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I’ll say it once and I’ll say it again: if you don’t come home to find a stranger browsing Facebook on your couch, you haven’t truly lived the college experience.

CBS Atlanta reports that a woman returned to her University of Georgia residence hall living quarters to find another woman sitting on her couch, using her laptop to mindlessly browse Facebook.

When the woman confronted her unwelcome Facebooker, she reportedly “stammered and apologized” before grabbing her things and scurrying off.

Later, it was determined that the woman had also peed on the couch that she was using to browse Facebook.

According to police, the intruder was an 18-year-old UGA student.

A college student stammering, in the wrong house, mindlessly clicking around Facebook and pissing on a couch? Wait a minute, that sounds familiar. Oh yeah, that basically describes every single night of a college freshman. Sounds like someone simply had too many jello shots and wandered into the wrong house.

Or, we have something much more sinister afoot. Police say the investigation is ongoing.

OpenDNS, the domain-name-server-provider-turned-security-company, has raised an undisclosed second round of capital as a Series B, and added Stefan Dyckerhoff from Sutter Hill Ventures to its board. The company, which last year expanded from DNS services to providing security optimized for today’s cloud environment, has seen its customer base grow significantly from 3,500 to 7,000 enterprise customers. The funding will help it add staff and data centers to support the Umbrella security offering.

Domain name servers are an integral part of the internet, containing the IP address of domain names you type into a browser. When a user types in a URL, the computer sends the request to a DNS server that then tells your computer the site’s IP address. When it comes to security, control of DNS servers allows OpenDNS to provide a level of security no matter where the person logging into a network sits, because a company can enforce its policies at the domain name server, essentially refusing employees access to questionable or malicious sites before the content ever gets to the device. It also stops attacks way out in the internet as opposed to on the corporate network.

For those who want to know more about security threats facing corporations here’s a video interview with OpenDNS CEO David Ulevitch discussing how the adoption of the cloud and geopolitical instability has led to a new level of security threats:

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• Quality of the cloud: best practices for ISVs
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• The evolution of consumer-media cloud storage

Technologies around the Internet and the WAN have been around for some time. However, it wasn’t until very recently that a specific term began circulating which was supposed to emphasize the combination of these technologies. Cloud computing was born out of the idea of a distributed computing system where information was available from numerous different points. Although the idea has certainly caught on – there are still some misconceptions and confusions around the cloud.

Many businesses have found great ways to utilize a cloud model. Now, they’re able to be more agile, grow faster and even add to their business resiliency. Still, there are those that have never really worked with an enterprise cloud model and are held back by myths and confusion points around the technology.

In HP’s Five myths of cloud computing, we learn some of the biggest myths currently circulating in the cloud industry. Remember, the cloud is a vast, diverse, model which can accommodate many different types of organizations. Whether it’s a private, public, hybrid or community cloud – there may be a fit for your organization. Still, without full understanding the cloud model, it’s easy to be confused by so many different types of offerings.

The Five myths of cloud computing whitepaper outlines the key areas where IT managers and business stakeholders should seek more clarification. Specifically:

• Myth 1: The public cloud is the most inexpensive way to procure IT services
• Myth 2: Baby steps in virtualization are the only way to reach the cloud
• Myth 3: Critical applications do not belong in the cloud
• Myth 4: All cloud security requirements are created equally
• Myth 5: There is only one way to do cloud computing

Download HP’s whitepaper on the five myths of cloud computing to see where you are able to adjust your cloud strategy and if your environment is really ready for a cloud computing model.

Google has launched a new way for sites to opt out of having their content show up in Google Shopping, Advisor, Flights, Hotels, and Google+ Local search.

Matt Cutts announced the feature in a very brief post on the Google Webmaster Central blog, saying, “Webmasters can now choose this option through our Webmaster Tools, and crawled content currently being displayed on Shopping, Advisor, Flights, Hotels, or Google+ Local search pages will be removed within 30 days.”

This is obviously not a feature that Google would want a ton of people to use, because the less content that appears in these services, the less useful they are. Perhaps that’s why Cutts hasn’t tweeted about the tool (maybe not, but perhaps). At least with the short announcement, they have something they can point to.

The feature is a direct response to an investigation by the Federal Trade Commission. When Google settled with the FTC, one of the voluntary concessions Google made was a feature that would let sites opt out of Google’s specialized search engines.

As Danny Sullivan notes, the feature doesn’t let you choose which search engines you wish to opt out of. If you use the feature, you’re opting out of all of those mentioned.

On a help page, Google says, “This opt-out option currently applies only to services hosted on google.com and won’t apply to other Google domains.”

This week might just have seen a significant shift in how British investors think about their role as owners of companies.

First up we had three of our largest unions teaming up behind a set of governance guidelines which they will wave noisily in the air at AGMs, but more significantly, Tuesday morning saw the first steps towards building the kind of collaborative architecture for investors envisioned by the Kay Review.

As first steps go, it’s fairly tentative (as was the first, first step). In a sparse announcement, the Association of British Insurers, the National Association of Pension Funds and Investment Management Association announced they will set up a working group to report back on how collective engagement “might be enhanced to make a positive difference.” It is a response to Economist John Kay’s government-backed report from last July, which argued funds could improve returns to savers by presenting a united front to company boards.

We’ve looked before at how difficult this will be given the diversity of outlook and motivation among investors. Significantly, Tuesday’s statement makes explicit reference to drawing in “overseas investors” who at the last count were heading towards ownership of half the UK stock market, though quite how that might work is hard to see. IMA chief executive Daniel Godfrey told Reuters he has already spent some time sounding out some of those foreign share owners, and encountered a “range of views and a range of enthusiasms.” The next step, he says, is to work out whether there’s a way to navigate past the obstacles.

The members of the working group tasked with this will be named by the end of next month and will be expected to deliver an answer in the autumn. The hope will be that they can avoid some of the issues which have hampered the ABI, NAPF and IMA’s last effort to join forces.

The IIC (Institutional Investor Committee) was — or in theory ‘is’ (it is still there in an odd kind of zombie state) — an initiative to corral institutional investors into a meaningful whole in the wake of the financial crisis. Its example will act as a warning to the working group trying to come up with an alternative.

The IIC’s first action seemed oddly to sidestep the flaws most visible during the crisis, setting up a committee to investigate rights issue fees which arrived at the not unexpected conclusion that they were… drumroll…. too high! Since then it has pretty much disappeared from the radar, knocking out ho-hum press releases at the rate of three a year and singularly failing to latch on to that new vigour among investors which inspired starry headlines during last year’s so-called ‘shareholder spring’.

The latest word is that IIC will continue to exist, even though its stated remit chimes harmoniously with this latest project, and with the conclusions of the Kay Review. It is probably fair to note that it has ‘focused’ on broad policy issues rather than on the nuts and bolts of browbeating chief executives or gathering forces to vote down a pay deal, but it also cannot be accused of leading the agenda on issues where is has got involved.

In short, it seems to lack ambition as much it lacks firepower, and this new initiative will have to make sure it falls at neither hurdle. Godfrey tells us he is “determined we should do something where we are able to follow through”; his blog post today hints at a nimble structure which is nevertheless able to do the “heavy lifting” in individual cases. Perhaps the crucial moment will come if it does succeed in gathering some support from among the giant sovereign funds and U.S. investment houses as well as investors whose outlook is more short-term. Progress convincing these players to join the game will mean there is half a chance that we might see a new Big Beast to shake-up British boardrooms.

Zombieland, the 2009 cult classic movie, about four unlikely people who come together to fight their way across an undead-filled America, is making a comeback of sorts — rising from the dead, as it were. Amazon Studios has picked up on the surprisingly popular movie and the not so surprising Zombie fetish we have and announced its latest offering.

Zombieland the series will be produced as a pilot and make its way into your living room via Amazon Prime. It is the seventh comedy pilot announced by the online TV studio and it joins six children’s show pilots also under production.

“Zombieland is a fan favorite and we can’t wait to see where this story line goes in a serialized format”, Roy Price, Amazon Studios director, says. “We’ve been announcing a lot of exciting exclusive content for Prime Instant Video, like Downton Abbey, Under the Dome, and Justified, and we think adding original shows to that lineup is going to make Prime even more enticing for customers”.

Creator Paul Wernick says “Zombieland will strive to break the rules—action, adventure, thrills, chills and laughs and all packed into a half hour format”. These are lofty expectations here, so the show had better deliver now.

Production has not yet started, so there is no release date yet announced, but in the meantime Prime customers have a quickly growing number of choices from the movie and TV show library. Amazon is in a race with Netflix, which is also now producing original content.

Over two years ago, actress Karen Black was diagnosed with ampullary cancer and had one-third of her pancreas removed. According to Black’s husband, Stephen Eckelberry, after extensive chemotherapy and radiation treatments she was able to conquer her cancer.

Unfortunately, her cancer has returned, and has begun spreading. After multiple operations, the Easy Rider actress, says Eckelberry, “can hardly move around and is mostly bed-bound.” She now weighs less than 100 pounds.

Eckelberry now believes that a clinical study in Europe could be Black’s last chance at survival. Only thing is, it’s rather expensive. As anyone living in the U.S. knows, medical bills and the costs associated with a medical condition pile up quickly. Black and Eckelberry have now found their finances dipping into the red. So, Eckelberry and Black looked to fans to help out with some crowdfunding.

Over one week ago, a gofundme campaign was launched to send Black for the European treatments. Now, after just 11 days, nearly $30,000 has been raised – far exceeding the $22,000 goal that was set.

Eckelberry updated the campaign page yesterday, thanking the donors profusely:

Everybody thank you so much for the donations and kind thoughts. Karen and are touched beyond belief. It’s so great to know she can make this trip. I promise to keep everybody updated. Any additional money that is raised beyond our goal will go towards my going with her. THIS IS AMAZING THANK YOU SO MUCH

(Image courtesy Vanessa Lua/Wikimedia Commons)

This is what happens when you’re a high-profile job switcher, especially in the gossip-mad tech world. People talk about you. And that’s what happened to Mark Hurd.

Reports surfaced last week that Hurd, who is co-president of Oracle, was on the short list of prospective Dell CEOs from Blacktone Partners, a private equity firm interested in buying Dell. Blackstone, presumably, would need to install its own guy if its bid against the current Dell guy, Michael Dell, wins the day.

Asked about the issue in Japan at a press event, Hurd said: “I’m very happy at Oracle. No interest.”

Mark Hurd in Japan goes on the record on #Dell: “I’m very happy at Oracle. No interest." #oracle http://t.co/pYsKAM9fDK—
deborah hellinger (@dhellinger) March 25, 2013

Of course, that doesn’t mean Blackstone didn’t ask.

The timing must have been awkward for Hurd. Later today, his boss, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, and systems guy John Fowler will unveil the latest-and-greatest Oracle server. If you want to sit in, you can register here. 

It doesn’t help when a humongous software company is trying to build hardware credibility for there to be rumors about one of your top guys — a hardware guy — jumping ship to another hardware company. Hurd is the former chairman and CEO of Hewlett-Packard who exited under a cloud in August, 2010.  A month later he was  snapped up by Ellison as Oracle co-president (with Safra Catz)

First line of Blackstone/Michael Dell meeting: "So, yeah… sorry for calling Mark Hurd before we called you."—
  (@danprimack) March 26, 2013

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Since coming up short in the November elections, its fifth popular-vote loss in the last six presidential elections, the Republican Party has been engaged in an anguished discussion of what went wrong, and what needs to change.

The latest example is the 100-page Growth and Opportunity Project (GOP, get it?) report that the Republican National Committee released last week. According to the RNC, “the Republican Party needs to stop talking to itself,” and figure out how to be more appealing to minorities, the young, and women. It also needs to get with this digital stuff (the biggest part of the report is devoted to campaign mechanics, especially the GOP disadvantage in use of data, social media, and other digital tools) and figure out how to use billionaire donors to its advantage rather than letting them hijack the party’s agenda.

For somebody who came of voting age in the 1980s, this is all quite disorienting. I always thought self-flagellation was a Democratic thing. But times change, and the Republicans now are in a situation a lot like the Democrats then — still holding on to an advantage in statehouses and in the House of Representatives, but facing ever-stiffer headwinds at the national level.

So what should the Republicans do about it? A key word in much of the discussion so far has been “rebranding.” (The RNC report uses the word “brand” five times and “rebranding” twice.) If only the party didn’t come across as so old and so angry and so white, the reasoning goes, it’d get more votes. This explains the sudden bursts of enthusiasm for the likes of Florida Senator Marco Rubio and — over the past few weeks — Maryland neurosurgeon Benjamin Carson.

It could well be that a charismatic candidate who appealed to minorities, made better use of campaign technology, and embraced some modest policy changes (mainly on immigration and gay marriage) could sweep Republicans back into the White House. It’s not like Obama’s popular-vote majority was that overwhelming, and the current Democratic mix of affluent professionals, minorities, unionized workers, and the young isn’t exactly a natural coalition.

But I think the Republicans are going about this all wrong. The party has been selling pretty much the same product for more than three decades now, while market conditions have changed. So far the self-examination has focused chiefly on its sales techniques; as detailed in the RNC report and Robert Draper’s New York Times Magazine cover story last month on young Republican operatives, GOP pollsters have been convening lots of focus groups in which people tell them the party comes across as old, angry, and out of touch. What most Republican leaders don’t seem to have worked very hard at yet is figuring out what voters outside the GOP base need and want.

It’s like the flailing companies in Ted Levitt’s classic HBR article “Marketing Myopia” that err by thinking their job is to sell a product rather than satisfy a customer need. And because all of us at HBR have A.G. Lafley and Roger L. Martin’s Playing to Win on the brain these days, I also can’t help but contrast the Republican reaction so far to what Lafley’s Procter & Gamble did to revive the skin-care brand Olay.

Oil of Olay was a bit like today’s GOP — its customers were aging and dying off, and younger women didn’t even really consider buying it. So P&G decided to target a different demographic, women from their mid-30s onward who were just beginning to notice signs of wear and tear on their skin, and reformulated the product using better, more expensive ingredients to fight “the seven signs of aging.” After that came a rebranding (from Oil of Olay to Olay), and all sorts of smart marketing and pricing choices that led to a spectacular revival.

I realize this is skin lotion we’re talking about, not politics and policy. But the idea of starting by rethinking of what potential customers need, then building a strategy aimed at winning those customers over, has widespread application.

In their book Grand New Party, published a few months before Barack Obama’s 2008 electoral triumph, young Republican thinkers Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam took just such a strategic approach to building a future Republican majority. The need they identified among the working-class “Sam’s Club voters” they deemed crucial was for policies that battled the economic insecurity that bedevils more and more Americans. Among other things, they recommended shifts in the tax code to favor young families (a much-expanded child tax credit, for example), health-care reform that combined catastrophic coverage for all with the removal of a lot of the current incentives for overspending, and job-creating investments in alternative energy.

I don’t know if this would actually be a winning strategy for the Republican Party (one conservative critic at the time called it “Sam’s Club socialism“), but it is at least a strategy, and a forward-looking and hopeful one, that is not inconsistent with Republican tradition.

After the book came out, the financial crisis and subsequent Great Recession made the problem of economic insecurity much, much worse. Instead of embracing the Douthat-Salam policy solutions or even the basic notion that insecurity is a problem, Republicans on the national level mostly ran bellowing loudly in the opposite direction. They did this in large part because the Obama administration was trying to address these problems, and they figured that outright opposition was a better tactic than tinkering at the margins of President Obama’s plans. As a result, I am hard-pressed to think of a single serious Republican legislative proposal at the national level over the past four years that addressed the problems of economic insecurity in a constructive way (yes, I’m sure somebody more wonkish and sympathetic than I will be able to identify a couple, but I think the basic point will stand).

The tone has changed a bit since the November election, with even hard-line House Majority Leader Eric Cantor backing a new “Making Life Work” initiative “to improve the lives of you and your family” and the expanded child-tax credit undergoing a revival. But so far it’s just talk, and has yet to run the apostasy-punishing gauntlet of a Republican primary season.

The primaries are of course a big part of the Republicans’ dilemma. If the people in charge of Oil of Olay had to be reelected by customers every two years, it would have been a lot harder for them to abandon those customers in search of new, more-profitable ones. And in a two-party system, the need to cobble together a majority adds a complexity to strategic choices that corporations selling products often don’t face.

But without a strategic approach that starts with the wants and needs of potential voters — not with the current set of GOP policies — the party is doomed to drift.

Google has successfully pressured the Swedish Language Council to remove a new word because it risks turning “google” into a generic term.

It’s a testament to Google’s dominance that most people simply say “google it” when they really mean “search it.” Because of this market domination, it’s completely understandable that a word like “ogooglebar” would emerge in the Swedish language. “Ogooglebar” translates to “ungoogleable,” as in “that was so obscure that it was ungoogleable, man.”

The word, which was added to the list of new Swedish words back in December, has officially been removed.

Google exerted pressure, asking the council to amend the definition to mean searches unable to be unearthed by Google only, not just any search engine. But instead of amending the definition, which the council said would go against their values, they decided to ax it altogether.

But just from the official list. It’s not like Swedes will stop using the word “ogooglebar.”

“If we want to have ogooglebar in the language, then we’ll use the word and it’s our use that gives it meaning – not a multinational company exerting pressure. Speech must be free!” said Swedish Language Council head Ann Cederberg.

Of course, the problem for Google is that the term “Google” is constantly toeing the dangerous line of falling into generic territory. Sure, it’s nice to be such a dominant force in your area of expertise that your company’s name becomes synonymous with the product itself.

Think Kleenex, Band-Aid, or Xerox? Those are actually trademarked names that people have gradually turned into the common name for the products they represent – tissue, bandages, and copy machines, respectively.

But it’s not so nice when your trademarks are in jeopardy of being declared generic – which is what can technically happen in situations like this. And it’s not like Google hasn’t had to deal with this before.

“It would go against our principles, and the principles of language. Google has forgotten one thing: language development doesn’t care about brand protection,” said Cederberg.

[The Local via The Verge]

In late February, Google launched the Chromebook Pixel to reviews praising the hardware, but criticizing its $1,300 price tag and lack of software. Still, the Pixel certainly has a market, and some may be waiting for the LTE version of Google’s new flagship Chromebook to launch. The good news is that you won’t have to wait much longer.

On the Chromebook Pixel product page, Google now says that the Pixel is expected to ship by April 8. The LTE Chromebook Pixel comes in at $1,449, or $149 more than the Wi-Fi Chromebook Pixel, but the added LTE capability may be worth it to the consumer that desires more mobility out of their consumer electronics.

Before you dive headfirst into the LTE Pixel, though, you should probably be aware of what you’re getting into. For starters, the LTE Pixel exclusively uses Verizon’s LTE network. Those who purchase it will get 100 MB a month for the first two years. After that, you’ll have to start paying normal LTE network fees.

If you want more data, you’ll have to purchase a data plan with Verizon. Gigaom reports that Verizon will be selling Pixel LTE data by the gigabyte with 1GB a month costing $20, 3GB a month costing $35 and 5GB a month costing $50. If you want unlimited data for a day, that will cost $9.99. Gigaom also confirmed with Verizon that those already on a data sharing plan with the wireless carrier can add the Pixel to their existing plan for $10 more a month.

At the moment, the Pixel is tied to Verizon. It will be interesting, however, to see if Google starts offering it on other carriers in the future. If T-Mobile can build out its 4G LTE network even more, I could see some people flocking to the carrier for its unlimited data plans.

Yelp announced the launch of a new “revenue estimator” tool, which lets local businesses compare their Yelp-driven business to the national average as found in a recent Boston Consulting Group study. According to that study, local businesses with free Yelp accounts saw $8,000 in annual revenue from Yelp. For advertisers, it was $23,000.

This new free tool does the math by multiplying customer leads sent from Yelp each month by the business’s average revenue per customer lead,” explains Yelp in a blog post. We’ve also included the average spend per customer for each business category for reference, based on the BCG study.”

“We think this new tool will be helpful to business owners for two reasons,” the company adds. “First, it helps quantify the revenue opportunity Yelp is already sending to each business. Second, it establishes a revenue baseline for prospective advertisers, from which they can later evaluate the impact of their investment in Yelp Ads.”

Business owners can use the tool when they log in to Yelp.

This isn’t the only new calculation tool out there available for businesses. Google just launched one too. This one helps you calculate the value of mobile for both online and offline conversions.

Babbel, maker of an online learning system for foreign languages, has closed its Series B round with $10 million, the company announced. The company, which previously raised $2.2 million in equity and debt financing, is backed by Reed Elsevier Ventures, Nokia Growth Partners, IBB Beteiligungsgesellschaft, and Kizoo.

PRESS RELEASE
Babbel, the online learning system for foreign languages, today announced the closing of a series B funding round. Leading the round is Reed Elsevier Ventures. Other investors include Nokia Growth Partners as well as existing investors, IBB Beteiligungsgesellschaft via its VC Fonds Technologie Berlin, and Kizoo. The investment will be used to accelerate international expansion and improve the adaptation to all relevant mobile and online platforms.

Present in more than 190 countries, the Berlin-based startup’s strongest footprint has so far been in the German market. Now it will aggressively enter other European countries, the Americas and emerging markets. Babbel will also extend its partnerships with different hardware manufacturers, platform providers and media across the world.

Babbel.com is operated by Lesson Nine GmbH, Berlin. The company had previously raised a total of $2.2M in equity and debt and has experienced rapid revenue growth of over 200% per year since 2011. Recently, Lesson Nine announced the acquisition of competitor PlaySay. The deal was fueled, without regard to the new investment, from operating cash flow.

The basis for the success of the language learning system is the consistent use of mobile and Internet technologies and the integration of modern, practical learning content that motivates and guides the learner in an entertaining way. Over 6500 tailor-made learning hours for thirteen languages are available to learners online, as an iPad app and as free vocabulary training apps for iPhone, Android and Windows 8, as of today, have been downloaded over 8 million times.

“Babbel is a European digital media success story and I am delighted that we are joining the investor group at this exciting time”, says Tony Askew, General Partner at Reed Elsevier Ventures. “The startup has grown rapidly to over 15 million users and has built a large subscriber base which generates positive cash flows. Babbel’s excellent mobile and online products consistently rate as consumer favorites and Babbel is very well positioned for explosive growth in the rapidly growing category of mobile and online language learning.”

“Nokia Growth Partners believes that in a converged digital world, every business must be mobile and this principle drives our investments,” adds Walter Masalin, principal at Nokia Growth Partners. “As mobile transforms the way people learn, Babbel’s flexible and efficient solution supporting multiple platforms means it is well positioned to capitalize on this trend.”

“Since our investment in 2008, Lesson Nine was already able to successfully occupy various markets with its innovative products, and has established itself worldwide as a serious player in the realm of mobile language learning“, says Marco Zeller, Managing Director of IBB Beteiligungsgesellschaft mbh. „This funding round, including other international investors, honors the Berlin company’s extremely positive development, and creates a foundation for even more dynamic growth. We are proud to have been on board with this success story since the beginning, and also to provide more capital as part of this round.”

Michael Greve, CEO of Kizoo Technology Ventures says, “Since we started to work with Babbel five years ago, the Babbel product took an exciting journey from a nice web tool to a modern fun language learning experience with a huge user base that is ready to subscribe for the service. I believe the ideal platform for language learning is tablets and we can expect an even accelerated growth of the beautiful mobile Babbel products in the future.”

“We are happy to have two new high-profile international investors on board. This financing round opens a great number of opportunities without limiting our strategic options. The renewed participation of existing investors IBB Beteiligungsgesellschaft and Kizoo also pleases me. For our great team of seventy people, there’s still much to be done and much to achieve,” says Markus Witte, CEO of Lesson Nine GmbH.

About babbel.com:
Babbel is the new way to learn languages. With the online language learning system, both beginners and continuing learners can study French, Spanish, Italian, Brazilian Portuguese, Swedish, German, Dutch, Indonesian, Polish, Turkish, Norwegian, Danish and English with the help of interactive listening, writing and speaking exercises. The website babbel.com offers numerous online courses. In addition there are apps for iPad, iPhone, iPod, Android and Windows 8 devices, as well as interactive eBooks. More than 15 million people from over 190 countries are already learning a language with Babbel.

Babbel is operated by Lesson Nine GmbH, Berlin. The company was founded in August, 2007, and now has around 170 employees and freelancers. Since March, 2013, Lesson Nine has been involved with Reed Elsevier Ventures, Nokia Growth Partners, Kizoo AG and VC-Fonds Berlin. Further information at: http://www.babbel.com

About Reed Elsevier Ventures:
Founded in 2000, Reed Elsevier Ventures is a venture capital firm based in London and San Francisco and backed by one of the world’s most successful media and information companies, Reed Elsevier. Reed Elsevier Ventures invests in talented and ambitious entrepreneurs and management teams who have the drive to build large, scalable businesses and the determination to become industry leaders. Reed Elsevier Ventures focus on high growth, internet, media and technology businesses based in the US, Europe or Israel in sectors such as big data and analytics, mobile, new media, healthcare information and groundbreaking analytic technologies. Example portfolio companies include Palantir, one of silicon valley’s most valuable technology companies, and Babylon, the world’s most downloaded language translation tool.

About Nokia Growth Partners:

Nokia Growth Partners invests in companies that are changing the face of mobility, communications and the internet. NGP offers industry expertise, capital and an extensive network, enabling entrepreneurs to build disruptive, industry-changing companies and take them to the global market. With offices in the US, Europe, India and China, NGP extends the reach of companies making their products and services local everywhere. Visit http://www.nokiagrowthpartners.com/ for more information.

About IBB Beteiligungsgesellschaft mbH:

The IBB Beteiligungsgesellschaft (www.ibb-bet.de) provides venture capital to innovative Berlin enterprises and has established itself as a market leader in the field of early stage financing in the location Berlin. The funds are used primarily for the development and market launch of innovative products or services, as well as for business concepts of creative industries. Currently two of the funds managed by the IBB Beteiligungsgesellschaft are in the investment phase, the VC Fonds Technologie Berlin with a fund size of € 52 million and the VC Fonds Kreativwirtschaft Berlin with a fund size of € 30 million. Both VC funds are financed by means of the Investitionsbank Berlin (IBB) and the European Fund for Regional Development (EFRE) administered by the State Berlin. Since 1997 the IBB Beteiligungsgesellschaft Berlin, in consortia with partners, has made 850 million € available to creative and technology-orientated companies; thereof, the portion invested by IBB Beteiligungsgesellschaft itself, as lead, co-lead or co-investor, was approximately 116 million €.

About Kizoo Technology Ventures:
Kizoo helps young start-up teams grow. As a seed and early stage investor with a focus on SaaS, Internet & Mobile Services and Social Applications Kizoo is happy to share its own longtime experience in development, marketing and product management in those markets.

The post Babbel Closes Series B Round appeared first on peHUB.

Final Book Now Available

As of December 2012, Operation Enduring Freedom (OEF) in Afghanistan and Operation Iraqi Freedom (OIF) in Iraq have resulted in the deployment of about 2.2 million troops; there have been 2,222 US fatalities in OEF and Operation New Dawn (OND)1 and 4,422 in OIF. The numbers of wounded US troops exceed 16,000 in Afghanistan and 32,000 in Iraq. In addition to deaths and morbidity, the operations have unforeseen consequences that are yet to be fully understood.

In contrast with previous conflicts, the all-volunteer military has experienced numerous deployments of individual service members; has seen increased deployments of women, parents of young children, and reserve and National Guard troops; and in some cases has been subject to longer deployments and shorter times at home between deployments. Numerous reports in the popular press have made the public aware of issues that have pointed to the difficulty of military personnel in readjusting after returning from Iraq and Afghanistan. Many of those who have served in OEF and OIF readjust with few difficulties, but others have problems in readjusting to home, reconnecting with family members, finding employment, and returning to school.

In response to the return of large numbers of veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan with physical-health and mental-health problems and to the growing readjustment needs of active duty service members, veterans, and their family members, Congress included Section 1661 of the National Defense Authorization Act for fiscal year 2008. That section required the secretary of defense, in consultation with the secretary of veterans affairs, to enter into an agreement with the National Academies for a study of the physical-health, mental-health, and other readjustment needs of members and former members of the armed forces who were deployed in OIF or OEF, their families, and their communities as a result of such deployment.

The study consisted of two phases. The Phase 1 task was to conduct a preliminary assessment. The Phase 2 task was to provide a comprehensive assessment of the physical, psychologic, social, and economic effects of deployment on and identification of gaps in care for members and former members, their families, and their communities. The Phase 1 report was completed in March 2010 and delivered to the Department of Defense (DOD), the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), and the relevant committees of the House of Representatives and the Senate. The secretaries of DOD and VA responded to the Phase 1 report in September 2010. Returning Home from Iraq and Afghanistan: Assessment of Readjustment Needs of Veterans, Service Members, and Their Families fulfills the requirement for Phase 2.

[Read the full report]

Topics: Health and Medicine

Months after allegedly sending her thousands of dollars for her tax bill, Charlie Sheen has finally convinced Lindsay Lohan to hop into bed with him. Not in their personal life, though. At least, not that we know of.

Lohan and Sheen shared a scene together this week on the set of Sheen’s FX show Anger Management. According to a TMZ report, the scene took place in Sheen’s character’s bed, where the two were implied to have had sex before the scene.

According to TMZ’s anonymous sources, Lohan showed up early for the shoot, nailed her pillow talk, and was “really funny.”

Lohan took to Twitter late last night to thank her co-stars and the Anger Management crew:

Lohan will be back on the Anger Management set today for more filming.

Wireless carriers have played a huge role in the proliferation of smartphones and tablets in recent years, and that fact that these devices make our lives easier is hardly their motive. According to a new report from market research firm ABI Research, revenue from mobile data is expected to balloon 21.4% between 2012 and 2014, at which time it will account for 40.4% of the $1 trillion spent globally on cell phone services. “By offering unlimited voice calls and texts, while making data the only component in a bundled plan with positive marginal costs to consumers, wireless operators as AT&T (T) and Verizon (VZ) help to prop up voice and messaging, making positive revenue contributions in the short to medium-term,” ABI research associate Ying Kang Tan said. “Rich Communication Services (RCS) and voice and messaging APIs are a key part of their strategy of making carrier-based calls and messaging relevant to their customers.”

Lesson Nine, the German company behind online and app-based language-learning platform Babbel.com, has picked up a $10 million Series B funding round that it intends to use for international expansion.

Babbel’s strongest market is in its home country, but the plan now is to push into the Americas, the rest of Europe and emerging markets. The funding round was led by Reed Elsevier Ventures (see disclosure), Nokia Growth Partners and existing investors, including the Investitionsbank Berlin (IBB) and Kizoo Technology Capital.

“If we look at France or the UK or U.S., then our presence there is rather poor,” CEO Markus Witte told me. “What we need to get is a good reach and brand recognition.”

Going large

Marketing will be part of that, but so will be cooperation with various other players, such as platform providers (the company recently collaborated with Microsoft on releasing apps for Windows 8 and Windows Phone), hardware manufacturers and media companies such as newspaper publishers, that might be diversifying and keen to get into the sale of language courses.

The mention of hardware manufacturers is interesting. Witte wouldn’t get into details there, but the sorts of tie-ins that phone makers could offer would extend to preloading the Babbel app or promoting it in an app store channel.

Just last week, Babbel also bought a small Silicon Valley language-learning app firm called PlaySay. Witte suggested to me that, while further acquisitions are possible, they’re not in the game plan right now. “In general we don’t feel the market is mature enough for a rollup strategy,” he noted.

Competition

So where does Babbel sit in the grand scheme of things? The big competitor is Rosetta Stone, a giant from the CD-ROM days that now offers its language courses by download, although the price still runs into the hundreds of dollars. Babbel charges monthly fees, starting at $7.45, and of course – being web-based — it hews to a continuous deployment model rather than the download-and-install model of old.

Then there are more community-based options such as Busuu and LiveMocha (which appears to be going more for the B2B market these days), as well as innovative new rivals such as DuoLingo, which combines language lessons with the translation of real-life web content. In short, there’s a lot of competition out there.

Still, Babbel has a fair amount of traction already. According to Tuesday’s release, the apps have been downloaded more than 8 million times and there are over 15 million users overall.

Disclosure: Reed Elsevier Ventures is also an investor in the parent company of GigaOM.

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