Geoff Entress of Voyager Capital, John Cunningham of Clearfir, Alex Algard chief executive of WhitePages.com, Jeff Schrock of Intel Capital, Richard Wolpert (former President of Disney Online). EVO Media has raised less than $2 million in all, and says this should be the last time it needs to raise a venture round.

The idea is to support demonstration projects that have the potential to scale in size. For example, if a workable energy storage system can be devised as a pilot project, it might eventually be scaled up for utilities to draw in more solar, wind and other distributed yet intermittent sources of energy.

In order to qualify for the grant money, the projects in question also had to receive support from the private sector, which in all will supplement the amount given by the government with another $1 billion. In order to better explain to average consumers why this money is being well spent, the DOE provided the video below on YouTube:

Demonstration projects are also advantageous because they’ll give the government and the private sector a better idea of how much broader Smart Grid development will eventually cost — before they actually spend the money. If the roll out of grid technology proceeds on course, the Electric Power Research Institute estimates that 4 percent of energy and $20.4 billion in costs will be saved by 2030.

With this announcement, energy secretary Stephen Chu and the department have gone to even greater lengths to explain why American citizens should want a more efficient grid. Taking Ohio as an example, they say that the state stands to save $700 million in energy costs, which breaks down to $61 in utility savings per Ohio resident.

Many of the projects receiving the demo grant money involve several major stakeholders, including state governments, utilities and companies. To administer the awards, the DOE has split the group in half. The first 16 awards — totaling $435 million — will go to regional Smart Grid demonstration projects that will affect 21 states, 50 utilities and 100 million customers. The second flock of 16 — totaling $185 million — will go specifically to utility-scale energy storage projects.

The emphasis on storage is particularly interesting, considering comments made by Vinod Khosla and many others at last week’s GreenBeat 2009 conference. Khosla, who says he hasn’t found a compelling investment in the Smart Grid space yet, said that storage is the one segment of the business to watch. This sentiment was echoed by all of the venture capitalists and bankers speaking to the financial side of grid development.

Whether or not the Smart Grid becomes a reality — or becomes truly green — depends largely on whether or not we can figure out how to store large volumes of energy. if this problem can be solved, not only will it be easier to integrate wind and solar sources of energy that remain hobbled by their inconsistency, we will also be able to take the end off peak demand periods, bringing down the cost of energy delivered during those times.

A full list of the Smart Grid demonstration projects receiving a slice of the $620 million has been posted below. But there are a few interesting players to take a closer look at:

• The Boeing Company received $8.6 million to demonstrate a Smart Grid system equipped with military-grade cybersecurity. Boeing is one of a number of defense contractors, including Lockheed Martin, looking to get in on the Smart Grid’s momentum. This award is also an example of the emphasis being placed on security.
• The Pecan Street Project in Austin, Tex. received $10.4 million to deploy microgrid technology in a residential setting. The system will link 1,000 home smart meters and 75 commercial smart meters, and produce valuable data for even further development of microgrids, a hot concept in the space that many have predicted to be the most viable model for large-scale Smart Grid growth.
• The Center for the Commercialization of Electric Technologies in Austin, Tex. is getting $13.5 million to experiment with wind power on the grid — testing devices to monitor and adjust to variable energy loads, including the impacts of battery storage, smart appliance and plug-in vehicles.
• Pacific Gas & Electric — which didn’t receive any of the prior $3.4 billion in grants — is getting $25 million to demo an underground saline porous rock energy storage system that will use 300 megawatts of compressed air energy storage. Incidentally, this project is near Bakersfield, Calif., where PG&E is being sued for hiking energy rates after installing smart meters.
• Fremont, Calif.-based Amber Kinetics and Massachusetts-based Beacon Power received $4 million and $24.1 million, respectively, to develop demo-scale flywheel technology — another promising yet often overlooked method of large-scale energy storage.
• The Detroit Edison Company nabbed $5 million to implement energy storage systems created by recently public company A123Systems.

SG_Demo_Project_List_11.24.09 –

I played the beta of MAG (which originally mean Massive Action Game), a multiplayer-only online game debuting on the PlayStation 3 early next year. If the game works as advertised and the supporting PlayStation Network holds up under the stress of so many players, MAG will represent a huge step forward in simultaneous multiplayer gaming. The title has been a labor of love at Zipper Interactive, the Redmond, Wash.-based game studio owned by Sony and the maker of the SOCOM: US Navy Seals series of combat games.

This game is set in 2025, where there is official “world peace” between nations but private corporations wage war against each other in the global economy. There are three different private corporate armies you can choose to play. Valor Company is comprised of former U.S. and U.K. special forces soldiers. SVER (pronounced “sever”)  has soldiers from the downtrodden states of Asia and Eastern Europe. While the Raven Industries faction has high-tech Western European gear but is the least battle hardened.

Most first-person shooter games max out at 12, 16, 32, or sometimes even 64 players at a time. No one has tried to build a network so good that it can support as many as MAG can. Seth Luisi, design director at Sony, said in an interview that the company has been working on the goal of creating massive frag fests for years. One of the technological tricks it has learned is coo. It’s hard to track so many moving objects at once; but each character only sees a few things moving around at a time and so the game itself only updates that data on moving objects that are within a given character’s view point. It’s truly impressive when you move into an overhead view of the battlefield and see all of the blue or red dots moving around, each of them an individual soldier played by a real human.

With MAG, the battles can take on a much larger scale and even require organized strategy. For instance, players need to capture certain strongpoints on a map in order to move closer to victory. They can fire artillery barrages at the enemy, prompting air strikes against the artillery from the other side. But the air strikes won’t be effective unless the infantry advances and takes out the other side’s antiaircraft missiles. If the infantry advances far enough, then reinforcements can spawn closer to the action and make resupply easier. These actions require so much strategy that it means that the soldiers and the squads that they belong to have to be guided by smart human commanders.

The character outfits are customizable. You can decorate your character and it shows up inside the game. You can create five “loadouts,” or collections of gear that your soldier can use in different combat situations. You can create a loadout for a medic, for instance, or a sniper. You can arm yourself for close combat, electronics hacking, marksmaship, heavy support, or explosives — whatever you want.

If you choose heavy weaponry, you have more firepower but you’ll move slower. You get to spend a fixed number of points tricking out the character; that equalizes the game since everybody gets treated equal. This is all fairly standard in multiplayer combat. If you work your way up to level 15, you can become a squad leader, who can be in charge of eight soldiers at a time. As a squad leader, you can assign objectives to your players and you give them a leadership bonus in the fighting when you are near them. You can gain double experience points if you fight as a group. That’s one of the things the game designers have done to avoid a free-for-all Lord of the Flies environment.

At 350 leadership points, you can become a platoon leader, in charge of four squads, or 32 soldiers. The highest rank is Officer in Charge, who can lead 128 soldiers. In the beta, there are 12 maps available. There are vehicles in the game which you can control, such as an armored personnel carrier. If you move the vehicle around on the map, it can become a mobile spawn point, which means it’s the place where soldiers respawn after they die.

Your character advances based on experience points. If you level up enough, you can create your own clan, a kind of virtual posse of players who fight together. You can unlock goodies that help you fight better, such as a gun grip that gives you better aim. At any given time during the action, you can look up stats on which side is winning and who has the most kills.

I’m embarrassed to report that I got only four kills in an 18 minute match. That was pathetic. But these enemies really had my team pinned down as we tried to cross a bridge or ford the river below it. It was easy to forget that every enemy within sight of me was a smart human who could see movement and would likely fire on me if I moved into the open. Unfortunately, in this game, we had to try to advance on the enemy after they blew up the bridge. They were dropping us with big fields of fire and dropping artillery and poison gas on us regularly. I think that meant that their defense was very well organized while our attack was uncoordinated. I tried to move to the side of the map in an attempt to flank the enemy, but some well placed snipers stopped me cold.

It’s too bad the game won’t be ready for the holidays. Sony recently extended the beta test until Dec. 5, and the actual game will debut on Jan. 26. During the beta test, Zipper has been evaluating the data, such as kill maps that show where soldiers are dying most often, or navigation paths that show the most traveled parts of a map. They adjust the levels to make the maps more balanced. Let’s hope they do a decent job finalizing. I’m looking forward to a lot of frag fests, but I’m not much for Lord of the Flies.

Sony has given VentureBeat 50 beta codes to give away. To get a code, send an email to megabeta4.5@gmail.com. The beta will continue until the stroke of midnight on Dec. 5. [Photo and video by Alexa Lee]

Open vs Closed is one of today’s hottest topics in the apps and appstores world. It seems like everybody supports Open; also everybody calls themselves Open, but is it really so?

First, let’s define what Open really means, because everybody understands it differently. Openness is not binary; it has many shades of grey, as it does different dimensions. It starts at the very fundamental property of a mobile platform – whether the user is allowed to download apps from different sources (appstores, mobile sites, memory cards and other places). Although it is commonly believed that the only two really closed platforms given this definition are iPhone and Brew, other places may not in reality be perfectly open either, despite different public positioning. E.g. not many would know that Android by default comes with settings restricting the user from freely downloading apps from other places than Android Market. Such practices can barely characterize Openness. Drawing a comparison with the real world, how would you feel if you were only allowed to shop for all of your needs (from clothing to toys) in only one mall?

More importantly, though, are content guidelines. Formally created to “guard user experience”, too often they are used to ban competing businesses. In fact, the restrictions affect the most important, interesting and profitable areas, such as voice, navigation, music, browsing, etc. As a result, developers are kept away from the most lucrative businesses – “Yes, you can sell $0.99 peanuts in our town, but don’t even try to open a bank, or even a restaurant here…”. Consumers also suffer, as they are forced to use (and pay for) one specific service, not because they’ve chosen it, but only because it’s the only available…

GetJar CEO Ilja Laurs was born in 1976 in Lithuania and attended school at a time when the country was part of the Soviet Union. Ilja enrolled in an American student exchange program and graduated from Jackson high school in Ohio in 1994. He came back to Lithuania to attend Vilnius University where he studied Economics, financing his education by teaching English to school students. Serial entrepreneur since 1999, Ilja’s launched over 20 successful projects, as diverse as Lithuania’s largest hotel reservation system LithuanianHotels.com, mobile payments service MicroPay.lt and mobile games studio Gaxo Interactive. Fluent in Lithuanian, Russian and English, he holds a keen interest in Basketball, Tennis, Chess and Watches, and enjoys traveling. In 2009, Informa Telecoms & Media included Ilja in the list of Top 40 most influential people in mobile communications.

Based in Sunnyvale, Calif., Telegent provides designs for semiconductors that allow people to watch live television broadcasts on their computers and phones. It sells them to other companies, many based in China, that actually assemble them. It has raised $50 million to date from New Enterprise Associates, Walden International, Index Ventures, Northern Light Venture Capital and Enterprise Partners Venture Capital. Both NEA and Walden hold 24 percent of the company right now. Index has 12.8 percent.

Fortinet wowed the market last Wednesday, closing well above the $9 to $11 projected share price. Planning to use the money for product development and to fuel a potential acquisition strategy, the company, also based in Sunnyvale, was backed by Redpoint Ventures (with 15.2 percent of the company), Meritech Capital (with 10.8 percent), Acorn Campus Ventures, DCM, WI Harper Group and Defta Partners.

Redpoint reportedly made $11 million from the sale, while Meritech bagged $7.5 million. They will retain control of 12.4 percent and 8.9 percent of Fortinet, respectively. In August, the company made news with its acquisition of assets from Woven Systems, a fabric Ethernet provider that had raised $35 million from Goldman Sachs, Mohr Davidow Ventures and Palomar Ventures.

Later in the week, QuinStreet announced that it was filing for its own $250 million IPO, surprising analysts that saw it coming, but not for a while. Based in Foster City, Calif., the company provides marketing services to large companies, particularly in the education and financial services sectors, including DeVry.

QuinStreet is backed by Split Rock Partners (with 16.4 percent), Sutter Hill Ventures (with 10.6 percent), GGV Capital (with 7.1 percent), W Capital Partners (with 6.9 percent), Catterton Partners (with 5.9 percent) and Partech International (with 5.5 percent).

None of the three companies share investors in common — which says two things: First, that the public exit market is finally opening up for a diversity of firms, not just a chosen few; and second, that with more successful IPOs popping up next year, even more firms will feel better about investing, strengthening the economy’s rebound.

Unsure of the exact reason for the tremendous growth, Facebook “assumes it’s the result of an ad campaign,” juxtaposed with a number of features on the company’s Fan Page stimulating growth of new fans.

One of these features on the Toys R Us Facebook Fan Page includes a specialized one catering to the impending Black Friday that immediately follows Thanksgiving Day and is notoriously the biggest shopping day of the year. This “Black Friday Preview” application allows fans to find out what deals are available, and limits visibility of certain Fan Page tabs to fans alone — non-fans are forced to become fans in order to access certain tabs on the Toys R Us Fan Page.

From a technical standpoint, ContextOptional, the company that helped develop the Toys R Us Fan Page, didn’t use the standard “fb:visible-to-connection” tag in the Facebook Markup Language (FBML) for limiting visibility. Instead, it appears to use a customized simple application to verify whether a user is a fan or not.

According to Facebook’s predictions, there is a high likelihood that the Toys R Us Fan Page will reach over 400,000 fans by the end of today, which is typically only achieved using the “pay per fan” model. Although the growth in new fans decreases each day , Toys R Us has become one of the top brands across Facebook in a very short amount of time.

The success of the Toys R Us Fan Page might be a result of the rapidly impending holiday season, combined with the fact that marked down prices that are only visible to its fans. The large fan base could also be attributed to the continually growing demographic of new Facebook users in the 30-55 year old age bracket who are likely parents and/or grandparents of younger children, and therefore targeted Toys R Us consumers.

Updated

A number of companies offer better ways to schedule meetings than the standard back-and-forth over email — Huddle, TimeBridge, and Presdo are a few that come to mind. Now Google is experimenting with a feature that tackles the same problem, though a bit less ambitiously.

Here’s how it works: When you create an event in Google Calendar, you can add a list of the guests that you’d like to invite. Then, if you have access to their Google Calendars, all of their schedules appear side by side, and you can drag a translucent bar representing the event around until you find a time when everyone is free. You can also view the calendars of just a few guests, if certain people’s schedules are more important. (See the screenshot above — yes, for illustration purposes, I’m scheduling an event with myself. That’s the magic of multiple Google accounts.)

Of course, the need for access to each person’s Google Calendar would be a pretty big hurdle if you’re trying to schedule all your meetings this way. This is probably most useful if you’re trying to set up get-togethers between a group of coworkers or friends. Still, in those cases this looks much more convenient than shooting emails back-and-forth, or even compared to looking at everyone’s schedule in the standard view in Google Calendar.

Right now, the feature is being offered as a “sneak preview” to a limited number of users. I’ve emailed Google to get more details and will update if I hear back. If nothing else, it looks like I’m not the only tech writer who tried it out.

Update: Google says the feature was first turned on as a preview on Friday, and is actually available to everyone today.

[Megan Berry works for mobile analytics and advertising company Mobclix.]

Does your business have a plan for mobile? How’s this for a novel idea: Don’t just go charging in to develop your own iPhone app. Take just a little time to consider what makes the most sense for your company. Mobile advertising can be a great way to get your feet wet, while building up a full mobile presence requires a bigger investment with the possibility of greater rewards and risks.

Mobile Advertising and Marketing

With mobile, your company has an unprecedented opportunity to, with one ad buy, reach your customers whether they happen to be in line at the grocery store, in their car, cooking, or at a restaurant.

According to Digital Life America, smartphone users have an income 50% higher than the national average, so they’re an attractive market to reach. Furthermore, a recent report by Telecom Trends International predicts that smartphones sales will overtake regular phones by 2015, so expect an expanding audience.

Many mobile advertising networks and exchanges are starting to offer highly accurate targeting for mobile campaigns. Choose between advertising on the mobile web, in mobile applications, or via other methods such as SMS. Mobile web and in-app advertising are growing dramatically as they become an increasingly effective way to reach a high-income consumer.

Many online ad networks are starting to offer mobile options, too. If you’re doing internet buys anyway, why not expand your reach to mobile? Furthermore, the small mobile screen means higher engagement as your advertising is front and center. If you’ve decided to advertise you have a few options to choose from depending on your goals.

In-app advertising is ideal for reaching the growing smartphone audience. The Apple App Market has 115,000 apps, and the Android market already has 13,000 according to a Mobclix App Snapshot in a recent SMART report. In-app advertising can allow in-depth targeting based not only on application, but also by behavior, demographic information, and location. For example, sports stores can choose to advertise on fantasy football apps, and brick and mortar stores can use location-based advertising.

Pros: Reach smartphones audiences in native apps, target your ads, measure conversions, rich media creatives, highly engaged users.
Cons: Only for smartphones with apps, best for iPhones and Android devices, no offline ad serving.

Advertising on the mobile web is a way to reach a broad audience. Many devices with small or non-existent app markets will support web browsing. Similar to in-app advertising you can target specific audiences and measure your engagement.

Pros: Access a larger audience.
Cons: Hard to build ads that will appear native on all devices, iPhone and Android device geared towards apps

Sponsoring an app: This way you leave the job of creating a top app to someone else, but still associate your company’s name with it. An example of this is the 50 cent “Baby By Me” sound lab that allows the user to remix 50 cent’s latest song, while prominently featuring Vitamin Water. This is much less common, but depending on your marketing strategy, might be a good middle way between banner ads and developing your own application.

Pros: Guaranteed success of being aligned with a top app. Reach a larger audience than with your own app.
Cons: Can be expensive, not your own app, success usually temporary.

Overall, advertising is a great way to try out the mobile space quickly and without committing major resources. Building a good mobile app, by comparison, can cost anywhere from $50,000 to $150,000; and for many companies, that money would be better spent on an advertising campaign.

Many ad networks will allow you to start slow with a test campaign to see what kind of engagement levels you can reach. Plan to spend time developing your mobile creatives. With the limited screen space available, building a high-impact ad banner and landing page is key. You should consider building interactive ads or specialized campaigns that click to a coupon, call, or a map.

Extend your Internet Presence to Mobile

Nowadays, it’s unheard of for a business to go without a website; and it’s time to feel the same way about a business without a mobile presence too. Whether your business would be better served by mobile applications or a mobile web site, it’s time to start thinking about mobile as simply another way to reach out to your customers.

Creating a mobile version of your website can build goodwill and increase conversions among the smartphone set. Mobile internet usage is growing at a rate of 20 percent a year according to Mobile Marketer.

Depending on your site, it’s generally a smaller investment than a mobile app and will work on all devices, not just a given app market. If your audience is involved in mobile, then having either a mobile site or an app is worth considering.

Pros: Works on all devices that support web browsing.
Cons: Not as immersive as an app, harder to build buzz around it, content not as rich as website (no flash, etc.).

Building a mobile app is another option. When undertaking such a project it’s good to think about concrete goals for your app before simply rushing into it. What would be a successful app for you? An app that gets a lot of buzz, encourages users to interact and build brand loyalty, or an app that converts users into sales? These different goals result in very different apps.

You could build a fun app that gets users interested, an app that allows customer/business interaction, or an app focused on ecommerce. Ebay’s iPhone app is a great success story for an ecommerce app. It brought in $400 million this year, according to TechCrunch.

Adobe’s Photoshop Mobile is a successful app intended simply to build buzz and consumer loyalty. It’s a free app, currently in the top 10 free apps list, that allows users to play around with their photos. It encourages users to check out and upload to Adobe’s photo sharing site, allowing Adobe to extend its reach to mobile consumers.

Pros: Build customer loyalty and buzz, possibly include ecommerce.
Cons: Big investment, most such apps don’t make it to the top.

If you already have a web application, and/or software as a service, then extending your service or product to mobile can not only add value to your users, but drive signups and create buzz. For example, Salesforce built out Salesforce Mobile, an iPhone app that allows Salesforce users to access their information on their phone. There’s both a lite version that any Salesforce user can access for free and a full version that’s only for customers with unlimited or mobile licenses.

Cisco’s WebEx went a similar route with a mobile application that lets you join a WebEx meeting from your iPhone. Building a mobile component adds user value, as customers increasingly rely on their mobile devices; it also positions your company as the technology leader that is updating for the benefit of its users.

Furthermore, some companies are finding that mobile is becoming more important for them than web. Internet radio provider Pandora, created a mobile application in July, starting with the iPhone but soon moving on to Blackberry, Palm, and Android. Now, Pandora has found that almost half of first-time users are signing up via mobile devices and 24% of its total user base has a smart phone account, according to GigaOm. Building out a mobile service can greatly expand your user base.

What strategies does your business use to reach a mobile audience? Start serious discussions today. Your competition is probably already doing it.

Megan Berry is an evangelist for Mobclix, the industry’s largest mobile ad exchange, working on social media and marketing. She also blogs at The Huffington Post and the Mobclix blog. You can follow her on Twitter as @meganberry, or through the @Mobclix handle.

The Wall Street Journal reported that Facebook is converting all current shareholders to Class B stock, which carries ten times the voting power of Class A stock. Those shares will remain Class B shares unless the owner sells them during an initial public offering, when they will turn into Class A shares. A dual-class structure could make the stock less attractive to investors because they have weaker voting powers. Google structured its offering in a similar way, with two classes of stock.

A Facebook spokesperson gave this comment:

“Facebook is a private company so we don’t typically share details on stock-related matters. But we did introduce a dual class stock structure because existing shareholders wanted to maintain control over voting on certain issues to help ensure the company can continue to focus on the long-term to build a great business. This revision to the stock structure should not be construed as a signal the company is planning to go public. Facebook has no plans to go public at this time.”

Asana

Asana is probably one of the more anticipated startups in Silicon Valley right now. Moskovitz, Mark Zuckerberg and Chris Hughes founded Facebook together during college at Harvard University. Rosenstein was another early Facebook employee. The pair are trying to re-imagine productivity management in a way that’s completely native to the web and overcomes many of the problems associated with other mediums like e-mail.

They went with two of the Valley’s best-known firms — Benchmark Capital has funded Twitter, eBay and Red Hat and Andreessen-Horowitz is the new fund from Netscape co-founder Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz. The new round is specifically to attract the best engineering and user interface design talent around: Asana boasts perks like in-house yoga, organic home-cooked meals and $10,000 to set up your workspace any way you want.

That’s not to diminish some of the technical infrastructure the company has built underpinning their product. While the pair didn’t say much about the look or feel of what they’re building, they did talk a bit about the some of the underlying technology. They haven’t released a time-line for when they’ll demo the product.

“We’re building a new kind of end-to-end system for developing web applications at literally an order of magnitude faster than is possible today,” said Rosenstein. “It’s fundamentally groundbreaking technology that involves many different kinds of problems in software engineering and computer science from infrastructure, algorithms and database work to programming languages and compilers.”

Rosenstein said the new programming system, called Lunascript after Moskovitz’ cat, eliminates a lot of the grunt work involved in software engineering.

“When you’re programming, there’s a lot of work that’s really quite repetitive and rote which we ended up doing over and over again,” Rosenstein said. “We’ve created a new kind of programming system that allows a developer to express the essence and intent of the application and handles that other 90 percent of the rote, repetitive work for them.”

As for the product itself, it’s productivity management software that can be applied to anything from engineering work to personal tasks. It rivals Google Wave in ambition, although Rosenstein said it doesn’t resemble anything out on the market. Asana’s team uses their own product to manage development work inside the company.

In designing the product, there were a few critical issues the team wanted to address. For example, if you’re working with a group of people, you might finish a task but then you have to spend time explaining to other people that you’ve done it.

“There’s this redundancy — I know I’ve done the work. The machine knows I’ve done the work. But there’s this completely superfluous task of making sure that other people who need that information have it,” he said. So Asana would automate that more. They’re also focused on speed through designing shortcuts and keystrokes to get things done quickly.

The company name’s, Asana, comes from yoga, which the company does together twice a week. Benchmark’s Matt Cohler, who knew the pair from his days as an early executive at Facebook, joins Asana’s board.

The two left Facebook last fall and founded the company out of some of the productivity issues they ran into there.

“We were thinking about how we could maximize the efficiency of Facebook and we realized it was such an important problem that it warranted its own company,” Rosenstein said. “Our goal is that, much in the spirit of something like e-mail, this will be useful to all people.”

Siri leverages speech-to-text technology and artificial intelligence to allow users to “just say what they want to do.” The VPA then takes over and does the rest. Siri explains: “You can discover things to do over the weekend, get tickets to the movies, or call a cab when you’re out on the town. You don’t have to search through a bunch of web pages, following links and hunting down facts. Siri does all the work giving you the information you need at your fingertips.”

Previously, Siri raised $8.5 million in round one funding from its second round investors. In addition, INQ Mobile chief executive Frank Meehan as been listed as a new board member.

While not officially launched yet, interested users can visit the site to register for a notification for when the product has been launched. The registration site also asks for your device type, suggesting that product will be available across platforms.

A new, malicious worm, dubbed the “Duh” worm, has hit jailbroken phones, grabbing personal information, including banking codes. But there are apparently a couple of ways to protect yourself.

U.K.–based security firm Sophos, which confirmed Duh’s existence says you’re likely to know when you’ve been hacked. Chester Wisniewski, a senior security advisory with Sophos, notes that “Duh’s” accessing information rapidly drains the iPhone’s battery. “And anyone playing by Apple’s rules is, of course, safe.” He recommends any and all jailbroken iPhone users to restore their devices to their purely Apple state, also adding the most current Apple firmware through iTunes, thus protecting the iPhone from possible intrusion.

But Paul Ducklin, also of Sophos, says you don’t necessarily have to play by the rules to stay safe. There’s a way to clean up an infected iPhone without leaving your jailbroken state. From his blog today:

To disinfect your iPhone, you should login as root with the password ohshit and remove at least the following files:

/private/var/mobile/home/sshd
/private/var/mobile/home/cydia.tgz
/private/var/mobile/home/inst
/private/var/mobile/home/syslog
/private/var/mobile/home/duh


However, since the directory /private/var/mobile/home does not exist on regular, uninfected iPhones, you may as well remove the entire directory and any subdirectories. Remove the file /etc/rel while you are about it.

Over the past few weeks, before the Duh worm hit, there had been reports of a seemingly benign worm infiltrating iPhone users who have jailbroken their devices. That older, benign worm was Australian-born and was aptly named the “rickrolling” Ikee worm, because it simply changed the background image on the device to a picture of Rick Astley, the 80s pop star. That worm was the first known worm to affect iPhone users to date.

Both Ikee and Duh affect phones that use the SSH (security shell) Unix utility application, a feature that lets users connect to their iPhone remotely through an encrypted Internet channel. The worms slither into iPhones through the SSH application due to the fact that many users have not changed the default password, thereby making them vulnerable targets.

However, Duh (or “Ikee.B”) is much more malicious than Ikee. Using the same technique as the “rickrolling” Ikee worm, it preys on this same vulnerability, only to those who have not changed the defaulted password, which is universally “alpine.” If users have not changed this password to a personalized password, the Duh worm will automatically change the password to their created password “ohshit,” and hack into the owners’ information, including possibly online banking codes. This personal information then gets sent to the central server (which has been tracked to Lithuania, although the hackers appear to be Dutch) and copycatted, then modified to the original Aussie Ikee worm’s code.

“Data theft like this is a sign of what practical future worms will be like on the mobile platforms,” warns Sophos’ Wisniewski.

[Image credit: www.techshout.com]

The idea is to become a social media dashboard, so you can update your Facebook, LinkedIn, Ping.fm and Twitter status and track what friends are doing on each network directly from HootSuite instead of visiting each web destination. After LinkedIn opened up its platform yesterday, a number of social media clients including Tweetdeck are adding LinkedIn status updates this week. HootSuite’s Facebook integration lets you see comments in addition to status updates.

The Vancouver-based company behind HootSuite, Invoke Media, also added Twitter lists: you can either import ones you’ve already made or create them using the client’s drag-and-drop feature.

So how does it stack up against the other big clients like Tweetdeck, Seesmic and Brizzly? HootSuite is one of the more professionally oriented social media clients — the kind of user that would want to schedule updates across several networks would probably be a brand or small business. HootSuite also has built-in analytics so a user can track how many others have clicked on links they’ve shared.

Each of the clients has their own comparative strengths. Tweetdeck is fast as an desktop application based on Adobe Air. Seesmic has several mobile apps on Blackberry and Android phones and has integrated Twitter’s new location feature. Brizzly is more consumer-oriented, and has some nice design flourishes like in-line photos and videos and explanations for trends.

Companies across the globe are hitting the social media scene hard in an effort to better reach their customers and deepen relationships. This kind of activity is visible on sites like Twitter or industry/company-specific online communities.

While many small business owners are acutely aware of this trend and are utilizing social media tools to reach their own customers, they rarely consider the fact that they are in fact customers themselves — customers who have a voice.

As a small business owner, you likely work with suppliers everyday. Chances are, many of the businesses that you work with desperately want your feedback and are harnessing the power of social media to get it. Just think… by engaging with the social media efforts of your suppliers, you can make a direct connection with them and in turn have immediate power over the way you are served.

Here are some examples:

- If you have a complaint over changes a supplier recently made to its payment structure, you can use social media to discuss the issue with other customers—all the while having the eyes and ears of the supplier you’re complaining about.

- If a supplier just launched an exciting new service that will benefit your business but you have a few ideas on how to make it even better, you can use social media to post these ideas and receive feedback from other customers.

- If you just received a new product from a supplier and are having trouble figuring out how to best utilize it and need help, you can use social media to post your questions and receive answers from other customers you’ve used it or the supplier itself.

There’s no doubt that your primary goal in social media engagement should be to connect with your own customers, but isn’t it also beneficial to connect with the businesses that are working to serve you?

The terms of the deal were not disclosed. The company was founded by Skype and Kazaa founders Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis. Adconion, which has 300 million monthly unique users, said it will pursue Joost’s new strategy, announced in June, of focusing on providing white-label video platforms for other companies. Among Adconion’s deals: it will provide the exclusive display and video ad-serving solution for European firm Goldbach Media Group.

Joost caused a stir earlier this summer when chief executive Mike Volpi left the company to join Index Ventures. Then Friis and Zennstrom sued Volpi, Index, and eBay for engaging in a deal that allegedly took the technology that belonged to the Skype founders. They also sued Volpi for using insider information. eBay eventually sold Skype to an investor group, but only after Index Ventures was jettisoned from the group.

Santa Monica, Calif.-based Adconion said it will continue to operate the Joost web site. Meanwhile, the Adconion.TV division will add Joost videos to its library of professionally-produced video content used by 2,000 publishers. Adconion inserts pre-roll video ads into those videos. Prior to the Joost deal, Adconion was serving 80 million video streams per day to those 2,000 web sites. We covered the company when it made another acquisition and raised money.

In a statement, Adconion CEO Tyler Moebius said, “Video is a top priority for our company, and through the acquisition of the Joost assets we will be able to provide advertisers, content owners and website publishers with an end-to-end global video platform and cross-channel video and display ad-serving solution.”